Read Long Time No See for Free Online Page A

sign. The sign read:

     
    Among some documents scattered on the bedroom floor, they found the dog’s papers. He was a full-blooded Labrador retriever and his name was Stanley. He and his master had been trained at the Guiding Eye School on South Perry. The other documents on the floor were a marriage certificate—the two witnesses who’d signed it were named Angela Coombes and Richard Gerard—a certificate of honorable discharge from the United States Army and an insurance policy with American Heritage, Inc. The insured as James Harris. The primary beneficiary was Isabel Harris. In the event of her death, the contingent beneficiary was Mrs. Sophie Harris, mother of the insured. The face amount of the policy was $25,000.
    That was all they found.
    The phone on Carella’s desk was ringing when he and Meyer got back to the squadroom at twenty minutes past 4:00. He pushed through the gate in the slatted wooden railing and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
    “87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
    “This is Maloney, Canine Unit.”
    “Yes, Maloney.”
    “What are we supposed to do with this dog?”
    “What dog?”
    “This black Labrador somebody sent us.”
    “Is he okay?”
    “He’s fine, but what’s his purpose, can you tell me?”
    “He belonged to a homicide victim,” Carella said.
    “That’s very interesting,” Maloney said, “but what’s that got to do with Canine?”
    “Nothing. We didn’t know what to do about him last night—”
    “So you sent him here.”
    “No, no. The desk sergeant called for a vet.”
    “Yeah, our vet. So now we got ourselves a dog we don’t know what to do with.”
    “Why don’t you train him?”
    “You know how much it costs to train one of these dogs? Also, how do we know he has any aptitude?”
    “Well,” Carella said, and sighed.
    “So what do you want me to do with him?”
    “I’ll get back to you on it.”
    “When? He ain’t out of here by Monday morning, I’m calling the shelter.”
    “What are you worried about? You haven’t got a mad dog on your hands there. He’s a seeing-eye dog, he looked perfectly healthy to me.”
    “Yeah, that ain’t it, Carella. He’s got more fuckin’ tags and crap hanging from his collar than all the dogs in this city put together. That ain’t it. It’s what are we supposed to do with him? This ain’t a zoo here, this is an arm of the police force and we got work to do, same as you. You want this fuckin’ dog in your office? You want him up there fuckin’ up your operation?”
    “No, but—”
    “Well, we don’t want him here either fuckin’ up ours. So what I’m telling you is we don’t hear from you first thing Monday morning about what disposition is to be taken with this dog here, then he goes to the shelter and may God have mercy on his soul.”
    “Got you, Maloney.”
    “Yeah,” Maloney said, and hung up.
    The squadroom on any given Friday looked much as it did on any other day of the week, weekends, and holidays included. A bit shabby, a bit run-down at the heels, tired from overwork and overuse, but comfortable and familiar and really the only game in town when you got right down to it. To those who knew it, there were no other squadrooms anywhere else in the world. Plunk Carella down in Peoria or Perth, in Amsterdam or Amherst, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Transfer him, in fact, to any one of the new and shining precincts in this very city, and he would have felt suddenly transported to Mars. He could not imagine being a cop anyplace else. Being a cop meant being a cop in the Eight-Seven. It was that simple. As far as Carella was concerned, this was where it was at. All other precincts and all other cops had to be measured against this precinct and these cops. Territorial imperative. Pride of place. This was it.
    This was a room on the second floor of the building, separated from the corridor by a slatted wooden railing with a swinging gate. In that corridor, there were two