by Nocturne
“Cocksucker,” the preppie says.
And pulls the bag over her head again.
Steaming cardboard containers of coffee in their hands, the detectives climbed the six stories to the roof of Santiago’s building, opened the fire door, and stepped outside. The city almost caught them by surprise. They almost found it beautiful. They stood by the parapet, sipping their coffees, staring down at the lights spread below them like a nest of jewels. Darkness was fading fast. On the far side of the roof, they could hear the gentle cooing of Santiago’s pigeons. They walked over to the coop.
The perching pigeons were hunkered down inside their gray and white overcoats.
The floor of the coop was covered with feathers and shit. Santiago was nowhere in sight.
The time was 6:53.
In three minutes, Yolande would be dead.
The preppie whose cock was in her hand a minute ago now has her by the right wrist, and the one who was fucking her has hold of her left wrist, and now they all join in the fun, the three Richards, two of them keeping her pinned down, the third one making sure the bag is in place over her head and tight around her neck. She is going to die, she knows she is going to die. She knows that in a minute, in thirty seconds, in two seconds, she will run out of breath and …
“No, bitch.”
And yanks off the bag, and sticks his cock in her mouth again.
This is a game for them, she thinks. She hopes. Only a game. Put the bag on, take the bag off. They have read someplace that depriving a person of oxygen heightens the sexual pleasure. She hopes. But then why are they calling her cunt and bitch and cocksucker and shitface, why is one of them pushing …
“No!” she screams, but it is too late, he has already shoved it inside her, whatever it is, hurting her, tearing her, no, please, and now the plastic bag is on her head again, and she hears over the ringing in her ears black Richard from across the room mumbling, “Hey, man, whut’s …?” and she screams inside the bag, tries to scream inside the bag, and she hears black Richard yelling, “The fuck you doin?” and she thinks Help! and she screams “Help!” inside the bag, and this time she knows she is going to die, this time the pain below is so overwhelming, why is he doing this to her, twisting something jagged and sharp inside her, she is going to die, please, she wants to die, she can’t breathe, she can’t bear it a moment …
“No, cunt!” he shouts, and yanks the bag from her head.
The rush of oxygen is so sweet.
She feels something sticky and wet on her lips.
She thinks this will be the end of it. They will leave her alone now. She hurts too badly. She is too torn and ragged below, she knows she is hemorrhaging below. Please, she thinks. Just leave me alone now. Please. Enough.
“You guys crazy?”
Richard.
Good, she thinks. This is the end of it.
But the bag is over her head again.
And they are holding her down again.
They were back in the car maybe two or three minutes when they caught a 10-29 to proceed to 841 St. Sebastian Avenue. The dispatcher wouldn’t call this a homicide for sure because all she had was a dead body in the alleyway there and nobody yet knew what the cause of death was. Could’ve been a heart attack there in the alley. So she told them the blues had a corpse there, and mentioned that she had also notified Homicide just in case, which is how Monoghan and Monroe got into the act for the second time that night.
The time was a quarter past seven, the sun was just coming up, sort of. This wasn’t going to be any rosy-fingered dawn, that was for sure. This was just the end of another hard day’s night, the shift almost having run its course, except that now they did, as it turned out, have another homicide on their hands. The freezer bag over the girl’s head told them that.
The girl looked like a hooker, but nowadays it was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. You got Hollywood starlets showing up at the Academy Awards wearing dresses that made them look like streetwalkers, but you also got bona fide prosties standing on the corner looking like apple-cheeked college girls from Minnesota, so who was to say for sure?
“A hooker,” Monoghan said.
“For sure,” Monroe said.
“Prolly her pimp done her,” Monoghan suggested.
“That’s why her handbag’s gone.”
Which was keen deduction. Carella figured if he hung around long enough, he might learn something. He was wondering why, if this had been a pimp, the guy hadn’t simply stabbed her. Or shot her. Why get fancy? Why a freezer bag over her head? It was obvious that someone, pimp or whoever, had dragged her into the alley. She was lying on her back in a sticky pool of coagulating blood, but bloody smears led to the curb, where the track seemed to have begun. Had someone driven her here, and then dragged her to where she now lay beside a bank of garbage cans and stacks of black-bagged garbage?
“She might have been pregnant,” Monroe speculated. “All that blood.”
“Nowadays, people kill you so they can tear the baby out of your belly,” Monoghan said.
“It’s ancient times all over again,” Monroe said.
“There’s no civilization anymore,” Monoghan said.
“Fucking savages nowadays,” Monroe said, with more feeling than Carella had ever thought he’d possessed.
In the dim light of a cold gray dawn, the girl’s face under the plastic freezer bag was as white as the ice on the alley floor.
They had wrapped her in the sheet before carrying her down to black Richard’s car, and then had driven a mile uptown on St. Sab’s, where they’d dragged her into the alley still wrapped in it. But black Richard knew cops had ways of tracing sheets and shit, and he’d convinced the others to roll her out of it before they left her there by the garbage cans, rats big as cats running all over the alley, made him shiver all over again just to think of them.
Fuckin honkies wanted no part of him once they’d used his car to drop the bitch off, but he reminded them it wasn’t him had suffocated her, wasn’t him had torn her open, was three fuckin rich guys named Richard, from a school named Pierce Academy, which was stitched on the front of all they fuckin P parkas the fuckin football on the back, dig? So either they helped him clean up the car and the apartment and get rid of the bloody sheet, or whut he was gonna do, ole black Richard here, was run straight to the cop shop. They believed him. Maybe cause he also showed them a switchblade knife bigger than any of they dicks and tole them he was gonna circumscribe them real bad if they tried to split on him now.
Ended up they’d tidied up the apartment like four speed queens come to work from a cleaning service. Weren’t no car washes open this time of night, day, whatever the fuck, and Richard didn’t want to go to no garage, neither, blood all over the backseat that way, he never knew anybody could bleed that bad. He remembered a movie he’d seen one time, blood and shit all over a car from a shootin inside it, this wasn’t like that, but there was plenty blood, anyway, and he didn’t know any big-shot gangster he could call to come set it straight. All he knew was these honkies had better help him or they name was shit.
In movies and on television, blacks and whites were all pals and shit, that was all make-believe. In real life, you never saw blacks and whites together hardly at all. In that movie where the guy’s brains were spattered all over the car, this black guy and this white guy were two contract hitters tighter’n Dick’s hatband. But that was make-believe, callin each other “nigger” and all that, black guy callin the white guy “nigger,” white guy callin the nigger “nigger” right back, break his fuckin head any white man called Richard “nigger,” never mind that movie bullshit! Was a white man wrote that movie, the fuck he knew about black folk?
What was real, my friend, was equality never did come to pass here in this land of the free and home of the brave, wasn’t no black man ever trusted a white man and vice versa, never. Richard didn’t trust these three white bastards and they didn’t trust him, either, but they needed each other
right now cause a girl had been killed in his apartment and they were the ones killed her. The white guys, not him. But it was his apartment, don’t forget that. Cops had a way of never forgettin little black mishaps like that, fuckin cops.
So this was what you might call strange bedfellows here, which was what it actually was called in a book Richard read one time. Oh, he was literate, man, don’t kid your fuckin self. Read books, saw movies, even went to see a play downtown one time had all blacks in it about soldiers. His opinion blacks were the best actors in the world cause they knew what sufferin was all about. That movie with the brains all over the car, was the black guy shoulda got the Cademy Award, never mind the white guy.
So here they were, the four of them, three white guys didn’t know shit about anything, and one black guy teachin them all about survival here in the big bad city. Thing they didn’t know was that soon as they cleaned up his car and got rid of the sheet they’d wrapped the bitch in, he was gonna stick it to them good.
The girl’s name was Yolande Marie Marx. Her fingerprints told them that. She had a B-sheet not quite as long as her arm, but long enough for a kid who was only nineteen. Most of the arrests were for prostitution. But there were two for shoplifting and half a dozen for possession, all bullshit violations when she was underage that had got her off with a succession of slaps on the wrist from bleeding-heart judges. When she turned eighteen, she finally did three months at Hopeville, some name for a female correctional facility. She worked under the name Marie St. Claire, which alias was on the record. Her pimp’s name was there, too.
The shift had changed without them.
At fifteen minutes to eight, give or take, the eight-man team of detectives on the day shift had relieved six of the detectives on the morning shift, but not Carella and Hawes, who were still out in the field. They were there, instead of home in bed, because maybe they had something to go on in the murder of Yolande Marie Marx. Her death might never make newspaper headlines; she was not Svetlana Dyalovich. Even if they caught whoever had brutally slain her, her murder would never result in anything more than brief media mention. But they had the name of her pimp. And the man had a substantial record, including an arrest for a New Orleans murder some ten years ago, for which he had done time at Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary. He was now gracing this city with his presence; a policeman’s lot was not a happy one.
Especially not at eight in the morning, when Carella and Hawes knocked on Jamal Stone’s door and four bullets came crashing through the wood even before they announced themselves.
“Gun!” Hawes shouted, but Carella had already hit the deck, and Hawes came tumbling down immediately afterward. Both men lay side by side in the hallway outside the door now, breathing hard, sweating heavily despite the cold, heads close together, guns in their hands.
“Guy’s a mind reader,” Hawes whispered.
Carella was wondering when the next shots would come.
Hawes was wondering the same thing.
The door opened, surprising them.
They almost shot him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jamal asked.
What it was—or so he explained in the second-floor interrogation room up at the old Eight-Seven—he was expecting someone else, was what it was. Instead, he got two policemen breaking down the door. Crack of dawn. Two cops.
“You always shoot at people who knock on your door?” Hawes asked.
“Only when I expect them to shoot me,” Jamal said.
This was now beginning to get interesting. In fact, Bert Kling was almost happy they’d asked him and Meyer to sit in on the interrogation. It was still early enough on the shift to enjoy a cup of coffee with colleagues who’d been out in the freezing cold all night long. But aside from the camaraderie, and the bonhomie, and the promise of some entertainment from a man who’d been around the block once or twice and who felt completely at home in a police station, the doubling-up was a way of bringing them up to speed on one of the two squeals Carella and Hawes had caught during the night.
There used to be a sign on the squadroom wall (before Detective Andy Parker tore it down in a fit of pique) that read: it’s your case! stick with it! The Dyalovich murder and the Marx murder did indeed belong to Carella and Hawes as the detectives who’d caught them. But they would not be on duty again until 11:45 tonight and meanwhile there were two long eight-hour shifts between now and then. In police work, things could become fast-breaking in the wink of an eye; briefing the oncoming team was a ritual these men observed more often than not.
Jamal figured the two new cops for the brains here. The ones asking the questions were the ones almost got themselves shot, so how smart could they be? But the big bald-headed guy—his ID tag read det/2nd gr meyer meyer, must’ve been a computer glitch—looked smart as could be. The tall blond guy with the appearance of a farm boy, det/3rd gr bert kling, was probably the one played Good Cop to the bald guy’s Bad Cop when they were working some cheap thief. Right now, though, both of them were as still as coiled snakes, watching, listening.
“Who were you expecting to shoot you?” Carella asked.
This was all vamping till ready. They didn’t actually care who wanted to shoot him, good riddance to bad rubbish, as Carella’s mother was fond of saying. All they really wanted to know was whether Jamal was the one who’d put that freezer bag over Yolande’s head. Toward that end, they would let him talk forever about all his real or imagined enemies out there, make him feel comfortable, ply him with cigarettes and coffee, wait for him to reveal through word or gesture that he already knew why he was here being questioned by a pair of detectives, which no one had yet told him, and which he hadn’t yet asked about, either. Which might or might not have meant something. With experienced felons, it was difficult to tell.
Jamal puffed on his cigarette.
Meyer and Kling watched him.
Their presence was a bit unsettling. He was beginning to wonder if they were cops from headquarters or something. What kind of thing was this, two cops from headquarters here observing? But he knew better than to ask why he was up here. Too easy to step into shit that way. So he puffed on his cigarette and sipped at his coffee and told them all about this Colombian crack dealer who thought he’d stole some shit from him, which he hadn’t, but who let the word out that he was looking for him and was going to kill him. So when he heard somebody banging on the door eight o’clock in the morning, the sun hardly up, he figured he’d better make the first move here because there might not be no second move. Which is why he’d pumped four through the door. Then, not hearing a sound out there, he figured he’d nailed whoever had done the knocking, and he opened the door expecting to find Manuel Diaz bleeding on the floor—
“That’s his name, Manuel Diaz, I just gave you something.”
As if they didn’t already know the names of all the dealers in most of the precincts up here.
“But instead it was you two guys, who I almost shot, by the way, before you yelled ‘Police.’ ” Jamal shrugged. “So here we are,” he said.
“Here we are,” Hawes agreed.
Jamal still knew better than to ask what this was all about. The big bald guy and the tall blond guy were both looking very stern now, as if he’d said something wrong a minute ago. He wondered what it could have been. Fuck em, he thought. I can wait this out as long as you can. He lit another cigarette. Meyer nodded. So did Kling. Jamal wondered why they were nodding. These two guys were making him very nervous. He felt relieved when Carella asked another question.
“Who was the girl with you?”
“Friend of mine,” Jamal said.
Carlyle Yancy was one of the two girls he ran. Her real name was Sarah Rowland, which he’d changed for her the minute he put her on the street. Jamal wasn’t about to discuss either her profession or his. “Friend of mine” covered a lot of territory.
“How old is she?” Hawes asked. This also covered a lot of territory. Cops always asked how old a girl was, figuring
you’d wet your pants if she was underage.
“Twenty,” Jamal said. “No cigar.”
“What’s she do?”
“What do you mean, what’s she do?”
“Is she a prostitute?”
“Hey, come on. What kind of question is that?”
“Well, Jamal, considering your record …”
So that’s how they’d got to him. But why? And calling a man by his first name was an old cop trick Jamal knew quite well, thank you.
“I haven’t been in that line of work for a long time,” he said.
Meyer raised an eyebrow. He was wondering how being a pimp qualified as work. So was Kling. And Carella. And Hawes. Jamal read their faces and figured them for a bunch of cynics.
“How about murder?” Carella asked. “Have you been in that line of work recently?”
“I paid my debt to society,” Jamal said with dignity.
“So we understand. Released last April, is that right?”
“That’s right. The slate is clean.”
Still with dignity.
“What have you been doing since?”
“Different kinds of work.”
“Different from pimping?” Hawes asked.
“Different from murder?” Carella asked.
“Just different jobs here and there.”
“Here and where?”
“Here in the city.”
“Lucky us,” Hawes said.
“What kind of different jobs?” Carella asked.
They were harassing him now. Trying to put him on edge. He knew it and they knew it. He remained unruffled. He’d been involved with cops ever since he was twelve. Wasn’t a cop in the world could rattle him now.
