Calypso by Ed McBain

by the scruffs of their necks and bang their heads together. He was so busy measuring himself that he didn't notice the name calling had stopped. Dominick Rizzo joined the navy and got killed in the war. Patrick Cassidy became a cop. It was Patrick, in fact, who talked Meyer into quitting law school and becoming a cop himself. Patrick was now a deputy inspector temporarily assigned to the D.A.'s office and investigating organized crime. Whenever he ran across Meyer, he asked him if he wanted to see the teeth marks that were still on his behind. Meyer always felt uncomfortable in his presence. But he did not feel guilty about having bought the Mercedes.
        He parked the Chevy a block from Bones's apartment building-the closest spot he could find-and then walked through the pouring rain toward 687 Downes, a tidy-looking brown-stone in a row of similarly tidy-looking buildings. In the lobby, he looked for a mailbox marked with Bones's name, found none, and rang the bell marked super. A white man in his late fifties opened the inner lobby door. Meyer showed his shield and his identification card, and told the man he was looking for Frederick Bones.
        "Freddie Bones, huh?" the super said. "You just missed him."
        "By how long?" Meyer asked.
        "By three months!" the super said, and burst out laughing. His teeth were tobacco stained, he was sporting a grizzled three-day-old beard on his cheeks and his chin. He cackled loudly in the hallway and seemed amazed that Meyer was not sharing his amusement.
        "Moved away, did he?" Meyer asked.
        "Got sent away," the super said, and burst out laughing again.
        "Sent where?" Meyer asked.
        "Castleview, upstate."
        "The prison?"
        "The prison, right enough," the super said.
        "Shit," Meyer said.
        
***
        
        The neighborhood in which Vicente Manuel Barragan lived had until as recently as five years ago been an Italian ghetto, but it was now almost exclusively Hispanic, and the neon signs that blistered the falling rain announced bodega and carniceria and joyeria and sastreria. Patterson Boulevard was a wide avenue with a tree-planted divider running up the middle of it. The trees had not yet begun to turn; the leaves hung limp and green in the downpour. Beneath the trees patches of grass sprang up between the tightly spaced cobblestones that paved the divider. The avenue itself had once been paved with cobblestones, but it had been resurfaced with asphalt, and the blacktop glistened in the rain, reflecting the glow of the street lamps, already illuminated in defense against the 3:00 p.m. gloom. The traffic light on the corner turned from red to green, and the blacktop echoed the change, a shimmering green ball suddenly appearing in the road ahead. Carella found a space across the street from 2557, thanked his lucky stars, turned down the visor to which was rubber-banded a hand-lettered sign announcing police officer on duty, and then got out of the car, remembering to close the window this time. In the pouring rain, he ran across the street to Barragan's building, raced up the front-stoop steps two at a time, threw open the glass-paneled entrance door, and stepped inside to a small foyer lined with brass mailboxes. A black plastic inset under one of the mailboxes told him that barragan was in Apartment 3C. He rang the bell, and then reached for the knob on the inner lobby door just as an answering buzz sounded.
        The building was spotlessly clean. A blue-and-white-tiled inner lobby, walls newly painted a muted blue, light bulbs in all the wall sconces, not a trace of graffiti anywhere. The steps smelled of Lysol. He took them up to the third floor, and heard the sound of someone playing a woodwind instrument -clarinet or flute, he could not tell at first-as he came down the hallway to Apartment 3C. The music was coming from inside the apartment, a flute he guessed now. He rang the bell and the