The Big Bad City (23 page)

“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.

“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 says. ‘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 lo and behold, right there in front of their eyes, the car starts lifting off the ground and into the air all by itself. The nun is astonished. ‘Son of a
bitch!
’ she says.”

Ollie 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 Farnes, 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
P.M.

“This is not the case on weekdays,” Farnes 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 highrise 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 Farnes 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,” Farnes said. “Did he mean the one where the girl got drunk?”

“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,” Farnes 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. Farnes 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,” Farnes 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 Farnes 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, Farnes 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, Farnes 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,” Farnes said, “have a glass of beer.”

The detectives opted for iced tea instead. They still didn’t know that four 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 Sal?”

“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?” Carella asked. “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. Farnes? 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 booked to play a full week at The Last 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 …