The Big Bad City (24 page)

“Well, I guess the others told you about it,” Farnes said.

“What’s that?” Brown asked.

“The drowning,” Farnes said.

On television that night, the Chief of Detectives said there was no way his officers could have known beforehand that the man in that apartment was not the Leslie Blyden they were looking for. They could not understand why the man in the apartment had come at them with a knife. The man had no reason to behave so irrationally. They had announced themselves as police. He knew they were police. They had asked him to identify himself. What had got into the fellow?

“My four detectives all acted within the guidelines,” he told the estimated four million people watching the eleven o’clock news. “They had a No-Knock warrant backed by probable cause. They had good reason to believe a burglar who had murdered two people was in that apartment. They went in with service pistols drawn because there was the distinct possibility that the man who’d already shot two people might be armed and dangerous on this occasion as well. They opened fire because the suspect had come at one of the detectives with a knife in his hand, was in fact ready to plunge that knife into the officer’s chest if they hadn’t taken preventive action when they did.”

The Chief of Detectives told the anchorman that in spite of all this there would be a thorough investigation.

Meanwhile, The Cookie Boy was still out there.

T
HE GIRL’S NAME WAS
T
IRANA
H
OBBS AND SHE TOLD
O
LLIE
W
EEKS SHE’D NEVER SEEN THIS
Sonny character before Friday night, hadn’t seen him since, and didn’t care to see him ever again, thanks. So what was this all about?

“Owner of the Siesta says you were sitting with Sonny Cole, is his full name, and a person named Julian Judell on Friday night, must’ve been around ten, ten-thirty, is that correct?”

“I just told you that’s the first and onliest time I ever seed the man.”

They were in the Diamondback apartment the girl shared with her mother and her two younger brothers. The brothers were still asleep in one of the rooms at the rear. Mama was in church. The girl was wearing a red robe over cotton pajamas. No makeup. Frizzed blonde hair looking like straw that had got hit by lightning. They were sitting at an enamel-topped table in a window open to the backyard. It was a bright hot sunny Sunday, and church bells were calling to the faithful and anyone else who cared to enjoy their mellifluent clamor.

“How about Judell? He goes by Juju. What was your relationship with him?”

“
Relationship
? What kind of
relationship
? I met him ten minutes before I met the other guy. What’d the two of them do, anyway?”

“One of them got himself killed,” Ollie said, trying to look sorrowful, the way television newscasters do
when they’re reporting a tragedy they don’t give a damn about. Ah yes, the bullshit of it all, he thought in his best W. C. Fields mode. “I was wondering did him and Sonny say where they might be going when they left the club?”

“For a walk.”

“A walk where?”

“Couldn’t be far cause they said they’d be back in a few minutes.”

“Way I understand it,” Ollie said, “Sonny came back about twenty minutes later, looking for you.”

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“Owner told him you were gone.”

“Then I guess I must’ve been.”

“What time did they leave for their little walk, would you remember?”

“I got no idea.”

“Ten-thirty? Around then?”

“I didn’t look at my watch.”

“Did Juju mention some hot babe he was going to meet?”

“No, all Juju did was put the moves on me.”

“So you didn’t get the impression they were leaving there to meet some woman.”

“No, Sonny said there were a few things him and Juju should talk about if he had a minute. That’s what prompted him to say they should take a walk.”

“Sonny?”

“No, was Juju who suggested it. Sonny was the one said it wouldn’t take but a few minutes.”

“Okay, thanks a lot, miss,” Ollie said.

For nothing, he thought.

·  ·  ·

This could have been Santo Domingo on any given day of the week. The women dressed in their church finery, the men looking slender and sleek and clean-shaven, the people out for a Sunday morning stroll, the sun shining brightly overhead. Almost made you forget for a minute that this was one of the shittiest parts of the city, rife with drugs and teeming with people itching to get the hell out of here the minute they made enough money to go back home and start a little business—or so Ollie conjectured. He’d probably have been surprised to learn that as many immigrants from Ireland went back home as did immigrants from the Dominican Republic. The Irish simply looked more American. But to Ollie, looks were ninety percent of the argument.

He figured the only route Sonny and Juju could have taken on Friday night was straight down to the river. Two black guys might’ve been mistaken for spics in this neighborhood, but only if they kept their mouths shut. Miracle was that they’d been in a Dominican club to begin with, but that’s where the ass was, Ollie supposed. He automatically figured Tirana Hobbs was a bleached-blonde black hooker peddling her wares to any spic came along. He didn’t know she was a manicurist, and he wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told him so. The nice thing about Ollie’s beliefs was that they were unshakable.

So he guessed the two black gents out for a friendly little walk wouldn’t have stopped in any local bar to sample the beer or the broads because Friday night could turn suddenly mean and dangerous in this neighborhood unless you were in a social club like the Siesta, where apparently Juju was well-known, according to the owner. Who’d also volunteered that he suspected Juju had connections with the drug people here in
Hightown, though he didn’t suggest
which
drug people, of whom there were only thousands. Ollie figured he was sucking up because he had a brother in jail or a sister in rehab. Around here, nobody offered information unless they were plea-bargaining. The man did not, however, mention that Juju was also a pimp who probably ran girls out of his little old Club Siesta here. Kept
that
bit of information strictly to himself, lest a padlock appear on his front door one fine night.

So if Sonny and Juju were walking to a quiet place where they could talk, why
not
down to the river? Have a seat on the rocks in the shadow of the bridge, discuss this pressing matter that was on Sonny’s mind. Not a bad surmise, ah yes, considering the fact that Juju’s body with his face all gone had been found nudging the pilings under the dock on Hector Street, not too terribly far downriver.

Ollie took a stroll down to the river himself, not expecting to find anything there, and not disappointed when he didn’t. His thinking, of course, was good riddance to bad rubbish, a black dope-dealer pimp, who gave a shit? But it irked him that Sonny Cole was out there thinking the cops couldn’t reach him. Bothered him further when he remembered that this was the guy Blue Wisdom said had put away Carella’s father, which made it nice if Ollie could run into him in a dark alley some night and repay the favor.

Thing was, first he had to find him.

Sal Roselli all at once remembered that the guy who ran The Last Stand had fallen into the water dead drunk the very night they ended their engagement there.

“We didn’t learn that until we were already up in Calusa,” he said.

“That he’d fallen into the river behind the club …”

“Yeah.”

“And drowned.”

“Yeah.”

“Is what Davey Farnes told us,” Brown said.

“We were long gone when it happened,” Roselli said. “We didn’t find out about it till the next day. Calusa cops came around, wanted to know if we’d seen anything, heard anything, you know how cops are.”

They were sitting not far from a small inflatable plastic pool behind Roselli’s development house on Sand’s Spit. His two little girls were in the water, splashing around. Brown was wondering why there had to be kids making noise every time they talked to somebody. Roselli’s wife, a somewhat overweight brunette wearing wedgies and a brown maillot, had gone into the house to mix some lemonade.

Roselli was wearing one of those skimpy swimsuits that made it look like all he had on was a shiny black jockstrap. Brown wondered how he had the balls, so to speak, to wear such a suit in front of his two little girls, couldn’t have been older than two or three. Roselli seemed oblivious. Black hair curling on his narrow chest, sweat beaded on his forehead under matching curly hair, he reclined in a lawn chair, smiling at the day. Brown wondered if he’d done a few lines just before they arrived. He had the look of a man serenely oblivious.

“How come you didn’t mention it when we were here?” he asked.

“I didn’t think it was important,” Roselli said, and shrugged.

“Man drowns, you didn’t think it was important?”

“It had nothing to do with us. We were transients. Play the music, take the money, go our merry way.”

“How many places you been where a man drowned?” Brown asked.

“Not very many. Not any, in fact.”

“But you didn’t think it was important enough to mention?”

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think of it.”

“Did the drowning have anything to do with Katie’s decision?” Carella asked.

There was a slight edge to his voice;
he
didn’t like Roselli’s choice of swimwear, either.

“What decision was that?”

“To leave the band.”

“To call it quits.”

“To go back to the order.”

“I have no idea what prompted her decision,” Roselli said. “Josie!” he called. “No splashing, honey.”

His wife was coming out of the house, carrying a tray with a pitcher and several glasses on it. The screen door slammed shut behind her. She put the tray down on the table, said, “Help yourselves, please,” and then went to sit in a plastic folding chair near the pool where her daughters splashed and squealed. Occasionally, she glanced back to where the detectives and her husband were sitting, a concerned look on her face. They figured their presence here a second time was making her nervous. The daughters seemed a little skittish, too. Altogether, Brown and Carella sensed an almost palpable air of tension around the pool.

But four years ago a man had drowned.

And a week ago Friday a nun had been strangled in the park.

“You said you were long gone when it happened,” Carella prompted. “Can you tell us …?”

“I’ll try to remember the sequence,” Roselli said.

Odd choice of language, Carella thought. Sequence.

“We played three shows that Thursday night,” Roselli said. “That was because Charlie ran some ads. And also because we were damn good, he said modestly, but we
were
, truly. After that tour, if Katie hadn’t left the band … but that’s another story. What’s done is done, what’s gone is gone.”

He lifted the pitcher, poured lemonade for all of them. From the pool, Mrs. Roselli and the little girls watched. Brown felt the way he had in Dr. Lowenthal’s office, when the woman in the green hat kept staring at them.

“The last show ended at two in the morning. We’d planned to drive up to Calusa the following day, sometime in the afternoon, set up when we got there. This was the Friday before Labor Day, we were scheduled to play that whole long weekend in Calusa, and then head north again. But we were all so high none of us could sleep,” Roselli said. “Well, except for Tote, he could sleep through World War III. He went back to his cabin, but the rest of us couldn’t stop jabbering. Have you ever felt that way? Where everything was so exciting, you just couldn’t calm down afterward?”

Like after a shoot-out in a bank, Brown thought. You answer a 10-30, and there are six guys in masks holding Uzis on the tellers, and all hell breaks loose. Like after that. When you’re drinking saloon beer with
the other guys and you can’t go home, you can’t even think of going home, this is where it is, this is what you shared. Like that.

“It was Davey who suggested that we pick up our pay, pack the van, and drive up to Calusa right then. Two-thirty, three in the morning, drive the hundred and fifty miles, whatever it was, go straight to sleep when we got there. We all thought it was a terrific idea. So Alan and I started packing the van … he’s dead now, you know. Died last month. Of AIDS. We all went to the funeral. Not Katie, of course, who the hell knew where
she
was? Disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, sure, a nun. Sister Mary Vincent. But who knew that?”

“So you and Alan were packing the van,” Brown said.

“Yeah. Carrying the instruments out while Davey and Katie went to get our pay. What a lot of these club owners did, they paid the musicians in cash. We’d been there a full week, there was a sizable amount of money due. This was now close to three in the morning, the parking lot was empty, you could hear the night insects racketing down by the water …”

From where he and Alan are loading the instruments into the van, Sal can see Davey and Katie going into Charlie Custer’s office. The air here in the Everglades is always laden with moisture; the two musicians are sweating heavily as they carry gear from the bandstand to the van. Down here in Florida, they’ve been performing in blue slacks and identical T-shirts with alternating blue and white stripes. Katie wears a blue mini and the T-shirt without a bra, the better to demonstrate her singing prowess. They are wearing the uniforms now, the trousers wrinkled, the T-shirts
stained with perspiration as they pack for the trip north.

Over the past several months, they have learned how to pack the van most efficiently, fitting in the drums, the speakers, the amps, the guitar cases, and the keyboard like pieces in a Chinese box. Davey’s drums are the biggest problem, of course. They take up the most room. Besides, he is enormously fussy about how they are handled and usually insists that he himself be the one to pack them. Back and forth the pair of them go, Alan and Sal, from bandstand to van, Sal and Alan, to the rooms for the suitcases, Alan and Sal knocking on Tote’s door to wake him up, and lastly going to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the long drive north. Out on the water, they can hear the splash of an alligator.