Fat Ollie's Book: A Novel of the 87th Precinct

by Ed McBain

  Wait a minute.

  Hold it right there.

  “Report to the Commissioner,” he said aloud.

  He’d been eating when the inspiration came to him. He yanked a paper napkin out of the holder on the pizzeria table, took a pen from his pocket, outlined a rectangle on the napkin…

  …and then began lettering inside it:

  And that was it.

  He had found a title, he had found an approach, he was on his way.

  “It was in the dispatch case you gave me,” Ollie said, “he prob’ly thought it was something else. Up the Eight-Eight, the only thing anybody carries in a dispatch case is hundred-dollar bills or cocaine. He prob’ly thought he was making a big score.”

  “Well, hey,” Isabelle said, “your bignovel! ”

  He would have to tell her sometime that skinny people shouldn’t try sarcasm.

  “Also they’re tryin’a take away this big homicide I caught.”

  “Maybe they’ll show more respect once your bignovel is published.”

  “It’s not that big,” Ollie said. “If you mean long.”

  “Anyway, what’s the big deal? Print another copy.”

  “Do what?”

  “Print another copy. Go to your computer and…”

  “What computer?”

  “Well, what’d you do? Write it in longhand on a lined yellow pad…”

  “No, I…”

  “Write it in lipstick on toilet paper?” Isabelle asked, and laughed at her own witticism.

  “No, I typed it on atypewriter, ” Ollie said. “You know, Isabelle, somebody should tell you that sarcasm doesn’t work when a person weighs thirty-seven pounds in her bare feet.”

  “Only large persons should try sarcasm, you’re right,” Isabelle said. “What’s a typewriter?”

  “You know damn well what a typewriter is.”

  “Are you saying you don’t have acopy of the book?”

  “Only the last chapter. The last chapter is home.”

  “What’s it doing home?”

  “I may need to polish it.”

  “Polish it? What is it, the family silverware?”

  “Nothing’s finished till it’s finished,” Ollie said.

  “So as I understand this, everything but the last chapter of your book was stolen from your car this morning.”

  “Five-sixths of my novel, yes.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “About thirty-six pages.”

  “Isn’t that short for a novel?”

  “Not if it’s a good novel. Besides, less is more. That’s an adage amongst us writers.”

  “Didn’t you writers ever hear of carbon paper?”

  “That’s why there are Kinko’s,” Ollie said, “so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Besides, I didn’t have time for carbon paper. And I didn’t know some junkie hophead was going to break into my car and steal my book. It so happens I’m occupied with a little crime on the side, you know,” he said, gathering steam. “It so happens I’m a professionallaw enforcement officer…”

  “Gee, and here I thought you were Nora Roberts…”

  “Isabelle, sarcasm really…”

  “Or Mary Higgins Clark…”

  “I am Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks,” he said, rising from the table and hurling his napkin onto his plate. “And don’t you ever forget it!”

  “Sit down, have some dessert,” she said.

  DETECTIVE STEVE CARELLAfirst heard about Fat Ollie Weeks being assigned to the Henderson homicide on Tuesday morning, when Lieutenant Byrnes called him into his corner office and tossed a copy of the city’s morning tabloid on his desk.

  “Did you see this?” he asked.

  The headline on the front page read:

  88TH PCT

  CATCHES

  HENDERSON

  HOMICIDE

  The subhead read:

  LOCAL FUZZ

  LAND BIG FISH

  “Seems Fat Ollie caught the squeal,” Byrnes said.

  “Good for him,” Carella said.

  “Bad for us,” Byrnes said. “Henderson lives in the Eight-Seven. Lived,” he corrected. “Over in Smoke Rise.”

  Smoke Rise was a walled and gated community of some seventy-five homes, all of them superbly located on sculpted terraces that overlooked the River Harb. The residents of Smoke Rise enjoyed the exclusive use of an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a health club, and tennis courts lighted at night. There was a private school on the property as well, the Smoke Rise Academy, for grades one through eight, boasting its own soccer and baseball teams, their gray-and-black uniforms seeming to conjure the very image of rising smoke.

  Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, Carella had caught a kidnapping there, at the residence of a man named Douglas King, whose estate lay within the confines of the Eight-Seven, at the farthermost reaches of the precinct territory in that nothing but the River Harb lay beyond it and the next state. In this exclusive corner of the Eight-Seven, Smoke Rise provided the ultra-urban face of the city with an atmosphere at once countrified and otherworldly. Smoke Rise signified wealth and exclusivity.

  It was here, on a tree-shaded street named Prospect Lane, that City Councilman Lester Henderson had lived with his wife and two children. And it was not seven miles away and a hundred miles distant—at the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback, a black and Hispanic section of the city coiling like a rattlesnake on the fringes of civilization—that Henderson had been shot to death yesterday morning.

  “Means we can expect Ollie any minute,” Byrnes said.

  Both men looked at each other.

  Carella actually sighed.

  • • •

  OLLIE DID NOT, in fact, show up at the precinct until twelve noon that Tuesday, just in time for lunch. Ollie’s internal mechanism always told him when it was time to eat. Ollie sometimes believed it told him it wasalways time to eat.

  “Anybody for lunch?” he asked.

  He had opened the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside, and was waddling—the proper word, Carella thought—across the room toward where Carella sat behind his desk. On this bright April morning, Ollie was wearing a plaid sports jacket over a lime green golfing shirt and blue Dacron trousers. He looked like a Roman galley under full sail. By contrast, Carella—who was expecting the imminent appearance of a burglary victim he’d scheduled for an interview—looked sartorially elegant in a wheat-colored linen shirt with the throat open and the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, and dark brown trousers that matched the color of his eyes. Ollie noticed for the first time that Carella’s eyes slanted downward, giving his face a somewhat Oriental appearance. He wondered if there was a little Chink in the armor back there someplace, huh, kiddies?

  “How’s my eternally grateful friend?” he asked.

  He was referring to the fact that around Christmastime, he had saved Carella’s life—twice, no less.

  “Eternally grateful,” Carella said. In all honesty, he didn’t enjoy the idea of being indebted to Ollie in any which way whatever. “What brings you to this part of town?” he asked. As if he didn’t know.

  “Seems a resident here got himself aced yesterday morning, ah yes,” Ollie said.

  “So I understand,” Carella said.

  “Then why’d you ask, m’little chickadee?” Ollie said, once again doing his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. The pity was—but hedidn’t realize this—nobody today knew who W. C. Fields was. Whenever Ollie did his impersonation, everyone thought he was doing Al Pacino inScent of a Woman.

  “Want to go get a bite to eat?”

  “Gee, what else is new?” Carella said.

  Sarcasm, Ollie thought. Everybody today is into sarcasm.

  THE PLACEthey chose was a diner on Culver and South Eleventh, which Ollie said was run by the Mob, which Carella doubted since he’d only been working in this precinct forever, and except for prostitut
ion and numbers, the boys had pretty much ceded the hood to black gangs and Colombian posses. The black gangs used to devote their time to street rumbles until they realized there was money to be made dealing dope. The Colombian gangs knew this all along. Unfortunately, dope didn’t stop anyone from killing anyone else. In fact, it seemed to encourage the activity.

  “I need your help,” Ollie said. “I’m gonna have my hands full checking out the Hall and how somebody could’ve got in and out of there with what Ballistics now tells me was a .32 aced Henderson. His views weren’t particularly appreciated in the so-called Negro community, you know, so it ain’t exactly unlikely that he was offed by some irate person of color, as they sometimes refer to themselves, ah yes.”

  “What is it you’d like me to do?” Carella asked.

  He was watching Fat Ollie eat, an undertaking of stupendous proportions to anyone not himself a glutton. Ollie had ordered three hamburgers to start, and was devouring them with both hands and a non-stop mouth, consuming simultaneously a huge platter of fries with ketchup, and drinking his second chocolate milk shake, a perpetual-motion, eating, drinking, slurping, slobbering, dripping, incessant ingestion machine.

  “I want you to go up Smoke Rise,” Ollie said, signaling to the waitress, “talk to the councilman’s widow, see you can find out did he have any enemies besides the usual suspects…yes, darling, here’s what I’d like if you could be so kind,” he said to the waitress. “Bring me another shake, that’s chocolate, and another hamburger, and that apple pie—is it apple?—looks good, too, with some vanilla ice cream on it, please, make it two scoops,is it apple?”

  “Actually, it’s strawberry peach,” the waitress said, looking already weary at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, but Ollie appreciated women who appeared beaten and defeated.

  “Yum, strawberry peach sounds good, too,” he said, “two scoops of ice cream, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that uniform is very becoming,” Ollie said, “ah yes, m’dear, have you ever considered modeling?”

  The waitress smiled.

  Ollie smiled back.

  Carella bit into his grilled cheese sandwich.

  “I’d like to take a look at the Hall,” he said. “See what happened there before I go talking to any widow.”

  “What’s one thing got to do with the other?” Ollie asked.

  “Well, a woman’s husband gets shot, maybe she’d like to know some of the details.”

  “I can tell you everything you need to know right now, you don’t have to waste time. He was up there getting the lay of the land, helping his people set the stage for what was supposed to be a big rally last night. Somebody plugged him from the wings, or the balcony, or wherever—I’m still waiting for information on trajectory, flight curve, all the other garbage, from both the ME and Ballistics. I got three different acoustics reports from witnesses at the scene. One said…”

  “Who were the witnesses?”

  “Guy named Alan Pierce, who’s Henderson’s aide, and a guy from the company supplying the balloons, the bunting, all the other shit, both of them standing right next to the councilman when the bullets took him.”

  “What’d they hear?”

  “Pierce says the shots came from the wings. The other guy—his name is Chuck Mastroiani, one of yourpaisans, ” Ollie said, and grinned as if he were telling a dirty joke, “says the shots came from the balcony. Neither of them know Shinola from bow-waves, they were prob’ly talking about muzzle reports. Third guy, this young college twerp, was actually sitting in the balcony, which is maybe why he told me the shots came from downstairs.Wherever the shots came from…”

  “How many?” Carella asked.

  “Six. Ballistics says they were fired from a .32 Smith & Wesson, which means the shooter emptied the gun at him. Betokens rage, mayhap? Leading back to the possibility that a jig done it—oops, forgive me, I know you don’t appreciate slang.”

  “Some people might consider your ‘slang’ racist,” Carella said.

  “Pip, pip, my good fellow,” Ollie said, trying to imitate a British member of Parliament, but sounding instead like either W. C. Fields or Al Pacino. “There’s a vast difference between being politically incorrect and being racist.”

  “Explain the difference to Artie Brown sometime.”

  “Actually, Brown’s a good cop,” Ollie said. “For a Negro.”

  “Explain ‘Negro’ to him, too.”

  “Steve, don’t bust my chops,” Ollie said. “I saved your goddamn life.”

  “Twice, don’t forget.”

  “Don’t forget is right.”

  “I still want to take a look at that hall,” Carella said.

  3

  YELLOWCRIME SCENE tapes defined a wide area leading from the sidewalk to the entrance doors of the hall. A row of uniformed cops stood outside the building, uneasily expecting the appearance of anyone with scrambled eggs on his cap. They all knew a city councilman had been shot to death inside here yesterday morning. They all knew the murder was all over the newspapers and television yesterday afternoon and early this morning. They also knew that last summer a series of gropings in Grover Park had attracted intense media scrutiny because some policemen appeared to have been inattentive to the needs of women whose panties were being yanked down. The cops here today did not wish to be considered derelict in their duty. So they stood outside the hall scratching their asses and wondering what the hell they were supposed to be doing here, while simultaneously trying to appear alert for future assassins. The appearance of two gold-and-blue shields on the scene made them uneasy.

  “At ease, men,” Ollie said, though none of the uniforms had snapped to attention.

  A sergeant who’d seen it all, and heard it all, and done it all merely looked at Ollie, who opened one of the glass doors and allowed Carella to precede him inside. The two made an odd-looking couple. Carella was some six feet tall in his stocking feet, weighing in at about a buck-eighty now that he was watching his weight, broadshouldered and narrow-waisted, with the stride of a natural athlete—which he certainly wasn’t. Ollie was somewhat shorter, with the pear-shaped body of a bell buoy floating off the harbor, but with a stride that actually surpassed Carella’s, not for nothing was it rumored that fat men were light on their feet. Once, in fact, while vacationing in the Caribbean, Ollie had won a salsa contest—but that was another story. Marching side by side into the marbled entrance lobby, Carella actually had difficulty keeping up with him. Ollie flashed the tin at the gaggle of uniforms standing attentive guard in front of the inner doors, and again allowed Carella to walk ahead of him, this time into the vast auditorium itself.

  The place had a ghostly silence to it, not unusual at the scene of a murder, but somehow more resolute because of the cavernous space. The stage was still partially hung with bunting and balloons, American flags and banners proclaiming the councilman’s name. But the job hadn’t been quite finished because someone had inconsiderately shot Henderson while he and his people were still setting things up. Like a woman who was dressed for a ball, but who hadn’t yet put on her earrings or her lipstick, the stage sat only partially adorned, forlornly incomplete. The two men stood at the rear of the hall, looking toward the stage, outwardly appearing to be sharing the same thoughts and feelings, but actually experiencing quite different emotions. For Carella, there was only a sense of loss, the same pain he felt whenever he looked down at a torn and bleeding corpse on the sidewalk. Ollie looked at the stage and saw only a puzzle that needed to be solved. Perhaps that was the essential difference between the two men.

  Silently, they walked down the center aisle. There were empty seats on either side of them, adding to the sense of an incomplete act, a performance postponed. Carella stopped midway toward the stage, turned, and looked up at the balcony. It seemed a hell of a long way for .32-caliber bullets to have traveled.

  “Had to be the wings, don’t you think?” Ollie asked, reading his mind.

  “Maybe.”


  “Thing is, nobodysaw anything. Pierce and yourpaisan ”—and again, the knowing leer—“were standing right next to him. Workmen are all over the place. Bam, bam, somebody drops Henderson and disappears. Nobody seen nothing.”

  “Workmen doing what?”

  “Putting up the flags and stuff.”

  They were standing on the stage now, the flags and stuff hanging above them. A podium behind which Henderson would never stand was under a huge banner that statedLESTER MEANS LAW . Neither of the detectives knew what that meant.

  “How many workmen?” Carella asked.

  “A dozen or so. I have the list.”

  “None of themsaw anything?”

  “I got some of my people out talking to them now. But I doubt we’ll get lucky.”

  “But they were all there working when he got shot, is that it?”

  “They were all on the stage here, putting up things, testing mikes, whatever they do.”

  “Nobody in the wings?”

  “Just the shooter.”

  “Let me get this straight…”

  “Sure.”

  “Henderson is onstage with his people and a dozen workmen…”

  “Is the way I got it.”

  “…when six shots are fired.”

  “Two of them taking him in the chest. Four went wild.”

  “And by the time anyone reacts, the shooter is gone.”

  “That’s the long and the short of it,” Ollie said.

  HE TOLD THEuniformed guard in the gate house booth that he was here to see Mrs. Henderson, and the guard checked his clipboard list, and then picked up the phone when he didn’t see Carella’s name on it. Apparently Pamela Henderson gave the okay; the guard told him it was the first house on the right on Prospect Lane, and then waved him on through.