Fat Ollie's Book

2

WHEN OLLIE GOT BACKto his car, the rear window on the passenger side door was smashed and the door was standing wide open. The briefcase withReport to the Commissionerin it was gone. Ollie turned to the nearest uniform.

“You!” he said. “Are you a cop or a doorman?”

“Sir?”

“Somebody broke in my car here and stole my book,” Ollie said. “You see anything happen, or were you standin here pickin your nose?”

“Sir?” the uniform said.

“They hiring deaf policemen now?” Ollie said. “Excuse me. Hearing-impairedpolicemen?”

“My orders were to keep anybody unauthorized out of the Hall,” the uniform said. “A city councilman got killed in there, you know.”

“Gee, no kidding?” Ollie said. “Mybookgotstolenouthere!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the uniform said. “But you can always go to the library and take out another one.”

“Give me your shield number and shut up,” Ollie said. “You let somebody vandalize a police vehicle and steal valuable property from it.”

“I was just following orders, sir.”

“Follow this a while,” Ollie said, and briefly grabbed his own crotch, shaking his jewels.

DETECTIVE-LIEUTENANT ISADORE HIRSCHwas in charge of the Eight-Eight Detective Squad, and he happened to be Jewish. Ollie did not particularly like Jews, but he expected fair play from him, nonetheless. Then again, Ollie did not like black people, either, whom he called “Negroes” because he knew it got them hot under the collar. For that matter, he wasn’t too keen on Irishmen or Italians, or Hispanics, or Latinos, or whatever the tango dancers were calling themselves these days. In fact, he hadn’t liked Afghanis or Pakis or other Muslim types infiltrating the city, evenbeforethey started blowing things up, and he didn’t much care for Chinks or Japs or other persons of Oriental persuasion. Ollie was in fact an equal opportunity bigot, but he did not consider himself prejudiced in any way. He merely thought of himself as discerning.

“Izzie,” he said—which sounded very Jewish to him, the name Izzie—“this is the first big one come my way in the past ten years. So upstairs is gonna take it away from me? It ain’t fair, Izzie, is it?”

“Who says life has to be fair?” Hirsch said, sounding like a rabbi, Ollie thought.

Hirsch in fact resembled a rabbi more than he did a cop with more citations for bravery than any man deserved, one of them for facing down an ex-con bearing a grudge and a sawed-off shotgun. Dark-eyed and dark-jowled, going a bit bald, long of jaw and sad of mien, he wore a perpetually mournful expression that made him seem like he should have been davening, or whatever they called it, at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or Haifa, or wherever it was.

“I was first man up,” Ollie said. “That used to mean something in this city. Don’t it mean nothing anymore?”

“Times change,” Hirsch said like a rabbi.

“I want this case, Izzie.”

“It should be ours, you’re right.”

“Damn right, it should be ours.”

“I’ll make some calls. I’ll see what I can do,” Hirsch said.

“You promise?”

“Trust me.”

Which usually meant “Go hide the silver.” But Ollie knew from experience that the Loot’s word was as good as gold.

Like a penitent to his priest, or a small boy to his father, he said, “They also stole my book, Iz.”

HE TOLD THISto his sister later that night.

“Isabelle,” he said, “they stole my book.”

As opposed to her “large” brother, as she thought of him, Isabelle Weeks was razor-thin. She had the same suspecting expression on her face, though, the same searching look in her piercing blue eyes. The other genetic trait they shared was an enormous appetite. But however much Isabelle ate—and right this minute she was doing a pretty good job of putting away the roast beef she’d prepared for their dinner—her weight remained constant. On the other hand, anything Ollie ingested turned immediately to…well, largeness. It wasn’t fair.

“Who stole your book?” Isabelle said. “What book?” she said.

“I told you I was writing a novel…”

“Oh yes.”

Dismissing it. Shoveling gravied mashed potatoes into her mouth. Boy, what a sister. Working on it since Christmas, she asksWhatbook? Boy.

“Anyway, it was in the back seat of the car, and somebody spotted it, and smashed the window, and stole it.”

“Why would anyone want to steal your book?” she asked.

She made it sound as if she was saying “Why would anyone want to steal youraccordion?” or something else worthless.

Ollie really did not wish to discuss his novel with a jackass like his sister. He had been working on it too long and too hard, and besides you could jinx a work of art if you discussed it with anyone not familiar with the nuances of literature. He had first titled the bookBad Money,which was a very good title in that the book was about a band of counterfeiters who are printing these hundred-dollar bills that are so superb you cannot tell them from the real thing. But there is a double-cross in the gang, and one of them runs off with six million four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the queer bills and stashes them in a basement in Diamondback—which Ollie called Rubytown in his book—and the story is all about how this very good detective not unlike Ollie himself recovers the missing loot and is promoted and decorated and all.

Ollie abandoned the titleBad Moneywhen he realized the word “Bad” was asking for criticism from some smartass book reviewer. He tried the titleGood Money,instead, which was what writers call litotes, a figure of speech that means you are using a word to mean the opposite of what you intend. But he figured not too many readers out there—and maybe not too many editors, either—would be familiar with writers’ tricks, so he abandoned that one, too, but not the book itself.

At first, the book itself was giving him trouble. Not the same trouble he’d had learning the first three notes of “Night and Day,” which he’d finally got through, thanks to Miss Hobson, his beloved piano teacher. The trouble was he was trying to sound too much like all those pissant writers out there who were not cops but who were writing what they called “police procedurals,” and by doing this, by imitating them, actually, he was losing track of his own distinctiveness, his very Oliver Wendell Weekness, no pun intended.

And then he hit upon his brilliant idea.

Suppose he wrote the book like a Detective Division report? In his own language, the way he’d type it on a DD form, though not in triplicate. (In retrospect, he wished he had written it in triplicate.) Suppose he made it sound like he was writing it for a superior officer, his Lieutenant, say, or the Chief of Detectives, or—why not?—even the Commissioner! Write it in his own language, his own words, warts and all, this is me, folks, Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks. Call the book “A Detective’s Report” or “Report from a Detective” or—

Wait a minute.

Hold it right there.

“Report to the Commissioner,” he said aloud.

He’d been eating when the inspiration came to him. He yanked a paper napkin out of the holder on the pizzeria table, took a pen from his pocket, outlined a rectangle on the napkin…

…and then began lettering inside it:

And that was it.

He had found a title, he had found an approach, he was on his way.

“It was in the dispatch case you gave me,” Ollie said, “he prob’ly thought it was something else. Up the Eight-Eight, the only thing anybody carries in a dispatch case is hundred-dollar bills or cocaine. He prob’ly thought he was making a big score.”

“Well, hey,” Isabelle said, “your bignovel!”

He would have to tell her sometime that skinny people shouldn’t try sarcasm.

“Also they’re tryin’a take away this big homicide I caught.”

“Maybe they’ll show more respect once your bignovelis published.”

“It’s not that big,” Ollie said. “If you mean long.”

“Anyway, what’s the big deal? Print another copy.”

“Do what?”

“Print another copy. Go to your computer and…”

“What computer?”

“Well, what’d you do? Write it in longhand on a lined yellow pad…”

“No, I…”

“Write it in lipstick on toilet paper?” Isabelle asked, and laughed at her own witticism.

“No, I typed it on atypewriter,” Ollie said. “You know, Isabelle, somebody should tell you that sarcasm doesn’t work when a person weighs thirty-seven pounds in her bare feet.”

“Only large persons should try sarcasm, you’re right,” Isabelle said. “What’s a typewriter?”

“You know damn well what a typewriter is.”

“Are you saying you don’t have acopyof the book?”

“Only the last chapter. The last chapter is home.”

“What’s it doing home?”

“I may need to polish it.”

“Polish it? What is it, the family silverware?”

“Nothing’s finished till it’s finished,” Ollie said.

“So as I understand this, everything but the last chapter of your book was stolen from your car this morning.”

“Five-sixths of my novel, yes.”

“What’s it about?”

“About thirty-six pages.”

“Isn’t that short for a novel?”

“Not if it’s a good novel. Besides, less is more. That’s an adage amongst us writers.”

“Didn’t you writers ever hear of carbon paper?”

“That’s why there are Kinko’s,” Ollie said, “so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Besides, I didn’t have time for carbon paper. And I didn’t know some junkie hophead was going to break into my car and steal my book. It so happens I’m occupied with a little crime on the side, you know,” he said, gathering steam. “It so happens I’m a professionallawenforcement officer…”

“Gee, and here I thought you were Nora Roberts…”

“Isabelle, sarcasm really…”

“Or Mary Higgins Clark…”

“I am Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks,” he said, rising from the table and hurling his napkin onto his plate. “And don’t you ever forget it!”

“Sit down, have some dessert,” she said.

DETECTIVE STEVE CARELLAfirst heard about Fat Ollie Weeks being assigned to the Henderson homicide on Tuesday morning, when Lieutenant Byrnes called him into his corner office and tossed a copy of the city’s morning tabloid on his desk.

“Did you see this?” he asked.

The headline on the front page read:

88TH PCT

CATCHES

HENDERSON

HOMICIDE

The subhead read:

LOCAL FUZZ

LAND BIG FISH

“Seems Fat Ollie caught the squeal,” Byrnes said.

“Good for him,” Carella said.

“Bad for us,” Byrnes said. “Henderson lives in the Eight-Seven. Lived,” he corrected. “Over in Smoke Rise.”

Smoke Rise was a walled and gated community of some seventy-five homes, all of them superbly located on sculpted terraces that overlooked the River Harb. The residents of Smoke Rise enjoyed the exclusive use of an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a health club, and tennis courts lighted at night. There was a private school on the property as well, the Smoke Rise Academy, for grades one through eight, boasting its own soccer and baseball teams, their gray-and-black uniforms seeming to conjure the very image of rising smoke.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, Carella had caught a kidnapping there, at the residence of a man named Douglas King, whose estate lay within the confines of the Eight-Seven, at the farthermost reaches of the precinct territory in that nothing but the River Harb lay beyond it and the next state. In this exclusive corner of the Eight-Seven, Smoke Rise provided the ultra-urban face of the city with an atmosphere at once countrified and otherworldly. Smoke Rise signified wealth and exclusivity.

It was here, on a tree-shaded street named Prospect Lane, that City Councilman Lester Henderson had lived with his wife and two children. And it was not seven miles away and a hundred miles distant—at the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback, a black and Hispanic section of the city coiling like a rattlesnake on the fringes of civilization—that Henderson had been shot to death yesterday morning.

“Means we can expect Ollie any minute,” Byrnes said.

Both men looked at each other.

Carella actually sighed.

• • •

OLLIE DID NOT, in fact, show up at the precinct until twelve noon that Tuesday, just in time for lunch. Ollie’s internal mechanism always told him when it was time to eat. Ollie sometimes believed it told him it wasalwaystime to eat.

“Anybody for lunch?” he asked.

He had opened the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside, and was waddling—the proper word, Carella thought—across the room toward where Carella sat behind his desk. On this bright April morning, Ollie was wearing a plaid sports jacket over a lime green golfing shirt and blue Dacron trousers. He looked like a Roman galley under full sail. By contrast, Carella—who was expecting the imminent appearance of a burglary victim he’d scheduled for an interview—looked sartorially elegant in a wheat-colored linen shirt with the throat open and the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, and dark brown trousers that matched the color of his eyes. Ollie noticed for the first time that Carella’s eyes slanted downward, giving his face a somewhat Oriental appearance. He wondered if there was a little Chink in the armor back there someplace, huh, kiddies?

“How’s my eternally grateful friend?” he asked.

He was referring to the fact that around Christmastime, he had saved Carella’s life—twice, no less.

“Eternally grateful,” Carella said. In all honesty, he didn’t enjoy the idea of being indebted to Ollie in any which way whatever. “What brings you to this part of town?” he asked. As if he didn’t know.

“Seems a resident here got himself aced yesterday morning, ah yes,” Ollie said.

“So I understand,” Carella said.

“Then why’d you ask, m’little chickadee?” Ollie said, once again doing his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. The pity was—but hedidn’t realize this—nobody today knew who W. C. Fields was. Whenever Ollie did his impersonation, everyone thought he was doing Al Pacino inScent of a Woman.

“Want to go get a bite to eat?”

“Gee, what else is new?” Carella said.

Sarcasm, Ollie thought. Everybody today is into sarcasm.

THE PLACEthey chose was a diner on Culver and South Eleventh, which Ollie said was run by the Mob, which Carella doubted since he’d only been working in this precinct forever, and except for prostitution and numbers, the boys had pretty much ceded the hood to black gangs and Colombian posses. The black gangs used to devote their time to street rumbles until they realized there was money to be made dealing dope. The Colombian gangs knew this all along. Unfortunately, dope didn’t stop anyone from killing anyone else. In fact, it seemed to encourage the activity.

“I need your help,” Ollie said. “I’m gonna have my hands full checking out the Hall and how somebody could’ve got in and out of there with what Ballistics now tells me was a .32 aced Henderson. His views weren’t particularly appreciated in the so-called Negro community, you know, so it ain’t exactly unlikely that he was offed by some irate person of color, as they sometimes refer to themselves, ah yes.”

“What is it you’d like me to do?” Carella asked.

He was watching Fat Ollie eat, an undertaking of stupendous proportions to anyone not himself a glutton. Ollie had ordered three hamburgers to start, and was devouring them with both hands and a non-stop mouth, consuming simultaneously a huge platter of fries with ketchup, and drinking his second chocolate milk shake, a perpetual-motion, eating, drinking, slurping, slobbering, dripping, incessant ingestion machine.

“I want you to go up Smoke Rise,” Ollie said, signaling to the waitress, “talk to the councilman’s widow, see you can find out did he have any enemies besides the usual suspects…yes, darling, here’s what I’d like if you could be so kind,” he said to the waitress. “Bring me another shake, that’s chocolate, and another hamburger, and that apple pie—is it apple?—looks good, too, with some vanilla ice cream on it, please, make it two scoops,isit apple?”

“Actually, it’s strawberry peach,” the waitress said, looking already weary at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, but Ollie appreciated women who appeared beaten and defeated.

“Yum, strawberry peach sounds good, too,” he said, “two scoops of ice cream, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that uniform is very becoming,” Ollie said, “ah yes, m’dear, have you ever considered modeling?”

The waitress smiled.

Ollie smiled back.

Carella bit into his grilled cheese sandwich.

“I’d like to take a look at the Hall,” he said. “See what happened there before I go talking to any widow.”

“What’s one thing got to do with the other?” Ollie asked.

“Well, a woman’s husband gets shot, maybe she’d like to know some of the details.”

“I can tell you everything you need to know right now, you don’t have to waste time. He was up there getting the lay of the land, helping his people set the stage for what was supposed to be a big rally last night. Somebody plugged him from the wings, or the balcony, or wherever—I’m still waiting for information on trajectory, flight curve, all the other garbage, from both the ME and Ballistics. I got three different acoustics reports from witnesses at the scene. One said…”

“Who were the witnesses?”

“Guy named Alan Pierce, who’s Henderson’s aide, and a guy from the company supplying the balloons, the bunting, all the other shit, both of them standing right next to the councilman when the bullets took him.”

“What’d they hear?”

“Pierce says the shots came from the wings. The other guy—his name is Chuck Mastroiani, one of yourpaisans,” Ollie said, and grinned as if he were telling a dirty joke, “says the shots came from the balcony. Neither of them know Shinola from bow-waves, they were prob’ly talking about muzzle reports. Third guy, this young college twerp, was actually sitting in the balcony, which is maybe why he told me the shots came from downstairs.Whereverthe shots came from…”

“How many?” Carella asked.

“Six. Ballistics says they were fired from a .32 Smith & Wesson, which means the shooter emptied the gun at him. Betokens rage, mayhap? Leading back to the possibility that a jig done it—oops, forgive me, I know you don’t appreciate slang.”

“Some people might consider your ‘slang’ racist,” Carella said.

“Pip, pip, my good fellow,” Ollie said, trying to imitate a British member of Parliament, but sounding instead like either W. C. Fields or Al Pacino. “There’s a vast difference between being politically incorrect and being racist.”

“Explain the difference to Artie Brown sometime.”

“Actually, Brown’s a good cop,” Ollie said. “For a Negro.”

“Explain ‘Negro’ to him, too.”

“Steve, don’t bust my chops,” Ollie said. “I saved your goddamn life.”

“Twice, don’t forget.”

“Don’t forget is right.”

“I still want to take a look at that hall,” Carella said.