"Sure," La Paz said. "What do you want to know?"
"Tell me about Clara Jean Hawkins," Carella said.
"I knew it," La Paz said.
"What'd you know?"
"That this was gonna be about her."
"What the fuck'd you
think
it was gonna be about, you dumb fuck?" Ollie said. "Girl gets killed, what d'you
think
these guys are lookin for, a fuckin dumb
procurin
bust? This is
homicide,
you dumb shit, you better answer these guys straight."
"I didn't kill her," La Paz said.
"Nobody ever killed anybody," Ollie said. "The world is full of victims, but nobody ever victimized them. Go on, Steve, ask him what you gotta ask."
"What do you know about a weekly beach party out on Sands Spit someplace?" Carella said.
"A
what?"
"You heard the man, you deaf or something?" Ollie said.
"A beach party?" La Paz said, and shook his head. "I don't know what you mean."
"He means did you send some of your girls partying out at the
beach
is what he means, you dumb fuck," Ollie said.
"Is that what you mean?" La Paz asked.
"You tell me," Carella said.
"I don't know anything about any beach parties out on Sands Spit."
"Wednesday night beach parties," Carella said.
"No, I don't know anything about them."
"Do you know where Clara Jean Hawkins went every Wednesday night?"
"Yeah, to see her mother. Her mother's sick, she used to go see her every Wednesday night, stayed over till Thursday."
"You didn't mind that?"
"Middle of the week's sort of slow anyway," La Paz said, and shrugged.
"What time would she get back on Thursday?"
"Time enough. She'd be out on the street maybe ten, eleven o'clock at night. I had no complaints about her visiting her mother, if that's what you're trying to establish here."
"I'm not trying to establish anything," Carella said. "Just cool it."
"Just cool it, you punk," Ollie said. "He ain't trying to establish anything."
"He's saying I didn't like her going to see her mother-"
"That ain't establishing anything," Ollie said. "Just answer the man's fuckin questions and keep your mouth shut. Go ahead, Steve."
"Have any harsh words with her lately?"
"No, we got along fine."
"Same as you got along with the other girls?"
"Same."
"Same as Sarah Wyatt?"
"Sarah's different."
"How so?"
"We got a thing going, Sarah and me."
"But not you and Clara Jean, huh?"
"No, not me and C. J., no. In the beginning, yeah, but not recently."
"In the beginning, she just adored you, huh?" Ollie said.
"Yeah, we had a thing going."
"That how you turned her out? Or was it smack?"
"No, she wasn't doing smack."
"Just fell in love with you, that it?"
"More or less."
"Easy to see why, you're so gorgeous."
"She thought so," La Paz said.
"Oh, I think so too, honey," Ollie said, and waved a limp wrist at him. "You fuckin little pimp, you turned the girl out as a whore, you realize that? Don't that mean nothin to you?"
"It didn't hurt her," La Paz said, and shrugged.
"No, it didn't hurt her at all," Ollie said. "All it done was
kill
her."
"Hookin didn't kill her."
"What
did?"
Carella asked at once.
"How do I know?"
"Why are you hiding?" Carella asked.
"Cause I knew about the moonlighting."
"Make up your mind," Carella said. "You just told us you
didn't
know anything about it."
"About what? I ain't followin you," La Paz said.
"About the Wednesday night beach parties."
"What's that got to-?"
"He's talking about the moottlightin, you dumb shit," Ollie said. "The Wednesday night
parties.
The parties you don't know anything about even though you know the fuckin girl was moonlightin. Now which is it?
Did
you know or
didn't
you know?"
"I knew she was moonlighting, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't know it was a steady party, anything like that. I just thought she was holding out on me."
"How'd you feel about that?" Carella asked.
La Paz shrugged.
"Just didn't matter, huh?" Ollie asked.
"I had a choice," La Paz said. "I could've beat the shit out of her and risked her crossing the street to some other dude, or I could've looked the other way. What was she skimming, when you got right down to it? A bill a week, something like that?"
"Two bills," Carella said.
"So even two bills," La Paz said, and shrugged. "Was it worth losing her for a lousy two bills?"
"How much was she bringing in?" Meyer asked.
"Fifteen hundred, two grand a week, somewhere in between there. So should I risk that for a lousy two bills?"
"All your girls bringing that in?" Ollie asked.
"Yeah, somewhere in there."
"How many girls you got?"
"Four with C. J. Three now."
"So you were making something like six, seven grand a week, huh?"
"Eight grand, some weeks."
"You know how much I make a
year,
you fuckin shithead? I'm a Detective/Second, you know how much I make a year, you know how much me and these two guys standin here make each year, huh? You got any idea?"
"No, I got no idea," La Paz said.
"Twenty-three fuckin thousand dollars a
year,
that's how much we make, you little pimp."
"Who told you about C. J.'s moonlighting?" Carella asked.
"Twenty-three thousand a
year,"
Ollie said, shaking his head.
"Sarah Wyatt," La Paz said.
"But she didn't know it was a beach party, huh?"
"No, sir, she didn't."
Carella and Meyer looked at each other. Carella sighed. Meyer nodded.
"Hey, you guys," Ollie said, "don't cry, huh? I hate to see grown men cry. You, you little shithead," he said to La Paz, "get your ass out of my precinct. I see your pimp ass up here ever again, you'll wish you were back in Mayagiiez or wherever the fuck you came from."
"Palmas Altas," La Paz said.
"Same fuckin thing," Ollie said. "Out," he said, and jerked his thumb toward the door.
"Let me get dressed first," La Paz said.
"Make it fast," Ollie said, "before my friends here decide to bust you just for the hell of it."
The moment La Paz reached for his shirt, Ollie turned and winked at Meyer and Carella. Neither of the men winked back. They were both thinking their case was as dead as all three victims.
13
The Elsinore County cops did not know they had a fourth victim in the tandem cases being investigated jointly by Midtown South and the Eight-Seven. The Elsinore County cops thought of
their
corpse as a first victim. They found the body that Thursday night at 10:00 p.m. The dead man's name was Wilbur Matthews. Before his demise, he'd been a locksmith living behind the shop he owned in the town of Fox Hill, previously known as Vauxhall after that district in the borough of Lambeth in London-everywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States was the influence of colonial Great Britain still felt.
Fox Hill had been a sleepy little fishing village until as recently as thirty years ago, when an enterprising gentleman from Los Angeles came east to open what was then called the Fox Hill Inn, a huge rambling waterfront hotel that had since fallen into other hands and been renamed the Fox Hill Arms. The building of the hotel had also been responsible for the building of a town around it, rather the way a frontier fort back in the dear, dead days eventually led to a settlement around it. Fox Hill was now a community of some forty thousand people, thirty thousand of them year-round residents, ten thousand known alternately as "the summer people" or, less affectionately, "the Sea Gulls." The locksmith Wilbur Matthews had been a year-round resident. A quick glance at the meticulous records he kept in his shop's locked filing cabinets showed that he had installed some three thousand locks in the past five years (his active records went back only that far) and had repaired another twelve hundred during that same time, some of them automobile locks, but most of them locks on homes.
Wilbur Matthews was well-liked in the community. Lock yourself out of your car or your house at two in the morning, all you had to do was call old Wilbur, and he'd get himself dressed and come help you, just like doctors used to do. Wilbur's wife had died back during the last big hurricane, not from the hurricane itself, not from drowning or anything, but just naturally, in her bed, sleeping like a babe. Wilbur had lived alone since. He was a churchgoing man (the First Presbyterian on Oceanview and Third) and a God-fearing man, and there wasn't a person in all Fox Hill who'd have said a mean word about him. But someone had shot him twice in the head, and the Elsinore County cops just couldn't figure out why.
The cops out there were somewhat more paramilitary than the cops in the city; even the detectives had ranks like sergeant and corporal. The two men assigned to the Wilbur Matthews homicide were Detective Sergeant Andrew (Buddy) Budd, and Detective Corporal Louis Dellarosa. They crouched in the rain outside the bedroom window of the old man's house, looking for shell casings. The lab technicians weren't there yet; the lab technicians had to come all the way from the county seat in Elsinore. Budd and Dellarosa searched but found nothing. Inside the house, a man from the Medical Examiner's Office was looking down at the dead man where he lay in his bed. There were two bullet holes in the wall behind the bed and another bullet hole in the pillow just to the left of Wilbur Matthews's head, and two more in Wilbur Matthews's head itself, one drilled through his left eye and the other through his forehead. The Assistant Medical Examiner turned to look toward the window because it seemed to him the trajectory had originated there, but he wasn't a Ballistics cop, and it would probably take the man from Ballistics just as long to get here as it would the lab technicians, both of them having to come all the way from Headquarters in Elsinore. The Assistant M.E. figured he'd best pronounce the man dead, and further figured he'd be absolutely safe in stating that the cause of death had been multiple gunshot wounds. He was beginning to write up his report when a flash of lightning illuminated the window he'd been glancing at not a moment before, followed by a thunderclap that scared him the way he'd once been scared on a vill sweep in Vietnam. He went out into the hallway at once, and asked a uniformed cop there if it was all right for him to use the bathroom. The cop said, "No, this is a crime scene."
***
After forty-eight hours, you begin to get a little desperate. After seventy-two, you start praying for a break; it is amazing how many cops get religion after putting in seventy-two hours on a cold homicide case. After four days, you're sure you'll
never
solve the damn thing. When you hit the six-day mark, you begin getting desperate all over again. It is a different sort of desperation. It is a desperation bordering on obsession; you begin to see murderers under every rock. If your grandmother looks at you cockeyed, you begin to suspect her. You go over your typed reports again and again, you study your crime-scene drawings, you read homicide reports from other precincts, you search through the files looking for homicide cases in which the weapon was a.38 or the victim was a hooker or a singer or a business manager, you hash over homicide cases involving frauds or semifrauds like Harry Caine's vanity-house caper, you rehash homicide cases involving missing or kidnapped persons-and eventually you become an expert on all such homicides committed in the goddamn city during the past ten years but you
still
don't know who the hell killed three people in the immediate past, never mind ten years ago.
It was now 9:40 a.m. on Friday morning, September 22, only fourteen hours short of 11:40 p.m., when exactly one week ago a concerned citizen dialed Emergency 911 to report two men bleeding on the sidewalk at Culver and South Eleventh. Fourteen hours short of a week. Fourteen short hours short. At twenty minutes to midnight tonight, George C. Chadderton would have been dead a full week. At 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, Clara Jean Hawkins would likewise have been dead a full week. Ambrose Harding, who was at present lying in a coffin at the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue, would be buried tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m., by which time
he'd
have been dead almost four days. And the case continued to lie there like a lox without a bagel.
At 9:40 that morning, Carella went to see Chloe Chadderton at her apartment in Diamondback. He had called from home first, and was therefore somewhat surprised to find her wearing the same long pink robe she'd worn on that night almost a week ago, when he and Meyer had knocked on her door at two in the morning. It occurred to him, as she let him into the apartment, that he had never seen Chloe in street clothes. She was always either in a nightgown with a robe over it, as she was now, or else strutting half-naked on a bar top, or else sitting at a table and wearing only a flimsy nylon wrapper over her dancing costume. He could understand why George Chadderton wanted his wife to get out of "show biz," considering what she seemed intent on showing day and night to any interested viewer. Sitting opposite her in the living room now, Carella looked across at the long length of leg revealed in the opening of her robe and silently admitted that he himself was an interested viewer. Embarrassed, recalling Chloe's total exposure on the bar top at the Hamingo, he quickly took out his notebook and busied himself leafing through its pages.