Sister woman, black woman…
5
Carella hated mysteries.
In mysteries, there were never funerals or wakes. In mysteries, the victim got shot or stabbed or strangled or clubbed to death, and then was conveniently forgotten. In mysteries, a corpse was only a device to set an investigative pot boiling. In real life, the murder victim was a
person,
and this person usually had relatives or friends who arranged for a wake and a decent burial. The dead man, in keeping with tribal custom everywhere, was accorded the same respect and dignity he would have earned had he died peacefully in his sleep. He had once been a person, you see, and you do not sweep people under the rug just so a private eye can keep things moving along at a brisk clip.
The wake for George Chadderton was held in the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback. Further uptown, near Pettit Lane, a similar wake was being held for a young black hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins who'd been murdered the night before in Midtown South, while Carella was poring over Chadderton's notebook. Carella did not know about the second murder. This was a very big city, and the Midtown South precinct was a good three miles from the Eight-Seven. The man who'd caught the squeal on the Hawkins murder was named Alex Leopold, a Detective Third who'd been transferred from a Calm's Point precinct three months earlier. He did not know Carella and had never worked with him. The two Homicide cops who'd put in their obligatory appearance at the scene of the second murder were not Monoghan and Monroe, who'd gone home to bed after leaving the scene of the Chadderton murder, but were instead a similar pair of dicks named Forbes and Phelps. Mandatory autopsies had been performed on both the Chadderton and Hawkins corpses, and recovered bullets had already been sent to the Ballistics Section. But two different men at Ballistics were working the two different cases, at microscopes not six feet from each other, and they had instructions only to report their findings to the two separate detectives working the two cases in different sections of Isola. There had been no witnesses to the second murder-no citizen eager to step forward and say that Clara Jean Hawkins had been slain by a tall, slender man or woman dressed entirely in black. At ten minutes to twelve that Saturday morning, September 16, as Carella approached the doors of the funeral home, neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department had the faintest notion that the murders might have been linked.
It was still raining. He was wearing a soggy trenchcoat and a soggier rain hat, and feeling very much the way he looked after only six hours of sleep on a cot in the precinct locker room. Chadderton's notebook was in a sodden manila Police Department evidence envelope he carried under his arm. He had studied it till close to 5:00 a.m., and had found nothing in the lyrics that would point a finger at a possible murderer. From Chadderton's appointment calendar, he had made a list of names he wanted to ask Chloe about. He intended to do that when he returned both books to her-with apologies for his behavior the night before. A call to the Medical Examiner's Office this morning had informed Carella that Chadderton's body had been picked up at the hospital at 8:00 a.m. for transfer to the funeral home on St. Sab's. Presumably the body had by now been drained of its blood and the contents of its stomach, intestines, and bladder. Presumably, the mortician had already injected by trocar or tube a solution of formaldehyde that would cause coagulation of the body's proteins. Presumably, the mortician had worked with wax and cosmetics to repair Chadderton's shattered left cheekbone and disguise the gaping holes in his neck and the top of his skull. Carella wondered whether there would be an open coffin. Mourners usually chose to see their departed loved ones as sleeping peacefully; either that, or they chose not to view them at all.
The funeral director was a short, very dark black man who told Carella that the body would be ready for viewing at 2:00 p.m., in the Blue Chapel. He further informed Carella that Mrs. Chadderton had been there earlier today, to receive the body and to make all the arrangements, and had left at approximately 11:00 a.m. She had mentioned that she would not be back until five. Carella thanked the man, and stepped outside into the pouring rain again. He went back in a moment later, and asked if he might use the telephone. The man showed him into an office opposite the Pink Chapel. In the Isola directory, Carella found a listing for George C. Chadderton at 1137 Raucher Street. He dialed the number and let it ring twelve times. There was no answer. He could not imagine that Chloe Chadderton had gone to work on the day following her husband's murder, but he looked up the number of the Club Flamingo, dialed it, and spoke to a woman who identified herself as one of the bartenders. She told him that Chloe was expected at twelve noon. He thanked her, hung up, jotted the club's address into his notebook, and then went outside to where he'd parked his car. He had forgotten to close the window on the driver's side, which he'd partially opened earlier to keep the windshield from fogging. The seat was soaking wet when he climbed inside.
Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising topless, bottomless, noon to 4:00 a.m. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. "It's a topless club," she'd said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One. In the other window was an equally large sign promising generous drinks, free lunch. Carella was hungry-he'd had only a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He opened one of the two entrance doors and stepped into the club's dim interior. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, he stood just inside the entrance doors, listening to the canned rock music that blared from speakers all around the room. Dead ahead was a long oval bar. Two girls, one on either side of the bar, were gyrating in time to the rock music. Both girls were wearing sequined, high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps and fringed G-strings. Both girls were bare-breasted. Neither of them wore anything under the G-strings. Neither of them was Chloe Chadderton.
He noticed now that there were small tables around the perimeter of the room. The place was not very crowded. He suspected the rain was keeping customers away. But at one of the tables, a blond girl danced-if one could call it that-for the exclusive pleasure of a man who sat there alone, nursing a beer. There were four men sitting at the bar, two on each side of it, three of them white, one of them black. Carella took a seat midway down the bar. One of the bartenders-a young redheaded girl wearing a black leotard and black net stockings-walked to where he was sitting, her high-heeled pumps clicking on the hard wooden floor.
"Something to drink, sir?" she said.
"Have you got anything soft?" Carella asked.
"Oh, yes indeed," she said, and rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, at once imparting sexual innuendo to his innocuous question. He looked at her. She figured she'd somehow made a mistake and immediately said, "Pepsi, Coke, Seven-Up, or ginger ale. It'll cost you same as the whiskey, though."
"How much is that?"
"Three-fifty. But that includes the lunch bar."
"Coke or Pepsi, either one's fine," Carella said. "Has Chloe Chadderton come in yet?"
"She's taking her break just now," the redhead said, and then casually asked, "You a cop?"
"Yes," Carella said, "I'm a cop."
"Figures. Guy comes in here wanting an ice-cream soda, he's got to be a cop on duty. What do you want with Chloe?"
"That's between her and me, isn't it?"
"This is a clean place, mister."
"Nobody said it wasn't."
"Chloe dances same as the other girls. You won't see nothing here you can't see in any one of the legitimate theaters downtown. They got big stage shows downtown with nude dancers in them, same as here."
"Mm-huh," Carella said.
The redhead turned away, uncapped his soft drink, and poured it into a glass. "Nobody is allowed to touch the girls here. They just dance, period. Same as downtown. If it isn't against the law in a legitimate theater, then it isn't against the law here, either."
"Relax," Carella said. "I'm not looking for a bust."
The girl rolled her eyes again. For a moment, he didn't quite understand her reaction. And then he realized she was deliberately equating the police expression for "arrest"-a term he was certain she'd heard a hundred times before-with what was bursting exuberantly in the black leotard top. He looked at her again. She shrugged elaborately, turned away, and walked to the cash register at the end of the bar. One of the dancers was squatting before the solitary black customer now, her legs widespread, tossing aside the fringe of the G-string to reveal herself completely. The man stared at her exposed genitals. The girl smiled at him. She licked her lips. The man was wearing eyeglasses. The girl took the glasses from his eyes, and wiped them slowly over her opening, a mock expression of shocked propriety on her face. She returned the glasses to the man's head, and then arched herself over backward, supporting herself with her arms, thrusting her open crotch toward his face, and pumping at him while he continued staring. Just like the legitimate theaters downtown, Carella thought.
The state's obscenity laws were defined in Article 235, Section 2 of the Criminal Law, wherein "producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance or participating in a portion thereof which is obscene and contributes to its obscenity" was considered a Class-A misdemeanor. A related provision-PL 235.00, Subdivision 1-stated: "Any material or performance is 'obscene' if (a) considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient, shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, -excretion, sadism or masochism, AND (b) it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in describing or representing such matters, AND (c) it is utterly without redeeming social value."
There was no question in Carella's mind but that the girl down the bar, her back arched, her own hand now toying with her vulva for the obvious pleasure of the man seated before her, was performing an act the predominant appeal of which was to a prurient interest in nudity and sex. But as the redheaded bartender had pointed out to him a moment ago, there wasn't anything you could see here that you couldn't see in some of the legitimate theaters downtown, provided you had a first-row seat. Make the bust, and you found yourself in endless courtroom squabbles about the difference between art and pornography, a thin line Carella himself-and even the Supreme Court of the United States-was quite unready to define.
When you thought about it-and he thought about it often-what the hell was so terrible about pornography, anyway? He had seen motion pictures rated "R" (no one under seventeen admitted unless in the company of an adult) or even "PG" (parental guidance advised) that he had found to be dirtier than any of the "X"-rated porn flicks running in the sleazy theaters along The Stem. The language in these socially acceptable films was identical to what he heard in the squadroom and on the streets every single waking day of his life-and he was a man whose job placed him in constant contact with the lowest elements of society. The sex in these approved films was equally candid, sparing an audience only the explicit intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus common in "X"-rated films. So where did you draw the line? If it was okay for a big-name male star to make simulated love to a totally naked woman in a multimillion-dollar epic (provided he kept his pants on), then why was it wrong to depict the
actual
sex act in a low-budget film starring unknowns? Put a serious actress up there on the screen, show her simulating the sex act (but, God forbid, never actually performing it), and somehow this became high cinema art while
Deep Throat
remained cheap porn. He guessed it was all in the camera angles. He guessed he was a cop who shouldn't be wondering so often about the laws he was being paid to enforce.
But what if he walked down the length of the bar right this minute and busted the dancer there for "participating in an obscene performance" (screwing a man's eyeglasses was certainly obscene, wasn't it?) and then busted the owner of the joint for "producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance"-what then? The offense was a Class-A misdemeanor, punishable by not more than a year in jail or more than a thousand-dollar fine. Get your conviction (which was unlikely), and they'd be out on the street again in three months' time. Meanwhile, there were killers, rapists, burglars, muggers, armed robbers, child molesters, and pushers roaming the city and victimizing the populace. So what was an honest cop to do? An honest cop sipped at his Pepsi or his Coca-Cola, whichever the redhead with the inventive pornographic mind had served him, and listened to the blaring rock, and watched the naked backside of the blond dancer across the bar as she leaned over to bring her enormous breasts to within an inch of a customer's lips.
At twenty minutes to one, Chloe Chadderton-naked except for high-heeled shoes and a silvery fringed G-string-stepped up onto the bar at the far end of it. The dancer she was replacing, the one who'd wiped the black man's glasses over what the Vice Squad would have called her "privates," patted Chloe on the behind as she strutted past her and down the ramp leading off the bartop. A new rock record dropped into place on the turntable. Smiling broadly, Chloe began dancing to it, high-stepping down the bar past the black man with the steamy eyeglasses, shaking her naked breasts, thrusting her hips, bumping and grinding to the frantic rhythm of the canned guitars, and finally stopping directly in front of Carella. Still shaking wildly, she began kneeling before him, arms stretched above her head, fingers widespread, breasts quaking, knees opening-and suddenly recognized him. A look of shocked embarrassment crossed her face. The smile dropped from her mouth.