The guy in the chair had himself another outburst. This time it was, “The sword of our almighty Lord shall striketh down all apostates!”
Logue looked down at him and snarled, “Jesus H. Christ, can’t you never shut the hell up?” Then he flicked some hot cigar ash on his wrist.
“Ouch!” the guy hollered, rubbing himself. “Ouch, God damn it!”
Logue said to me, “Sounds like the Rev is finally coming around, don’t it? When we first come in, he was talking in tongues.”
The cigar was making me feel better. I could have used another taste of Prescott’s Scotch, though.
I looked at Logue, then at the Rev rubbing himself, then at the blasphemy. I crossed myself and asked Logue, “How do you think this one plays?”
“You tell me, Hock. We ain’t touched nothing here yet, on account of my orders are to wait for you to join the party.” Logue leaned over and jabbed the young guy’s collarbone. “What do you say, Rev? This what you’d call a case of all hell breaking loose?”
Logue laughed at this and so did a couple of the uniforms standing near us. The butt of the joke only rocked back and forth in his chair, poker-faced.
I looked at him fondling his white bible, then I asked Logue, “Who is he?”
“Say hello to the Most Reverend Billy-Boy Miracle, Hock. Believe it or not, that’s what it says on his driver’s license from Arkansas.” Then Logue said to Miracle, “Rev, this here is Detective Neil Hockaday. He’s the one I told you about with the rubber hose.”
“Thanks,” I said to Logue, who shrugged. Then, to the reverend, “Reverend Miracle?”
He looked up at me with his sallow poker face and said solemnly, “Are you written in the book of life, Detective Hockaday?”
“Quit busting our chops, padre,” Logue said. “Detective Hockaday and me, we’re a couple of regular shamrock Catholics, okay? We belong to the biggest show in town. So we won’t be needing your little tent.”
I took Logue by the arm and pulled him off to the side of the altar. A uniform moved in close to the Most Reverend Miracle.
“So what do you have, Logue?”
“A perp is what.”
“That cracker?”
“Look, he’ll do. You got Slattery at the Post and everybody else up your back. Maybe a nice loony perp from Arkansas can take some pressure off?”
“How about you just tell me what happened?”
“Fifteen minutes ago, we get here. The door’s open and we figure somebody’s inside, so we slip in quiet. Right away we seen what you see, and smell what you smell. Also, there’s Billy-Boy standing right about where we’re standing, beholding this sick thing. He turns around and notices all us cops. Then Billy-Boy gets the very bright idea to flop down on the floor and have himself one lovely holy-rolling spastic screaming fit. Too bad you missed out on that, Hock.”
“Did you read him yet?”
“Well, we put him in the chair and we tried. But he don’t say he understands his rights, he don’t say he wants a lawyer. All he does is start spieling the scriptures, which you heard yourself.”
I looked over at the glassy-eyed Miracle. I puffed my cigar. “Maybe he looks good,” I said, “but I don’t think that’s our maniac.”
“To tell you the truth, me neither.” Logue shrugged.
“He might’ve been innocently standing here drooling over a bare-assed dead guy, then in waltzes a gang of cops and Billy-Boy is suddenly mortified so he goes into his act,” Logue said. “He wouldn’t be the first Jesus jumper who’s a homo and a pervo, right? Besides which, there’s eight million stories in the naked city.”
“You’ve got a very prurient imagination, Logue.”
“I think it’s on account of all the freaking opera my old lady plays on the radio.”
“Could be,” I said. “Come on, let’s take a look up there.”
Logue followed me to the altar, then around behind it to where the naked corpse was lashed at the wrists, waist and ankles to a tall wooden crucifix.
Dark brown blood streaked his face. There was a knife stuck in the left breast, the blade sunk into his heart. The smell was overpowering now.
I scraped a patch of blood that had dripped down from his chest to his toes. “It’s not sticky anymore,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s been hanging a while,” Logue said.
I would not have recognized him by looking at his face. Not with all that blood and the agony that had twisted the features.
But I knew.
And there was no mistaking the meaning behind the words penned on a plain white envelope stuffed between the dead man’s blood-caked ankles: WHAT HAPPENS TO HALOS.
Logue was looking at me. He said, “A penny for your thoughts.”
I was about to answer when I heard Inspector Neglio call my name. He stood in the aisle, holding a handkerchief to his nose. A uniform gave him a cigar.
“Save your money,” I said to Logue.
I walked down from the altar and stepped over to Billy-Boy Miracle. I looked at his pale clean hands folded on top of his bible and said, “Son, I know you didn’t have anything to do with this. Your hands are spotless.”
Miracle looked up at me. His eyes were red and wet.
“Reverend Miracle, can you help me on this? Anything you might know?”
He lunged forward in his chair and shouted, “Whosoever obeyeth not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be punished with everlasting damnation! Whosoever is not found written in the book of life shall be cast into the boiling lake of fire!”
I left him shouting in his chair and walked over to where Neglio stood. I said, “Let’s get some air.”
“Yeah, Hock, let’s.”
I left Logue to supervise the scene. Neglio and I went out to the street where his black Chrysler waited, along with a couple of television camera crews—so far—and the ever-dependable Slattery yelling after us about a statement.
A half-dozen uniforms formed a walking circle around Neglio and me, leading us toward the Chrysler. The air on the street was hot with strobe lights. We slid into the backseat of the Chrysler; the driver gunned the engine. And the car sped west across the sealed-off block of Forty-first Street, then turned downtown onto Ninth Avenue.
I leaned forward and told the driver, “Go to Thirty-fourth, pal, then take a right. Right again on Tenth and crawl slow along the east side of the avenue, real slow so I can check the side streets.”
When I sat back, Neglio said quietly, “Question time, Hock.”
“Ask away. You’ve got until I get to my stop.”
“Let’s start with the corncob in the chair back there at the church,” Neglio said. “Who is he and why was he yelling from the bible?”
“I guess he’s the pastor of the cracker box,” I said. “He discovered the murder you saw and smelled. I think he’s a young, frightened thumper and that’s about it. If he’s got any ulterior motive for the theatrics, it’s only publicity.”
“Publicity for what?”
“Logue’s holding him as a perp. Talk it over with him. Logue seems to think maybe we’d all get a little more breathing space if the press bought it that we had a major break in the case.”
“What’s the thumper’s name?”
“Get this: the Most Reverend Billy-Boy Miracle, direct from Arkansas.”
“Beautiful,” Neglio said. He thought for a second, and we stopped for the light at Thirty-fourth Street. “But you’re thinking it’s only a cheap turnaround collar?”
“Yeah, I am. I don’t see guys like Slattery buying the Reverend Miracle as our real McCoy maniac. So, I don’t see the percentage of even holding Billy-Boy. Besides, if he is spouting off just to get his name in the papers, what do you suppose happens?”
“What else?” Neglio said. “Billy-Boy winds up with more sheep to fleece, which means he gets richer.”
“It’s sweet if you look at it his way.”
Neglio nodded and the light changed. Then he said, “Next questio
n: who’s the dead guy on that cross?”
“Johnny Halo.”
“What?”
“The one and only,” I said. “What did you dig up on him so far?”
Neglio groaned. “He’s connected, all right. But sometimes that’s all they need to know.”
“They?”
“Know-nothing reporters who think every guinea in New York who maybe once got a favor from the outfit is some kind of a major hood. The Mafia Writers of America.” “Don’t take it so personal, Inspector. Just tell me how Halo was connected.”
“Strictly errand-boy, that’s all the guy ever was, Hock. The biggest thing he ever did was run cash through his bar once in a while that a friend maybe didn’t want to put in the bank. He’s forever a small-time wise-guy. He never had the cojones to make the big score.”
Neglio paused. Then he asked, “Or was that about to change?”
“Yeah, I think it was.”
Neglio waited for me to say something, but I did not feel like elaborating since we were now headed up Tenth Avenue and I was intent on looking east down the side streets.
Finally, Neglio said, “You’re just going to leave it like that?”
“For now,” I said.
At the corner of Thirty-eighth Street, I saw what I had hoped to see. I had the driver stop. “Here’s where I get out,” I said.
Neglio took a long look down the black street full of dark shapes and said, “So it’s back to your briar patch, Hock? Lots of luck.”
“Go tell the mayor he shouldn’t worry, that I’m closing in,” I said, starting out the door. “Meanwhile, Inspector, with all due respect, if I were you I would get myself and my big black car out of this part of Hell’s Kitchen.”
I walked slowly down Thirty-eighth, stepping over and around broken glass and used condoms and bullet casings and smashed syringes toward the gang of junkies I had seen from the corner. They were lounging in the same doorway where l saw my snitch, Rat, only the other night, the night Benito Reyes was killed, seven blocks up Tenth Avenue.
Once again, here was I—a perfect slob of a detective. Once again trusting in the uncertain rhythms of luck and instinct. Because I am an artist among cops, not a scientist.
It turned out to be my night.
There was Rat himself, nestled contentedly in a tangle of ten or so ragged men and women nodding off to communal oblivion that had come from what the heroin mainliners in my neighborhood call “passing the prick”—the needle.
Rat is the ultimate fatalist of his breed; even worse, he is out of fashion. Today’s politicians and journalists are appalled by crack cocaine, and something called “ice” looks to be next season’s dread. But old-fashioned dopers like Rat have never gone away, and old-fashioned cops see that their ranks are hardly thinning. They are still out there injecting every day, seeking the rush of yesterday’s horror; they stare at their own blood filling a syringe, mixing with silvery junk. And thousands and thousands of Rats do not give a drug czar’s damn whether they live or die after pushing the plunger down.
I stood across the street from the doorway where Rat and his gang lay like dying horses in their wary junkie sleep: eyelids at half-mast, hands clutching valuables and tucked into armpits, knees loose and feet ready to run. I made a smacking sound with my lips. Heads rose in response, sniffing the air.
“Rat!” I called.
I saw him put his hands on his chest, as if saying, Who, me? He looked my way. Again I called, “Rat!”
Then he picked himself up and stepped away from the pack, rubbing his nose with a sleeve. He did not look as he crossed the street. A taxi nearly struck him down; the driver shouted a curse at his dark shape.
“Hello, my friend,” I said, taking his thin, cold fists into my hands. I opened the fingers of one fist and laid a crisp twenty-dollar bill across the palm. “I need your help tonight.”
It had grown chilly and my words were followed by puffs of frosted air. Rat looked at these puffs with his liquid eyes, black and dilated. Then he looked up at me, trying to understand this reversal of our custom; it was usually he who came to me.
Rat was a head shorter than me and only a few years younger. His hair was black and gray, tied back in a ponytail. His rough and reddened face was high-boned, spotted by grime that had worn into the creases of his skin over the years. His thin brown lips puckered over parts of his mouth where teeth were missing.
Rat bent at the waist, as if he had suddenly broken. He slipped the twenty into his shoe and stood back up again.
“I am already fixed for the night, Hock,” he said in his soft, slurry voice. “But I thank you for tomorrow’s stake. I’ll think of you in my technicolor dreams.”
He gave me a mock salute.
“I’m looking for somebody in the cracks,” I said. “It’s what the twenty is for.”
“Somebody I know?”
“A squatter,” I said. “I think he’s right here in the neighborhood. Have you heard of a man called Picasso?”
“Every serious person has.”
“I don’t mean the painter. Well, he’s a painter. But I mean the guy in the newspapers, the guy the police are hunting in connection with the murders.”
“I don’t read newspapers, Hock. I’ve got enough vulgarity in my life.”
“Please,” I said. Then I described Charlie Furman to Rat.
And then I got lucky.
“Yes, I’ve seen the man,” Rat said.
“When?”
“Last fall, thereabouts.”
“Where?”
“In this very street, Hock. But only once. And I only remember it now because of the beret you mentioned and because he carried something large and bulky under his arm. You say he’s a painter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now that I think of it, it could have been an easel.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“I had no reason for that,” Rat said. “But I can tell you this about him: he was walking along talking in the fiercest way to somebody.”
“That’s Picasso, he does that,” I said. “He’s got some maginary friend he’s always talking to, or arguing with.”
“No, this was nothing imaginary.”
I thought, Of course not! There was Ruby’s dream: “What ¢ou see is an artist painting about death—not murdering, minting.” Picasso would have to know one real friend, at east one real and murderous friend.
I said, “Who was he with, Rat?”
“She wasn’t much to look at. So in fact, I didn’t.”
“A woman?”
“She wore a coat, a big coat. I can’t tell you what she ooked like, I can’t tell you anything about her.”
I could see that Rat was honestly straining his memory. I jelieved him.
And I knew what I might do next to best puzzle this out.
I gave Rat another twenty and said good bye, then walked jack to Tenth Avenue and up to my building at Forty-third. I checked the mailbox. Nothing but bills to ignore.
I climbed the stairs to my apartment where I put the lewly gathered bills on the sideboard at the top of a nounting stack of other such appeals. Beside this lay Patrick Jnoody’s letter about my dying Uncle Liam.
Then I telephoned Ruby. “Remember how I said I’d be leeding you?”
She said she would meet me in an hour.
I took a hot shower. Then I hauled out my best suit and tie ind put them on.
Too bad about Celia, and I really mean that. But she went ‘otten on me, didn’t she? Ho, ho, didn’t she, though!
Damn straight.
And ain’t I always said nobody beats the odds?
Damn straight I said that!
And who needs another one of them shrinkers with only questions and no answers? Ain’t I always said fuck Dr. Freud? Ain’t I?
But you think they’ll listen, even now?
Hey, how do you like the balls on that Puerto Rican? I do my very best for him, I put my best observations on his windows.
Like that pig I showed you that day—the essential fear I captured in that pig’s eyes, remember?
How does he pay me off? In crummy sandwiches! Can you beat that? Not cash money like an honest hard-working artist deserves, sandwiches! You call that respect?
So, I don’t respect him back. Him, I don’t give the respect of oil on canvas. I give him calcimine on glass, the Puerto Rican bastard!
Johnny Halo! They ought to give me a medal for painting Johnny Halo like I done!
Damn straight.
Oh, this is some lovely bunch of coconuts I got in my broken-down life, hey?
Ain’t it the truth?
Ain’t I got the rest of my work cut out for me?
Ho, ho! One potato, two potato, three potato, four!
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I got over to Angelo’s Ebb Tide before Ruby.
The dining room in back was filled with generally the same types who were inconvenienced the other night when Celia Furman took it in the neck and upset everybody’s happy hour by being dead on her barstool. The crowd around the bar looked much the same as then, too—mostly the types that annoy Angelo so much. Which is maybe why he took the dim view of my good suit.
“Who went and died, Hock?”
“That is all too painfully obvious if you read the newspapers. What I want to know is, who went and killed everybody?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s awful good to see you,” Angelo said, rolling his eyes in disgust at the rest of the crowd. “How about the usual? The first round’s on me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just have a red, before she gets here.”
“Oh, so that’s what’s got you dressed to the nines tonight—a she, is it?”
“I forgot. You haven’t met Ruby yet.”
“Ruby’s her name, is it?”
“You’ll be seeing a lot of her.”
“What, you’re getting married again, Hock?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And did I say anything against it? I happen to believe marriage is a fine institution. After all, it’s a friendship recognized by the police.”
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