by Nocturne
“So what is this about a pistol?” he asked. “Everyone wishes to know about this pistol.”
“The feathers, too,” Carella said.
“And the bird shit,” Hawes said.
“Such a mess,” Sikhar agreed, nodding, puffing on the cigarette, holding it the way Peter Lorre did in The Maltese Falcon. He himself looked something of a mess, but perhaps that was because the developing beard looked like a smudge on his face.
“What kind of feathers were they, would you know?” Hawes asked.
“Pigeon feathers, I would say.”
“Why would you say that?”
“There are many pigeons near the bridge.”
“And you think some of them got in the car somehow, is that it?”
“I think so, yes. And panicked. Which is why they shit all over everything.”
“Pretty messy in there, huh?” Carella said.
“Oh yes.”
“How do you suppose they got out again?” Hawes asked.
“Birds have ways,” Sikhar said.
He looked at the men mysteriously.
They looked back mysteriously.
“How about the gun?” Carella said.
“What gun?”
“You know what gun.”
Sikhar dropped the cigarette to the floor, ground it out under the sole of one black shoe, and took a crumpled package of Camels from the right-hand pocket of the long black coat. “Cigarette?” he asked, offering the pack first to Carella and next to Hawes, both of whom refused, each shaking his head somewhat violently. Sikhar did not get the subtle message. He fired up at once. Clouds of smoke billowed into the hallway, tinted orange by the sputtering neon outside the window. For some peculiar reason, Carella thought of Dante’s Inferno.
“The gun,” he prompted.
“The famous missing pistol,” Sikhar said. “I know nothing about it.”
“You spent an hour or so in that car, didn’t you? Cleaning up the mess?”
“A terrible mess,” Sikhar agreed.
“Did the birds get anywhere near the glove compartment?”
“No, the mess was confined exclusively to the backseat.”
“So you spent an hour or so in the backseat of the car.”
“At least.”
“Never once went into the front seat?”
“Never. Why would I? The mess was in the backseat.”
“I thought, while you were cleaning the car …”
“No.”
“… you might have gone up front, given the dashboard a wipe …”
“No.”
“The glove compartment door, give everything a wipe up there, too.”
“No, I didn’t do that.”
“Then you wouldn’t know whether the glove compartment was unlocked or not, would you?”
“I would not know.”
“What time did you start work on the car?”
“When I got there. Jimmy showed me the mess and told me to clean it up. I got immediately to work.”
“What time was that?”
“About seven o’clock.”
“On Saturday morning.”
“Yes, Saturday. I work six days a week,” he said pointedly, and looked at his watch. It was now close to six o’clock on Sunday morning. Dawn would come in an hour and fifteen minutes.
“Anybody else come near that car while you were in it?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Jose Santiago.”
The thing Richard the Fourth did up here in Diamondback was sell crack cocaine to nice little boys like the three Richards he was now leading up the street to an underground bar where he promised them there’d be girls aplenty. Richard’s family name was Cooper, and he was sometimes called Coop by people who wanted to get friendly with him, not knowing he despised the name Coop. This was the same as some jackass coming up to some dude and slamming him on the back and yelling in his face, “Hey, remember me, Sal?” Only his fuckin name ain’t Sal, dig? Richard’s name was Richard, and that was what he preferred being called, thank you. Certainly not Coop, nor Rich or Richie neither, nor even Ricky or Rick. Just plain Richard. Like the three Richards with him now, who he was telling about these quite nice jumbo vials he happened to have in his pocket, would they care for a taste at fifteen a pop?
The crack and the money were changing hands, black to white and white to black, when the taxi pulled up to the curb, and a long-legged white girl in a fake-fur jacket and red leather boots stepped out. The driver’s window rolled down. The driver looked somewhat dazed, as if he’d been hit by a bus. “Thanks, Max,” the girl said, and blew him a kiss, and was swiveling onto the sidewalk, a slender, red, patent-leather bag under her arm, when Richard Cooper said, “Hey, Yolande, you jess the girl we lookin for.”
Fifty-six minutes later, she was dead.
5
She has done three-ways before, but this is what at first promises to be a four-way and then possibly a five-way if Richard puts in his two cents. She knows Richard from the hood, he deals good shit. In fact, he used to be in business together with Jamal for some time before they went their separate ways. She is not particularly eager for this to turn into a five-way with Richard in the equation, but as Jamal is fond of saying, “Business is business and never the twain shall meet.”
At the same time, it’s been a very busy night, thank God, and she’s really very sleepy, and would like nothing better than to go back to the pad and present to Jamal the spoils of the night, so to speak, and then cuddle with him a little, he is very good at cuddling when you lay almost two thousand bucks on him. But Richard here is talking six hundred for the three preppies here, two hundred apiece for the next few hours, and giving her the nod to indicate he might wish to wet his wick a bit, too, in which case he will throw into the pot five jumbos.
What he is suggesting—and she is considering this seriously now, even though she is bone-tired and cold besides—is that they all go up to his place to do some crack and get down to realities, sistuh, you hear whut I’m sayin? She is thinking six hundred and the five jumbos, which at today’s market price is fifteen for the red-topped vials, and wondering how she can escalate this thing a bit higher, it being so late at night or so early in the morning, depending on where you’re coming from. She wonders if they’ll go for a big one and ten jumbos. She decides that’s too far a reach. Instead, she tells Richard—and the three preppies who are nodding sympathetically while ripping off her clothes with their eyes—tells Richard she’s been out since eleven last night and it’s been a long one, bro, so maybe we ought to just pass unless we can sweeten the pot a little, hm? He asks her what she means by sweeten it, how sweet does she wish to sweeten it, and she decides to push the envelope, what the hell.
“If you’ll be joining the party,” she says, “I’ll need ten jumbos …”
“No problem,” Richard says at once.
Jesus! she thinks.
“And a grand from the college boys here.”
The preppies are flattered that she thinks they’re from Princeton or Yale instead of some shitty little boys’ school in Vermont or wherever the fuck. But the thousand-dollar tab sticks in their craw, she can see that, so she says at once, “Though you’re all so cute, I might do it for nine.”
One of the preppies—she later learns they’re all named Richard, this is going to be some kind of confusing gang bang—immediately says, “Make it eight,” but she knows he’s just trying to sound like his banker father in Michigan or wherever, so she says, “I can’t do it for less than nine. Hey, you’re all real cute, but …”
“How about eight-fifty?” one of the other Richards asks.
“It has to be nine or I’m out of here,” she says.
She does not know, at that juncture in time, that if she walks right this minute, she will still be alive fifty-one minutes from now. She does not begin to realize she’s in serious danger until it is almost too late, when things begin getting out of hand. T
his is much later. Right now, they are haggling over price, and if she walks she still has a shot at survival. The boys go into a kind of a football huddle—she later learns they’re all stars on their school’s football team—come clapping out of it, big financial meeting over, big white Ps on the back of their parkas, and one of them says, “Will you accept traveler’s checks?” Richard busts out laughing. Laughing with him, Yolande says, “Done deal.”
She has done three-ways before and in fact has enjoyed some of them, especially when it’s two girls and a guy. With most of the girls you fake it, you know, you make a lot of lapping, slurping sounds, and you moan Oh yeah, honey, do it, while nobody’s doing anything to anybody. But the john gets all excited thinking he’s got two hot lezzies here really getting it off. With some girls in a three-way, though, you’re really doing what the john thinks you’re doing, and it can be quite enjoyable, really, all that tongue play, because another girl knows just where the target is, knows just which buttons to push, so yeah it can be really really good.
Two guys and a girl, you kind of lose control. It’s that they get all macho on you, one of them fucking you from behind while you’re blowing the other one, and they start saying, You love it, don’t you, cunt?, all that, it gets degrading when there are two guys flexing their muscles and trying to prove how big their cocks are. It’s not that she thinks she’s a princess or anything, she knows what she does for a living, she knows she’s a fucking whore, I mean, she knows that. It’s just that when there are two guys, she really begins to feel used, you know, she really begins to feel they have no respect at all for her, and she comes away with a dirty feeling afterward, no matter how much she tells herself she was detached the whole time. It’s that they used her, is all. They flat out used her.
So now, here in Richard’s pad—where she remembers coming to a party once with Jamal when the two of them were first starting out in business together, dealing pot to kindergarten kids, that’s a joke, son, they never went near any of the schools, you think they’re crazy? Can remember coming to a party here, but not this kind of party with three white preppies and a black guy has a shlong the size of a python. The only black guy she does it with is Jamal and that’s because he takes care of her and she loves him. She knows how big black guys can be, and she gets sore even after she does it with Jamal, which is not too frequently because business is business and never the twain shall meet.
Anyway, what she shares with Jamal transcends mere sex, he was the one took her under his wing when she got off the bus from Cleveland, he’s the one makes sure nobody hurts her. Anybody gets funny with her, she tells Jamal about it and he breaks the guy’s legs. Besides, Jamal is regularly fuckin this other girl he takes care of, whose name is Carlyle, which Jamal gave her. Carlyle is black and very beautiful, Yolande can understand the attraction. Occasionally they do three-ways together. Jamal Stone and Carlyle Yancy (which he also gave her) and Marie St. Claire. Sometimes Yolande wonders how she ever got into all this stuff, boy. But listen, what the hell.
She is wondering now how she got into this stuff tonight when she’s so goddamn bone-weary, but of course nine bills is nine bills, not to mention the ten jumbos, which are worth a cool hundred and fifty. Plus, the preppies are sharing their stash with her, everybody beaming up to the Enterprise on the boys’ nickel, until they’re all sitting stoned in their underwear and grinning at each other, Jesus what a shlong on Richard, the black Richard, which is when she discovers they’re all four of them named Richard, how cute. Richard—the black Richard—is standing in front of her now and idly gliding the head of his long dick over her lips, while a preppie on either side of her is grabbing a tit and the third preppie is watching and jerking off in preparation.
So far, no one has called her cunt or bitch.
Or cocksucker is a favorite, too.
Later, she will wonder how this got so out of hand.
Nobody seemed to know where Jose Santiago was.
This was now six-forty in the morning, nobody knew where he was. His mother didn’t know, his sister didn’t know, none of his friends knew, the guy behind the counter at the local hangout hamburger joint didn’t know, nobody knew, the whole neighborhood had suddenly gone deaf, dumb, and blind. In police work, you took this to mean that everybody knew where Santiago was, but you are The Man, man, and nobody is going to tell you, señor.
A faint hint of morngloam only seemed to touch the sky. It was still thirty-five minutes till dawn, the night refused to yield. The bleak January morning was still flat, dull and dark, but there was activity in the streets now. Even on a Sunday, there was work to be done in this city, and early risers were beginning to move sluggishly toward the subways and the bus stops, passing revelers and predators who were just now heading home to bed. The homeless, sensing dawn, anticipating the safety that would come with full light, were already crawling back into their cardboard boxes.
Outside a candy store on the corner of Santiago’s block, a man was carrying in a tied bundle of newspapers. He was still wearing his overcoat and earmuffs. The scalloped edge of the furled green awning over the front of the store read: HERNANDEZ VARIETY-NEWSPAPERS-LOTTERY-COFFEE. They assumed he was Hernandez himself; there was a bustling air of ownership about him. The store lights beckoned warmly behind him. Coffee sounded pretty good just about now.
“Cops, right?” Hernandez asked the moment they stepped inside.
“Right,” Hawes said.
“How did I know, right?”
Not a trace of an accent. Hawes figured him for a third-generation Puerto Rican, grandfather probably came over on the Marine Tiger with the first wave of immigrants from the island. Probably had kids in college.
“How did you know?” he asked.
Hernandez shrugged as if to indicate he couldn’t waste valuable time answering such a ridiculous question. He had still not taken off the overcoat and earmuffs. The store was cold. The entire universe was cold this morning. Ignoring them, he busied himself cutting the cords around the newspaper bundles. The big headline on the morning tabloid read:
PIANIST
SLAIN
On the so-called quality paper, big headlines were reserved for acts of war or national disaster. But a smaller headline over a boxed article in the right-hand corner of the front page read:
VIRTUOSO MURDERED
SVETLANA DYALOVICH VICTIM OF SHOOTING
Easy come, easy go.
“You serving coffee yet?” Carella asked.
“Should be ready in a few minutes.”
“Know anybody named Jose Santiago?” Hawes asked.
What the hell, they’d already asked everyone else in the neighborhood. He looked to Carella for approval. Carella was watching the hot plate on a narrow shelf behind the counter. Brewing coffee dripped steadily into the pot. The aroma was almost too much to bear.
“Why, what’d he do?” Hernandez asked.
“Nothing. We just want to talk to him.”
Hernandez shrugged again. The shrug said that this statement was also too ridiculous even to acknowledge.
“Do you know him?” Hawes persisted.
“He comes in here,” Hernandez admitted offhandedly.
“Know where he is right now?”
“No, where?”
Little joke there. Hee hee hee.
“Do you or don’t you?” Hawes asked.
They were smelling something besides coffee here.
“Why? What’d he do?”
“Nothing.”
Hernandez looked at them.
“Really,” Hawes said.
“Then try the roof of his building. He keeps pigeons.”
Richard, the black Richard, has already come—all over her face, as a matter of fact, which she didn’t quite appreciate, but he’s the one set up the party, after all. He’s sitting in a corner now, a blanket around him, watching television, so she knows for sure he’s not the one who starts this thing going haywire. For once you can’t blame the black guy, mister
.
She doesn’t think it’s the Richard with the red hair, either, because he’s sort of content to keep toying with her right tit, which she has to admit she has terrific knockers, even back in Cleveland they said so. The Richard with the dark hair is now sticking his fingers inside her, searching for her clit, good luck, mister, the condition you’re in. He’s very hard. She has his cock in her hand and she is stroking it pretty fiercely, hoping she can bring him off this way, get this thing over with, go home to bed. But he’s spreading her legs now, and trying to climb into her, they’re all so fuckin stoned nobody knows how to do diddly, except the preppie who’s licking her nipple like it’s his own mother’s. He knows just what he’s doing, and he seems to be having a nice time doing it, maybe he can come this way, she certainly hopes so, kill two birds with one stone here.
So it must be the blond Richard who pulls the plastic freezer bag over her head.
She knows at once that she is going to die.
She knows this is going to be her worst nightmare realized.
She is going to suffocate inside a plastic freezer bag, one of those sturdy things you stuff a leg of lamb in, not the kind of thin plastic that clings to your face, they warn you to keep away from children. No, she’s not going to die with plastic clinging to her nostrils and her lips. Instead, she’s going to exhaust all the oxygen inside the bag, she’s going to die that way, there’ll be no more oxygen left to breathe inside the bag, she is going to die …
“No, cunt,” he says, and takes the bag from her head and sticks his cock in her mouth.
She is actually grateful for the cock. She will accept a cock any day of the week over a freezer bag on her head, accept the one in her mouth and the one in her hand and the one in her vagina—she always thinks of it as her vagina, it is her vagina, thank you, same as the vagina on a lady in London. So happy is she that the freezer bag isn’t on her head anymore, she will even accept black Richard’s big shlong again, if he would like to bring it over right this minute. But no, black Richard seems content to be lying there in the corner all huddled up, watching television. She wonders if she should yell over to him that this preppie son of a bitch tried to scare her a minute ago by putting a freezer bag over her head.