Ghosts

“We got another one,” he said. “Upstairs in Apartment 304.”

The second call had come into Communications Division at exactly ten minutes past 7:00. The dispatcher had put the information into his computer, and the two-hour sector scan of previously reported incidents had confused him at first. Car Adam Eleven had been dispatched to the same scene a half hour earlier: a cutting on Jackson and Eighth. But the first victim had been reported as a white female bleeding on the sidewalk outside 781 Jackson, and this new call was from a hysterical woman in Apartment 304, and she was telling the police there was a man stabbed on the bedroom floor up there, and could they please send somebody right away? The dispatcher had radioed Adam Eleven again and told him to check upstairs, and the patrolman who took the call in the RMP car said, “You got to be kidding,” and then walked over to where the detectives were talking with the security guard.

The woman who’d called the police was waiting in the third-floor corridor for them. She was a white woman in her early twenties, Carella guessed, with brown eyes and black hair, and she so closely resembled his wife that he hesitated mid-stride as he came out of the elevator and then did a double take and realized this could not be Teddy; Teddy was home in Riverhead with Fanny and the kids. The resemblance was not lost on Hawes. He glanced swiftly to Carella and then looked down the corridor again to where the woman stood just outside the open door to Apartment 304. She was wearing her overcoat, the shoulders still damp with melted snow. There was a look of utter panic on her face and in her eyes. The cops came down the corridor in a flying wedge, Carella and Hawes in the forefront, Monoghan and Monroe behind them. Monroe was thinking this was just what they needed, another stiff.

“Where is he?” Carella asked.

“Inside,” the woman answered. “In the…the bedroom.”

The front door opened into a foyer with a mirror and mail table facing the entrance. The apartment branched off on both sides of the hall. On the right, Carella could see through an open door into the kitchen. On the left was the living room. They came through quickly, no signs of disorder, the room decorated neatly and expensively in clean modern, several paintings on the walls, a bar unit with a whiskey decanter and two glasses on it, both of them sparkling, everything neat and clean and orderly. The bedroom was quite another matter. From the moment they walked through the door, they knew this was going to be a bad one.

The room was in complete disarray. The drawers of the white Formica dresser had been pulled out, the clothing thrown all over the floor. Men’s clothes and women’s clothes, undershorts and brassieres, lingerie and pajamas, dress shirts and silk blouses, baby-doll nightgowns and socks, crewneck sweaters and bikini panties lay strewn in androgynous confusion on the thick pile rug. The doors on both closets were open, and the clothes had been pulled from their hangers and scattered over the floor, the bed, and the chairs. Men’s sports jackets and suits, women’s gowns and skirts, high-heeled pumps, walking shoes, loafers, topcoats, trench coats, overcoats—all twisted a tortuous trail across the rug to where the dead man lay on the side of the bed farthest from the door.

He was a white man—in his early fifties, Carella guessed—wearing blue slacks, a lime green T-shirt, and a dark blue cardigan sweater. No shoes. His hands were bound behind his back with a twisted wire hanger. The T-shirt had been slashed to ribbons. There were stab wounds on his chest and his throat and his hands and his arms. One ear dangled loose from the right side of his head, where it had been partially severed. Carella looked down at the dead man and felt again a familiar mixture of horror and sadness—the same each and every time—a revulsion for the violence that had reduced a human being to a fleshy pile of bloody rubble, a grief for the utter wastefulness of it. He turned to Hawes and said, “If the ME’s downstairs, we’d better get him up here.”

“Better get another team of techs, too,” Monoghan said. “Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.”

On one wall of the room, facing the windows that overlooked the River Harb, there was a long white Formica desk with a typewriter on it. A ream of yellow paper rested on the desktop, just beside an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. A sheet of paper was in the typewriter. Without touching either the paper or the machine, Carella leaned over the desk and read the typewritten words:

There was, from the beginning, a palpable sense of something alien in the house. I had been called here to investigate the claim that poltergeists had invaded the premises, and there was no question now, before I had taken three steps into the entrance hall, that the claim was valid. The air virtually hummed with unseen specters. When there are ghosts in a place

“Suicide note?” Monroe asked behind him.

“Sure,” Carella said. “The guy’s laying on the floor with his hands tied behind him and thirty-six knife wounds in his chest…”

“How do you know there’s thirty-six?” Monoghan said.

“Make it forty,” Carella said. “It’s obviously a suicide.”

“He’s pulling our leg,” Monroe said.

“He’s joshing us.”

“He’s a very humorous cop.”

“All the cops at the Eight-Seven are very humorous.”

“You want to know something, Carella?”

“Go fuck yourself, Carella.”

The woman who looked like Carella’s wife was waiting in the living room outside. She had not yet taken off her coat. She sat in one of the stark white easy chairs, her hands clasped over the bag in her lap. As they talked, Hawes came back with the Medical Examiner and led him silently into the bedroom. The second team of lab technicians arrived, and they went about their task like a hush of pallbearers.

“When did you find him?” Carella asked.

“Just before I called the police.”

“Where’d you make the call?”

“Here. Right here.” She indicated the white telephone resting on the bar unit alongside the decanter and the two clean glasses.

“Touch anything else in the apartment?”

“No.”

“Just the phone.”

“Yes. Well, the doorknob, when I came in. I unlocked the door, and then I called to Greg, and when I got no answer, I went straight to…to the bedroom and…and…that was when I saw him.”

“And then you called the police.”

“Yes. And…and I went outside to…to wait for you. I didn’t want to wait in here. Not with…not with…”

Carella took out his notebook and busied himself with finding a clean page. He suspected she was about to cry, and he never knew what to do when they began crying.

“Can you tell me his name, please?” he asked gently.

“Gregory Craig,” she said, and paused, and looked into Carella’s eyes, and he felt she expected some sort of response she wasn’t getting. Puzzled, he waited for her to say something more. “Gregory Craig,” she repeated.

“Would you spell that for me, please?”

“G-R-E-G-O-R-Y.”

“And the last name?” “C-R-A-I-G.”

“And your name?”

“Hillary Scott.” She paused. “We weren’t married.”

“Where were you coming from, Miss Scott?”

“Work.”

“Do you usually get home at about this time?”

“I was a little late tonight. We were waiting for a call from the Coast.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

“I work for the Parapsychological Society.” She paused and then said, “I’m a medium.”

“A medium?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, what…?”

“I’m gifted with psychic powers,” she said.

Carella looked at her. She seemed sane enough, sitting there in her wet overcoat, her hands clenched on her pocketbook, her eyes beginning to mist with tears. In his notebook, he wrote the word “Medium” and then put a question mark after it. When he looked up again, she was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief she’d taken from her bag.