The Last Dance (11 page)

Or maybe the man had forgotten that he and Ollie had worked together before. Ollie could not imagine this; he did not consider himself an eminently forgettable human being. Did the man work with detectives as fat as Ollie every day of the week? The man
had
to know that the fat detective in the loud sports jacket was the one in charge here. Or was he pretending not to know Ollie because he didn't want Ollie to think the only
reason
he remembered him was
because
he was fat? If so, that was stupid. Ollie
knew
he was fat. He also knew that behind his back people called him Fat Ollie. He considered it a measure of respect that nobody ever called him this to his face.

“Oh, hello, Weeks,” the ME said, as if noticing him for the first time, which was tantamount to suddenly noticing a hippopotamus at the dinner table. “What've we got?”

“Dead black girl in the kitchen,” Ollie said.

The ME's name was Frederick Kurtz, a Nazi bastard if Ollie had ever met one. Even had a little Hitler mustache under his nose. Little black satchel like some mad doctor at Buchenwald. Wearing a rumpled suit looked as if he'd slept in it all this past week. Had a bad cold, too. Kept taking a soiled handkerchief from his back pocket and blowing fresh snot into it, the fuckin Nazi. Ollie followed him into the kitchen.

The girl lay on her back in front of the sink counter, the knife still in her. This was going to be a real tough call. It would take a fuckin Nazi rocket scientist to diagnose this one as a fatal stabbing. Nobody had yet taken the knife out of her because rule number one was you didn't touch anything till the ME officially pronounced the vic dead. Ollie waited while Kurtz circled the body like a vulture, trying to find a comfortable position from which to examine the dead girl. He put his satchel down on the floor beside her, and leaned over close to her mouth, as if hoping to catch a shimmer of breath from her lips. Ollie was thinking if the girl was still breathing, she'd be sanctified before nightfall. Be the first black saint from this city. Kurtz placed his forefinger and middle finger on the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse in the carotid artery. Fat Chance Department, Ollie thought.

“Reckon she's dead?” he asked, trying to sound like John Wayne, but succeeding only in sounding like W. C. Fields. Ollie sometimes tried to do Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro, but somehow all his imitations came out sounding like W. C. Fields. He didn't realize this. He actually considered his imitations right on the money, and often thought of himself as the man with the golden ear. Kurtz knew sarcasm when he heard it, however, even when it came from a fat dick who neither looked nor sounded like a cowboy. He didn't answer Ollie. Instead, he put his stethoscope to the girl's chest, already knowing she was dead as a doornail, to coin a medical phrase, and went about his examination pretending Ollie wasn't there, something difficult to do under any circumstances. A voice from the bedroom doorway startled Kurtz, echoing as it did his own earlier question,

“Who's in charge here?” Monoghan asked.

Same stupid question from another jackass who should know better, Ollie thought. In this city, the detective catching the squeal was the cop officially investigating the case from that moment on. Detective Monoghan, his partner Detective Monroe, and various
other detectives from the Homicide Division were sent to the scene of any murder in their bailiwick, to serve in a so-called advisory and supervisory capacity. The reason for their existence was that this city was a bureaucratic monolith that cost more to run than the entire nation of Zaire.

In this city, ten people were necessary to do the job of one person. What this city did was hire high school dropouts, put them in suits, and then teach them how to greet the public with blank stares on their faces. In this city, if you needed a copy of, say, your birth certificate or your driver's license, you stood on line for an hour and a half while some nitwit pretended to be operating a computer. When he or she finally located what you were there for, you had to go over to the post office and stand on line for another hour and a half to purchase a money order to pay for it. That was because in this city, municipal employees weren't allowed to accept cash, personal checks, or credit cards. This was because the city fathers knew the caliber of the people who were featherbedding throughout the entire system, knew that cash would disappear in a wink, knew that credit cards would be cloned, knew that personal checks would somehow end up in private bank accounts hither and yon. That's why all those people behind municipal counters gave you such hostile stares. They were angry at the system because they couldn't steal from it. Or maybe they were pissed off because they couldn't qualify for more lucrative jobs like security officers at any of the city's jails, where an ambitious man could earn a goodly amount of unreportable cash by smuggling in dope to the inmates.

Monoghan and Monroe were necessary to such a system.

Without two jackasses here to tell an experienced detective like Ollie how to do his job, the system would fall apart in a minute and a half. The Homicide dicks knew damn well who was in charge here. Oliver Wendell Weeks was in charge here. It bothered them, too, that in days of yore, the Homicide Division in this city had merited the measure of respect it now enjoyed only on television.
Nowadays, Homicide's proud tradition was vestigial at best. All that remained of its elegant past were the black suits Homicide cops still wore, the color of death, the color of murder itself.

Both Monoghan and Monroe were wearing black on this dismal November afternoon. They looked as if they were on their way to a funeral home to tell some Irish mick like themselves how sorry they were that Paddy O'Toole had kicked the bucket, poor drunken soul. The consistent thing about Ollie Weeks was that he hated everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. Ollie was a consummate bigot. Without even knowing it.

“These two Irishmen walk out of a bar?” he said.

“Yeah?” Monoghan said.

“It could happen,” Ollie said, and shrugged.

Neither Monoghan nor Monroe laughed.

Kurtz, the fuckin Nazi, laughed, but he tried to hide it by blowing his nose again, because to tell the truth these two big Irish cops scared hell out of him. He guessed Ollie was of English descent, or he wouldn't have told such a joke to two Irishmen dressed like morticians and looking somewhat red in the face to begin with.

“What is that, some kind of ethnic slur?” Monoghan asked.

“Some kind of stereotypical innuendo?” Monroe asked.

“Is she dead or not?” Ollie asked the ME, changing the subject because these two Irish jackasses seemed to be getting touchy about their drunken cronies.

“Yes, she's dead,” Kurtz said.

“Would you wish to venture a guess as to the cause?” Ollie said, this time trying to sound like a sarcastic British barrister, but it still came out as W. C. Fields.

“Coroner's Office'll send you a report,” Kurtz said, thinking he could ace the Big O, but Ollie merely smiled.

“I can't blame you for being so cautious,” he said, “knife stickin out of her chest and all.”

Fuck you, Fat Boy, the ME thought, but he blew his nose instead and walked out.

The Homicide dicks wandered around the apartment looking grouchy. Ollie guessed they were still smarting over his Irish joke, which he thought was a pretty good one, hey, if you can't take a joke, go fuck yourself. There were enough personal items around the place—an engagement calendar, an address book, bras and panties in the dresser—to convince Ollie that the girl lived here and wasn't just visiting whoever had juked her. The super of the building confirmed this a few minutes later when he came upstairs to see how the investigation was coming along. One thing Ollie hated—among other things he hated—was amateur detectives sticking their noses in police work. He asked the super what the girl's name was, and the super told him she was Althea Cleary, and that she'd been living here since May sometime. He thought she was from Ohio or someplace like that. Idaho maybe. Iowa. Someplace like that. Ollie thanked him for the valuable information and his citizenly concern and ushered him out of the apartment. One of the responding blues told him the lady who'd phoned the police was in the hall outside waiting to talk to him, was it okay to let her in?

“What makes you think it wouldn't be okay?” Ollie asked.

“Well, it being a crime scene and all.”

“That's very good thinking,” Ollie said, and smiled enigmatically. “Show her in.”

The woman was in her late fifties, Ollie guessed, wearing a green cardigan sweater and a brown woolen skirt. She told Ollie that she and Althea were friends, and that she'd knocked on her door around two o'clock to see if she wanted to go down for a cappuccino.

“I work at home,” the woman said. “And Althea was home a lot, too. So sometimes, we walked over to Starbucks for cappuccino.”

“What is it you do?” Ollie asked. “At home, I mean.”

“Well, I teach piano,” she said.

“I always wanted to play piano,” Ollie said. “Could you teach me five songs?”

“I'm sorry?”

“I want to learn five songs. I want to play five songs like a pro. Then when I go to a party, I can sit down and play the five songs and everybody'll think I know how to play piano.”

“Well, if you can play five songs, then actually you
are
playing the piano, aren't you?”

Ollie hated smart-ass women, even if they knew how to play piano.

“Sure,” he said, “but I mean they'll think I know
more
than just the five songs.”

“I suppose I could teach you five songs,” the woman said.

“Have you got a card or anything?”

“Don't you want to know about Althea?”

“Sure, I do. Have you got a card? I'll give you a call, you can teach me five songs sometime. Do you know ‘Night and Day'?”

“Yes, I do. You should understand, however … I normally teach classical piano. To children, mostly.”

“That's okay, all I want is five songs.”

“Well,” the woman said, and sighed, and opened her handbag. She fished in it for a card, found one, and handed it to Ollie. The name on the card was Helen Hobson.

“How much do you charge?” he asked.

“We can discuss that,” she said.

“Maybe you can give me a flat rate for just the five songs,” he said. “Did she work nights or what?”

His change of direction was so abrupt that Helen actually blinked.

“You said she was home a lot,” Ollie said.

“Oh, yes. She worked nights. At the telephone company.”

Ollie hated the telephone company. He could easily imagine some irritated subscriber stabbing Althea Cleary in the chest half a dozen times.

“I liked her a lot,” Helen said. “She was a very nice person.”

“Who you used to have cappuccino with every now and then.”

“Almost every day.”

“But today when you went down, you found her dead.”

“The door was open,” Helen said, nodding.

“Standing wide open, you mean?”

“No, just a crack. I thought this was odd. I called Althea's name, and when I got no answer, I walked in. She was in the kitchen. On the floor there.”

“What'd you do then?”

“I went up to my own apartment and called the police.”

“What time was this, Miss Hobson?”

“A little after two. My lesson ended at two, I don't have another one till four. So I came down to see if Althea wanted to come with me to Starbucks.”

“How'd you come down?”

“By the stairs. I'm only one flight up.”

“See anybody on the way down?”

“No one.”

“Anybody outside her apartment?”

“No.”

“When did you notice the door was open?”

“Immediately.”

“Before you knocked or anything?”

“I didn't knock at all. I saw the door standing open maybe an inch or two, so I called her name, and went in.”

“Thanks, Miss Hobson, we appreciate your help,” he said. “I'll call you about the lessons. All I want to learn is five songs.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“‘Night and Day,' and four others. So I can impress people.”

“I'm sure they'll be very impressed.”

“Hey, tell me about it,” Ollie said.

“You got this under control here?” Monoghan asked.

“Soon as the technicians get here,” Ollie said. “What's holding up traffic? Is the Pope in town or something?”

“You gonna tell a Pope joke now?”

“I only know one Pope joke,” Ollie said.

“Maybe this lady here can teach you four more,” Monroe said. “Then you can really impress people. You can play five songs on the piano, tell five Pope jokes, and maybe five Irish jokes if there are any Irishmen in the crowd.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Ollie said. “You know four Pope jokes, Miss Hobson?”

“I don't know any Pope jokes at all,” she said.

“I need four more Pope jokes,” Ollie said. “I'll have to get them someplace else, I guess.”

“Can I leave now?” she asked.

“You want some advice?” Monroe said.

“Sure, what's that?” Ollie said.

“There are lots of Irishmen on the job. I wouldn't go telling any more Irish jokes, I was you.”

“Gee, is that your advice?”

“That's our advice,” Monroe said.

“You think telling Irish jokes might be politically incorrect, huh?”

“It might be downright dangerous,” Monroe said.

“Gee, I hope that's not a threat,” Ollie said.

“It ain't a threat, but you can take it as one if you wish.”

“Can I leave now?” Helen said again.

“Cause you know,” Ollie said, “I don't give a rat's ass about what's politically correct or what ain't. All I want to do is learn my five songs and my five Pope jokes, is all I want to do, and maybe in my spare time find out who stabbed this little girl. So if you got no further advice to dispense here …”