Nocturne

9

"Anything happen while we were gone?" Carella asked.

"Same old shit," Willis said. "How are the roads?"

"Lousy."

The clock on the squad room wall read eleven-forty P.M. It was twenty minutes to midnight. Cotton Hawes was just coming through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squad room from the corridor outside. Beyond the steel mesh on the high squad room windows, it was still snowing. This meant they could add a half hour, maybe forty minutes to any outside visits they made.

"Frozen tundra out there," Hawes said, and took off his coat. Carella was leafing through the messages on his desk.

"Chicken feathers, huh?" he asked Willis. "Is what the man said,"

Willis answered. "And fish stains on the mink."

"Yeah."

"What kind of fish, did Grossman say?"

"I didn't ask."

"You should have. Just for the halibut."

Willis winced.

"Meyer and Kling tossed the piano player's apartment again," he said.

"Zilch."

"That means a hundred and twenty-five K is still kicking around someplace."

"For what it's worth, Kling thinks the burglar theory's the one to go with."

"That's why we're looking for whoever stole a gun," Hawes said.

"If somebody stole it," Carella said. "Otherwise, Pratt's our man."

"Alibi a mile long."

"Sure, his wife."

"Gee, detective work is so exciting," Willis said and put on his hat and walked out.

"Chicken feathers," Carella said. "What did he say about the shit?"

"Anybody's guess."

"We can dismiss illegal hunting…"

"Nobody hunts chickens."

"So that leaves theft from a chicken market."

"Not too many chicken markets around these days."

"Lots of them in Riverhead and Majesta. Some of the ethnics like their chickens fresh-killed. Hangover from the old country."

"Don't Orthodox Jews kill their chickens fresh?"

"You think it was a dead chicken in the Caddy?"

"Or chickens. Plural."

"Then how come no bloodstains?"

"Good point. So it was a live chicken."

"Or chickens."

"You know how to make Hungarian chicken soup?"

"How?"

"First you steal a chicken."

"Okay, let's say somebody stole a chicken."

"Took it for a ride in the backseat of Pratt's Caddy."

"Would you make that movie?"

"I wouldn't even go see that movie."

"But, okay, just for the halibut, let's say somebody was hungry enough or desperate enough to steal a chicken from a chicken market…"

"Do pet shops sell chickens?"

"Chicks."

"In January?"

"Around Easter."

"Anyway, a chick ain't a chicken."

"No, this had to be a chicken market."

"How about a petting zoo? Where they have goats and cows and chickens and ducks…"

"Do people pet chickens?"

"They cook chickens."

"So, okay, first you steal a chicken."

"They also sacrifice chickens."

"Voodoo."

"Mm."

Both men fell silent. It was midnight. Blue Monday. And still snowing.

"Let's ask around," Hawes said.

The technician who had thought vile thoughts about Fat Ollie Weeks nonetheless got back to him just as he was leaving the squad room at a few minutes past midnight. Except for the names on desktop plaques and bulletin-board duty rosters, the squad room here at the Eight-Eight was an almost exact duplicate of the one at the Eight-Seven, or, for that matter, any other police station in the city. Even the newly constructed buildings began to look shoddy and decrepit time, an apple-green pallor overtaking seemingly at once. Ollie looked at the speckled face the wall clock, remembering that he'd told the tech wanted the stuff by a quarter to, and thinking he'll be lucky Ollie was still here, otherwise it would have been his ass. He ripped open the manila envelope yanked out the report.

No latents at all on the champagne bottles and knife used to slit the estimable Jamal's throat. No latents on any of the bathroom fixtures or any of doorknobs in the apartment, either. Meaning that there hadn't been any other person or persons in the room, then he, she, or they had seen a lot of movies and knew enough to wipe up after themselves. So the only thing they could compare against the corpses fingerprints which the tech had dutifully lifted the two stiffs in the bathroom, copies of which included in the packet was the prints on the patent-leather clutch. The smaller prints on the bag matched the prints of the woman named Yolande Marie Marx, whose Ohio driver's license Ollie found in the red patent-leather clutch. Apparently, Yolande was now lying in the morgue at Hospital; the fingerprints the tech had lifted from the bag identified her as a white, nineteen-year-old shoplifter and prostitute with an arrest record that went back several years. The other prints on the bag matched the late Richie Cooper's. According to the report, Jamal Stone hadn't touched the bag.

Ollie kept reading.

Of hairs, there had been many, and only some of them matched those plucked from the heads of the poor unfortunate victims. Some of the hairs were blond, and they matched samples taken from the head of the dead girl. Fibers vacuumed in the apartment matched fibers from the short black skirt and red fake-fur jacket she'd been wearing at the time of her death.

There were other fibers and other hairs.

There were a significant number of dark blue wool fibers. They did not match any fibers from the clothing of the two victims.

There were red hairs. And black hairs. And blond hairs.

Some of them were head hairs.

Some of them were genital hairs.

All of them were hairs from white human beings. All of them were male hairs.

Three white males, two dead black dudes, and a dead white hooker, Ollie thought, and farted.

El Castillo de Palacios would have been ungrammatical in Spanish if the Palacios hadn't been a person's name, which in this case it happened to be. Palacio meant "palace" in Spanish, and palacios meant "palaces," and when you had a plural noun, the article and noun were supposed to correspond, unlike English where everything was so sloppily put together, thank God. El Castillo de los Palacios would have been the proper Spanish for "The Castle of the Palaces," but since Francisco Palacios was a person, El Castillo de Palacios was, in fact, correct even though it translated as "Palacios's Castle," a play words however you sliced it, English or Spanish. And worth repeating, by the way, as were many things in this friendly universe the good Lord created.

Francisco Palacios was a good-looking man with clean-living habits, now that he'd served three years upstate on a burglary rap. He owned and operated a pleasant little store that sold medicinal herbs, books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards and the like. His silent partners were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a store behind the other store, and this one offered for sale such medically approved "marital aids" as dildos. French ticklers, open-crotch panties bra gas sin entrepierna), plastic vibrators (eight-inch and in the white, twelve-inch in the black), leather executioner's masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, leather anklets studded with chrome, extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized dolls, condoms every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben-wa balls in plastic and gold plate, and a highly mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Sue-u-lator, in case you missed all this while you were out in the fragrant cloisters reading your vespers.

Selling these things in this city was not illegal; the Gaucho and the Cowboy were breaking no laws. This was not why they ran their store behind the store owned and operated by Francisco. Rather, they did so out of a sense of responsibility to the Puerto Rican community of which they were a part. They did not, for example, want a little old lady in a black shawl to wander into the back store shop and faint dead away at the sight of playing cards featuring men, women, police dogs and midgets in fifty-two marital-aid positions, fifty-four if you counted the jokers. Both the Gaucho and the Cowboy had community pride to match that of Francisco himself. Francisco, the Gaucho, and the Cowboy were, in fact, all one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or even in some quarters a rat.

El Castillo de Palacios was in a ratty quarter of the Eight-Seven known as El Infierno, which, until the recent influx of Jamaicans, Koreans, Haitians, Vietnamese and Martians had been almost exclusively Puerto Rican, or if you preferred "of Spanish origin," which was both clumsy and cumbersome but favored over the completely phony "Latino." On the politically correct highway, both of these categorizing expressions fell far behind the ever-popular (by fifty-eight percent) simple descriptive term "Hispanic." Ten percent of the Hispanics queried didn't care what they were called, so long as it wasn't "spic" or late for dinner.

El Infierno meant guess what? The Inferno. It was.

Palacios was just closing up when they got there at about twenty past midnight after a snowy fifteen-minute ride cross town which under ordinary circumstances would have taken five minutes. Palacios wore his black hair in a high pompadour, the way kids used to wear it back in the fifties. Dark eyes. Matinee-idol teeth. It was rumored in the town that Palacios had three wives, which like the violation the police held dangling over his head against the law. All of which Hawes and Carella and every other cop in the precinct (and every other being in the world) already knew, but so what? Nobo was counting, and nobody was sending anyone to just yet-provided the information was good.

It was.

Symbiosis, Hawes thought.

A nice word and a cozy arrangement.

Hawes sometimes felt the entire world ran on arrangements.

"Ai, mari cones Palacios said, "quO pasa?" He knew the cops could send him up anytime they felt like it. Meanwhile, he could be friendly with them, no? Besides, mar icon meant "homosexual," mari cones was the plural of that, which he didn't think they knew. They did know, but they also knew it was a friendly form of greeting among Hispanic men, knew why, and God protect any non-Hispanic if they used it in greeting.

They got straight to the point.

"Voodoo."

"Mm, voodoo," Palacios said, nodding. "Anything go down this past Friday night?"

"Like what?"

"Any Papa Legbas sitting on the gate?"

"Any Maitresse Ezilis tossing their hips?"

"Any Damballahs?"

"Any Baron Samedis?"

"Any chickens getting their throats slit?"

"You know some voodoo, huh?"

"Un poquito," Hawes said.

"No, no, muchisimo," Palacios said, praising him as extravagantly as if he'd just translated Cervantes.

"So," Carella said, cutting through the bullshit, "anything at all this past Friday?"

"Talk to Clotilde Prouteau," Palacios said. "She's a mamaloi…"

"A what?"

"A priestess. Well, sometimes. She also conjures. I sell her War Water and Four Thieves Vinegar, Guinea Paradise and Guinea Pepper, Three Jacks and a King, Lucky Dog, jasmine and narcisse, white rose and essence of van van whatever she needs to conjure. Tell her Francois sent you. Le Cowboy Espagnol, tell her."

The three of them were sitting at a table somewhat removed from the piano and the bar, Priscilla trying to control her anger while simultaneously venting it, Georgie and Tony trying to catch her whispered words. This was Sunday night well, Monday morning already and Priscilla's night off, but the bar was open and the drinks were free and this was a good quiet place to talk on a Sunday, especially when it was snowing like mad outside and the place was almost empty.

Priscilla was steamed, no doubt about it.

She had been steamed since eight P.M. when the boys finally got back to the hotel with an envelope they'd retrieved from the pay locker at the Rendell Road Terminal. The envelope had contained a letter that read:

My dearest Priscilla:

In the event of my death, you will have been this locker where you will find a great deal I have been saving this money for you all these years never touching it, living only on my welfare eh, and whatever small amounts still come in on company royalties.

It is my wish that the cash will enable you to your career as a concert pianist.

I have always loved you

Your grandmother,

Svetlana

In the envelope, there was five thousand dollars hundred-dollar bills.

"Five thousand?." Priscilla had yelled. "This is great deal of cash?"

"It ain't peanuts," Georgie suggested.

"This is supposed to take care of me?"

"Five grand is actually a lot of money," Georgie said.

Which it was.

Though not as much as the ninety-five they'd stolen from the locker.

"Five thousand is supposed to buy a career as a fucking concert pianist?"

She still couldn't get over it.

Sitting here at ten minutes to one in the morning, drinking the twenty-year-old Scotch the bartender had brought to her table, courtesy of the house, Priscilla kept shaking her head over and over again. The boys sympathized with her. Priscilla looked at her watch. "You know what I think?" she asked.

Georgie was afraid to hear what she was thinking. He didn't want her to be thinking that they'd opened that envelope and stolen ninety-five thousand dollars from it. Priscilla didn't notice, but his knuckles went white around his whiskey glass.

He waited breathlessly.

"I think whoever delivered that key went to the locker first," she said.

"I'll bet," Georgie said at once.

"And cleaned it out," she said.

"Left just enough to make it look good," Tony said, nodding.

"Exactly," Georgie said.

"Made it look like the old lady was senile or something," Tony said.

"Leaving you five grand as if it's a fortune."

"Just what she did," Priscilla said.

"Well, it is sort of a for{tfune," Georgie said. Priscilla was getting angrier by the minute. The very thought of some blond thief who couldn't even speak English cleaning out the locker before delivering the key to her! Tony kept fueling the anger. Georgie listening to him in stunned amazement.

"Who knows how much cash could've been in the locker?" he said.

"Well, after all, five grand is quite a lot," Georgie said, and shot Tony a look.

"Could've been twenty thousand in that envelope Tony suggested.

"More," Priscilla said. "She told me I'd be taken care of when she died."

"Could've been even fifty thousand in that Tony amended.

"There was five, don't forget," Georgie said. "Even a hundred, there could've been," Tony said which Georgie thought was getting a little too close for comfort.

Priscilla looked at her watch again.

"Let's go find the son of a bitch," she said, and graciously. Flashing a dazzling smile at the seven eight people sitting in the room, she strode ele into the lobby, the boys following her.

They found Clotilde Prouteau at one A.M. Monday, sitting at the bar of a little French smoking. Nobody understood the city's Code prohibiting smoking in public places, but it generally agreed that you could smoke in a restaurant with fewer than thirty-five patrons. Le Canard met this criterion. Moreover, even in restaurants larger than this, smoking was permitted at any bar serviced by a bartender. There was no bartender on duty at the moment, but Clotilde was covered by the size limitation, and so she was smoking her brains out. Besides, they weren't here to bust her for smoking in public. Nor for practicing voodoo, either.

A fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman with a marked French accent and a complexion the color of oak, she sat with a red cigarette holder in her right hand, courteously blowing smoke away from the detectives. Her eyes were a pale greenish-grey, accentuated with blue liner and thick mascara. Her truly voluptuous mouth was painted an outrageously bright red. She wore a patterned silk caftan that flowed liquidly over ample hips, buttocks and breasts. Enameled red earrings dangled from her ears. An enameled red pendant necklace hung at her throat. Outside a snowstorm was raging and the temperature was eight degrees Fahrenheit.

But here in this small smoky bistro a CD player oozed plaintive Piaf, and Clotilde Prouteatt looked exotically tropical and flagrantly French.

"Voodoo is not illegal, you know that, eh?" she asked.

"We know it."

"It is a religion," she said.

"We know.,

"And here in America, we can still practice whatever religion we choose, eh?"

The Four Freedoms speech, Carella thought, and wondered if she had a green card.

"Francisco Palacios tells us you sometimes do the ceremony."

"Pardon? Do the ceremony?"

"Conduct the ceremony. Whatever."

"What ceremony do you mean?"

"Come on, Miss Prouteau. We're talking here, and we're talking the lady who implores Legba to open the gate, and who sacrifices…"

"Sacrifices? Vraiment, messieurs…"

"We know you sacrifice chickens, goats…"

"No, no, this is against the law."

"But nobody cares," Carella said. She looked at them.

The specific law Clotilde had referred to was Article 26, Section 353 of the Agriculture and Markets which specifically prohibited overdriving, overloading torturing, cruelly beating, unjustifiably injuring maiming, mutilating, or killing any animal, wild or tame. The offence was punishable by imprisonment for not more than a or a fine of a thousand dollars, or both.

Like most laws in this city, this one was designed to protect a civilization evolved over centuries. rarely ever invoked the law to prevent animal in religious ceremonies, lest all the civil rights advocates demanded their shields and their Clotilde was now weighing up whether these two were about to get tough with her for doing something was done routinely all over the city, especially Haitian neighborhoods. Why bother with me? she was wondering. You have nothing better to do, messieurs' You have no trafiquants to arrest? No terroristes? how had they learned about Friday night, anyway?

"What is it you are looking for precisely?" she asked.

"We're trying to locate a person who may have driven a live chicken to a voodoo ceremony," Hawes said, and felt suddenly foolish.

"I am sorry, but I did not drive a chicken anywhere," Clotilde said.

"Live or otherwise. A chicken, did you say?"

Hawes felt even more foolish.

"We're trying to find a person who may have stolen a gun from a borrowed Cadillac," Carella said.

This didn't sound any better.

"I did not steal a gun, either," Clotilde said.

"But did you conduct a voodoo ceremony this past Friday night?"

"Voodoo is not against the law."

"Then you have nothing to worry about. Do you?"

"I did."

"Tell us about it."

"What is there to tell?"

"What time did it start?"

"Nine o'clock?"

An indifferent shrug. Another drag on the cigarette in its red holder that matched the earrings, the necklace and the pouty painted lips. A cloud of smoke blown away from the two detectives.

"Who was there?"

"Worshipers. Supplicants. Believers. Call them whatever you choose.

As I have told you, it is a religion."

"Yes, we've got that, thanks," Hawes said. "Pardon?"

"Can you tell us what happened?"

"Happened? Nothing unusual happened. What do you think happened?"

We think someone delivered a chicken for sacrifice and stole a gun from the car while he was at it. Is what we think happened, Hawes thought, but did not say. "Did anyone arrive with a chicken?" Carella asked. "For what?"

"For sacrifice."

"We do not sacrifice."

"What do you do?" Hawes insisted.

Clotilde sighed heavily.

"We meet in an old stone building that was once a Catholic church," she said. "But, as you know, are many elements of Catholicism in voodoo, al though our divinities constitute a pantheon larger than holy trinity.

It is my role as mamaloi to call upon Legba…"

"Guardian of the gates," Carella said.

"God of the crossroads," Hawes said.

"Yes," Clotilde whispered reverently. "As mentioned earlier, I implore him to open the gate…"

"Papa Legba, ouvrez vos barr ires pour Papa Legba, oh sont vos petits enfants?"

The gathered faithful in the old stone church their eyes and chant in response, "Papa Legba, violht. Papa Legba, ouvrez vos barribres pour laisser passer!"

"Papa Legba," Clotilde pleads, "open the gate,.."

"Open the gate," the faithful intone. "Papa Legba, open the gate…"

"So that we may pass through." Call and response.

Africa.

"When we will have passed…"

"We will thank Legba."

"Legba who sits on the gate…"

"Give us the right to pass."

The strong African elements in the religion.

And now a girl of six or seven glides toward the altar. She is dressed entirely in white and she holds in either hand a lighted white candle.

In a thin, high, liltingly haunting voice, she begins to sing. "The wild goat has escaped. "And must find its way home. "I wonder what's the matter.

"In Guinea, everyone is ill. "I am not ill. "But I will die.

"I wonder what's the matter."

Clotilde fell silent. The detectives waited. She drew on the cigarette again, exhaled. Piaf was still singing of unrequited love.

"Guinea is Africa," Clotilde explained. She fell silent again, as if drifting back to Haiti and beyond that to Africa itself, to the Guinea in the child's plaintive song, to the Grain Coast and the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, to the empires of the Fula and the Mandingo and the Ashanti and Kangasi, the Hausa and the Congo. Still the detectives waited. Clotilde drew on the cigarette again, exhaled a billow of smoke, and began speaking in a low, hoarse voice. From the rising smoke of the cigarette and the hypnotic smoke-seared rasp of her voice, the old stone church seemed to materialize again, a young girl in white standing before Clotilde, the priestess sprinkling her hair with wine and oil water, whitening her eye-lids with flour. Clotilde blows out the candles. The faithful are chanting again. "Mistress Ezili, come to guide us! "If you want a chicken, "We will give one to you! "If you want a goat, "It is here for you! "If you want a bull,

"We will give one to you! "But a goat without horns, "Oh, where will we find one.. "Where will we find one… "Where will we find one?"

The bar went silent.

Clotilde exhaled another cloud of smoke, blowing over her shoulder, away from the detectives.

"That is essentially how the ceremony goes," she said "The faithful call to Ezili until she appears. Usually takes the form of a woman being mounted…"

"Mounted?"

"Possessed, you would say. Ezili possesses her.

Goddess Ezili. I left out some things, but essentially…"

"You left out the sacrifice," Carella said. "Well, yes, in Haiti a goat or a chicken or a bull be sacrificed. And perhaps, centuries ago in Africa, the sacrifice may have been human, I truly don't know. I suppose that's what the goat without horns is all about. But here in America?"

"No."

"Here in America, yes," Carella said.

Clotilde looked at him.

"No," she said.

Yes, Carella said. "After the oil and the water… "No."

"… and the wine and the flour, someone slits the throat of a chicken or a goat…"

"Not here in America."

"Please, Madame Proteau. This is where the priestess dips her finger into the blood and makes a cross on the girl's forehead. This is where the sacrifice is placed on the altar and the drumming begins. The sacrifice is what finally convinces Ezili to appear. The sacrifice…"

"I am telling you there are no blood sacrifices in our ceremonies."

"We're not looking for a cheap three-fifty-three bust," Hawes said.

"Good," Clotilde said, and nodded in dismissal.

"We're working a homicide," Carella said. "Any help you can give us…" ats, quest-ce que je peux faire?" she said, and shrugged. "If there was no chicken, there was no chicken." She ejected the cigarette stub from the holder, and inserted a new one into its end. Piaf was singing "Je Ne Regrette Rien." Taking a lighter from her purse, Clotilde handed it to Hawes. He lighted the cigarette for her. She blew smoke away from him and said, "There are cockfights all over the city on Friday nights, did you know that?"

The interesting thing about Jamal Stone's yellow sheet was that it listed the names of several hookers in his on-again off-again stables.

Among these, and apparently current until her recent demise, was Yolande Marie Marx, alias Marie St. Claire, who left behind in the apartment of the dead Cooper her handbag and samples of hair and fiber Ah, yes, Ollie thought, doing his world-famous W C Fields imitation even within the confines of his mind, a small world indeed, ah, yes. Another one Stone's current racehorses was a girl named Rowland, alias Carlyle Yancy, whose address listed as the very same domicile Stone had while among the living, ah, yes.

Ollie didn't expect to find a working girl home this hour of the night.

But even the good Lord works on Sunday (although it was already Monday), so he drove downtown through the snow and into Precinct territory, getting to Stone's block at quarter past one, and stopping for a cup of coffee in open diner before going into Stone's building of piss in the hallway and then upstairs to the floor to knock on his door. Lo and behold, and wonders never, a girl's voice answered his knock. "Yes, who is it?"

"Police," Ollie said, "sorry to be bothering you late at night, would you mind opening the door please?" All in a rush in the hope that she'd just open the goddamn door before she began thinking about search warrant, and police brutality, and invasion of privacy, and civil rights, and all the bullshit people up here thought about day and night.

"Just a minute," she said.

Footsteps inside, approaching the door.

He waited.

The door opened a crack, pulled up short by a night chain. Part of a face appeared in the wedge. High-yeller girl looked about nineteen, twenty years old. Suspicious brown eye peering out at him. "What is it?"

"Miss Rowland?"

"Yes."

"Detective Weeks, Eighty-eighth Squad," he said, and held his shield up to the wedge. "Okay to come in a minute?"

"Why?" she asked.

He wondered if she knew her pimp was dead. News traveled fast in the black community, but maybe it hadn't reached her yet.

"I'm investigating the murder of Jamal Stone," he said, flat out. "I'd like to ask you a few questions."

She knew. He could see that on her face. Still, she hesitated. White cop banging on a black girl's door one o'clock in the morning. Did he think nobody watched television "What do you say, miss? I'm trying to help here," he said.

He saw the faint nod. The night chain came off. The door opened wide.

She was wearing a short silk robe with some kind of flower pattern on it, black with pink petals, sashed at the waist, black silk pajama bottoms under it, black bedroom slippers with pink pompoms. She looked very young and very fresh, but he knew in her line of work this wouldn't last long. Not that he gave a shit.

"Thanks," he said, and stepped into the apartment.

She closed the door behind him, locked it, put on the chain again. The apartment was cold.

"Police been here already?" he asked. "Not about Jamal."

"Oh? Then who?"

"Yolande."

"Oh? When was this?"

"Yesterday. Two detectives from the Eight-Seven."

"Uh-huh. Well, this is about Jamal."

"Do you think they're related?"

"The murders, do you mean?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't know. You tell me."

"Richie was killed, too," she said. "Isn't that Richard?"

"He didn't like to be called Richie."

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah. He liked to be called Richard."

The scumbag, he thought.

"Do you think somebody was after all three of them?" she asked.

"Well, I don't know. You tell me."

Ollie often found this effective. Get speculating, they told you all kinds of things. Sometimes, they speculated themselves right Murder One rap. Cause they all thought they were fuckin smart. Far as he knew, this sweet, looking doll here had torn open the other hooker drowned Richard the scumbag and then slashed her own pimp, who the hell knew? These people could tell? So they ask do you think they're and do you think somebody was after all three of them, which could all be a pose, the one person you could never trust was anybody.

"All I know is the last time I saw Jamal, he was going out to look for her bag."

"Her bag, huh?"

"This red clutch bag she was wearing when she left here."

"Which was when?"

"Saturday night. Jamal drove her down the bridge."

"Which bridge?"

"The Majesta."

"What time was this?"

"They left here around a quarter to ten."

"What time did Stone get back?"

"Around eleven. He came to pick me up, take me to this party he arranged with some businessmen from Texas."

"How many?"

"The Texans? Three of them."

"Remember their names?"

"Just their first names. Charlie, Joe, and Lou."

"Where was this?"

"The Brill. They had a suite there."

"On Fawcett?"

"Yeah."

"What time did you get there?"

"Jamal dropped me at midnight. I took a cab home."

"When?"

"Three."

"What kind of car did he drive? Stone."

"A Lexus."

"Know where he kept it?"

"A garage around the corner. On Ainsley. Why?"

"Might be something in it, who knows?"

He was thinking dope. There might be dope in the car. Jumbos on the bathroom floor and in the girl's handbag, this might've been a dope thing, who the knew, these people.

"You know the license plate number?" he asked. "No."

"Did they know him at the garage?"

"Oh, sure."

"On Ainsley, you said?"

"Yeah."

"You know the name?"

"No, but it's right around the corner from here."

"Okay. So you say you got back here around three Was Yolande home yet?"

"No. Just Jamal."

"What time did Yolande get home?"

"She didn't. Next thing we know, two cops banging down the door."

"When was this?"

"Eight o'clock Sunday morning. Jamal though was this crazy Colombian crack dealer who said stole some bottles from him and he was gonna kill for it, which Jamal didn't, by the way."

"Didn't steal no crack from him, you mean."

"Right. Still, Jamal popped four caps through door, thinking it was this crazy buck Diaz, but it was two cops instead."

"Shot at two cops, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Not a good idea."

"Tell me about it."

"Who were they, do you remember?"

"Two guys from the Eight-Seven. One of them had red hair."

"Hawes, was that his name?"

"I don't know."

"What's Diaz's first name? The crack dealer."

"Manny. Manuel, actually. You think he killed them?"

"Well, I don't know. You tell me."

"I think he coulda killed Jamal, cause he's crazy, you know, and he thinks Jamal stole some shit from him, which he didn't. But I don't see how that ties in with Yolande or Richie."

"Richard. You know him?"

"Just to say hello."

"He deals, too, you know."

"Yeah"

"You think he might've known this Diaz guy?"

"I don't know."

"So Jamal pops four through the door…"

"Yeah." so naturally they arrest him."

"Yeah."

"Then what?"

"Dragged him out of here."

"How come he was on the street again? How come they didn't lock him up?"

"I guess they figured they didn't have nothing on him."

"How about the gun? He shot at two fuckin cops, they didn't lock him up?"

"He thought it was Diaz."

"Did he have a license for the gun?"

"I think so."

"Guy with a record, they gave him a license?"

"Then maybe not."

"So why'd they let him go?"

"I got no idea."

Ollie was thinking that sometimes a bull shit misdemeanor wasn't even worth taking downtown. included violations of 265.01, where a criminal with a firearm could get you a year in prison, which was insignificant even if you behaved yourself and got on the street in three and a third months.

But this Jamal jerk had popped four at a pair of cops which should have irked them considerably caused them to haul his ass downtown toot Unless they were thinking he'd be more valuable to them outside, lead them to whoever had torn out a dead hooker's insides, who the hell knew? Take a look at Ollie, first thing you'd be picking up all your and next thing you'd be downtown waiting arraignment with your shoes falling off and your falling down cause they took away your belt and shoelaces and your brand-new stolen Rolex.

Or and this was a possibility maybe they with a murder on their hands and the shift change they didn't want to bother with booking and mug shots and printing and court appearances on an Amis the guy might even walk if he pulled a bleedin black judge. Better to let the shithead walk especially since he'd been trying to chill shithead, which maybe next time he'd succeed, more power to him. There are more things in police work, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your potato patch. Still, Ollie would ask.

Next time he was up the Eight-Seven, he would ask why they let a nigger in criminal possession of a weapon stroll right out of that li'l ole squad room ah, yes, m'dear boys, yes, indeed.

"So Yolande, and Jamal left here about a quarter to ten…"

"Yeah."

"And Jamal got back around eleven…"

"Yeah."

"And drove you to the Brill."

"That's right."

"And he was here when you got home around three…"

"Three-thirty, it must've been."

"He was home."

"Yes."

"But Yolande never made it."

"No. Which is funny."

"Funny how?"

Ollie asked.

"Cause she called to say she was on her way."

"Oh? When was this?"

"Around five-thirty in the morning."

"Called here?"

"Yeah. Told Jamal she was just leaving the Stardust…"

"The Stardust? Down on Coombes?"

"Yeah."

"And said she was coming home?"

"Soon as she could catch a cab," Carlyle said. Bingo, Ollie thought.