Nocturne (29 page)

“What’s his number?” Ollie asked.

The phone company told Hawes that the call from the wall phone of The Juice Bar at 1:17
a.m
. on January nineteenth had been made to a telephone listed to a subscriber named Svetlana Helder at 1217 Lincoln Street in
Isola.

This was puzzling.

Why had Larry Whoever called a woman who was murdered the very next night with a gun he’d purchased not five minutes after
he’d got off the phone with her?

Meanwhile, Carella was dialing the number Bernie the Banker had given them. This was now a quarter past six in the morning.
A woman’s sleepy voice said,
“Pronto.”

“Signora?”
he said.

“Sì?”

“Voglio parlare con Lorenzo, per piacere.”

“Non c’è.”

In the next five minutes, in tattered Italian and shattered English, the woman—whose name was Carmela Buongiorno and who said
she was the landlady of a rooming house on Trent Street, not five blocks from where Svetlana had been shot—told Carella that
Lorenzo Schiavinato had been living there since October the twenty-fourth, but had moved out this past Sunday. She did not
know where he was now. He seemed to be a nice man, was something the matter?

“Che succese?”
she asked.

What happened?

“Niente, signora, niente,”
Carella said.

Nothing,
signora,
nothing.

But something had indeed happened.

Murder had happened.

And Lorenzo Schiavinato had purchased the murder weapon the night before someone used it on Svetlana Dyalovich.

They now had his full name.

They ran it through the computer.

There was
niente, signora
.

Niente.

Ollie figured Curly Joe Simms would turn out to be a bald guy and he wasn’t disappointed. He made a note to mention to Meyer
Meyer, up at the Eight-Seven, that he would start calling himself Curly Meyer. Curly Joe was wearing yellow earmuffs and a
brown woolen coat buttoned over a green muffler. His eyes kept watering and he kept blowing his nose as he explained to Ollie
that he was a night person, which meant that he only slept during the daytime. He was beginning to get a little drowsy right
now, in fact, but he felt it was important to do his civic duty, wasn’t it? Ollie was a little drowsy, too, but only because
he’d just got up half an hour ago. At six forty-two in the morning, there weren’t too many places open near the 88th Precinct
station house. They met in the coffee shop of the Harley Hotel on Ninety-second and Jackson. The Harley was a hotbed dive
catering to hookers and their clientele. A steady stream of girls walked in and out of the coffee shop while Ollie and Curly
Joe talked.

Curly Joe was bothered that someone had drowned poor Richie Cooper.

“Richie was a close friend of mine,” he said.

So close you didn’t know he hated being called Richie, Ollie thought, but did not say. The man had come all the way over from
Ainsley and Eleventh, six in the morning, he deserved a hearing, even if he was bald. Ollie ate another donut and listened.

Curly Joe sipped at his coffee and told him how on Saturday night he was sitting with Richie in one of the window booths at
the Silver Chief Diner, both of them having coffee, when all at once Richie jumps up and yells, “Look at that, willya?”

“Look at what?” Curly Joe said.

“Out there. Those three guys.”

Curly Joe looked.

Three big guys in hooded parkas were standing at the curb, pissing in the gutter. This was not such an unusual sight up here,
so Curly Joe couldn’t understand why Richie was so upset by it. But he certainly was annoyed, jumping up out of the booth,
and putting on his black leather jacket …

“He was dressed all in black,” Curly Joe said. “Black jeans, black shirt, black boots, the black jacket …”

“Yeah, go on,” Ollie said.

… putting on the jacket, and tossing a couple of bucks on the table as his share of the bill, and then storming out of the
diner and walking over to where the three guys were still standing there, shaking out their dicks. From where Curly Joe watched
through the diner window, he saw, but could not hear, the conversation taking place between the four of them, Richie dressed
all in black and appearing before them like an avenging angel of death. They almost all three of them peed on his boots, he
was standing that close.

——
Now what do you call this?

——
We call it pissing in the gutter.

——
I call it disrespect for the neighborhood. That what the letter P stand for? Pissing?

——
Join us, why don’t you?

——
My name is Richard.

Big white guy zipping up and extending his hand to Richie.

——
So is mine.

Second white guy holding out his hand, too.

——
Me, too.

Third guy holding out his hand.

——
As it happens, my name is Richard, too.

Richie holding out his hand, shaking hands with the three white guys, one after the other. And now there’s a serious conversation
at the curb, Richie probably explaining that what he did up here in Diamondback was sell crack cocaine to nice little boys
like the three preppies here in their hooded parkas. In a minute or so, he begins leading them up the street, past the diner
where Curly Joe is still sitting in the window booth, probably taking them to a place called the Trash Cat, which is an underground
bar where there are plenty of girls all hours of the night, just like the Harley here.

They stop again not far from the diner, like at an angle to it, for another serious conversation Curly Joe can see but not
hear.

——
You dudes interested in some nice jumbo vials I happen to have in my pocket here? You care for a taste at fifteen a pop?

And now Curly Joe sees crack and money changing hands, black to white and white to black, and all at once a taxi pulls up
to the curb, and a long-legged white girl in a fake-fur jacket and red leather boots steps out. She looks familiar but Curly
Joe doesn’t recognize her at first. The driver’s window rolls down, he’s got like a dazed expression on his face, as if he
just got hit by a bus.

——
Thanks, Max.

The girl blows him a kiss and swivels onto the sidewalk, a red handbag under her arm …

——
Hey, Yolande, you jess the girl we lookin for.

… and Curly Joe recognizes her all at once as a hooker Jamal Stone fixed him up with one time when Jamal laid two bills on
a pony and was a little short of cash. Her name was Marie St. Claire, she’d given Curly Joe the best blow job he’d ever had
in his lifetime, did Ollie ever hear of a Moroccan Sip? So now there’s another big conference at the curb, Curly Joe watching
but not hearing, Richie’s hands flying,
Six hundred for the three preppies here, whutchoo say? Two hundred apiece for the next few hours
, head bobbing,
you take me on, I’ll throw five jumbos in the pot, whutchoo say, girlfriend?
—big summit meeting here on Ainsley Avenue—
We all go up my place, do some crack, get down to
realities,
sistuh, you hear whut I’m sayin?

——
Well, I’ve been out since eleven last night, it’s been a long one, bro. So maybe we ought to just pass unless we can sweeten
the pot a little, hm?

——
Whutchoo mean sweeten it? How sweet do you wish to sweeten it?

——
If you’ll be joining the party, I’ll need ten jumbos …

——
No problem.

——
And a grand from the college boys here. Though you’re all so cute, I might do it for nine.

——
Make it eight.

——
I can’t do it for less than nine. Hey, you’re all real cute, but …

——
How about eight-fifty?

——
It has to be nine or I’m out of here.

——
Will you accept traveler’s checks?

——
Done deal.

“… and they all start laughing. They musta concluded their negotiation, don’t you think?” Curly Joe said. “Cause next thing
you know, she’s looping her hands through two of the guys’ arms, and they’re all marchin off toward Richie’s buildin, her
in the red jacket, and Richie in his black leather, and the three kids with these hooded blue parkas got big white Ps and
footballs on the back of them.”

Daybreak is aptly named.

Unlike sunset, where colors linger in the sky long after the sun has dropped below the horizon, sunrise is heralded by a similar
flush, but the display is brief, and suddenly it is morning. Suddenly the sky is bright. Day literally
breaks
, surprising the pinkish night, setting it to rout.

From the windows of the squadroom on the second floor of the old precinct building, they watched the day break over the city.
It was going to be cold and clear again. The clock on the squadroom wall read seven-fifteen.

At a little past seven-thirty, the detectives began drifting in for the shift change. Officially this was called the eight-to-four,
but it started at seven forty-five, because many uniformed cops were relieved on post, and detectives—all of whom had once
pounded beats—honored the timeworn tradition. They hung their hats and coats on the rack in the corner, and exchanged morning
greetings. Complaining about the vile coffee from the pot brewing in the clerical office down the hall, they sat nonetheless
on the edges of their desks and sipped it from soggy cardboard containers. Outside the wind raged at the windows.

They double-teamed this one because it was now more than thirty-one hours since they’d caught the Dyalovich squeal and they
were not very much closer to finding the person or persons who’d killed her. It was also two full days since they’d discovered
the body of Yolande Marie Marx in the alleyway on St. Sab’s and First. But whereas the Marx murder was officially theirs under
the First Man Up rule, they had been informed that Fat Ollie Weeks of the Eight-Eight had caught a related double murder,
and they were more than content to leave the three-way investigation to him. A hooker, a pimp, and a small-time ounce dealer?
Let Ollie’s mother worry.

So here they all were, those legendary stalwarts of the Eight-Seven, gathered in Lieutenant Byrne’s sunny corner office at
ten minutes to eight that Monday morning, Carella and Hawes telling the others what they had so far, and hoping that someone
in this brilliant think tank would offer a clue or clues that would help them crack the case wide open.

“What it sounds like to me,” Andy Parker said, “is you have nothing.”

Parker was a good friend of Ollie Weeks. That’s because they were both bigots. But whereas Ollie was also a good detective,
Parker only rarely rose to heights of deductive dazzle. He was almost as big a slob as Ollie, however, favoring unpressed
shirts, soiled suits, unpolished shoes, and an unshaven look he believed made him resemble a good television cop. Parker figured
there were only two kinds of television cop shows. The lousy ones, which he called
The Cops of Madison County,
and the good ones, which he called
Real Meat Funk
.

As a detective, albeit not a very good one, Parker knew that the word “funk” descended from the word “funky,” which in turn
evolved from a style of jazz piano-playing called “funky butt,” which translated as “smelly asshole.” He was amused the other
day when a radio restaurant critic mentioned that the food in a downtown bistro was “funky.”

Not many things amused Parker.

Especially so early in the morning.

“Well, we do have the guy’s name,” Hawes said.

“What guy?”

“The guy who bought the murder weapon.”

“Who you can’t find.”

“Well, he moved out yesterday,” Carella said.

“So he’s in flight, is that what you figure?” Willis asked.

He was poised on the edge of the lieutenant’s desk like a gargoyle on Notre Dame cathedral, listening carefully, brown eyes
intent. Byrnes liked him a lot. He liked small people, figured small people had to try harder. Willis had barely cleared the
minimum-height requirement for policemen in this city, but he was an expert at judo and could knock any cheap thief flat on
his ass in less than ten seconds. His girlfriend had been shot and killed only recently, by a pair of Colombian goons who’d
broken into her apartment. Willis never much talked about her, but he hadn’t been the same since. Byrnes worried. He worried
about all of his people.

“Day after the murder, he powders,” Kling said, “it’s got to be flight.”

Worried a lot about Kling, too. Never had any luck with women, it seemed. Byrnes understood he’d taken up with a black woman,
a deputy chief in the department, no less, as if the black-white thing wasn’t difficult enough. Byrnes wished him the best,
but it remained to be seen. Next chapter, he thought. Life is always full of next chapters, some of them never written.

“Maybe he’s already back in Italy,” Brown said.

Scowling. Always scowling. Made it look as if he was angry all the time, like a lot of black people in this city were, with
damn good cause. But in all the years he’d known Brown, he’d never seen him lose his temper. Giant of a man, could have been
a linebacker for a professional football team, reminded him a lot of Rosie Grier, in fact, though Grier was now, what, a minister?
He tried to imagine Brown as a minister. His imagination would not take him quite that far.

“Maybe,” Carella said.

“Where in Italy?” Meyer asked.

“Don’t know.”

“What’d you find when you tossed her apartment?” Byrnes asked.

“Me?”

“You.”

“Dead cat lying alongside her,” Carella said.

“Skip the cat.”

“Fish bones all over the kitchen floor.”

“I said skip the cat.”

“Savings account passbook in a dresser drawer, hundred and twenty-five thou withdrawn the morning before she got killed.”

“What time?”

“Ten twenty-seven
a.m
.”