The Empty Hours

The

Empty Hours

* * * *

They thought she was colored at
first.

The
patrolman who investigated the complaint didn’t expect to find a dead woman.
This was the first time he’d seen a corpse, and he was somewhat shaken by the
ludicrously relaxed grotesqueness of the girl lying on her back on the rug, and
his hand trembled a little as he made out his report. But when he came to the
blank line calling for an identification of RACE, he unhesitatingly wrote “Negro.”

The
call had been taken at Headquarters by a patrolman in the central Complaint
Bureau. He sat at a desk with a pad of printed forms before him, and he copied
down the information, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal,
rolled the form and slipped it into a metal carrier, and then shot it by
pneumatic tube to the radio room. A dispatcher there read the complaint form,
shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, studied the precinct map on
the wall opposite his desk, and then dispatched car eleven of the 87th Precinct
to the scene.

* * * *

The girl was dead.

She may
have been a pretty girl, but she was hideous in death, distorted by the expanding
gases inside her skin case. She was wearing a sweater and skirt, and she was
barefoot, and her skirt had pulled back when she fell to the rug. Her head was
twisted at a curious angle, the short black hair cradled by the rug, her eyes
open and brown in a bloated face. The patrolman felt a sudden impulse to pull
the girl’s skirt down over her knees. He knew, suddenly, she would have wanted
this. Death had caught her in this indecent posture, robbing her of female
instinct. There were things this girl would never do again, so many things, all
of which must have seemed enormously important to the girl herself. But the
single universal thing was an infinitesimal detail, magnified now by death: she
would never again perform the simple feminine and somehow beautiful act of
pulling her skirt down over her knees.

The
patrolman sighed and finished his report. The image of the dead girl remained
in his mind all the way down to the squad car.

* * * *

It was hot in the squadroom on
that night in early August. The men working the graveyard shift had reported
for duty at 6:00 p.m., and they would not go home until eight the following
morning. They were all detectives and perhaps privileged members of the police
force, but there were many policemen
— Detective Meyer Meyer among
them — who maintained that a uniformed cop’s life made a hell of a lot more
sense than a detective’s.

“Sure,
it does,” Meyer insisted now, sitting at his desk in his shirt sleeves. “A patrolman’s
schedule provides regularity and security. It gives a man a home life.”

“This
squadroom is your home, Meyer,” Carella said. “Admit it.”

“Sure,”
Meyer answered, grinning. “I can’t wait to come to work each day.” He passed a
hand over his bald pate. “You know what I like especially about this place? The
interior decoration. The decor. It’s very restful.”

“Oh,
you don’t like your fellow workers, huh?” Carella said. He slid off the desk
and winked at Cotton Hawes, who was standing at one of the filing cabinets.
Then he walked toward the water cooler at the other end of the room, just
inside the slatted railing that divided squadroom from corridor. He moved with
a nonchalant ease that was deceptive. Steve Carella had never been one of
those weight-lifting goons, and the image he presented was hardly one of
bulging muscular power. But there was a quiet strength about the man and the
way he moved, a confidence in the way he casually accepted the capabilities and
limitations of his body. He stopped at the water cooler, filled a paper cup,
and turned to look at Meyer again.

“No, I
like my colleagues,” Meyer said. “In fact, Steve, if I had my choice in all the
world of who to work with, I would choose you honorable, decent guys. Sure.”
Meyer nodded, building steam. “In fact, I’m thinking of having some medals cast
off, so I can hand them out to you guys. Boy, am I lucky to have this job! I
may come to work without pay from now on. I may just refuse my salary, this job
is so enriching. I want to thank you guys. You make me recognize the real
values in life.”

“He
makes a nice speech,” Hawes said.

“He
should run the line-up. It would break the monotony. How come you don’t run the
line-up, Meyer?”

“Steve,
I been offered the job,” Meyer said seriously. “I told them I’m needed right
here at the Eighty-seventh, the garden spot of all the precincts. Why, they
offered me chief of detectives, and when I said no, they offered me
commissioner, but I was loyal to the squad.”

“Let’s
give
him a
medal,” Hawes said, and the telephone rang.

Meyer
lifted the receiver. “Eighty-seventh Squad. Detective Meyer. What? Yeah, just a
second.” He pulled a pad into place and began writing. “Yeah, I got it. Right.
Right. Right. Okay.” He hung up. Carella had walked to his desk. “A little
colored girl,” Meyer said.

“Yeah?”

“In a
furnished room on South Eleventh.”

“Yeah?”

“Dead,”
Meyer said.

* * * *

The city doesn’t seem to be
itself in the very early hours of the morning.

She is
a woman, of course, and time will never change that. She awakes as a woman,
tentatively touching the day in a yawning, smiling stretch, her lips free of
color, her hair tousled, warm from sleep, her body richer, an innocent girlish
quality about her as sunlight stains the eastern sky and covers her with early
heat. She dresses in furnished rooms in crumby rundown slums, and she dresses
in Hall Avenue penthouses, and in the countless apartments that crowd the
buildings of Isola and Riverhead and Calm’s Point, in the private houses that
line the streets of Bethtown and Majesta, and she emerges a different woman,
sleek and businesslike, attractive but not sexy, a look of utter competence
about her, manicured and polished, but with no time for nonsense, there is a
long working day ahead of her. At five o’clock a metamorphosis takes place. She
does not change her costume, this city, this woman, she wears the same frock or
the same suit, the same high-heeled pumps or the same suburban loafers, but
something breaks through that immaculate shell, a mood, a tone, an undercurrent.
She is a different woman who sits in the bars and cocktail lounges, who relaxes
on the patios or on the terraces shelving the skyscrapers, a different woman
with a somewhat lazily inviting grin, a somewhat tired expression, an
impenetrable knowledge on her face and in her eyes: she lifts her glass, she
laughs gently, the evening sits expectantly on the skyline, the sky is awash
with the purple of day’s end.

She
turns female in the night.

She
drops her femininity and turns female. The polish is gone, the mechanized
competence; she becomes a little scatterbrained and a little cuddly; she
crosses her legs recklessly and allows her lipstick to be kissed clear off her
mouth, and she responds to the male hands on her body, and she turns soft and
inviting and miraculously primitive. The night is a female time, and the city
is nothing but a woman.

And in
the empty hours she sleeps, and she does not seem to be herself.

In the
morning she will awake again and touch the silent air in a yawn, spreading her
arms, the contented smile on her naked mouth. Her hair will be mussed, we will
know her, we have seen her this way often.

But now
she sleeps. She sleeps silently, this city. Oh, an eye open in the buildings of
the night here and there, winking on, off again, silence. She rests. In sleep
we do not recognize her. Her sleep is not like death, for we can hear and sense
the murmur of life beneath the warm bedclothes. But she is a strange woman whom
we have known intimately, loved passionately, and now she curls into an
unresponsive ball beneath the sheets, and our hand is on her rich hip. We can
feel life there, but we do not know her. She is faceless and featureless in the
dark. She could be any city, any woman, anywhere. We touch her uncertainly.
She has pulled the black nightgown of early morning around her, and we do not
know her. She is a stranger, and her eyes are closed.

The
landlady was frightened by the presence of policemen, even though she had
summoned them. The taller one, the one who called himself Detective Hawes, was
a redheaded giant with a white streak in his hair, a horror if she’d ever seen
one. The landlady stood in the apartment where the girl lay dead on the rug,
and she talked to the detectives in whispers, not because she was in the presence
of death, but only because it was three o’clock in the morning. The landlady
was wearing a bathrobe over her gown. There was an intimacy to the scene, the
same intimacy that hangs alike over an impending fishing trip or a completed
tragedy. Three a.m. is a time for slumber, and those who are awake while the
city sleeps share a common bond that makes them friendly aliens.

“What’s
the girl’s name?” Carella asked. It was three o’clock in the morning, and he
had not shaved since 5 p.m. the day before, but his chin looked smooth. His
eyes slanted slightly downward, combining with his clean-shaven face to give
him a curiously oriental appearance. The landlady liked him. He was a nice
boy, she thought. In her lexicon the men of the world were either “nice boys”
or “louses.” She wasn’t sure about Cotton Hawes yet, but she imagined he was a
parasitic insect.

“Claudia
Davis,” she answered, directing the answer to Carella whom she liked, and
totally ignoring Hawes who had no right to be so big a man with a frightening
white streak in his hair.

“Do you
know how old she was?” Carella asked.

“Twenty-eight
or twenty-nine, I think.”

“Had
she been living here long?”

“Since
June,” the landlady said.

“That
short a time, huh?”

“And
this
has to happen,” the landlady said. “She seemed like such a nice girl. Who
do you suppose did it?”

“I don’t
know,” Carella said.

“Or do
you think it was suicide? I don’t smell no gas, do you?”

“No,”
Carella said. “Do you know where she lived before this, Mrs. Mauder?”

“No, I
don’t.”

“You
didn’t ask for references when she took the apartment?”

“It’s
only a furnished room,” Mrs. Mauder said, shrugging. “She paid me a month’s
rent in advance.”