The Big Bad City

11.

The morning started out good.

Saturday, the twenty-ninth day of August.

Not too hot, not too muggy. Looked like it was going to be a great day for the beach. Looked like there wouldn't be too much traffic on the highways leading to the mountains or the beaches; most people who had the wherewithal had got out of the city yesterday afternoon. All in all, it looked good, a distinct change from the night before. Well, the start of the weekend. You had to expect things.

Last night, for example, some kid in a Calm's Point mall had shot up seven or eight innocent bystanders while trying to target a fifteen-year-old girl who'd had the temerity to quit a violent street gang. The shooter missed her entirely. He also got away. Last night, too, because this was a big city and it was the summertime, and tempers flared during the summer, a man threw another man's pigeon coop off the roof in an area of the city called Cascabel, which was the Hispanic section of Diamondback. For good measure, he also threw the owner of the pigeon coop off the roof. Nobody knew what had caused the argument between them.

In another part of the city last night, a kid trying to light a crack pipe had accidentally set fire to his T-shirt, and had ripped off the shirt and tossed it into a corner that unfortunately happened to have a pile of newspapers stacked in it. The papers had caught fire and caused a consuming blaze in the Riverhead apartment where the kid's three-month-old sister was asleep in her crib. The little girl suffered third-degree burns all over her body. The kids' parents had been out dancing.

Also last night, a body came floating in downstream of the Hamilton Bridge on the River Harb, and it was identified as that of a small-time drug dealer and part-time pimp known as Julian "Juju" Judell, who had been arrested for illegal possession only a week earlier, and was out on bail waiting trial when someone shot him and tossed him in the river. Half his face had been blown away with a high-caliber weapon.

The other half had been gnawed away by river rats before the body was discovered under the pilings off Hector Street.

None of this happened in the Eighty-seventh Precinct.

It was a big city.

But on Saturday morning at eight o'clock sharp, because both cops and lab technicians get to work early, Harold Fowles called the Eight-Seven and asked to speak to Detective Meyer Meyer, who had got in some twenty minutes earlier and was drinking a cup of coffee at his desk. Foles reported that they'd come up roses on the felony-murder suspect, and he give Meyer a name for the man whose fingerprints he'd lifted from the fire escape. He also gave him an address that was three years old and probably no longer valid.

The good day was starting to go bad.

Sonny was starting to was except What realize that when he was home with the wife and kiddies, Carella was joined at the hip to his partner, the big black cop whose name Sonny didn't even know. So unless he wanted to shoot up the whole fuckin police department and Carella's family besides, he had to catch him either going in the house or coming out of it. Alone. Had to catch the man by his lonesome or a lot of innocent people would suffer.

Sonny had no desire to hurt any innocent person.

It never once occurred to him that Carella's father had been an innocent person who'd been gunned down minding his own business during a holdup.

It never occurred to him that Juju Judell had been an innocent person merely imparting wisdom about the ways cops carded grudges over the years. It never occurred to him that Carella the target of all this surveillance and scrutiny was himself an innocent person who had, in fact, not blown Sonny away when he'd had the opportunity to do so. None of this occurred to him. His focus now was in getting the job done. Because, you see, it was beginning to trouble him, the glimpses he had of this man kissing his wife goodbye when he left the house in the morning, the glimpses he had of this man laughing and joking with his partner, the glimpses he had of this man leaving the station house at night, his brow furrowed, his face troubled, like he was deep in thought. This man was beginning to seem like someone he knew, someone he might have hung with, the way he felt certain his black partner hung with him when they weren't out chasing people like Sonny. If circumstances had been a little different he wouldn't have shot this man's father he couldn't even remember now the series of events leading to the shooting and wouldn't now have to take out Carella himself because he represented a lifelong threat.

That was the whole damn thing of it.

The man had to go because Juju was right, Sonny'd never be able to breathe easy while he was still alive. At the same time, if circumstances were just a little different .

Fuck that noise, circumstances were not a little different!

Circumstances were what they were. Circumstances were what they'd been for Sonny from the day a doctor smacked his black ass and brought him into this fucking white world. The thing had to be done. And it had to be done fast. Before Sonny went all pussy. Before it started going bad.

He didn't know that it had already started going bad up there in Hightown, where the owner of a social club named Siesta had told a detective from the Eighty eight Precinct that the last person they'd seen Juju with was a man named Sonny Cole.

The fingerprints belonged to a man named Leslie Blyden He was twenty-seven years old, and had served with a mechanized cavalry division during the Gulf War. He'd got his right hand caught between a drive wheel and a crawler track, crushing the poke and necessitating amputation. He'd earned a Purple Heart, a medical discharge, and a plane ride back home. His last known address was on Beasley Boulevard in Majesta, but tlae super mere salt no ,c t,y ua ,l"". was living there now. The super himself was new, so he couldn't tell them when Mr. Blyden had moved away.

Blyden was not a common name. Only six of them in the Isola directory, none of them Leslies. Four in Riverhead, ditto. Another half dozen in Calm's Point, only two in Majesta. None of them were Leslies. But one of the three Blydens listed in the Bethtown directory was a person named Leslie. Male or female, they couldn't tell, but they guessed a woman would have used the letter L instead of her full name. They dared not call ahead to find out. If Leslie Blyden was their man, he had killed two people. Besides, it was a good day for a ferry ride.

It would start turning bad for them in about forty minutes.

Thomas Hollister, the man who'd played bass guitar for The Five Chord nee The Racketeers, had stopped calling himself Totobi Hollister the moment he recognized that if you deliberately chose a name that branded you as an African-American, you were limiting your job possibilities.

Tote Hollister was fine for a bass guitarist in a rock band, but it was not so fine for a lawyer. The minute the band broke up, Hotlister had gone back to school, getting his law degree last year from Ramsey University, right here in the city. He'd been working for the firm of Gideon, Weinberg and Katzman since last July, more than a year now.

"When did the band break up?" Brown asked. "Minute we finished the tour that summer. Katie decided she'd had enough, told us so long, boys. Without Katie, we were just another garage band.”

The men were sitting in a small pocket park across the street from Hollister's office. He had come in on a Saturday to finish some work in preparation for the start of a Monday morning trial. A slight, slender man, he was wearing designer sunglasses and a tan tropical suit that complemented his coconut-shell color. He was lighter than Brown.

Hell, Brown's wife said every brother in the city was lighter than he was. Brown took this as a compliment. He enjoyed looking mean and tough. He enjoyed the hell out of being a big black cop.

"Why'd she decide to quit, do you know?" Carella asked.

"Well ... I'm not sure I know why," Hollister said. "Did you ever talk about it?”

“Never.”

"We understand you were close to her," Carella said.

"I think we were. You know how it is," he said to Brown. "There are limitations.”

Brown nodded: "Be nice if there weren't, but there are," Hollister said. "As it was, we were very good friends. Which in itself was a miracle. Poor black kid from the ghetto, upper-middle-class white girl from Philadelphia? Her father a college professor, her mother a psychiatrist? Hell, my mother packs groceries in a supermarket. My father drives a bus. It probably wouldn't have gone farther, anyway. At least we ended up good friends.”

"Would you have liked it to go farther?" Carella asked.

"Yes. Sure. In fact, I think I might have been in me, too. It's funny, you know. There are no color lines in the music business. You make good music, it doesn't matter who or what you are.

If there's any prejudice at all, it's the other way around. Black musicians, white musicians, there's always a sort of rivalry as to who's better. Like you invented harmony, man, but we invented rhythm.

Look, I'm not saying anything would have developed between Katie and me if we hadn't been traveling through Dixie. It just made it more difficult. It pointed up our differences instead of our samenesses, do you see what I mean? We were both damn good musicians. That should have been the point.”

Behind them, a wall of water flowed down a high wall, creating an artificial waterfall that seemed to cool the day and possibly might have. The air stirred. Mist touched their faces. They did not want Hollister to go into the same sort of reverie Roselli had indulged in yesterday. At the same time, they wanted to know what had happened down South that had caused Katie Cochran to leave the band when the tour was over.

"The South isn'.t what it used to be, you know," Hollister said. "You go into any expensive restat gant in Georgia, you'll see more blacks in it than you will in a similar restaurant up here. Integration is a fact down south. Up here, it's a myth. Up here, there isn't even a pretense of races mingling. In the South, you don't have to sit in the back of the bus anymore and you don't have to drink at separate water fountains, but at the same time you don't see any pepper-and-salt couples, at least I didn't. I do a lot of business in San Francisco, more to odd couples there than I do either here or in the South, mostly Asian-white, but mixed anyway.

The prejudices linger, man, they linger.”

Brown nodded again.

"There's integration in the South," Hollister said, "but there isn't oneness, do, you follow me? They don't say nigger anymore, but they still think nigger. Sambas up here. The N word is forbidden, but that doesn't stop the white man from thinking it. The only reason he doesn't say it out loud is he knows it can get him killed. Excuse me, Detective, that's prejudice in itself, isn't it?”

"But maybe you're right," Carella said.

Brown looked at him.

"I remember one thing that really disturbed me one night," Hollister said. "In fact, it still bothers me ...”

This was in Alabama, we were maybe a third of the way into the tour.

There was this crowd of young college professors at the place we were playing, drinking a lot, laughing it up, really digging the music. A very hip, white clique. Some single guys, some guys with their wives, all of them educated, all of them color-blind, right? So one of the professors asked us to come back to his house when we quit for the night, he and his wife wanted to extend the evening, this was one o'clock on a Saturday night, what the hell, they could all sleep late tomorrow morning. This was the New South, nobody had to stand up for my rights. It was understood that if the band went to this party, then Tote went with the band. There was no quarrel there, not even a murmur of dissent. We packed our axes and off we went. Well ... One of the single guys, a professor who taught anthropology or archeology or whatever thought it might make me feel more comfortable if he invited a black girl to join us. This was already condescension, can you dig? I was already perfectly comfortable. I was a college graduate, and a skilled musician besides, here with my friends and fellow musicians who had just made superb music in a roadside joint that frankly didn't deserve us. But the professor decided to make me feel more comfortable by asking one of the waitresses at the club to come on along to the party.

The girl wasn't a college girl putting herself through school, she wasn't an aspiring model or actress or anything but a very dumb eighteen-year-old black girl who spoke largely black English and drank too much bourbon and made a complete fool of herself while the professor stood by waiting to get in her pants. That was the whole point of the exercise. He no more wanted this mud eating nigger at that party yes, nigger than he wanted me there. All he wanted to do was humiliate her and fuck her. And by doing so, he was humiliating me as well. He was raping us both.

I'll never forget that night," Hollister said. "I told Katie how I felt afterward. The others had all gone to sleep, we were sitting on the porch outside this motel we were staying at, one of these old rundown Southern motels surrounded by trees hung with moss." For a moment, he was silent, lost in the memory.

"She kissed me that night," he said. "Just before we went to our separate rooms. Kissed me and said goodnight. That was the one and only time we ever kissed. I'll remember that night as long as I live. Kissing Katie Cochran on the porch of that old Southern motel. Two months later, she quit the band.”

tlaere. Brown asked.

"What'd you mean back 9”

“When?" Carella asked.

"When you told him maybe he was right. About the white man thinking nigger. You don't think nigger, do you?”

"No.”

"So why'd you say maybe he was right?”

"Because lots of white people do.”

"Let me tell you my own band story," Brown said. "I used to play clarinet in the high school marching band, this was a long time ago.

Some guys ...”

"I didn't know you played clarinet.”

"Yeah. B-flat tenor, too, later on. But at the time, all I played was clarinet. And these guys I knew in high school, they were all of them white, were starting a band and they asked would I like to join them.

This was kind of weird instrumentation for a rock group, it wasn't your usual rhythm and guitars. We also had a trumpet in there. Actually, we got a good sound. Five of us in the group. Lead guitar, bass, drums, clarinet, and trumpet. We only played weekends, we were still in high school, you know.”

"Anyway, we go to this wedding job up in Riverhead one Saturday night, and the bride's father takes one look at me and he pulls the leader aside a kid named Freddy Stein, I'll never forget his name and he tells him either the black guy goes or we can forget about the job. I think back then it was cotorea guy. Either the colored guy goes or there's no job for you here. So the band took a vote. And Freddy went to the father of the bride, and told him either the colored guy stays or your daughter has no music for her wedding. He reconsidered. We played the job and everybody went home happy.”

"Nice story," Carella said.

"True story," Brown said. "It was an Italian wedding.”

"Figures.”

"You think that guy still thinks nigger?”

"I'm sure," Carella said.

"That's the pity of it," Brown said. "We made damn good music that night.”

Four of them went in with Kevlar vests because maybe this was a murderer inside the apartment. There was Meyer on point and Kling directly behind him, with Parker and Willis flanking the door and ready to charge in as backups. It was about to go bad in the next three minutes, but none of them knew that yet. They were prepared for anything, jacketed and upholstered, and ready to go the minute Meyer kicked in the door. They were equipped with a No-Knock warrant. This was maybe a murderer inside there. In a minute, it would start going bad. Meyer listened at the wood. Not a sound in there.

He shrugged, turned to the others, shook his head, signaled nothing in there.

In thirty seconds, it would go bad.

He listened again.

Turned to the others again.

Nodded and backed off the door, knee coming up, arms spread like a punter going for the extra point, sole and heel of his shoe smashing into the lock, splintering the wood and breaking the screws loose.

"Police!" he yelled and behind him Kling yelled "Police!" and all four of them rushed into the room. In ten seconds ... A man wearing gold-rimmed eyeglasses was standing in his undershorts at the kitchen counter, a bread knife in his right hand, his left hand cupped over a loaf of Italian bread on the counter.

"Leslie Blyden?" Meyer shouted. "Don't move!" Kling shouted. Five seconds ... Behind them, Willis and Parker had fanned into the room.

In three seconds ... "Leslie Blyden?" Meyer shouted again.

And it went bad.

The man turned on them with the bread knife in his hand. He must have seen that they were all wearing vests because he went directly for Meyer, raising the knife high over his head like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, coming at him with the same purposeful stiff legged stride.

There was an instant ... There is always an instant. when Meyer hesitated, but only for an instant because the blade of the knife was rushing toward is chest with seemingly blinding speed, the man's downward thrust fierce and decisive, he was going to plunge the knife into Meyer's chest. His eyes said that, the grim set of his mouth said that, but most of all the plunging knife said that.

Meyer shot him.

So did the other three cops in the room.

The man's chest exploded like the villain's chest in a Sylvester Stallone movie, holes appearing everywhere, fountains of blood erupting. He was dead even before the knife fell from his hand and he collapsed to the floor. "Jesus," Parker whispered.

Trouble was, the guy laying dead on the floor there had all five fingers on both of his hands.

Fat Ollie Weeks called the squad room at twelve fifteen that Saturday afternoon and asked to talk to his good old buddy Steve Carella.

Sergeant Murchison, sitting the muster desk, told him Carella and Brown were in the field just now, was there anything he could do to help? "I hear you guys are getting very trigger-happy, hm?" Ollie said.

He was sitting at his own desk in the Eight-Eight squad room farther uptown, looking out the window and eating a ham sandwich on a buttered roll with mustard. Half the sandwich was on his tie. It was rumored that Ollie was the only man in the world who could eat and fart at the same time. Actually, he managed this alternately, taking a bite of the sandwich, swallowing, drinking chocolate milk shake from a cardboard container, passing wind, biting again, chewing, farting, drinking, occasionally belching, a virtual perpetual digestion machine. "First you shoot a guy with a sling-blade knife in your own squad room and next you shoot another guy with a bread knife in his own kitchen. You trying to rid the world of knifers, is that it?”

Murchison didn't know what he meant about the guy with a bread knife because Meyer and the others were still downtown at Headquarters, trying to explain why they'd thought it necessary to kill the man who'd rushed them, and Murchison didn't yet know there'd been a hassle. Not to appear stupid, he said, "Must be something like that," and grinned into the mouthpiece. He liked the idea of shooting guys who wielded knives. To Murchison, knives and razors were the most frightening weapons in the world. That was one of the reasons he was very careful shaving every morning.

"I also hear Steve caught a dead nun," Ollie said.

"Where do you hear all these things?" Murchison asked.

"Eyes and ears of the world, m'boy, ah yes," Ollie said, doing his world-famous W.C. Fields imitation. "I got a nun joke for him. Too bad he ain't there.”

“Tell me instead,”

Murchison said. "You sure you're old enough?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

He was already smiling in anticipation. "This nun is driving along in a car ...”

“Is this Parker's pisspot story?”

“Parker's what?”

"His chamber pot story.”

"No, no, this is about the flat tire. Do you know it?”

“Tell it,”

Murchison said, his grin widening.

210 .

"This nun is driving along in a car and she gets a flat tire, do you know it?”

"No, let me hear it.”

"So she gets out to change it, but she doesn't know how to do it cause she's a nun, what the fuck do they know about changing flat tires? So she's fiddlin around with the jack, trying to dope out how it works, when this truck comes along, and it stops, and the driver gets out and offers to change the tire for her, did you hear this one?”

"No, go ahead.”

"So he puts the jack under the car and starts jacking it up and the car slips off the jack and he yells, "Son of a bitch!" Well, the nun is shocked. She says, "Please don't swear like that, it isn't nice," and the truck driver says, "Sorry, Sister," and he starts jacking up the car again, and again it slips off the jack, and again he yells, "Son of a bitch!" Well this time the nun gets angry. You mustn't use that kind of language," she hays. "If you can't control yourself, I'll change the tire myself." The truck driver apologizes all over the place, and the nun says, "If you find yourself about to swear, just say "Sweet Jesus, help me." It'll calm you." So he starts jacking up the car again ... you sure you didn't hear this?”

"I'm positive. Go ahead.”

"He starts jacking up the car again, and it slips off the jack again, and he's about to say "Son of a bitch!" when he remembers what the nun advised him, and instead he says, "Sweet Jesus, help me! "And Io and behold, right there in front of their eyes, the car starts lifting off tlae ground and into the air all by itself. The nun is astonished.

"Son of a bitch!" she says?”

Olile burst out laughing. Then, because he was eating and laughing and belching and farting and drinking all at the same time, he also started choking. It took him a moment or two to realize that Murchison wasn't laughing with him.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Didn't you think it was funny?”

"It's just I heard it before," Murchison said. "So whyn't you say so in the beginning?”

“I didn't recognize it.”

"What took you so long to recognize a joke about a nun with a flat tire?”

"I thought it was Parker's pisspot joke.”

“I told you it wasn't.”

“The chamber pot joke.”

"You let me go through a whole long fuckin joke you already heard?”

"Yeah, but I didn't know I heard it.”

“I almost choked here.”

“Yeah, I'm sorry.”

"Tell Steve I called," Ollie said angrily, and hung up. And forgot to tell him that last night he'd caught a floater named Juju Judell under the docks off Hector Street, and it now looked like he was last seen alive with the guy who'd killed Carella's old man.

The name of the restaurant was Davey's, and the owner was Davey Fames, who'd been the drummer in the band his father had first named The Racketeers and later The Five Chord. His father had also bought him the restaurant, which was a steak-and-potatoes joint in the financial district downtown, as still as a tomb on this Saturday at one '.M.

"This is not the case on weekdays," Fames was quick to point out. "We do a very brisk lunch business Monday to Friday. But Saturdays are Tombstone, Arizona.”

This was the old city, first settled by the Dutch, and still traversed by narrow streets and tight little cobblestoned alleys. Here was where the mercantile world collided with the judicial and the municipal, the high-rise stone-and-glass towers of finance nesting cheek by jowl with the splendid colonnaded temples of the law and the undistinguished gray structures of state and city government. The areas spilled over from one to the other, all equally deserted on weekends, when the stock market was closed, and citizens of the city could seek neither magisterial nor civic redress nor even a good steak, if Davey's was any example.

Davey Fames himself was a tall, thin man in his late twenties, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, wearing on this hot afternoon a ponytail with a blue-rag tie, a red tank-top shirt, and sawed off blue jeans. His hair was a reddish brown, his eyes blue. When the detectives arrived, he was supervising the unloading of a produce delivery at the back of the restaurant, ticking off cardboard cartons of fruit and vegetables on a clipboard with an order form attached to it.

"You know," he said, "I thought that might be Katie when I saw the nun's picture on television, but I wondered how that could be. Katie? A nun? Not the Katie I knew.”

Two restaurant employees were carrying crates of cauliflower, spinach, broccoli, and strawberries from the loading platform into the restaurant kitchen. The driver of the truck kept moving crates onto the platform. On the river drive several blocks south, there was the occasional sound of automobile traffic. This was a hot summer Saturday, and people were at the beach or sitting on fire escapes catching air from electric fans.

There was the occasional rumble of distant thunder, but it seemed as if any rain would bypass the city entirely, worse luck.

"Mr. Hollister was telling us about a party in Alabama. Do you remember that party?" Brown asked.

"Well, there were parties everywhere we went," Fames said. "Did he mean the one where the girl got drunkg.”

"Black girl one of the professors invited," Brown said.

"Yeah, that's the one. What about it?”

“Seemed to bother Mr.Hollister," Brown said "Bothered all of us. The band was color-blind. We didn't dig that kind of shit.”

"How much did it bother Katie ?”

"I didn't discuss it with her.”

“What we're trying to find out," Carella said, "is why she quit the band and went back into the order.

Did anything happen that might have occasioned ... ?”

"Nothing I can think of," Fames said. "Hold it, let me see that," he said, and motioned for a short Hispanic man to put down the carton of melons he was carrying into the restaurant. Fames knelt beside the carton, opened it, and looked into it. "These were supposed to be honeydews," he said to the driver.

"That's what they are," the driver said.

"No, they're cantaloupes," Fames said. It says so right on the carton. Cantaloupes. And that's what they are." He picked up one of the melons. "This is a cantaloupe," he said. "Honeydews are green.”

"You don't want it, I'll give you credit and put it back on the truck,”

the driver said.

"Haven't you got any honeydews on the truck?”

“These are all the melons I've got. There's no problem. You don't want them, they go back on the truck.”

"Yeah, but Why should I accept cantaloupes when I ordered honeydews?”

"You don't have to accept them. I'll put 'em right back on the truck.”

Just put 'em back on the damn truck, Brown thought.

And remembered that it was Davey Fames who'd got all agitated when the booking agent thought the name of the band was The Five Chords instead of The Five Chord.

The thing went on for another five minutes, Fames complaining that this was the third time in a month he'd ordered one thing and another thing was shipped, the driver explaining that all he did was make deliveries, he was just the messenger here, so don't chop off his head, okay? Finally, Fames accepted the cantaloupes and signed for the entire order, and the truck driver moved out into the city.

It was very still again.

"Come on inside," Fames said, "have a glass of beer.”

The detectives opted for iced tea instead. They still oiorit 1 6w tlaat tour of the squad were at this moment in the Chief of Detectives' office, trying to justify their earlier actions, but they were still on duty, and you never knew who was going to make a phone call. saying two cops were sipping beer at one, one-thirty in the afternoon. The restaurant inside was furnished like a true steak joint, all mahogany and brass and green leather booths and hanging pewter tankards. If the food tasted as good as the place looked, Davey's was indeed a find, albeit far from the beaten track. Carella was tempted to ask for a menu he could take home.

"The band had no leader, right?" Carella asked.

"Right. We made all our decisions by vote. We were very close, you know. It's a shame what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

"Well, Katie quitting, first of all. And then the band breaking up, and Alan dying last month. And, of course, Sal.”

"What about SalT' "Well ... I really shouldn't tell you this, I guess...”

Carella nodded. Not in agreement, but in encouragement.

"But at the funeral last month, he was doing cocaine.”

"Crack cocaine?" Brown said.

"No, he was snorting the white stuff.”

"You saw this?”

"Oh yes. I shouldn't have been surprised. Even back then, he was smoking pot.”

"Back then?”

"On tour. Four years ago.”

"That's normal, though, isn't it'!" Uafella a:en. "Musicians doing a little pot?”

"This wasn't a little pot. It was day and night. I just never thought it would escalate.”

"Katie Cochran do any dope when she was singing with you?" Brown asked "No, sir. She came from a good family in Philadelphia. Her father taught political science at Temple. Her mother was a psychiatrist.

From what she told us, they were very well off. I never saw her go near anything.”

"How about you?”

"Pot, sure. But that's all.”

"Who'd she go to?" Carella asked. "When she decided to quit the band.”

"I think she told all of us. If I remember correctly, we were discussing our plans for the fall when she said she was quitting?”

"Did she give you any reason?”

"She just said she didn't think this was the life for her.”

"Did she say she was going back to the order?”

"We didn't know there was an order to go back to. She never once mentioned she'd been a nun.”

"So she just said this wasn't the life for her.”

“Maybe not in those words. But that was the essence.”

“Did she say what she didn't like about the life?”

“No. Up till then, I thought she was pretty happy.”

"When was this, Mr. Fames? That she told you?”

“Right after Labor Day. We'd ended the tour, we were back here in the city. The last of the tour was really terrific, especially down in the Everglades. We played a little town called Boyle's Landing, just south of Chokoloskee. Man named Charlie Custer ran a roadhouse there. Called it The Last Stand because of his name and also because it was the last watering hole before you jumped off into the glades. He did a lot of business. We played to packed houses every night we were there. Which wasn't easy on the edge of the wilderness ...”

Boyle's Landing is on the northernmost rim of the national park. The greater part of the town is situated on the Gulf of Mexico. The rest sprawls haphazardly toward an inland marsh teeming with wildlife, a precursor of the wilder glades themselves. Custer has built his roadhouse with its back to the swamp, its entrance on Route 29, a secondary road running from Ochopee through Everglades City and Chokoloskee, dead-ending at Boyle's Landing. On any given night, the sound of the band competes with noises from the "swamp critters", as Charlie Custer calls them, the birds, frogs, and insects that make their home in the river and the marsh. There are great white herons here and short-tailed hawks and flamingos. And alligators. The alligators make no sound.

But you know they are in the water behind the roadhouse. If you stand on the waterside dock and run a flashlight over the bank, you can see their yellow eyes in the dark. Charlie tells Sal that they've already taken two of his dogs, one of them a German shepherd the size of a panther. Sal shivers when he hears this, and the notion that he's managed to frighten him tickles Charlie no end. "There's panthers here, too," he tells him, chuckling. "You better watch your ass, Piano Boy.”

They are 19ooKec to pray Stand, arriving on a Friday morning, and playing through the weekend and most of the next week, departing on the following Friday for a Labor Day weekend stand in Calusa, some hundred and thirty miles to the north. The Calusa gig will be the end of the tour. Calusa is supposed to be the Athens of southwest Florida, and Hymie Rogers has booked them into a club called Hopwood's, one of the younger places in town, on Whisper Key.

Here in Boyle's Landing, they play to capacity crowds on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, and then to almost full houses on Monday and Tuesday. Charlie is absolutely delighted with the band's spectacular success. He has hired an unknown rock group and they are pulling in teenagers not only from neighboring towns like Copeland and Jerome, directly to the north, and Monroe Station and Paolita, to the east, but also more distant places like Naples, to the northwest, on the Gulf of Mexico.

On Wednesday morning, in newspapers as far north as Fort Myers, the first of Charlie's ads appears. They announce that tonight and tomorrow night will mark the. final appearances of The Five Chord in "the Wildlands of Southern Florida," as he calls them. That night, to accommodate overflow crowds, he has to set up tables on the deck overlooking the river where the alligators silently watch. On Thursday night, following a repeat of the ad, there are cars backed up all along Routes 41 and 29. He is compelled to do three shows that night, one at eight, another at ten, and the last at midnight. He has never done better business in his life. The irony, of course ... Well, i guess the others told you about it," Fames said.

"What's that?" Brown asked.

"The drowning," Fames said.

On television that night, the Chief of Detectives said there was no way his officers could have known beforehand that the man in that apartment was not the Leslie Blyden they were looking for. They could not understand why the man in the apartment had come at them with a knife.

The man had no reason to behave so irrationally. They had announced themselves as police. He knew they were police. They had asked him to identify himself. What had got into the fellow? "My four detectives all acted within the guidelines," he told the estimated four million people watching the eleven o'clock news. "They had a No-Knock warrant backed by probable cause. They had good reason to believe a burglar who had murdered two people was in that apartment.

They went in with service pistols drawn because there was the distinct possibility that the man who'd already shot two people might be armed and dangerous on this occasion as well. They opened fire because the suspect had come at one of the detectives with a knife in his hand, was in fact ready to plunge that knife into the officer's chest if they hadn't taken preventive action when they did.”

The Chief of Detectives told the anchorman that in spite of all this there would be a thorough investigation.

Meanwhile, The Cookie Boy was still out there.