Fat Ollie's Book

15

OFFICER PATRICIA GOMEZkept wondering how somebody who’d shot somebody from the stage-right wings of the auditorium could have dropped the murder weapon in a sewer in the alley outside stage left. Wouldn’t this person have had tocrossthe stage in order to do that? And wouldn’t someone in the auditorium haveseenhim crossing the stage?

Patricia stood now in the alley outside stage right, where the killershouldhave come out of the auditorium if reason had followed logic. The trouble with police work, however, was that very often nothing seemed logical or reasonable. She had been a cop for only four months so far, and in that amount of time she had seen and heard so many totally illogical and unreasonable things that sometimes she wished she’d become a fire fighter instead, which had been one of the options open to a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the Riverhead section of the city.

Patricia’s first day on the job, walking her beat in her spanking new tailor-made blues, an eleven-year-old girl eating a jelly apple had stepped out of a bodega and onto the sidewalk just as two gangs disputing the same dope-dealing corner opened fire on each other. The girl had been caught in the crossfire. When Patricia came onto the scene, the girl’s blood was staining the freshly fallen snow under her, and her grandmother was holding her in her arms and screaming, “Adelia, no! Adelia! Adelia!” But the girl was already dead.

Patricia found this unreasonable and illogical.

Her sergeant told her, “You get used to it.”

In the ensuing months, she’d seen a man with four big holes in his face where his wife had shot him when she found him in bed with the woman next door; she’d seen a baby whose face had been chewed to ribbons by rats after her mother left her alone in her crib while she went out to the movies with a girlfriend; she’d seen a woman trapped in a car that had crashed into a Mickey D’s, and had watched while the ES guys scissored the car open and lifted the woman out all bleeding and broken and crushed, and she had thought this is unreasonable, this is illogical.

And only two weeks ago, she had thought the same thing when a man of seventy-five had had his throat slit by someone they still hadn’t caught, who had also cleaned out the man’s wallet and thrown it into the gutter where his blood was still running red when Patricia knelt beside him, and said, “You’ll be okay, hang on,” but he was dead, of course, and there was no hanging on, and it was all so totally fucking unreasonable and illogical.

She stood alone in the alleyway now, trying to understand what it might have been like to shoot somebody and then run from the scene of the crime. You shoot from stage right, you run away stage right. You don’t cross a crowded auditorium, and exit stage left, and drop the weapon in a sewer on the opposite side of the building. You do not do that. I have seen too many illogical and unreasonable things in these past four months, but I have to tell you I would not do that if I had just shot and killed a man.

So whatwouldI do? she asked herself.

I would come out through the doors there, and because I would have the murder weapon in my hand, I would immediately dump it in the most convenient place. Which would be the sewer right there under the drain pipe. But no. The killer had gone to theotherside of the building and dumped the gun there. It didn’t make sense. The gun should have been onthisside of the building.

Unless.

Well, this was just supposing.

But suppose there’d been an accomplice? Suppose there’d been two of them in on it,twopeople who wanted the councilman dead for whatever reasons of their own…well, at the Academy they’d been taught there were only two reasons for murder, and those reasons were love or money. Socherchez la femme,honey, or follow the money, cause that’s all there is to know, and all you need to know.

Suppose I shoot him from stage right…

…and I hand off the gun to an accomplice, who goes out the doors on the left side of the building and drops the gun there…

While meanwhile…

Now let’s just hold this a minute, she thought.

No, that’s right,meanwhileI’m on the right side of the building, no gun anymore, and I go strolling away from the building and up the avenue, nothing to attract attention anymore, no gun, no nothing, you solved the fucking crime, Patricia!

So how come nobody saw me? she asked herself.

I pop six caps from the wings there, nobody sees me?

How often do people get shot in this place?

I mean, okay, maybe nobody on thestagegot a good look at me, I’m in the wings, after all, and there must’ve been a lot of confusion, somebody getting shot. But how aboutoffthe stage,backstage,whatever they call it? How aboutthere?Nobody standing there with a broom or a mop? Nobody in the whole damn building who saw me leaving the place—whichever side I left it, right, left, who cares?—nobody saw meleavingthe scene of the crime?

Didn’t Ollie question anybody whoworkshere?

I’ll bet he questionedeverybodywho works here, he’s a good cop, Iguesshe’s a good cop, I’m only a rookie, what do I know? And besides, the patrol sarge is going to start wondering why I’m not out on the beat right this minute, where people might illogically and unreasonably be getting themselves killed.

She looked at her watch.

It was almost lunch time.

She decided she would call in and say she was taking five.

Then, instead of grabbing a bite to eat, she would go into King Memorial for twenty minutes or so, and see if she could scare up a custodian or something.

ALTHOUGH OLLIE’S SISTERonce told him there might have been a touch of the shamrock in their own heritage, he did not particularly like people of Irish descent. Ollie preferred thinking of himself as descending from British aristocracy. He knew for an absolute fact that his ancestry could be traced back to Norman times in England, when—according to the Domesday Book—a lord of the barony of Hastings held a knight’s fief in Wikes, which Ollie supposed was a town, what else could it be? “Wikes” was only one of the variants of the name “Weeks,” just like Weackes or Weacks or Weakes or Weaks or for that matter Weekes. Of course, people whose name was Wykes—of whom there were many, and please don’t write to me, Ollie thought—considered Weeks a variant of their name, same as people named Anne thought Ann was a variant and not vice versa, the world was full of fuckin nuts.

His sister—who always looked on the dim side because she herself was so dim, the jackass—told him he should stop putting on airs since there was absolute proof that there’d been a Robert Weeks living in Walberswick, Suffolk, in the year 1596, and he’d been a mere merchant. In fact, she had looked up his merchant’s mark, and had needle-pointed it into a sampler for Ollie, which he kept in the bathroom, hanging over the toilet bowl.

“Please observe the way the letter ‘W’ is worked into the design,” she’d said, the jackass. She had given him the sampler, framed, for Christmas one year, a gift as worthless as the stolen dispatch case, which was why he was here to see an Irishman like Walsh in the first place.

He greeted Walsh with his favorite Irish joke.

“These two Irishmen walk out of a bar?” he said.

“Yeah?” Walsh said, grinning in anticipation.

“It could happen,” Ollie said, and shrugged.

The grin dropped from Walsh’s face. Ollie guessed the man thought he was making some kind of remark about Irishmen being drunk all the time. Well, if he couldn’t take a joke, a fart on him.

“I’m looking for a cross-dressing whore named Emilio Herrera,” he said, “street name Emmy. Does it ring a bell?”

“I’m still thinking about that so-called joke of yours,” Walsh said.

He was perhaps six feet, two or three inches tall, a big redheaded mick going gray at the temples, wide shoulders, arms like oaks, the butt of a Glock sticking out of a shoulder holster on the left side of his body for an easy right-handed draw. He was in shirtsleeves on this bright April morning, the sleeves rolled up, the collar open, the tie pulled down. Ollie guessed Walsh thought he looked like a TV detective. TV detectives thought they looked like real-life detectives, which they didn’t. Trouble was, real-life detectives watched TV and then started acting like TV detectives, who were acting the way they thought real-life detectives did. It was a vicious cycle. Ollie was glad he looked like himself.

“Don’t worry about jokes,” he said. And then, because he was not only a real-life detective, but also a real-life writer, he added, “Jokes are the folk lore of truth.”

“Does that mean it’s true that two Irishmen can’twalkout of a bar?” Walsh asked.

“It could happen,” Ollie said, and shrugged again.

“That’s what’s offensive about the joke,” Walsh said. “Those words ‘It could happen.’ And the accompanying shrug, indicating that whereas it’s a remote possibility that a pair of Irishmencouldwalk out of a bar, the teller of the joke has certainly neverseensuch a phenomenon in his entire life, though that doesn’t mean to say itcouldn’thappen, two Irishmenwalkingout instead ofstaggeringout or falling down deaddrunkas they come out, is what that joke is saying,” Walsh concluded somewhat heatedly.

“Gee, is that so?” Ollie said, and shook his head in wonder. “I never thought of it that way. Can you help me find this Herrera punk?”

THE MANPatricia spoke to was a Serb named Branislav Something, she couldn’t catch the last name. Something with no vowels in it. He had been working here at the Hall since last December, just about when she’d started on the beat.

“I tink I see you valking around,” he said, grinning. He had bad teeth and patchy hair. He was probably fifty years old, she guessed, and was surprised when he later told her he was only forty-one. He had nice blue eyes. He kept smiling all the while he talked to her. He had been in Kosovo when the Americans bombed, he said. “I don’t blame Americans,” he said, “I blame Albanian bastards.”

“Were you here Monday morning?” she asked him. “When the councilman got shot?”

“Whoo,” he said, and rolled his blue eyes. “Vot a trouble!”

“Where were you?” she asked.

“In toilets,” he said. “Cleaning toilets.”

“Are the toilets anywhere near the stage?”

“Some toilet near, some not,” he said. “You tink I shot councilman?”

“No, no. I just wanted to know if you’d seen anybody running from the stage.”

“Nobody. Saw nobody.”

“Somebody with a gun?”

“Nobody. Saw nobody. Mop floors, wash windows, clean toilets, sinks, everything, make sparkle like new.”

“There are windows in these toilets?” Patricia asked.

“Two toilets got windows,” he said. “Let fresh air come in.”

“Can I see these toilets?”

“Both for men’s,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said, “I’m a cop.”

When Patricia was eight years old and visiting her grandparents in San Juan, her father took them to a show in one of the big hotels one night, and she had to go to the bathroom after the show, but there was a big line of women out in the hall, the way there always is. He came out of the men’s room and saw her standing there, dancing from foot to foot, and he said, “Come with me, it’s empty in here,” and he took her into the men’s room and stood outside the door to make sure nobody came in while she was peeing. That was the first time she saw urinals.

The next time she saw urinals was just last week at the Sony Theater on Farley and First, where somebody had mugged some kid in the men’s room, smashing his face into a urinal that was running with blood and piss when she came in with her gun drawn and the perp long gone.Harry Potterwas playing on the screen outside.

The first men’s room Branislav showed her was just off the right side of the stage. The urinals here were sparkling clean, just as he’d promised. A pebbled glass window was on the wall opposite the urinals, at the far end of the room. The window was wide open. A hand dryer was on the adjoining wall. Patricia hated hand dryers. She did not know anyone who liked hand dryers. She figured hand dryers were designed not to dry a person’s hands but to save money on paper towels. She went to the window, bent over, and looked out.

She was looking out onto what appeared to be an airshaft that ran from right to left across the back of the building.

So much for an accomplice theory, she thought.

• • •

PORTOLES AND DOYLEwere just coming out of the Okeh Diner that Monday when Carella and Kling caught up with them. They seemed surprised to learn that the detectives were here about the murder at King Memorial; until now, they’d thought the Fat Boy was investigating that case.

“Was Weeks pulled off it?” Portoles asked. “Is that it?”

“No, we’re handling it together,” Kling said.

“You ain’t shooflies, are you?” Doyle asked.

“No, we’re just honest, decent law enforcement officers investigating a mere homicide,” Carella said.

Doyle looked at him, not sure whether he was kidding or not. Portoles wasn’t sure, either. Sometimes Internal Affairs sent around guys pretending to be what they weren’t.

“So what can we do for you?” he asked.

“We understand you talked to some bum in the alley outside the building,” Carella said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah, a Vietnam vet, he said he was.”

“Did you get his name?”

“No, he was an old drunk.”

“How old could he be, Vietnam?” Kling asked.

“Well, helookedold, let’s put it that way,” Doyle said.

“Did you get his name?”

“No. He was drunk, he didn’t see a weapon, what’s the uproar here?”

“You just didn’t bother to take his name, is that it?” Kling said. “An eye witness.”

“An old drunk,” Doyle insisted.

“Besides,” Portoles said, “the TV lady got it.”

“Got what?” Carella said. “What TV lady?”

“His name,” Portoles said.

“He had to sign some kind of release,” Doyle said.

“What washername?” Kling asked. “The TV lady. Did you gethername?”

“Ohsure,” Doyle said, beaming. “Honey Blair, Channel Four News.Everybodyknows Honey Blair.”

• • •

CARELLA CALLED HERas soon as they got back to the squadroom. He got her answering machine.

“Miss Blair,” he said, “this is Detective Steve Carella, you probably won’t remember me, we met around Christmastime at the Grover Park Zoo, the case with the lady and the lions, do you remember? I need to know the name of the Vietnam vet you talked to outside King Memorial on the day Lester Henderson got shot and killed. One of the responding officers told us the man signed a release for you. If we could have his name, we’d appreciate it. You can call me back at Frederick seven, eight, oh, two, four, thanks a lot.”

She called back ten minutes later.

“Well, well,” she said, “Detective Carella.”

“Hi, Miss Blair, I’m glad you…”

“Honey,” she said.

“Thank you for returning my call, uh, Honey,” he said. “I won’t take much of your time. All I need…”

“You can take all the time you need with me,” Honey said.

“All I want is the name of the man you…”

“It’s Clarence Weaver, 702 Huxley Boulevard, I don’t have a phone number for him, what else is on your mind?”

“Nothing right now,” he said.

“When you think of something, give me another call,” Honey said.

There was a click on the line.

He looked at the receiver.

THE HAND-LETTEREDwooden sign over the entrance door readDSS HUXLEY. The DSS stood for Department of Social Services. Huxley Boulevard had once been a tree-lined esplanade with elegant apartment buildings on either side of it. The trees were still there, but the apartment buildings were now run by the city and were used for welfare housing. 702 Huxley had once been a movie theater. The seats had been torn out seven years ago, when the building was turned into a shelter for the homeless. That was where they found Clarence Weaver on that Monday afternoon a week after Henderson’s murder.

There were eight hundred and forty-seven cots in the shelter. Weaver was lying on cot number 312, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. He was wearing khaki fatigues and a khaki-colored tank-top undershirt. He had taken off his shoes and socks. His feet were dirty, grime caked between the toes, the ankles smudged with filth from the streets.

Gently, Carella said, “Mr. Weaver?”

He sat upright, eyes snapping open. He truly looked too old and too frail ever to have served in Vietnam, a scrawny, unshaven, toothless black man with thin arms and a sunken chest, the stench of whiskey on his breath at two o’clock in the afternoon.

“Whut’s it?” he said at once, and looked around wildly, as if he had just heard incoming mail.

“It’s okay,” Carella said, and showed Weaver his shield. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

Weaver studied the shield carefully.

“I’m Detective Carella, this is my partner, Detective Kling.”

He looked up at the detectives, swung his legs over the side of the cot. “That TV station never sent me a nickel,” he said, and shook his head. “I axed was they a reward, the blond lady tole me to just please sign the release. I told them ever’thin I knowed, but nobody sent me nothin.”

“What is it you told them, Mr. Weaver? What did you see that morning?”

As Weaver recalls it, he was planning to enter the alley on the side of King Memorial…

“They’s two alleys,” he said, “one to the right, one to the left. One of them usually has nothin but papers an’ trash in the garbage cans, from the offices that side of the buildin. The other one sometimes has soda bottles in it, sometimes even food, from people usin the aud’torium for one reason or another. I was juss about to go in there to start mah search, when I seed this young feller come racin out the buildin…”

“When you say young…”

“Yessir.”

“How young?”

“Hard to say. You know how these young fellers look nowadays. Tall, kind of thin…”

“How tall?”

“Five-seven? Five-eight?”

Carella was thinking that wasn’t tall. Kling was thinking the same thing.

“White or black?” he asked.

“White man. He was a white man.”

“Clean-shaven? Or did he have a beard? A mustache?”

“No, nothin like that. Clean-shaven, I’d say.”

“Any scars? Did you notice any scars?”

“No, he was comin too fast. An the cap made it hard to see his face.”

“We understand he didn’t have a gun.”

“That’s right, he did not have a piece, suhs. I was in the Army, you know, I’m a Vietnam vet, I knows all about weapons. He did not have a weapon, this man. I was in Nam durin the Tet offensive, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” Kling said. “Sir, can you tell us what this man was wearing?”

“I tole the other officers, he had on blue jeans and a ski parka…”

“What color parka?”

“Blue. Darker than the jeans. An white sneakers, and this cap pulled down over his eyes.”

“What kind of cap?”

“A baseball cap.”

“What color was it?”

“Black.”

“Anything on it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Any letters for a team?”

“I still don’t get you.”

“NY for New York, or LA for Los Angeles…”

“SD for San Diego? The Padres?”

“M for the Milwaukee Brewers?”

Weaver was thinking.

“The Phillies?” Kling said.

“The Royals?”

“Anything like that?”

“Yes, they was letters on it,” Weaver said at last.

“Which team?”

“I got no idea.”

“Well, what’d you see, sir?”

“SRA.”

“SRA?” Kling said.

“The letters SRA, yessir.”

“SRA,” Carella repeated.

“You sure it wasn’t SF?” Kling asked. “For San Francisco? The San Francisco Giants?”

“Or SL?” Carella asked. “For the St. Louis Cardinals?”

“No, it was SRA. I feel sure about that. I was a spotter, you know. In Nam.”

“What color were the letters?” Carella asked.

“White.”

“White letters on a black cap,” Kling said. “What team do you suppose that can be?”

“Oh Jesus,” Carella said.

“What?”

“Smoke Rise. Smoke Rise Academy.”