Fat Ollie's Book (16 page)

“Looks older than that,” Kling said. “Did you see a doctor about it?”

“No. I put an ice pack on it.”

“Last night?”

“
Yes,
last night,” she said, her voice rising in indignation, a host of unspoken words once again flaring in her eyes and curling on her lip: Why are you asking me the same question over and over again, don't you
believe
me? Why would I lie about a goddamn bee sting? How dare you not
believe
me? My mother has a condo in Fort Laud-erdale, my mother orders monogrammed stationery that costs a fortune!

All of this in her eyes and on her face.

“Who hit you?” Carella asked.

“
Not
Lester, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Then who?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody, but not Lester, huh?”

“What is this? You don't think
I
killed him, do you?” she said, and tried a laugh. “Is
that
what you think?” The laugh died, the indignation flared again in her green eyes. My mother has
attorneys,
her eyes said. How dare you?

But somebody had smacked her in one of those lovely green eyes, and the flesh surrounding it was still discolored red and purple and blue.

“Who hit you?” Carella asked again. “And
when?
”

“My
boyfriend,
okay?” she shouted.

 

THE WAY SHE
tells it, she was going steady with this boy from school…

“I go to Ramsey U,” she said, “I'm a sophomore there, an English major.”

…when she met Lester Henderson while he was giving a talk for the Political Science Department. She went up to chat with him afterward, and to get him to sign this book he'd written titled
Why the Law?,
and to ask the questions she hadn't had a chance to ask from the floor even though she kept waving her hand at the guy with the microphone. Mr. Henderson…

“I was still calling him Mr. Henderson then.”

…told her if she'd like to continue the discussion over a cup of coffee, he'd be happy to, and she said sure because he was so very cute and all in a dynamic, forceful, vibrant, vigorous sort of way, not like Lucas at all.

“Lucas is my boyfriend,” she said. “
Was
my boyfriend.”

“Lucas what?”

“Riley,” she said.

“Is he the one who hung the shiner on you?”

“Yes.”

“Last night?”

“No.”

“When?”

“Monday morning. After I got back to the city.”

“Why?”

“He found out about Lester.”

The way she explains it, she kept seeing Lucas because, after all, he'd pinned her and everything. But at the same time she was seeing Lester once or twice a week, sometimes three or four times, depending on how often he could get away from his wife, and how often she could tell Lucas she had to study for a Chaucer test or something. This had been going on since last November, you know, when Lester spoke at the school, just after Thanksgiving, between Thanksgiving and Christmas was when it started. But Lucas never suspected anything at all, well, you know Lucas, he's so laid back about everything. Until Monday morning.

“On Monday, he came to my apartment…”

“What time was this?”

“Around eleven-thirty.”

“Came to your apartment, yes.”

“And told me he knew where I'd been that weekend…and…and started to hit me.”

“Did he know you'd been with Henderson?”

“Yes.”

“He told you that?”

“Not in those words.”

“What words?”

“He called him ‘That fucking cheap politician.'”

“But he knew it was Henderson.”

“Yes, he knew.”

“Where does your boyfriend live?”

“He's not my boyfriend anymore.”

“Where does he live?”

“831 Granger. Near the school.”

•   •   •

FATS DONNER
didn't call Ollie until twelve noon that Sunday. He announced himself to the desk sergeant as “William Donner,” which didn't ring a bell until Donner said, somewhat impatiently and heatedly, “Fats Donner, tell him it's
Fats
Donner,” at which time the sergeant recognized a snitch if ever there was one. He put Donner through at once.

“You should tell your people to be more alert,” Donner said.

“Why, what happened?” Ollie asked.

“I'm calling with valuable information, and the man doesn't recognize my name?”

“Gee, I'm sorry about that,” Ollie said. “What have you got for me?”

“I've got Emmy,” Donner said.

 

ROSIE WASHINGTON
was not an easy person to keep in sight. A not uncommon mix of Hispanic and African blood, she was a good-looking, light-skinned woman in a community that boasted of many such racial blendings. If she were Chinese, it would be a different story. But the only Chinks up here ran laundries or places that gave women manicures, though Parker supposed the girls who worked in the nail parlors were all Koreans, same fuckin difference.

What Parker was trying to do was ascertain that the buy this coming Tuesday night would indeed take place in the basement of the building at 3211 Culver Av. Toward that end, he thought it might prove providential to put a discreet tail on the lady. His reasoning was that if three hundred large was about to change hands on Tuesday at midnight, the lady would at least case the joint first to make sure she wasn't stepping into another setup like the one on the rooftop with the Miami spics. The Gaucho hadn't actually
said
they were spics, but what else could dope buyers from Miami be? Anyway, Palacios was a spic himself, so what did you expect him to say? My
compadres
ripped off a nice Spanish lady?

All things considered, Rosie Washington was in fact rumored to be a nice lady. That is to say, in a racket where sudden extermination was always a distinct possibility, she hadn't killed anyone yet—or at least she hadn't committed any murders the police
knew
about yet. This was not to say there weren't a multitude of bodies at the bottom of the river or in the trunks of cars at the airport, or even buried in somebody's basement, maybe even the basement in which the lady would be selling cocaine worth three hundred thousand dollars this Tuesday night. It merely meant that for someone who'd been in the business as long as Rosie had, she'd managed to stay remarkably beyond the reach of the law. Except for a minor possessions charge when she was nineteen years old and presumably still learning her trade, there was nothing on her in the files.

Parker hoped to change all that this Tuesday night.

Actually, following Rosie was not such a terrible chore. In fact, it was almost enjoyable. For a woman who was now forty-seven—according to her date of birth at the time of the single possessions bust—she had a very sweet little ass that was a definite pleasure to observe. Swinging up the avenue in a tight black skirt, she looked like any one of the hookers patrolling this turf. Then again, to Parker
all
Puerto Rican girls looked like hookers.

But where was she going in such a hurry?

 

ROSITA WASHINGTON
knew she was being followed.

This troubled her.

The buy was supposed to go down this coming Tuesday at midnight, and this was now already past twelve o'clock on Sunday afternoon and some clumsy cop who looked like a homeless person was on her tail. It was one thing to have to worry about the people supposed to be buying the product from you. It was another to have to worry that maybe the cops had found out. But how?

Two brothers coming toward her from the opposite direction smacked their lips and rolled their eyes and craned their necks at her as she went by. She wanted to tell them Yo, mind your fuckin manners, okay? but you never knew who was carrying a box cutter these days, or even a gun, so it was just better to keep your mouth shut and let them come in their pants.

She stopped to look in the window of a shop selling running shoes and barbells and all kinds of fitness shit, when all she wanted to do was take a quick peek up the street to see if Mr. Law was still on her ass. There he was, stopping to light a cigarette as if he was paying her no mind, oh my what a smart detective you are, mister. Made you the minute you picked me up outside my building, now the problem is how to
shake
you.

She went in the A & P up the street, and then hurried to the ladies' room at the back of the store, figuring to stay in there awhile, let him believe he'd lost her. She'd have gone out the back way, but there wasn't no back way cause there were too many thefts in the hood, you had only one way in and out most stores so you could keep an eye on a woman suddenly got pregnant with a sack of potatoes under her coat. He was waiting outside when she finally hit the street again, pretending to be studying the Mother's Day display of flowering plants on a cart outside the store—was Mother's Day already here? Man, the way these holidays snuck up on you! She marched right past him without skipping a beat, just as if he wasn't there, and kept on walking till she got to a place she
knew
had a back door.

The lettering on the plate glass window of the shop read:

She opened the door and went in.

A little bell tinkled over the door. She closed the door behind her, glanced quickly through the window to make sure the cop was still with her, and then smiled as The Gaucho came out from the back to greet her.

WELL NOW
, Parker thought, isn't this interesting?

The Gaucho is giving us information on a Rosie Washington deal going down this Tuesday night, and here's Rosie herself marching into his shop big as daylight on Sunday afternoon, will wonders never?

Of course, they were both spics, so who knew
what
evil the two of them had cooked up together?

Half-spic, anyway, in her case.

He took up a position across the street, thinking maybe he should try to get a court order to plant a bug in The Cowboy's shop.

 

THE FIRST THING
Palacios thought as he came through the beaded curtains from the back of his shop was that Rosie knew he'd ratted her out.

“Hey, hello, Rosie,” he said, smiling. “What brings you here?”

“I need a dreams book,” she said. “For my cousin.”

Not everyone knew what kind of a shop Palacios ran
behind
his shop. Most people truly did come in for religious, paranormal, or supernatural items. So it was entirely possible that Rosie had a cousin who needed a book that would explain the significance of a recent dream so that she'd know whether she was going to win the lottery or fall under a spell instead. No one but the police knew that Palacios was an informer. Well, of course not. If everyone knew how he picked up a few extra pennies, how could he ever garner any information at all? It was terrifying to think that Rosie had somehow discovered he'd be getting a tidy little sum after they busted her this Tuesday night. Rosie was not in the business of selling violets to opera goers. Rosie was in a business where people broke other people's heads and shot them in the balls.

“What kind of dreams has your cousin been having?” Palacios asked.

“She's been dreaming that a cop is following her,” Rosie said, and Palacios went pale. “Gaucho,” she said in a rush, “I think the law is on my tail. Can I go out your back door?”

Palacios almost wet his pants in relief.

 

AT FIRST
, Ollie thought the girl sitting on the park bench with Donner was the Emmy he was looking for. The girl was a blonde, wearing a short blue skirt and knee-high blue socks, flat brown shoes, and an abundant white blouse. As he came closer to the bench, however, he realized that the girl couldn't be older than thirteen.

“Go play, Heather,” Donner told her. “But don't get lost.”

“Okay, Bill,” the girl said, and smiled at Ollie, and then walked off toward the playground equipment on the hill.

“Little old for you, ain't she?” Ollie said.

“Yeah, well, times are difficult,” Donner said. “You want to lecture me, or you want to hear about Emmy?”

“I'm listening.”

“She's a boy.”

Ollie looked at him.

“That's not what Stein told me.”

“Stein told you right. Emmy can pass for a girl any day of the week. But she ain't Emmy, she's Emilio. And Emilio's a boy.”

“Emilio what?”

“Ah-ha,” Donner said. “That's where the cash comes in.”

“Do you have a last name for him?”

“I do.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I do not.”

“So how much do you want for this
valuable
information?”

“I told you. A deuce.”

“For just a name? No address?”

“The valuable information is that you're looking for a cross-dresser. The minute I give you his name, you're on him like a bag of fleas.”

Ollie sighed.

“Lollipops cost,” Donner said philosophically.

Ollie opened his wallet. He took two hundreds from it, and handed them to Donner. Up on the hill behind them, Heather was on one of the swings, blue skirt flying, white panties showing. Donner fingered the bills.

“Herrera,” he said. “Emilio Herrera.”

Of which there were probably ten thousand in this city alone.

 

LUCAS RILEY
was perhaps twenty years old, they guessed, a skinny, blue-eyed kid some five feet, nine inches tall, freckles spattered all over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, the map of County Donegal all over his face. He was wearing jeans, a Ramsey U sweatshirt, high-topped workmen's shoes, and a baseball cap turned backwards, the peak at the back of his head, the band on his forehead. They found him at last in the library at Ramsey U, and they asked him to come outside with them, please, and then walked him over to the school's football field, empty on Sunday except for some kids in jogging clothes running around the perimeter.

They sat in the stands under a clear blue sky.

The breeze was mild, the sun was shining.

But Lucas Riley had swatted a nineteen-year-old girl last Monday morning at eleven-thirty after he discovered she'd spent the weekend with Lester Henderson. And Henderson had been killed an hour or so before that.

“So tell us about it,” Carella said.

“I lost my temper.”

“Twice?”

“I don't know what that means.”

“Did you lose your temper with the councilman, too?”

“I never met the slimy bastard.”

“How'd you find out about them?”

“Her girlfriend.”

“Carrie's girlfriend?”

Lucas nodded. “I called her Saturday night, I thought maybe Carrie was there studying with her, she told me she had a lot of studying to do that weekend. So Maria said No, she wasn't there, and she sounded sort of hesitant, you know, the way people do when they're hiding something, holding something back? So I said What is it, Maria? and she opened up, told me Carrie'd been seeing this older man since just after Thanksgiving, told me she was tired of making alibis for her, told me Carrie was upstate right that minute with the son of a bitch! I wanted to
kill
him!”

The detectives looked at him.

He seemed to realize what he'd just said, and immediately added, “But I didn't.”

“You beat her up instead,” Kling said.

“I only hit her once.”

“Where were you before then?”

“Like say between ten and ten-thirty that morning?”

“I had an early class.”

“How early?”

“Nine o'clock. It let out at eleven. I went straight to Carrie's afterward. She was still unpacking from her big trip.”

“Where'd this class meet?”

“Morten Parker Hall. Room 713.”

“What's the instructor's name?”

“Dr. Nagel.”

“What's his first name?”

“She's a woman. Phyllis, I think. Or Felice, I'm not sure.”

“Does she keep attendance?”

“I'm sure she does.”

“What sort of class is it?” Carella asked.

“Romantic Poetry,” Lucas said.

 

ROSITA THOUGHT
these three people were total dummies, and she could not imagine how they'd managed to come up with three hundred thousand dollars, but they assured her they already had the money, and it was now merely a matter of ascertaining that she could deliver the product.

“How do we know you even
have
the jelly beans?” their apparent leader said.

His name was Lonnie Doyle, or so he'd said, she never believed any names that were exchanged in drug transactions. She herself had told them her name was Rosalie Wadsworth, which was close to Rosita Washington, but no cigar, thank you. She did not think Lonnie Doyle could possibly be this man's real name, but then again maybe he was stupid enough to have given her a square handle, who could tell when you were dealing with dummies?

One sure sign that these people were not playing with a full deck was the way they kept referring to the cocaine as “jelly beans.” They were sitting at a back table in a little cuchi frito joint on Culver, maybe two or three other people in the place, plus the guy behind the counter. There was not the remotest possibility that anyone had planted a bug here, but they were using
code,
anyway, could you believe it! Jelly beans!

“I will have the jelly beans,” Rosita said. “And they will be very high-grade jelly beans.”

Jesus, she thought.

Another one of the dummies, a guy who'd introduced himself as Constantine Skevopoulos, a phony name if ever there was one, asked if these “jelly beans” would be in the quantity specified? He was a twitchy little man with a silly grin. “Quantity specified” were the exact words he used. Dopey little grin on his face. Quantity specified.

“The
jelly
beans will…” Rosita started, and rolled her eyes, and because she knew there couldn't in a million years be a bug in this place, and since she knew Juanito behind the counter there was a little deaf in the bargain, she said flat out, “The coke will come in tenkilo lots at twenty thousand a lot, for a total of three hundred thousand dollars.”

The one named Harry Curtis looked suddenly alarmed, either by her having used the word “coke” or else by the enormity of the purchase price, which Rosita had to admit was a thousand more per lot than the going price, but hey these were dummies. Harry Curtis—if that was his real name, which she felt sure it wasn't—was a huge man. He sat hunkered over the table like a grizzly bear, his eyes popping wide open when he heard Rosita talking about cocaine so openly. The other two looked startled as well, glancing around the room as if expecting an immediate raid, the dummies.

“So if we understand the purchase price,” Rosita said, “and if we know how many
jelly beans
you'll be buying,” stressing the words, rolling her eyes again, “all we need to settle, once and for all, is where the transaction will take place.”

“Don't say the address out loud,” Constantine said, twitching and grinning.

“Write it down,” Lonnie said.

“On a piece of paper,” Harry said.

Where else? Rosita thought. On the wall?

She opened her handbag, tore a sheet of paper from her address book…

“Letter it,” Harry said.

“So we can read it,” Lonnie said.

Constantine nodded and grinned.

In a large bold hand, Rosita lettered the address onto the sheet of paper:

And then, just to show these dummies they were truly stupid to be worrying about a bug in a cuchi frito joint, she read the address out loud, anyway.

“Thirty-two eleven Culver Avenue,” she said. “The basement. Be there. And bring the money.”

The three men hurried out of there as if their pants were on fire. Rosita lingered over her Coke—the soft drink, not the jelly bean—and then left the shop, passing a girl sitting at a table nearby. The girl was wearing a flared skirt and a white blouse, white ankle socks and brown loafers. She could have been your average Irish teenager were it not for the apathetic look that betrayed her for a drug addict. Rosita recognized the look at once; dope was her business. She nodded understandingly, perhaps even sympathetically, and walked past the girl and out of the shop.

The girl did not nod back.

The girl was Aine Duggan.

 

IT WAS NOT
until ten past one that Parker realized Rosita had shaken the tail. He debated going into the shop and confronting Palacios with the accusation that he'd aided and abetted the very person Parker was following, but then that would alert the son of a bitch if he and Miss Washington with the swiveling little ass were trying to pull something funny here.

So he went back to the squadroom and told Eileen he thought the Washington woman had made him, and he suggested that Eileen pick up the surveillance. Otherwise they'd go down that friggin basement on Tuesday night—

He actually used the word “friggin” in deference to Eileen's delicacy. Eileen found this amusing; in her many years as a cop, she had certainly heard the word “fuck” in all its derivations. But even if she weren't a cop, which she most certainly was, all she had to do was go to the movies on any given Sunday, and she'd get an education she'd never received in church, believe me, Father Mulahy.

“Go down the friggin basement this Tuesday night,” Parker said, “and find nothing there but cockroaches and rats. I think Palacios may be tryin'a pull something funny here.”

“Why?” Eileen asked. “No bust, no money.”

Which was a thought.

“Maybe she's paying him more than we are,” Parker suggested.

“Why?” Eileen asked.

Another good thought.