Fat Ollie's Book

by Ed McBain

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” he amended.

  “I’m sure there won’t be any problem, sir,” Eileen said.

  Byrnes noted the “sir.” They had worked together before, when Eileen had been loaned to him as an undercover decoy, and back then it had been “Pete.” Now it was “sir,” which meant he’d got off on the wrong foot with her, something he didn’t particularly wish. In apology, he said, “You’re the first woman I’ve had on my squad, Eileen.”

  “I know that, sir.”

  “Make it Pete, can you?”

  “Pete,” she said, and nodded.

  “You may find it quiet around here,” he said. “After Hostage Negotiating.”

  “In this city, nothing’s quiet,” she said.

  As a matter of fact, hostage-taking had cooled down a bit in recent years. Oh sure, you had the occasional nut who shot his wife and two of his kids and was holding the third kid at gun point in a ratty apartment someplace in Majesta while the cops promised him an airplane to Peru and three dozen Hershey bars, but for the most part the bad guys had bigger things on their minds. You didn’t—in fact, couldn’t—send a negotiator to talk to some fanatic who had taken over an airliner. Maybe the Eight-Seven would seem a little tame after standing face to face with a hostage-taker holding an AK-47 on his grandma, but maybe Eileen needed a rest in the country. Besides, from the inter-departmental jive she’d heard, the boys up here had recently been involved in a very big case involving the Treasury Department, the CIA, and God knew what else.

  Byrnes was thinking he should tell her he’d try his best not to partner her with Kling—but that sounded apologetic. He was thinking he’d tell her that very often the working relationship between two detectives made the difference between life or death—but that sounded corny.

  “Eileen,” he said simply, “we’re a tight-knit family here. Welcome to it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “Pete.”

  Which was when a knock sounded on the lieutenant’s door.

  “Come,” Byrnes said.

  The door opened—and speak of the devil.

  AT TWENTY MINUTES to nine that Wednesday morning—some fifteen minutes after he’d stepped into the lieutenant’s office to encounter a redheaded ghost—Bert Kling was at the wheel of an unmarked police sedan driving himself and Carella uptown to the Eight-Eight.

  “I have to tell you the truth,” he said, “my heart stopped.”

  Carella said nothing. He had called the lieutenant the night before, and told him about Ollie Weeks’s offer of a fifty-fifty bust, if ever there was one. He had told the lieutenant that you had to grab this city by the balls before it grabbed you first. He had told him that opportunity knocks but once, and it wasn’t every cop in the world who got invited to talk on Larry King.

  “Oliver Wendell Weeks has spoken,” he’d said.

  Byrnes had responded, “Let’s go for it.”

  So here he was on the way uptown again, listening to Kling tell him all about how he’d felt upon seeing, after all this time, the woman who had once been the love of his life.

  It had begun raining.

  The Eight-Seven had investigated a case one March where it had rained almost constantly. They would later refer to it as “The Rain Case,” even though it had involved finding a severed hand in an airline bag. In this city, rain could actually be pleasant sometimes. Not this morning. The rain was driving and incessant, falling from the sky in buckets—to coin a phrase—cascading onto the windshield where the wipers worked in vain to maintain some semblance of visibility.

  “I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot,” Kling said. “But the Loot was sitting right there, and besides I didn’t want to give her the idea there might be anything there anymore.”

  “So what did you say?” Carella asked.

  “Well, Pete told me she’d be working with us from now on, so I said, ‘Glad to have you aboard,’ or something stupid like that, and we shook hands. It felt strange shaking hands. I mean…we were together a long time, you know, we were a couple. And now we were just shaking hands. Like strangers. That’s when I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot. While we were shaking hands.”

  “We can park behind the station,” Carella said, “go in the back way.”

  Kling leaned over the wheel, squinting through the windshield to locate the driveway, and then swung the car into the lot. He parked in a space as close to the building as he could find, but they both almost drowned before they’d stepped a foot out of the car to begin a mad dash to the rear door of the station house.

  All of these old precincts had the same layout. They could just as easily have been entering the Eight-Seven as the Eight-Eight. They came into a long corridor illuminated by a naked light bulb. No one inside the door, it occurred to Carella that some lunatic with a bomb could just march in. He made a mental note to mention this to Byrnes when they got back home. Down the corridor, past an old defunct coal-burning furnace, up a flight of wooden steps to a door that opened onto the first-floor muster room. Same muster desk as the Eight-Seven’s, different sergeant behind it. He either recognized Carella and Kling, or else didn’t give a damn that they might be desperate terrorists.

  Mobile radio rack to the left of them, rack with vests to the right. Up the iron-runged stairs to the second floor, past a men’s room, and a ladies’ room, and then through a gate in a slatted wooden railing identical to the one back home, and there you were, face to face with His Royal Girth.

  “You’re late,” Ollie said, grinning.

  It was 9:01 A.M.

  Here, too, were the familiar sounds and smells. The ringing telephones, the aroma of coffee brewing on a hot plate, the stale odor—especially on a rainy day—of a room that had seen too many days and nights of use and abuse, and there, yes, the faintest trace of a scent only cops could identify as coming from the black ink on the fingerprint table across the room. One of the windows across the room was open just a crack. There was even an unaccustomed whiff of fresh air. All so very familiar. Especially if you watched television.

  “We found the bag,” Ollie said.

  Kling wondered what bag.

  For a moment, Carella wondered the same thing.

  “Oh, the bag,” he said, remembering.

  Ollie rose from his swivel chair like a whale off the coast of Mexico. He waddled across the room to where one of those small black airline bags on wheels rested near the water cooler. Yanking out the handle, he wheeled the bag over to his desk, hoisted it onto its top and—like a magician about to pull a rabbit from a top hat—unzipped the bag, and threw back the flap.

  “This is what a city councilman packs for an overnight trip,” he said, and opened his hands wide. “Found it sitting on the stage, near the rear wall.”

  The clothing in the bag was stuffed into it like laundry—which is what it undoubtedly was. These were the clothes Henderson had worn during his two-night stay in the state’s capital. Packed in the bag were a pair of men’s undershorts, two pairs of dark blue socks, a blue, long-sleeved, button-down shirt, a similar white shirt, a blue tropical weight suit, a blue-and-green-striped silk tie, a pair of black shoes, a toilet kit, and an electric razor.

  “He was wearing jeans, loafers, and a faggoty pink sweater when he got killed,” Ollie said. “Probably wore them home on the plane.”

  “Tells us nothing,” Kling said.

  Ollie looked at him.

  Carella braced himself for whatever was coming. With Ollie, you never knew. But nothing came. Ollie merely sighed heavily. The sigh could have meant “How come I always get stuck with stupid rookies?” (which Kling certainly wasn’t) or alternatively, “How come it’s raining on a day when we have so much to do?”

  “How much time can you guys give me today?” he asked.

  “The Loot says we’re at your disposal.”

  “Really? Who’s gonna take care of the old lady in the bathtub?” Ollie asked, as if he gave a damn who’d stabb
ed her in the eye. Carella recognized the question as rhetorical. Kling didn’t know what they were talking about. “Here’s what I’d like to do today,” Ollie said, and began ticking the points off on his left hand, starting with the pinky. “One, I’ll go chase down this guy who was on the follow spot when Henderson caught it Monday morning, nail down what he saw, what he heard, and so on. Nobody leaves alive. Next,” ticking it off on his ring finger, “I want you guys to talk to the Reverend Gabriel Foster about a little fracas him and Henderson got into just a week or so ago.”

  “Why us?” Carella asked.

  “Let’s say the rev and me don’t get along too well, ah yes.”

  “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “What kind of fracas?” Kling asked.

  “Name calling, fists flying, like that.”

  “Where was this?”

  “A Town Hall debate. Hizzoner was there, too, that shmuck.”

  “You don’t really think Foster had anything to do with Henderson’s murder, do you?” Carella said.

  “I think where there’s a nigger in the woodpile, you smoke him out,” Ollie said.

  Kling looked at him.

  “Something?” Ollie said.

  “I don’t like that expression.”

  “Well, gee, shove it up your ass,” Ollie said.

  Carella stepped in at once. “Where do we see you later?”

  “You mean when shall we three meet again?” Ollie said. “Ah yes. How about right here, back at the ranch, let’s say three o’clock.” He looked Kling in the eye and said, “I hope you know Henderson was for stiffening drug laws.”

  “So?”

  “So some people in the so-called black community might’ve thought he was trying to send their so-called brothers to jail.”

  “So?”

  “Targeting persons of color, they might have thought,” Ollie said.

  “What some people up here call profiling. You ought to keep that in mind when you’re talking to him.”

  “Thanks, we’ll keep it in mind,” Kling said.

  “What I’m suggesting is Foster’s a well-known Negro agitator and rabble rouser. Maybe he got himself all agitated and aroused Monday morning.”

  “Or maybe not,” Carella said.

  “Or maybe not,” Ollie agreed. “It’s a free country, and nobody’s hassling the man.”

  “Except us,” Kling said.

  “Asking pertinent questions ain’t hassling. Unless you’re a Negro, of course, and then everybody in the whole fucking world is hassling you. Foster’s been around the block once or twice, so watch your ass, he’s slippery as a wet condom. Then again, they all are. This is where the big bad city begins, Sonny Boy, right here in the Eight-Eight, the home of the jig and the land of the spic.”

  “One more time, Ollie,” Kling said.

  “What the fuck’s with you?” Ollie said, genuinely puzzled.

  “See you at three,” Carella said, and took Kling’s elbow and steered him out of the squadroom.

  Behind them, Ollie called, “You new in the job, or what?”

  IT OCCURRED TO CARELLA that it had been raining the last time he’d visited the Reverend Gabriel Foster here at the First Baptist Church. This time he took an umbrella from the car. In this city, you never saw a uniformed cop carrying an umbrella and you hardly ever saw a detective carrying one, either. That was because law enforcement officers could walk between the drops. Walking between the drops now, Carella hunched with Kling under the large black umbrella, and they splashed their way together to the front doors of the church.

  The First Bap was housed in a white clapboard structure wedged between a pair of six-story tenements whose red-brick facades had been recently sandblasted. There were sections of Diamondback that long ago had been sucked into the quagmire of hopeless poverty, where any thoughts of gentrification were mere pipe dreams. But St. Sebastian Avenue, here in the Double-Eight between Seventeenth and Twenty-first, was the hub of a thriving mini-community not unlike a self-contained small town. Along this stretch of avenue, you could find good restaurants, markets brimming with prime cuts of meat and fresh produce, clothing stores selling designer labels, repair shops for shoes, bicycles, or umbrellas, a new movie complex with six screens, even a fitness center.

  Carella rang the doorbell.

  The middle of the three doors opened.

  A slight black man wearing a dark suit and glasses peered out at them.

  “Come in out of the rain,” he said.

  Inside, rain battered the roof of the church, and only the palest light trickled through stained-glass windows. The pews echoed themselves row upon row, silent and empty. Carella closed the umbrella.

  “You’re policemen, aren’t you?” the man said.

  “Detective Carella,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember. Did you want to see the Reverend?”

  “If he’s here.”

  “I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you. I’m Deacon Ainsworth,” he said, and offered his hand.

  Both detectives shook hands with him.

  “Come with me,” he said, and led them down a side aisle to a door to the right of the altar. The door opened onto a narrow passageway lined with windows on the street side. They walked past the windows to another door at the far end. Ainsworth knocked. A voice within said, “Yes, come in.” Ainsworth opened the door.

  According to police records, the Reverend Gabriel Foster’s birth name was Gabriel Foster Jones. He’d changed it to Rhino Jones when he enjoyed a brief career as a heavyweight boxer, and then settled on Gabriel Foster when he began preaching. Foster considered himself a civil rights activist. The police considered him a rabble rouser, an opportunistic self-promoter, and a race racketeer. His church, in fact, was listed in the files as a “sensitive location,” departmental code for anyplace where the uninvited presence of the police might cause a race riot.

  Six feet, two inches tall, with the wide shoulders and broad chest of the heavyweight fighter he once had been, his eyebrows still ridged with scar tissue, Foster at the age of forty-nine and fast approaching fifty still looked as if he could knock your average contender on his ass in thirty seconds flat. He extended his right hand the moment the detectives entered the rectory. Grinning, he said, “Detective Carella! Nice to see you again.”

  The men shook hands. Carella was mindful of the fact that the last time he was here, Foster hadn’t been at all happy to see him.

  “This is Detective Kling,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kling said.

  “I know why you’re here,” Foster said. “You’re shaking the tree, am I right?”

  “We’re here because the last time you and Henderson debated, it ended in a fist fight,” Carella said.

  “Well, that’s not quite true,” Foster said.

  “It’s our understanding of what happened.”

  “Oh, we came to blows, all right, that part of it is most certainly true,” Foster said, grinning. “It’s the ‘debate’ part I would challenge. I wouldn’t exactly call his diatribe a debate.”

  Kling was trying to decide whether he liked the man or not. He had become overly sensitive in his dealings with black people ever since he’d begun living with a black woman. What he tried to do was see all black people through Sharyn’s eyes. In that way, all the color bullshit disappeared. The first thing he’d learned from her was that she despised the label “African-American.” The second thing he’d learned was that she liked to kiss with her eyes open. Sharyn Cooke was a medical doctor and a Deputy Chief in the Police Department, but Kling never saluted her.

  He guessed he liked the mischievous gleam in Foster’s eyes. He knew the man was a troublemaker, but sometimes troublemakers were good if they raked up the right kind of trouble. He was wondering how Lester Henderson had managed to survive a fist fight with the man who’d once been Rhino Jones. Henderson’s pictures in this morning’s paper showed hi
m as a slight man with narrow shoulders and the sort of haircut every politician on television sported, a nonpartisan trim that Kling personally called “The Trent Lott Cut.” Weren’t the Reverend Foster’s hamlike fists registered as deadly weapons? Or had he pulled his punches? And when, exactly, had that boxing match taken place, anyway?

  Reading his mind, Carella said, “Tell us about that fight, Reverend Foster.”

  “Most people call me Gabe,” Foster said. “It was hardly what I’d call a fight, either. A fight is where two people exchange punches with the idea of knocking somebody unconscious. That is what a fight is all about. Or even killing the other person—which I understand might be a sensitive subject at the moment, considering what happened to that S.O.B.” Foster grinned again. “A week ago Sunday, Lester threw a punch at me, which I sidestepped, and I shoved out at him, which caused him to fall on his ass, and that was the end of that. Photo op for all the cameras in town, but no decision.”

  “Why’d he punch you, Gabe?” Kling asked.

  “He did not punch me, per se, he tried to punch me. I saw it coming all the way from North Dakota, and was out of the way before it was even a thought.”

  “Why’d he try to punch you?” Kling asked.

  “Are you the brother dating Sharyn Cooke?” Foster said.

  “Brother” was not a word Kling might have used. Neither was “dating.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” he asked.

  “Just wondered. I used to know Sharyn’s mother. Cleaning lady up here in Diamondback. She helped around the church every now and then. When I was just starting out.”

  “Why’d Henderson try to punch you?” Kling asked. Third time around. Maybe he’d get lucky.