Fat Ollie's Book: A Novel of the 87th Precinct

by Ed McBain

  “Kingston Station is six blocks wide and a mile long,” Ollie said. “That’s a lot of territory to get lost in.”

  “It’s also Jamaican,” Walsh said.

  “So?”

  “Your man’s Puerto Rican. He should stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “I’ve been looking for the little fuck the past week,” Ollie said. “So far he ain’t sticking out so good.”

  “What’s your book called?” Walsh asked.

  “Fuck you,” Ollie said.

  “Nice title,” Walsh said, and threw a finger at him and walked away from the car.

  • • •

  THE TRUE AND PROPER NAMEof the neighborhood now called Kingston Station was Westfield Station. Perhaps that was because when railroad tracks still ran along that side of the city, the station stop there was called Westfield. It was not until an overwhelmingly large number of Irish immigrants settled in Westfield Station that the neighborhood was familiarly dubbed Dublin Town. Russian Jews started pouring in at the turn of the century, and the place was popularly renamed Little Kiev. Upward mobility sent the Jews to the suburbs, ceding the area to Italians moving out of ghettos downtown. The area was still called Little Kiev, but the streets now resonated to cries of“Buon giorno” and“Ba fahn gool!” But not for long.

  Prosperity led to migration. The Italians, too, followed the trail to the suburbs. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Puerto Ricans came next, and finally the Jamaicans. So many Jamaicans, in fact, that first the rest of the whitebread city, and then the residents themselves, began calling the area Kingston Station. An enterprising mayor, gunning for the Jamaican vote, even suggested that the name be legally changed to what everyone was calling it, anyway. Nobody but the Jamaicans liked that idea. In everyday conversation, then, Westfield Station was Kingston Station. But the name on the maps remained what it had been back in 1878, when the railroad opened its route along the river.

  Everybody in Kingston Station—

  Well, everybody along James Street, anyway.

  —had heard of the transvestite hooker who called himself Emmy, but nobody knew where the hell he was. Ollie had been a detective for a very long time. He knew the word had gone out. Somehow, Emilio Herrera had learned that the law was looking for him.

  So where the hell was he?

  • • •

  SHANAHAN’S BARat midnight was full of policemen who’d just come off duty. This made Emilio and Aine somewhat uncomfortable. But they were here to learn if this was, in fact, the bar Olivia Wesley Watts had mentioned in her report to the Commissioner, and it certainly looked as if it might be.

  Emilio was convinced that the woman they’d seen coming out of the basement on Culver Av was indeed Livvie, who had somehow escaped her captors. Aine thought this was a very far-fetched notion.

  “She fits the description exactly,” Emilio said, and quoted from the report, which by now he knew by heart because he’d read and reread it so many times, searching for clues. “‘I am a female police detective, twenty-nine years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing one hundred and twenty-three pounds, which is slender.’”

  “I weigh a hundred and six,” Aine said. “That’sslender.”

  “That’sskinny,” Emilio said, and went on quoting from the report. “‘My hair is a sort of reddish brown, what my mother used to call auburn…’”

  “My hair is red, too.”

  “Your hair is not reddish brown.”

  “But it’s red.”

  “It’s carrot colored.”

  “That’s still red,” Aine insisted.

  “‘I wear it cut to just above the shoulders,’” Emilio quoted. “‘What my mother used to call a shag cut.’”

  “I wear my hair short, too,” Aine said.

  “And shaggy,” he agreed. “‘My eyes are green…’”

  “So are mine.”

  “‘I look very Irish…’”

  “So do I.”

  “Aine, what is yourpoint? ” Emilio asked, truly irritated now.

  “My point is, do you thinkI’m Olivia Watts-her-name?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So why do you think some Irish babe you ran into on the street is her?”

  “Because she was coming out of the verybuilding! ” Emilio said. “Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence!”

  “The world is full of coincidence,” Aine said wisely.

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Emilio said. “You believe in coincidence, then you don’t believe in God. It’s God makes things happen, not coincidence.”

  “Oh okay. Then it was God made me a junkie and a whore, right?”

  Emilio looked at her.

  “Whatare you?” he asked. “Some kind of atheist?”

  “That’s what I am, yes,” Aine said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I was twelve years old and a priest felt me up in the rectory.”

  “That never happened.”

  “Oh no?”

  “And anyway, you can’t blame God for some horny priest.”

  “Whatdo I blame him for? All these fucking lunatics fighting wars in his name? Killing each other in his name? I don’t know any atheists who kill people in God’s name. Not a single one. I don’t believe in a God who allows such things to happen. I believe in coincidence, is what makes things happen.”

  Which was when Francisco Palacios walked in and took a stool beside them at the bar.

  BECAUSE THE GAUCHOrecognized Emilio as a fellow Puerto Rican, and because he had an eye for the women, especially if they seemed not to be wearing either panties or a bra, he struck up a conversation with the young couple, directing his conversation at first directly to Emilio, entirely in Spanish, because he didn’t want the young Irish girl, was what she looked like, to think he was coming on to her, even though he was. This annoyed Aine, so she said, “Are you guys gonna talk Spanish all night? Because if you are, I’ve got better things to do.”

  The Gaucho leaned over the bar and began chatting with Aine about the latest movies she’d seen and her favorite color and did she like to walk hatless in spring rain, all the stuff he thought a woman liked to hear. Aine was in fact flattered by his attention. She was well aware of the adage that held if you wanted to succeed with a lady, you treated her like a whore, and vice versa. She knew he was treating her like a lady, which meant he suspected she was a whore, but that was okay with her. It was the thought that counted.

  On the other hand, The Gaucho had no idea she was a working girl. In his eyes, she looked like a well-scrubbed Irish girl from one of the suburbs, albeit one of these anachronistic hippie types who ran around without underwear. There was something sharp and snippy about her, qualities he liked in a woman. Qualities he had found in Eileen Burke, who did not, alas, seem too terribly interested in him. He looked at his watch. The detectives were now ten minutes late.

  “Listen,” he said, “I know you’re here with your boyfriend and all…”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Aine said.

  “Oh, well good,” The Gaucho said. “I have an appointment here—in fact they’re late—but it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to discuss our business, and then I thought maybe you’d like to go for a drink someplace quieter than this, what do you think?”

  Aine looked him dead in the eye.

  Green eyes clashing with brown eyes, sparks flying.

  “Sure,” she said, and smiled like an Irish shillelagh, whatever that was.

  As coincidence would have it, Eileen Burke walked in just then.

  EMILIO SHREWDLY CALCULATEDthat the other guy who came in some five minutes later was either a civilian like Palacios or a detective like Livvie. He was absolutely positive now that the girl with the reddish-brown hair was Olivia Wesley Watts.

  All three of them had moved to a table over by the phone booths. From where he was still sitting at the bar with Aine, who had her legs crossed and who was nursing a very sugary non-alcoholic beverag
e, Emilio could not hear a word of their conversation. This was unfortunate because he was sure they were discussing the blood diamonds hidden in the basement from which Livvie had escaped earlier today.

  They were instead discussing cocaine.

  So were the three men in the living room of a tenement flat half a mile uptown.

  SUZIE Q. CURTISwas never permitted to sit in on any of these brainstorming sessions between her mastermind husband and his two rocket-scientist associates. Her job was to keep them supplied with food, like the women in theGodfather movies. Although to see those movies, you sometimes got the feeling the gangsters in them were as interested in cooking spaghetti with clams, or sausage with peppers, as they were in killing people. Just nice homey fellows who if you looked at them cross-eyed, they would slit your throat.

  Her husband and his cronies were talking about killing some people tomorrow night.

  Listening from the kitchen, where Suzie was making tuna fish sandwiches with slices of tomato on them, she could hear their conversation clear as a bell.

  “We go in shootin,” her husband was saying. “Never give them a chance to frisk us.”

  “Cause then we’d be at a disadvantage,” Constantine said. “If we let them frisk us.”

  She could just imagine him twitching and grinning.

  “Exactly,” her husband said. “We know she’ll be there with the coke, she’d be stupid not to bring the coke when we went to all this trouble setting this up. We mow everybody down, grab the coke, and split.”

  “She’ll have goons with her,” Lonnie said.

  “How many? Two, three? Even half a dozen? We got the element of surprise on our side.”

  “That’s right,” Constantine said. “Nobody’s gonna expect us to come in shootin.”

  “Exactly!” Harry said, and laughed. “Who’d think we could be that stupid?”

  Me, Suzie thought, and sliced another tomato.

  HE HAD TAKEN HERinto the back room of his shop, where there were all sorts of sex toys. She had seen all of them before, of course—there was nothing she hadn’t seen or done—but she looked at them all agog and amazed like an Irish virgin, and pretended to be shocked when he asked her to put on a leather merry widow and thigh-high leather boots, so where’s the whip, honey? she was thinking. It turned out he wasn’t into the dominatrix scene, after all; it was just the opposite. He merely wanted to see what a nice Catholic girl like Aine would look like all dressed up like a whore.

  She figured she wouldn’t break his heart just yet.

  She’d go along with it, let him believe she was Cathleen the Colleen for a little while longer. Then she’d tell him she was a working girl, bro, and ask him for a deuce. Or whatever the traffic would bear.

  Instead, he started talking about himself.

  She kind of found this interesting about him.

  The way he opened up to her.

  He told her he was a spy named The Gaucho.

  Shutup, she said, aspy?

  Verdad,he said. Or Cowboy, I’m sometimes called.

  Boy, she said, a spy.

  For the Police Department, he said.

  So what it was, he was a snitch, was what it was.

  She didn’t say this to his face.

  She let him talk.

  And, of course, like all men, he wanted to show her how important he was.

  So he told her he had been instrumental in uncovering valuable information that would lead the police to a big drug bust tomorrow night at midnight in the basement of an apartment building on Culver Avenue.

  3211 Culver, she thought, but did not say.

  Midnight, she thought.

  That’s when it’s going down.

  Midnight tomorrow.

  A hun’ fifty keys of coke will change hands, he told her.

  Three hundred thousand dollars will change hands, he told her.

  So she didn’t ask him for any money, after all.

  He had given her enough already.

  And besides, it was kind of nice to make love instead of to be fucked all the time.

  I FOUND THE LETTERSfrom her the night before.

  I knew right then I had to kill him.

  We kept a gun in the house. I don’t know where Lester bought it. I think in a pawnshop someplace downtown, near his office. He bought it when the first of our children was born. Lyle. When he was born. We’d heard there’d been a kidnapping in Smoke Rise, many years ago, at the King estate, on the water. Douglas King. So we figured we needed a gun. I don’t know whether Lester registered the gun or not. Frankly, I didn’t care. Lester was a councilman, he often took liberties. I mean, he parked in clearly marked No Parking zones, he went through red lights when he’d had a little too much to drink, he was a great one for breaking the rules. He felt he was privileged, do you know? A city councilman. Only this time, he broke one rule too many.

  I know I’m not a beautiful woman, but I’ve always been a good wife. To think of him with a nineteen-year-old girl—how could he? I had to kill him. That was all I knew. Never mind confrontation, never mind asking for explanations, never mind forgiving him, I wanted him dead, I wanted to kill him. I knew he’d be going directly to King Memorial after his trip upstate. I knew what time he’d be getting there. I knew all this, he’d told me all this on the phone. The only thing he hadn’t told me was that a young girl was in bed with him.

  The gun was in the safe in his study. Same place I found the letters. The desk in his study. I wasn’t looking for the letters, I was looking for his appointment calendar. Because we were supposed to go to a dinner party that Sunday when he got home, and I had the time written in my calendar as six o’clock, which sounded early, so I wanted to check it against his calendar, to make sure. But I couldn’t find it anywhere on his desk, his calendar, so I started looking through the drawers, and that was when I found the letters, at the back of the middle drawer to the right of the kneehole, buried under a stack of papers.

  I wanted him dead.

  I read the letters, and I went directly to the wall safe, and opened it, and took out the gun, and loaded it. We kept it unloaded, because of the children. The box of cartridges was in the safe, with the gun. I loaded the gun, and then I went upstairs to dress.

  I dressed for expediency. Nothing else. I wasn’t thinking of any kind of disguise, I had no thought of getting away with it, I just didn’t give a damn. I merely wanted him dead. So I dressed for ease of movement. Baggy blue jeans I used when I was gardening, a T-shirt, white socks and Reeboks, my hair up under Lyle’s baseball cap so it wouldn’t fly all over my face, wouldn’t get in my eyes when it came time to shoot him. I put on a ski parka when I left the house. We used to ski a lot before the children were born. The gun was in the right hand pocket of the parka.

  I took a taxi up to the Hall. I walked right in, nobody there to stop me, you’d think after all this terrorist stuff there’d be people frisking me or something. But no. I walked right in with the gun in my pocket. I opened the door at the back of the auditorium, opened it just enough so I could look in. He was onstage with a lot of other people, Alan Pierce, Josh Coogan, some other people I didn’t know. I closed the door and came around the side of the auditorium, to where there were a lot of offices and a corridor running between them. I went down the corridor almost to the end of it, and then opened a door that led to the stage.

  My heart was beating very fast.

  I opened the door and found myself in this backstage area, the wings I guess you’d call them, looking out at the stage. It was very dark where I was standing. There was no one around. Everyone was onstage, calling directions and adjusting lights and what not. Alan told Lester to go off left and then walk toward the podium so they could make sure the follow spot was on him, something like that. I took the gun out of my pocket.

  Alan said Okay, start your cross, and Lester stepped out of the wings on the other side of the stage and began moving toward the center of the stage, this bright light on him, it was as if t
hey were illuminating him for me, so I could kill him, the son of a bitch.

  My hand was shaking.

  When he reached the podium, I shot him.

  I fired six times. I don’t think all of my shots got him. But I saw him falling, and I could see blood all over his pink sweater, so I figured I had got him good. Then everyone started screaming and yelling. I turned and ran.

  That was the first time I had even a notion of survival. Of getting away.

  Before then, I’d only wanted him dead.

  I could hear yelling behind me.

  I kept running.

  There was a corridor with anEXIT sign at the end of it. I was heading for the door under it, when someone came out of an office at the end of the hall, a woman, and I turned and started running in the opposite direction again, back toward the stage. But there were voices ahead of me now, coming off the stage, so I opened the nearest door and went in whatever it was, I didn’t know what it was, I was just trying to hide.

  The room was dark except for faint daylight coming through a narrow window at the far end. I could hear people running by outside, shouting. In the dim light, I saw urinals. I was in a men’s room. I ducked into one of the stalls just as someone cracked open the door. Anyone in here? a man’s voice yelled. I held my breath. The room was dark, the light from the window filtered. Where’s the fuckin light switch? the man asked himself. Silence. I heard him fumbling around on the wall. Then he asked Anyone in here? again, and muttered something, and closed the door, and was gone. I heard more running outside, voices passing by, fading. I waited.

  I didn’t know where to go. I wanted to cry. I had killed him, and now I wanted to cry. Not because he was dead, the son of a bitch. But because they would catch me and put me in prison forever. The children, I thought. I kept still in the dark, terrified that the man would come back and put on the light this time, and search the room, and find me, and take me away.

  I don’t know how long I waited there in the dark, in the stall. At last, I came out of the stall and stood still, listening in the dark, for several moments. Then I went to the window. It was open a crack, just some three or four inches. I opened it all the way. I was looking out onto what seemed to be an airshaft, the sky far above, a narrow paved passageway below. I climbed up and over the sill and dropped to my feet on the other side. The passageway ran behind the building for the entire width of it. I ran down it, enclosed by walls on either side of me, and saw another window on the far wall. This one was open just a little bit, too. I reached up, and opened it all the way. Then I hoisted myself up and climbed into what I realized was another men’s room, a smaller one this time, just two stalls, and a single urinal, and some sinks.