Long black hair pulled into a ponytail. Soulful brown eyes. Delicate, long-fingered hands. Great profile.
His name was Marvin.
Change it, Priscilla thought.
“I’ll tell you why we’re here, Marvin,” she said.
Marvin. Jesus.
He was looking at her card, impressed. He figured the two goons were bodyguards. Lady played piano at the Powell, she needed
bodyguards. He hoped that one day, when he was a matinee idol, or a movie star, or both, he would have bodyguards of his own.
Meanwhile he was honored that she was here in their midst. Shitty little dump like this, hey.
“The man we’re looking for, Marvin …”
Jesus.
“… is someone who would’ve been here yesterday morning around eleven-thirty, maybe a bit later.”
She was figuring half an hour or so to get uptown by cab, on a Sunday morning, when the traffic would’ve been light. The blond
man had left the hotel at a little past eleven. Placing him on Harris Avenue at eleven-thirty was reasonable.
“Yeah, it’s possible,” Marvin said. “We start serving breakfast at six.”
“Are you still serving at eleven-thirty?”
“On Sundays, yeah. We get a big brunch crowd, serve till two-thirty, three o’clock, then open again at nine. We’re open all
weekend, closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, dead nights here in the city.”
“Were you working this past Saturday night?”
“I come on at four
every
night. That’s when we go underground and the shift changes. Well, not Tuesdays or Wednesdays.”
“Did you come on at four this past Saturday night?”
“Yeah. Well, Sunday
morning
it was, actually.”
“Four
a.m
., right?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you here at eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock?”
“Yeah, I work through till we close. Sunday’s a long day. I put in almost twelve hours. Rest of the week, we close at nine
in the morning. It’s like a courtesy breakfast we serve. For the all-night crowd.”
Georgie was wondering how come, if Marvin came on at
four
every morning but Tuesday and Wednesday, how come he was here, now, at
three
, three-fifteen, whatever the hell it was on a
Monday
morning? He looked at his watch. Twenty after. So how come, Marvin?
Marvin was a mind reader.
“Jerry called me to come in early,” he explained.
Who’s Jerry? Georgie wondered.
“Cause Frank started throwing up.”
Who’s Frank? Georgie wondered.
“Must’ve been one of those flu bugs,” Marvin explained.
“So today you came in early, is that what you’re saying?” Tony asked.
“Yeah, I got here about an hour ago.”
“How about yesterday?” Priscilla asked.
“I got here the usual time.”
“Four
a.m
.”
“Right.”
“The man we’re looking for would’ve been blond,” Priscilla said.
“You’re a cop, right?” Marvin said.
“No, I’m an entertainer. You saw my card.”
“How about your two friends here? Are they cops?”
“Do they look like cops?” Priscilla asked.
They didn’t look like cops to Marvin.
“Tall blond man wearing a blue coat and a red scarf,” Priscilla said.
Marvin was already shaking his head.
“See anyone like that?” Georgie asked.
He was pleased that Marvin was shaking his head. What he wanted to do now was get out of here fast, before Marvin the mind
reader changed his mind.
“I don’t remember anyone who looked like that,” Marvin said.
Good, Tony thought. Let’s get the hell out of here.
“But why don’t you ask Anna?” Marvin said. “She’s the one would’ve taken his coat.”
They finally found Jose Santiago at 3:25
a.m
. that Monday. They figured that a man who kept pigeons, and also drove a fighting rooster around in the backseat of a borrowed
limo, had to be a bird fancier of sorts. So they checked out the roof of his building again, and sure enough, there he was,
sitting with his back against the side wall of his pigeon coop. Last time they were here, dawn was fast approaching on a cold
Sunday morning. Now, on an even colder Monday morning, sunrise was still approximately four hours away, and they were no closer
to learning who had killed Svetlana Dyalovich on Saturday night. Nor did it appear that Santiago was going to offer any assistance
in that direction. Santiago was weeping. He was also very, very drunk.
“Jose Santiago?” Hawes asked.
“That is me,” Santiago said.
“Detective Cotton Hawes, Eighty-seventh Squad.”
“Mi gusto,”
Santiago said.
“My partner, Detective Carella.”
“Igualmente,”
Santiago said, and tilted a bottle of Don Quixote rum to his lips and took a long swallow. It was perhaps two degrees below
zero out here, but he was wearing only blue jeans, a white shirt, and a pink V-necked cotton sweater. He was a slender man
in his early thirties, Carella guessed, with curly black hair, a pale complexion, and delicate features. His dark brown eyes
seemed out of focus, moist at the moment because he was still weeping. Immediately after the detectives introduced themselves,
he seemed to forget their presence. As if alone here on the roof, he began shaking his head over and over again, weeping more
bitterly, clutching the rum to his narrow chest, his knuckles white around the neck of the bottle. In the bitter cold, his
breath plumed onto the night.
“What’s the matter, Jose?” Hawes asked gently.
“I killed him,” Santiago said.
Here in the dead of night, the pigeons still and silent behind Santiago, both detectives felt their backs stiffen. But the
man who’d just confessed to murder seemed completely harmless, sitting there sobbing, clutching the bottle to his chest, hot
tears rolling down his face and freezing at once.
“Who’d you kill?” Hawes asked.
Voice still gentle. The night black around them. Carella standing beside him, looking down at the sobbing man in the pink
cotton sweater, ridiculous for this time of year, sitting with his knees bent, his back to the dark silent pigeon coop.
“Tell us who you killed, Jose.”
“Diablo.”
“Who’s Diablo?”
“Mi hermano de sangue.”
My blood brother.
“Is that his street name? Diablo?”
Santiago shook his head.
“It’s his real name?”
Santiago nodded.
“Diablo
what
?”
Santiago tilted the bottle again, swallowed more rum, began coughing and sobbing and choking. The detectives waited.
“What’s his last name, Jose?”
Hawes again. Carella stayed out of it. Just stood there with his right hand resting inside the overlapping flap of his coat,
where three buttons were unbuttoned at the waist. He may have looked a bit like Napoleon with his hand inside his coat that
way, but his holster and the butt of a .38 Detective Special were only inches away from his fingertips. Santiago said nothing.
Hawes tried another tack.
“When did you kill this person, Jose?”
Still no answer.
“Jose? Can you tell us when this happened?”
Santiago nodded.
“Then when?”
“Friday night.”
“This past Friday night?”
Santiago nodded again.
“Where? Can you tell us where, Jose? Can you tell us what happened?”
And now, in the piercing cold of the night, Santiago began a rambling recitation in English and in Spanish, telling them it
was all his fault, it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t
allowed
it, he had killed Diablo as certainly as if he’d slit his throat with a knife. Swilling rum, spitting, slobbering down the
front of the absurd cotton sweater, his hands shaking, telling them he’d always taken care of him like a brother, they were
partners, he’d never done anything to harm him, never. But on Friday night he’d killed him as sure as if he’d, oh dear God,
he’d killed him, oh sweet Mary, he’d allowed the thing he loved most in the entire world to be slashed and torn …
Carella was beginning to get it.
… to shreds, he should have stopped it the moment he realized …
So was Hawes.
… how it would end, the moment he saw that the other bird was stronger, he should have stopped the fight, climbed into the
ring, snatched his prizefighting rooster away from the ripping steel talons of the bigger, stronger bird. But no, instead
he’d watched in horror, covering his face at last, screaming aloud like a woman when poor Diablo was slain.
“I killed him,” he said again.
And now he confessed that he’d suspected from the start that the other bird was on steroids, the sheer
size
of him, a vulture against a chick, poor brave Diablo strutting into the ring like the proud champion he was, battling in
vain against overwhelming odds, giving his life …
“I was greedy,” Santiago said, “I had ten thousand dollars bet on him, I thought he could still win, the blood, so much blood,
all over his feathers,
madre de Dios
! I should have tried to stop the slaughter. There are owners who jump into the ring during a fight, without the permission
of the fence judge, there are strict rules, you know, but they break the rules, they save their beloved birds. I was greedy
and I was afraid of breaking the rules, and so I let him die. I could have saved his life, I
should
have saved his life, forgive me, Mary, mother of God, I took an innocent life.”
“What
else
did you take?” Carella asked.
Because all at once this was still the tale of a gun and a dead old woman, and not a sad soap opera about a dead chicken.
People ate chicken every Sunday.
“Take?” Santiago asked drunkenly. “What do you mean?”
“You drove Diablo uptown in a limo, didn’t you?”
“He was a champion!”
“You stole a black Caddy …”
“I borrowed it!”
“… from Bridge Texaco. A limo that …”
“I
returned
it!”
“… was in for a new engine.”
“He was a champion!”
“He was a bird who needed a ride uptown.”
“A hero!”
“Who made a mess all over the backseat.”
“A
mess
? A champion’s feathers!
Diablo’s
feathers!”
Diablo’s shit, too, Hawes thought.
“How could I bear
touching
them?” Santiago said, and began weeping again. He tilted the rum bottle to his lips, but it was empty. He wiped his nose
on the sleeve of the pink sweater.
“Did you find a gun in the glove compartment of that car?” Carella asked.
“No. Hey, no. No.”
“Did you
know
there was a gun in the glove compartment?”
“No. What gun? A gun? No.”
“A .38 Smith & Wesson.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t see the gun, huh?”
“No.”
“Didn’t know it was in the glove compartment.”
“No.”
“That’s good, Jose. Because the gun was used in a murder …”
“A murder? No.”
“A murder, yes.”
“And if we can trace that gun to you …”
“If your fingerprints are on that gun, for example …”
“I didn’t shoot anybody with that gun.”
“Oh? You know the gun we mean, huh?”
“I know the gun, yes. But …”
“Did you steal it from that glove compartment?”
“I borrowed it.”
“Same way you borrowed the limo, huh?”
“I
did
borrow the limo. And I borrowed the gun, too.”
“Why?”
“To shoot the bird who killed Diablo.”
“So this was after the match, huh?”
“Sí.”
“You took the gun from the car
after
the match.”
“Sí. To shoot the bird.”
“
Did
you shoot the bird?”
“No. The cops came. I was going back in the theater when I saw all these cops. So I ran back to the garage.”
“With the gun.”
“With the gun,
sí
.”
“What did you do with the gun then?”
“I sold it.”
The detectives looked at each other.
“That’s right,” Jose said. “I sold it.”
Carella sighed.
So did Hawes.
“Who’d you sell it to?”
“A man I met at a club up the street.”
“What club?”
“The Juice Bar.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“You sold a stolen gun to a man you didn’t even
know
?”
“We were talking, he said he needed a gun. So I happened to have a gun. So I sold it to him.”
“You sold him a gun you’d just stolen.”
“I had just lost my best friend in the whole world.”
“What’s that got to do with stealing a gun and selling it?”
“I
also
lost ten thousand dollars.”
“Ah. So how much did you get for the gun?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“That’s cutting your losses, all right,” Hawes said.
“My greatest loss was Diablo.”
“What’d he look like?” Carella asked.
“He was a white bird, large in the chest, with …”
“The man who bought the gun.”
“Oh. He was a tall blond guy.”
“Blond guy with a blue coat and a red scarf, yeah,” Anna said. “Tall blond guy. Sure. Matter of fact, he was in here
twice
.”
This was beginning to get interesting.
Georgie hoped it wouldn’t get
too
interesting.
“The first time was Friday night around midnight,” Anna said. “He was meeting a guy named Bernie, comes in here all the time.
Scar on his right cheek, I think he’s a bookie.”
“The blond guy?” Tony asked.
“No, Bernie.”
“Did you happen to get his name?” Priscilla asked.
“I just told you. Bernie.”
“I mean the blond guy.”
“No, I didn’t. Matter of fact, the first time I laid eyes on him was Friday night.”
“When was the next time he came in?”
“Yesterday,” Anna said. “Around twelve noon. Met with Bernie again. They sat right over there,” she said, and pointed to a
table. “Money changed hands. At least yesterday, it did. On Friday, they were just talking. He seemed very angry.”