by Ed McBain
“Very simple,” Carella said. “Paco Lopez’s girlfriend was stabbed Sunday night.”
“What!”
“Died yesterday morning at Saint Jude’s.”
“Where’d this happen?” Meyer asked.
“That’s just it. Charlie Car found her outside her building on Ainsley Avenue. It’s all on the Activity Report spindle, Meyer. A Ten-Twenty-four described as a cutting, victim taken to Saint Jude’s.”
“Who was catching Sunday night?”
“That’s not the point. The blues didn’t find her till Monday morning. The graveyard shift had already been relieved, this was the eight-to-four.”
“That’s when we were catching!” Meyer said.
“You’re beginning to get the message.”
“So why the hell didn’t the blues call it in?”
“They did.”
“Then why didn’t we get it?”
“Officer’s discretion,” Carella said. “Charlie Car called for a meat wagon, and then accompanied it to the hospital. The girl was still alive when they delivered her. That’s the way it appears on the activity report they wrote up at the end of their tour.”
“At four o’clock, you mean? What time did the girl die?”
“Around eleven.”
“Is that on an activity report, too?”
“How could it be? I found out from Danny Gimp.”
“Great! A snitch pulling together the pieces!”
“Exactly Pete’s words.”
“So what now?”
“Now we ask Timothy Moore about the ‘extra’ cash his girlfriend was making.”
“I mean, what about the Quadrado girl?”
“She was cut, Meyer. Does that sound like the same m.o. to you?”
“Maybe the guy’s running out of bullets.”
“Maybe. Or maybe this was just another one of the hundred cuttings we get every day of the week. I want to talk to her cousin later, the kid who first put us onto her when we caught the Lopez murder. Maybe he’ll know something.”
“If this is related to cocaine—”
“It might be.”
“Then it’s starting to look like gang shit,” Meyer said. “And gang shit, I can do without.”
“Let’s talk to Moore,” Carella said.
Well, they knew it was a big city. And in a big city, mistakes were bound to occur. Chances were that even if they’d known of Judite Quadrado’s condition before she’d died, the girl might not have been able to tell them anything of value in cracking their case—or cases as the case happened to be. Knowing about her in time to have questioned her, and perhaps to have elicited a deathbed statement, might have proved a pointless exercise, anyway. Even in a big city, though, it was nice to know things.
Carella was very happy, for example, to have learned from Lieutenant Byrnes (between his readings of the Riot Act) that Brown and Kling had found $300,000 in $100 bills in the safe of Marvin Edelman, the last—or at least the most recent; they hoped he’d prove to be the last—of the murder victims killed with the same .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. The presence of such a large bundle might have been attributed, of course, to the very nature of the man’s business: a precious-gems merchant did not normally accept subway tokens in exchange for his commodity. But why such an awesome amount of money had been kept in his office safe, instead of in a bank account, or even a bank’s safety deposit box, was something that troubled the detectives. It might not have troubled them so much if Edelman’s fellow victims hadn’t been involved, in one way or another, with cocaine. When cocaine was on the scene, big bucks were mandatory. And the bucks in Edelman’s safe were very big indeed.
In street parlance over the years, cocaine had been known under various names: C, coke, snow, happy dust, sleigh ride, gold dust, Bernice, Corrine, girl, flake, star dust, blow, white lady, and—of course—nose candy. When combined with heroin, it was called a speedball, although the street jargon for this combination had recently changed to “Belushi Cocktail.” Whatever you chose to call it, cocaine was a headache. Up in the Eight-Seven, the heroin dealers had taken to giving their wares “brand” names. You bought your little glassine bag, and it came with a label pasted on it, and the label read Coolie High or Murder One or Rush or Jusey Whales or Quick Silver or Rope of Dope or Cousin Eddie or Bunny or Stay High or Crazy Eddie Shit or Good Pussy, hardly names that would ever be considered by General Foods. But since the people selling dope were criminals, and since there truly was no honor among thieves, within hours after a reputable dealer’s terrific stuff hit the street with a brand name like “Devil,” for example, or “Prophecy” or “New Admissions,” some slimy little pusher at the bottom of the ladder would be selling you a bag with the same brand name on it, but with the heroin cut almost to nothing—a “beat bag,” as it was known to addicts and dealers alike. But that was heroin.
Cocaine was something else.
The most recent federal report handed around the squadroom estimated that an approximate sixty metric tons of cocaine had been smuggled into the United States in the past year, at a wholesale value of $50 billion.
Cocaine was fashionable.
That was the biggest problem with cocaine. You didn’t have to be a raggedy-pantsed slum kid to snort a line. You could be running a big Hollywood studio, making multimillion-dollar decisions about the next movie you’d be foisting on an unsuspecting public, and that night you could sit around your Malibu beach house listening to the pounding of the surf and the pounding of your own head as you inhaled coke from the little gold spoon you wore on a slender gold chain under your custom-tailored silk shirt. In fact, if you wanted to start doing cocaine, it helped to be among the nation’s biggest wage earners. Every working cop knew the mathematics of cocaine. Every working cop was also an expert on the metric system of weights and measures. To understand the economy, you had to know that an ounce of cocaine was the same thing as 28.3 grams, and a kilo was the equivalent of 35.2 ounces, or 2.2 pounds by avoirdupois measure. Your average Colombian coca farmer sold his leaves to a trafficker for about $1 a pound—$2 a kilo, give or take a penny. By the time this raw material was transformed into cocaine hydrochloride, and then diluted again and again—“stepped on” or “whacked” or “hit”—and then sold in little packets about the size of the one you might find in a sugar bowl, a gram could cost you anywhere between $100 and $125, depending on the quality. The astronomical bucks to be realized in the cocaine trade were attributable to the extraordinary number of middlemen between the source and the consumer, and the ruthless dilution—all the way down the line—from a high of 90 to 98 percent pure in South America to a low of 12 percent pure on the city’s streets.
Both Meyer and Carella had mixed feelings about a possible cocaine connection to the murders. On the one hand, they were eager to close out the Lopez/Anderson/Edelman (and possibly Quadrado) file. On the other hand, if the murders had anything to do with the South American gangsters who operated out of Majesta across the river, in a neighborhood dubbed Baby Bogota by the police—well, they just weren’t sure that was a can of peas they particularly cared to open. Organized crime wasn’t their bag, and the Colombian underworld was perhaps something more than a pair of flatfoots from an undernourished precinct could cope with effectively. As they knocked on the door to Timothy Moore’s second-floor apartment on Chelsea Place, they were hoping he would be able to tell them Sally Anderson was into some big-time drug dealing that was netting her the “extra” cash the black dancer Lonnie had hinted at—but they were also hoping the lead was a false one; better a bona fide crazy than a Colombian hit man.
There was music playing behind the door. Classical music. Lots of strings. Both of the detectives were musical ignoramuses; neither of them could identify it. The music was very loud. It flooded out past the wooden door and into the corridor. They knocked again.
“Hello!” a voice yelled.
“Police!” Carella yelled back.
“Okay, hold on!”
They held on. The music was all-pervasive, strings giving way to brasses and then to what Carella guessed was an oboe. Beneath the melodious din, he heard a lock being turned. The door opened. The music swelled more loudly into the hallway.
“Hey, hi,” Timothy Moore said.
He was wearing a gray sweat shirt imprinted in purple with the name and seal of Ramsey University. He was also wearing brown corduroy trousers and frayed house slippers.
“Come on in,” he said. “I just got home a few minutes ago.”
Home appeared to be a three-room apartment, living room, bedroom, and kitchen; in this section of town, so close to the school, it was probably costing him something like $600 a month. The entrance door opened onto the small living room, furnished with a thrift-shop sofa, chairs, and lamp, and unpainted bookcases brimming with thick tomes Carella assumed were medical texts. A human skeleton hung on a rack in one corner of the room. On an end table near the battered sofa, a telephone rested alongside the portable radio that was blaring the symphony or concerto or sonata or whatever it was. The radio was one of those little Japanese jobs like Genero’s, similar in every respect except one: Genero’s was usually tuned to a rock station. Beyond the sofa, a door opened into a bedroom with an unmade bed. On the opposite wall, another door opened into the kitchen.
“Let me turn this down,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio. As he lowered the volume, Carella wondered why he simply didn’t turn it off. He said nothing.
“There,” Moore said.
The volume was still loud enough to make it annoying. Carella wondered if Moore was a little hard of hearing, and then wondered if he wasn’t overreacting. All Teddy had to learn was that he’d been annoyed by the listening habits of someone who might be a bit deaf.
“We didn’t want to bother you at the school,” he said over the sound coming from the radio. Clarinets now, he guessed. Or maybe flutes.
“I wonder if you could lower that a bit more,” Meyer said, apparently unburdened by any guilt over hurting the feelings of the possibly handicapped.
“Oh, sorry,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio again. “I have it on all the time, I sometimes forget how loud it is.”
“There’ve been studies,” Meyer said.
“Studies?”
“About the rock-and-roll generation growing up deaf.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Meyer said. “From all the decibels.”
“Well, I’m not deaf yet,” Moore said, and smiled. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A drink?”
“Nothing, thanks,” Carella said.
“Well, sit down, won’t you? You said you tried me at the school—”
“No, we didn’t want to bother you at the school.”
“Well, thanks, I appreciate that. The way I’m falling behind these days, all I’d have needed was to be yanked out of class.” He looked first at Carella and then at Meyer. “What is it? Is there some good news?”
“Well, no,” Carella said. “That’s not why we’re here.”
“Oh. I thought for a moment—”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Do you think…is there still a chance you may get him?”
“We’re working on it,” Carella said.
“Mr. Moore,” Meyer said, “we had a long talk with a girl named Lonnie Cooper yesterday, she’s one of the dancers in Fatback.”
“Yes, I know her,” Moore said.
“She told us all about the party that took place in her apartment a week ago Sunday—the party you missed.”
“Yes?” Moore said, looking puzzled.
“She confirmed that there was cocaine at the party.”
“Confirmed?”
“We had previously heard it from three separate sources.”
“Yes?” Moore said. He still looked puzzled.
“Mr. Moore,” Carella said, “the last time we spoke to you, we asked if Sally Anderson was involved with drugs. You told us—”
“Well, I really don’t remember exactly what—”
“We asked you, specifically, ‘Was she involved with drugs?’ and you answered, specifically, no. We also asked if she was involved in any other illegal activity, and you answered no to that one, too.”
“As far as I know, Sally was not involved in drugs or any other illegal activity, that’s correct.”
“You still maintain that?”
“I do.”
“Mr. Moore, four different people so far have told us that Sally Anderson was sniffing coke at that party.”
“Sally?” He was already shaking his head. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t believe that.”
“You knew nothing about her habit, huh?”
“Well, you know, of course, that cocaine isn’t habit-forming. I’m speaking from a strictly physiological standpoint. There’s absolutely no evidence of any dependence potential for methylester of benzoylecgonine. None whatever.”
“How about a psychological dependence?”
“Well, yes, but when you ask me whether or not Sally had a habit—”
“We asked whether you knew about her habit, Mr. Moore.”
“I take exception to the word habit, that’s all. But in any event, to answer your question, I do not believe Sally Anderson was using cocaine. Or any other drug, for that matter.”
“How about marijuana?”
“Well, I don’t consider that a drug.”
“We found marijuana fibers and seeds in her handbag, Mr. Moore.”
“That’s entirely likely. But, as I just said, I do not consider marijuana a drug, per se.”
“We also found a residue of cocaine.”
“That surprises me.”
“Even after what we told you about that party?”
“I don’t know who told you Sally was sniffing cocaine—”
“Do you want their names?”
“Yes, please.”
“Tina Wong, Tony Asensio, Mike Roldan, and Lonnie Cooper.”
Moore sighed heavily, and then shook his head. “I don’t understand that,” he said. “I have no reason to doubt you, but—”
“She never used cocaine in your presence, is that it?”
“Never.”
“And this all comes as a total surprise to you.”
“Yes, it does. In fact, I’m flabbergasted.”
“Mr. Moore, in your relationship with Miss Anderson, did you ever see her on Sundays?”
“Sundays?” he said, and the telephone rang. “Excuse me,” he said and lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said. “Oh, hi, Mom, how are you?” he said. He listened and then said, “No, nothing new. In fact, I have the two detectives with me right this minute. The ones working on the case. No, not yet.” He listened again. “Still very cold,” he said, “how is it down there? Well, Mom, sixty-eight isn’t what I’d consider cold.” He listened, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and then said, “I’m really not sure. Right now, I’m in the middle of exams. Maybe during the spring break, I’ll see. I know I haven’t been down there in a while, Mom, but…well, August wasn’t all that long ago, really. No, it hasn’t been eight months, Mom, it’s only been six months. Less than six months, in fact. Are you feeling okay? How’s your arm? Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. You did, huh? Well, what did he say it was? Well, he’s probably right. Mom, he’s an orthopedist, he’d certainly know better than I what…Well, not yet, Mom. Well, thank you, but I’m not a doctor yet. Not for a while yet. An opinion from me wouldn’t be worth much, Mom. Well…uh-huh…uh-huh…well, if you want to think I saved that boy’s life, fine. But that doesn’t make me a doctor yet. And besides, anyone could have done what I did. The Heimlich Maneuver. Heimlich. What difference does it make how you spell it, Mom?” He rolled his eyes again. “Mom, I really have to go now, I have these detectives…what? Yes, I’ll tell them. I’m sure they’re doing their best, anyway, but I’ll tell them. Yes, Mom. I’ll talk to you soon. Good-bye, Mom.”
He put the phone back on the
cradle, sighed in relief, turned to the detectives, and said, unnecessarily, “My mother.”
“Is she Jewish?” Meyer asked.
“Mother? No, no.”
“She sounded Jewish,” Meyer said, and shrugged. “Maybe all mothers are Jewish, who knows?”
“She gets lonely down there,” Moore said. “Ever since my father died—”
“I’m sorry,” Carella said.
“Well, it was a while ago. Last June, in fact. But they say it takes at least a year to get over either a death or a divorce, and she’s still taking it pretty hard. Sally was a tonic for her, but now…” He shook his head. “It’s just that she misses him so terribly much, you see. He was a wonderful man, my father. A doctor, you know. A surgeon, which is what I plan to be. Took care of us as if we were royalty. Even after he died. Made sure my mother wouldn’t have to worry for the rest of her life, even left me enough money to see me through medical school and set up a practice afterward. A wonderful man.” He shook his head again. “I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said. “You were asking me—”
“What was that about the Heimlich Manuever?” Carella asked.
Moore smiled. “When I was down there last August, a kid began turning purple in a restaurant. Twelve-year-old Cuban kid, all dressed up for the big Sunday dinner with his family. I realized he was choking, and I jumped up and did the Heimlich on him. My mother thought I’d lost my mind, grabbing the kid from behind and—well, I’m sure you know the maneuver.”
“Yes,” Meyer said.
“Anyway, it helped him,” Moore said modestly. “His parents were very grateful. You’d have thought I liberated Cuba single-handedly. And, of course, I’ve been a hero to my mother ever since.”
“Her son the doctor,” Meyer said.
“Yeah,” Moore said. He was still smiling.
“So,” Carella said.
“So, yeah, what were we talking about?”
“Sundays and Sally.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you ever see her on Sundays?”
“Occasionally. She was usually pretty busy on Sundays. Her day off, you know, no show that night.”
“Busy doing what?”