The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “Relationship? What kind of relationship? I met him ten minutes before I met the other guy. What’d the two of them do, anyway?”

  “One of them got himself killed,” Ollie said, trying to look sorrowful, the way television newscasters do when they’re reporting a tragedy they don’t give a damn about. Ah yes, the bullshit of it all, he thought in his best W. C. Fields mode. “I was wondering did him and Sonny say where they might be going when they left the club?”

  “For a walk.”

  “A walk where?”

  “Couldn’t be far cause they said they’d be back in a few minutes.”

  “Way I understand it,” Ollie said, “Sonny came back about twenty minutes later, looking for you.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Owner told him you were gone.”

  “Then I guess I must’ve been.”

  “What time did they leave for their little walk, would you remember?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “Ten-thirty? Around then?”

  “I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “Did Juju mention some hot babe he was going to meet?”

  “No, all Juju did was put the moves on me.”

  “So you didn’t get the impression they were leaving there to meet some woman.”

  “No, Sonny said there were a few things him and Juju should talk about if he had a minute. That’s what prompted him to say they should take a walk.”

  “Sonny?”

  “No, was Juju who suggested it. Sonny was the one said it wouldn’t take but a few minutes.”

  “Okay, thanks a lot, miss,” Ollie said.

  For nothing, he thought.

  · · ·

  This could have been Santo Domingo on any given day of the week. The women dressed in their church finery, the men looking slender and sleek and clean-shaven, the people out for a Sunday morning stroll, the sun shining brightly overhead. Almost made you forget for a minute that this was one of the shittiest parts of the city, rife with drugs and teeming with people itching to get the hell out of here the minute they made enough money to go back home and start a little business—or so Ollie conjectured. He’d probably have been surprised to learn that as many immigrants from Ireland went back home as did immigrants from the Dominican Republic. The Irish simply looked more American. But to Ollie, looks were ninety percent of the argument.

  He figured the only route Sonny and Juju could have taken on Friday night was straight down to the river. Two black guys might’ve been mistaken for spics in this neighborhood, but only if they kept their mouths shut. Miracle was that they’d been in a Dominican club to begin with, but that’s where the ass was, Ollie supposed. He automatically figured Tirana Hobbs was a bleached-blonde black hooker peddling her wares to any spic came along. He didn’t know she was a manicurist, and he wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told him so. The nice thing about Ollie’s beliefs was that they were unshakable.

  So he guessed the two black gents out for a friendly little walk wouldn’t have stopped in any local bar to sample the beer or the broads because Friday night could turn suddenly mean and dangerous in this neighborhood unless you were in a social club like the Siesta, where apparently Juju was well-known, according to the owner. Who’d also volunteered that he suspected Juju had connections with the drug people here in Hightown, though he didn’t suggest which drug people, of whom there were only thousands. Ollie figured he was sucking up because he had a brother in jail or a sister in rehab. Around here, nobody offered information unless they were plea-bargaining. The man did not, however, mention that Juju was also a pimp who probably ran girls out of his little old Club Siesta here. Kept that bit of information strictly to himself, lest a padlock appear on his front door one fine night.

  So if Sonny and Juju were walking to a quiet place where they could talk, why not down to the river? Have a seat on the rocks in the shadow of the bridge, discuss this pressing matter that was on Sonny’s mind. Not a bad surmise, ah yes, considering the fact that Juju’s body with his face all gone had been found nudging the pilings under the dock on Hector Street, not too terribly far downriver.

  Ollie took a stroll down to the river himself, not expecting to find anything there, and not disappointed when he didn’t. His thinking, of course, was good riddance to bad rubbish, a black dope-dealer pimp, who gave a shit? But it irked him that Sonny Cole was out there thinking the cops couldn’t reach him. Bothered him further when he remembered that this was the guy Blue Wisdom said had put away Carella’s father, which made it nice if Ollie could run into him in a dark alley some night and repay the favor.

  Thing was, first he had to find him.

  Sal Roselli all at once remembered that the guy who ran The Last Stand had fallen into the water dead drunk the very night they ended their engagement there.

  “We didn’t learn that until we were already up in Calusa,” he said.

  “That he’d fallen into the river behind the club …”

  “Yeah.”

  “And drowned.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is what Davey Farnes told us,” Brown said.

  “We were long gone when it happened,” Roselli said. “We didn’t find out about it till the next day. Calusa cops came around, wanted to know if we’d seen anything, heard anything, you know how cops are.”

  They were sitting not far from a small inflatable plastic pool behind Roselli’s development house on Sand’s Spit. His two little girls were in the water, splashing around. Brown was wondering why there had to be kids making noise every time they talked to somebody. Roselli’s wife, a somewhat overweight brunette wearing wedgies and a brown maillot, had gone into the house to mix some lemonade.

  Roselli was wearing one of those skimpy swimsuits that made it look like all he had on was a shiny black jockstrap. Brown wondered how he had the balls, so to speak, to wear such a suit in front of his two little girls, couldn’t have been older than two or three. Roselli seemed oblivious. Black hair curling on his narrow chest, sweat beaded on his forehead under matching curly hair, he reclined in a lawn chair, smiling at the day. Brown wondered if he’d done a few lines just before they arrived. He had the look of a man serenely oblivious.

  “How come you didn’t mention it when we were here?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think it was important,” Roselli said, and shrugged.

  “Man drowns, you didn’t think it was important?”

  “It had nothing to do with us. We were transients. Play the music, take the money, go our merry way.”

  “How many places you been where a man drowned?” Brown asked.

  “Not very many. Not any, in fact.”

  “But you didn’t think it was important enough to mention?”

  “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think of it.”

  “Did the drowning have anything to do with Katie’s decision?” Carella asked.

  There was a slight edge to his voice; he didn’t like Roselli’s choice of swimwear, either.

  “What decision was that?”

  “To leave the band.”

  “To call it quits.”

  “To go back to the order.”

  “I have no idea what prompted her decision,” Roselli said. “Josie!” he called. “No splashing, honey.”

  His wife was coming out of the house, carrying a tray with a pitcher and several glasses on it. The screen door slammed shut behind her. She put the tray down on the table, said, “Help yourselves, please,” and then went to sit in a plastic folding chair near the pool where her daughters splashed and squealed. Occasionally, she glanced back to where the detectives and her husband were sitting, a concerned look on her face. They figured their presence here a second time was making her nervous. The daughters seemed a little skittish, too. Altogether, Brown and Carella sensed an almost palpable air of tension around the pool.

  But four years ago a man had drowned.

  And a week ago Friday a nun had been strangled in the
park.

  “You said you were long gone when it happened,” Carella prompted. “Can you tell us …?”

  “I’ll try to remember the sequence,” Roselli said.

  Odd choice of language, Carella thought. Sequence.

  “We played three shows that Thursday night,” Roselli said. “That was because Charlie ran some ads. And also because we were damn good, he said modestly, but we were, truly. After that tour, if Katie hadn’t left the band … but that’s another story. What’s done is done, what’s gone is gone.”

  He lifted the pitcher, poured lemonade for all of them. From the pool, Mrs. Roselli and the little girls watched. Brown felt the way he had in Dr. Lowenthal’s office, when the woman in the green hat kept staring at them.

  “The last show ended at two in the morning. We’d planned to drive up to Calusa the following day, sometime in the afternoon, set up when we got there. This was the Friday before Labor Day, we were scheduled to play that whole long weekend in Calusa, and then head north again. But we were all so high none of us could sleep,” Roselli said. “Well, except for Tote, he could sleep through World War III. He went back to his cabin, but the rest of us couldn’t stop jabbering. Have you ever felt that way? Where everything was so exciting, you just couldn’t calm down afterward?”

  Like after a shoot-out in a bank, Brown thought. You answer a 10-30, and there are six guys in masks holding Uzis on the tellers, and all hell breaks loose. Like after that. When you’re drinking saloon beer with the other guys and you can’t go home, you can’t even think of going home, this is where it is, this is what you shared. Like that.

  “It was Davey who suggested that we pick up our pay, pack the van, and drive up to Calusa right then. Two-thirty, three in the morning, drive the hundred and fifty miles, whatever it was, go straight to sleep when we got there. We all thought it was a terrific idea. So Alan and I started packing the van … he’s dead now, you know. Died last month. Of AIDS. We all went to the funeral. Not Katie, of course, who the hell knew where she was? Disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, sure, a nun. Sister Mary Vincent. But who knew that?”

  “So you and Alan were packing the van,” Brown said.

  “Yeah. Carrying the instruments out while Davey and Katie went to get our pay. What a lot of these club owners did, they paid the musicians in cash. We’d been there a full week, there was a sizable amount of money due. This was now close to three in the morning, the parking lot was empty, you could hear the night insects racketing down by the water …”

  From where he and Alan are loading the instruments into the van, Sal can see Davey and Katie going into Charlie Custer’s office. The air here in the Everglades is always laden with moisture; the two musicians are sweating heavily as they carry gear from the bandstand to the van. Down here in Florida, they’ve been performing in blue slacks and identical T-shirts with alternating blue and white stripes. Katie wears a blue mini and the T-shirt without a bra, the better to demonstrate her singing prowess. They are wearing the uniforms now, the trousers wrinkled, the T-shirts stained with perspiration as they pack for the trip north.

  Over the past several months, they have learned how to pack the van most efficiently, fitting in the drums, the speakers, the amps, the guitar cases, and the keyboard like pieces in a Chinese box. Davey’s drums are the biggest problem, of course. They take up the most room. Besides, he is enormously fussy about how they are handled and usually insists that he himself be the one to pack them. Back and forth the pair of them go, Alan and Sal, from bandstand to van, Sal and Alan, to the rooms for the suitcases, Alan and Sal knocking on Tote’s door to wake him up, and lastly going to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the long drive north. Out on the water, they can hear the splash of an alligator.

  It takes them perhaps half an hour to finish all they have to do. Alan gets behind the wheel and honks the horn. In the stillness of the night, it sounds like the cry of one of Charlie Custer’s swamp critters. Tote comes running out of his cabin and tosses his suitcase into the back of the van. A moment later, Davey and Katie come out of Custer’s office. Alan starts the car. Climbing onto the back seat, Davey says, “Got the bread, let’s go.” Katie sits beside him and pulls her T-shirt away from her body, encouraging the cool flow from the air conditioner.

  “We made it to Calusa in an hour and forty minutes,” Roselli tells them now. “That afternoon, we found out Charlie had fallen in the river and drowned. And got eaten by alligators.”

  They did not reach Davey Farnes again until nine o’clock on Monday morning. He explained that he’d been at the beach all day yesterday, and had gone directly to dinner afterward—

  “I like to check on the competition,” he said. “Didn’t get home till around ten. Were you trying to reach me?”

  “On and off,” Carella said. “I wonder if we can stop by now.”

  “Oh?” Farnes said. “Something come up?”

  “Just a few questions we’d like to ask.”

  “I have to leave for the restaurant at ten-thirty. Will that give you enough time?”

  “Sure,” Carella said. “See you in half an hour.”

  They got to Farnes’s building at a quarter to ten. He lived in a part of the city not far from his restaurant, an area undergoing intensive urban renewal. Where once there’d been shabby tenements housing illegal aliens, there were now four- and five-story elevator buildings, many of them with doormen. Farnes’s apartment was on the fifth floor of a building renovated a year or so ago. There was no doorman, so they announced themselves via the intercom over the downstairs buzzer, and then took the elevator up.

  Farnes led them into a living room modestly furnished with a teakwood sofa and two matching easy chairs upholstered in bleached linen. There was a teak coffee table in front of the sofa. A pair of standing floor lamps with glass shades, one blue, one orange, flanked the sofa. An open door led to a small kitchen. A closed second door led to what they supposed was the bedroom. Another closed door beside it probably opened onto a bathroom. The apartment was pleasantly air-conditioned, the windows closed to the noise of the traffic below and the incessant rise and fall of police and ambulance sirens.

  “Something to drink?” he asked.

  “Thanks, no,” Carella said. “We’re sorry to bother you again, Mr. Farnes …”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  “… but I wonder if you can tell us again what happened on that last night in Boyle’s Landing.”

  “The night Charlie drowned, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t think that had anything to do with Katie’s murder, do you?”

  “No, but we were wondering if it influenced her decision.”

  “To quit the band, you mean?”

  “Yes. You told us on Saturday that she broke the news right after Labor Day. That would’ve been immediately after the tour ended. So it’s possible …”

  “Yeah, I see where you’re going. Well, I guess it might have been upsetting to her. The thing is, we didn’t find out about it until the next day. It wasn’t as if we witnessed the drowning, or anything. I mean, we didn’t actually see any alligators tearing him apart. So … I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Maybe we can try reconstructing what happened that night.”

  “Well … sure.”

  “You finished playing at two, is that right?”

  “Two A.M., correct. We did three shows that night.”

  “Tote went to sleep …”

  “Man would sleep around the clock if you let him.”

  “The rest of you were up talking …”

  “Talking, drinking.”

  “You, Alan, Katie, and Sal, is that right?”

  “Charlie joined us a little bit later.”

  “When was that?”

  “Before he paid us. I was the one who suggested we pick up our pay, pack the van, and drive up to Calusa right then, instead of waiting till tomorrow. Well, it already was tomorrow, this was two-thirty, th
ree in the morning. I suggested that we drive the hundred and fifty miles or so, go straight to sleep when we got there. They all thought it was a terrific idea. So Alan and I started packing the van …”

  “Wait a minute,” Brown said. “It was Alan and Sal who packed the van, wasn’t it?”

  “Not the way I remember it. Who told you that?”

  “Sal did. That’s the way he remembers it.”

  “No, he’s mistaken. I wouldn’t let anyone touch my drums.”

  “So the way you remember it, it was Alan and you who packed the van, is that right?”

  “That’s absolutely right.”

  “Packed the van and you all drove off.”

  “Yes. Around three-thirty, something like that.”

  “And the Calusa cops came around the next day.”

  “Yes.”

  “Asked you did you know anything about what happened the night before.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But nobody could tell them anything.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Cause none of you were there when Charlie Custer drowned.”

  “None of us were there.”

  “Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Farnes,” Carella said. “We appreciate your time.”

  “And got eaten by alligators,” Brown added.

  “None of us,” Farnes repeated.

  It was almost twelve noon in Calusa, Florida, when Cynthia Huellen buzzed Matthew Hope and told him that a detective named Steve Carella was on line five.

  “Hey,” Matthew said, surprised. “How are you?”

  “Fine. How’s the weather down there?”

  “Hot.”

  “Here, too. What are you doing these days? You still out of the crime business?”

  “Planning a trip to the Czech Republic, in fact,” Matthew said.

  “Why there?”

  “Prague’s there.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Got to find a woman first.”

  “Plenty of women there, I’ll bet,” Carella said.

  “Can’t chance it. I’m getting old, Steve.”

  “So am I. I’ll be forty in October.”

  “Now that’s old, man.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  They chatted on for another five minutes or so, two old friends who had never met, one a lawyer in the sleepy Florida town of Calusa, the other a detective in a noisy northern city, strangers when first they’d met on the telephone, strangers still, perhaps, though each felt a kinship they could not explain.