Fiddlers

6.

REGGIE WAS IN the bathtub singing when Charles got back to the hotel at eleven thirty that Thursday night.

‘Everything go all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes, fine,’ he said. ‘You have a nice voice.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘They’re from my cabaret act.’

He looked puzzled.

‘The songs,’ she explained. ‘From when I came east two years ago. Seventeen and full of beans. Well, almost eighteen, I’ll be twenty this September. I had a choice of three places. L.A., Vegas, or here. I figured I’d do best here. But this is one tough town, believe me. Even getting in a booking agent’s door is a monumental task. I was playing little dives out on Sands Spit, ever been out there in January or February? I’m singing about fiddlers fleeing while all I’ve got is a piano player at an upright behind me, and when it was time to pay the bill there were only two or three people in the place.

‘Finally, in one of these joints there was this stand-up comic, good-looking blonde girl in her thirties, had an act where she mostly trashed her ex-husband. We got to talking one night, and she told me the way she made ends meet was to moonlight with an escort agency, though sometimes she wondered which was the moonlighting and which was the act, the stand-up she did in these dives, or the girl who dressed up in flimsy lingerie and went wherever she was sent.

‘Which by the way,’ Reggie said, ‘I haven’t called the agency in more than a week now, they must be wondering what the hell happened to me. I told them I had my period, but how long can that last, am I right? I just hope they don’t send one of their goons looking for me. Annie told me they have these goons, though I’ve never had the pleasure, thank you. Annie is the stand-up comic who first put me in contact with Sophisticates, that’s the agency you called, remember?

‘Anyway, Annie told me everything in life has its side effects. You do one thing, you take one road, it leads someplace, it has its side effects. What if I’d gone to L.A., and landed a good gig in a club on the Strip, and what if a movie director or an agent had spotted me there, I could be a movie star now, am I right? I could have a house in Palm Desert. Would you like to go to Palm Desert sometime? I would love that. You know, I still think of myself as a singer who’s turning tricks on the side so I’ll be able to sing. But maybe it’s the other way around, maybe I’m just a hooker with a good voice, maybe the singing is just a side effect of the hooking, or is it vice versa?’

‘You’re not a hooker, Reg,’ he said.

‘I like that. Reg. Only one who ever called me Reg was my kid brother, who couldn’t pronounce Regina. Which name I hate, by the way. Do you like being called Charles? It sounds so formal. Have you always called yourself Charles?’

‘Well, different names at different times of my life.’

‘What’d they call you in the Army?’

‘Charlie. Though we also called the enemy that. Charlie. The Vietcong. They were Charlie to us.’

‘And other times? Before you went in the Army?’

‘Chuck.’

‘I like that. Come dry my back, Chuck,’ she said, and stepped out of the tub.

‘That was in junior high and high,’ he said, taking a towel from the rack, beginning to work on her back. ‘I should’ve kept it in the Army, huh? Differentiate me from the enemy.’

‘How come you didn’t?’

‘I dunno. In Basic, they just started calling me Charlie. So I accepted it. You accept lots of things in life.’

‘Side effects,’ she said.

‘Yes. I suppose.’

‘What’d they call you when you were a kid?’

‘Carlie.’

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Definitely not.’

‘My mother hung that on me.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Yes.’

He hesitated a moment, and then said, ‘She left when I was eight.’ Hesitated again. ‘I lost track of her.’

‘Left?’

‘My father, the family. She abandoned us. Later married the guy she’d run off with, I didn’t even know his name, my father never talked about it. I was just a kid, my brother and I were just kids when she left. I was still called Carlie then. They only started calling me Chuck in junior high.’

‘Do you still see your brother?’

‘No, he died of cancer twelve years ago. Funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? I was in a war zone, I came out alive. But cancer takes my brother when he’s only forty-eight.’

‘Side effects,’ she said, and nodded. ‘Has anyone ever called you Chaz?’

‘Chaz? No.’

‘May I call you Chaz?’

‘Sure.’

‘Starting right now, okay? That’s your new name. Chaz.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘What do we have planned for tomorrow, Chaz?’

‘I thought I’d let you decide.’

‘Let’s take the Jag out again. I really enjoyed that.’

‘Head upstate maybe.’

‘Yes. Maybe stay overnight at a little bed and breakfast…”

“Well, no, I can’t do that. Not tomorrow night.’

Her face fell.

‘There’s someone I have to see tomorrow night. But it’ll be the last time, I promise. After that, I’m free.’

‘I thought maybe you didn’t like my singing,’ she said.

‘I love your singing.’

‘Shall I sing for you again?’

‘I would love you to sing for me again.’

So now, at close to midnight, she sat up in bed, the sheet below her waist, her cupcake breasts dusted with freckles, and she sang to him about Natchez to Saint Joe and moonlight and music and not knowing if you can find these things and about there was a strange enchanted boy and about it being quarter to three and no one in the place except you and me.

And when she finished singing, she cuddled in his arms again, and said, ‘I love you, Chaz.’

And he said, ‘I love you, too, Reg.’

* * * *

‘Well, well, well,’ Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks said. ‘Another dead priest.’

This as if a dead priest showed up every day of the week. Last one he could remember, in fact, was the one over in the Eight-Seven, years ago, young priest snuffed while he was at vespers. This one was an old priest.

‘Ancient, in fact,’ Detective Monoghan said.

‘Got to be ninety-six in his bare feet,’ Detective Monroe said.

The two Homicide detectives were looking down at the body as though it were a wrapped mummy in one of the city’s museums, instead of a fresh corpse here on the stone floor off the church’s garden. The nun who’d found him was still trembling. She was no spring chicken herself. In her fifties, Ollie guessed, more or less. She’d told the responding patrolmen she’d been a nun for the past twenty years. Would’ve made her around thirty when she joined the Church. Both Homicide detectives were wondering what she looked like with no clothes on. Ollie was wondering the same thing.

‘Two in the face,’ Monroe said.

‘Do dee M.O. strike a familiar note, Ruby Begonia?’ Monoghan said.

‘Six-to-five a Glock was the weapon.’

Ollie didn’t know what they were talking about.

‘The Glock Murders,’ Monroe explained.

‘The Geezer Murders,’ Monoghan said.

‘All over the newspapers.’

‘Television, too.’

‘This makes what? Number Three?’

‘Four,’ Monoghan said. ‘If it’s the same Glock.’

‘Let me in on it, okay?’ Ollie said.

He hated Homicide cops. Hated the dumb regulations in this city that made their appearance mandatory at the scene of any murder or suicide. Their role was quote advisory and supervisory unquote. Which meant they stood around with their thumbs up their asses, demanding copies of all the paperwork. Besides, both Monoghan and Monroe could stand going on diets. So could the two patrolmen who’d first responded. Not to mention the nun. When you were in love, the whole world could stand losing a little weight. Not that Ollie was in love.

‘Guy’s been running all over the city killing old farts,’ Monoghan said.

‘With a Glock nine,’ Monroe said.

‘Should be an easy one then,’ Ollie said, and turned to the first overweight uniform. ‘What’s the nun’s name?’ he asked.

‘Sister Margaret.’

‘How’d she come upon the priest?’

‘Came out to see if the garden gate was latched.’

‘She live here, or just visiting?’

‘Got a room over on the other side of the church.’

Ollie nodded.

‘You think the old priest was banging her?’ Monroe asked his partner.

‘Would you bang her?’ Monoghan said.

‘He’d bang anything that moves,’ Ollie said.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Monroe said, but the thought of having sex with a nun was stimulating in a primitive pagan sort of way. Monoghan found it vaguely exciting, too. So did Ollie, for that matter. The nun stood there trembling, saying her beads, poor soul. Ollie walked over to her.

‘Sister Margaret,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.’

Actually, he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, one priest more or less in this vale of tears, especially a guy had to be a hundred years old.

‘But I have to ask a few questions, if you feel up to it,’ he said.

The nun nodded, whimpering into her beads.

‘What time was it that you found the victim… by the way, what is his name?’

‘Father Michael Hopwell,’ she said.

‘I understand you came out here into the garden to lock the gate

‘To see if it was locked.’

‘And was it?’

‘I didn’t check. I found Father Michael and ran right back inside.’

‘So if it’s unlocked now, it would have been unlocked then,’ Ollie said.

‘Or vice versa,’ Sister Margaret agreed, nodding.

One thing he couldn’t stand was a smartass nun.

‘You went inside…” he prompted.

‘Yes, and immediately called the police.’

‘Knew he was dead, did you?’

‘Knew he was hurt. All the blood…”

She shook her head.

‘See anyone when you first came out here in the garden?’

‘No. Actually, I’d hardly stepped outside when I saw him lying there. I turned right around, ran right back in again.’

‘Hear any shots before you came outside?’

‘No.’

‘When’s the last time you saw Father Michael alive?’

‘When Father Joseph arrived. I took him back.’

‘Took who back?’

‘Father Joseph.’

‘Back where?’

‘To the rectory.’

‘And Father Joseph is?’

‘An old friend of Father Michael’s. He’s retired now. He comes here often.’

‘What time did he get here tonight?’

‘Around eight o’clock.’

‘And left when?’

‘A little after ten.’

‘You saw him leave?’

‘No, I heard them exchanging “good nights.”

‘But you didn’t hear any shots?’ Ollie said, surprised.

‘No. I went into the chapel to say complin before I went to bed.’

‘Complin?’

‘That’s the last prayer of the day.’

‘Didn’t hear any shots all that time?’

‘The chapel walls are thick.’

‘Tell me about this Father Joseph.’

‘They were priests together at Our Lady of Grace, in Riverhead.’

‘They get along?’

‘Oh yes. Get along? Of course. They’re old friends.’

‘Where is he now, this Father Joseph?’

‘He lives in the community center on Stanley Street.’

Ollie looked at his watch.

It was ten past midnight.

He wondered what time priests went to bed. Well, retired priests. He wondered who paid for a priest’s retirement. He wondered who’d shot Father Michael here.

‘Who’s got these other Glock murders?’ he asked Monroe.

‘The Eight-Seven,’ Monroe said.

‘Well, well, well,’ Ollie said.

* * * *

In the middle of the night, he woke up screaming.

She sat up, yelled, ‘Chaz! What is it?’

‘A nightmare,’ he said.

But he was doubled over in bed, clutching his abdomen.

He lay beside her, trembling. He felt cold to the touch. She held him close. In a little while, he got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She heard the water in the sink running. He was in there for five minutes before he came back to bed.

‘Tell me the dream,’ she said.

He hesitated, thinking. Then he said, ‘It was in Nam.’

He was still holding his belly. The chills seemed to be gone, though.

‘This woman and her baby are sitting on the hood of a Jeep. We’re supposed to transport them back to where an interpreter is waiting to question the woman. Well, the girl, actually; she’s no more than nineteen. The sergeant thinks the girl is a spy for the Vietcong, I don’t know what gave him that idea.

‘The sergeant is driving the Jeep. He likes to drive. I’m riding shotgun. M-1 in my lap. The girl is sitting on the hood of the vehicle. Baby in one arm, holding the baby tight. Other arm extended, stiff, hand clutching this like sort of handle on the hood, so she won’t fall off with her baby. The road is rutted and bumpy, these mud roads they had over there, between the rice paddies…”

He began trembling again.

‘I don’t remember the rest of it,’ he said.

When she got up to pee later, he was sound asleep.

She kept thinking about his dream. After she’d washed her hands, she opened the door to the medicine chest over the sink.

There were five bottles of prescription pain relievers in there.

She wondered if he’d had a nightmare at all.

* * * *

It certainly had been very nice to fall into two gratuitous drug busts while investigating a pair of homicides. But these windfalls hadn’t brought them any closer to learning who had killed the blind violinist, or the cosmetics sales rep, or even the university professor. Nor did it much endear them to Connors and Brancusi, the two Narcotics cops who now had Internal Affairs to deal with because some punk nightclub manager was making noises about having greased them for protection. The things a desperate ex-con would say to avoid taking another fall!

And now, to make matters worse, a dead priest had turned up last night in the Eight-Eight.

And guess who’d caught the case?

‘Now the usual thing that would happen here,’ Ollie explained to the assembled detectives of the Eight-Seven that Friday morning, ‘would be if a person caught a body that he later learned had been shot with the same pistol used in three previous murders another squad had been investigating - fruitlessly, I might add - since the sixteenth of the month

This was now the twenty-fifth day of June. The clock on the squadroom wall read 9:10 A.M.

‘The usual thing that would happen would be for the responding detective to cite FMU, and then run the paper over posthaste to the squad that originally caught the squeal, in this case yours precisely, the Famous Eighty-seventh.’

He paused to have his droll sarcasm appreciated.

‘But it so happens that my plate at the moment is both literally and figuratively empty

He did not expect any of the cops here in this room to understand or appreciate such literary terms, but the fact was that there’d been a dearth of murders in his own precinct and besides he was on a diet, hence the empty plates all around…

‘… and so I’ve decided to join forces with you, so to speak, and take upon myself the investigation of the priest’s murder, whose name happens to be Father Michael Hopwell, should this be of any interest to you. And also to lend whatever assistance I may deem myself capable of, ah yes, in the ongoing investigations of the Geezer Murders you are already pursuing.’

The Eight-Seven detectives did not know whether this was a blessing or a curse.

‘Thank you,’ Ollie said, ‘don’t bother standing, no applause necessary,’ and executed a slight but difficult bow with one hand on his still quite ample middle, empty plate or not.

Ollie’s idle comment notwithstanding, the tabloids spread on Carella’s desktop that Thursday morning were still calling the string of homicides ‘the Glock Murders.’ Now that Ollie was on the scene, would the murders be remembered from this day to the ending of the world as ‘the Geezer Murders’? Carella hoped not.

But look at the facts.

Four murders thus far, all committed with the same automatic pistol. Two of the vics in their fifties. One in her sixties. And now one in his seventies. These were not youngsters, Maude. These were people getting on in life, you might say. Given your average life span of what -seventy, seventy-five, eighty tops? - this put middle age somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Yes, kiddies, face it. You were rounding the bend at thirty, and middle-aged at thirty-five, imagine that. Fifty was fast approaching old age. Sixty was, in fact, old. Seventy was decrepit. Eighty was ready for the box. None of these victims had been skipping off to kindergarten with a lunch pail in one hand and a box of crayons in the other. In all truth, the ages of the victims made the case sort of boring. Like watching Woody Allen kissing a beautiful blonde in one of his movies. If someone’s about to die soon, anyway, what was the sense of going to all the trouble of killing him? Or her?

Well, you couldn’t say the two fifty-something-year-olds were exactly at death’s door. In fact, Alicia Hendricks had been a damn good-looking woman, in excellent health - and sexually active when she was younger, don’t forget. And whereas the wandering violinist had been blind, he was otherwise in pretty good shape and certainly not rushing out to buy himself a burial plot. But aside from those two, the others seemed unlikely candidates for termination. Ho hum, let nature take its course was what most citizens of this city were thinking as they turned the pages of their newspapers to sexier stuff like the killing and torture of Iraqi prisoners of war.

Not that the tabloids weren’t doing their best to make the murders sound as sexy as possible. The first thing they did was suggest that the Glock Murders were in fact serial murders, and then they quoted various FBI profile statistics common to most serial murders.

Never mind that until the murder of the priest last night, there had been only three killings…

(A serial killer is someone who usually kills more than five people.)

Never mind that the now-four murders had been committed in the relatively short space of six days…

(A serial killer usually slays over a longer period of time, sometimes even months or years, allowing a so-called cooling-off period between each murder.)

Never mind that the victims here were a mixed bag: a blind musician, a cosmetics saleswoman cum dope dealer, a university professor, and now a priest.

(A serial killer’s victims are usually of the same type - prostitutes, hitchhikers, postal employees, what have you, but always easily categorized.)

Never mind that all the victims here were shot in the face at close range with an automatic pistol.

(Most serial murders are committed by strangulation, suffocation, or stabbing.)

One of the tabloids suggested that the serial killer here was trying to obliterate his victims’ faces, a supposition with which a PD profiler actually agreed. All of the tabloids agreed that the primary motive of a serial killer was sexual, whether or not any sex had actually taken place before or after the murder. They also agreed that most serial killers were white males between the ages of twenty and thirty, which description fit half the stockbrokers downtown.

The detectives looking at all these statistics saw only two converging characteristics that might have marked their man as a serial killer: his victim’s ages and their race: they were all getting on in years, and they were all white.

It was Fat Ollie Weeks who came up with the notion that three of the murders might be simple smoke-screen murders.

‘Maybe he was only after one of them,’ he said. ‘Let’s say the priest last night, for example. Maybe the rest were just to throw us off the track. No connection at all between them.’

‘Among them,’ Willis corrected, though he had to admit Ollie might have a point here. Aware that Eileen Burke was watching him, waiting for his further response, he merely said, ‘In which case, which one?’

‘Was he really after, you mean?’

‘You kill four people, you’re really after each and every one of them,’ Parker said.

‘I’m inclined to agree,’ Byrnes said, surprising Parker. ‘A smoke screen isn’t usually this prolonged. Too much danger here of us closing in.’

‘I don’t see the danger yet,’ Eileen said. ‘We haven’t found any connection, so maybe Ollie’s right.’

‘In which case, which one was he really after?’ Willis insisted. ‘Who was the real victim?’

‘Far as I’m concerned,’ Byrnes said, ‘they’re all real victims, and he was after each and every one of them. Stay on all of them,’ he advised. Or warned. ‘And bring me something!’

* * * *

Parker caught up with Ollie on his way out of the squadroom, and asked how things were going with his little Latina dish.

‘Or do you plan on marrying her?’ he said. ‘Is that it, Ollie?’

‘Well, no. I mean, the subject hasn’t come up. We’ve only seen each other a few times, whattya mean marry her?’

‘Is exactly what I’m saying. But if there are no wedding bells on the horizon, then when do you plan to make your move?’

‘I don’t know what move you mean.’

‘Ho-ho, he don’t know what move I mean,’ Parker said to the air. ‘I mean getting in her pants, sir, is what I mean. When do you plan to attempt this?’

‘I didn’t make any plans for that,’ Ollie said.

‘Then start now,’ Parker said. ‘When are you seeing her again?’

‘Saturday night.’

‘Tomorrow night?’

‘No, next Saturday night.’

‘No,’ Parker said.

‘Whattya mean no? That’s when I’m seeing her. July third, next Saturday night.’

‘Wrong,’ Parker said. ‘Saturday night is wrong, July third, July whenever. She’ll know what you’re planning, she’ll…’

‘I ain’t planning nothing.’

‘She’ll think you’re planning something. Saturday night? Of course you’re planning something! She’ll be on High Alert, she’ll put up a Panty Block.’

‘A what?’

‘These Latinas, they call themselves, they know all kinds of ways to cut off a man’s dick and sell it to a cuchi frito joint. It’s called a Panty Block. If she suspects for a single minute what you’re planning…”

‘But I’m not…”

‘… she’ll throw up a Panty Block like you never saw in your life. Here’s what you gotta do,’ Parker said. ‘If you wanna get in this girl’s pants, you first gotta create an ambulance.’

‘A what?’ Ollie said.

‘An ambulance. In French, that means like a setting.’

‘I always thought an ambulance

‘Yeah, I know, but the French are peculiar. To them, ambulance means lighting, music, mood, the whole setting. Ambulance, is what they call it. They know about such things, the French. Saturday night is out. Any Saturday night. What’d you plan to do that Saturday night?’

‘I told her to come over around seven. I told her I’d cook dinner for her.’

‘Oh boy! High Alert at once! Panty Block, Panty Block!’ Parker said, and threw up his hands in alarm. ‘You want my advice?’

‘Well…’

‘Call her, tell her you want to change it to brunch. Tell her to come over for a nice Sunday brunch. Eleven o’clock Sunday.’

‘That’s the Fourth of July.’

‘Good, that’s a good American holiday, these Latina girls like to think they’re American. Tell her you’ll make pancakes. Pancakes are very American, very innocent. Tell her to dress casual. Blue jeans, if she likes. Most of these Latina girls don’t wear pants under their jeans, you’re already halfway home.’

‘Well, I’m not sure I want to trick her that way…”

‘What trick? You’re creating a safe ambulance is all. Nice Sunday morning brunch, the Fourth of July, who could suspect Wee Willie is lurking in the bushes?’

‘It ain’t so wee.’

‘That’s just an expression. No one’s disparaging your package.’

‘Just so you know.’

‘Call her. Change it to brunch.’

‘You think?’

‘Am I talking to the wall here?’ Parker said. ‘Call her!’

* * * *

Dr. Angelo Babbio was the head of the Visual Impairment Services Team at the Veterans Administration Medical Center. He told them that before the Iraq War began, a survey here at VAMC estimated that the number of legally blind veterans in America would increase by 37 percent, from 108,122 in 1995 to 147,864 in 2010.

‘That was before we started getting the figures from Iraq,’ he said.

‘Do your records go back to the Vietnam War?’ Carella asked.

‘They go back to World War I,’ Babbio said. ‘What’s your interest in the visually impaired?’

‘We’re investigating the murder of a blinded vet.’

‘And you think he may have been treated here?’

‘According to his brother, yes.’

‘When do you think this might have been?’

‘Late sixties, early seventies.’

‘Long time ago,’ Babbio said.

He led them through corridors lined with silent men sitting in wheelchairs. Elderly men on oxygen. Young soldiers recently returned from the desert. A bird colonel still proudly wearing his uniform, sitting motionless in his chair, his head bandaged. Facing a window beyond which was a green lawn and a blue sky he could not see.

Max Sobolov’s records were already on microfilm. He’d indeed been treated here for rehab. Nothing they could do about his eyes, he’d lost both those to a mortar explosion. But they could teach him about spatial layouts, and environmental constants, and features of walls and floors, and how to use echolocation. They could teach him how to carry out complex tasks, travel intricate routes, locate difficult objectives. They could teach him the use of the long cane. They could teach him independence.

‘We have him discharged after five years,’ Babbio said. ‘According to this…’ He tapped the file folder. ‘… he was a difficult patient.’

‘In what way?’ Meyer asked.

‘Bitter, uncooperative. Lots of them come back that way, you know. They go off all gung-ho, and suddenly they’re home, and they’re still young, but they’ve lost an arm or a leg, or half a face, or they’re paralyzed, or blind - as was the case with Sobolov here - and it gives them an entirely different perspective. Sobolov was in a lot of pain. We had to medicate him quite heavily.’

‘Did he become drug dependent?’ Carella asked.

‘Well… who can say? We gave him a lot of morphine, let’s put it that way.’

‘Was he an addict when he left here?’ Carella insisted.

‘There is nothing in his record to indicate he was morphine-addicted when he left VAMC,’ Babbio said.

The detectives did not appear convinced.

‘Look,’ Babbio said, ‘we’re lucky we were able to release him as a functioning member of society. Most of them never get back to what they once were.’

Carella wondered how many wars it would take.

* * * *

They tried to imagine what this Riverhead neighborhood must have looked like forty years ago.

The elevated-train stops on the Dover Plains Avenue line would have been the same. Cannon Hill Road, and then the stations named after the numbered streets, spaced some nine blocks apart. The end of the line would have signaled an expanse of vacant lots, and then the beginning of the first small town beyond the city itself. Today, those once-empty lots were crowded with low-rise apartment buildings and shops where city melted imperceptibly into suburb.

No longer were there trolley tracks under the elevated tracks, and the traffic was heavier now. Today, Dover Plains Avenue was lined with bodegas where once there had been Italian groceries or Jewish delis. What had earlier been an ice-cream parlor was now a cuchi frito joint. The pizzeria and the bowling alley were perhaps there long ago, but the language spoken in them now was Spanish.

Times had changed, and so had the neighborhood where Alicia Hendricks and her brother, Karl, had once lived. But still anchoring the hood, like pegs at the corners of a triangular tent, were Our Lady of Grace Church, the Roger Mercer Junior High School, and Warren G. Harding High.

Alicia and her brother had each attended both schools. Karl had gone on from Harding High to prison. Alicia had begun work at a restaurant named Rocco’s. They did not expect the restaurant to be there today. But there it was, sitting on the corner of Laurelwood and Trent, a green and white awning spread over the sidewalk, tables outdoors a little early in the season, waiters in long white aprons bustling in and out of the place. ROCCO’s, the sign above the awning read.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Parker said.

The present owner was a man named Geoffrey Lucantonio. His father, now deceased, was the Rocco who’d owned the place when Alicia worked here all those years ago. Geoffrey was seventeen when Alicia took the job. He remembered her well.

‘Sure. I used to fuck her,’ he said discreetly. ‘Then again, so did everyone else.’

Apparently, Alicia’s reputation had preceded her from Mercer Junior High. Well-developed at the age of twelve, she had first gained a following as the ‘vacuum cleaner’ of the seventh grade, a sobriquet deriving from her ability to perform excellent oral sex, a trend that was catching on among pubescent girls as a means of avoiding vaginal penetration and therefore unwanted pregnancies. By the time she reached the ninth grade, she’d tipped to the fact that blowjobs were a form of male exploitation, and she moved on to sex that brought satisfaction to herself as well. It wasn’t long before her phone number was scrawled in telephone booths and on men’s room walls with the advisory ‘For a wild ride, call Alicia.’

‘They used to have these Friday night dances at Our Lady of Grace,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The guys used to line up around the block, waiting to dance with her. Just to get close to her, you know? Those tits, you know?’

Parker could just imagine.

‘And she fell right into my lap,’ Geoffrey said, rolling his eyes. ‘I mean, talk about letting the fox into the chicken coop.’

Genero figured he’d got that backwards.

Parker was a little envious. Beautiful, uninhibited fifteen-year-old coming to work in your father’s restaurant? His own father had never even owned a hot-dog stand!

‘How long did she work here, would you know?’ he asked.

‘Of course I know! Two years. Left when she was seventeen. Went to manicuring school to get a license. Never heard from her since.’ Geoffrey hesitated. ‘Best two years of my life,’ he said, and sighed longingly.

Parker almost sighed with him.

* * * *

That Friday afternoon, as they sat at an outdoor table on the sidewalk of a place called Rimbaud’s in a small town perched on a river upstate, eating ice-cream sundaes and sipping thick black espressos, she said, out of the blue, ‘Chaz, from now on, I don’t want to charge you.’

He looked across the table at her.

And suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears.

She was so startled, she almost began crying herself.

‘Chaz?’ she said. ‘Chaz?’ and reached across the table to take his hand. ‘What is it, honey? Please, what is it?’

He shook his head.

Tears spilling down his cheeks.

He took out a handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes.

‘I wish I’d met you sooner,’ he said.

‘Any sooner, you’d be a pedophile,’ she said, and smiled across the table at him, and kept holding his hand.

He began laughing through his tears.

‘Are you doing this because it hasn’t been working for us?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘It has been working.’

‘I meant… the sex.’

‘Oh, that’ll be fine,’ she said airily, ‘don’t worry about it. We just need more practice at it.’

He nodded, said nothing.

‘We’ve just met each other,’ she said, enforcing her point. ‘We have to keep at it, is all. Learn each other. We have plenty of time.’

He still said nothing.

“The sex is nothing, I’m ready to wait forever for it to work,’ she said. ‘You want to know why? Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met. Some guys, in the middle of the night, they like to start complaining about their wives, you know? I know you haven’t got a wife, I’m just trying to explain something. They do that because they suddenly feel guilty about being in bed with a whore. So they blame it on the wife. The wife does this, the wife doesn’t do that, it’s all the wife’s fault.

‘Other guys, they like to tell you how brainy they are, or how macho they are. Middle of the night. This is because they’re paying to get laid, and they want you to realize they don’t have to pay for it if they choose not to, they are really something quite special, and they want you to appreciate this. Some of them, if you don’t appreciate how marvelous they are, they start smacking you around. Those are the ones who are so very marvelous that they may knock out a girl’s teeth or break her arm or suddenly pull a gun or a knife on her. Those are the ones you get the hell out of there fast. Run out in your panties, run out bare-assed, just get out before this truly gets dangerous. You weigh a hundred and ten pounds, and the gorilla in bed with you weighs two-fifty, never mind the Marines coming to the rescue.

‘I’ve never been to bed with anybody like you, Chaz,’ she said, and reached across the table, and took both his hands in her own again. ‘Never. You never try to show off, you never brag about yourself, you never tell me you have an IQ of three hundred and twelve, or biceps measuring eight inches around. You’re just… so full of life, Chaz. Just so… nice… and… gentle… and… and…

‘You always treat me like a lady, Chaz. Always. Well… that’s because I’m a whore, right? I know that. Always treat a lady like a whore, and a whore like a lady, right?’

‘You’re not a whore, Reggie.’

‘You keep saying that, I’ll start believing it.’

‘Believe it,’ he said.

‘Chaz,’ she said, and paused, and looked across the table at him, and said, ‘do you trust me?’

‘Completely.’

‘Then tell me what happened last night.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. When last night?’

‘Where’d you go, for example? What’d you do?’

‘I had some business to take care of. I told you.’

‘Late at night? You didn’t get back to the hotel till…”

‘Yes, Reggie. Late at night.’

‘Please don’t get angry with me. I’m only trying to…’

‘I’m not getting angry.’

‘Was that really a nightmare you had, Chaz?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because, the way you were clutching yourself…”

‘It was a nightmare, Reg.’

‘… you seemed to be in pain.’

‘It was a painful nightmare.’

‘You’ve got a lot of pain pills in the bathroom, Chaz.’

The table went silent.

‘Chaz? What are all those pills for?’

‘I sometimes get headaches. Remembering Nam.’

‘Headaches in your belly?’

‘Let it go, Reg.’

‘Don’t get angry, please don’t.’

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Where are you going tonight, Chaz? What business do you have to take care of tonight? That’s stopping us from staying at a bed and breakfast up here?’

‘Old business.’

‘You told me this would be the end of it…”

‘It will.’

‘The end of what, Chaz?’

‘All this old business.’

‘What old business? Chaz, if I’m not a whore, then trust me, okay? Let me help you with whatever…”

‘I’m all right, Reggie. There’s nothing you can do to help, believe me.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘Believe me.’

She looked into his eyes.

‘Believe me,’ he said again.

She wished she could.

She wished she didn’t feel that something very terrible was going to happen very soon.

* * * *

‘Christine and I were both fresh out of college,’ Susan Hardigan told them. ‘Both of us very young, and very arrogant, and I fear not very attractive.’

She was sitting in a wheelchair in fading sunlight, a fading woman herself, in her late sixties now, they guessed, frail in a blue nursing home robe and woolly blue slippers, her gray hair pulled to the back of her head in a tidy bun. They suspected she had never been a pretty woman, but age had not been kind to her, either. Her crackling mind came filtered through a quavering voice, and she sat wrinkled and shriveled, as if cowering from death itself.

They had found her name on a stack of letters in Christine Langston’s desk, the most recent dated April 24, almost nine weeks ago. They had called ahead and asked if they might come talk to her, and an administrator at the Fairview Nursing Home had told them that would be fine if they made the visit a short one. The drive out to Sands Spit had taken a bit more than two hours. Now, at seven in the evening, they sat on a porch in a wide bay window, dusk falling swiftly around them.

‘And you’ve kept your friendship all these years?’ Kling asked. He sounded surprised. He was still young enough to believe that friendships fell into clearly defined periods of a person’s life: Childhood, High School, College, Grown Up. He couldn’t quite imagine a friendship that endured into a person’s old age, perhaps even to his death. But here was Susan Hardigan, who had known Christine Langston when they were both young teachers at Warren G. Harding High School in Riverhead.

‘Yes, all these years,’ she said. ‘Well, we don’t see each other all that often, especially since I began having trouble with my legs. But we correspond regularly, and we talk to each other on the phone, yes. We’re still very good friends.’

It occurred to both detectives, almost simultaneously, that she did not yet know Christine Langston was dead. Brown glanced at Kling, found him turning to him at the same moment. So who would tell her? They both suddenly wished they hadn’t driven all the way out here today.

‘Miss Hardigan,’ Brown said, ‘there’s something you should know.’

His voice, his eyes transmitted the message before he said the words.

‘Has something happened to her?’ Susan asked at once. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘Ma’am,’ Brown said, ‘she was murdered.’

‘I dreamt it,’ she said. ‘The other night. I dreamt someone had stabbed her.’

Brown told her what had actually happened. He told her they’d been talking to associates of hers, students she’d taught, trying to get a handle on the case. Susan listened intently. He didn’t know quite how he should broach the matter of Christine Langston’s… sexuality? This was an elderly woman sitting here in a wheelchair, a spinster woman who reminded him of his aunt Hattie in North Carolina, albeit white. How did you ask her if she knew her close friend had once phoned in a false rape charge back then when you and I were young, Maggie?

‘Did you know of any trouble she’d reported to the police?’ Kling said, gingerly picking up the ball.

‘What sort of trouble?’ Susan asked.

‘Curried favors from a cab driver,’ Kling sort of mumbled.

Curried, Brown thought. Well, an Indian cab driver.

‘A cab driver curried favors from her?’

‘No,’ Kling said, and cleared his throat. ‘Miss Langston curried favors from him.’

‘Nonsense,’ Susan snapped. ‘What kind of favors?’

Kling cleared his throat again.

‘Sexual favors,’ he said.

Brown wished he was dead.

‘Are you talking about that trick she played one time?’ Susan said. ‘Is that what you’re referring to?’

‘What trick would that be, ma’arn?’

‘Back at Harding? The young man who needed an A?’

‘Tell us about it,’ Brown said.

‘But he wasn’t a cab driver. He was a student.’

Plainly about to enjoy this, almost rubbing her hands together in anticipation, Susan shifted in her wheelchair, leaned forward as if to share a delicious secret, lowered her voice, and said, ‘This boy desperately needed an A in the course Christine was teaching. Basic Elements of Composition, whatever it was. This was high school, he was a graduating senior, eighteen years old. But he needed an A from her to pull up his average from a C to a B. He’d applied to a college, some dinky little school in Vermont, and acceptance was contingent on his maintaining a B average.’

Susan grinned. Her teeth were bad, Brown noticed. She suddenly didn’t remind him of Aunt Hattie at all.

‘Well… this is really rich, I must tell you. As a joke, Christine told the boy…” She suddenly winked at the detectives. ‘I don’t know if either of you are old enough to hear this.’

‘Try us,’ Brown said.

‘She told him if he’d go to bed with her, she’d give him an A. Joking, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Brown said.

‘But he took her up on it!’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ Brown said.

‘Can you imagine! She’s joking with the boy, and he thinks she’s truly propositioning him?’

‘So she explained that she was just kidding, right?’

‘Well, no,’ Susan said, chuckling. ‘He was eighteen, she was twenty-three, this was consensual. Nothing wrong with that.’

‘Nothing at all,’ Kling said. ‘What was this boy’s name, would you remember?’

‘She never said. Told me the story one night while we were having dinner together.’

‘You’re saying she went to bed with him,’ Brown said.

‘Isn’t that delicious?’ Susan said, and actually clapped her hands. She leaned closer, conspiratorially. Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it.’

Neither of them dared ask what the end of it was.

‘She gave him a C, anyway!’ Susan said gleefully.

The detectives said nothing for a moment.

‘Was he accepted at that college in Vermont?’ Brown asked at last.

‘No! He got drafted into the Army!’

Brown nodded.

‘Isn’t that the supreme irony!’ Susan said.

* * * *

‘You know something,’ Brown said in the car on the way back to the city. ‘There are people who are ugly when they’re young, and they’re still ugly when they’re old. Nothing changes there. Ugly is ugly.’

They were caught in inexplicable post-rush-hour traffic. Brown was driving. The car windows were open. An incessant buzz seemed to hang over everything.

‘I’ll tell you something else,’ he said. ‘If you’re getting a picture here of a mean old lady, then ten to one she was a mean young lady, too. And probably a mean little brat. Nothing changes. Mean is mean. Susan Hardigan enjoyed telling that damn story. They must have been two prize bitches back then, her and her good friend Christine. Both of them ugly, both of them mean.’

‘Yep,’ Kling said.

They drove in silence for some time, pondering the vast mysteries of life.

‘Got time for a drink?’ Kling asked. ‘Caroline’s waiting,’ Brown said.

* * * *

When Carella got home that night, he explained that the reason he was late was there’d been another murder, and the Loot had them running all around town again.

‘In the Eight-Eight this time, an old priest, same Glock,’ he told Teddy. ‘Ollie Weeks caught it, lucky us.’

How many does this make? Teddy signed.

‘Four.’

Is it some nutcase shooting people at random?

The word ‘nutcase’ was difficult to sign.

At first, Carella read it as ‘Nazi.’

‘Oh, nutcase,’ he said, after she’d repeated it three times. ‘Maybe.’

But he didn’t think so.

* * * *

First thing Kling thought was, She’s a hooker.

Sliding onto the stool next to his, She’s a hooker. Or was that racial profiling? Or had he been drinking too much? Or did he just miss Sharyn too much? When you’re in love, the whole world’s black. Sharyn’s words. The girl smiled at him. Very black girl, very white smile. Short skirt, crossed her legs. Smooth black legs, bare, shiny. He almost put his hand on her knee. Reflexive action. Been with Sharyn too long a time now. Once you taste black, there’s no going back. Sharyn’s words, too.

‘Dirty martini,’ the girl told the bartender.

‘What’s that?’ Kling asked. ‘A dirty martini.’

The girl turned to him. ‘You don’t know whut a dirty martini is?’ she said, and then, to the bartender, ‘He aon’t know whut a dirty martini is, Louis.’

‘Tell him what it is, Sade,’ the bartender said.

Sadie Harris,’ the girl said, and held out her hand. Kling took it.

‘Bert Kling,’ he said.

‘Nice’t’meet you, Bert. Way I make a dirty martini,’ she said, and again to the bartender, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Louis.’

‘You’re the one taught me how to make ‘em,’ Louis said, grinning.

‘You take two shots of gin,’ Sadie said, ‘and you add three teaspoons of olive juice. No vermouth. Just the olive juice. Then you either shake it or stir it

‘I prefer stirring it,’ Louis said, actually working on the drink now.

‘… over ice,’ Sadie said, ‘and you pour it in an up glass, and add an olive. I like a jalapefio olive in mine, as Louis well knows. Thank you, Louis,’ she said, and accepted the stemmed glass. ‘You want a little taste of this, Bert?’ she asked. ‘Li’l sip of this?’

‘Why not?’ he said.

She held the glass for him, brought it to his mouth. He sipped.

‘Nice,’ he said.

‘Yummy,’ she said, and brought the glass to her own mouth. Thick lips, berry ripe with lipstick. Black hair in corn rows. Earrings dangling. Legs crossed, skirt high on her thighs, one foot jiggling a strappy sandal, half on, half off. Low-cut silk blouse unbuttoned three buttons down. No bra. Silk puckered. Nipple on one breast almost showing. Not quite.

‘So what do you do, Bert?’ she asked.

‘I’m a cop,’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ Sadie said.

‘How about you?’

‘Be funny if I was a hooker, wouldn’t it?’ she said, and winked at Louis.

‘What are you?’ Kling asked.

‘A librarian.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘I’ll bet you’re a cop, too.’

‘You’d win.’

“What are you, Narcotics?’

‘Nope.’

‘Street Crime?’

‘Nope.’

‘Vice?’

‘Nope.’

‘Cause if you was Vice, and I was a hooker, I’d have to be real careful here, you know whut I’m saying?’

‘I guess you’d have to be careful, yes.’

‘Good thing I’m just a librarian.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And you’re just a plain old cop.’

‘Just a plain old Detective/Third Grade.’

‘Whut precinct?’

‘The Eight-Seven.’

‘You think he’s really a cop, Louis?’

‘Man says he’s a cop, I got no reason to doubt his word.’

‘Let me see your badge,’ Sadie said.

Kling reached for his wallet, opened it to where his shield was pinned to the leather.

‘Gee,’ Sadie said.

‘Told you,’ Kling said, and closed the wallet and put it back in his pocket.

‘Wanna see my library card?’ Sadie asked.

‘No, I believe you.’

‘So what do you think the chances are of a white blond cop meeting a gorgeous black librarian in a bar on the edge of the universe?’

‘Pretty slim, I’d say.’

‘You agree, though, huh?’

Kling looked at her, puzzled.

‘That I’m gorgeous,’ Sadie said.

‘It crossed my mind, yes.’

‘So if I’m not a hooker, why am I sitting here flashing my stuff at you? What kind of librarian would behave like such a brazen hussy?’

‘A brazen hussy, huh?’ Kling said, and smiled.

‘A brazen hussy, is exactly right. Jiggling her foot, letting her boobs spill all over the bar. Lord a’mercy, my daddy would throw a fit.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Let me have another one of these li’l mothas, Louis.’

He poured her another drink.

Sadie lifted the stemmed glass.

‘Would you like another li’l taste of this, Bert?’ she asked. ‘I’m assuming you’re off duty, seeing as how it’s a Friday night, and you’re sitting here drinking and all. Another li’l sip, Bert? Another sweet li’l taste?’

She lifted the glass to his mouth again, tilted it.

He sipped.

‘Yummy, ain’t it?’ she said, and raised one eyebrow like a movie star. ‘But getting back, Bert, if I was a hooker, I would have to tell you how much I charge and all that, you know whut I’m saying? And even then, before you could make a vice bust, I’d have to be naked and accepting actual cash, whatever it is these girls charge, a hundred for a blowjob, two hundred for the missionary, five for the whole night, whatever, around the world understood. Then again, you’re off duty, Bert, isn’t that right? My question is: When is an off-duty cop not a cop? And how would he like to make love to a gorgeous black librarian?’

Kling looked at her.

Louis was a discreet ten feet down the bar.

‘Li’l taste, Bert?’ Sadie said.

‘I think…”

She took his hand, placed it on her thigh.

Jiggling her foot.

Eyebrow raised.

He rose abruptly and went to the phone booth.

* * * *

Sharyn answered on the third ring.

‘Don’t hang up,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘I was in the shower,’ she said. ‘I’m soaking wet.’

‘Get a towel. I’ll call you back.’

‘I have a towel.’

‘Sharyn, I love you to death.’

Silence.

‘Sharyn, let me come there. Please.’

‘No,’ she said, and hung up.

* * * *

Sadie was still sitting at the bar. She ignored him when he sat down beside her. Then she took a long swallow of the martini, draining the glass, and placed it delicately on the bar top, and turned to him, her knees touching his.

‘Mama give you permission?’ she asked.

* * * *

The old lady was walking her dog at almost eleven thirty P.M., not a particularly wise thing to do in this part of the city, but she did it every night at this time, and everyone in the neighborhood knew her, black or white, and she’d never had any trouble so far. When she heard the voice behind her, she was startled, but not frightened.

‘Helen?’

She turned.

The dog didn’t even growl, just stared into the darkness with her.

‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

‘You should,’ he said, ‘it’s Carlie,’ and shot her twice in the face.

As the dog turned to run, he shot her, too.