The Big Bad City (30 page)

“He’s been driving my car for almost two weeks now.”

“How come?”

“I lent it to him.”

“What’s your relationship with him, miss?”

“We’re friends.”

“How long have you known him?”

“About three months.”

“And you loaned him your car?”

“He’s a good driver.”

“Must be. Parked in a no-parking zone, must be an excellent driver.”

“So what’s the big deal? A parking ticket? They send out detectives on parking tickets?”

“You know anyone named Juju Judell?”

“No.”

“Sonny ever mention him to you?”

“No.”

“When’s the last time you saw Sonny?”

“He stops by every now and then.”

“When’s the last time he stopped by?”

“Coupla days ago.”

“Did he happen to stop by on Friday night?”

“No.”

“This past Friday night. Didn’t stop by then?”

“No.”

“When did he stop by?”

“Sunday?”

“Well, was it or wasn’t it?”

“I just told you.”

“You made it sound like a question.”

“No, it was Sunday. We went to the street fair on Culver.”

“He isn’t living here, is he?”

“No, I live here with my mother.”

“What do you do for a living, miss?”

“I’m a student.#8221;

“You’re not a manicurist?”

“A manicurist? What?”

“Do you know where Sonny lives?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Never been to his apartment?”

“Never.”

“He just stops by here, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Gets his nails done, right?”

“What?”

“Where do you go to school, miss?”

“Ramsey U.”

“Studying what?”

“Communications.”

“Learning to communicate, huh?”

“Learning television broadcasting.”

“Why’d you lend him your car?”

“He’s trying to collect money he lent his cousin’s husband.”

“His
what?
”

“His cousin had an operation and Sonny lent her husband thousands of dollars to pay for it.”

“His cousin’s husband, huh?”

“Yes. His first cousin. Well, they’re separated now. Which is why Sonny needed a car. So he could follow him and maybe he’d lead him to his cousin.”

“Where’d you get this story, miss?”

“It isn’t a story. Sonny needs to find his cousin, the one who had the kidney operation …”

“A kidney operation, I see.”

“So he can ask her to plead his case, tell her former husband to pay him back the money.”

“So he’s trailing this guy around.”

“Yes.”

“In your car.”

“Yes. He’s a cop, you may even know him.”

“Who’s a cop?”

“The guy who owes him the money.”

“Sonny Cole is trailing a
cop?
” Ollie said.

“That’s what he told me.”

Oh, Jesus, Ollie thought.

H
E CALLED THE
E
IGHT
-S
EVEN THE MINUTE HE FOUND A PAY PHONE. THIS WAS NOW AROUND THREE-
thirty. Parker answered the phone and told him Carella was in with the lieutenant just then.

“Tell him the guy who killed his old man is trailing him,” Ollie said. “In a green Honda.”

“No kidding?” Parker said.

“Sonny Cole. Tell him. The license plate number is WU 3200. Did Murchison tell you my nun joke?”

“No.”

“Forget it, I got a better one.”

“Let me hear it,” Parker said.

“These two nuns are riding back to the convent on their bicycles, and they take a wrong turn?”

“Yeah?”

“They’re bouncing along the road, and one of the nuns realizes they’re lost so she asks the other nun, ‘Have you ever come this way before?’ And the other nun says, ‘No. It must be the cobblestones.’ ”

“I don’t get it,” Parker said.

“Discuss it with Murchison,” Ollie said. “And don’t forget to tell Carella. Sonny Cole. A green Honda. WU 3200.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Write it down.”

“Yeah, don’t worry.”

“Put it on his desk.”

“Yeah, fine. Is it that she realizes they’re lost because of the cobblestones?” Parker asked.

“Yeah, you got it, pal,” Ollie said, and hung up.

“So what Roselli’s saying is she killed the man, is that it?” Byrnes asked.

“That’s what he’s saying,” Brown said.

“Who’s to contradict him? A dead woman?”

“Is what he’s counting on.”

“Have you got a theory?”

“Well … let’s say Roselli’s telling the truth. She
did
kill Charlie Custer. In which case, she quit the band and went back to the order so she could hide.”

“From who? The police down there already closed it out, didn’t they? Who’s she hiding from?”

“Roselli.”

“The only witness to the crime. Okay, that makes sense.”

“On the other hand, if she
didn’t
kill him …”

“Then Roselli did.”

“Right. And she
still
went back to the order so she could hide from him.”

“Because
she
witnessed
his
crime.”

“So she disappears completely, becomes Sister Mary Vincent again.”

“None of these guys knew she’d once been a nun, is that right?”

“Came as a total surprise to them.”

“So running back to the convent was actually a good idea.”

“Perfect way to vanish.”

“So what happened? He found her?”

“That’s what
he’s
got to tell us, Pete.”

“Why should he?”

The office went silent.

“You think he’s the one who wrote that letter to her?”

“Could be.”

“But we haven’t got the letter.”

“That’s right.”

“So we don’t know what it said.”

“If he’s the one who ransacked her apartment, that’s what he was looking for.”

“And if he found it, he burned it a minute later.”

“So we’re back to zero.”

“He’s a user, Pete.”

“How do you know?”

“Farnes told us. Four years ago he was doing pot …”

“Everybody does pot when he’s a kid.”

“Not such a kid, Pete. He was twenty-four.”

“Even
I
did pot when I was twenty-four,” Byrnes said.

“He graduated. At Figgs’s funeral, he was sniffing coke.”

“Still according to Farnes?”

“Yes.”

“Reliable?”

“Who knows?”

“Okay, let’s say he’s a user. What are you looking for?”

“Guy’s on cocaine, he needs money. He told us he’s having a hard time finding work, been giving piano lessons to make ends meet. Okay, let’s say he tracked Katie down, tried to blackmail her. Told her he’d blow the whistle on the murder unless she paid him two grand. So she …”

“That’s assuming she did it. You can’t blackmail a person who’s …”

“No, it’s assuming he’ll
say
she did it.”

“He’s already got his story, Pete. The same one he told us. Katie killed Custer.”

“All he has to do is tell it again.”

“Or
threaten
to tell it.”

“That’s blackmail, Pete.”

“Give me two grand or I go to the police.”

“Where’d you get that figure?”

“That’s how much she asked her brother for.”

“But he turned her down,” Brown said.

“Okay, so she goes to the park empty,” Byrnes said. “What then?”

“He kills her.”

“Why?”

The office went silent again.

“Find something,” Byrnes said.

It was almost four-thirty when they came out of Byrnes’s office. Andy Parker had already left for the day. As always, he’d been in a hurry to get out of there. Maybe this was why he’d neglected to leave a note about Sonny Cole and the green Honda. Or maybe he simply didn’t think it was important.

In the Chevy sedan, on their way home, Carella and Brown tried to dope out their next move. They concluded it would be fruitless to ask for a search warrant for the letter stolen from Katie’s apartment—if indeed a letter
had
been stolen and if, further, the letter had been stolen by the person who’d murdered her. Byrnes was right. If the letter was that important, it would have been burned a minute after the thief left her apartment.

They couldn’t search Roselli’s house for a murder weapon, either, because the weapon had been the killer’s hands. Nor could they go to a judge and say they wanted to look through the house for cocaine because they couldn’t for the life of them see how they could show probable cause and they knew a judge would tell them to go home and be nice boys.

They could arrest Roselli and put him in the box, of course, in the hope that he’d fall all to pieces without a fix and tell them all about how it was he himself who’d shoved Custer over that railing and not little Katie Cochran. But that was for the movies. If Roselli had, in fact, killed Katie he’d simply refuse to answer any questions. Only this time there wasn’t a handy burglary they could charge him with. Earlier today, the judge at Leslie Blyden’s arraignment had set a very low bail of one thousand dollars, which The Cookie Boy had easily met. Whether he now left town was entirely up to him. They didn’t want a repeat performance from Roselli.

It was a little past six
P.M
. Brown was driving Carella home first, and they had almost reached his house in Riverhead.

“I keep wondering if she’d still be alive,” Brown said.

“How do you mean?”

“If the brother had only lent her some of that money he inherited.”

The car went silent.

And then, both detectives started speaking at the same time.

“Didn’t Roselli say …?”

“How’d he know …?”

And all of a sudden, everything fell into place.

·  ·  ·

On the phone, Roselli’s wife told them he’d already left for a job in the city.

“Where in the city?” Carella asked.

“What is this?” she said. “You’re beginning to upset me and the children, bothering us all the time.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Roselli,” Carella said. “We just have a few more questions.”

“He’s playing in the bandshell at the Seventh Street Seaport. I wish you’d leave us alone. Really,” she said, and hung up.

The seaport was a reconstructed area on the River Dix. Two blocks of souvenir shops and food stands lined a boardwalk that ran into an oval-shaped dance floor with a bandshell behind it. Pennants flapped on a hasty river wind. Music wafted on the soft evening summer air. Roselli was part of a four-piece rock group playing all the golden oldies Carella knew by heart. Hearing the music that had been so vital to him when he was growing up, seeing all the pretty young girls in the arms of handsome young boys, he remembered again that he would soon be forty. On the river, a cruise boat drifted past. Carella could hear the guide over the loudspeaker, telling the passengers they were passing the Seventh Street Seaport. Everything suddenly seemed so poignant to him, as if it were in imminent danger of becoming lost forever. It was seven-forty
P.M
. and the sky was already melting into the river.

“There he is,” Brown said.

The tune ended. The teenagers on the floor applauded. The band played a little signature riff, and came down off the platform. Carella could not shake the feeling of impending loss.

“Hey,” Roselli said, “what are
you
guys doing here?”

“Mr. Roselli,” Brown said, “how’d you know Katie’s parents were dead?”

“She told me,” he said.

“When?”

“While we were on tour. She was very upset about it.”

“Told you they’d been in a car accident?”

“Yes.”

“Told you this four years ago?”

“Sometime on the tour, I don’t know if it was exactly four years ago.”

“Explained that her rich brother who’d inherited all that money didn’t want to have anything to do with her, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did she happen to mention
when
the car accident took place?”

“No.”

“Last July, Sal.”

“Not four years ago, Sal.”

“The Fourth of July, Sal. Last year.”

He looked at them. He wasn’t doing any arithmetic because he knew it was too late for arithmetic. He knew exactly what they knew. He knew Katie couldn’t have told him about her parents unless he’d seen her since last July. He knew he’d made a mistake, and the mistake was a bad one, and he couldn’t see any way of correcting it. Across the river, lights were beginning to show in apartment buildings. When night came in this city, it came with heart-stopping suddenness.

He put his head in his hands and began weeping.

·  ·  ·

“I can’t tell you what a great job I think you kids did,” Charlie says. He’s been drinking too much and his speech is slurred. A bottle of beer in one hand, he staggers as he walks to the safe, catches his balance, says, “Oops,” gives a gurgly little giggle and then grins in broad apology and winks at Katie. He raises the bottle in a belated toast. “Here’s to next time,” he says, and tilts the bottle to his mouth and drinks again. Sal is hoping he won’t pass out before he opens the safe and pays them. He himself has been smoking pot all night long, and is a bit dazzled, so to speak. He certainly hopes Katie isn’t too tired to count the money.

Charlie is wearing a wrinkled white linen suit, he looks as if he’s auditioning for the role of Big Daddy in
Cat
. Chomping on a cigar, belching around it, he takes it out of his mouth only to swig more beer. Finally, he sets the bottle down on top of the safe. This is a big old Mosler that sits on the floor, he has some difficulty kneeling down in front of it, first because he’s so fat, and next because he’s so drunk. Sal is really beginning to worry now that they’ll have to wait till morning to get paid. How’s Charlie even going to remember the combination, much less see the numbers on the dial? And how is he himself, Salvatore Roselli, going to know the difference between a single and a hundred-dollar bill, so absolutely wonderfully stoned is he.

It is unbearably hot here in die office. The window air conditioner is functioning, but only minimally, and Charlie has thrown open the French doors to the deck, hoping to catch a stray breeze. Outside, there is the sound of insects and wilder things, the cries of animals in the deep dark. Only the alligators are silent.