Long Time No See by Ed McBain Page B

was an accurate portrayal of their own human condition? Or did those blacks cavorting on the small screen symbolize for them the hope of America? Could their own problems be one day reduced to the mindless sitcom chatter that flowed into their own living rooms, where overhead leaking pipes bloated the ceiling and would continue to do so till the plaster caved in, despite repeated phone calls to the landlord (who was white) and to the Department of Health (which didn’t give a damn)?
    Sophie Harris was a woman in her late forties. She might have been a beauty when she was younger—her complexion was a warm chocolate brown, her eyes an amber the color of the cat’s, she was still slender and tall—but the burden of living in the non-television black world had stooped her shoulders and grayed her hair, lined her face and reduced the timbre of her voice to a hoarse whisper further weighted by the tragedy of the recent murders. She apologized at once for the appearance of the apartment—it seemed spotlessly clean to both Carella and Meyer—and then offered the detectives something to drink. Whiskey? Tea? There might be a little wine in the refrigerator—anything? The detectives declined. Outside the living room window, where they sat beneath the bloated and threatening ceiling, the neon sign of the bar across the street flickered against the curtainless night. There was the sound of an ambulance siren someplace—in this city, there was always the sound of sirens.
    “Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in—”
    “Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”
    She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. It was phony and fake, it denied the ethnicity that the phony and fake television sitcom shows simulated so well. To television-watchers, the sitcom shows were real. Never mind this shitty apartment in Diamondback. Whatever they saw on the tube was the reality. The real Depression family was the one on television, forget your own father who struggled along on five bucks a week in 1932. The television doctors were real, the television cops were real, everything on television was real except science fiction, and even that was more real than the moon shots.
    So here they sat. Two real cops and a real black woman. One of the cops was Italian, but he didn’t wear a dirty raincoat, and he didn’t fumble for words and he didn’t pretend he was dumb. The other cop was bald, but he didn’t suck lollipops and he didn’t shave his pate clean and he didn’t dress like the mayor. The black woman wasn’t married to a man who owned a string of dry-cleaning stores, and she wasn’t dressed as if she were going to bingo. She was embarrassed by the presence of the two men because they were white—even though her own daughter-in-law had been white. And she was intimidated by them because they were cops. All three sat there in real and uncomfortable proximity because someone real had murdered two other people. Otherwise, they might never have met each other in their entire lives. That was something television missed—the purely accidental nature of life itself. In televisionland, everything had a reason, everyone had a motive. Only cops knew that even Sherlock Holmes was total bullshit, and that all too often a knife in the back was put there senselessly. They were here to learn whether there’d indeed been a motive; they would not have been surprised to learn there hadn’t been the shred of one.
    “Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”
    “Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.
    “Would you know their