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

by Ed McBain

  He grinned, exposing the gold-and-diamond tooth at the front of his mouth.

  “So, Detective Watts,” he exclaimed. “We meet again.”

  And that was when someone hit me on the back of the head with something very hard, and I swam downwards into oblivion on a sea of utter blackness.

  And that was all she wrote.

  Or so Emilio thought.

  A HASTY RAINbroke over the city early Monday morning, followed by a rainbow that took the citizens by surprise, causing them to follow its arc by eye, hopeful they would catch a glitter that would signify a pot of gold at its end. Ollie considered the rainbow a good omen. Surely, there would be fingerprints all over the dispatch case. Surely some of those fingerprints would be Emilio Herrera’s. And just as surely, a he-she hooker and petty thief would have run afoul of the law long before now; Herrera would have a record; Herrera would have a last known address.

  Ollie immediately checked with AFIS to see if any of the prints triggered a hit. His own prints were on the case, and they came up in the system check. Well, of course; he was a law enforcement officer. There were prints on file for Veronica D’Allesandro as well; she was a resident alien, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service had taken her prints before issuing her a green card.

  A match came up for someone named Thomas Kingsley, who had served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War. A call to the Gucci store on Hall Avenue confirmed that he was the man who’d sold the case to Ollie’s sister.

  There was nothing for Isabelle Weeks, thank God. Nothing for Irving Stein, either. Worst of all, there was nothing for Emilio Herrera. The man—or woman, as he would have it—was clean.

  Ollie liked to think of himself as The Lone Wolf. In fact, he visualized himself as a predator of the night, all sleek and svelte and lithe. He did not like working with other people, perhaps because he knew they did not like working with him. This was because most people in this world, especially law enforcement officers, could not accept the utter frankness Ollie considered his most admirable character trait. Well, that was too damn bad, really. If they couldn’t cope with his special and praiseworthy brand of candor, a fart on them all, and to Tiny Tim a good night.

  But there were times when he was obliged to deal with other people in the department, as for example when he’d needed the help of Hogan or Logan or whatever the fuck his name was, in bringing up those serial numbers on the murder weapon, never mind his two worthless spic assistants, Pancho and Pablo.

  This was one of those times.

  So he put in a call to Jimmy Walsh in Vice.

  THAT SAMEMonday morning, Carella and Kling went back to talk to Josh Coogan again. This time, they found him in the youth-oriented offices of Councilman Lester Henderson, who seemed to be somewhat youth-oriented himself. Coogan seemed harried. Everyone in the late councilman’s offices seemed harried. Gee, that’s too damn bad, Carella thought.

  “It occurred to us that of all the people in the auditorium that morning, you had the best overview of what was happening,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” Coogan said, looking puzzled. “Overview?”

  “You were up there in the balcony when the shooting started. You could see everything happening down there.”

  “Well, so could the guy in the booth.”

  “He had his mind on the follow spot. He had a job to do. You were simply observing.”

  “No, I was listening to sound checks.”

  “What did that entail?”

  “Volume levels, clarity.”

  “Required yourears, right?”

  “Okay, I get what you mean.”

  “So tell us what you saw that morning,” Carella said.

  As Coogan remembers it, there was a buzz of excitement in the air because everyone was expecting Henderson to announce his run for mayor at the rally that night. He’d been upstate all weekend, and it was no secret that he’d met with the Governor’s people and also with someone from the White House…

  “We didn’t know that,” Carella said.

  “Well, that was the skinny, anyway. The whole team was on his side, was the impression I got. So naturally…”

  …if the man was going to announce he’d be making a run for the mayor’s office, everyone wanted everything to be just right. They’d worked with Chuck Mastroiani before, and they trusted him to make sure the place looked suitably patriotic and partisan, but he was nonetheless bustling around down there on the stage, ordering his crew to put an extra tuck in a draped bunting or supervising the placement of a fan so that an American flag would ripple with just the right amount of vigor. Coogan himself was in the balcony listening to what was coming from speakers around the hall while Mastroiani’s audio guy kept repeating the same sentences over and over again at the mike behind the podium. This must have been ten-fifteen, ten-twenty, they’d all been working since nine o’clock or a little after…

  “What time did Henderson get to the hall?” Carella asked.

  “Around nine-thirty.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  “No. He was alone.”

  “Okay, so it’s now ten-fifteen or so…what happened?”

  “Well, Mr. Henderson was rehearsing his entrance…”

  …striding on from stage left toward the podium, the follow spot on him all the way, raising his arm in greeting the way he would do it tonight, stopping when he reached the podium, starting to turn to face out front when the shots came. Six shots in a row, bam, bam, bam, and Henderson was falling, it almost looked like slow motion, the follow spot on him as he went down to the stage. Mastroiani yelled, “Kill the spot!” and when the guy in the booth was too slow to do that, he yelled again, “Kill that fuckin’ spot!” and the light went off. Alan yelled, “Stop him! Get him!,” something like that, and went running off the stage to the right…

  “He didn’t tell us that.”

  “Yes, he went running off with Mastroiani and some of his crew following him. I went downstairs the minute I realized what had happened. By the time I got on the stage, Alan and the others were already coming back. The shooter had got away clean.”

  “Where’d they look for him?”

  “In the building, I guess. Wherever. I really don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “Younever got a look at the shooter, did you?”

  “I didn’t even know from which side of the stage the shots had come from.”

  “Well, it was stage right,” Carella said, “we know that. You didn’t see anyone standing there in the wings shooting, did you?”

  “Not a soul. I was watching the audio guy behind the mike.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Pandemonium. Everyone yelling at once. Alan told me to call the cops, which I’d already done, by the way…”

  “You’re the one who placed the call to the Eight-Eight?”

  “Well, no, I didn’t know what precinct we were in. I just dialed nine-one-one.”

  “When was that?”

  “The minute I got downstairs and realized Mr. Henderson was dead. I called from my cell phone.”

  “Where were the others?”

  “Still out in the hall, chasing whoever had shot him. In fact…”

  Coogan hesitated, shook his head.

  “Yes?” Carella said.

  “Alan was pissed off that I’d placed the call without first consulting him. I mean, the guy is laying there dead, his sweater all covered with blood, I’m supposed to wait forclearance to call the police?”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said this was a delicate matter, I shouldn’t have taken the initiative on my own. I told him I didn’t know what to do, there’s a dead man here, I assumed we’d want the police notified at once. Anyway, it was academic. By the time he finished yelling at me, the police were already there.”

  “He was yelling at you?” Kling asked.

  “He was upset, l
et’s put it that way. He’d just gone running all over the building trying to find whoever had done the shooting, and now an insubordinate little twerp had taken action on his own.”

  “Is that what he called you?” Carella asked. “An insubordinate little twerp?”

  “No, those are my words. But that’s probably what he was thinking.”

  “Did you talk to the responding officers?”

  “Just to tell them I was the one who’d made the call to nine-oneone. Most of the time, they were shmoozing with Alan. Till all the detectives got there, anyway.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “I assume you never got anything more from that witness. Right?”

  “What witness?” Carella asked at once.

  “The old bum.”

  “What old bum?”

  “The one the blues were joking about.”

  “Joking? About awitness? ” Carella said.

  “Well, they were telling Alan about this drunk they’d talked to outside the building.”

  “Yeah, what about him?”

  “The guy said he’d seen someone running out of the alley.”

  “Hewhat? ”

  “He saw some…”

  “Awitness saw someone running out of the alley?”

  “That’s what the blues were saying, anyway. But he couldn’t have.”

  “What do you mean he couldn’t have? Why not?”

  “Because the alley he saw the guy coming out of was on the wrong side of the building. Alan told them straight off this was impossible. He’d just finished chasing the killer all over theother side of the building.”

  Carella was thinking that the gun had been found on the wrong side of the building, too. He was thinking that maybe the killer was a magician. Or maybe stage right and stage left were meaningless when it came to murder.

  “Thank you,” he said, “we appreciate your time.”

  15

  OFFICER PATRICIA GOMEZkept wondering how somebody who’d shot somebody from the stage-right wings of the auditorium could have dropped the murder weapon in a sewer in the alley outside stage left. Wouldn’t this person have had tocross the stage in order to do that? And wouldn’t someone in the auditorium haveseen him crossing the stage?

  Patricia stood now in the alley outside stage right, where the killershould have come out of the auditorium if reason had followed logic. The trouble with police work, however, was that very often nothing seemed logical or reasonable. She had been a cop for only four months so far, and in that amount of time she had seen and heard so many totally illogical and unreasonable things that sometimes she wished she’d become a fire fighter instead, which had been one of the options open to a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the Riverhead section of the city.

  Patricia’s first day on the job, walking her beat in her spanking new tailor-made blues, an eleven-year-old girl eating a jelly apple had stepped out of a bodega and onto the sidewalk just as two gangs disputing the same dope-dealing corner opened fire on each other. The girl had been caught in the crossfire. When Patricia came onto the scene, the girl’s blood was staining the freshly fallen snow under her, and her grandmother was holding her in her arms and screaming, “Adelia, no! Adelia! Adelia!” But the girl was already dead.

  Patricia found this unreasonable and illogical.

  Her sergeant told her, “You get used to it.”

  In the ensuing months, she’d seen a man with four big holes in his face where his wife had shot him when she found him in bed with the woman next door; she’d seen a baby whose face had been chewed to ribbons by rats after her mother left her alone in her crib while she went out to the movies with a girlfriend; she’d seen a woman trapped in a car that had crashed into a Mickey D’s, and had watched while the ES guys scissored the car open and lifted the woman out all bleeding and broken and crushed, and she had thought this is unreasonable, this is illogical.

  And only two weeks ago, she had thought the same thing when a man of seventy-five had had his throat slit by someone they still hadn’t caught, who had also cleaned out the man’s wallet and thrown it into the gutter where his blood was still running red when Patricia knelt beside him, and said, “You’ll be okay, hang on,” but he was dead, of course, and there was no hanging on, and it was all so totally fucking unreasonable and illogical.

  She stood alone in the alleyway now, trying to understand what it might have been like to shoot somebody and then run from the scene of the crime. You shoot from stage right, you run away stage right. You don’t cross a crowded auditorium, and exit stage left, and drop the weapon in a sewer on the opposite side of the building. You do not do that. I have seen too many illogical and unreasonable things in these past four months, but I have to tell you I would not do that if I had just shot and killed a man.

  So whatwould I do? she asked herself.

  I would come out through the doors there, and because I would have the murder weapon in my hand, I would immediately dump it in the most convenient place. Which would be the sewer right there under the drain pipe. But no. The killer had gone to theother side of the building and dumped the gun there. It didn’t make sense. The gun should have been onthis side of the building.

  Unless.

  Well, this was just supposing.

  But suppose there’d been an accomplice? Suppose there’d been two of them in on it,two people who wanted the councilman dead for whatever reasons of their own…well, at the Academy they’d been taught there were only two reasons for murder, and those reasons were love or money. Socherchez la femme, honey, or follow the money, cause that’s all there is to know, and all you need to know.

  Suppose I shoot him from stage right…

  …and I hand off the gun to an accomplice, who goes out the doors on the left side of the building and drops the gun there…

  While meanwhile…

  Now let’s just hold this a minute, she thought.

  No, that’s right,meanwhile I’m on the right side of the building, no gun anymore, and I go strolling away from the building and up the avenue, nothing to attract attention anymore, no gun, no nothing, you solved the fucking crime, Patricia!

  So how come nobody saw me? she asked herself.

  I pop six caps from the wings there, nobody sees me?

  How often do people get shot in this place?

  I mean, okay, maybe nobody on thestage got a good look at me, I’m in the wings, after all, and there must’ve been a lot of confusion, somebody getting shot. But how aboutoff the stage,backstage, whatever they call it? How aboutthere? Nobody standing there with a broom or a mop? Nobody in the whole damn building who saw me leaving the place—whichever side I left it, right, left, who cares?—nobody saw meleaving the scene of the crime?

  Didn’t Ollie question anybody whoworks here?

  I’ll bet he questionedeverybody who works here, he’s a good cop, Iguess he’s a good cop, I’m only a rookie, what do I know? And besides, the patrol sarge is going to start wondering why I’m not out on the beat right this minute, where people might illogically and unreasonably be getting themselves killed.

  She looked at her watch.

  It was almost lunch time.

  She decided she would call in and say she was taking five.

  Then, instead of grabbing a bite to eat, she would go into King Memorial for twenty minutes or so, and see if she could scare up a custodian or something.

  ALTHOUGH OLLIE’S SISTERonce told him there might have been a touch of the shamrock in their own heritage, he did not particularly like people of Irish descent. Ollie preferred thinking of himself as descending from British aristocracy. He knew for an absolute fact that his ancestry could be traced back to Norman times in England, when—according to the Domesday Book—a lord of the barony of Hastings held a knight’s fief in Wikes, which Ollie supposed was a town, what else could it be? “Wikes” was only one of the variants of the name “Weeks,” just like Weackes or Weacks or Weakes or Weaks or for that matter Weekes. Of course, people whose name was Wykes—of w
hom there were many, and please don’t write to me, Ollie thought—considered Weeks a variant of their name, same as people named Anne thought Ann was a variant and not vice versa, the world was full of fuckin nuts.

  His sister—who always looked on the dim side because she herself was so dim, the jackass—told him he should stop putting on airs since there was absolute proof that there’d been a Robert Weeks living in Walberswick, Suffolk, in the year 1596, and he’d been a mere merchant. In fact, she had looked up his merchant’s mark, and had needle-pointed it into a sampler for Ollie, which he kept in the bathroom, hanging over the toilet bowl.

  “Please observe the way the letter ‘W’ is worked into the design,” she’d said, the jackass. She had given him the sampler, framed, for Christmas one year, a gift as worthless as the stolen dispatch case, which was why he was here to see an Irishman like Walsh in the first place.

  He greeted Walsh with his favorite Irish joke.

  “These two Irishmen walk out of a bar?” he said.

  “Yeah?” Walsh said, grinning in anticipation.

  “It could happen,” Ollie said, and shrugged.

  The grin dropped from Walsh’s face. Ollie guessed the man thought he was making some kind of remark about Irishmen being drunk all the time. Well, if he couldn’t take a joke, a fart on him.

  “I’m looking for a cross-dressing whore named Emilio Herrera,” he said, “street name Emmy. Does it ring a bell?”

  “I’m still thinking about that so-called joke of yours,” Walsh said.

  He was perhaps six feet, two or three inches tall, a big redheaded mick going gray at the temples, wide shoulders, arms like oaks, the butt of a Glock sticking out of a shoulder holster on the left side of his body for an easy right-handed draw. He was in shirtsleeves on this bright April morning, the sleeves rolled up, the collar open, the tie pulled down. Ollie guessed Walsh thought he looked like a TV detective. TV detectives thought they looked like real-life detectives, which they didn’t. Trouble was, real-life detectives watched TV and then started acting like TV detectives, who were acting the way they thought real-life detectives did. It was a vicious cycle. Ollie was glad he looked like himself.