Long Time No See (17 page)

There was nothing in the police dossier about Roxanne Dumas having been raped by members of the gang and carried bleeding to a vacant lot. The dossier went much beyond the Christmas twelve years ago, detailing the disposition of each gang member—drafted, busted, hooked, burned, or snuffed. But there was nothing about the basement rape; nothing about a bleeding teenage girl being found in a vacant weed-filled lot on a street corner near the clubhouse; nothing about a hospital admitting Roxanne as an emergency patient, wherever she’d been found or wherever she’d dragged herself. Either the beat patrolmen had been derelict, Roxanne had crawled off unnoticed, the records kept by Jonesy’s partner were incomplete—or the incident had never taken place at all.

The records seemed fastidious enough. According to his dossier, Lloyd had resigned as president of the Hawks at the ripe old age of twenty-three, four years
after
the alleged basement rape. He had been in and out of trouble with the law ever since, but his biggest fall occurred six years ago when he was busted for Robbery One and sentenced to ten at Castleview. He’d served three, and was currently out on parole and working in a car wash on Landis Avenue. He was now thirty-one years old.

Five years ago, when Lloyd was serving the first year of his sentence at Castleview, Roxanne married a dope pusher named Schoolhouse Hardy. That was his real name. She was twenty-four when she became Mrs. Hardy. She was twenty-eight when Schoolhouse got busted and sent away under the state’s stringent dope laws. Schoolhouse would not be seeing his wife again for a long, long time—except on visiting days. He was now thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine. According to the follow-up on her, she had begun working as a beautician in a place called The Beauty Hut last August, shortly after Schoolhouse was sentenced to twenty-five at Castleview for unlawful possession of eight ounces of cocaine. There was no indication in the records that she had ever again seen Lloyd Baxter from the day he was sent away to the present.

They thanked Detective Richard Jones for his time, and went to look up the long-ago sweethearts at their separate last-known addresses.

834 North 89th was a four-story brownstone with wrought-iron railings flanking the front stoop. They found a mailbox listing for Lloyd Baxter in apartment 22, rang the bell, and got an answering buzz almost at once. The interior hallway was spotlessly clean; in fact, it smelled of disinfectant. The linoleum on the steps was worn and patched, but it, too, had been scrubbed to within an inch of its tired life. A gleaming window on the first floor let in frosty November sunlight. They continued climbing, Meyer puffing audibly and blaming it on his hangover, until they came to the second floor. There were only two doors on the landing, one opposite the other. They knocked on the door to apartment 22, and the door opened instantly.

The black man who looked out at them was perhaps six feet four inches tall, wearing only belted trousers and looking very much like a magazine ad extolling the merits of weight lifting. Bare-chested and barefooted, broad-shouldered and strikingly handsome, he looked out at the two detectives in clear surprise, eyebrows raising at first and then coming together into a frown.

“Yeah, what is it?” he said, obviously annoyed.

“Police,” Carella said, and showed him the shield. “Are you Lloyd Baxter?”

“I’m Lloyd Baxter. What now?”

“All right for us to come in?”

“What’s the beef? I’m gainfully employed, I go see my PO when I’m sposed to, and I ain’t so much as spit on the sidewalk in months.”

“No beef,” Meyer said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“We have some questions.”

“About what?”

“About something that happened twelve years ago.”

“I can hardly remember what happened twelve
minutes
ago.”

“Is it okay for us to come in?”

“I’m expecting somebody,” Baxter said. “I thought it was her at the door, matter of fact.”

“We won’t be long.”

“I got to get dressed,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“You can dress while we talk.”

“Well,” he said reluctantly, “come on in, then.”

They stepped inside and he closed the door behind them and led them through the apartment into a bedroom on the street side. The room was simply furnished—bed, dresser, a pair of nightstands, a few lamps. Baxter took a clean white shirt from one of the dresser drawers and began unbuttoning it. “So what are the questions?” he said.

“Know anybody named Jimmy Harris?”

“Yeah. Man, this really
must
be twelve years ago. I haven’t seen him since he got drafted.”

“Christmastime twelve years ago,” Carella said. “Does that ring a bell?”

“No. What kind of bell is it supposed to ring?”

“A girl named Roxanne Dumas.”

“Yeah,” Baxter said, and nodded, and put on the shirt. “What about her?”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“Yeah. But, man, that’s ancient history. She got married while I was upstate doing time. Guy named Schoolhouse Hardy.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Six, seven years ago,” Baxter said. He was buttoning the shirt now, obviously pressed for time, glancing at his watch and then going back to the buttoning again.

“Do you remember what happened in the Hawks’ clubhouse twelve years ago?”

“No, what happened?” Baxter asked, and tucked the shirt into his trousers. He zipped up his fly, tightened his belt, and then walked swiftly to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Searching there for a moment, he found a pair of blue socks a shade darker than the trousers he was wearing, sat on the bed, and began putting them on.

“You remember dancing with Roxanne?”

“I was
always
dancing with Roxanne. She was my woman. I don’t understand this,” Baxter said, looking up, one sock on, the other in his hands. “What’s supposed to have happened, man?”

“Do you remember a record with drums on it?”

“Come on, man, every record I ever heard’s got
drums
on it.”

“You were dancing with Roxanne and there were five other boys in the room. You told them to quit watching you. You told them to go upstairs.”

Baxter was pulling the other sock onto his foot now. He looked up again, clearly puzzled. “Yeah?” he said.

“Do you remember?”

“No.”

“The boys said they were tired. The Hawks had been rumbling with another gang…”

“We were
always
rumbling with other gangs. Man, I still don’t get what you’re after.”

“The boys grabbed you and held you against a basement post.”

“The boys
grabbed
me?” Baxter said, and burst out laughing. “You talking about
me
?” he said, still laughing, and rose from the bed and walked toward the closet. “Take an
army
to grab me and hold me against no post. I been this big since I was fourteen, ain’t nobody
ever
grabbed me but the mother-fuckin’ cop who busted me, and
he
was holdin’ a cannon in his fist. Ain’t nobody on the Hawks ever grabbed Lloyd Baxter and messed with him. Be some busted legs, they even
thought
about it. Be some bodies strewn all over the sidewalk,” Baxter said, shaking his head in utter disbelief, and opening the closet door and taking from the floor there a pair of black patent leather shoes. “Where’d you get this shit, man? Whoever told you anything like that?”

“Jimmy Harris.”

“Told you some cats in the club jumped me?”

“Told his doctor.”

“Why’d he tell a doctor no shit like that?”

“You’re saying it didn’t happen?”

“You bet your ass that’s what I’m saying,” Baxter said, plainly insulted by the very notion. He sat on the edge of the bed again and began putting on his shoes.

Carella looked at Meyer. Meyer shrugged. “We have reason to believe Roxanne Dumas was raped in that basement room twelve years ago,” Carella said.

“What?” Baxter said, and burst out laughing again. “Man, these are
fairy
tales, you understand me? These are
pipe
dreams.”

“She
didn’t
get raped, is that what you’re saying?”

“Who’d rape her, man, would you tell me? If you knew Roxanne was my woman, would
you
rape her, man? Would you even
wink
at her, man?” Baxter stood up again.

The detectives watched him as he went to the closet for a tie. They were both thinking they would not have winked at Baxter’s girlfriend. Baxter made his selection, a simple blue-and-red-striped silk rep, lifted the collar of the shirt, slipped the tie around his neck, and began knotting it.

“So none of this happened, is that it?” Carella said.

“None of it, man.”

“You’re sure you’re remembering correctly?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then why would Jimmy have said it happened?”

“Man, I guess you got to go ask Jimmy.”

There was no asking Jimmy, not anymore there wasn’t.

But there still remained the lady in question, Roxanne Hardy née Dumas, who—if indeed she had been raped—could be considered an unimpeachable source of information on the subject. If she had not been raped, Carella didn’t know what to think. Neither did Meyer. Of the two, Carella was perhaps more psychologically oriented than his partner, but both men were conditioned to believe—after having seen films like
The Three Faces of Eve
and
David and Lisa
, and
Spellbound
and
Marnie
, and any one of a thousand television dramas depicting mental patients who were severe catatonics standing in corners with their faces to the wall till some understanding psychiatrist unlocked the past for them and let the sunshine in on the trauma that was causing all their pain—after having seen mental rehabilitation happen dramatically and suddenly once the patient knew what was bugging him, Meyer and Carella were both ready to accept Lemarre’s contention that Jimmy’s nightmares were rooted in Roxanne’s rape twelve years ago. Except that now Lloyd Baxter had told them there’d
been
no rape,
been
no such event that might have irritated a man Lloyd’s size and caused him to break you in itty-bitty pieces.

Which left Roxanne.

They did not find her till a little after 3:00 that afternoon. They had tried her last-known address and were told by the landlady there that she’d moved out, oh, at least six months ago, she didn’t know where. They had then checked the Isola telephone directory for a place called The Beauty Hut, and had found a listing for one on The Stem. They did not expect anyone to answer the phone there—this was Sunday—and no one did. But they drove over anyway, hoping to find something open in the immediate neighborhood—a delicatessen, a bar, a restaurant, a luncheonette, a movie theater—anything where there might be someone who knew the person who owned The Beauty Hut.

The stores immediately adjacent to it were a closed pawnshop on its left and a closed lingerie shop on its right. Two doors down was an open countertop store selling pizza by the slice. It was now past 2:00 in the afternoon, and neither of the men had yet had lunch. They each ordered two slices of pizza and an orange drink, and Carella asked the counterman if he knew who ran the beauty parlor down the street. The attendant told him it was a woman named Harriet Lesser. Carella asked if he knew where Harriet Lesser lived, and the counterman said, no, she only came in every now and then for a slice of pizza—why? Was Carella a cop? Carella said, yes, he was a cop, and then he finished his pizza and both he and Meyer paid their own separate tabs and went to the telephone at the back of the store where a directory was hanging on a chain.

The directory was frayed and frazzled, but it told them there were thirty-three Lessers (thirty-three, count ’em, thirty-three) in Isola, fourteen of which were clearly business establishments like Lesser Drafting Service, Inc., Lesser Marine and Lesser Volkswagen, which left nineteen Lessers to go, and none of them named Harriet. There were two H. Lessers in the directory. They tried calling them first. One was a Helen and the other was a Hortense. It was not until almost 3:00 that they discovered a Harriet Lesser who was the wife of a Charles Lesser and who (hallelujah!) owned The Beauty Hut. They told her who they were and what they wanted, and she gave them Roxanne Hardy’s new address. They got into Carella’s car again, and drove downtown and crosstown, arriving at her apartment at twelve minutes past the hour.

The woman who opened the door was tall and lissome, with a smooth pecan-colored complexion and luminous brown eyes that looked puzzled now by the presence of two white men on her doorstep. She was wearing a striped caftan that flowed about her body like a huge sail in the wind, tight across her abundant breasts, flaring out below to end just above her ankles and her bare feet.

“Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Hardy?” Carella said.

“Yes?”

“Police,” he said, and showed her the shield.

She examined it without interest. The puzzlement left her eyes and a look of mild curiosity replaced it—a slight lifting of one eyebrow, a bemused expression about the mouth.

“May we come in?” Carella asked.

“For what purpose, Officer?” she said, and there was in her voice the lilt she’d brought with her from Jamaica seventeen years before, when she was still a girl of twelve unfamiliar with the ways of any city bigger than Kingston.

Carella didn’t know quite how to put his question. Should he ask her flat-out if she’d been raped twelve years ago by four assorted members of the Hawks? He might have done just that, if Lloyd Baxter hadn’t seemed quite so certain that nothing of the sort had happened. Instead, he said, “Mrs. Hardy, I understand you have some knowledge of a street gang called the Hawks,” and realized at once that he was referring to
carnal
knowledge, and again wondered about the subterranean workings of his own mind, and by extension, Jimmy’s. If Jimmy
hadn’t
witnessed a rape, then what the hell
had
traumatized him: The recurring nightmares hadn’t come out of thin air, they were rooted somewhere in his unconscious. All right—
where?