Long Time No See by Ed McBain

number.”
    “This can’t wait till Monday.”
    “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”
    “Miss Houlihan, are you familiar with Section 195.10 of the Penal Law?”
    “No, I’m not”
    “It’s titled Refusing to Aid a Peace Officer. I’m a peace officer, Miss Houlihan, and you’re refusing to aid me.” He was telling only the partial truth. The Class B misdemeanor was defined this way: “Upon command by a peace officer identifiable or identified to one as such, unreasonably failing or refusing to aid such peace officer in effecting an arrest or in preventing the commission by another person of any offense.”
    Miss Houlihan was silent for an inordinately long time.
    “Why don’t you just look it up in the phone book?” she said at last.
    “Where does he live?”
    “Riverhead.”
    “What’s his first name?”
    “Frank.”
    “Thank you,” Carella said, and hung up. He pulled the Riverhead directory out of his drawer, opened it to the P’s, and ran his finger down the forty or so Prestons listed. There was a Frank Preston on South Edgeheath Road. Carella looked up at the clock and dialed the number.
    The number rang five times before a woman picked it up.
    “Hello?” she said.
    “Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Preston?”
    “Who’s this, please?”
    “Detective Carella of the 87th Squad.”
    “Who?”
    “Detective Carella of the—”
    “Is this the police?”
    “Yes,” Carella said.
    “He’s not home yet.”
    “Who am I speaking to, please?” Carella asked.
    “His wife.”
    “Mrs. Preston, what time do you expect him?”
    “He’s usually home by six on Fridays. Is this about the blind girl?”
    “Yes.”
    “What a shame.”
    “Yes. Mrs. Preston, would you tell your husband I’ll try to reach him again later tonight?”
    “I’ll tell him.”
    “Thank you,” Carella said, and put the receiver back onto the cradle.
    Meyer was on the telephone at his own desk, talking to Sophie Harris, Jimmy’s mother. “We’ll be up there in about half an hour, does that sound all right?” he said, and nodded. “We’ll see you then.” He hung up, turned in the swivel chair. “You feel up to it?” he asked Carella.
    “Yes, sure,” Carella said.
    “She was bawling like a baby on the phone. Just got back from identifying both bodies. What’d you get from the Army?”
    “Not much. I just placed a call to the man Isabel worked for, Frank Preston’s his name. I’ll try him again later, see what he can tell us. They’re both kind of blanks so far, aren’t they?”
    “Jimmy and Isabel, do you mean?”
    “Yeah. We don’t really know who they were , do we?”
    “Not yet,” Meyer said. “Let’s go talk to Mama.”

The tempo of the city was changing.
    From the dreary four/four of the workaday week, it was moving into a swifter beat, a quarter note played with the speed of an eighth, a sixteenth flashing by like a thirty-second—this was Friday night and the weekend was ahead. On the island of Isola, uptown and down, the citizens poured out of subway kiosks, heading for hot baths and fresh threads. In Riverhead, Calm’s Point, and Majesta, the public transportation system was mostly aboveground, the elevated structures winding above the city streets with all the grace of poor planning, steel supporting pillars embedded in concrete that was wedded to cobblestones that went back to the turn of the century. The elevated tracks and elevated platforms created a landscape of eternal shade below. The graffiti-sprayed subway cars came up out of their underground tunnels and clattered along the tracks toward distant destinations; to someone who lived at the other end of Riverhead, the farthest station stop in Calm’s Point was a two-hour-and-ten-minute ride away. You could get to Paris on the Concorde in just a little while longer. Here in Diamondback, the tracks were underground, and the only ugliness to be seen was in the tenements that lined the avenues and streets.
    Diamondback was