Nocturne (18 page)

“What is it?” Richard the First asked.

“What’s the scenario here?”

“Scenario?”

“Yes, how did this
happen
?”

“I see his point,” Richard the Second said.

“What point? They were fighting over the bag. They killed each other.”

“How can a person stab another person while that person is drowning him?”

“That’s
not
how it happened.”

“Then how
did
it happen?”

Richard the First thought this over for a moment.

“They were fighting over the bag,” he said again.

The other two waited.

“Richard stabbed him, whoever he is.”

They still waited.

“Then he got in the tub so he could wash off the blood.”

“With his clothes on?”

“He was drunk,” Richard the First said. “That’s why he got in the tub with all his clothes on. In fact, that’s how he
drowned
. He was trying to wash himself, but he fell in the tub. He was
drunk
!”

He looked at the other two expectantly.

“Sounds good to me,” Richard the Second said.

“Just might fly,” Richard the Third said.

Grinning, Richard the First winked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.

It was snowing when they left the apartment for the bus terminal.

The time was ten minutes past two.

D
etective/First Grade Oliver Weeks—known far and wide, but particularly wide, as
Fat
Ollie Weeks, though never to his face—got into the act because the two dead bodies were found in an apartment in the Eighty-eighth
Precinct, which happened to be his bailiwick.

The discovery was made by a woman who lived on Richard Cooper’s floor, who happened to be passing by his door when she saw
it standing wide open. She called in to him, and then stepped inside the apartment and saw a mess there, clothes thrown all
over every which way, drawers pulled out, and figured somebody’s been in there and ripped him off, so she went downstairs
to tell the super. This was at seventeen minutes past five, about a half hour after Ollie and his team had relieved the day
watch. The super went upstairs with her and found the two bodies in the bathroom and ran right down again to dial Nine-One-One.
The responding blues radioed the precinct with a double DOA and Ollie and an Eight-Eight detective named Wilbur Sloat, who
sounded black but who was actually a tall, thin blond man with a scraggly blond mustache, rode over there to Ainsley and North
Eleventh. They got there at a quarter to six.

Since Ollie was a bigot in the truest sense of the word—that is to say, he hated
everyone
—he was naturally tickled to death to see two of the precinct’s more contemptible black specimens dead by their own hands.
For such was what it appeared to be at first glance.

“Make either one of them?” Sloat asked.

He was a new detective, and he affected mannerisms and speech he heard on cop television shows. Ollie would have liked it
better if Sloat had stayed back in the squadroom, answering telephones and picking his nose. Ollie was a loner. He preferred
being a loner. That way, you didn’t have to deal with assholes all the time.

The one with his throat slit, he recognized at once as a small-time pimp named Jamal “The Jackal” Stone, formerly known as
Jackson Stone before he picked himself a name he thought sounded African. Jamal, my ass. Ollie had recently read in
Newsweek
magazine that forty-four percent of all persons of color in America preferred being called “black,” whereas only twenty-eight
percent liked to be called “African-American.” So why did all these niggers (Ollie’s own choice of appellation by a personal
margin of one hundred percent) give themselves African names and run around celebrating African holidays and wearing fezzes
and robes, what the hell was it?

The way Ollie looked at it, a simple fact of American life was that one out of every three black males was currently enmeshed
in the criminal justice system. That meant that thirty-three and a third percent of the black male population was either in
jail, on parole, or awaiting trial. So, yeah, if a white guy crossed the street when he saw three black men approaching him,
it was because one of them might be Johnnie Cochran, sure, and another might be Chris Darden, okay, but the third one might
be O. J. Simpson.

So here were two dead black men in a bathroom.

Big surprise.

The way Ollie saw it, there were two institutions that should be reinstated all over the world. One of them was dictatorship
and the other was slavery.

He told Sloat who the one on the floor was.

“Got himself juked real good,” Sloat said.

Juked, Ollie thought. Jesus.

The one in the tub he didn’t recognize under all that water, which distorted his good looks. But when the M.E. had him pulled
out of the tub so he could examine him, Ollie pegged him at once, an ugly two-bit drug dealer named Richard Cooper, who once
broke both a man’s legs for calling him Richie. The M.E. wouldn’t even
speculate
that the cause of death was drowning, having been burned on a similar call years ago where it turned out a man had been shot
before someone shoved his head facedown in a toilet bowl. The one on the floor had definitely been slashed, though, so the
M.E. had no trouble determining that the cause of death was severance of the carotid artery.

The two Homicide detectives working the night shift were called Flaherty and Flanagan. Ollie told them he knew both of the
victims, one of them by his ugly face, the other by his ugly reputation. Sloat suggested that perhaps they’d got into a fight
over the handbag there on the floor, one thing leading to another, and so on and so forth, the same old story.

Same old story, Ollie thought. Fuckin dope’s been a detective hardly three months, he’s talkin about the same old story.

“A clutch,” Flaherty said.

“Well, I don’t know whether they were grabbing each other or not,” Sloat said. “I’m only suggesting they may have done each
other.”

Done each other, Ollie thought.

“The bag, I mean,” Flaherty said. “A clutch.”

“It’s called a clutch,” Flanagan said.

“The type of bag,” Flaherty said.

“A clutch bag.”

“A handbag without handles.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” Ollie asked impatiently.

“For the sake of accuracy,” Flaherty said. “In your report. You should call it a clutch bag.”

“A red patent-leather clutch handbag,” Flanagan said.

Most Homicide Division detectives favored wearing black, the color of mourning, the color of death. But black suited these
two more than it did many of their colleagues. Tall and thin, with pale features and slender waxen hands, the two resembled
vampires who had wandered in out of the snowy cold, the shoulders of their black coats damp, their eyes a watery blue, their
lips bloodless, their shoes a sodden black. They were both wearing white woolen mufflers, a limp sartorial touch.

“How much money is that on the floor?” Flanagan asked.

“Five C-notes,” Sloat said.

C-notes, Ollie thought.

“Don’t forget the three jumbo vials,” Flaherty said.

“Hey, you!” Ollie yelled to one of the technicians. “Okay to look in this bag now? This clutch bag? This red patent-leather
clutch handbag?”

The technician turned off his vacuum cleaner, walked over to where they were standing, and began dusting the bag for latents.
The detectives wandered around the apartment, waiting for him to finish.

“No sheets on the bed, you notice that?” Flaherty said.

“What do these people know about sheets?” Ollie said. “You think they have sheets in Africa? In Africa they sleep in huts
with mud floors, they have flies in their fuckin eyes day and night, they drink goat’s milk with blood in it, what the fuck
do they know about sheets?”

“This ain’t Africa,” Flanagan said.

“And there
still
ain’t no sheets on the bed,” Flaherty said.

“Looks like somebody really tossed the place,” Flanagan said, observing the clothes strewn everywhere, the open dresser drawers
and kitchen cabinets, the overturned trash basket.

“Maybe it was an interrupted crib job,” Sloat suggested.

“Jamal’s a fuckin pimp,” Ollie said. “What does he know about burglaries?”

“Which one is Jamal?”

“The one with his tonsils showing.”

“Maybe he was the one being burglarized. Maybe he walked in and found the other guy …”

“No, the mailbox says Cooper. Who don’t like to be called Richie. You gonna take all day with that fuckin
clutch
bag?” Ollie yelled to the technician.

“You can have it now,” the technician said, handing it to him.

“What’d you get?”

“Some good ones. Patent’s a good surface.”

“What do they look like?”

“Smaller ones may be female. The others, who knows?”

“When can I have something?”

“Later today?”

“How much later? I go home at midnight.”

“A
quarter
to midnight,” Sloat amended.

“Soon as we process them,” the technician said.

“Run them through Records at the same time, okay?” Ollie said. “See if we come up roses.”

“Sure.”

“So what time?”

“What’s the rush?
They’re
not going anywhere,” he said, and glanced toward the open bathroom door, where the police photographer was taking his Polaroids.

“I’m just wonderin what really happened here, is all,” Ollie said. “Send me what you get the minute you get it, okay? The
Eight-Eight. Oliver Weeks.”

“Sure,” the technician said, and shrugged and went back to his vacuuming.

“I think what happened here is what the kid
says
happened here,” Flaherty said.

Sloat looked flattered.

“They killed each other, right?” Ollie said. He was already beginning to go through the bag the technician had handed him.
The
clutch
bag, excuse me all to hell. Looked like some more hundred-dollar bills in here …

“Dude’s about to take a bath,” Sloat suggested, “he hears somebody coming in the apartment, he immediately grabs for a knife
…”

“I think the kid’s got it,” Flaherty said, and beamed approval again.

Fuckin Homicide jackass, Ollie thought. Fourteen hundred in the bag, plus the five on the floor, came to nineteen. Money like
that spelled dope or prostitution. More red tops on the bottom of the bag, looked more like a dope thing every minute. He
fished out a driver’s license with a photo ID on it.

“What’ve you got?” Flanagan asked.

“Ohio driver’s license,” Ollie said.

“Out-of-towner,” Sloat surmised.

“Probably mugged her, one or the other of them, then got into a fight over the bag.”

“When was this?” Ollie asked. “Before he turned the apartment upside down or after?”

“What?”

“Whoever got killed first. Give me the sequence, Wilbur.”

He made the name sound like a dirty word.

“Start with the muggin,” Flanagan said.

“Cooper mugged her, brought the bag back to his apartment,” Sloat said.

“Who’s Cooper?” Flaherty asked.

“The one who drowned.”

From the door, where he was putting on his hat, the M.E. called, “I didn’t say he drowned.”

“
If
he drowned,” Sloat said.

“For all I know, he was poisoned.”

Yeah, bullshit, Ollie thought.

“Good night, gentlemen,” the M.E. said, and headed downstairs to the snow and the wind.

Ollie looked at his watch.

A quarter to seven.

“So let’s hear it, Wilbur,” he said.

“I’ve got an even
better
idea,” Sloat said.

“Even better than your
first
one?” Ollie said, sounding surprised.

“They
both
mugged her.”

“That’s very good,” Flaherty said appreciatively.

“Came back here to celebrate. All these empty champagne bottles? They were drinking champagne.”

“Got drunk, got wild, started throwing around clothes and stuff,” Flanagan suggested.

“I like it,” Flaherty said.

“A drunken party,” Sloat said. “Cooper goes in the bathroom to run a tub. Jamal comes in after him, and they start arguing
about how to split the money.”

“Better all the time,” Flaherty said.

“Cooper pulls a knife, slashes Jamal. Jamal shoves out at him as he goes down. Cooper falls in the tub and drowns.”

“Case closed,” Flaherty said, grinning.

Assholes, Ollie thought.

“Hey, you!” he yelled to the technician.

The technician turned off his vacuum cleaner again.

“I want the knife and the champagne bottles dusted. I want every fuckin surface in this dump dusted. I want comparison prints
lifted from both those two black shits in the bathroom. I want comparison hairs from their heads, and comparison fibers from
their clothes, and I want them checked against whatever you pick up with that fuckin noisy vacuum of yours. Where’d you buy
that vacuum, anyway? From a pushcart in Majesta?”