Fat Ollie's Book (13 page)

“I'm fine,” Eileen said.

“I could use one,” Parker said.

Palacios signaled to the waiter, who slouched over to the table and took their order for two fresh brews. A pair of heavy-looking guys came through the front door, and Palacios gave them the once-over, but they turned out to be two off-duty cops who went over to join some buddies at another table. Eileen was still trying to find out a little bit more about this mysterious deal that was about to happen in some mysterious basement.

“Who are the players here?” she asked. “You say they haven't changed, so who are they?”

“I think you had traffic before with the lady selling the crack,” Palacios said. “You remember a black woman named Rosita Washington, she's half-Spanish?”

Eileen shook her head. “Who are the buyers?”

“Three guys who are total amateurs,” Palacios said. “They're the ones who are dangerous. Ah,
gracias, señor,
” he said to the waiter, and immediately picked up his beer mug. Tilting it in Eileen's direction, he said, “To the beautiful lady,” and drank. Eileen acknowledged the toast dead-panned. “The three of them think all black people are stupid,” Palacios said, “but if they try to rip off Rosie Washington, there's gonna be real trouble, I can tell you.”

“All black people
are
stupid,” Parker said, not for nothing was he a close friend of Ollie Weeks.

“Not as stupid as these three jerks, believe me,” Palacios said. “You heard of The Three Stooges? Shake hands with these guys. I don't know how they raised the three hundred thou they need for the deal,
if
they raised it. But I can tell you, if they go in empty-handed they're dead on the platter. Rosie ain't gonna get stiffed a second time.”

“Who are they?” Eileen asked.

“Three jackasses named Harry Curtis, Constantine Skevopoulos, and Lonnie Doyle. You know them?”

“No,” Parker said.

“No,” Eileen said.

“Grifters from the year one. Which is why I think they might try to rip off Rosie, in which case run for cover,
niños,
run for cover. Thing you should do, you want my advice, is go down the basement, yell ‘Cops, freeze!' and bust all of them before any shooting starts. You nail Rosie for possession of the coke, and you nail the three dopes for tryin'a buy it, is my advice.”

“Thanks,” Parker said drily.

“Where is this basement?” Eileen asked.

“3211 Culver. Between Tenth and Eleventh.”

“I gotta pee,” Parker said, and rose, and headed for the men's room. One of the heavy-looking guys who'd come in earlier walked over to the juke box, put some coins in it, and pushed some buttons. Sinatra came out singing “It Was a Very Good Year.” You didn't hear Sinatra too often these days. Eileen missed him. She sat listening, swaying in time with the music. He was singing now about city girls who lived up the stairs.

“Do you like to dance?” Palacios asked.

“Yes, I like to dance,” she said.

“You want to come dancing with me sometime?”

She looked at him.

“No, I don't think so,” she said.

“Why not? I'm a very good dancer.”

“I don't doubt it, Cowboy.”

“So?”

“You also have four wives.”

“Had,”
Palacios said. “Past tense. Had. I'm divorced now. Four times.”

“Terrific recommendation,” Eileen said.

“Come on, we go dancing one night.”

“Cowboy, we've got enough on you to send you away for twenty years.”

“So? Meanwhile, we go dancing.”

“I'm a cop,” Eileen said.

“So? Cops don't dance?”

“Let it go, Cowboy.”

“I'll ask you again.”

She looked at him another time. She was thinking he was handsome as hell, and she hadn't been to bed with anyone for the past six months now, and she'd heard Hispanic lovers were the cat's ass, so why not go dancing one night? She was also thinking you don't get involved with guys on the other side of the law, this man would be doing time at Castleview if we hadn't let him walk in exchange for his services. So thanks, Cowboy, she thought.

“Thanks, Cowboy,” she said, “but no.”

Parker was back.

“Lay it out for me one more time,” he told Palacios.

 

OH SHIT
, Suzie thought, it's about to get complicated again.

Just when I dared hope things would stay clear and simple forever, Harry brings his dumb-ass friends home with him again, and they're sitting there in the living room playing cards at eight o'clock at night, and talking about their next brilliant scheme to make a million dollars without having to work for it.

The last time they had a great idea was four weeks ago, when they decided to stick up a floating crap game in Diamondback. Twelve humongous black guys in the game, any one of them could've broken these three wimps in half without lifting a finger, they decide to go stick it up. What happened was it was raining that night, and the game got called off, which was lucky for her husband and his pals, or there would've been three broken heads around here. So now they were planning another one of their grand capers, but maybe—if they got lucky again—it would rain again and save them a lot of heartache and grief.

She sometimes wondered why she stayed married to Harry Curtis. Sometimes wondered, in fact, why she'd married him in the first place. Well, she always did go for big men. Suzie Q, they used to call her when she was in her teens—well, some of her friends still called her that. Short for Suzie Quinn. Now she was Susan Q. Curtis, twenty-three years old and married to a man who was twice her age and big all over, including his ideas.

The thing of it was that Harry Curtis thought all black people were stupid, and all you had to do was trick them out of their money, usually by sticking a gun in their face. It really was a good thing him and his bright cronies hadn't held up that crap game because from what Luella told her down at the beauty parlor where she worked, the people in that game were truly Diamondback “gangstas,” Luella's word, a bit of information her brilliant husband shrugged off when she later told him about it.

It was Suzie herself who had casually mentioned the time and location of the crap game to Harry, who in turn had mentioned it to his two brainy buddies, who had decided that here was a score worthy of their combined talents. Never mind she also later mentioned the guys in the game were gangstas, that didn't scare them off, oh no, they were three big macho men with three big pistolas, and they weren't afraid of no niggers up there in Diamondback. Lucky thing it rained that night. Though now Suzie wondered what kind of gangstas these guys could've been if they'd got scared off of their game by a little rain. Well, a lot of rain.

She could hear their voices coming from the other room.

“Cocaine,” one of them was saying. Lonnie. Her husband's oldest friend. Went to high school together, went to jail together, but that was another story. And besides, it was only for a year and a half after all was said and done. And they'd met some nice people there.

“See your five and raise you five,” her husband said.

“High grade snow,” Lonnie said.

“What does that make it?”

This from Constantine, the one with the dopey grin and the fidgety shoulders. Constantine in motion was a wondrous thing to behold.

“It makes it a ten-dollar raise,” Harry said.

“Too steep for me,” Constantine said.

“Asking price, three hundred thou,” Lonnie said. “Call.”

“So it's just you and me, Lon,” Harry said, and chuckled. She guessed maybe that was one of the reasons she married him. That deep low chuckle of his. And also his size, of course.

“Where we gonna get three hundred thou?” Constantine asked. She could visualize his shoulders twitching. As if he was trying to shake off bugs.

“We don't hafta get it,” Lonnie said.

“Beat kings full,” her husband said.

“Four deuces, sport,” Lonnie said.

“Then how we gonna buy the coke?” Constantine asked.

“We
ain't
gonna buy it,” Lonnie said. “We gonna
steal
it.”

Of course, Suzie thought.

Otherwise it would be too damn simple, am I right?

ON FRIDAY MORNING, AFIS
—the Automated Fingerprint Identification Section—identified the larger of the prints, the man's prints, as belonging to Lester Lyle Henderson, who had served a stint with the U.S. Air Force during the Gulf War. Some of the smaller prints matched the ones Pamela Henderson had allowed them to take. For the other small prints, presumably left by the Carrie who'd written the letters, there was nothing.

The lab downtown identified the plain white envelopes as a product of the Haley Paper Company, available in any variety store, any office supply store, any supermarket across the entire nation. Carella suddenly felt like the FBI trying to track down the envelopes used by whoever'd been mailing anthrax hither and yon.

The monogrammed stationery was another matter.

The lab identified it as a quality paper made by Generation Paper Mills in Portland, Maine, a supplier to Carter Paper Products in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the manufacturer of an exclusive line of stationery called Letter Perfect, which was carried by only two department stores and seven specialty shops in the city. Both department stores were located in the midtown area. Carella and Kling went to visit them first.

Except for charge customers, neither of the stores kept sales records going back earlier than a year ago. Within the past year, there was no record of any customer—cash
or
charge—having ordered Letter Perfect stationery with the monogram JSH. One of the stores did not keep charge records for more than two years. The other did not keep them for more than eighteen months. In any case, it would take some time to peruse the earlier files; they would have to get back to Carella.

The prospect was even dimmer at the seven specialty shops. None of them remembered a customer with the initials JSH, and none of them had time to go through their back records just now. They promised to call the detectives if anything turned up.

Carella still felt like the FBI.

 

THE OFFICES OF
Councilman Lester Lyle Henderson were close to City Hall, in a part of town still referred to as the Old City. Here stood the ocean-battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago, the massive cannons atop it seeming to control the approach from the Atlantic even now, though their barrels had long ago been filled with cement. Here at the very tip of the island, you could watch the Dix and the Harb churning with crosscurrents where the two rivers met. The streets down here had once accommodated only horse-drawn carriages, and were now too narrow to permit the passage of more than a single automobile. Where once there had been two-story wooden taverns, a precious few of which still survived, there were now concrete buildings soaring into the sky, infested redundantly with lawyers and financiers. And yet—perhaps because the Atlantic was right here to touch, rumbling majestically off toward the Old World that had given the city its life—there was still the feel here of what it must have been like when everyone was still very young and very innocent.

There was no sense of the Old World in Henderson's offices. Neither was there the slightest whiff of innocence. Youth, however, was in rich abundance. The girl sitting behind the reception desk couldn't have been older than twenty-three. Pert and blond, wearing a very short green mini and a white-buttoned navy blue blouse, she sensed immediately that Kling was the single guy in this dynamic duo, and turned her full attention to him.

“How can I help you?” she asked, smiling radiantly.

She sounded Southern. North Carolina? Georgia? Kling wondered what she was doing in a politician's office up north.

“We're here for Alan Pierce,” Kling said.

“Is he expecting you?”

“He is.”

“And you are?” she asked.

Kling felt as if he'd just asked her to dance at the senior prom, and she wanted to know which home room he was in.

“Detective Kling,” he said, and opened the leather fob to which his shield was pinned. “This is my partner, Detective Carella.”

“Is he in?” Carella asked.

“Let me see, sir,” she asked.

Sir. Made Carella feel like forty. Which he was.

The blonde lifted a phone receiver, tapped a button on the phone base, smiled up at Kling, listened, and then said, “Alan, there are two detectives here to see you.” She listened again, said, “Right,” and then put the phone back on the receiver. Smiling at Kling again, she said, “Through the door there, and into the main office. Then through that to Mr. Pierce's office at the far end. If you need me, just whistle.”

The line sounded familiar to Kling.

They walked past a wall hung with framed campaign posters of bygone years to an unmarked door with a brass knob. Beyond that door was a huge open room banked on one side with windows now open to breezes that blew in off the water where the rivers clashed. There were perhaps twenty desks in this room, all of them the same color as the computers sitting on top of them, an array of greens and purples and grays that seemed as cheerful as springtime. Behind each desk sat the so-called T-Generation, kids who had come of age when the terrorists bombed America, none of them older than twenty-five, all of them staring at their computers as if transfixed, fingers flying, performing God only knew what political tasks for their now deceased leader. None of them looked up as Carella and Kling worked their way to the rear of the room where three identical doors sat like props in a stage farce. One of them bore a plaque that read:
A
.
PIERCE
.

“Lauren Bacall,” Carella said.
“To Have and Have Not.”

Kling looked at him.

“The next line is, ‘You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.'”

“Oh,” Kling said. “Yeah,” and knocked on the door.

“Bogart's name was Steve,” Carella explained. “In the picture.”

“Come in,” a voice called.

Alan Pierce was a man in his late thirties, Carella guessed, old by comparison to the cadre of kids manning the computers outside. He came from behind his desk with his hand extended, a tall, slender man exhibiting the obvious end results of hours in the gym, a flat tummy, a narrow waist, and wide shoulders clearly his own since he was in shirtsleeves. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Nice to see you. Sit down. Please.”

Carella wondered if Pierce was doing an imitation of President Bush, who couldn't seem to get through a sentence longer than five words without parsing it. “We are. Going to. Find and destroy. The Evil One.” Pierce here seemed to go him one better. Or perhaps this was just a memorized way of greeting people. He shook hands vigorously now, as if he were soliciting votes.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

Same words the blond receptionist had used. Carella wondered if this was office protocol. He suddenly realized he did not trust politicians. And he wondered if this attitude had been reinforced by the letters Henderson had received from someone named Carrie—which, after all, was why they were here today.

“Mr. Pierce,” he said, “I under…”

“Alan,” he said. “Please.”

“Alan,” Carella said, and cleared his throat, “I understand that you and Mr. Henderson flew up to the state capital together last…”

“Yes, we did.”

“That would have been last Saturday, is that right?”

“Yes. Saturday morning.”

“April twentieth, right?”

“Yes.”

“Just the two of you?” Carella asked.

“Just the two of us, yes.”

“And you came back the next morning, is that correct?”

“Correct. Sunday the twenty-first.”

“Alone.”

“I came back alone, yes.”

“You left Mr. Henderson up there and flew back alone.”

“Yes. I had some personal matters to attend to here in the city. And he no longer needed me.”

“What'd you guys do up there, anyway?” Kling asked.

“Attended meetings. As you probably know, the Governor had approached Lester about running for mayor. We met with his people on Saturday. And Lester had a lunch meeting with the Governor himself scheduled for Sunday. That's why he stayed over. It was a summit thing, just the two of them.”

The telephone rang.

Pierce picked up the receiver.

“Yes?” he said. “Who? Oh, yes, certainly, put him through. Sorry,” he said to the detectives, and then, into the phone again, “Hello, Roger,” he said, “how can I help you?”

There it is again, Carella thought. How can I help you?

“Well, I have to tell you frankly,” Pierce said, “I find it not only premature but also somewhat ghoulish for you people to be asking that question so soon after we put the councilman in the ground.” He listened and then said, “I don't care
what
the Governor's office is putting out. No one has talked to me about it, and I just told you I don't wish to entertain any questions about it.” He listened and then said, “Then can you please extend me that courtesy?” He looked at the detectives, rolled his eyes, listened again, and then said, “When I'm
ready
to discuss it. When a decent interval has passed.
If
then. Goodbye, Rog,” he said, “thanks for calling.”

He put the receiver back on the cradle rest, said, “I'm sorry, gentlemen. They keep asking me if I plan to run for mayor now that Lester…” He shook his head. “No fucking decency left in this world, is there? Forgive me, but they're like animals.” He sighed heavily, sat in the big leather chair behind his desk again, and said, “We were discussing?”

“Your coming back home early,” Kling said.

“No, I'm sorry if I gave you that impression. I never
expected
to stay any longer.”

“I thought…”

“No.”

“When you said you had some personal matters…”

“Yes, but I knew before I went upstate that Lester would be lunching with the Governor. This wasn't something that came as a surprise.”

“Sorry I misinterpreted it,” Kling said.

“Sorry if I misled you.”

“What sort of meetings did you have up there?” Carella asked.

“Well, first with some members of the Governor's exploratory committee, it's called, and then with the Governor's campaign people, and then with people from the national party itself. Mayor of this city is a big deal, you know. Both parties would like their own man in there.”

“This was all day long?” Carella asked. “The meetings.”

“Well, the first one was at ten Saturday morning. We broke for lunch, and then met with the campaign people at two. Our last meeting was at four.”

“What time did that end?” Carella asked.

“Oh, around six, six-thirty.”

“What then?”

“We had dinner and went to sleep. I had an early flight the next morning.”

“You had dinner together?” Kling asked.

“Well, no, actually. I called room service. I don't know where Lester ate. I imagine he did the same thing. We'd had a long day.”

“Did he say he was going to call room service?”

“Well, no. I'm just assuming…I really don't know.”

“Was there a restaurant in the hotel?”

“Oh, sure.”

“So he might've had dinner there.”

“He might've. Or anywhere else in town, for that matter. There are lots of good restaurants up there. Italian ones, especially. There's a large Italian constituency up there. Population, I should say.”

“Did you talk to him on Sunday morning?”

“No. I was catching a seven
A
.
M
. flight.”

“Didn't want to wake him, was that it?” Carella asked.

“Exactly. Besides, there was really nothing more to say. We'd said it all the night before.”

“Had a talk the night before?”

“Yes. After our last meeting.”

“At around six, six-thirty?”

“Around then, yes. We had a drink in the lobby…”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes. To rehash the day. Then I went to my room, had dinner, and went to bed. I don't know where Lester went.”

“He didn't say where he
might
be going, did he?”

“No.”

“But you think he might have called room service.”

“That was just a guess. He seemed tired…that was just an educated guess.”

“Were there any women at these meetings?” Kling asked.

“Oh yes. This isn't Afghanistan, you know,” Pierce said, and smiled.

“Did any of these women come up from the city?” Carella asked.