The Big Bad City (20 page)

We got The Racketeers from Davey’s father, by the way. He came in one day while we were rehearsing in Davey’s living room, and remarked in his Deliberately Dense Parent mode, “This racket you’re making … is it supposed to be music?” Hence The Racketeers, imminently to become The Five Chord the moment Davey’s father came up with yet another name for the band. This was after Katie had joined us, there were now
five
of us in the band. This time Davey’s father was in his Learned Elder mode, explaining that rock bands play mostly in the key of G, and the five chord in the key of G is the D triad. That’s D, F sharp, and A, if you’d like to try it on your accordion. So what Mr. Farnes—that’s Davey’s father’s name, Anthony Farnes,
he
sounds Dickensian, too, I just realized.
Looked
sort of Dickensian, for that matter. Anyway, what he was trying to do was convey the fact that this was a rock band, and there were
five
of us in it. The
five
chord, dig? And the five chord in the key of G, which is the key favored …

“Forget it,” Roselli said. “I guess you had to be there.” He turned the nozzle of the hose, began spraying another section of lawn. “A nun, huh?” he said. “Who’d have expected it?”

“The Sisters of Christ’s Mercy,” Carella said.

“I mean … it wasn’t that she was
wild
or anything, quite the contrary. But a
nun
? I mean, come on. Katie?”

She may have
looked
like your kid sister, but this was the girl who wrote songs you could fry eggs on. Five-seven, weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, skinny as a wren, but nice breasts. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail that first time she sang for us, you never expected this sexy voice to come out of her mouth. Turned out she knew all the R&B repertoire, could do all the later rock stuff, too—well,
everything
, for that matter. Pop, Broadway show tunes, you name it, Katie could sing it. I guess we all four of us fell in love with her that very first day. Summertime was just around the corner, this must’ve been April when we auditioned her.

I remember the booking agent Herbie sent us to wanted to know if the name of the band was supposed to be
plural
. Hymie Rogers, his name was, a short, fat guy with a cigar he kept chomping. “Is it The Five
Chords
?” he wanted to know.

“No, it’s The Five
Chord
,” Davey said, sounding a little pissed off that the guy hadn’t understood the reference, a booking agent for
rock
bands, for Christ’s sake! At the time, I felt this was a mistake on Davey’s part, getting so agitated, I mean. I mean, we weren’t Pink
Floyd
, we were a garage band with a girl singer whose voice could shatter concrete. Which, of course, the agent recognized the minute Katie opened her mouth.

Make a long story short, he booked us for “a summer tour of Dixie,” as he called it, which meant we’d be following a club circuit that ran through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia before heading into Florida, where we’d play Tampa and St. Pete, and a town near
the Everglades, and then back north again to end the tour in Calusa. Every rock band’s dream tour, right?

This was three years ago.

Well, let me see, I was twenty-five at the time. So that makes it … well, wait a minute, it was
four
years ago. That means I was only twenty-four. Jesus. We all had beards back then, all the guys on the band. Davey was exactly my age, give or take a few weeks. Tote was a little older. You ought to talk to him. I mean, he’d probably give you a different slant. He knew Katie better than any of us.

Anyway, we left the city here on the last day of June, for the beginning of the tour, a Fourth-of-July-weekend gig in Richmond, Virginia. The way we traveled was in a sports utility wagon, a used Jeep actually that Davey had picked up cheap from a bass player leaving for a gig in London. There was plenty of room for the five of us plus the instruments, speakers, amps, all of it, inside the car. Every night, we carried
everything
into whichever cheap motel we were staying at. Some of these towns we played, you wouldn’t leave a stick of
chewing
gum in the car, no less instruments and equipment worth thousands of dollars.

A favorite joke of ours was “Are you
sure
the Beatles got started this way?” That was whenever anything went wrong. Like when we pulled up in front of a club called The Roadside
Palace
or some such and it turned out to be this ramshackle dive on the edge of a cliff. Or when we plugged in one night—this was in Georgia someplace—and blew out every light in the club. The owner took a fit till we advised him to put candles on all the tables and find us some acoustic guitars and an upright piano, which for Georgia worked remarkably
well, Katie singing all kinds of bluesy shit and all of us playing sort of hushed and reverential behind her, a kind of
intime
evening, if you dig. Then there was the time …

On and on, Roselli went, reminiscing about that summer tour four years ago, painting it in glowing terms while the sultry afternoon waned and the detectives worried about hitting heavy traffic going back into the city. Finally, he turned off the recitation and the hose.

“I hope I’ve been helpful,” he said.

He hadn’t.

He was afraid he might never do another burglary.

Burglary was his entire life. He truly enjoyed what he did, but now he was fearful that he might never derive pleasure from it again. He’d really been frightened that day, he admitted it to himself now. And because he’d been so frightened, he hadn’t done another job since. Nor had he baked any cookies. The one enjoyment was linked to the other, and all because of a clumsy accident he’d been deprived of both pleasures. All he could think was that the police would knock on his door at any moment.

They had to know he was the one who’d been in that apartment. He didn’t know how they’d found out, but he knew they knew. Otherwise, why had all the television stories stopped? How come there was nothing more about The Cookie Boy? No cute little stories about the burglar who left behind chocolate chip cookies. He was sure the police were behind that. They’d been told to throw a blanket over any news release about him. Probably some trick to keep him
complacent while they closed in. Any minute now, they’d knock on his door. Probably were questioning everyone in the neighborhood right this minute. Know anybody who bakes cookies? Tightening the net. See anybody who looks like this man? Did they have a composite drawing of him? Had someone seen him going in or coming out of the building that day?

He tried to think of any mistakes he’d made in the apartment. Had he wiped everything clean? He couldn’t remember. He usually did that because he knew his fingerprints were on file from his days in the army, but now he couldn’t remember. That’s because he’d been so frightened. Such a stupid encounter. He sometimes thought he should go to the police, tell them he hadn’t killed anybody in that apartment, it was the
woman
who’d done all the goddamn shooting, it was the
woman
who had the weapon! Had he somehow left fingerprints on it? No, his hands were over hers, she was the one with her finger on the trigger, she was the one who’d first shot the boy and then shot herself. Maybe he
should
go to the police. Sure, how are you, they’d say, nice you stopped by. That’s two counts of felony murder, so long, fella, see you in a hundred years.

If only …

Well, look, there was no sense second-guessing this. What happened happened. He should have been more careful, he should have listened more intently, he shouldn’t have taken a step into that goddamn apartment until he was dead certain nobody was in it.

Had he left something behind?

He didn’t think so.

But had they been able to trace him somehow?
Were they this very instant climbing the steps to the fourth floor here, ready to knock on the door, you are under arrest, you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to …

The ring.

The one he’d given that hooker.

Could they link him to that?

Well, even if they did …

Marilyn Monroe, was that what she’d told him her name was? Jesus, why hadn’t he gotten her real name? Jesus, how could he have been so stupid?

But even if they did …

Wait a minute here.

Suppose somehow they got to the hooker, and suppose, somehow, she told them how she’d got the ring, and suppose, somehow, they knew this was a ring he’d stolen from an apartment three weeks
before
that dumb fucking woman shot herself and that stupid little boy, suppose
all
that. Okay, how could they possibly link the murders to the ring?

They couldn’t.

But suppose they could?

Suppose somehow …

He’d given the woman a phony name, same as she’d given him, he couldn’t even
remember
what name he’d given her. So there was no danger there.

But suppose she’d identified him?

Look, it was
impossible
that they’d been able to track down a cheap whore he’d met in a shitty little bar. But suppose they had, and suppose they’d shown her the ring, and suppose she told them yes this man gave me the ring, this man whatever his name was, whatever name I gave her, traded the ring for my services. And
this man was missing the pinkie on his right hand, suppose she’d mentioned
that
? Suppose she’d been as revulsed by that missing pinkie as most women seemed to be? Suppose she’d remembered that
one
thing about him, never mind anything else, never mind people telling him he looked a little like a young John Travolta, just remember the fucking missing
pinkie!

Well, so what?

He didn’t have a criminal record, so no one was going to be able to tap into a computer and call up all the burglars in the world who had a pinkie missing on the right hand. So fuck you, lady, you remembered the missing pinkie, so who cares?

The only thing they could possibly trace were his fingerprints if he’d left any in that apartment. Go back to his army records, hello, fella, come right along.

He wished he could remember whether or not he’d wiped that apartment clean before he’d left it.

He must have.

He always did.

The call from the Mobile Crime Lab came at six-thirty that night, just as Meyer was taking his nine-millimeter service pistol from his locked desk drawer in preparation for heading home. The technician calling was a man named Harold Fowles who, together with his partner had dusted and vacuumed and otherwise scrutinized the Cooper apartment for hairs, latent prints, semen stains, and the like.

“I’m the one found the cookie crumbles, remember?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” Meyer said. “How are you, Harold?”

“Fine, thanks. Well, a little hot, but otherwise fine.”

“So what’ve you got for me?”

“Well, we went over the latents, and all of them match prints of either the woman or her husband or the kid was banging her, and other members of the family, too, we had a lot of cooperation here, and the maid, and the super who was in there a few weeks ago to unclog the toilet. All people who had legitimate access to the apartment. No wild prints is what I’m saying. Nothing that didn’t belong there, so to speak. Okay.”

Meyer waited.

“We know the guy went in through the dining room window just off the fire escape,” Fowles said. “There were wipe marks outside and inside the window, and imprints of his feet in the carpet where he dropped to the floor and then walked across the room. He left the window open behind him. We also know he went
out
of the apartment by way of the front door. It was unlocked and there were wipe marks on both the inside and the outside knobs. Okay. Something occurred to me.”

Meyer waited.

“If he went to all the trouble of wiping everything clean, then he wasn’t wearing gloves. Maybe he was afraid someone would spot him with gloves on in this heat, who knows, I’m not a criminal. But if he
wasn’t
wearing gloves, and if he didn’t go
out
the same way he went
in
, which I’m positive is the case, then there was one thing he couldn’t have wiped.”

“What was that?” Meyer asked.

“The ladder.”

“What ladder?”

“The fire-escape ladder. The one he had to jump up
for. I went back there this afternoon. I recovered some nice latents from the bottom rung where he pulled the ladder down and also some good ones from the rungs above it, which he left when he was climbing to the first-floor landing. I’m running them through the system now. If the guy’s got any kind of record, criminal or military, maybe we’ve got something. It may take a while, but …”

“I’ll give you my home number,” Meyer said.

Sonny finally caught up with him at ten that night in a private club called Siesta, all the way uptown in a section of the city called Hightown. Here in the shadow of the bridge connecting Isola to the state next door, you had more damn drug dealers than you could find in the entire nation, all of them Dominican, all of them linked to the Colombian cartel. This was dangerous turf, man. Worth your life to look cockeyed at a man standing on a street corner here, lest he believe you were invading his turf. Sonny couldn’t understand what Juju was doing all the way up here where Spanish was the language and a person’s sensitivity could easily turn into a challenge. He was glad he had the Eagle tucked in his belt. He drove around the block three times, looking for a space, and finally parked in front of the club in a zone clearly marked no parking. Fuck it, he thought, and went inside.

The owner of the club was a man named Rigoberto Mendez. Sonny introduced himself and told him he was looking for his good friend Juju Judell. A CD player was oozing dreamy close-dancin music when Sonny stepped into the place. The sweet scent of marijuana floated on air thick with smoke, and skinny girls in clingy, tight summer dresses swayed in the arms of
dudes black and tan. Juju sat at a table in the corner chatting up a tall black girl with bleached blonde frizzy hair and earrings long as fingers hanging from her ears, low-cut dress about to pop with righteous fruit within. He had an eye for the women, Juju did.