Fat Ollie's Book (23 page)

“Ready when you are, hon,” Flo said.

“I'll be back,” Wanda said, and swung out sideways to get off the stool, the skirt sliding back even higher on her thighs, almost to Katmandu, in fact. She went to the other end of the bar, picked up her order, looked back over her shoulder at Ollie—who felt himself growing faintly tumescent in his pants—winked at him, and then swiveled over to a man sitting alone alongside the wall under a framed poster of Boy George.

“I wish I could write a book,” Flo said wistfully.

“Maybe I could give you lessons sometime,” Ollie said.

“Maybe you could give us
both
lessons,” she said.

“Maybe so. Let's ask Wanda when she comes back.”

Ollie was thinking he'd stepped in shit here. A three-way without any effort at all. How lucky could a person get? Walsh looked at him. There was a faint, smug, Irish look on his kisser. Probably congratulating himself on his wise-ass John Grisham remark, whoever the hell that was.

“Meanwhile,” Walsh said, “we wanted to ask you girls about somebody who maybe you've seen in here.”

“What makes you think that?” Flo asked.

“Kind of place The Cozy is,” Walsh said.

“Hi, honey, you miss me?” Wanda said, and took the stool on Ollie's left again. Ollie put his left hand on her knee.

“How come you decided to put a girl's name on the book?” she asked.

“I thought it would sell more copies,” Ollie said, and slid his hand onto her thigh.

“That the only reason?” Wanda asked, and snuggled a little closer to him.

“Guy's a Puerto Rican switch-hitter,” Walsh told Flo. “Goes by Emmy on the street. His square handle is Emilio Herrera. Ever see him in here?”

“Oh, sure,” Flo said. “Emmy's a darling.”

“You know Emmy, too?” Ollie asked Wanda, just as he reached clear up under her skirt and got the shock of his life.

•   •   •

“YOU SHOULD HAVE
told me she was a he,” he shouted at Walsh. The two men were striding up the street toward where Ollie had parked the car. One look at them, you'd know they were cops, that stride they had. Same way you took one look at a hooker, you knew she was a hooker, the strut on her.

“You were getting along so fine there,” Walsh said, grinning. “I didn't want to…”

“And who the fuck is John Grisham?”

“…interrupt a beautiful…”

“Is the other one a man, too? Flo? Is she a man?”

“She is a man, yes, Ollie.” He grinned again, the fuckin Irish bastard. “I guess that rules out both of them, huh?” he said.

Ollie walked on ahead of him. He was at the car, unlocking the door, checking the windows to make sure some other faggot junkie hooker hadn't smashed one of them, when Walsh caught up.

“You won't be needing me anymore, will you?” he asked. “You got what you wanted, right?”

“I got a
location
is all I got.”

“They told you he lives in Kingston Station,” Walsh said. “What more do you need?”

“Kingston Station is six blocks wide and a mile long,” Ollie said. “That's a lot of territory to get lost in.”

“It's also Jamaican,” Walsh said.

“So?”

“Your man's Puerto Rican. He should stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I've been looking for the little fuck the past week,” Ollie said. “So far he ain't sticking out so good.”

“What's your book called?” Walsh asked.

“Fuck you,” Ollie said.

“Nice title,” Walsh said, and threw a finger at him and walked away from the car.

•   •   •

THE TRUE AND PROPER NAME
of the neighborhood now called Kingston Station was Westfield Station. Perhaps that was because when railroad tracks still ran along that side of the city, the station stop there was called Westfield. It was not until an overwhelmingly large number of Irish immigrants settled in Westfield Station that the neighborhood was familiarly dubbed Dublin Town. Russian Jews started pouring in at the turn of the century, and the place was popularly renamed Little Kiev. Upward mobility sent the Jews to the suburbs, ceding the area to Italians moving out of ghettos downtown. The area was still called Little Kiev, but the streets now resonated to cries of
“Buon giorno”
and
“Ba fahn gool!”
But not for long.

Prosperity led to migration. The Italians, too, followed the trail to the suburbs. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Puerto Ricans came next, and finally the Jamaicans. So many Jamaicans, in fact, that first the rest of the whitebread city, and then the residents themselves, began calling the area Kingston Station. An enterprising mayor, gunning for the Jamaican vote, even suggested that the name be legally changed to what everyone was calling it, anyway. Nobody but the Jamaicans liked that idea. In everyday conversation, then, Westfield Station was Kingston Station. But the name on the maps remained what it had been back in 1878, when the railroad opened its route along the river.

Everybody in Kingston Station—

Well, everybody along James Street, anyway.

—had heard of the transvestite hooker who called himself Emmy, but nobody knew where the hell he was. Ollie had been a detective for a very long time. He knew the word had gone out. Somehow, Emilio Herrera had learned that the law was looking for him.

So where the hell was he?

•   •   •

SHANAHAN'S BAR
at midnight was full of policemen who'd just come off duty. This made Emilio and Aine somewhat uncomfortable. But they were here to learn if this was, in fact, the bar Olivia Wesley Watts had mentioned in her report to the Commissioner, and it certainly looked as if it might be.

Emilio was convinced that the woman they'd seen coming out of the basement on Culver Av was indeed Livvie, who had somehow escaped her captors. Aine thought this was a very far-fetched notion.

“She fits the description exactly,” Emilio said, and quoted from the report, which by now he knew by heart because he'd read and reread it so many times, searching for clues. “‘I am a female police detective, twenty-nine years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing one hundred and twenty-three pounds, which is slender.'”

“I weigh a hundred and six,” Aine said. “
That's
slender.”

“
That's
skinny,” Emilio said, and went on quoting from the report. “‘My hair is a sort of reddish brown, what my mother used to call auburn…'”

“My hair is red, too.”

“Your hair is not reddish brown.”

“But it's red.”

“It's carrot colored.”

“That's still red,” Aine insisted.

“‘I wear it cut to just above the shoulders,'” Emilio quoted. “‘What my mother used to call a shag cut.'”

“I wear my hair short, too,” Aine said.

“And shaggy,” he agreed. “‘My eyes are green…'”

“So are mine.”

“‘I look very Irish…'”

“So do I.”

“Aine, what is your
point?
” Emilio asked, truly irritated now.

“My point is, do you think
I'm
Olivia Watts-her-name?”

“Of course not.”

“So why do you think some Irish babe you ran into on the street is her?”

“Because she was coming out of the very
building!
” Emilio said. “Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence!”

“The world is full of coincidence,” Aine said wisely.

“I don't believe in coincidence,” Emilio said. “You believe in coincidence, then you don't believe in God. It's God makes things happen, not coincidence.”

“Oh okay. Then it was God made me a junkie and a whore, right?”

Emilio looked at her.

“What
are
you?” he asked. “Some kind of atheist?”

“That's what I am, yes,” Aine said.

“Since when?”

“Since I was twelve years old and a priest felt me up in the rectory.”

“That never happened.”

“Oh no?”

“And anyway, you can't blame God for some horny priest.”

“What
do
I blame him for? All these fucking lunatics fighting wars in his name? Killing each other in his name? I don't know any atheists who kill people in God's name. Not a single one. I don't believe in a God who allows such things to happen. I believe in coincidence, is what makes things happen.”

Which was when Francisco Palacios walked in and took a stool beside them at the bar.

 

BECAUSE THE GAUCHO
recognized Emilio as a fellow Puerto Rican, and because he had an eye for the women, especially if they seemed not to be wearing either panties or a bra, he struck up a conversation with the young couple, directing his conversation at first directly to Emilio, entirely in Spanish, because he didn't want the young Irish girl, was what she looked like, to think he was coming on to her, even though he was. This annoyed Aine, so she said, “Are you guys gonna talk Spanish all night? Because if you are, I've got better things to do.”

The Gaucho leaned over the bar and began chatting with Aine about the latest movies she'd seen and her favorite color and did she like to walk hatless in spring rain, all the stuff he thought a woman liked to hear. Aine was in fact flattered by his attention. She was well aware of the adage that held if you wanted to succeed with a lady, you treated her like a whore, and vice versa. She knew he was treating her like a lady, which meant he suspected she was a whore, but that was okay with her. It was the thought that counted.

On the other hand, The Gaucho had no idea she was a working girl. In his eyes, she looked like a well-scrubbed Irish girl from one of the suburbs, albeit one of these anachronistic hippie types who ran around without underwear. There was something sharp and snippy about her, qualities he liked in a woman. Qualities he had found in Eileen Burke, who did not, alas, seem too terribly interested in him. He looked at his watch. The detectives were now ten minutes late.

“Listen,” he said, “I know you're here with your boyfriend and all…”

“He's not my boyfriend,” Aine said.

“Oh, well good,” The Gaucho said. “I have an appointment here—in fact they're late—but it shouldn't take more than half an hour to discuss our business, and then I thought maybe you'd like to go for a drink someplace quieter than this, what do you think?”

Aine looked him dead in the eye.

Green eyes clashing with brown eyes, sparks flying.

“Sure,” she said, and smiled like an Irish shillelagh, whatever that was.

As coincidence would have it, Eileen Burke walked in just then.

 

EMILIO SHREWDLY CALCULATED
that the other guy who came in some five minutes later was either a civilian like Palacios or a detective like Livvie. He was absolutely positive now that the girl with the reddish-brown hair was Olivia Wesley Watts.

All three of them had moved to a table over by the phone booths. From where he was still sitting at the bar with Aine, who had her legs crossed and who was nursing a very sugary non-alcoholic beverage, Emilio could not hear a word of their conversation. This was unfortunate because he was sure they were discussing the blood diamonds hidden in the basement from which Livvie had escaped earlier today.

They were instead discussing cocaine.

So were the three men in the living room of a tenement flat half a mile uptown.

 

SUZIE Q. CURTIS
was never permitted to sit in on any of these brainstorming sessions between her mastermind husband and his two rocket-scientist associates. Her job was to keep them supplied with food, like the women in the
Godfather
movies. Although to see those movies, you sometimes got the feeling the gangsters in them were as interested in cooking spaghetti with clams, or sausage with peppers, as they were in killing people. Just nice homey fellows who if you looked at them cross-eyed, they would slit your throat.

Her husband and his cronies were talking about killing some people tomorrow night.

Listening from the kitchen, where Suzie was making tuna fish sandwiches with slices of tomato on them, she could hear their conversation clear as a bell.

“We go in shootin,” her husband was saying. “Never give them a chance to frisk us.”

“Cause then we'd be at a disadvantage,” Constantine said. “If we let them frisk us.”