The Last Dance (14 page)

“You said Althea bought three half-hour tickets last night,” Carella said.

“Thass right. An' if that's all the time she bought, then whut the boys wanted was hand jobs. Tickets woulda cost her twenty for the half-hour, she probably charged fifty, sixty to milk 'em. When we're doin more
serious
work, ahem, we usually buy an hour ticket for fifty bucks, charge the john a full C for it. What Mac does is rent
space
to us, you comprehend? The back room is
space,
that's all. He lets us use his stage to advertise our goodies only cause his customers drink while they watchin us.”

“So if a guy went in the back room with Althea last night …”

“Yeah, it woulda been a hand job. That's what we buy a half-hour ticket for.”

“Anybody follow her out? When she left last night?”

“Not that I seen.”

“Where were you when you saw her leaving?”

“Onstage. It was the last dance. The last dance starts at two. The place closes at two-thirty, three.”

“So she left before the last dance, is that it?”

“Guess she'd made money enough by then,” Ruby said, and shrugged again.

“How? You said a hundred is tops for G-string change …”

“Well, a hundred, a hun'twenty …”

“Okay, and if she got fifty for each trip to the back room …”

“Sixty be more like it.”

“Okay, that netted her forty on each trip. That's a hun'twenty plus the G-string money comes to two-forty. What time do you girls start?”

“Nine.”

“If she left at two, that was five hours,” Ollie said. “Divide two-forty
by five, you come up with forty-eight bucks an hour. She coulda made more workin at McDonald's.”

“Not hardly.”

“You consider forty-eight an hour good wages?”

“Most nights we do better.”

“If two-forty was all she'd earned last night, why'd she leave half an hour before closing?”

“Maybe she was tired.”

“Or maybe she'd arranged for somebody to meet her outside and take her home,” Carella said. “Is that possible?”

“Anything's possible,” Ruby said.

“What'd these guys look like?” Ollie asked. “The ones who went back with her.”

“Who
knows
what any of these creeps look like?”

“Any of them look Jamaican?”

“Whut's a Jamaican look like?”

“This one was light-skinned, with blue-green eyes and curly black hair. Around six-two or -three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a charming lilt to his speech.”

“If I'd seen anybody like that aroun here,” Ruby said, “I'da axed him to marry me.”

That Wednesday night, the airwaves were full of stories about Danny Gimp and his two murderers. Slain stool pigeons do not normally attract too much attention. Unless they're killed in a place as public as a pizzeria, in broad daylight, during a week when television was panting for something sensational to captivate the imagination of the ever-salivating American viewing audience. The hanging death of a nondescript old man in a shabby little apartment in a meager section of the city was nothing as compared to two bald-faced gunmen striding into a pizzeria during the breakfast hour and blazing away like Butch and Sundance, albeit one had been black.

In a city divided by race, even the racial symmetry was reason for
jubilance. For here, if nowhere else, a black man and a white man seemed to have worked in harmonious accord to rid the earth of that vilest of all human beings, the informer. Danny Gimp, unremarkable and unregarded while alive, became in death something of an inverted martyr, a man made suddenly famous by his extinction. In a world where wars were given mini-series titles, Danny and his two bold slayers stepped out of reality into the realm of truth made to
seem
fictitious, achieving in the space of several days a notoriety reserved for mythical bad guys and their destroyers. Killers though they were, The White Guy and The Black Guy had slain The Rat. One would have thought, from the interest generated on television, that once the salt-and-pepper assassins were apprehended, they'd be awarded medals and a ticker tape parade down Hall Avenue.

That Wednesday night, all five networks featured stories about Danny Gimp, the black and white shooters, and the similarly hued pair of detectives—Brown and Kling—who had responded to the call. The talking heads on the cable channels, babbling away on shows joining in their titles the words “pizza,” “shootout,” “terror,” “confrontation,” and “ambush” in various unimaginative combinations, endlessly debated whether a police informer was truly a “rat” as the term was commonly understood, why illegal guns seemed to proliferate at such an alarming rate in American cities, and whether it was politic or merely politics to have a black-and-white detective team investigating a case involving a black and a white shooter.

Thursday came and Thursday went.

So did Friday and Saturday.

And Sunday.

And all at once it was a new week.

In days of yore, the police department used to run a lineup every Monday to Thursday morning. Detectives from squads all over the city would gather in the gymnasium at headquarters downtown, where the Chief of Detectives paraded any felony offender arrested the night before. This was done solely to acquaint the people
in law enforcement with the people doing mischief in their town, the premise being that the bad guys would continue being bad all their lives and it was a good thing to be able to recognize them on the street.

Nowadays, lineups were held only for purposes of identification, the suspected perp standing on a lighted stage with five innocent people, two of whom were usually squadroom detectives, the victim sitting behind a one-way mirror hoping to pick out a winner. But there was also another type of lineup, and it took place on television news programs whenever the tapes from hidden surveillance cameras were shown. On the five o'clock news that Monday night, the surveillance tapes from the pizzeria cameras were run for the first time, revealing in all their glory the two bold gunmen who had sprinted into the place and sprayed it with bullets. Danny Nelson's assailants were identifiable chiefly by race, but otherwise blurry to anyone who didn't really know them. In any event, no one came forward.

In a brilliant public-relations move, however, Restaurant Affiliates, Inc.—the company that owned the Guido's Pizzeria chain—now posted a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the capture and conviction of the two gunmen who'd shot up their fine establishment on Culver Avenue. That RA, Inc. seemed more interested in the damage done to their place of business than to the untimely demise of Danny Nelson went unnoticed by television viewers and newspaper readers alike. Informers were admittedly the scum of the earth, the campaign suggested, but public places should not be submitted to wanton violence. Linking pizza to after-school sports and public prayer, the TV commercials and newspaper ads called for swift apprehension of the culprits and stricter gun control everywhere in this wild and woolly nation. In conjunction with the police, an 800 line was set up and strict confidence was guaranteed any caller. A newspaper columnist wryly commented that Charlton Heston had stopped eating pizza in favor of a Japanese dish called Shogun Sushi, a weak pun on “shotgun,” but
this was the afternoon paper. The column caused no end of amusement among the executive types up at RA, Inc.

Still no one came forward.

In a bit more than three weeks' time, the Danny Gimp case passed from intense media scrutiny to total oblivion.

Thanksgiving Day seemed almost an afterthought.

HE HAD
drunk too much, and had argued with his uncle Dominick too loudly about whichever war was current wherever in the world. His uncle's attitude was always and ever “Let's bomb the shit out of them!” Carella had heard these words from him ever since he was old enough to understand, and his mother had always warned, “Dom, the children,” but that hadn't stopped Uncle Dominick, who looked like an enforcer for the mob, and who—for all Carella knew, but never asked—might very well have been one in his younger days.

They had got back home to Riverhead at about nine that night and the twins had reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that there was no school tomorrow, so they'd allowed them to stay up for a Thanksgiving special on NBC. Carella was still grumbling about his thick-headed uncle and Teddy was signing that maybe he should take a nice hot shower before he went to bed because tomorrow was another day, and
he
wasn't off from school, and there would always be another war to fight in this sorry world of ours and more people out of whom to bomb the S-H-I-T, which word
she spelled out letter by letter with her fingers lest Carella miss the point that he was beginning to
annoy
her. He came out of the shower looking wet and contrite and in need of a haircut, which she hadn't noticed before.

He didn't say anything to her until she herself was in her nightgown—a long flannel granny because even with the temperature set at seventy-two, the old house was drafty and cold on this dank November night—her dark hair loose about her face, wearing a moisturizing cream she claimed was non-greasy but which he swore was made from goose grease, pulling back the covers, and jumping in quickly, and then reaching over to turn out the light—but his flying fingers caught her attention.

“I'm sorry,” he said aloud, signing simultaneously.

She was half-turned away from him, she missed what he was saying. He said it again.

“I'm sorry.”

And signed it.

Only baby boomers in their late forties believed that love meant never having to say you're sorry. Everyone else knew that if you truly loved someone and had hurt her, you
had
to say you were sorry—but you only had to say it once. You didn't have to get down on your hands and knees and beg forgiveness over and over again for the rest of your life, not if the person believed you. You just said it once. “I'm sorry.” Unless you had a wife who could not hear your voice because she'd been born without hearing, and could not see your hands because her back was partially turned, in which case you said it again. “I'm sorry.” And she heard you this time, and nodded, and took one of your hands between both hers, and nodded again.

They left the light on.

She moved into his arms, on his pillow, and he kissed the top of her head and held her close and told her it hadn't been his jackass uncle Dom who'd caused him to drink too much at his mother's
house this cold Thanksgiving Day, but instead it was the dead old guy hanging from a bathroom hook and Danny Gimp getting shot in that pizzeria and the girl stabbed uptown in Fat Ollie's precinct that made him feel so goddamn worthless. It was suddenly as if all the cases he'd ever closed out had burst open again, exploding into a triple fireworks display trailing white-hot sparks on the night, a single brutal case where everything seemed linked but perhaps nothing was. And on top of that, his jackass uncle Dom probably
had
been a muscle man for a neighborhood smalltime hood named Vinnie Pineapples, a fat slob with bigger tits than most women had.

Teddy listened to everything he had to say, her eyes performing their magic trick of watching his moving fingers and his moving lips at one and the same time, and then she told him how she herself always felt so worthless at the beginning of the holidays because there were so many gifts to buy, but especially this year when they were short of cash because of the payments on the new car. She didn't want to take a job stuffing grocery bags at the supermarket, but at the same time not very many prospective employers wanted someone around the office who was handicapped, even though she could take steno and type eighty words a minute and was proficient in Word and Quicken and was very well-organized, go ask the twins. So he had to forgive her if sometimes she moped around the house, it was just that she often felt she wasn't doing enough for him or the children, wasn't doing enough for
herself
. And Vinnie Pineapples probably
did
have bigger tits than hers.

In the dead of night, in the dark, with the children sleeping soundly in their separate bedrooms down the hall, and the house as still as her own silent world, they comforted each other.

In a little while, Teddy fell asleep.

Carella lay awake for most of the night.

A lapsed Catholic—the last time he'd been to church was when he'd investigated the murder of a priest slain during vespers—Carella
should have felt some vestiges of religious fervor during the Yuletide season, but instead he felt only guilt. Thanksgiving Day marked a full month since Andrew Hale was murdered. The beginning of the Christmas shopping season on the following day should have signaled the beginning of a month-long celebration that would not end until the last carol was sung and the last nog drunk on Boxing Day. Instead, it served as a reminder that the case was still unresolved. Carella wondered if Fat Ollie Weeks, a mile or so uptown, was experiencing the same feelings of helplessness and remorse. He almost called him. Instead, he slogged through a caseload that seemed to grow more mountainous day by day, taking small solace from the fact that the children seemed to be finding more joy in the holiday season than he did.

Meyer was similarly depressed.

A Jew in a Christian nation, he always felt oddly dispossessed at Christmas time. Never mind the euphemistic Chanukah bush he and Sarah had put up for the kids when they were small and still believed in Santa Claus. Never mind the gifts and the greetings exchanged. Try as he might to convince himself that the season had less to do with religion than with people being kind to each other, he could never shake the knowledge that this was not
his
holiday. He had once invited Carella and his family to a seder, and Carella had later confessed that he'd felt oddly out of place, even though Meyer had himself conducted the traditional ceremony, in English. Carella would hide Meyer in his basement in a minute and fight a thousand Nazis who tried to break down the door. Carella would break the head of anyone who made the slightest derogatory remark to Meyer. Carella would defend Meyer with his honor and his very life. But he had felt strange celebrating Passover with him. A measure of their friendship was that he'd been able to admit this.