The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “The horns?”

  “The ends of the hyoid bone. We’ll sometimes find fractures of calcified hyoid bone in old people who’ve suffered a fatal fall or some sort of accidental blow to the neck. But usually the bone and cartilage fractures we see are caused by strangulation. That’s not to say we don’t get old people who’ve been strangled. Or even strangled and raped. Your nun was how old?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Sure. Of course, fractures can happen during dissection, but then we don’t find focal bleeding. However slight, hemorrhaging of the tissues adjacent to a laryngeal fracture indicates it occurred while the victim was still alive. We found blood. She was strangled, Steve, no question.”

  “Was she also raped?”

  “Whenever a strangulation victim is female, we routinely check the genitalia. That entails a search for sperm in the vaginal vault, and acid phostase determinations on vaginal washings. She wasn’t raped, Steve.”

  “I’ll tell Homicide.”

  “Incidentally …”

  Carella looked at him.

  “Are you sure she’s a nun?”

  “Why?” Carella asked. “What else did you find?”

  “Breast implants,” Blaney said.

  3

  THEN SHE’S NOT A NUN,” CARELLA’S MOTHER SAID.

  “DON’T BE SO OLD-FASHIONED,” HIS sister said.

  “What’s old-fashioned got to do with it? A nun doesn’t get herself breast implants, Angela. That’s all there is to it.”

  Carella expected her to cross her fingers and spit on them, the way she used to when he was a kid. The trouble with sign language, he thought, is that fingers can’t whisper. Last night after dinner, he had told Teddy all about Blaney’s discovery, little knowing that the twins—presumably playing Monopoly across the room, on the floor beneath the imitation Tiffany lamp—had been eavesdropping, each of them fascinated in a separate boy-girl way by the topic under discussion.

  According to Blaney, before 1992 there had been three types of fillings for the implant: silicone gel, saline, or a combination of both, where saline was contained in one compartment of an elastomer shell and silicone gel in another. When it was discovered that the gel could bleed through the envelope and migrate to other parts of the body, potentially causing cancer, silicone gel implants were banned.

  Sister Mary Vincent’s implants were saline.

  This did not necessarily mean they’d been inserted since 1992; saline implants had been on the market for more than a decade before the ban on silicone gel. But a good reason to suspect the implants had been recent was the fact that the shell had not yet turned from clear to cloudy. Apparently, when the shell was in place for any amount of time, the body’s oxidizing compounds attacked it, causing discoloration. This had not yet happened in Mary’s instance. Given the fact that Mary was only twenty-seven, given the longevity of the silicone gel ban, given as well the fact that the envelope was still clear, Blaney was willing to guess that the implants could not have been more than three or four years old.

  All of this the prepubescent twins had overheard and felt compelled to repeat to their grandmother the moment they were all assembled on her backyard lawn for the big outdoor barbecue. Judging from previous Sunday afternoon feasts at his mother’s house all throughout his childhood and beyond, he would not get home till eight tonight, by which time Sixty Minutes would have come and gone, oh well.

  The indiscretion of the twins was compounded by the presence at the barbecue of Angela’s new boyfriend, an assistant district attorney named Henry Lowell, who had merely allowed the man who’d killed Carella’s father to walk out of a courtroom scot-free. He now had the balls to say, “That’s privileged information, isn’t it, Steve?” to which Carella replied, “Only if it’s revealed by me, Henry,” to which the asshole replied, “Who else was privy to it?” to which Carella replied, “Mark and April. They’re twelve.”

  “Oh, let it go,” Angela said.

  The men were standing at the barbecue, Carella turning steaks, Lowell placing chicken breasts on the grill for anyone who preferred white meat. Teddy was just coming out of the house, carrying a bowl of pasta that had been warming on the big stove in the kitchen. The screen door slammed shut behind her, the sound signaling dappled sunlight, capturing her in stuttered gold. Depending on which degree of political correctness you wished to accept, Teddy Carella was either a deaf mute, a hearing-and-speech impaired woman, or an aurally and vocally challenged person. Or else she was simply Carella’s wife and the most beautiful woman in the world, dark-haired and dark-eyed, moving with elegance and grace as she carried the steaming bowl to the wooden picnic table and set it down. Carella watched her. He loved to watch her. She caught him. Threw a brazen hip at him. He smiled. On the table, his mother’s good red sauce immediately attracted bees. Teddy ripped plastic wrap from a roll, shooed the bees, covered the steaming bowl.

  “Angela, the salad!” his mother called. “The bread!”

  “Getting it now, Mom!”

  Angela slammed into the house, followed by her three-year-old twins. Bang, bang, and bang again, the screen door went. Twins ran in the family. There were two sets here today, his sister’s and Carella’s own. Plus Angela’s seven-year-old, Tess.

  “April! Mark! Dinner! Cindy! Mindy! Everybody! Henry! Come on! Tess! Dinner!” his mother called, though this wasn’t quite dinner at two in the afternoon, nor was it lunch, either, just your garden-variety, eat-till-you-bust Italian-style Sunday get-together.

  He could remember hiding under the dining room table with his sister when they were kids. Now her estranged husband was a goddamn drug addict, and her boyfriend had let their father’s killer walk, my how the time does fly.

  His mother would not let go of the breasts, so to speak.

  Kept rattling on and on about it being impossible for the woman in the park to be a nun because nuns simply didn’t need or want breast implants. Sometimes she gave him a pain in the ass. Well, he guessed she was a little better nowadays, didn’t as often fall into those long moments of deep silence, when she retreated to whatever private space she continued to share with her dead husband. My father, too, don’t forget, Carella thought. My dead father. I mean, Mom, we all lost Pop, you know. But I don’t retreat, I dare not retreat, oh dear God I would burst into tears.

  Today it wasn’t one of her deep meaningful silences. Instead, it was the nun and the Catholic Church, his mother seemingly having forgotten that she herself hadn’t been to church for, what was it, twenty years? And, listen, don’t even mention confession! On and on about the nun who had to be an impostor, while Henry Lowell sat across the table fretting over a detective’s family knowing the intimate details of a case the detective was investigating, well, gee, pardon me all to hell, Henry!

  Carella would be forty years old in October.

  Oh, yes, no more thirtysomething, forget it. He had read someplace that when Hollywood studios wanted to do a movie about a twelve-year-old, they hired a twelve-year-old to write the script. That was because a forty-year-old writer had never been twelve. Which meant that a seventy-year-old writer had never been forty, though a Hollywood studio would never hire a seventy-year-old to do anything but star in a movie opposite a thirty-four-year-old girl, the theory being that the gonads remembered what the heart and the head had long ago forgotten.

  He sometimes watched old ladies plodding heavily across city streets where buses threatened, and knew for certain that inside those shrunken bodies were the shining faces of fourteen-year-olds.

  Angela’s three-year-olds were babbling in their own secret code, he remembered Mark and April when they were that age, inseparable, a gang in miniature. Twelve years old now. April blossoming into a young woman, already taller than her brother, Mark, who was essentially still a boy. Sunrise, sunset, where had the time flown? Mark favored his father, poor kid. April was the image of Teddy, who was now signing to Angela—and Angela was trying to understand—that her court appearance
was scheduled for tomorrow morning at nine, and she was scared to death they’d find her guilty and send her to jail.

  “They won’t, Mom,” Mark said at once, forgetting to sign, and then tapped her arm, and when she turned, reassured her in the language that had been in his hands from when he was a small boy.

  “No one’s going to find you guilty,” Carella said aloud, simultaneously signing it, even though he knew this was no mere bullshit violation. Assault Three was a misdemeanor for which Teddy could spend a year in jail if she was convicted. The accident leading to the assault charge had occurred so long ago that neither of them could remember exactly when, but court calendars being what they were, it was only coming to trial tomorrow morning.

  “Who’s the judge?” Lowell asked.

  “Man named Franklin Roosevelt Pierson, do you know him?”

  “Yes. He’s fair and honest. What’s this all about, anyway?”

  Teddy began signing, and Carella began talking at the same time, so she yielded to him for the sake of expediency since Lowell didn’t understand sign language at all.

  What had happened was that a woman had backed her red Buick station wagon into the grille of Teddy’s little red Geo. The district attorney was insisting that a) Teddy had caused the accident, and b) Teddy had kicked the woman, and c) Teddy had taken advantage of her husband’s position as a police detective to intimidate the arresting officer at the scene. The only truth to any of this was that Teddy had, in fact, kicked the woman, but only after she’d taken Teddy by the shoulders and shaken her the way some nannies do with infants.

  April had heard all this before, so she turned to her aunt and asked her if she knew about this new nail polish that dried in ninety seconds flat. If this were a sitcom, Mark would have told her she was too young to wear nail polish, and April would have warned him to shut up, brat. But this was real life here on Grandma’s lawn, and Teddy had let her daughter wear lip gloss for the occasion and Mark said, “Yeah, that’s cool, Sis, I saw it on television.”

  Carella knew that it could go badly for Teddy tomorrow morning because the plaintiff was a black woman and so was the judge, and nobody in this city liked to see a person of color pushed around by a white cop, even if it was only a white cop’s white wife. He did not mention a word of this to Teddy. He planned to be at the trial tomorrow morning, dead nun or not. Even in police work, there were priorities.

  “Who’s representing you?” Lowell asked.

  Proper nouns were the most difficult words to sign. Especially when your listener couldn’t read your fingers. Teddy turned helplessly to Carella.

  “Jerry Flanagan,” he said.

  “Good lawyer,” Lowell said.

  Unlike you, Carella thought.

  Maybe it made a person cranky—twelve years old, or going on forty, or well over the hill at seventy—to be sitting opposite the district attorney who with an ironclad chain of evidence on the murder weapon had allowed a man to walk, had so bungled the case that a jury had let a murderer walk out of that courtroom, the man who’d killed Carella’s father, well, listen, who the hell cared?

  Could you just imagine sitting at a dinner party with Carella on your right, and he’s telling you all about how justice had not been served in the case of his father’s murder, a killer had been allowed to walk free, oh, what a delightful dinner companion this would be, are all police detectives as entertaining as you?

  Maybe it had to do with getting to be forty.

  Or maybe it had to do with guilt.

  Carella himself had arrested the son of a bitch, you see, Carella could have blown the man’s brains out in a deserted hallway with no one to witness except another cop who was urging him to pull the trigger, Do it, do it, but he had not done it, he had not killed the man who’d killed his father because he’d felt somewhere deep inside him that becoming a beast of prey was tantamount to having been that beast all along.

  And now the guilt.

  In the guilt game, Italians were second only to Jews. He never thought of himself as Italian, however, because, gee, you see, he’d been born here in these United States of America, you see, and an Italian was somebody who lived in Rome, or was he mistaken? He never thought of himself as an Italian-American, either, because that was someone who’d come to this country from Italy, correct? An immigrant? As, for example, his father’s father, whom he’d never met because the man had died before Carella was born. He was the Italian-American, the hyphenate, the man who’d come all those miles from a walled mountaintop village midway between Bari and Naples, Italian at the start of his long journey, Italian when he’d reached these shores and this big bad city, becoming Italian-American only after he’d recited the pledge of allegiance under oath.

  Carella’s father was an American, born and bred in this country. And the man who’d killed him was American as well. Whatever his distant heritage had been, he’d been born here, and raised here, and he’d acquired his gun here in this land of the free and home of the brave, but only when you had a pistol in your hand. This American had learned to use his pistol here, and he had used it on Carella’s father, another American, bang, bang, you’re dead.

  I should have killed him, Carella thought.

  Because this is the way it turns out.

  You are here on a sweltering Sunday in August, and your sister has brought to the table the man who let your father’s murderer walk, and she is sleeping with this man, she is fucking him in the dead of night, and all your mother can talk about is a nun with fake tits.

  He guessed he was getting to be forty.

  He wondered if he’d suddenly start chasing nineteen-year-old girls.

  He looked across at his wife.

  She winked at him.

  He winked back.

  He would kill himself first.

  Sunday evening turned a rosy pink and then a deeper blush and then a reddish-lavender-blue and then purple and black, the golden day succumbing at last to night.

  It was time to go buy a gun.

  Stringent laws or not, it was as easy to buy a gun here in this city as it was in the state of Florida. That’s because laws were made for honest people. Honest people knew that if you wanted to purchase a handgun in this city, you first had to get a permit from the police department’s Pistol Licensing Division. The PLD issued four different types of permits. Owners of businesses that had been robbed, or persons who made night deposits at banks could apply for a “carry” permit. A “premise” permit could be issued for keeping a gun in a home or a business location. “Special” permits could be granted to out-of-state residents, and “target” permits to gun-club members. In this city, it was illegal to own or carry a handgun without a permit. But the police estimated that there were at least two million handguns out there—despite the fact that fewer than fifty thousand permits had been issued. Thieves didn’t need permits. Thieves knew a hundred and one ways to buy an illegal piece.

  One of those ways was Little Nicholas.

  At eleven o’clock that Sunday night, Sonny went to see him.

  · · ·

  Little Nicholas did business in the rear of a laundromat he owned and operated on Lyons and South Thirty-fifth. The washing and drying machines closed down at ten-thirty, which is why Sonny didn’t go by until eleven. He had called ahead, and he was expected. Even so, Little Nicholas was extremely cautious about opening the back door of the Soapy Suds until he’d turned on the outside floods and ascertained through a peephole that his visitor was indeed Samson Wilbur Cole.

  “Hey, man,” he said, and instantly closed and double-locked the door behind Sonny. The two men shook hands. Little Nicholas’s grip was thick and sweaty. He was wearing a white tank-top undershirt and shorts roomy enough to accommodate two men his size, a length of clothesline threaded through the loops and tied at the gathered waist. Sonny guessed he was about five-eight and weighed in at three-fifty.

  “Got some nice new merchandise up from Georgia yesterday,” Little Nicholas said. “One of m
y mules made a quick run down there and back. Picked up a silver-plated Mac-11, a pair of Glock-17s, a 5.56 semi, a Colt .45 with a laser scope, and four .25-caliber Ravens. What are you looking for?”

  “Got to do me some hunting,” Sonny said.

  “Then you need stopping power,” Nicholas said. “We’re talking a nine. Your nine is anything that uses a .357 or a 9-millimeter cartridge.”

  “I know what a nine is.”

  Was a nine stopped Carella’s father.

  “So show me,” Sonny said.

  Part of the ritual here was who could outlip who. The price often rose or fell on who had the biggest mouth.

  “Your nine did three hundred and two homicides in this city, last year alone,” Nicholas said.

  “Nobody’s thinking of any homicide here.”

  “Course not. Just thought you’d like to know. How much money are we talking here?”

  “Money’s no object.”

  “I heard that tune before. Till I state the price.”

  “State it.”

  “I got nines ranging from seven hundred to a thou. Your uglies are more expensive. The Cobray M-11 and the Tec-9’ll run you around twelve, fifteen hundred, depending. But you can’t hide an ugly, cept under an overcoat, and you’re not about to wear a coat in this heat, are you? Or did you plan to go huntin after it cools down a little?”

  “I’ll be needin the gun now.”

  “So you want somethin you can tuck in your waistband or a holster, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Sonny said.

  “But not one of your junk guns, cost you a low of fifty, a high of two-fifty.”

  “You talking your Raven and such?”

  “Your Raven, your Jennings weapons, all the cheap Saturday-night specials.”

  “I want a gun can do the job.”

  “Your junk gun’ll give you control but not much else.”

  “Show me what you got in a nine.”

  “Happy to,” Nicholas said, and waddled over to a wall covered with half a dozen cabinet doors. “You got anything against Jews?” he asked.