Fat Ollie's Book

6

ANDY PARKERdidn’t particularly like being partnered with women, especially any woman who’d been hurt on the job. The way he understood it, Eileen Burke had been slashed while serving as an undercover decoy in a case she’d been working with the Rape Squad. Blue wisdom maintained she’d also been violated at the time, so to speak, but nobody talked about that because Burke had friends with short tempers, among them Bert Kling who Parker knew for a fact had been going steady with her when all this occurred. What went on between them—or even between her legs, for that matter—was none of his business. What happened on the job when you were partnered with someone who’d been cut or shot was another matter. They were never the same again, he knew that for a fact, too.

The man they were talking to this Wednesday night was a person Parker had been working with ever since February. His name was Francisco Palacios, and he owned and operated a cozy little shop that sold medicinal herbs, dream books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards, and other related items.

His silent partners, however, were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a shopbehindthe other shop, andthisone offered for sale various unrelated and medically approved “marital aids” like dildoes, French ticklers, open-crotch panties, plastic vibrators, leather executioners’ masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, penis extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized female dolls, condoms in every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben wa balls in both plastic and gold plate, and a highly popular mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Suc-u-lator.

Francisco, The Gaucho, and The Cowboy were in fact one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or in some quarters even a rat. At the back of El Castillo de Palacios, as The Gaucho called his bifurcated shop, he sat with the two detectives and tried to fill them in on what was about to come down next Tuesday night. He found it somewhat difficult to concentrate on business, however, because his eyes kept wandering to the redheaded detective’s crossed legs, and he kept wondering what it would be like to put her in a pair ofbragas sin entrepiernaand leather anklets studded with chrome.

The Gaucho wondered if she found him good-looking.

He himself thought he was one coolhombre.As tall and as lean as a matinee idol, with dark brown eyes and a mustache he hadn’t sported a year or so ago, he still wore his long black hair in a high pompadour, the way kids used to wear it in the fifties. He did not admit to having four wives because that was against the law—havingthem, notadmittingto having them. But none of them was redheaded. In fact, he had never been to bed with a redheaded woman in his life. He wondered if it was true that they were even more passionate than blondes. None of his wives was blond, either. Not really blond, anyway. He wondered if Eileen Burke here, with her splendidly crossedgambasand the faintest trace of a scar on her left cheek was, in fact, arealredhead. Does the carpet match the drapes, he wondered, or is she merely Miss Clairol’s cousin?

“What is going to happen next Tuesday at midnight,” he said, “is a very large quantity…”

“When you sayTuesdayat midnight,” Parker interrupted, “do you meanTuesdaynight when the…”

“Yes,” Palacios said.

“…clock strikes twelve…”

“Yes.”

“OrMondaynight when the clock strikes twelve?” Parker asked, cleaving the air with the edge of his hand.

Palacios looked at him.

“What I’m asking is…let’s say it’s eleven fifty-nineP.M., and then it’s midnight, and then the minute hand moves to twelve-ohone…is thisTuesdaynight we’re talking about, orMondaynight?”

“I am talking aboutTuesdayat midnight,” Palacios said. “It is eleven fifty-nine on Tuesday night, and then it is midnight, and then it is twelve-oh-one on Wednesday morning. The shit will go down on Tuesday night at midnight.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to look at a calendar?” Eileen suggested.

Men, she thought.

There was, in fact, a calendar on the wall of The Gaucho’s shop, and it showed a picture of a dark-haired, spread-legged woman wearing nothing but an open Japanese fan. Palacios put his finger on the square for Wednesday, April 24. “This is today,” he said. He moved his finger down to the next row of dates. “And this is Tuesday, April thirtieth, the last day of the month. That is when the shit will go down. Tuesday night at midnight.”

“Is that clear, Eileen?” Parker asked.

She looked at him.

Palacios caught the glance.

Very nice, he thought, and wondered if she would care to be spanked by him some day.

Parker was thinking, Well, pardon me all to hell, lady, but these are not kindergarten kids we’re playing with here, and I would not like to show up a day late and a dollar short, and lose the whole damn bust, if you don’t mind. What he was afraid of, in fact, was that they’d break down the door next week and go down the basement steps, and Burke here would see a gun or even a box cutter and pick up her skirts and run right into everybody else in her haste to get out of there.

“These people are not amateurs,” he said aloud.

“They are very definitely not amateurs,” Palacios said, smiling at her to let her know he realized her partner here was being condescending merely because she was a ravishingly beautiful redhead he would love to take to bed sometime. “The ones selling the candy, anyway. They’ve been working on this deal for a long time now,” he said. “They are not going to like you going down their basement and messing with them.”

You can hardly see where she was cut, Parker thought. On the face, he understood. Psychologically bad, especially for a woman. Still, they did wonders with cosmetic surgery these days. And yet…

“Where is this basement of theirs?” Eileen asked.

“That’s one of the problems,” Palacios said.

“I didn’t know there were any problems,” Eileen said, and looked at Parker again.

“The problem is it keeps changing,” Palacios said.

“What keeps changing?”

“The basement where the dope is.”

“They keep moving the dope, is that what you mean?”

“So far, yes, it’s been in three different locations.”

“Why is that, do you suppose?”

“They’re being cautious,” Parker said.

“Careful,” Palacios agreed, nodding.

“They’re not amateurs,” Parker reminded her again.

“Or,”Eileen said.

Both men looked at her.

“They’re onto us,” she said.

HOGAN GOT BACKto Ollie at ten that night.

Ollie was enjoying a snack before going to bed. He hated any of his meals being interrupted, and was almost sorry he’d given Hogan his home number.

“What I did,” Hogan explained, “was first I cleaned the site, filed it down smooth, and polished it with Carborundum till I had it looking like a mirror. Then I kept swabbing it with hydrochloric acid till the numbers came up. Took me three hours altogether.”

Don’t tell me your fuckin troubles while I’m eating, Ollie thought.

“So what’d the computer have to say?” he asked.

“The gun was registered to a guy named Charles McGrath. He used it in a bank holdup five years ago, shot the guard and a lady making a deposit. He still had the piece in his possession when he got busted two months later.”

“Where is he now?”

“Castleview. Doing a max of twenty on a B-felony conviction. He should be coming up for parole in a year or so.”

“Meanwhile he’s behind bars, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what the computer says.”

“What happened to the gun?”

“What do you mean?”

“After they sent Mr. McGrath to the country.”

“I told you. It was recovered in his possession.”

“Yeah, but how’d it get on the street again?”

“Well now, gee, that’syourjob, ain’t it?” Hogan said, and hung up.

SHARYN EVERARD COOKEwas the Police Department’s Deputy Chief Surgeon, the first black woman ever to be appointed to the job—though “black” was a misnomer in that her skin was the color of burnt almond. She wore her black hair in a modified Afro, which—together with high cheekbones, a generous mouth, and eyes the color of loam—gave her the look of a proud Masai woman. Five feet, nine inches tall, she considered herself a trifle overweight at a hundred and thirty pounds. Bert Kling thought she looked just right. Bert Kling thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Bert Kling loved her to death.

The only problem was where to sleep.

Sharyn’s apartment was at the very end of the Calm’s Point subway line, some forty minutes from Kling’s studio apartment across the river and into the trees. From his apartment, it took him twenty minutes to get to work in the morning. From her apartment, it took him an hour and fifteen minutes. Sharyn still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief, she still worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week at the Chief Surgeon’s Office, which was located in Rankin Plaza in that part of the city known as Majesta. Majesta happened to be forty-five minutes by subway from Kling’s apartment. So it all got down to where they should sleep on any given night. All couples should have such a problem.

They had planned to spend that Wednesday night in Sharyn’s apartment, but because a cop had got shot downtown, and Sharyn was here in The City, anyway—

No matter where you lived in this city, Isola was still called The City. If you lived in Riverhead or Majesta or Calm’s Point or even Bethtown, and you were taking the subway or a bus downtown, you were going into The City. That was it. Sharyn lived in Calm’s Point, but Kling lived in The City, and since she wasinthe city anyway that day, they decided to sleep at his place, talk about lengthy exposition.

His place was a studio apartment.

His place wasn’t too very comfortable.

But she loved him, so what could you do?

“Did your mother really work for Gabe Foster?” he asked.

She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. She was still wearing a half slip and a bra and the sandals she’d worn to work that morning, strappy and buckled, with a medium-sized heel. She had rinsed out her pantyhose, and they were hanging over the shower rod. He liked her things hanging all over the place. He liked anything that reminded him of her.

“My mother worked for everyone in the world,” she said. “How do you think I got through college and med school?”

“Foster said she used to help around the church every now and then. When he was just starting out.”

“That’s possible,” Sharyn said. “I’ll have to ask her.”

She was cold-creaming makeup off her face now. It took her a half-hour every night to get ready for bed. She always came to bed smelling sweet and clean and fresh and beautiful. He loved the way she smelled. He loved everything about her.

“You ever meet him?” Kling asked.

“Foster? Once. There was a liquor store holdup in Diamondback, and one of the cops who responded was a brother. He got shot twice in the chest. Foster showed up at the hospital to do his thing.”

“What’s his thing?”

“False compassion for anyone who’s black, indignation for any imagined slight to the black man—or woman, he claims, though I understand he favors honkie trim. He’s a rabble rouser who wants to be mayor of this city one day. How’d you happen to talk to him?”

“Ollie Weeks thinks…”

“Bigot.”

“I know. Maybe that’s why he thinks Foster might have had something to do with the councilman’s murder.”

“Are you on that case?”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean, sort of?”

“We’re sharing the bust with Ollie. If we make one.”

“Is Foster a suspect?”

“Not really. Not yet, anyway. But he had a fist fight with Henderson…”

“Uh-oh.”

“Well, maybe. Be sort of dumb to shoot a guy you just brawled with, though.”

“Not something I would do, that’s for sure.”

“Especially if you’re in the public eye, the way Foster is.”

“So ask him where he was when the shooting took place.”

“We did. He could have been in the neighborhood.”

“Then heisa suspect.”

“Maybe. In police work…”

“Yes, dear, tell me all about police work.”

“Inpolicework, wise guy, everyone’s a suspect until he’s no longer a suspect.”

“Gee,” Sharyn said, and rolled her eyes in mock amazement.

She was standing in the bathroom door now, the light behind her, looking tall and magnificent and lovely and wonderful. She put her hands on her hips. She looked across the room to where he was lying on the bed in his undershorts. The window was open. There was the sound of traffic below, moving toward the Calm’s Point Bridge.

“Are we going to make love tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Do you feel like it?”

“Do you?”

“I think I could be persuaded.”

“What I’m asking…”

“I know.”

“Should I put the diaphragm in?” Her voice lowered. “Is what I’m asking.”

“Well, if you’re going to look so sexy and beautiful and all in that transparent slip with the light behind you, I think you ought to put in your diaphragm and take the pill and do everything possible to protect yourself because I’m but a mere mortal who can’t possibly resist you, is what I think.”

“Sweet talker,” she said, and smiled, and went back into the bathroom, and closed the door.

In a little while, she came to him.

THE THING ABOUTbeing with him was the shared intimacy. Before him, she had never been intimate with another man. She didn’t mean sexually intimate, she’d had sex with a dozen men, at least, before she met Kling. Having sex with a man wasn’t the kind of intimacy she meant. You could be sexually intimate with any man, she supposed, white or black, although Kling was the first white man she’d ever been to bed with. She never expected to go to bed with any other white man in her life. Any other black man, either. Being sexually intimate with some man wasn’t the point of it all. She had finally discovered the point of it all with Bert Kling, the least likely candidate for the job.

To begin with, she outranked him in spades, no pun intended, and political correctness be damned. That was one of the things she meant about being intimate with him. She could happen to say, “Besides, I outrank you in spades,” and he could put on a big Sammy Davis, Jr. watermelon accent and answer, “You can saythatagain, honey chile,” and she could laugh at the racial allusion and not get angry, the way a black woman in America—especially a black woman who wanted to become a doctor—could sometimes get very damned angry in America. And besides, shedidoutrank him in spades, which meant that she was a Deputy Chief who earned sixty-eight grand a year, and he was but a Detective/Third Grade who earned a whole hell of a lot less than that, a fact she had to remind him of every time he insisted on picking up a restaurant check, God, how she loved this man.

That had been one of the early problems, their relative positions in this small paramilitary force known as the Police Department, wherein fraternization between a chief and the lowest grade of detective was—if not forbidden by fiat—at least discreetly frowned upon. Not to mention this other small matter of their disparate coloration, orlackof coloration as the case actually was, black and white being an absence of hue rather than a plain statement like red or green for stop or go. That was what they’d had to decide rather early on. Stop or go.

Oddly, her rank was what had troubled him most.

She could remember him calling for the first time from one of those open plastic phone shells, standing in the rain and asking her if she’d care to have dinner with him. He thought it might make a difference that he was just a detective/third and she was a one-star chief. No mention of his blond hair or her black skin.

“Does it?” he’d asked.

“Does what?”

“Doesit make a difference? Your rank?”

“No,” she’d said.

But what about the other? she’d wondered. What about whites and blacks killing each other in public places? What about that, Detective Kling?

“Rainy day like today,” he’d said, “I thought it’d be nice to have dinner and go to a movie.”

With a white man, she’d thought.

Tell my mother I’m going on a date with a white man. My mother who scrubbed white men’s offices on her knees. You hear this, Mom? A white man wants to take me out to dinner and a movie.

Bring the subject up, she’d thought. Face it head on. Ask him if he realizes I’m black. Tell him I’ve never done anything like this before. Tell him my mother’ll jump off the roof. Tell him I don’t need this kind of complication in my life, tell him…

“Well…uh…do you think you mightliketo?” he’d asked. “Go to a movie and have dinner?”

“Why do you want to do this?” she’d asked.

“Well,” he’d said, “I think we might enjoy each other’s company.”

She supposed the intimacy between them had started right that minute.

It was an intimacy that had nothing to do with protecting or defending their right to be together in these racially divided United States of America, nothing to do with this white man and black woman having unimaginably found each other long before the slogan “United We Stand” came into vogue again. Nor did their intimacy have anything to do with his whiteness or her blackness although each found this disparity enormously attractive. They both realized that terrorism wouldn’t last forever, all wars ended sooner or later, and there would still be an America where blacks and whites could never be intimate unless they first forgot they were black or white.

Sharyn Everard Cooke and Bertram Alexander Kling had forgotten that a long time ago. In the dark there were only two people making love. But this was sexual intimacy, and they had both enjoyed that before, albeit never with anyone who wasn’t color-coordinated. Now that they were equal opportunity employers, so to speak, they had to admit that sex with someone of a different tint was actually something of a kick.

“How about all this stuff I hear about black men?” Kling once asked.

“Why?” she said. “Are you feeling underprivileged?”

“I’m just curious.”

“You know the joke, don’t you?”

“Which one is that?”

“Man loses his penis in an automobile accident, he goes to see a surgeon who says he can give him a penis implant?”

“Yeah?”

“Guy says, ‘That’s great, but how will I know what I’m getting?’ The surgeon says, ‘I’ll show you some samples.’ He goes in the back room, comes back with a penis six inches long, shows it to the guy. The guy says, ‘Well, since I’ll be getting a new one, I was hoping…’ The surgeon holds up his hands, says, ‘I understand completely,’ goes in the back room, comes back with a peniseightinches long. The guy says, ‘Well, to be perfectly frank, I was hoping for something with a bit more authority.’ The surgeon goes off again, comes back with a penistwelveinches long. The guy says, ‘Now you’re talking! Does it come in white?’”

Kling burst out laughing.

“Do that answer yo question, honey chile?” Sharyn asked.

The intimacy went beyond white and black.

The intimacy was based on the knowledge that living together withanyonewas something that required constant care and attention. Intimacy demanded utter honesty and complete trust. Intimacy meant never being afraid of revealing yourself to another person, exposing yourself to this person, warts and all, without fear of condemnation or derision.

Kling, who was not Jewish, described intimacy as a “shlep,” a Yiddish word that actually meant “to carry, or pull, or drag, or lag behind,” but which he took to mean “a long haul,” as in the expression “Man, that was a shlep and a half!” common to everyone in this city regardless of stripe or persuasion, United We Stand, and God Bless America! They were both in this for the long haul. And though they knew true intimacy wasn’t easy, they realized that once you got the knack of it, everything else seemed so very simple.

Sharyn found a yarn shop near Rankin Plaza that would needle-point a small pillow to her specifications. Actually, she had two of the pillows made, one for his apartment, the other for hers, one in white letters on black, the other in black letters on white. Each pillow read:

Share

Help

Love

Encourage

Protect

Kling was bone-weary when he got to her apartment that night. He had taken the subway out to Calm’s Point, and didn’t get there till almost nine-thirty. He’d grabbed a hamburger at the squadroom, but he was grateful nonetheless for the soup and sandwich she had waiting for him. He didn’t see the pillow until after he’d eaten. In fact, he was lying on the sofa in her living room, watching the Eleven O’Clock News, his head resting rightonthe pillow, when Sharyn suggested that he might be more comfortable with a softer pillow, and he said, “No, I’m fine, hon,” and she said, “Here, let me help you,” and she took the pillow from under his head and replaced it with a down pillow from the bedroom, and then she put the smaller pillow on his chest, and hestilldidn’t look at it, what waswrongwith this man? Patience, she told herself, you did get through med school, you know.

So she waited until the news went off, and they were both ready for bed, and then she came into the bedroom stark naked, holding the pillow with both hands at the joining of her legs, covering the wild tangle of her pubic patch, and he squinted at her, and said, “A definite improvement,” and she burst out laughing and threw the pillow at him.

He read the needlepoint:

Share

Help

Love

Encourage

Protect

“That says it all,” he told her, and took her into his arms.

Now, with her in his arms again, spent and somewhat damp from their exertion, the lights of the bridge twinkling in the distance, he told her that Eileen Burke had been transferred to the Eight-Seven and would be working there from now on, and Sharyn asked, “Does that bother you?” and he said, “I don’t know.”

And that was honest.

And that was what the two of them were all about.