The Big Bad City (25 page)

It takes them perhaps half an hour to finish all they have to do. Alan gets behind the wheel and honks the horn. In the stillness of the night, it sounds like the cry of one of Charlie Custer’s swamp critters. Tote comes running out of his cabin and tosses his suitcase into the back of the van. A moment later, Davey and Katie come out of Custer’s office. Alan starts the car. Climbing onto the back seat, Davey says, “Got the bread, let’s go.” Katie sits beside him and pulls her T-shirt away from her body, encouraging the cool flow from the air conditioner.

“We made it to Calusa in an hour and forty minutes,” Roselli tells them now. “That afternoon, we found out Charlie had fallen in the river and drowned. And got eaten by alligators.”

They did not reach Davey Farnes again until nine o’clock on Monday morning. He explained that he’d
been at the beach all day yesterday, and had gone directly to dinner afterward—

“I like to check on the competition,” he said. “Didn’t get home till around ten. Were you trying to reach me?”

“On and off,” Carella said. “I wonder if we can stop by now.”

“Oh?” Farnes said. “Something come up?”

“Just a few questions we’d like to ask.”

“I have to leave for the restaurant at ten-thirty. Will that give you enough time?”

“Sure,” Carella said. “See you in half an hour.”

They got to Farnes’s building at a quarter to ten. He lived in a part of the city not far from his restaurant, an area undergoing intensive urban renewal. Where once there’d been shabby tenements housing illegal aliens, there were now four- and five-story elevator buildings, many of them with doormen. Farnes’s apartment was on the fifth floor of a building renovated a year or so ago. There was no doorman, so they announced themselves via the intercom over the downstairs buzzer, and then took the elevator up.

Farnes led them into a living room modestly furnished with a teakwood sofa and two matching easy chairs upholstered in bleached linen. There was a teak coffee table in front of the sofa. A pair of standing floor lamps with glass shades, one blue, one orange, flanked the sofa. An open door led to a small kitchen. A closed second door led to what they supposed was the bedroom. Another closed door beside it probably opened onto a bathroom. The apartment was pleasantly air-conditioned, the windows closed to the noise of the traffic below and the incessant rise and fall of police and ambulance sirens.

“Something to drink?” he asked.

“Thanks, no,” Carella said. “We’re sorry to bother you again, Mr. Farnes …”

“Hey, no problem.”

“… but I wonder if you can tell us again what happened on that last night in Boyle’s Landing.”

“The night Charlie drowned, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think that had anything to do with Katie’s murder, do you?”

“No, but we were wondering if it influenced her decision.”

“To quit the band, you mean?”

“Yes. You told us on Saturday that she broke the news right after Labor Day. That would’ve been immediately after the tour ended. So it’s possible …”

“Yeah, I see where you’re going. Well, I guess it
might
have been upsetting to her. The thing is, we didn’t find
out
about it until the next day. It wasn’t as if we
witnessed
the drowning, or anything. I mean, we didn’t actually see any alligators tearing him apart. So … I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Maybe we can try reconstructing what happened that night.”

“Well … sure.”

“You finished playing at two, is that right?”

“Two
A.M.
, correct. We did
three
shows that night.”

“Tote went to sleep …”

“Man would sleep around the clock if you let him.”

“The rest of you were up talking …”

“Talking, drinking.”

“You, Alan, Katie, and Sal, is that right?”

“Charlie joined us a little bit later.”

“When was that?”

“Before he paid us. I was the one who suggested we pick up our pay, pack the van, and drive up to Calusa right then, instead of waiting till tomorrow. Well, it already
was
tomorrow, this was two-thirty, three in the morning. I suggested that we drive the hundred and fifty miles or so, go straight to sleep when we got there. They all thought it was a terrific idea. So Alan and I started packing the van …”

“Wait a minute,” Brown said. “It was Alan and
Sal
who packed the van, wasn’t it?”

“Not the way I remember it. Who told you that?”

“Sal did. That’s the way he remembers it.”

“No, he’s mistaken. I wouldn’t let anyone touch my drums.”

“So the way
you
remember it, it was Alan and you who packed the van, is that right?”

“That’s absolutely right.”

“Packed the van and you all drove off.”

“Yes. Around three-thirty, something like that.”

“And the Calusa cops came around the next day.”

“Yes.”

“Asked you did you know anything about what happened the night before.”

“That’s right.”

“But nobody could tell them anything.”

“Nobody.”

“Cause none of you were there when Charlie Custer drowned.”

“None of us were there.”

“Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Farnes,” Carella said. “We appreciate your time.”

“And got eaten by alligators,” Brown added.

“None of us,” Farnes repeated.

It was almost twelve noon in Calusa, Florida, when Cynthia Huellen buzzed Matthew Hope and told him that a detective named Steve Carella was on line five.

“Hey,” Matthew said, surprised. “How are you?”

“Fine. How’s the weather down there?”

“Hot.”

“Here, too. What are you doing these days? You still out of the crime business?”

“Planning a trip to the Czech Republic, in fact,” Matthew said.

“Why there?”

“Prague’s there.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Got to find a woman first.”

“Plenty of women there, I’ll bet,” Carella said.

“Can’t chance it. I’m getting old, Steve.”

“So am I. I’ll be forty in October.”

“Now
that’s
old, man.”

“Tell me about it.”

They chatted on for another five minutes or so, two old friends who had never met, one a lawyer in the sleepy Florida town of Calusa, the other a detective in a noisy northern city, strangers when first they’d met on the telephone, strangers still, perhaps, though each felt a kinship they could not explain.

“So what occasions this call?” Matthew asked at last.

“Well, if you’re
really
out of the crime business …”

“I am.”

“Then you can’t tell me what the Calusa police
learned from four musicians and a girl singer who were down there around this time four years ago.”

“Why were the Calusa cops interested in them?” Matthew asked.

“Because a man named Charlie Custer drowned and got eaten by alligators.”

“Piece of cake,” Matthew said.

The man Murchison put through to the squadroom told Meyer that he knew the Leslie Blyden they were looking for.

“I saw the Chief of Detectives on television Saturday night,” he said, “talking about a Leslie Blyden. I said to myself, What? Then yesterday’s papers said he had a pinkie missing, the Blyden you’re looking for. I said to myself, That has to be the Les I knew in the Gulf. What I want to know now …”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is there a reward?”

“No, sir, there is not.”

“Then thanks a lot,” the man said and hung up.

Meyer guessed he didn’t know that police departments had Caller ID capability and that his name was already displayed on Meyer’s desktop LED panel.
FRANK GIRARDI
was what it read, with a telephone number directly above it.

Meyer didn’t think they’d be calling ahead.

“So what we’ve got,” Brown said, “is a piano player and a drummer who each say they were packing instruments in a van with a person who’s now dead of AIDS. And we’ve got the piano player saying he saw the drummer, together with a lady who later got strangled
in the park, go in the office of a man who later got eaten by alligators. And we’ve got the drummer saying the same thing about the piano player.”

“That’s what we’ve got,” Carella said.

“So one of them’s got to be lying.”

“Not necessarily. Four years was a long time ago. They may not be remembering clearly.”

“They remembered every
other
detail about that night, though, didn’t they?” Brown said. “Drummers lie a lot, Steve. So do piano players. In fact, been my experience most musicians do. Specially when there’s nobody alive can contradict them.”

“You’ll get letters.”

“I hope not,” Brown said, and turned to look over his shoulder. “Am I dreaming,” he asked, “or has that Honda been with us the past half hour?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Behind us. Little green Accord.”

Carella looked in the rearview mirror.

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“Black man at the wheel.”

“Makes him a wanted desperado, right?” Carella said.

“It’s the next left,” Brown said.

“I know.”

He made the turn at the next corner. Brown’s apartment building was three doors in. He pulled up in front of it. The little green Accord drove right on by. Brown gave it a hard look, and then got out of the car.

“See you tomorrow,” Carella said.

“Want to come up for a drink?”

“Got to go pick up the dope money from Riverhead.”

“Tell them to mail mine.”

“The protection we give, they should messenger it.”

“No respect anymore,” Brown said, and grinned, and closed the door on his side. Carella returned the grin and drove off.

Frank Girardi had lost both legs in George Bush’s television war, which featured surgical strikes and hardly any deaths on either side, to hear the generals and the politicians tell it. Girardi had been wounded in the First Cavalry Division feint up the Wadi al Batin, and now he worked at a computer in his small Calm’s Point apartment, addressing envelopes for any firm that was willing to pay him for this onerous task.

“Reason you get so many letters with handwritten addresses on them is because a lot of people don’t know how to do the envelopes on their computers. I make address files for these various companies, and then I run off the envelopes on my printer and send them back by messenger. I get ten cents an envelope. It’s not bad work.”

Girardi looked to be in his late twenties. Each of the detectives had a good ten years on him. They were each suddenly aware of their legs, the fact that they had legs and Girardi didn’t. They were here to pry Leslie Blyden’s address from him, but it was a little difficult to put the muscle on a man who was sitting in a wheelchair.

“Reason I asked if there was a reward,” Girardi said, “is I figure I got one coming, don’t you? I get all shot up in what was basically an
oil
war, I think my country owes me something, don’t you?”

Meyer did not think it appropriate to inform Girardi that the city’s police department was not his country. They had come here prepared to offer what
they would have given any police informer, a sum ranging from a hundred to a thousand, depending on the value of the information. They took this money from a squadroom slush fund, the origins of which were obscure, but in police work petty detail often fell between the cracks and the point was to get the job done. Just before he and Kling left the squadroom, Meyer signed out a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. If this money had originally belonged to a dope dealer and it was now being used to buy information that would lead to a killer, that was justification enough not to ask questions.

The trouble here, though, was that Girardi wasn’t a sleazy two-bit informer who’d sell his ax-murderer brother for a cup of coffee and a donut. Girardi was a war hero. A man with both the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor. You couldn’t offer a war hero a dope dealer’s dirty money in exchange for information. You couldn’t pressure him, either. You couldn’t say, Okay, Frank, you want us to take another look at the open file on that grocery store holdup? You couldn’t bargain. You couldn’t say, So long, Frank, this shit isn’t worth more than a hundred. The man was a war hero.

“Look,” Meyer said, “we don’t want to insult you …”

“I’ve been insulted by experts,” Girardi said.

“As I told you on the phone, there’s no reward on this thing. But we’re prepared to give you money out of our own pockets …”

“Bullshit,” Girardi said.

“Whatever. It embarrasses me, believe me. A man who did so much for his country, I wish I could offer more. But all we can go is a thousand.”

“I’ll take it,” Girardi said.

T
HE PROBLEM WAS ALL THE BACKGROUND
.

B
LYDEN’S LANDLADY HAD TOLD
them that she’d seen him leaving the building at around six-thirty
P.M.
What he usually did, she told them, was walk up to the McDonald’s on the next block, catch himself a bite there. Did it every night, far as she could tell. A creature of habit was Mr. Leslie Blyden.

The sign out front was claiming billions and billions of hamburgers sold, but Meyer figured that was an underestimate. The place at a quarter to seven that Monday night was packed with diners inside and cars outside. They had no clear picture of what Blyden looked like because the Feebs hadn’t yet sent along his army ID photo. All they had was the description of him from when he’d entered the service nine years ago. They also knew he’d lost the pinkie on his right hand since then.

This same information hadn’t helped them much when they killed the Leslie Blyden who now turned out to be a man named Lester Blier, who was wanted in the state of Arizona for mail fraud, and who’d been living here in the city under a touch-close alias for nearly two years—which perhaps explained his panicky reaction on Saturday. The new data somewhat lessened the public hue and cry over four armed and armored police detectives nailing an innocent man in his own kitchen. But only somewhat. Mail fraud was perceived in the
public imagination as some sort of gentlemanly crime, far distant from armed robbery or rape. You didn’t go gunning down a man who had a mail fraud warrant chasing him from Wee Mesa, Arizona. This was a sophisticated city, man, and it did not expect its police officers to behave like barbaric goons.