The Big Bad City (11 page)

The windows were wide open because it was another hot morning—he did all his baking in the morning—and he was preheating the oven to three hundred and seventy-five degrees. Whenever he baked, which was every day except Sunday, he imagined people all over the neighborhood poking their heads out of similarly opened windows to sniff in the good, sweet aroma of his cookies wafting out on the still summer air. All of his ingredients were laid out on the kitchen table, his sugars and his margarine, his flour and baking soda, his vanilla and salt, his egg white and his chocolate chips. The oven was almost ready. He began mixing.

First the half cup of granulated sugar and next the quarter cup of brown sugar. Then the quarter cup of softened margarine and the teaspoon of vanilla. All in a large bowl, mixed with a wooden spoon, his hand moving in circles, a smile on his face, oh how he loved doing this!
Now he stirred in a cup of flour and a quarter teaspoon of salt, and then he dropped in his semisweet chocolate chips, a half cup of them, dribbling them in bit by bit, watching them fall like punctuation marks into the white mix, stirring them in, sniffing the air, smiling, opening the oven and feeling the good heat on his face, oh my. Onto an ungreased cookie sheet, he dropped his teaspoon-size bits of dough, spacing them about two inches apart, and then sliding the sheet into the oven, and setting the timer for ten minutes. The recipe was good for about fifty cookies.

Smiling, sitting at the kitchen table now and drinking a cup of decaffeinated coffee, he imagined he could see, actually
see
, wave after wave of aroma rolling from the oven to the open windows across the room and out into the courtyard, drifting on the air, through the open windows across the way, above and below, floating into the apartments of grateful neighbors who could only wonder who on earth was baking these glorious treats, never once imagining that the baker was The Cookie Boy himself.

This afternoon, in whichever apartment he burglarized, he would leave a dozen chocolate chip cookies in a little white box on the bed, resting on whichever pillow he supposed the lady of the house placed her head upon. A gift from The Cookie Boy, madam.

A name he rather fancied, after all, now that he played it over and again in his mind.

When they got to St. Margaret’s at nine-thirty that morning, the head nurse told them Rene Schneider and Jenna DiSalvo were in with a patient. They went down the hall to the visitors’ waiting room, and took
chairs in a windowed corner overlooking the parking lot. Brown seemed unusually silent.

“What are you thinking?” Carella asked.

“Nothing.”

“You still upset?”

“Yes, you want to know. I didn’t handle it right, I realize that. But I have to tell you, Steve, I don’t really
care
if they’re nuns or priests or whatever the hell they are, the mother superior, the pope himself. Somebody got
killed
here!”

“Take it easy, Artie.”

“I’m sorry, but what did I say that was so damn outrageous, can you please tell me? Is it impossible for a nun to have a drinking problem? Last night, Father Clemente
said
there were nuns who did.”

“He also said Mary wasn’t one of them.”

“Yeah, well, my mother told me it never hurts to ask the same question twice.”

“She must’ve known
my
mother.”

“I have to look at this person like a human being. And human beings borrow money. So what’d Sister Felicia get so upset about? Did I spit on her crucifix or something? I asked if Mary owed anybody money, big deal! She tells me Oh, gee, I’m terribly sorry, but such a thing would never
occur
to me! Why not? Mary all at once needs money, why’s it impossible that she owed somebody?”

“She was a nun, Artie.”

“So what? Can’t a nun bet on the horses? Can’t she buy crack on the street corner? Can’t she go play poker with
other
nuns? She lived in an apartment all by herself, Steve. Nobody was checking on her.”

“God was checking on her.”

“Oh, come on. Do you believe that?”

“No. But I’m sure she did.”

“Okay, why do
you
think she suddenly needed more money?”

“Why do you?”

“Blackmail,” Brown said.

“Excuse me?”

They both turned toward the entrance door. Two uniformed nurses were standing there, one of them blonde, the other dark-haired.

“You wanted to see us?” the blonde said.

The detectives rose. The nurses came into the room.

“I’m Jenna DiSalvo,” the blonde said.

“I’m Rene Schneider,” the brunette said.

The detectives introduced themselves. The nurses apologized for the delay and told them they’d been doing a wet-to-dry dressing on a patient with a decubitus ulcer on his coccyx …

“A pressure sore,” Jenna explained.

“On his tailbone,” Rene explained.

… which had taken two of them because he was too weak to keep himself rolled over on his side, and one of them had to hold him while the other one cleaned the two-inch hole with saline, and then packed the wound with saline-soaked gauze, and then put dry gauze and an ABD pad over that, and then paper-taped it. The whole dressing change had taken about fifteen minutes, which was why they were late, and again they apologized.

Not for a
hundred
million dollars, Carella thought.

The nurses, crisp and white in their pristine uniforms, looked unruffled but enormously wary. They
knew that in police work a mandatory suspect was anyone who’d had contact with the victim in the proximate period before a murder. They’d also seen too many tabloid television shows about mistaken arrests and police brutality. The detectives were both wearing Dacron suits, rumpled in this heat, damp button-down shirts, silk ties that needed pressing. They looked tough. When Brown asked if they might talk to each of the women separately, the nurses knew positively that they’d both end up in a state penitentiary where they’d be sodomized by hardened criminals and sadistic guards.

Jenna led Carella down the hall to the nurses’ lounge.

Brown stayed here with Rene in the visitors’ waiting room.

Because she got the black cop, Rene figured she’d end up in the electric chair. She happened to be Jewish, and she knew blacks, the ingrates, didn’t like Jews. Because Jenna got the cop with the Italian name, she figured she’d get the electric chair, too. She happened to be of Italian descent herself, and she knew Italians didn’t trust other Italians.

“Have a seat,” Brown said, as if the waiting room were his own living room. Rene took a seat on the sofa. Brown sat in an easy chair facing her. Rene cleared her throat and folded her hands in her lap. She was the prettier of the two women, and she knew it. But that wasn’t going to save her from the electric chair. Brown took a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“August fourteenth,” he said. “That would’ve been the Friday a week before Mary Vincent was murdered.”

·  ·  ·

“You’re listed in her calendar for seven o’clock that night,” Carella said. “You met at her apartment, is that right?”

“Yes,” Jenna said. “For drinks.”

“We went out to dinner afterward,” Rene said.

“How much did she drink?” Brown asked.

Never hurt to ask the same question
three
times, either.

“She had a single glass of wine.”

“Got there at seven, did you?”

“
I
did. Jenna got there a bit later. We went separately.”

“Where’d you go after you had your drinks?”

“To a Chinese restaurant nearby.”

“Would you remember the name of it?”

“Ah Fong,” Jenna said.

“Ah Wong,” Rene said.

“Who paid for dinner?”

“We split the check.”

“We went Dutch.”

“Was that Mary’s suggestion?”

“No, we always worked it that way. Whenever we went out together.”

“How often was that?”

“Every two weeks,” Jenna said.

“Once a month,” Rene said.

“Did Mary mention anything about money?”

“Money?”

“About the bill? It being too expensive. Anything like that?”

“No, why would she?”

“It came to something like nine dollars each. Including tip. Why would she think that was expensive?”

“Well, she was on a tight budget, wasn’t she?”

“How would I know?”

“Never said anything about how hard it was to make ends meet?”

“No. Why would she? She was earning a good salary.”

“How much was she earning, do you know?”

“Twenty-two dollars an hour, same as us. I think. No, wait a minute, it might have been less. Rene and I are RNs. Mary was an LPN.”

“She was probably getting fifteen, sixteen bucks an hour,” Rene said. “But how is that pertinent?”

“We’ve been told she was worried about money.”

“What’s that got to do with how much money
we
earn? How much money do you
earn
, okay?”

“Did she mention any threatening telephone calls or letters?”

“No.”

“Would you know if she owed money to anyone?”

“Yes,” Jenna said. “She owed me a buck seventy-five for bus fare. Her transit card gave out, so I ran her through on mine.”

·  ·  ·

Later, Rene told her mother that the shvartzeh had grilled her like a common criminal.

“It’s what we get,” her mother said.

Jenna later asked her boyfriend, who was a lawyer, if she could sue Carella for treating her like a common streetwalker.

“How were you sitting?” her boy friend asked.

C
OOKIE
B
OY NEVER WENT FOR THE BIG SCORE
. H
E FIGURED THAT WAS FOR AMATEURS
. E
VERYBODY WAS IN THE
business for money, sure, but amateurs were also in it for the glamour and the thrill, the goddamn glory. Amateurs thought of themselves as movie stars. Get past security in a luxury high-rise overlooking the park, pick the lock on the door, crack the safe behind the framed Rembrandt on the wall, walk off with a fortune. Thank you, thank, you, this is an honor. I also want to thank my mother, my drama coach, and my police dog.

Amateurs.

America was a nation of lucky amateurs.

Cookie Boy never even
thought
of the big score. He’d see a lady in a sable coat that dusted her ankles, strutting out of a luxury building, doorman whistling for a cab, holding an umbrella for her, whisking her inside the taxi, Cookie Boy walked right on by. Sure, you managed to get in her pad you’d find a couple more furs, loads of diamonds, priceless artwork, whatever. Which you had to get
out
with, don’t forget. Even if you got past security once, going in, you still had to get past them a
second
time, going out. Not only going out, but going out with a shitpot full of stolen goods, try explaining
that
to the members of the Academy, thank you all, I love you all so very much, this is such a great honor.

What Cookie Boy had learned early on in his career was that even poor people had treasures. Whether it was
a locket that used to be Grandma’s they kept in a candy tin, or five hundred bucks hidden in the bottom rail of a venetian blind, everybody had something. Well, not everybody. He didn’t go into tenement apartments in Diamondback, for example, where he wouldn’t find anything but cockroaches and empty crack vials.

Cookie Boy chose to walk the middle ground.

He considered himself a moderate.

He knew there were people in the profession who felt that if you were going to take the chance of going in at all, then you might as well go for the big one. You were looking at the same time whether you walked off with Grandma’s locket or the rich lady’s sable. It was all burglary. Well, there were different
degrees
of burglary, depending on whether you went in armed—he
never
went in armed, that was foolish—or whether it was the daytime or the nighttime or whether it was a dwelling or a place of business, or whether the place was occupied at the time or not. All of these factors determined how long you could stay in prison, where Cookie Boy had never been, and where he never intended to go, thank you very much.

But the amateur thinking went: If you’re looking at five, ten, twenty, whatever, depending on the particular circumstances, God forbid you should
kill
somebody during the commission, which made it a felony murder and you were looking at the long one, baby—

But the amateur thinking went: Suppose you were looking at ten in the slammer, that wasn’t going to change no matter
what
you stole, the price of admission was ten in the slammer, got it? You wanted to play, you had to understand you were looking at ten down the line if you got caught.

Cookie Boy never intended to get caught.

First of all because he didn’t go after the really big scores, that was for amateurs. Second because he was
content
with the smaller hits, didn’t go around grumbling or complaining, didn’t tell bartenders he coulda been a contenduh, didn’t let it bother him that he went home with three, four grand a week instead of five hundred thou on a single hit. Cookie Boy was living well and enjoying himself besides. And every now and then, he’d pop a crib and lo and behold he’d discover a red-fox jacket and a candy tin full of all kinds of baubles and beads. He’d fence the jacket for five hundred and the jewelry for a thou, which gave him a fifteen-hundred-dollar profit for jimmying a window and spending twenty minutes in an apartment.

Sometimes you went in and you found a shithole, what could you do? You could tell at a glance you wouldn’t find anything of value in such an apartment, but you tossed it fast, anyway, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, and you got out as fast as you came in, no sense looking at time for no reason at all, risks were for amateurs. Never mind leaving any cookies, either, thanks for
nothing,
lady!

What he tried to do was find a well-kept building in a low-crime area, didn’t have to be silk stocking. Just your average middle-class neighborhood where you’d find buildings without doormen, some of them walk-ups without elevators, it didn’t matter. You were looking for something without security. You walked the neighborhood three or four times, got the feel of it, looked for steps leading down to the backyards, made a few trips behind the buildings. Anybody questioned you, you told them you were a “city inspector,” checking
“ordinances,” and you moved on to another block. If you took no risks, you spent no time upstate.