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

by Ed McBain

  “I mean it. Well, not Cantonese. I only know it in Mandarin.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  Ollie squinted his eyes. Cleaving the air with the edge of his palm, he shouted“May-oh BANfa!” and burst out laughing. Patricia laughed with him.

  “That’s remarkable,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Ollie said. “I want to learn it in Arabic, too. So when I arrest some terrorist hump and he complains about his civil rights, I’ll tell him to go fight City Hall in his native tongue.”

  Patricia’s walkie-talkie went off.

  She pulled it from her belt, flipped it on, said, “Gomez,” and listened. “I was just on my way, Sarge,” she said. “Right away. Yes, Sarge. This very minute.” She turned off the radio, pulled a face, and said, “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe we can have coffee again sometime,” Ollie said.

  “Maybe we could,” Patricia said.

  “Think up a Spanish song for me,” he said. “I’ll ask my teacher to get the sheet music for me.”

  “You read music and everything?”

  “Oh sure, everything,” he said. “I even wrote a book.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “I did. Some hump stole it from my car. I’m searching for him now, I’ll bust his ass when I find him.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Ollie said modestly.

  “I’ll try to think of a song,” she said, and rose, and said, “Thanks for the coffee. Let me know when you figure out how that gun got over to the wrong side of the hall.”

  “I will. You think about it, too. Maybe we can come up with something together.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, and looked at him for a moment, and then said, “Well, I have to go,” and smiled, and raised her hand in farewell, and then turned and walked away from the table, one hip heavy with the weight of the Glock, swiveling toward the front door. He kept watching her till she was out of the shop. Then he went to the counter and bought another cookie.

  9

  The challenge now seemed clear: Find a good woman in this city. Which was not as simple as it first appeared. With all due respect, Commish, nothing is ever simple in police work, nothing is ever uncomplicated.

  To begin with, if this woman was, or evenwere still alive, she could be anywhere in the city, which I don’t have to tell you is a very big city. But more than that, if she was or were still alive, did she evenexist? By Mercer Grant’s own admission, Marie Grant was a phony name, what we call a misnomer. But then again, so were Mercer Grant and his alleged cousin Ambrose Field. I have been a cop for a long time now, so the first thing I did was check the phone books for all five sections of the city…

  Wow, that’s just whatI did, Emilio thought. Well, just Isola and Riverhead. But still.

  …and discovered in a flash that there were a voluminous multitude of Grants here, which seemed to be a very popular name, but there were no Mercer Grants or Marie Grants and no Ambrose Fields, either, though there seemed to be plenty of other Fields in this fair city. Which meant that Mr. Grant, or whatever his name was, had been telling the truth, in which case why had he been lying? That is to say, why had he lied about his name and his wife’s name and his cousin’s name? What was Mercer Grant hiding? In addition to all those names, of course. And if he was or were hiding something, why had he gone to the police in the first place?

  Well, Emilio thought, for that matter, why are you yourself lying, Livvie? Because there is no Olivia Wesley Watts in the phone book, either. Which Emilio thought was somewhat understandable, though, her being a cop and a woman both. If he himself were or was either a cop or a woman, he wouldn’t have put his name in the phone book, either. In fact, he prided himself on having thought exactly the way Livvie had, on both levels, as a copand as a woman.

  On this Thursday afternoon at a little past three o’clock, Emilio sat with Livvie’s report in his lap, his Japanese silk kimono open, his La Perla silk stockings and lace-fringed garter belt exposed where the robe fell loose over his legs and thighs. A frizzy blond wig was sitting on top of the dresser across the room. He would put on the wig and his spike-heeled strappy Prada pumps when he dressed for the stroll tonight. When times were good and heroin was cheap, Emilio earned enough as a hooker to afford nice things like the shoes and the lingerie and all his leather minis and long-sleeved silk blouses that hid the track marks on his arms. Times were not so very good these days. The shortage of heroin from Afghanistan had caused the price of the drug to sky rocket. He hoped the situation was only temporary. Not the war, he knewthat would go on forever. But if he could find the diamonds Livvie was talking about in her report…

  Okay, so stop day-dreaming, man. Get back to it.

  What was Mercer Grant hiding? In addition to all those names, of course. And if he was or were hiding something, why had he come to the police in the first place?

  In police work—as well you know, Commish—we detectives frequently make use of informers, what we call in the trade snitches. These are people upon who or even whom we usually have something we can hold over their heads. As for example, The Needle is a Jamaican informer who used to be adrug dealer before we busted a posse that had originally operated out of London. In London, young Jamaican males involved in violence and/or drugs are called Yardies—a little known fact, but true. The point is, The Needle ratted out half a dozen of these so-called Yardies when we busted the posse, this in exchange for dropping all charges against him. Temporarily, that is. We still have enough on him to put him away for a goodly number of years, were we so disposed. The Needle knows this. He also knows that if we let it be bruited about that he was the one who sold out the posse, oh dear, he might find himself down a sewer one night with his throat slit. So he is very inclined toward helping us whenever we come calling.

  I went calling on him that Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Grant left the office. What Mr. Grant did not know was that when I asked him to please wait for me in the corridor outside while I checked with the Loot to see if he, the Loot, had any questions he might care to ask, what I was doing in actuality was talking to Barry Lock, a detective who works with me. What I was asking Barry to do was follow Mr. Grant home so that we could perhaps get a true name and address for the gentleman. So when I came back out and told Mr. Grant the Loot had nothing to add to what we’d already discussed, Barry had already gone downstairs and would be waiting for Mr. Grant when he came out of the station house. Mr. Grant didn’t know anything about this, of course. That is why it is called detective work.

  Nor did he know that I myself was on my way to meet with The Needle.

  The Needle was not so-named because he is tall and thin, which he is. Nor is that his name because he has only one eye, which he has. No, he is The Needle because when he was but a mere youth, he used to run a dope parlor where you could come up and flop while he injected heroin in your arm or sometimes into the inside of your thigh if you were a girl and didn’t want track marks to show for all to see. Also, if he used a thigh, it being so proximate and all, chances were good he might get a little something besides money in exchange for his product, one of the perks of being a dope dealer with female clients. It is not only the Taliban who took advantage of women, you know. I hate to say this, Mr. Commissioner, but I have been in precincts where rookie female cops, nonames mentioned, have had their lockers broken into and their shoes pissed into, pardon my French. It is not an easy life we women lead, cops or not.

  Anyway, The Needle is this very tall, very thin, one-eyed but not unhandsome Jamaican individual, if you like Jamaicans, who was in the drug trade long before we busted the Yardieposse, and who—for all I know—is still dealing drugs this very minute. I really don’tknow, and I don’t care. We have enough on him to send him away for a long time as it is, without adding anything else to it, so “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is my policy. Except that when I ask, The Needlebetter tell, or I pull the chain on him.

  “What do you know a
bout a Jamaican fellow named Mercer Grant?” I asked.

  We were sitting in the kitchen of The Needle’s apartment, which is not too far from the station house and also O’Malley’s, the bar where all of this started. Because if it hadn’t been for Margie Gannon mentioning all that stuff about conflict diamonds, and if it hadn’t been for Mr. Grant bringing up the matter of the Revolutionary United Front, I wouldn’t be sitting here in a basement waiting for somebody to kill me. The Needle’s true and proper name, by the way, is Mortimer Loop. I am told there are a lot of Loops in Kingston. He is a very personable fellow with one annoying habit—well, two if you count his drug addiction. Theother annoying habit is that he fancies himself to be a rap artist. That is to say, he constantly talks rap.

  “Mercer Grant, Mercer Grant, do dee mon be Jamaican? How you laks yo’ eggs, wid some sausages or bacon?”

  “Yes, he’s Jamaican,” I said.

  He was standing at the stove, cracking eggs for omelets. This was already two in the afternoon, but The Needle had just woken up. He was, in fact, still wearing pajamas. To those not familiar with police work, this may seem unusual, a man in pajamas cooking eggs for a woman wearing beige slacks and tan French-heeled shoes, and a green long-sleeved blouse and a brown jacket, and carrying a nine-millimeter Glock automatic in a tan leather tote bag that matched the shoes when they were not even sharing any kind of personal relationship, the man and the woman. But in many respects, a law enforcement officer is similar to a physician. And so a cheap thief will often feel perfectly comfortable while dressed casually, let us say, in the presence of a female detective dressed for business. Besides, The Needle and I had worked together before, and the pajamas were very nicely patterned with a sort of peony design on black silk.

  “And I’ll have sausages,” I said. “If you’ve got them.”

  “Sausages,” The Needle said, and then went into another rap riff that carried him over to the refrigerator. “Dee lady want sausages, Dee Needle want bacon. She lookin for a mon she say be Jamaican.” Carrying the meats, he trotted back to the stove again on the heels of yet another rap. “What he do, this mon, do he break dee law? Otherwise, why dee cop, what she comin here for?”

  I told The Needle that so far as I knew, Mercer Grant hadn’t committed any crime, but that he had come up to the squadroom with a whole bundle of phony names and a diamond chip in his front tooth…

  “Oh, dee man got a di’mon, should be easy to fine. Is he tall, is he short, is he five feet, nine?”

  I told The Needle that Grant was more like six-one, six-two, a tall angular man with a light complexion and a trim little mustache under his nose. I told him that Grant wasn’t even his real name, nor was Marie his wife’s real name, who by Tuesday would be dead, anyway, by her own estimate, which was today.

  “So the wife be dead, but her name ain’ Marie. And the husband ain’ Grant, so what you want from me?”

  “What do you know about conflict diamonds?” I asked him.

  “Is he link to the war in Sierra Leone? Or he movin dee ice by his self all alone?”

  “I have no idea. He told me his wife was gone, and then he asked me if I’d ever heard of the RUF, which stands for Revolutionary United Front…”

  “You think she got whacked by the RUF?”

  “Well, that crossed my mind. But…”

  “Cause they mean mothah-fuckers, and I rather be deaf.”

  The Needle forked strips of bacon out of the frying pan, and placed them on paper towels. Then he dropped four links of sausage into the sizzling bacon fat, and went back to stirring half a dozen eggs in a bowl. On the range, several squares of butter were melting in a second frying pan. The Needle dropped two slices of bread into a toaster on the counter top. I was beginning to work up an appetite.

  “I was thinking of writing a cook book,” I told him. “Livvie Watts’s Recipes, how does that sound?”

  “Shitty,” The Needle said, and didn’t go for a rhyme.

  “Kay Scarpetta wrote a cook book,” I told him.

  “Who dee fuck be she, what she mean to me? Would you lak some coffee, shall I brew some tea?”

  We had breakfast, or lunch, or brunch, or whatever it was at a small table near a window that overlooked the street below. I could hear the sounds of little girls skipping rope downstairs. I could see pigeons flying from the rooftop across the way. It was springtime in the city, and the sausages and eggs were delicious. Even as The Needle promised me he would look for the elusive Grant and his missing, or perhaps already dead wife…

  “Have no fear, I go on the ear. A mon with a di’mon, his wife ain’ Marie. I hear what I hear, I see what I see.”

  …I had not even a glimmer that I would soon be placed in a situation that would test me in ways I’d never dreamt I’d be tested. Little did I know that the clock had already started ticking and that the fate of the world was hanging in the balance, not to mention my own fate.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  You’re not going too fast for me, honey, Emilio thought. You’re giving me clue after clue. If I don’t find you by Sunday, I’ll eat my rhinestone-studded thong panties. You have just told me that your informant is a tall, thin, one-eyed Jamaican who is known as The Needle, big surprise, but whose real name is Mortimer Loop, which is probably not his real name, either, they are so fuckin cagey, these people. But let’s take a look in the phone book, anyway, just to verify, as they say.

  Not to Emilio’s great surprise, there were no Mortimer Loops listed in either of the two directories he owned, but there was a Henrietta Loop who sounded interesting, and also a Loretta Loop, who sounded like Henrietta’s twin sister though their addresses were different. He wondered why Livvie would be using a fake name for her informant, but perhaps that was to protect herself in case her report got into the wrong hands before it was delivered to the commissioner. Emilio had no intention of delivering the report to anyone engaged in law enforcement. All he wanted to do was find that basement where all the diamonds were, give Livvie a big kiss of gratitude, and then leave for Rio de Janeiro.

  Toward that end, he called a friend of his who used to be a bartender.

  IN OLLIE’S NOVEL, his stool pigeon was a razor-thin, one-eyed Jamaican named Mortimer Loop, alias The Needle. In real life, this was a white man named William “Fats” Donner. Ollie had changed Donner’s name and description for fictitious purposes and also because he did not wish to get sued later on by a fat junkie snitch.

  In fact, Donner was not merely fat, he was Fats. And “Fats” was “fat” in the plural. Fats Donner was obese. He was immense. He was mountainous. He also had a penchant for young girls and Turkish baths. In his novel, Ollie had changed these character traits to a fondness for cooking and rapping. He figured this was literary license.

  On Thursday afternoon at three twenty-seven, Ollie found Donner at a place called The Samuel Baths, on Lincoln and South Twenty-ninth. The Baths had been named for a black faggot named Albert Samuel, who had made his money running a numbers game, and who needed a place where his fruity friends could gather to jerk each other off. Ollie didn’t think Donner was gay. He figured he came here only because, unlike Stockholm, there was a paucity of steam baths in this town. He was sitting now with a towel draped across his crotch, sucking in steam, thick layers of flesh quivering all over his sickly white body. He was altogether a somewhat disgusting person who did perverse things with twelve-year-old girls, but this was the big bad city and Donner was a very good informer. Sometimes you had to make allowances.

  Ollie came in with his own towel and took a seat beside Donner on the wooden bench. Together, they looked like a pair of giant white Buddhas. Steam swirled around them.

  “I’m looking for a hooker named Emmy,” Ollie said. “Blond hair, big tits. Ring a bell?”

  “Most hookers these days got blond hair and big tits,” Donner said.

  “Not the Puerto Rican ones,” Ollie said.

  “Ah, we’re closing in,” Donner
said.

  “You know her?”

  “Only what you just told me, dad. Blond, big tits, a spic. What part of town is she working?”

  “She hocked a Gucci dispatch case in a pawnshop on Ainsley and Fifth. Broker’s a guy named Irving Stein.”

  “No last name, this chick?”

  “Stein didn’t ask for one. It was a two-bit transaction,” Ollie explained. “I’m looking for the case, too, if you get anything on it. A fat lady bought it from Stein.”

  “Does she have a name, this fat lady?”

  “No.”

  “How fat is she?”

  Not as fat as you, Ollie was tempted to say, but didn’t.

  “She looked like an opera singer,” he said. “White. Brown hair, brown eyes.”

  “Let’s get back to the hooker, dad. Not many of them work that stretch of turf. Is it possible Emmylives near the pawnshop?”

  “I don’t know where she lives. And besides, Stein told me he getslots of hookers in there.”

  “I’m only saying that ain’t a stretch they normally stroll, man. You talking Hookerland, try Mason Avenue.”

  “Are you telling me lots of hookerslive near Ainsley and Fifth?”

  “Lots of hookers live everywhere in this city. Most of ’em don’t eat where they shit, though, is all I’m saying.”

  “Then why’d Stein tell me he gets lots of hookers in his shop?”

  “Maybe he does.”

  “Who live in the neighborhood?”

  “It’s possible. Lots of them big old buildings used to have Jewish families in them, the ones south of Ainsley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could be hookers in them buildings now.”

  “The queen could be king, too, if she had balls,” Ollie said.

  “I’m only tryin’a zero in, dad,” Donner said. “If I can get a bead on her territory, maybe I can find her for you. Where’d she get this dispatch case?”

  “She stole it from a parked car outside King Memorial.”