Fat Ollie's Book

12

The Needle got back to me on Wednesday morning, the day after Mercer Grant came to report his missing wife. By that time my associate Barry Lock had trailed Grant to several different apartments in the city and could not say with certainty that Grant lived in any of them. He had finally lost him when he went into the Barnes & Noble on Thirty-fifth Street, where Lock observed him reading several magazines he did not offer to buy, while sipping a cappuccino he had apparently purchased.

But that’s where Lock lost him because, you should pardon this, Commish—and this is just between you and I, or maybe even you and me—he had to relieve himself. And while he was in the back of the store where the men’s room was, Grant took it in his head to depart, whether by coincidence or design. In short, I still didn’t know where he lived. So it was with considerably great expectations that I took the call from The Needle that morning. Hopefully, The Needle…

Or perhaps IhopedThe Needle…

Or maybe I was evenhopefulthat The Needle…

Hopefully,The Needle would have some information on Grant or his missing wife Marie or his cousin Ambrose Fields. To which extent, I held my breath and prayed to the good Lord above.

“What have you got for me?” I asked.

“Well, the picture ain’ bright, but neither be it dim. I can’t find neither hide nor hair of him.”

“Then how do you figure the picture’s bright, Morty?”

The Needle did not like being called Morty when his true and honorable name was Mortimer. He once told me that Mortimer is a name from the old Anglo-French, and that it means “one who lives near the sea,” which might have been okay if he was still living in Jamaica, which was surrounded by water, but not if you lived in this city, which was surrounded by thieves of all kinds. Besides, I didn’t like Jamaicans putting on airs, so every now and then I called him Morty to get a rise out of him. It did not get a rise out of him that morning. He went on with his report as if I hadn’t even addressed him.

“I tink I know what dee RUF mean. But it ain no di’mons, it’s a whole ’nother scene.”

“If it’s not diamonds, what…?”

“These conflic’ di’mons, they also called ‘blood.’ An’ the folks dat trade ’em is nothin but crud.”

“What makes you think the RUF isn’t involved here?”

“Blood di’mons is rare on dee street dese days. What we lookin’ at here is a new kinda craze.”

“Like what, Morty?”

“What I got from a lady whose name is Grace, is dee RUF is aunderwearsplace.”

“Underwear?”

“What you put on first…”

“Iknowwhat underwear…”

“…when you gettin dressed. So yo outer clothes dey don’ get all messed.”

“What do you mean by an underwear place? A lingerie shop?”

“What I mean is afac’tryby dee River Dowd. Where dey makes underwears for dee upper-class crowd.”

“What kind of underwear?”

“Lacy bras, garter belts, frilly panties an’ such. If you want to hear more, it won’t coss you too much.”

“Howmuch, Morty?”

“Fo’ dee name, fo’ dee address, pay me juss a fin…”

“No way!”

“Make it four an’ a half, and I’ll cave right in.”

“That’s still too high.”

“Den how about four, do dat sound too dear? Shall I take a walk, or you want to hear?”

“Three hundred is all I can go, Morty.”

“Mother mercy of God, why dee girl socheap? Kinda money like dat ain’ wurt even a peep!”

“Morty, I’m not in the mood for a stickup in a dark alley!”

“Okay den, fine, make it t’ree twenty-five. Do we have a deal? Are we still alive?”

“Three twenty-five. Let me hear it. And it better be good.”

“On dee River Dowd, Queen Elizabeth side,” Mortimer said, his voice lowering to a whisper. “Tink I’ll come along wid you, juss for dee ride.”

“What’s the name and address?”

“I tell you doze when I gets dee pay. Otherwise I see you some udder day.”

“Trust me, Morty.”

“Run hide dee silver, cause dee lady wants trust…”

“Morty…”

“Never see her again once she makes dee bust.”

“You can trust me, you know that. What’s the name and address?”

Mortimer sighed deeply.

“Juss between you an’ I, or perhaps you an’ me, it’s the Rêve du Jour Underwears Factory.”

“Rêve du Jour Underwear,” I said. “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

“Accordin to dee lady whose name is Grace, it’s twenty-one, forty-four Riverview Place.”

“Thank you, Mortimer.”

“You owe me t’ree an’ a quarter,” he said.

The trouble with Livvie’s city was that it was imaginary. The people, the places in her pages were all fictitious. For all Emilio knew, even the police routine was phony and not based on established investigatory technique. He realized that this was what she’d had to do in order to throw the bad guys off her track, but man it certainly made things difficult for a person trying to rescue her.

He thought of himself as her rescuer.

Her savior.

Her knight in shining armor.

The person who would kick in the door to that basement, wherever the hell it was, clutching her brave report in his hands and crying, “I’m here, Olivia, what ho!”

Was what they cried in novels and movies.

But, still, he wished she hadn’t made it so damn complicated. Things were complicated enough these days without imaginary cities with imaginary places in them. For example…

Where was this bar two blocks from Livvie’s station house?

And where was this factory across the river?

He had just learned from reading her report yet another time that there was a ladies underwear factory across the river, which was exciting in itself, all garter belts and panties and such. He supposed “dee River Dowd” was the River Dix in real life, and he further guessed that the “Queen Elizabeth side” of the river was Majesta, directly over the bridge. But none of this brought him any closer to finding the basement Livvie was trapped in.

He wondered if he should read her report yet another time from top to bottom because, to tell the truth, it was very lively reading and it gave him some very keen insights into the workings of a woman’s mind, which he could use in his business, as it were, or even was. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be more profitable to take a stroll over the bridge, scope the neighborhood there, see if there was anything that evensoundedlike Rêve du Jour Underwear Factory at 2144 Riverview Place, which of course was a phony street name in Livvie’s imaginary city.

He wondered if Aine would like to come with him.

Sometimes, if you offered a dealer a two-fer, he gave you a break on the price.

Emilio let her phone ring a dozen times.

Either she was out looking for a bar two blocks from a police precinct, or else she was laying on the floor stoned out of her mind.

So he headed for the bridge all by his lonesome.

THE STREETS ONeither side of the Majesta Bridge were perhaps among the noisiest in the entire city. Teeming with vehicular traffic, the approaches to the bridge seemed miles long, although in actuality they measured only several blocks. The din was relentless. Taxis, trucks, passenger cars honked their horns incessantly.

The building Carolyn Harris lived in was in the shadow of the bridge. If Emilio Herrera had looked down as he started across the bridge that morning at ten, he would have seen two detectives talking to the doorman outside. He wouldn’t have recognized them, and in any case he wouldn’t have known they were detectives. Emilio had met many detectives in his checkered career, but not these two. Besides, the only detective on his mind right now was Olivia Wesley Watts.

The doorman was telling Carella and Kling that he’d seen Miss Harris leaving the building for church at a quarter to nine this morning. He expected she’d be back by eleven. What she usually did was go to nine o’clock mass, take holy communion, and then have breakfast afterward at a deli on Bradley.

“Did she do that last week, too?” Kling asked.

“No, sir,” the doorman said. “She was out of town last week.”

“Bradley and where?” Carella asked.

They recognized her at once because she was the only blonde eating in the place, sitting in a booth, her back to the entrance doors. They debated just going in and sitting opposite her in the booth, and then decided to wait outside until she’d finished her breakfast. They let her walk a respectable distance from the deli, and then caught up with her on the street corner. Even on a Sunday, the noise was horrific.

“Miss Harris?” Carella said.

She turned, surprised.

She was sporting a shiner the color of Burgundy wine.

“Yes?” she said.

“Detective Carella,” he said, and flashed the tin. “My partner, Detective Kling.”

She knew at once.

“This is about Lester, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, miss, it’s about Lester. What happened to your eye?”

“Nothing. A bee stung me.”

Which was perhaps more inventive than “I walked into a door,” or “I got hit with a tennis ball,” or “I fell off the toilet bowl,” or any one of the dozen or more reasons abused women found to alibi the men who were abusing them.

Carella let it pass. For now.

“Few questions we’d like to ask you,” he said. “If you’ve got a minute.”

They walked several blocks downtown and then south to the river where a pocket park nestled at the water’s edge. The noise was less frightful here; it merely sounded like distant thunder. Across the river, they could see Majesta with its factories and smoke stacks. They did not know, nor would it have meant anything to them, that at about that time, Emilio Herrera was just leaving the bridge’s footpath and coming down the steps to the street below.

“How did you find me?” Carrie asked.

“The stationery,” Carella said.

“My mother’s,” she said, and nodded. “I shouldn’t have used her stationery. She let me take some home with me when I went down to see her last winter. She lives in Florida, you know…well, I guess youdoknow if that’s how you got to me, her stationery.”

“Miss Harris,” Carella said, “where were you last week at around this time?”

“I was with Lester Henderson.”

“Where?”

“The Raleigh Hotel. Upstate. The capital.”

“You had a room at the Raleigh, did you?”

“Yes. But we spent most of the time in his room.”

“Did you have dinner with him last Saturday night, at a restaurant called Amboise?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you go back there for lunch alone the next day? Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“And did you have dinner with him that Sunday night at a restaurant called The Unicorn?”

“Yes, I did. We did.”

“Did you spend Sunday night with him as well?”

“Yes.”

“Did you accompany him home on Monday morning?”

“Yes, we took the same plane back to the city, yes.”

“The same early plane.”

“Seven-ten, it was, I believe.”

“Then what, Miss Harris?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Where did you go from the airport?”

“Home.”

She looked surprised. Where do you think I went? Where would you go from the airport? You’d go home, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s where I went. Home.

“You didn’t go to King Memorial, did you?”

“No, of course not. Lester went his way, I went mine. He’s married, you know.”

Carella refrained from saying, Yes,Iknow. Didyouknow?

“What happened to your eye?” he asked again.

“I told you. I got stung by a bee.”

“When?”

“When?”

Again the surprised look. What difference does it makewhenI got stung? Did you ever get stung by a bee? Then don’t ask mewhenI got stung!

“Yes,” Carella said. “When?”

“Last night, okay?”

“Looks older than that,” Kling said. “Did you see a doctor about it?”

“No. I put an ice pack on it.”

“Last night?”

“Yes,last night,” she said, her voice rising in indignation, a host of unspoken words once again flaring in her eyes and curling on her lip: Why are you asking me the same question over and over again, don’t youbelieveme? Why would I lie about a goddamn bee sting? How dare you notbelieveme? My mother has a condo in Fort Laud-erdale, my mother orders monogrammed stationery that costs a fortune!

All of this in her eyes and on her face.

“Who hit you?” Carella asked.

“NotLester, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Then who?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody, but not Lester, huh?”

“What is this? You don’t thinkIkilled him, do you?” she said, and tried a laugh. “Isthatwhat you think?” The laugh died, the indignation flared again in her green eyes. My mother hasattorneys,her eyes said. How dare you?

But somebody had smacked her in one of those lovely green eyes, and the flesh surrounding it was still discolored red and purple and blue.

“Who hit you?” Carella asked again. “Andwhen?”

“Myboyfriend,okay?” she shouted.

THE WAY SHEtells it, she was going steady with this boy from school…

“I go to Ramsey U,” she said, “I’m a sophomore there, an English major.”

…when she met Lester Henderson while he was giving a talk for the Political Science Department. She went up to chat with him afterward, and to get him to sign this book he’d written titledWhy the Law?,and to ask the questions she hadn’t had a chance to ask from the floor even though she kept waving her hand at the guy with the microphone. Mr. Henderson…

“I was still calling him Mr. Henderson then.”

…told her if she’d like to continue the discussion over a cup of coffee, he’d be happy to, and she said sure because he was so very cute and all in a dynamic, forceful, vibrant, vigorous sort of way, not like Lucas at all.

“Lucas is my boyfriend,” she said. “Wasmy boyfriend.”

“Lucas what?”

“Riley,” she said.

“Is he the one who hung the shiner on you?”

“Yes.”

“Last night?”

“No.”

“When?”

“Monday morning. After I got back to the city.”

“Why?”

“He found out about Lester.”

The way she explains it, she kept seeing Lucas because, after all, he’d pinned her and everything. But at the same time she was seeing Lester once or twice a week, sometimes three or four times, depending on how often he could get away from his wife, and how often she could tell Lucas she had to study for a Chaucer test or something. This had been going on since last November, you know, when Lester spoke at the school, just after Thanksgiving, between Thanksgiving and Christmas was when it started. But Lucas never suspected anything at all, well, you know Lucas, he’s so laid back about everything. Until Monday morning.

“On Monday, he came to my apartment…”

“What time was this?”

“Around eleven-thirty.”

“Came to your apartment, yes.”

“And told me he knew where I’d been that weekend…and…and started to hit me.”

“Did he know you’d been with Henderson?”

“Yes.”

“He told you that?”

“Not in those words.”

“What words?”

“He called him ‘That fucking cheap politician.’”

“But he knew it was Henderson.”

“Yes, he knew.”

“Where does your boyfriend live?”

“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”

“Where does he live?”

“831 Granger. Near the school.”

• • •

FATS DONNERdidn’t call Ollie until twelve noon that Sunday. He announced himself to the desk sergeant as “William Donner,” which didn’t ring a bell until Donner said, somewhat impatiently and heatedly, “Fats Donner, tell him it’sFatsDonner,” at which time the sergeant recognized a snitch if ever there was one. He put Donner through at once.

“You should tell your people to be more alert,” Donner said.

“Why, what happened?” Ollie asked.

“I’m calling with valuable information, and the man doesn’t recognize my name?”

“Gee, I’m sorry about that,” Ollie said. “What have you got for me?”

“I’ve got Emmy,” Donner said.

ROSIE WASHINGTONwas not an easy person to keep in sight. A not uncommon mix of Hispanic and African blood, she was a good-looking, light-skinned woman in a community that boasted of many such racial blendings. If she were Chinese, it would be a different story. But the only Chinks up here ran laundries or places that gave women manicures, though Parker supposed the girls who worked in the nail parlors were all Koreans, same fuckin difference.

What Parker was trying to do was ascertain that the buy this coming Tuesday night would indeed take place in the basement of the building at 3211 Culver Av. Toward that end, he thought it might prove providential to put a discreet tail on the lady. His reasoning was that if three hundred large was about to change hands on Tuesday at midnight, the lady would at least case the joint first to make sure she wasn’t stepping into another setup like the one on the rooftop with the Miami spics. The Gaucho hadn’t actuallysaidthey were spics, but what else could dope buyers from Miami be? Anyway, Palacios was a spic himself, so what did you expect him to say? Mycompadresripped off a nice Spanish lady?

All things considered, Rosie Washington was in fact rumored to be a nice lady. That is to say, in a racket where sudden extermination was always a distinct possibility, she hadn’t killed anyone yet—or at least she hadn’t committed any murders the policeknewabout yet. This was not to say there weren’t a multitude of bodies at the bottom of the river or in the trunks of cars at the airport, or even buried in somebody’s basement, maybe even the basement in which the lady would be selling cocaine worth three hundred thousand dollars this Tuesday night. It merely meant that for someone who’d been in the business as long as Rosie had, she’d managed to stay remarkably beyond the reach of the law. Except for a minor possessions charge when she was nineteen years old and presumably still learning her trade, there was nothing on her in the files.

Parker hoped to change all that this Tuesday night.

Actually, following Rosie was not such a terrible chore. In fact, it was almost enjoyable. For a woman who was now forty-seven—according to her date of birth at the time of the single possessions bust—she had a very sweet little ass that was a definite pleasure to observe. Swinging up the avenue in a tight black skirt, she looked like any one of the hookers patrolling this turf. Then again, to ParkerallPuerto Rican girls looked like hookers.

But where was she going in such a hurry?

ROSITA WASHINGTONknew she was being followed.

This troubled her.

The buy was supposed to go down this coming Tuesday at midnight, and this was now already past twelve o’clock on Sunday afternoon and some clumsy cop who looked like a homeless person was on her tail. It was one thing to have to worry about the people supposed to be buying the product from you. It was another to have to worry that maybe the cops had found out. But how?

Two brothers coming toward her from the opposite direction smacked their lips and rolled their eyes and craned their necks at her as she went by. She wanted to tell them Yo, mind your fuckin manners, okay? but you never knew who was carrying a box cutter these days, or even a gun, so it was just better to keep your mouth shut and let them come in their pants.

She stopped to look in the window of a shop selling running shoes and barbells and all kinds of fitness shit, when all she wanted to do was take a quick peek up the street to see if Mr. Law was still on her ass. There he was, stopping to light a cigarette as if he was paying her no mind, oh my what a smart detective you are, mister. Made you the minute you picked me up outside my building, now the problem is how toshakeyou.

She went in the A & P up the street, and then hurried to the ladies’ room at the back of the store, figuring to stay in there awhile, let him believe he’d lost her. She’d have gone out the back way, but there wasn’t no back way cause there were too many thefts in the hood, you had only one way in and out most stores so you could keep an eye on a woman suddenly got pregnant with a sack of potatoes under her coat. He was waiting outside when she finally hit the street again, pretending to be studying the Mother’s Day display of flowering plants on a cart outside the store—was Mother’s Day already here? Man, the way these holidays snuck up on you! She marched right past him without skipping a beat, just as if he wasn’t there, and kept on walking till she got to a place sheknewhad a back door.

The lettering on the plate glass window of the shop read: EL CASTILLO DE PALACIOS

She opened the door and went in.

A little bell tinkled over the door. She closed the door behind her, glanced quickly through the window to make sure the cop was still with her, and then smiled as The Gaucho came out from the back to greet her.