Fat Ollie's Book

9

The challenge now seemed clear: Find a good woman in this city. Which was not as simple as it first appeared. With all due respect, Commish, nothing is ever simple in police work, nothing is ever uncomplicated.

To begin with, if this woman was, or evenwerestill alive, she could be anywhere in the city, which I don’t have to tell you is a very big city. But more than that, if she was or were still alive, did she evenexist?By Mercer Grant’s own admission, Marie Grant was a phony name, what we call a misnomer. But then again, so were Mercer Grant and his alleged cousin Ambrose Field. I have been a cop for a long time now, so the first thing I did was check the phone books for all five sections of the city…

Wow, that’s just whatIdid, Emilio thought. Well, just Isola and Riverhead. But still.

…and discovered in a flash that there were a voluminous multitude of Grants here, which seemed to be a very popular name, but there were no Mercer Grants or Marie Grants and no Ambrose Fields, either, though there seemed to be plenty of other Fields in this fair city. Which meant that Mr. Grant, or whatever his name was, had been telling the truth, in which case why had he been lying? That is to say, why had he lied about his name and his wife’s name and his cousin’s name? What was Mercer Grant hiding? In addition to all those names, of course. And if he was or were hiding something, why had he gone to the police in the first place?

Well, Emilio thought, for that matter, why are you yourself lying, Livvie? Because there is no Olivia Wesley Watts in the phone book, either. Which Emilio thought was somewhat understandable, though, her being a cop and a woman both. If he himself were or was either a cop or a woman, he wouldn’t have put his name in the phone book, either. In fact, he prided himself on having thought exactly the way Livvie had, on both levels, as a copandas a woman.

On this Thursday afternoon at a little past three o’clock, Emilio sat with Livvie’s report in his lap, his Japanese silk kimono open, his La Perla silk stockings and lace-fringed garter belt exposed where the robe fell loose over his legs and thighs. A frizzy blond wig was sitting on top of the dresser across the room. He would put on the wig and his spike-heeled strappy Prada pumps when he dressed for the stroll tonight. When times were good and heroin was cheap, Emilio earned enough as a hooker to afford nice things like the shoes and the lingerie and all his leather minis and long-sleeved silk blouses that hid the track marks on his arms. Times were not so very good these days. The shortage of heroin from Afghanistan had caused the price of the drug to sky rocket. He hoped the situation was only temporary. Not the war, he knewthatwould go on forever. But if he could find the diamonds Livvie was talking about in her report…

Okay, so stop day-dreaming, man. Get back to it.

What was Mercer Grant hiding? In addition to all those names, of course. And if he was or were hiding something, why had he come to the police in the first place?

In police work—as well you know, Commish—we detectives frequently make use of informers, what we call in the trade snitches. These are people upon who or even whom we usually have something we can hold over their heads. As for example, The Needle is a Jamaican informer who used to be adrug dealer before we busted a posse that had originally operated out of London. In London, young Jamaican males involved in violence and/or drugs are called Yardies—a little known fact, but true. The point is, The Needle ratted out half a dozen of these so-called Yardies when we busted the posse, this in exchange for dropping all charges against him. Temporarily, that is. We still have enough on him to put him away for a goodly number of years, were we so disposed. The Needle knows this. He also knows that if we let it be bruited about that he was the one who sold out the posse, oh dear, he might find himself down a sewer one night with his throat slit. So he is very inclined toward helping us whenever we come calling.

I went calling on him that Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Grant left the office. What Mr. Grant did not know was that when I asked him to please wait for me in the corridor outside while I checked with the Loot to see if he, the Loot, had any questions he might care to ask, what I was doing in actuality was talking to Barry Lock, a detective who works with me. What I was asking Barry to do was follow Mr. Grant home so that we could perhaps get a true name and address for the gentleman. So when I came back out and told Mr. Grant the Loot had nothing to add to what we’d already discussed, Barry had already gone downstairs and would be waiting for Mr. Grant when he came out of the station house. Mr. Grant didn’t know anything about this, of course. That is why it is called detective work.

Nor did he know that I myself was on my way to meet with The Needle.

The Needle was not so-named because he is tall and thin, which he is. Nor is that his name because he has only one eye, which he has. No, he is The Needle because when he was but a mere youth, he used to run a dope parlor where you could come up and flop while he injected heroin in your arm or sometimes into the inside of your thigh if you were a girl and didn’t want track marks to show for all to see. Also, if he used a thigh, it being so proximate and all, chances were good he might get a little something besides money in exchange for his product, one of the perks of being a dope dealer with female clients. It is not only the Taliban who took advantage of women, you know. I hate to say this, Mr. Commissioner, but I have been in precincts where rookie female cops, nonames mentioned, have had their lockers broken into and their shoes pissed into, pardon my French. It is not an easy life we women lead, cops or not.

Anyway, The Needle is this very tall, very thin, one-eyed but not unhandsome Jamaican individual, if you like Jamaicans, who was in the drug trade long before we busted the Yardieposse, and who—for all I know—is still dealing drugs this very minute. I really don’tknow, and I don’t care. We have enough on him to send him away for a long time as it is, without adding anything else to it, so “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is my policy. Except that when I ask, The Needlebettertell, or I pull the chain on him.

“What do you know about a Jamaican fellow named Mercer Grant?” I asked.

We were sitting in the kitchen of The Needle’s apartment, which is not too far from the station house and also O’Malley’s, the bar where all of this started. Because if it hadn’t been for Margie Gannon mentioning all that stuff about conflict diamonds, and if it hadn’t been for Mr. Grant bringing up the matter of the Revolutionary United Front, I wouldn’t be sitting here in a basement waiting for somebody to kill me. The Needle’s true and proper name, by the way, is Mortimer Loop. I am told there are a lot of Loops in Kingston. He is a very personable fellow with one annoying habit—well, two if you count his drug addiction. Theotherannoying habit is that he fancies himself to be a rap artist. That is to say, he constantly talks rap.

“Mercer Grant, Mercer Grant, do dee mon be Jamaican? How you laks yo’ eggs, wid some sausages or bacon?”

“Yes, he’s Jamaican,” I said.

He was standing at the stove, cracking eggs for omelets. This was already two in the afternoon, but The Needle had just woken up. He was, in fact, still wearing pajamas. To those not familiar with police work, this may seem unusual, a man in pajamas cooking eggs for a woman wearing beige slacks and tan French-heeled shoes, and a green long-sleeved blouse and a brown jacket, and carrying a nine-millimeter Glock automatic in a tan leather tote bag that matched the shoes when they were not even sharing any kind of personal relationship, the man and the woman. But in many respects, a law enforcement officer is similar to a physician. And so a cheap thief will often feel perfectly comfortable while dressed casually, let us say, in the presence of a female detective dressed for business. Besides, The Needle and I had worked together before, and the pajamas were very nicely patterned with a sort of peony design on black silk.

“And I’ll have sausages,” I said. “If you’ve got them.”

“Sausages,” The Needle said, and then went into another rap riff that carried him over to the refrigerator. “Dee lady want sausages, Dee Needle want bacon. She lookin for a mon she say be Jamaican.” Carrying the meats, he trotted back to the stove again on the heels of yet another rap. “What he do, this mon, do he break dee law? Otherwise, why dee cop, what she comin here for?”

I told The Needle that so far as I knew, Mercer Grant hadn’t committed any crime, but that he had come up to the squadroom with a whole bundle of phony names and a diamond chip in his front tooth…

“Oh, dee man got a di’mon, should be easy to fine. Is he tall, is he short, is he five feet, nine?”

I told The Needle that Grant was more like six-one, six-two, a tall angular man with a light complexion and a trim little mustache under his nose. I told him that Grant wasn’t even his real name, nor was Marie his wife’s real name, who by Tuesday would be dead, anyway, by her own estimate, which was today.

“So the wife be dead, but her name ain’ Marie. And the husband ain’ Grant, so what you want from me?”

“What do you know about conflict diamonds?” I asked him.

“Is he link to the war in Sierra Leone? Or he movin dee ice by his self all alone?”

“I have no idea. He told me his wife was gone, and then he asked me if I’d ever heard of the RUF, which stands for Revolutionary United Front…”

“You think she got whacked by the RUF?”

“Well, that crossed my mind. But…”

“Cause they mean mothah-fuckers, and I rather be deaf.”

The Needle forked strips of bacon out of the frying pan, and placed them on paper towels. Then he dropped four links of sausage into the sizzling bacon fat, and went back to stirring half a dozen eggs in a bowl. On the range, several squares of butter were melting in a second frying pan. The Needle dropped two slices of bread into a toaster on the counter top. I was beginning to work up an appetite.

“I was thinking of writing a cook book,” I told him. “Livvie Watts’s Recipes, how does that sound?”

“Shitty,” The Needle said, and didn’t go for a rhyme.

“Kay Scarpetta wrote a cook book,” I told him.

“Who dee fuck be she, what she mean to me? Would you lak some coffee, shall I brew some tea?”

We had breakfast, or lunch, or brunch, or whatever it was at a small table near a window that overlooked the street below. I could hear the sounds of little girls skipping rope downstairs. I could see pigeons flying from the rooftop across the way. It was springtime in the city, and the sausages and eggs were delicious. Even as The Needle promised me he would look for the elusive Grant and his missing, or perhaps already dead wife…

“Have no fear, I go on the ear. A mon with a di’mon, his wife ain’ Marie. I hear what I hear, I see what I see.”

…I had not even a glimmer that I would soon be placed in a situation that would test me in ways I’d never dreamt I’d be tested. Little did I know that the clock had already started ticking and that the fate of the world was hanging in the balance, not to mention my own fate.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You’re not going too fast for me, honey, Emilio thought. You’re giving me clue after clue. If I don’t find you by Sunday, I’ll eat my rhinestone-studded thong panties. You have just told me that your informant is a tall, thin, one-eyed Jamaican who is known as The Needle, big surprise, but whose real name is Mortimer Loop, which is probably not his real name, either, they are so fuckin cagey, these people. But let’s take a look in the phone book, anyway, just to verify, as they say.

Not to Emilio’s great surprise, there were no Mortimer Loops listed in either of the two directories he owned, but there was a Henrietta Loop who sounded interesting, and also a Loretta Loop, who sounded like Henrietta’s twin sister though their addresses were different. He wondered why Livvie would be using a fake name for her informant, but perhaps that was to protect herself in case her report got into the wrong hands before it was delivered to the commissioner. Emilio had no intention of delivering the report to anyone engaged in law enforcement. All he wanted to do was find that basement where all the diamonds were, give Livvie a big kiss of gratitude, and then leave for Rio de Janeiro.

Toward that end, he called a friend of his who used to be a bartender.

IN OLLIE’S NOVEL, his stool pigeon was a razor-thin, one-eyed Jamaican named Mortimer Loop, alias The Needle. In real life, this was a white man named William “Fats” Donner. Ollie had changed Donner’s name and description for fictitious purposes and also because he did not wish to get sued later on by a fat junkie snitch.

In fact, Donner was not merely fat, he was Fats. And “Fats” was “fat” in the plural. Fats Donner was obese. He was immense. He was mountainous. He also had a penchant for young girls and Turkish baths. In his novel, Ollie had changed these character traits to a fondness for cooking and rapping. He figured this was literary license.

On Thursday afternoon at three twenty-seven, Ollie found Donner at a place called The Samuel Baths, on Lincoln and South Twenty-ninth. The Baths had been named for a black faggot named Albert Samuel, who had made his money running a numbers game, and who needed a place where his fruity friends could gather to jerk each other off. Ollie didn’t think Donner was gay. He figured he came here only because, unlike Stockholm, there was a paucity of steam baths in this town. He was sitting now with a towel draped across his crotch, sucking in steam, thick layers of flesh quivering all over his sickly white body. He was altogether a somewhat disgusting person who did perverse things with twelve-year-old girls, but this was the big bad city and Donner was a very good informer. Sometimes you had to make allowances.

Ollie came in with his own towel and took a seat beside Donner on the wooden bench. Together, they looked like a pair of giant white Buddhas. Steam swirled around them.

“I’m looking for a hooker named Emmy,” Ollie said. “Blond hair, big tits. Ring a bell?”

“Most hookers these days got blond hair and big tits,” Donner said.

“Not the Puerto Rican ones,” Ollie said.

“Ah, we’re closing in,” Donner said.

“You know her?”

“Only what you just told me, dad. Blond, big tits, a spic. What part of town is she working?”

“She hocked a Gucci dispatch case in a pawnshop on Ainsley and Fifth. Broker’s a guy named Irving Stein.”

“No last name, this chick?”

“Stein didn’t ask for one. It was a two-bit transaction,” Ollie explained. “I’m looking for the case, too, if you get anything on it. A fat lady bought it from Stein.”

“Does she have a name, this fat lady?”

“No.”

“How fat is she?”

Not as fat as you, Ollie was tempted to say, but didn’t.

“She looked like an opera singer,” he said. “White. Brown hair, brown eyes.”

“Let’s get back to the hooker, dad. Not many of them work that stretch of turf. Is it possible Emmylivesnear the pawnshop?”

“I don’t know where she lives. And besides, Stein told me he getslotsof hookers in there.”

“I’m only saying that ain’t a stretch they normally stroll, man. You talking Hookerland, try Mason Avenue.”

“Are you telling me lots of hookerslivenear Ainsley and Fifth?”

“Lots of hookers live everywhere in this city. Most of ’em don’t eat where they shit, though, is all I’m saying.”

“Then why’d Stein tell me he gets lots of hookers in his shop?”

“Maybe he does.”

“Who live in the neighborhood?”

“It’s possible. Lots of them big old buildings used to have Jewish families in them, the ones south of Ainsley?”

“Yeah?”

“Could be hookers in them buildings now.”

“The queen could be king, too, if she had balls,” Ollie said.

“I’m only tryin’a zero in, dad,” Donner said. “If I can get a bead on her territory, maybe I can find her for you. Where’d she get this dispatch case?”

“She stole it from a parked car outside King Memorial.”

“Ah-ha!” Donner said. “Now you’re talkin, man. That’s hooker turf, the King area. Lots of events there, lots of white men on the town uptown, lookin for bars, lookin for black pussy, spic pussy, now you’re talkin. Let me go on the earie.”

“I’m eager to find this broad,” Ollie said.

“How much are we talkin here?” Donner asked. “You tell me the Gucci was a two-bit transaction…”

“I’m thinking a C-note if you find her for me.”

“You’re thinking small, dad. This is the twenty-first century.”

“And Castleview is still a penitentiary,” Ollie said.

“Oh dear, don’t threaten me, dad.”

“It’s all I know how to do,” Ollie said, and grinned like a barracuda.

“Make it a deuce,” Donner said.

“Let’s see what you come up with.”

“Emmy,” Donner said. “Let’s see.”

AT A QUARTERto four that Thursday afternoon, just as the night shift was gathering before the muster desk downstairs, preparing to relieve on post at fourP.M., and just as detectives were beginning to wend their separate ways up the iron-runged stairway that led to the second-floor squadroom, Pamela Henderson stopped at the desk and asked Sergeant Murchison where she could find a Detective Steve Carella. Murchison picked up a phone, pushed a button on it, said a few words into the receiver, and then told her to go up the steps there to the second floor and down the corridor.

Carella was waiting inside the slatted wooden railing to greet her. He opened the gate, led her in, and offered her a chair at his desk.

Still wearing black—her husband had been dead only four days, after all—she looked somehow taller than she had in jeans and a turtleneck, perhaps because she was wearing high-heeled pumps with the black skirt and jacket. She sat, crossed her legs, and said, “Is this an inconvenient time? I sense a changing of the guard.”

“Not at all,” Carella said. “I had some papers to file, anyway.”

Pamela looked at him and nodded.

He sensed that she didn’t quite trust him.

He said, “Really, I’m in no hurry. How can I help you?”

Still, she hesitated.

“Really,” he said again.

She sighed heavily. Nodded again.

“I found some letters,” she said.

He glanced, he hoped surreptitiously, at the clock on the wall, and he thought, What this case doesn’t need at a quarter to four in the afternoon, ten to four already, after a long hard day when I’m ready to pack it in and go home to my wife and family, what this case definitely does not need is more complications, this case already has enough complications.

Ollie had called him earlier to tell him the gun was found on the wrong side of the hall. Now here was the murdered man’s wife telling him she’d found some letters, which he somehow suspected were not letters from her mother.

“Letters from whom?” he asked.

“Someone named Carrie.”

“As in Grant?”

“No, as in Stephen King.”

“A woman.”

“Yes. A woman.”

Landing on the word heavily. A woman. Yes.

“To whom were these letters addressed, Mrs. Henderson?”

“To my husband,” she said.

Carella pulled on the white cotton gloves.

THERE WERE THREEletters in all.

All of them written in a delicate hand, in purple ink on pale lavender writing paper. The stationery was obviously expensive, embossed with the monogrammed initials JSH. If there had been matching envelopes to go with the single sheet of paper in each envelope, they had not been used for these mailings. Instead, Carrie—for such was how she’d signed her name—had used plain white envelopes she could have bought in any variety store for ten cents apiece. In her same delicate handwriting, she had addressed the letters to Councilman Lester Henderson at his office downtown. Hand-lettered across the face of each envelope were the councilman’s name and address and the wordsPERSONAL AND PRIVATE. The envelopes had been postmarked at a post office in an area called Laughton’s Market, one of the city’s better neighborhoods.

The first letter read:

My darling Lester:

I can’t believe this is really happening! Will we really be alone together for two full nights? Will you really not have to watch a clock or catch a taxi? Will I be able to sleep in your arms all night long, wake up in your arms the next morning, linger in your arms, make love to you as often as I like, spoil you to within an inch of your life? Will this really happen this coming weekend? I can’t believe it. I’m afraid if I pinch myself, I’ll wake up. Hurry to me, my darling, hurry, hurry, hurry.

Carrie

The second letter read:

My darling Lester:

When you receive this, it will be Tuesday. On Saturday morning I’ll be boarding an airplane that will fly me to the Raleigh Hotel in a city I’ve never visited, there to await the arrival of the man I love so very much. I cannot wait, I simply cannot wait. I love you to death, I adore you.

Carrie

Carella slipped the letters back into their envelopes.

“You know,” he said, “maybe it would be better if I…”

“I’ve read them all,” Pamela said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m beyond shock.”

He nodded, and opened the third envelope.

My darling Lester:

It will be Friday when you receive this. Tomorrow morning, I will take a taxi to the airport, and fly into your waiting arms. I love you, my darling, I adore you, I am completely and hopelessly madly in love with you, am I gushing? So allow me to gush. I’m nineteen, I’m entitled.

Carrie

“So, uh, where’d you find these?” Carella asked, folding the last letter, sliding it back into its envelope, busying himself with the task, not looking at Lester Henderson’s widow, who sat beside the desk in monumental silence.

“In his study. At the back of a drawer in his desk.”

“When was this?”

“This morning.”

He didn’t ask what she was doing in his desk. A man dies, you go through his things. Death robs everyone of privacy. Death has no respect for secrets. If you’re fucking a nineteen-year-old girl, don’t leave her letters around. Death will uncover them.

“Does the name mean anything to you?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t know anyone named Carrie?”

“No one.”

“How about the monogram. JSH. Do those initials ring a bell?”

“No.”

“They don’t seem to match the name ‘Carrie.’”

“No, they don’t.”

“Did you suspect any of this?”

“No.”

“Any idea your husband was…uh…?”

“No. This came as a total surprise.”

“Any…uh…past history of…uh…”

“Never. As far as I knew, he was completely faithful to me.”

“May I keep these letters?”

“Of course. That’s why I brought them here. Won’t there be fingerprints on them or something?”

“Well, yours certainly, and your husband’s. And, yes, maybe the girl’s, too.”

Nineteen. He guessed that was a girl. He guessed that was still a girl.

“If you’ll let us take your prints before you go,” he said. “For comparison.”

“Yes, of course.”

“We have your husband’s,” he said. He did not mention that cadavers were routinely printed at the morgue. He did not mention that even if they recovered some good prints for the girl, chances of finding anything on her in the system were exceedingly slim. Nineteen years old? Had she ever been in the armed services? Had she ever held a government job? What was the likelihood that a nineteen-year-old girl who wrote letters on expensive monogrammed stationery had ever been arrested for anything? Still, you went through the paces, and sometimes you got lucky.

“Will you let me know if you learn anything?”

“I’ll call you right away,” he said.

“I hate him for this,” she said out of the blue.

THE BAR TWO BLOCKSfrom the Eighty-seventh Precinct station house was called Shanahan’s. At four-thirty that afternoon, forty-five minutes after the day watch was relieved, Eileen Burke and Andy Parker met there with Francisco Palacios, who was not too terribly tickled to be seen in a place where so many cops went for drinks after work. The Gaucho liked to keep a low profile.

On the other hand, if he was involved in the business of supplying information to the police, would he be doing it so blatantly out in the open? Mindful of the fact that another person in his profession—an informer named Danny Gimp—had been killed in a public place while sharing coffee and chocolate eclairs with yet another detective from the Eight-Seven, Palacios kept a roving eye on the people coming in and out of Shanahan’s, lest he, too, be cold-cocked for no reason whatsoever.

He was here this evening to tell Parker and Eileen what he had learned about the drug deal that would go down this Tuesday at midnight. The date and the time hadn’t changed. Neither had the names of the principal players. But he was now able to give them with some degree of certainty the exact location of the impending transaction.

“The thing is she’s being very careful, this woman,” he said. “I think she got burned once before, really bad, by some sharpies up from Miami, so she wants to make sure nobody does it to her again. Five times already, she changed the location. It’s always a basement, she likes to do business in basements cause nobody can get in and out too fast if they have to run up and down steps. When the Miami guys took her, it was on a rooftop. She figured a rooftop would be safe,verdad?Instead, she handed over the crack and next thing you know she’s looking at half a dozen Glocks and the Miami guys are jumping over to the next roof, and it’s so long, see you on the beach, honey. Ever since then, it’s basements, does anybody want another beer?”

“I’m fine,” Eileen said.

“I could use one,” Parker said.

Palacios signaled to the waiter, who slouched over to the table and took their order for two fresh brews. A pair of heavy-looking guys came through the front door, and Palacios gave them the once-over, but they turned out to be two off-duty cops who went over to join some buddies at another table. Eileen was still trying to find out a little bit more about this mysterious deal that was about to happen in some mysterious basement.

“Who are the players here?” she asked. “You say they haven’t changed, so who are they?”

“I think you had traffic before with the lady selling the crack,” Palacios said. “You remember a black woman named Rosita Washington, she’s half-Spanish?”

Eileen shook her head. “Who are the buyers?”

“Three guys who are total amateurs,” Palacios said. “They’re the ones who are dangerous. Ah,gracias, señor,” he said to the waiter, and immediately picked up his beer mug. Tilting it in Eileen’s direction, he said, “To the beautiful lady,” and drank. Eileen acknowledged the toast dead-panned. “The three of them think all black people are stupid,” Palacios said, “but if they try to rip off Rosie Washington, there’s gonna be real trouble, I can tell you.”

“All black peoplearestupid,” Parker said, not for nothing was he a close friend of Ollie Weeks.

“Not as stupid as these three jerks, believe me,” Palacios said. “You heard of The Three Stooges? Shake hands with these guys. I don’t know how they raised the three hundred thou they need for the deal,ifthey raised it. But I can tell you, if they go in empty-handed they’re dead on the platter. Rosie ain’t gonna get stiffed a second time.”

“Who are they?” Eileen asked.

“Three jackasses named Harry Curtis, Constantine Skevopoulos, and Lonnie Doyle. You know them?”

“No,” Parker said.

“No,” Eileen said.

“Grifters from the year one. Which is why I think they might try to rip off Rosie, in which case run for cover,niños,run for cover. Thing you should do, you want my advice, is go down the basement, yell ‘Cops, freeze!’ and bust all of them before any shooting starts. You nail Rosie for possession of the coke, and you nail the three dopes for tryin’a buy it, is my advice.”

“Thanks,” Parker said drily.

“Where is this basement?” Eileen asked.

“3211 Culver. Between Tenth and Eleventh.”

“I gotta pee,” Parker said, and rose, and headed for the men’s room. One of the heavy-looking guys who’d come in earlier walked over to the juke box, put some coins in it, and pushed some buttons. Sinatra came out singing “It Was a Very Good Year.” You didn’t hear Sinatra too often these days. Eileen missed him. She sat listening, swaying in time with the music. He was singing now about city girls who lived up the stairs.

“Do you like to dance?” Palacios asked.

“Yes, I like to dance,” she said.

“You want to come dancing with me sometime?”

She looked at him.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why not? I’m a very good dancer.”

“I don’t doubt it, Cowboy.”

“So?”

“You also have four wives.”

“Had,”Palacios said. “Past tense. Had. I’m divorced now. Four times.”

“Terrific recommendation,” Eileen said.

“Come on, we go dancing one night.”

“Cowboy, we’ve got enough on you to send you away for twenty years.”

“So? Meanwhile, we go dancing.”

“I’m a cop,” Eileen said.

“So? Cops don’t dance?”

“Let it go, Cowboy.”

“I’ll ask you again.”

She looked at him another time. She was thinking he was handsome as hell, and she hadn’t been to bed with anyone for the past six months now, and she’d heard Hispanic lovers were the cat’s ass, so why not go dancing one night? She was also thinking you don’t get involved with guys on the other side of the law, this man would be doing time at Castleview if we hadn’t let him walk in exchange for his services. So thanks, Cowboy, she thought.

“Thanks, Cowboy,” she said, “but no.”

Parker was back.

“Lay it out for me one more time,” he told Palacios.

OH SHIT, Suzie thought, it’s about to get complicated again.

Just when I dared hope things would stay clear and simple forever, Harry brings his dumb-ass friends home with him again, and they’re sitting there in the living room playing cards at eight o’clock at night, and talking about their next brilliant scheme to make a million dollars without having to work for it.

The last time they had a great idea was four weeks ago, when they decided to stick up a floating crap game in Diamondback. Twelve humongous black guys in the game, any one of them could’ve broken these three wimps in half without lifting a finger, they decide to go stick it up. What happened was it was raining that night, and the game got called off, which was lucky for her husband and his pals, or there would’ve been three broken heads around here. So now they were planning another one of their grand capers, but maybe—if they got lucky again—it would rain again and save them a lot of heartache and grief.

She sometimes wondered why she stayed married to Harry Curtis. Sometimes wondered, in fact, why she’d married him in the first place. Well, she always did go for big men. Suzie Q, they used to call her when she was in her teens—well, some of her friends still called her that. Short for Suzie Quinn. Now she was Susan Q. Curtis, twenty-three years old and married to a man who was twice her age and big all over, including his ideas.

The thing of it was that Harry Curtis thought all black people were stupid, and all you had to do was trick them out of their money, usually by sticking a gun in their face. It really was a good thing him and his bright cronies hadn’t held up that crap game because from what Luella told her down at the beauty parlor where she worked, the people in that game were truly Diamondback “gangstas,” Luella’s word, a bit of information her brilliant husband shrugged off when she later told him about it.

It was Suzie herself who had casually mentioned the time and location of the crap game to Harry, who in turn had mentioned it to his two brainy buddies, who had decided that here was a score worthy of their combined talents. Never mind she also later mentioned the guys in the game were gangstas, that didn’t scare them off, oh no, they were three big macho men with three big pistolas, and they weren’t afraid of no niggers up there in Diamondback. Lucky thing it rained that night. Though now Suzie wondered what kind of gangstas these guys could’ve been if they’d got scared off of their game by a little rain. Well, a lot of rain.

She could hear their voices coming from the other room.

“Cocaine,” one of them was saying. Lonnie. Her husband’s oldest friend. Went to high school together, went to jail together, but that was another story. And besides, it was only for a year and a half after all was said and done. And they’d met some nice people there.

“See your five and raise you five,” her husband said.

“High grade snow,” Lonnie said.

“What does that make it?”

This from Constantine, the one with the dopey grin and the fidgety shoulders. Constantine in motion was a wondrous thing to behold.

“It makes it a ten-dollar raise,” Harry said.

“Too steep for me,” Constantine said.

“Asking price, three hundred thou,” Lonnie said. “Call.”

“So it’s just you and me, Lon,” Harry said, and chuckled. She guessed maybe that was one of the reasons she married him. That deep low chuckle of his. And also his size, of course.

“Where we gonna get three hundred thou?” Constantine asked. She could visualize his shoulders twitching. As if he was trying to shake off bugs.

“We don’t hafta get it,” Lonnie said.

“Beat kings full,” her husband said.

“Four deuces, sport,” Lonnie said.

“Then how we gonna buy the coke?” Constantine asked.

“Weain’tgonna buy it,” Lonnie said. “We gonnastealit.”

Of course, Suzie thought.

Otherwise it would be too damn simple, am I right?