by Nocturne
Catch a man red-handed, about to shoot his girlfriend, a gun in his fist, the barrel in the woman’s mouth, and he will tell you first that it isn’t his gun, hey, what kind of individual do you think I am? Besides, we’re only rehearsing a scene from a play here. Or if they won’t quite appreciate that one in Des Moines, then how about she was choking on a fish bone, and I was trying to hook it out with the gun barrel while we were waiting for the ambulance to take her to the hospital? Or if that sounds a bit fishy, how about she asked me to put the barrel in her mouth in order to test her mettle and her courage? Anyway, this isn’t even my gun, and if it is my gun, it was stolen or lost. Besides, I’m a juvenile.
“Stolen,” Carella said, turning from the windows. No intonation in his voice, just the single unstressed word, spoken softly, and sounding like a booming accusation in that three a.m. living room.
“Yes,” Pratt said. “Stolen.”
Unlike Carella, he did stress the word.
“When did you say this was?” Hawes asked.
“Thursday night.”
“That would’ve been …”
Hawes had taken out his notebook and was flipping to the calendar page.
“The eighteenth,” Pratt said. “A hoodoo jinx of a day. First my car quits dead, and next somebody steals my gun from the glove compartment.”
“Let’s back up a little,” Hawes said.
“No, let’s back up a lot,” Pratt said. “Reason you’re putting me through this shit three a.m. in the morning is I’m black. So just do your little ritual dance and get the hell out, okay? You’ve got the wrong party here.”
“We may have the wrong party,” Carella said, “but we’ve got the right gun. And it happens to be yours.”
“I don’t know anything about what that gun was doing earlier tonight. You say it killed somebody, I’ll take your word for it. I’m telling you the gun has not been in my possession since Thursday night, when my car quit and I stopped at an all-night gas station to have it looked at.”
“Where was that?”
“Just off the Majesta Bridge.”
“Which side of it?”
“This side. I’d driven a diamond merchant home and was coming back to the city.”
The locution marked him as a native. This sprawling city was divided into five separate distinct geographical zones, but unless you’d just moved here from Mars, only one of these sectors was ever referred to as “the city.”
“Started rattling on the bridge,” Pratt said. “Time I hit Isola, she quit dead. Brand-new limo. Less than a thousand miles on it.” He shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Never buy a fuckin American car,” he said.
Carella himself drove a Chevrolet that had never given him a moment’s trouble. He said nothing.
“What time was this?” Hawes asked.
“Little before midnight.”
“This past Thursday.”
“Hoodoo jinx of a day,” he said again.
“Remember the name of the gas station?”
“Sure.”
“What was it?”
“Bridge Texaco.”
“Now that’s what I call inventive,” Hawes said.
“You think I’m lying?” Pratt said at once.
“No, no, I meant …”
“When did you discover the gun was missing?” Carella asked.
Get this thing back on track, he thought. Pratt wasn’t quite getting all this. He thought two white cops were here hassling him only because he was black when instead they were hassling him only because he owned a gun used in a murder. So let’s hear about the gun, okay?
“When I picked the car up,” Pratt said, turning to him. He still suspected a trap, still figured they were setting him up somehow.
“And when was that?”
“Yesterday morning. There weren’t any mechanics on duty when I pulled in Thursday night. The manager told me they’d have to work on it the next day.”
“Which they did, is that right?”
“Yeah. Turned out somebody’d put styrene in my fuckin crankcase.”
Carella wondered what styrene in the crankcase had to do with buying an American car.
“Broke down the oil and ruined the engine,” Pratt said. “They had to order me a new one, put it in on Friday.”
“And you picked the car up yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
“Ten o’clock in the morning.”
“So the car was there all night Thursday and all day Friday.”
“Yeah. And two hours yesterday, too. They open at eight.”
“With the gun in the glove compartment.”
“Well, it disappeared during that time.”
“When did you realize that?”
“When I got back here. There’s a garage in the building. I parked the car, unlocked the glove compartment to take out the gun, and saw it was gone.”
“Always take it out of the glove compartment when you get home?”
“Always.”
“How come you left it at the garage?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was pissed off about the car quitting on me. It’s force of habit. I get home, I unlock the box, reach in for the gun. The garage wasn’t home. I just wasn’t thinking.”
“Did you report the gun stolen?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Hawes asked.
“I figured somebody steals a piece, I’ll never see it again, anyway. So why bother? It’s not like a TV set. A piece isn’t gonna turn up in a hockshop. It’s gonna end up on the street.”
“Ever occur to you that the gun might be used later in the commission of a crime?”
“It occurred to me.”
“But you still didn’t report its theft?”
“I didn’t report it, no.”
“How come?”
This from Hawes. Casually. Just a matter of curiosity. How come your gun is stolen and you know somebody might use it to do something bad, but you don’t go to the cops? How come?
Carella knew how come. Black people were beginning to believe that the best way to survive was to keep their distance from the police. Because if they didn’t, they got set up and framed. That was O.J.’s legacy. Thanks a lot, Juice, we needed you.
“I talked privately to the day manager,” Pratt said. “Told him somebody’d ripped off the piece. He said he’d ask around quietly.”
“Did he ask around? Quietly.”
“None of his people knew anything about it.”
Naturally, Carella thought.
Hawes was thinking the same thing.
“And you say the glove compartment was locked when you got back home here?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“What do you mean, you think so?”
“Why do you guys think everything I say is a lie?”
Carella sighed in exasperation.
“Come on, was it locked or wasn’t it?” he said. “That isn’t a trick question. Just tell us yes or no.”
“I’m telling you I don’t know. I put the key in the lock and turned it. But whether it was locked or not …”
“You didn’t try to thumb it open before you put the key in?”
“No, I always leave it locked.”
“Then what makes you think it may have been unlocked this time?”
“The fucking gun was missing, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but you didn’t know that before you opened the compartment.”
“I know it now. If it was already unlocked when I turned the key, then what I was doing was locking it all over again. So I had to turn the key back again to unlock it.”
“Is that in fact what you did?”
“I don’t remember. I might have. A glove compartment isn’t like your front door, you know, where you lock it and unlock it a hundred times a day, and you know just which way to turn the key to open it.”
“Then what you’re saying now, in retrospect, is that it might have be
en unlocked.”
“Is what I’m saying in retrospect. Because the gun was missing. Which means somebody had already got in there.”
Bridge. Which I believe is against the law anywhere in the city.”
“Did you leave a valet key with the car, or …?”
“I lost the valet key.”
“So the key you left in the ignition could have unlocked the glove compartment, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you’re saying someone at the garage unlocked it and stole the gun.”
“Is exactly what I’m saying.”
“You don’t think whoever put styrene in the crankcase might have stolen the gun, do you?”
“I don’t see how.”
“You didn’t notice the hood open, did you?”
“Yeah, the hood was open. How would they get at the engine without lifting the hood?”
“I mean, before you took it to the garage.”
“No, I didn’t see the hood open.”
“Tell us where you went with the car that Thursday. Before somebody did the styrene job.”
“I don’t know when the styrene job was done.”
“Tell us where you went, anyway, okay? Help us out here, willya?”
“First, I drove an actress over to NBC for a television interview that morning …”
“NBC where?”
“Downtown. Off Hall Avenue.”
“When was that?”
“Six-thirty in the morning.”
“Did you go inside with her?”
“No, I stayed with the car.”
“Then what?”
“Drove her back to her hotel, waited downstairs for her.”
“Leave the car?”
“No. Well, wait a minute, yeah. I got out of the car to have a smoke, but I was standing right by it.”
“Gun still in the glove compartment?”
“Far as I know. I didn’t look.”
“You said you waited for her downstairs …”
“Yeah.”
“What time did she come back down?”
“Twelve-fifteen.”
“Where’d you go then?”
“To J. C. Willoughby’s for lunch. She was meeting her agent there.”
“And then?”
“Picked her up at two, drove her to …”
“Were you with the car all that time?”
“Come to think of it, no. I went for a bite myself. Parked it in a garage.”
“Where?”
“Near the restaurant. On Lloyd.”
“So somebody could have lifted the hood and poured that styrene in.”
“I guess.”
“Did you leave the key in the car?”
“Of course. How else could they drive it?”
“Then someone could have unlocked the glove compartment, too.”
“Yeah, but …”
“Yeah?”
“I still think somebody at the gas station swiped that piece.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Just a feeling. You know how you get a feeling something’s wrong? I had the feeling those guys knew something about the car I didn’t know.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know what.”
“Which guys?”
“All of them. The day manager when I went to pick it up, all the guys working …”
“When did you pick up your diamond merchant?”
“What?”
“You said …”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Aaronson. I was with the actress all day, stayed with her while she shopped Hall Avenue. She was doing some shopping before she went back to L.A. Drove her to meet some friends for dinner, took her back to the hotel afterward.”
“Stayed with the car all that time?”
“Didn’t budge from it. Picked up Mr. Aaronson at ten-thirty, drove him home. He was heavy that night.”
“Heavy.”
“Lots of gems in his suitcase.”
“What’d you do then?”
“Started back over the bridge, heard the car starting to conk out.”
“Would you remember where you parked the car while you were having lunch?”
“I told you. Place on Lloyd, just off Detavoner. Only one on the block, you can’t miss it.”
“You wouldn’t know who parked it, would you?”
“All those guys look the same to me.”
“Can you think of anyone who might’ve put that styrene in your crankcase?”
“No.”
“Or stolen the gun?”
“Yeah. Somebody at the fuckin gas station.”
“One last question,” Carella said. “Where were you tonight between ten and midnight?”
“Here is comes,” Pratt said, and rolled his eyes.
“Where were you?” Carella asked again.
“Right here.”
“Anyone with you?”
“My wife. You want to wake her up, too?”
“Do we have to?” Carella asked.
“She’ll tell you.”
“I’ll bet she will.”
Pratt was beginning to glower again.
“Let her sleep,” Carella said.
Pratt looked at him.
“I think we’re finished here. Sorry to have bothered you. Cotton? Anything?”
“One thing,” Hawes said. “Do you know who worked on your car?”
“Yeah, somebody named Gus. He’s the one who signed the service order, but he wasn’t there when I picked the car up yesterday.”
“Do you know if the day manager asked him about the gun?”
“He says he did.”
“What’s his name?”
“The day manager? Jimmy.”
“Jimmy what?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about the night manager? The one you left the car with?”
“Ralph. I don’t know Ralph what. They have their names stitched on the front of their coveralls. Just the first names.”
“Thanks,” Hawes said. “Good night, sir, we’re sorry to have bothered you.”
“Mm,” Pratt said sourly.
In the hallway outside, Carella said, “So now it becomes the tale of a gun.”
“I saw that movie, too,” Hawes said.
Bridge Texaco was in the shadow of the Majesta Bridge, which connected two of the city’s most populous sectors, creating massive traffic jams at either end. Here in Isola—simply and appropriately named since it was an island and Isola meant “island” in Italian—the side streets and avenues leading to the bridge were thronged with taxis, trucks and passenger vehicles from six a.m. to midnight, when things began slowing down a bit. At three-thirty in the morning, when the detectives got there, one would never have guessed that just a few hours earlier the surrounding streets had resonated with the din of honking horns and shouted epithets, the result of a stalled truck in the middle of the bridge.
There were two city statutes, both of them punishable by mere fines, that made the blowing of horns unlawful. Using profanity in public was also against the law. The pertinent section in the Penal Law was 240.20, and it was titled Disorderly Conduct. It read: “A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture.” Disorderly conduct was a simple violation, punishable by not more than a term of fifteen days in jail. The two statutes and the Penal Law section only defined civilization. Perhaps this was why a uniformed cop on the street corner had merely scratched his ass at midnight while an angry motorist leaned incessantly on his horn, yelling “Move it, you fuckin cocksucker!”
Now, at 3:30 a.m., all the horn-blowing had stopped, all the profanity had flown on the wind. There was only the bitter cold of the January streets, and a gas station with fluorescent lights that seemed to echo winter’s chill. A yellow taxicab was parked at one of the pumps. Its
driver, hunched against the cold, jiggling from foot to foot, was filling the tank. The paneled doors opening on the service bays were closed tight against the frigid air. In the station’s warmly lighted office, a man wearing a brown uniform and a peaked brown hat sat with his feet up on the desk, reading a copy of Penthouse. He looked up when the detectives came in. The stitched name on the front of his uniform read Ralph.
Carella showed the tin.
“Detective Carella,” he said. “My partner, Detective Hawes.”
“Ralph Bonelli. What’s up?”
“We’re trying to trace a gun that …”
“That again?” Bonelli said, and looked heavenward.
“Any idea what happened to it?”
“No. I told Pratt nobody here knew anything about it. That hasn’t changed.”
“Who’d you ask?”
“The mechanic who worked on it. Gus. He didn’t see it. Some of the other guys who were working on Friday. None of them saw any gun.”
“How many other guys?”
“Two. They’re not mechanics, they just pump gas.”
“So Gus is the only one who worked on the car.”
“Yeah, the only one.”
“Where’d he work on it?”
“One of the service bays in there,” Bonelli said, and gestured with his head. “Had it up on the hydraulic lift.”
“Key in it?”
“Yeah, he had to drive it in, didn’t he?”
“How about when he was finished with it? Where’d the key go then?”
“Key box there on the wall,” Bonelli said, indicating a gray metal cabinet fastened to the wall near the cash register. A small key was sticking out of a keyway on the door.
“Do you ever lock that cabinet?”
“Well … no.”
“Leave the key in it all the time?”
“I see where you’re going, but you’re wrong. Nobody who works here stole that gun.”
“Well, it was in the glove compartment when Mr. Pratt drove the car in …”
“That’s what he says.”
“You don’t think it was, huh?”
“Did I see it? Did anybody see it? We got only the jig’s word for it.”
“Why would he say there was a gun in the glove compartment if there wasn’t one?”
“Maybe he wanted me to write off the repair job, who knows?”