Nocturne

5

She has done three-ways before, but this is what promises to be a four-way and then possibly if Richard puts in his two cents. She knows from the hood, he deals good shit. In fact, he used to be in business together with Jamal for some time they went their separate ways. She is not eager for this to turn into a five-way with Richard the equation, but as Jamal is fond of saying, "Business is business and never the twain shall meet."

At the same time, it's been a very busy night, God, and she's really very sleepy, and would like nothing better than to go back to the pad and present Jamal with the spoils of the night, so to speak, and cuddle with him a little, he is very good at cuddlin when you lay almost two thousand bucks on him. Richard here is talking six hundred for the preppies here, two hundred apiece for the next hours, and giving her the nod to indicate he must wet his wick a bit, too, in which case he will put into the pot five jumbos.

What he is suggesting and she is considering seriously now, even though she is bone-tired and besides is that they all go up to his place to do crack and get down to realities, sistuh, you hear what I'm sayin? She is thinking six hundred and the jumbos, which at today's market price is fifteen for the red-topped vials, and wondering how she can escalate thing a bit higher, it being so late at night or so early in the morning, depending on where you're coming from. She wonders if they'll go for a big one and ten jumbos. She decides that's too far a reach.

Instead, she tells Richard and the three preppies who are nodding sympathetically while ripping off her clothes with their eyes tells Richard she's been out since eleven last night and it's been along one, bro, so maybe we ought to just pass unless we can sweeten the pot a little, hm? He asks her what she means by sweeten it, how sweet does she wish to sweeten it, and she decides to push the envelope, what the hell.

"If you'll be joining the party," she says, I'll need ten jumbos…"

"No problem," Richard says at once.

Jesus! she thinks.

"And a grand from the college boys here."

The preppies are flattered that she thinks they'-re from Princeton or Yale instead of some shiny little boys' school in Vermont or wherever the fuck. But the thousand-dollar tab sticks in their craw, she can see that, so she says at once, "Though you're all so cute, I might do it for nine."

One of the preppies she later learns they're all named Richard, this is going to be some kind of confusing gang bang immediately says, "Make it eight," but she knows he's just trying to sound like his banker father in Michigan or wherever, so she says, "I can't do it for less than nine. Hey, you're all real cute, but…"

"How about eight-fifty?" one of the other Richards 'asks.

"It has to be nine or I'm out of here," she says. She does not know, at that juncture in time, she walks right this minute, she will still be al fifty-one minutes from now. She does not begin realize she's in serious danger until it is almost late, when things begin getting out of hand. This much later. Right now, they are haggling over and if she walks she still has a shot at survival. boys go into a kind of a football huddle she learns they're all stars on their school's team come clapping out of it, big financial over, big white Ps on the back of their parkas, and one of them says, "Will you accept traveler's check, Richard busts out laughing. Laughing as Yolande says, "Done deal."

She has done three-ways before and in fact enjoyed some of them, especially when it's two and a guy. With most of the girls you fake it, you know, you make a lot of lapping, slurping sounds, you moan Oh yeah, honey, do it, while nobody's anything to anybody. But the john gets all thinking he's got two hot lezzies here really getting off. With some girls in a three-way, though, you're really doing what the john thinks you're doing, and can be quite enjoyable, really, all that tongue because another girl knows just where the target is, knows just which buttons to push, so yeah it can be really really good.

Two guys and a girl, you kind of lose control. that they get all macho on you, one of them fucking you from behind while you're blowing the other one and they start saying, You love it, don't you, cunt?

It gets degrading when there are two guys flexing, their muscles and trying to prove how big their cocks are. It's not that she thinks she's a princess or anything, she knows what she does for a living, she knows she's a fucking whore, I mean, she knows that. It's just that when there are two guys, she really begins to feel used, you know, she really begins to feel they have no respect at all for her, and she comes away with a dirty feeling afterward, no matter how much she tells herself she was detached the whole time. It's that they used her, is all. They flat out used her.

So now, here in Richard's pad where she remembers coming to a party once with Jamal when the two of them were first starting out in business together, dealing pot to kindergarten kids, that's a :. joke, son, they never went near any of the schools, you think they're crazy? Can remember coming to a party here, but not this kind of party with three white preppies and a black guy has a shlong the size of a python. The only black guy she does it with is Jamal and that's because he takes care of her and she loves him. She knows how big black guys can be, and she gets sore even after she does it with Jamal, which is not too frequently because business is business and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, what she shares with Jamal transcends mere sex, he was the one took her under his wing when she got off the bus from Cleveland, he's the one makes sure nobody hurts her. Anybody gets funny with her, she tells Jamal about it and he breaks the guy's legs. Besides, Jamal is regularly fuckin this other girl he takes care of,: whose name is Carlyle, which Jamal gave her. Carlyle is black and very beautiful, can understand the attraction. Occasionally they three-ways together.

Jamal Stone and Carlyle (which he also gave her) and Marie St. Claire Sometimes Yolande wonders how she ever got into this stuff, boy. But listen, what the hell.

She is wondering now how she got into this tonight when she's so goddamn bone-weary, but, course nine bills is nine bills, not to mention the jumbos, which are worth a cool hundred and Plus, the preppies are sharing their stash with everybody beaming up to the Enterprise on the nickel, until they're all sitting stoned in their underwear and grinning at each other, Jesus the shlong on Richard, the black Richard, which is she discovers they're all four of them named Richard how cute. Richard the black Richard is standing front of her now and idly gliding the head of his dick over her lips, while a preppie on either side is grabbing a tit and the third preppie is watching jerking off in preparation.

So far, no one has called her cunt or bitch.

Or cocksucker is a favorite, too.

Later, she will wonder how this got so out of hand.

Nobody seemed to know where Jose Santiago was.

This was now six-forty in the morning. His mother didn't know, none of his friends knew, the guy at the counter at the local hangout hamburger joint didn't know, nobody knew, the whole neighborhood suddenly gone deaf, dumb, and blind. The police took this to mean that everybody knew where Santiago was, but you are The Man, man, and nobody going to tell you, ЖКsave for a faint hint of mom gloam only seemed to touch the sky. It was still thirty-five minutes till dawn, the night refused to yield. The bleak January morning was still flat, dull and dark, but there was activity in the streets right now. Even on a Sunday, there was work to be done in this city, and early risers were beginning to move sluggishly toward the subways and the bus stops, passing revelers and predators who were just now heading home to bed.

The homeless, sensing dawn, anticipating the safety that would come with full light, were already crawling back into their cardboard boxes.

Outside a candy store on the corner of Santiago's block, a man was carrying in a tied bundle of newspapers. He was still wearing his overcoat and earmuffs. The scalloped edge of the furled green awning over the front of the store read: HERNANDEZ VARIETY- NEWSPAPERS LOTTERY-COFFEE. They assumed he was Hernandez himself; there was a bustling air of ownership about him. The store lights beckoned warmly behind him. Coffee sounded pretty good just about now.

"Cops, right?" Hernandez asked the moment they stepped inside.

"Right," Hawes said.

"How did I know, right?"

Not a trace of an accent. Hawes figured him for a third-generation Puerto Rican, grandfather probably came over on the Marine Tiger with the first wave of immigrants from the island. Probably had kids at college.

"How did you know?" he asked. Hernandez shrugged as if to indicate he wasted valuable time answering such a ridicuh question. He had still not taken off the overcoat and earmuffs. The store was cold. The entire universe cold this morning. Ignoring them, he busied himself cutting the cords around the newspaper bundles. big headline on the morning tabloid read:

PIANIST

SLAIN

On the so-called quality paper, big headlines reserved for acts of war or national disaster. smaller headline over a boxed article in the right corner of the front page read:

VIRTUOSO MURDERED

SVETLANA DYALOVICH VICTIM OF SHOOTING

Easy come, easy go.

"You serving coffee yet?" Carella asked. "Should be ready in a few minutes."

"Know anybody named Jose Santiago?" asked.

What the hell, they'd already asked everyone else the neighborhood. He looked to Carella for Carella was watching the hot plate on a narrow shelf behind the counter.

Brewing coffee dripped into the pot. The aroma was almost too much.

"Why, what'd he do?" Hernandez asked. "Nothing. We just want to talk to him."

Hernandez shrugged again. The shrug said that this also too ridiculous even to acknowledge. "Do you know him?" Hawes persisted.

"He comes in here," Hernandez admitted offhandedly. "Know where he is right now?"

"No, where?"

Little joke there. Hee hee hee.

"Do you or don't you?" Hawes asked.

They were smelling something besides coffee here. "Why? What'd he do?"

"Nothing."

Hernandez looked at them.

"Really," Hawes said.

"Then try the roof of his building. He keeps pigeons."

Richard, the black Richard, has already come all over her face, as a matter of fact, which she didn't quite appreciate, but he's the one set up the party, after all. He's sitting in a corner now, a blanket around him, watching television, so she knows for sure he's not the one who starts this thing going haywire. For once you can't blame the black guy, mister.

She doesn't think it's the Richard with the red hair, either, because he's sort of content to keep toying with her right tit, which she has to admit she has terrific knockers, even back in Cleveland they said so. The Richard with the dark hair is now sticking his fingers inside her, searching for her clit, good luck, mister, the condition you're in. He's very hard. She has his cock in her hand and she is stroking it pretty fiercely, hoping she can bring him off this way, get this thing over with, go home to bed. But he's spreading her legs now, and trying to climb into her, they're all so stoned nobody knows how to do diddly, except the preppie who's licking her nipple like it's his mother's. He knows just what he's doing, and seems to be having a nice time doing it, maybe he'll come this way, she certainly hopes so, kill two with one stone here.

So it must be the blond Richard who pulls the freezer bag over her head.

She knows at once that she is going to die.

She knows this is going to be her worst nightmare realized.

She is going to suffocate inside a plastic freezer bag one of those sturdy things you stuff a leg of lamb in not the kind of thin plastic that clings to your face, warn you to keep away from children. No, she's n going to die with plastic clinging to her nostrils her lips. Instead, she's going to exhaust all the inside the bag, she's going to die that way, there'll be no more oxygen left to breathe inside the bag, she's going to die… "No, cunt," he says, and takes the bag from her and sticks his cock in her mouth.

She is actually grateful for the cock. She will have a cock any day of the week over a freezer bag on her head, accept the one in her mouth and the one in her hand and the one in her vagina she always thinks of it as her vagina, it is her vagina, thank you, same as vagina on a lady in London. So happy is she that the freezer bag isn't on her head anymore, she will even accept black Richard's big shlong again, if he would like to bring it over right this minute. But no, black Richard seems content to be lying there in the corner all huddled up, watching television. She wonders if she should yell over to him that this preppie son of a bitch tried to scare her a minute ago by putting a freezer bag over her head.

"Cocksucker," the preppie says.

And pulls the bag over her head again.

Steaming cardboard containers of coffee in their hands, the detectives climbed the six stories to the roof of Santiago's building, opened the fire door, and stepped outside. The city almost caught them by surprise. They almost found it beautiful. They stood by the parapet, sipping their coffees, staring down at the lights spread below them like a nest of jewels. Darkness was fading fast. On the far side of the roof, they could hear the gentle cooing of Santiago's pigeons. They walked over to the coop.

The perching pigeons were hunkered down inside their grey and white overcoats.

The floor of the coop was covered with feathers and shit.

Santiago was nowhere in sight.

The time was 6:5.

In three minutes, Yolande would be dead.

The preppie whose cock was in her hand a minute ago now has her by the right wrist, and the one who was fucking her has hold of her left wrist, and now they all join in the fun, the three Richards, two of them keeping her pinned down, the third one making sure the bag is in place over her head and tight around her neck. She is going to die, she knows she is going to die. She knows that in a minute, in thirty seconds, two seconds, she will run out of breath and… "No, bitch."

And he yanks off the bag, and sticks his cock in her mouth again.

This is a game for them, she thinks. She hopes. a game. Put the bag on, take the bag off. They read someplace that depriving a person of air heightens the sexual pleasure. She hopes. But why are they calling her cunt and bitch and shit face why is one of them pushing… "No!" she screams, but it is too late, he has shoved it inside her, whatever it is, hurting her, tearin her, no, please, and now the plastic bag is on her again, and she hears over the ringing in her ears Richard from across the room mumbling, "Hey, whut's…?" and she screams inside the bag, tries to scream inside the bag, and she hears black yelling, "The fuck you doin?" and she thinks Help! and she screams "Help!" inside the bag, and this time she knows she is going to die, this time the pain is so overwhelming, why is he doing this to her twisting something jagged and sharp inside her, she is going to die, please, she wants to die, she breathes, she can't bear it a moment…

"No, cunt!" he shouts, and yanks the bag from head.

The rush of oxygen is so sweet.

She feels something Sticky,and wet on her lips.

She thinks this will be the end of it. They will leave her alone now.

She hurts too badly. She is too torn and ragged below, she knows she is hemorrhaging below. Please, she thinks. Just leave me alone now. Please. Enough.

"You guys crazy?"

Richard.

Good, she thinks. This is the end of it. But the bag is over her head again. And they are holding her down again.

They were back in the car maybe two or three minutes when they caught a 10-29 to proceed to 841 St. Sebastian Avenue. The dispatcher wouldn't call this a homicide for sure because all she had was a dead body in the alleyway there and nobody yet knew what the cause of death was.

Could've been a heart attack there in the alley. So she told them the blues had a corpse there, and mentioned that she had also notified Homicide just in case, which is how Monoghan and Monroe got into the act for the second time that night.

The time was a quarter past seven, the sun was just coming up, sort of.

This wasn't going to be any rosy-fingered dawn, that was for sure. This was just the end of another hard day's night, the shift almost having run its course, except that now they did, as it turned out, have another homicide on their hands. The freezer bag over the girl's head told them that.

The girl looked like a hooker, but nowadays it was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. You got Hollywood starlets showing up at the Academy Awards wearing dresses that made them look like streetwalkers, but you also got bona fide prosties standing on the corner looking like apple-cheeked college girls Minnesota, so who was to say for sure? "A hooker," Monoghan said.

"For sure," Monroe said.

"Probably her pimp done her," Monoghan suggested.

"That's why her handbag's gone."

Which was keen deduction. Carella figured if he hung around long enough, he might learn something. He was wondering why, if this had been a pimp, why the guy hadn't simply stabbed her. Or shot her. Why fancy? Why a freezer bag over her head? It was obvious that someone, pimp or whoever, had dragged her into the alley. She was lying on her back in a pool of coagulating blood, but bloody smears led from the curb, where the track seemed to have begun. someone driven her here, and then dragged her to where she now lay beside a bank of garbage cans and stacks of black-bagged garbage?

"She might have been pregnant," speculated. "All that blood."

"Nowadays, people kill you so they can tear the baby out of your belly,"

Monoghan said.

"It's ancient times all over again," Monroe said.

"There's no civilization anymore," Monoghan said. "Fucking savages nowadays," Monroe said, with more feeling than Carella had ever thought he'd possessed.

In the dim light of a cold grey dawn, the girl's face under the plastic freezer bag was as white as the ice on the alley floor.

They had wrapped her in the sheet before carrying her down to black Richard's car, and then had driven a mile uptown on St. Sab's, where they'd dragged her into the alley still wrapped in it. But black Richard knew cops had ways of tracing sheets and shit, and he'd convinced the others to roll her out of it before they left her there by the garbage cans, rats big as cats running all over the alley, made him shiver all over again just to think of them.

Fuckin honkies wanted no part of him once they'd used his car to drop the bitch off, but he reminded them it wasn't him had suffocated her, wasn't him had torn her open, was three fuckin rich guys named Richard, from a school named Pierce Academy, which was stitched on the front of all their fuckin P parkas the fuckin football on the back, dig? So either they helped him clean up the car and the apartment and get rid of the bloody sheet, or whut he was gonna do, ole black Richard here, would run straight to the cop shop. They believed him. Maybe cause he also showed them a switchblade knife bigger than any of their dicks and tole them he was gonna circumscribe them real bad if they tried to split on him now.

Ended up they'd tidied up the apartment like four speed queens come to work from a cleaning service.

Weren't no car washes open this time of night, day, whatever the fuck, and Richard didn't want to go to no garage, neither, blood all over the backseat that way, he never knew anybody could bleed that bad. He remembered a movie he'd seen one time, blood and shit all over a car from a shootin inside it, this wasn't like that, but there was plenty blood, anyway, and he didn't know any big-shot gangster he could call come set it straight.

All he knew was these honkies better help him or their name was shit.

In movies and on television, blacks and whites all pals and shit, that was all make-believe. In real life you never saw blacks and whites together hardly at all In that movie where the guy's brains were spattered over the car, this black guy and this white guy two contract hitters tighter'n Dick's hatband. But was make-believe, callin each other "nigger" and that, black guy callin the white guy "nigger," guy callin the nigger "nigger" right back, break the fuckin head any white man called Richard "nigger," never mind that movie bullshit! Was a white wrote that movie, the luck he knew about black What was real, my friend, was equality never come to pass here in this land of the free and home the brave, wasn't no black man ever trusted a man and vice versa, never. Richard didn't trust these three white bastards and they didn't trust him, but they needed each other right now cause a girl been killed in his apartment and they were the guy's who killed her. The white guys, not him. But it was his apartment, don't forget that. Cops had a way of never forgettin little black mishaps like that, fuckin cops.

So this was what you might call strange bedfellows here, which was what it actually was called in a book Richard read one time. Oh, he was literate, man, don't kid your fuckin self. Read books, saw movies, even went to see a play downtown one time had all blacks in it about soldiers. His opinion blacks were the best actors in the world cause they knew what sufferin was all about. That movie with the brains all over the car, was the black guy shoulda got the Cademy Award, never mind the white guy.

So here they were, the four of them, three white guys didn't know shit about anything, and one black guy teachin them all about survival here in the big bad city. Thing they didn't know was that soon as they cleaned up his car and got rid of the sheet they'd wrapped the bitch in, he was gonna stick it to them good.

The girl's name was Yolande Marie Marx. Her fingerprints told them that. She had a B-sheet not quite as long as her arm, but long enough for a kid who was only nineteen. Most of the arrests were for prostitution. But there were two for shoplifting and half a dozen for possession, all bullshit violations when she was underage that had got her off with a succession of slaps on the wrist from bleeding-heart judges. When she turned eighteen, she finally did three months at Hopeville, some name for a female correctional facility. She worked under the name Marie St. Claire, which alias was on the record. Her pimp's name was there, too.

The shift had changed without them.

At fifteen minutes to eight, give or take, the eight-man team of detectives on the day shift had relieved six of the detectives on the morning shift, but not Carella and Hawes, who were still out in the field. They were there, instead of home in bed, because maybe they had something to go on in the murder of Yolande Marie Marx. Her death might never make newspaper headlines; she was not Sw Even if they caught whoever had brutally slain her, murder would never result in anything more than media mention. But they had the name of her pimp And the man had a substantial record, including arrest for a New Orleans murder some ten years afor which he had done time at Louisiana's An State Penitentiary. He was now gracing this city with his presence; a policeman's lot was not a happy one.

Especially not at eight in the morning, when Carel and Hawes knocked on Jamal Stone's door and bullets came crashing through the wood even when they announced themselves.

"Gun!" Hawes shouted, but Carella had already hit the deck, and Hawes came tumbling immediately afterward. Both men lay side by side the hallway outside the door now, breathing sweating heavily despite the cold, heads close together, guns in their hands.

"Guy's a mind reader," Hawes whispered.

Carella was wondering when the next shots would come.

Hawes was wondering the same thing. The door opened, surprising them.

They almost shot him.

"Who the fuck are you?" Jamal asked.

What it was or so he explained in the secon interrogation room up at the old Eight-Seven he was expecting someone else, was what it was.

Instead, he got two policemen breaking down the door. Crack of dawn.

Two cops.

"You always shoot at people who knock on your door?" Hawes asked.

"Only when I expect them to shoot me," Jamal said. This was now beginning to get interesting. In fact, Bert Kling was almost happy they'd asked him and Meyer to sit in on the interrogation. It was still early enough on the shift to enjoy a cup of coffee with colleagues who'd been out in the freezing cold all night long. But aside from the camaraderie, and the bonhomie, and the promise of some entertainment from a man who'd been around the block once or twice and who felt completely at home in a police station, the doubling-up was a way of bringing them up to speed on one of the two squeals Carella and Hawes had caught during the night.

There used to be a sign on the squad room wall (before Detective Andy Parker tore it down in a fit of pique) that read: IT'S YOUR CASE! STICK WITH IT! The Dyalovich murder and the Marx murder did indeed belong to Carella and Hawes as the detectives who'd caught them. But they would not be on duty again until 11:45 tonight and meanwhile there were two long eight-hour shifts between now and then. In police work, things could become fast-breaking in the wink of an eye; briefing the oncoming team was a ritual these men observed more often than not.

Jamal figured the two new cops for the brains here. The ones asking the questions were the ones almost got themselves shot, so how smart could they be? But the big bald-headed guy his ID tag read DET/2ND GR MEYER MEYER, must've been a computer glitch looked smart as could be.

The tall blond guy with the appearance of a farm boy, DET/3RD BERT KLING, was probably the one played Go, Cop to the bald guy's Bad Cop when they had some cheap thief. Right now, though, both of them were as still as coiled snakes, watching, listening.

"Who were you expecting to shoot you?" Carella asked.

This was all vamping till ready. They didn't actually care who wanted to shoot him, good riddance to bad rubbish, as Carella's mother was fond of saying. All they really wanted to know was whether Jamal was the one who'd put that freezer bag over Yolande's head. Toward that end, they would let him talk forever all his real or imagined enemies out there, make him feel comfortable, ply him with cigarettes and wait for him to reveal through word or gesture that they already knew why he was here being questioned by a pair of detectives, which no one had yet told him, which he hadn't yet asked about, either. Which might or might not have meant something. felons, it was difficult to tell.

Jamal puffed on his cigarette.

Meyer and Kling watched him.

Their presence was a bit unsettling. He was beginning to wonder if they were cops headquarters or something. What kind of thing was this, two cops from headquarters here observing? he knew better than to ask why he was up here. Too easy to step into shit that way. So he puffed on his cigarette and sipped at his coffee and told them all about this Colombian crack dealer who thought he'd stole some shit from him, which he hadn't, but who let the word out that he was looking for him and was going to kill him. So when he heard somebody banging on the door eight o' clock in the morning, the sun hardly up, he figured he'd better make the first move here because there might not be no second move. Which is why he'd pumped four through the door. Then, not hearing a sound out there, he figured he'd nailed whoever had done the knocking, and he opened the door expecting to find Manuel Diaz bleeding on the floor "That's his name, Manuel Diaz, I just gave you something."

As if they didn't already know the names of all the dealers in most of the precincts up here.

"But instead it was you two guys, who I almost shot, by the way, before you yelled 'Police.' "

Jamal shrugged. "So here we are," he said.

"Here we are," Hawes agreed.

Jamal still knew better than to ask what this was all about. The big bald guy and the tall blond guy were both looking very stern now, as if he'd said something wrong a minute ago. He wondered what it could have been. Fuck em, he thought. I can wait this out as long as you can. He lit another cigarette. Meyer nodded. So did Kling. Jamal wondered why they were nodding. These two guys were making him very nervous.

He felt relieved when Carella asked another question. "Who was the girl with you?"

"Friend of mine," Jamal said.

Carlyle Yancy was one of the two girls he ran. Her real name was Sarah Rowland, which he'd changed for her the minute he put her on the street. Jamal wasn't about to discuss either her profession or "Friend of mine" covered a lot of territory.

"How old is she?" Hawes asked. This also covered a lot of territory.

Cops always asked how old was the girl figuring you'd wet your pants if she was underage. "Twenty," Jamal said. "No cigar."

"What's she do?"

"What do you mean, what's she do?"

"Is she a prostitute?"

"Hey, come on. What kind of question is that?"

"Well, Jamal, considering your record…" So that's how they'd got to him. But why? calling a man by his first name was an old cop trick. Jamal knew quite well, thank you.

"I haven't been in that line of work for a long time he said.

Meyer raised an eyebrow. He was wondering if being a pimp qualified as work. So was Kling Carella And Hawes. Jamal read their faces and figured them for a bunch of cynics. "How about murder?" Carella asked.

"Have you been in that line of work recently?"

"I paid my debt to society," Jamal said with dignity "So we understand. Released last April, is that right?"

"That's right. The slate is clean."

Still with dignity.

"What have you been doing since?"

"Different kinds of work."

"Different from pimping?" Hawes asked. "Different from murder?"

Carella asked. "Just different jobs here and there."

"Here and where?"

"Here in the city."

"Lucky us," Hawes said.

"What kind of different jobs?" Carella asked.

They were harassing him now. Trying to put him on edge. He knew it and they knew it. He remained unruffled. He'd been involved with cops ever since he was twelve. Wasn't a cop in the world could rattle him now.

"Drove a taxi, drove a delivery truck, worked as a waiter," he said.

"Odd jobs like that."

"By the way," Hawes said, "we have another B-sheet here," and turned it so Jamal could see the name typed across the top of it. MARX, YOLANDE MARIE, and below that, in parentheses, alias MARIE ST. CLAIRE.

"Know her?" Carella asked.

If they had her B-sheet, they knew he was pimping for her. Was she in some kind of trouble again? The last time she'd shoplifted, he told her he'd break both her legs if she ever brought down heat again. Whatever this was, he figured it was time to play it straight. "I know her," he said.

"You're her pimp, right?"

"I know her."

"How about the pimp part?"

Jamal nodded, shrugged, wagged his head, waggled his fingers, all intended to convey uncertainty, they guessed. They looked at him silently, waiting for elaboration. He was wondering what Yolande had done this time. Why had they punched up her B-sheet? He said nothing.

Wait them out, he thought. Play the game.

"When did you see her last?" Hawes asked. "Why?". Jamal said. "Can you tell us?"

"Sure, I can tell you. But why?"

"Just tell us, okay?"

"I drove her down by the bridge around nine o'clock."

"Put her on the street at ten?"

"Well… yeah."

"Which bridge?"

"The Majesta Bridge."

"What was she wearing?"

"Little black skirt, fake-fur jacket, black stockin red boots, red handbag."

"See her after that?"

"No. Is she in jail?"

The detectives looked at each other. As Yogi once said, "When you come to a crossroads, take They took it.

"She's dead," Carella said, and tossed a photo onto the desk. The photo had been taken in the alley St. Sebastian Avenue. It was a black-and-white with the address of the crime scene camera-lettered white at the bottom of the picture, the date and time the right-hand corner. Jamal looked at the picture.

That was it. Dead hooker, you go to her pimp.

"So?" Hawes said.

"So, I'm sorry. She was a good kid. I liked her."

"Is that why you put her on the street in underwear last night? Twelve fuckin degrees out there, you liked her, huh?"

"Oh, did she freeze to death?" Jamal asked.

"Don't get smart," Hawes warned.

"Nobody twisted her arm," Jamal said. "What was it? An overdose?"

"You tell us."

"You think I did her? What for?"

"Where were you around seven this morning?"

"Home in bed."

"Alone?"

"No, I was with my friend. You saw her. That's who I was with."

"Carlyle Yancy, is that her name?"

"That's what she told you, isn't it?"

"Is that her real name?"

"She's never been busted, forget it."

"What's her real name?"

"Sarah Rowland."

"We'll check, you know."

"Check. She's clean."

"From what time to what time?" Carella asked. "What do you mean?"

"Was she with you."

"She got home around three-thirty. I was with her from then till you came busting down my door. We were waiting for Yolande, in fact."

"We'll check that, too, you know."

"She'll tell you." Meyer turned to Carella.

"You looking for a bullshit gun bust?" he asked. "I'm looking for a murderer," Carella said.

"Then go home, there's nothing but a 265.01 here." He turned to Jamal.

"You, too," he said. "We'll keep the piece, thanks."