Fat Ollie's Book (5 page)

Artie Brown, looking huge and menacing and dark and scowling, stood at the bulletin board, pondering the multitude of posters, notes, and announcements hanging there, glancing as well at the latest posted e-mail jokes from other police stations all over the country. Carella thought he detected a smile from him. He turned as Carella went by, waved vaguely in his direction, and then went back to his desk, where the phone began ringing furiously.

Another day, another dollar, Carella thought, and knocked on the lieutenant's door.

 

DETECTIVE-LIEUTENANT PETER BYRNES
did not like high-profile cases. Given his druthers, he would have preferred that Lester Henderson had not lived in Smoke Rise, had instead lived across the river in the next state, or anyplace else but the Eight-Seven. He would have preferred that Ollie Weeks had not come calling with his courtesy request, although asking payback for saving someone's life—twice, don't forget—possibly qualified as something more substantial than a mere exchange of good manners. It was not unusual for cops in this city to ask favors of other precincts. Usually, but not always, they offered to share credit for any ensuing bust. Ollie had not deemed such an offer necessary. But, hey, he had saved Carella's life.
Twice!

The first time was when a lion was about to eat him.

Yes.

A lion was sitting on Carella's chest, don't ask.

Ollie shot the beast between the eyes, end of lion, end of story. Carella could still smell the animal's foul breath.

The second time was a week or so later, when a blonde carrying an AK-47 was not about to
eat
Carella, more's the pity, but was instead ready to shoot him in the eye or someplace when who should arrive upon the scene but the large man from the Eight-Eight—wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, though he did not kill her as dead as he had the lion. Carella could still smell
her
breath, too. A whiff of Tic Tacs, as he recalled, spiked with that selfsame stink of imminent extinction.

Ollie had a right, Byrnes guessed. But he sure as hell wished nobody but the usual suspects had got killed yesterday morning.

“So what'd she have to say?” he asked Carella.

“Her husband wasn't home Sunday night.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked her when he left the house yesterday morning, she told me she didn't know, he wasn't home.”

“So where was he?”

“Upstate. Meeting with the Governor's people.”

“That's very nice, the Governor's people,” Byrnes said.

“His wife told me they were trying to convince him to run for mayor.”

“Oh, Jesus, don't tell me this is going to get political,” Byrnes said.

“It could. He's a politician, Pete. Was.”

“Too much bad blood between Democrats and Republicans these days,” Byrnes said, shaking his head.

“You think a Democrat killed him?”

He was smiling. The idea of a Democrat killing a Republican was somewhat amusing. For that matter, so was the idea of a Republican killing a Democrat.

“I don't know who killed him,” Byrnes said. He was not smiling.

“You know something else? I don't even
care
who killed him. This case belongs to His Lord Fatness, I don't know how the hell we got involved in it.”

“Payback time, Pete.”

“You should try not to get yourself killed so often. And you should try to avoid obese saviors.”

“I'll try.”

“Where'd Henderson stay upstate? Did she say?”

“I'll ask her.”

“Call whichever hotel it was, find out what time he checked out, did he drive, did he take the train, did he fly, whatever. Give Ollie an ETA at the hall, and then tell him goodbye.”

“Yes, sir, is that an order, sir?”

“I don't want this case,” Byrnes said.

 

AT SEVEN O'CLOCK
that Tuesday night, while Carella was at the dinner table with his wife and two children, Ollie Weeks called to say he was sorry he'd missed him at the office earlier today, but was it convenient for him to talk now?

“I'm in the middle of dinner,” Carella said.

“That's okay,” Ollie said, “so am I.”

Carella had the feeling that somehow Ollie was
always
in the middle of dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. Or something.

“Can I call you back later?” he asked.

“Well, sure,” Ollie said, sounding offended, and hung up.

Carella called him back at a little past eight, after the twins were in bed. Ollie picked up the phone, said, “Weeks,” and then belched.

“Ollie, it's Steve.”

“Yes, Steve.”

Still sounding offended.

“I wanted to report on what I learned from Mrs. Henderson…”

“Yes, Steve.”

His tone was saying I only saved your life, you know.

“I had a long telephone conversation with her this afternoon. She…”

“I thought you were going to see her personally,” Ollie said.

“I did. This was
after
I saw her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She said her husband flew up to the state capital on Saturday…”

“Uh-huh.”

“…stayed the weekend at the Raleigh Hotel there…”

“Okay.”

“Probably flew back early Monday morning…”

“What do you mean
probably?
”

“He didn't come home. She thinks he must have gone directly from the airport to King Memorial.”

“What do you mean she
thinks?
”

“Ollie,” Carella said, “
non mi rompere,
okay?”

“What?”

“I'm trying to tell you what I've got here. The lady doesn't know for
sure
where he was when. The last time she spoke to him was from the Raleigh. The next thing she knows he's shot dead at King Memorial. So she's assuming he flew back and went directly…”

“Okay, I get it, I get it,” Ollie said. “Did you call the airport?”

“There are two non-stop flights leaving here early in the morning, both on US Airways. Takes about an hour to get to the capital. Any connecting flight doesn't pay, you can just as easily drive up these days, the long lines.”

“How about coming back?”

“Same thing. Two early morning flights. I called the hotel. Henderson checked out at six Monday morning. He could've caught either one of them, been here in the city by eight, eight-thirty. A cab from the airport would've put him at the Hall by eight-thirty, nine. Which is about right, more or less.”

“Where's his suitcase?”

“What?”

“He had to have a bag, no? So if he went straight to the Hall, where's the bag?”

“Good question.”

“We'll find out tomorrow. Meet me up the precinct at eight o'clock.”

“Uh…Ollie…my boss wants me off this.”

“Oh? Why?”

“He thinks it's too uptown for us.”

“We been uptown together before, my friend, ah yes.”

“The Loot isn't sure he wants to go there again.”

“Even if we share the bust?”

“I just don't think he wants any part of it.”

“You negotiating with me, or what?”

“Would I even dream?”

“We crack this one, we're made men.”

“I thought only the Mob had made men.”

“The Police Department is a mob, too, believe it or not. Tell your loot we share the bust, we'll all be glory boys.”

“How do you figure that, Ollie?”

“Guy about to run for mayor, he gets snuffed? Hey, this is big-time stuff, Steve-a-rino.”

“How do you know he was going to run for mayor?”

“His aide told me. Alan Pierce, Mr. Wasp from Waspville. Steve, I know it don't mean nothing I saved your life…”

“Enough already, Ollie.”

“Talk to your loot. Tell him we'll all get rich and famous.”

“He's already rich and famous.”

“Sure. Like my Aunt Tillie. Tell him we'll be on television and everything.”

“You know what we caught this morning, Ollie?”

“Tell me what you caught this morning, Steve.”

“A hundred-and-four-year-old lady drowned in her bathtub.”

“Not unusual. These old broads, they sometimes…”

“She was stabbed in the eye first, Ollie.”

“Extraordinary,” Ollie said. “But it ain't gonna get your picture in the papers. You want the Eight-Seven to remain a shitty little precinct the rest of your life, or you want to step up to the plate and knock one out of the ball park?”

“I want to go say goodnight to my kids.”

“Call your loot instead, what's his name? Bernstein?”

“Byrnes.”

“I thought he was a Yid, like my boss. Tell him does he want another juicy one like that money money case we caught around Christmastime…”

“Money money
money,
” Carella said.

“Or does he just want another old lady moldering in a bathtub?”

“I think he might prefer the old lady.”

“Then he's an old lady himself, your boss. Tell him you got to grab this city by the balls before it grabs you first. Tell him opportunity knocks but once, tell him it's not every cop in the world gets invited to talk on
Larry King.
Tell him Oliver Wendell Weeks has spoken.”

“I'm sure he'll be impressed.”

“Tell him.”

“I'll tell him.”

“Don't forget the old lady metaphor,” Ollie said, and hung up.

DETECTIVE/SECOND GRADE EILEEN BURKE
did not know how she felt about being transferred to the Eight-Seven.

Lieutenant Byrnes voiced it for her.

“Eileen, you're a good cop,” he said, “and I'm glad to have you with us. But there's this thing with Bert.”

The lieutenant was referring to the fact that in the not too distant past, Eileen had enjoyed an arduous but brief (well, brief in the annals of the Eight-Seven) relationship with one of his detectives. The look on Byrnes's face indicated he did not want problems related to ancient love affairs. Eileen read the look, and registered his words, and didn't know quite what to say. She had not seen Bert Kling in a very long time, and she knew he was now involved with someone else.

Standing before her new boss's desk, wearing brown slacks and brown low-heeled pumps, an olive-green crewneck sweater with a matching cardigan over it, sunshine streaming through the Loot's corner windows and setting her red hair ablaze, she wondered what gave him the right to intrude on her personal life, wondered if he would give the male half of this prior romance the same warning, and was tempted to tell him to go to hell. He must have read the look in her green eyes, must have seen County Cork flaring; he was Irish himself, after all.

“Not that it's any of my business,” he amended.

“I'm sure there won't be any problem, sir,” Eileen said.

Byrnes noted the “sir.” They had worked together before, when Eileen had been loaned to him as an undercover decoy, and back then it had been “Pete.” Now it was “sir,” which meant he'd got off on the wrong foot with her, something he didn't particularly wish. In apology, he said, “You're the first woman I've had on my squad, Eileen.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Make it Pete, can you?”

“Pete,” she said, and nodded.

“You may find it quiet around here,” he said. “After Hostage Negotiating.”

“In this city, nothing's quiet,” she said.

As a matter of fact, hostage-taking had cooled down a bit in recent years. Oh sure, you had the occasional nut who shot his wife and two of his kids and was holding the third kid at gun point in a ratty apartment someplace in Majesta while the cops promised him an airplane to Peru and three dozen Hershey bars, but for the most part the bad guys had bigger things on their minds. You didn't—in fact, couldn't—send a negotiator to talk to some fanatic who had taken over an airliner. Maybe the Eight-Seven
would
seem a little tame after standing face to face with a hostage-taker holding an AK-47 on his grandma, but maybe Eileen needed a rest in the country. Besides, from the inter-departmental jive she'd heard, the boys up here had recently been involved in a very big case involving the Treasury Department, the CIA, and God knew what else.

Byrnes was thinking he should tell her he'd try his best not to partner her with Kling—but that sounded apologetic. He was thinking he'd tell her that very often the working relationship between two detectives made the difference between life or death—but that sounded corny.

“Eileen,” he said simply, “we're a tight-knit family here. Welcome to it.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “Pete.”

Which was when a knock sounded on the lieutenant's door.

“Come,” Byrnes said.

The door opened—and speak of the devil.

 

AT TWENTY MINUTES
to nine that Wednesday morning—some fifteen minutes after he'd stepped into the lieutenant's office to encounter a redheaded ghost—Bert Kling was at the wheel of an unmarked police sedan driving himself and Carella uptown to the Eight-Eight.

“I have to tell you the truth,” he said, “my heart stopped.”

Carella said nothing. He had called the lieutenant the night before, and told him about Ollie Weeks's offer of a fifty-fifty bust, if ever there was one. He had told the lieutenant that you had to grab this city by the balls before it grabbed you first. He had told him that opportunity knocks but once, and it wasn't every cop in the world who got invited to talk on
Larry King.

“Oliver Wendell Weeks has spoken,” he'd said.

Byrnes had responded, “Let's go for it.”

So here he was on the way uptown again, listening to Kling tell him all about how he'd felt upon seeing, after all this time, the woman who had once been the love of his life.

It had begun raining.

The Eight-Seven had investigated a case one March where it had rained almost constantly. They would later refer to it as “The Rain Case,” even though it had involved finding a severed hand in an airline bag. In this city, rain could actually be pleasant sometimes. Not this morning. The rain was driving and incessant, falling from the sky in buckets—to coin a phrase—cascading onto the windshield where the wipers worked in vain to maintain some semblance of visibility.

“I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot,” Kling said. “But the Loot was sitting right there, and besides I didn't want to give her the idea there might be anything there anymore.”

“So what
did
you say?” Carella asked.

“Well, Pete told me she'd be working with us from now on, so I said, ‘Glad to have you aboard,' or something stupid like that, and we shook hands. It felt strange shaking hands. I mean…we were together a long time, you know, we were a
couple.
And now we were just shaking hands. Like strangers. That's when I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot. While we were shaking hands.”

“We can park behind the station,” Carella said, “go in the back way.”

Kling leaned over the wheel, squinting through the windshield to locate the driveway, and then swung the car into the lot. He parked in a space as close to the building as he could find, but they both almost drowned before they'd stepped a foot out of the car to begin a mad dash to the rear door of the station house.

All of these old precincts had the same layout. They could just as easily have been entering the Eight-Seven as the Eight-Eight. They came into a long corridor illuminated by a naked light bulb. No one inside the door, it occurred to Carella that some lunatic with a bomb could just march in. He made a mental note to mention this to Byrnes when they got back home. Down the corridor, past an old defunct coal-burning furnace, up a flight of wooden steps to a door that opened onto the first-floor muster room. Same muster desk as the Eight-Seven's, different sergeant behind it. He either recognized Carella and Kling, or else didn't give a damn that they might be desperate terrorists.

Mobile radio rack to the left of them, rack with vests to the right. Up the iron-runged stairs to the second floor, past a men's room, and a ladies' room, and then through a gate in a slatted wooden railing identical to the one back home, and there you were, face to face with His Royal Girth.

“You're late,” Ollie said, grinning.

It was 9:01
A
.
M
.

Here, too, were the familiar sounds and smells. The ringing telephones, the aroma of coffee brewing on a hot plate, the stale odor—especially on a rainy day—of a room that had seen too many days and nights of use and abuse, and there, yes, the faintest trace of a scent only cops could identify as coming from the black ink on the fingerprint table across the room. One of the windows across the room was open just a crack. There was even an unaccustomed whiff of fresh air. All so very familiar. Especially if you watched television.

“We found the bag,” Ollie said.

Kling wondered what bag.

For a moment, Carella wondered the same thing.

“Oh, the bag,” he said, remembering.

Ollie rose from his swivel chair like a whale off the coast of Mexico. He waddled across the room to where one of those small black airline bags on wheels rested near the water cooler. Yanking out the handle, he wheeled the bag over to his desk, hoisted it onto its top and—like a magician about to pull a rabbit from a top hat—unzipped the bag, and threw back the flap.

“This is what a city councilman packs for an overnight trip,” he said, and opened his hands wide. “Found it sitting on the stage, near the rear wall.”

The clothing in the bag was stuffed into it like laundry—which is what it undoubtedly was. These were the clothes Henderson had worn during his two-night stay in the state's capital. Packed in the bag were a pair of men's undershorts, two pairs of dark blue socks, a blue, long-sleeved, button-down shirt, a similar white shirt, a blue tropical weight suit, a blue-and-green-striped silk tie, a pair of black shoes, a toilet kit, and an electric razor.

“He was wearing jeans, loafers, and a faggoty pink sweater when he got killed,” Ollie said. “Probably wore them home on the plane.”

“Tells us nothing,” Kling said.

Ollie looked at him.

Carella braced himself for whatever was coming. With Ollie, you never knew. But nothing came. Ollie merely sighed heavily. The sigh could have meant “How come I always get stuck with stupid rookies?” (which Kling certainly wasn't) or alternatively, “How come it's raining on a day when we have so much to do?”

“How much time can you guys give me today?” he asked.

“The Loot says we're at your disposal.”

“Really? Who's gonna take care of the old lady in the bathtub?” Ollie asked, as if he gave a damn who'd stabbed her in the eye. Carella recognized the question as rhetorical. Kling didn't know what they were talking about. “Here's what I'd like to do today,” Ollie said, and began ticking the points off on his left hand, starting with the pinky. “One,
I'll
go chase down this guy who was on the follow spot when Henderson caught it Monday morning, nail down what he saw, what he heard, and so on. Nobody leaves alive. Next,” ticking it off on his ring finger, “I want
you
guys to talk to the Reverend Gabriel Foster about a little fracas him and Henderson got into just a week or so ago.”

“Why us?” Carella asked.

“Let's say the rev and me don't get along too well, ah yes.”

“Gee, I wonder why.”

“What kind of fracas?” Kling asked.

“Name calling, fists flying, like that.”

“Where was this?”

“A Town Hall debate. Hizzoner was there, too,
that
shmuck.”

“You don't really think Foster had anything to do with Henderson's murder, do you?” Carella said.

“I think where there's a nigger in the woodpile, you smoke him out,” Ollie said.

Kling looked at him.

“Something?” Ollie said.

“I don't like that expression.”

“Well, gee, shove it up your ass,” Ollie said.

Carella stepped in at once. “Where do we see you later?”

“You mean when shall we three meet again?” Ollie said. “Ah yes. How about right here, back at the ranch, let's say three o'clock.” He looked Kling in the eye and said, “I hope you know Henderson was for stiffening drug laws.”

“So?”

“So some people in the so-called black community might've thought he was trying to send their so-called brothers to jail.”

“So?”

“Targeting persons of color, they might have thought,” Ollie said.

“What some people up here call profiling. You ought to keep that in mind when you're talking to him.”

“Thanks, we'll keep it in mind,” Kling said.

“What I'm suggesting is Foster's a well-known Negro agitator and rabble rouser. Maybe he got himself all agitated and aroused Monday morning.”

“Or maybe not,” Carella said.

“Or maybe not,” Ollie agreed. “It's a free country, and nobody's hassling the man.”

“Except us,” Kling said.

“Asking pertinent questions ain't hassling. Unless you're a Negro, of course, and then everybody in the whole fucking world is hassling you. Foster's been around the block once or twice, so watch your ass, he's slippery as a wet condom. Then again, they all are. This is where the big bad city begins, Sonny Boy, right here in the Eight-Eight, the home of the jig and the land of the spic.”

“One more time, Ollie,” Kling said.

“What the fuck's with you?” Ollie said, genuinely puzzled.

“See you at three,” Carella said, and took Kling's elbow and steered him out of the squadroom.

Behind them, Ollie called, “You new in the job, or what?”

 

IT OCCURRED TO CARELLA
that it had been raining the last time he'd visited the Reverend Gabriel Foster here at the First Baptist Church. This time he took an umbrella from the car. In this city, you never saw a uniformed cop carrying an umbrella and you hardly ever saw a detective carrying one, either. That was because law enforcement officers could walk between the drops. Walking between the drops now, Carella hunched with Kling under the large black umbrella, and they splashed their way together to the front doors of the church.