Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “Drove a taxi, drove a delivery truck, worked as a waiter,” he said. “Odd jobs like that.”

  “By the way,” Hawes said, “we have another B-sheet here,” and turned it so Jamal could see the name typed across the top of it. marx, yolande marie, and below that, in parentheses, alias marie st. claire.

  “Know her?” Carella asked.

  If they had her B-sheet, they knew he was pimping for her. Was she in some kind of trouble again? The last time she’d shoplifted, he told her he’d break both her legs she ever brought down heat again. Whatever this was, he figured it was time to play it straight.

  “I know her,” he said.

  “You’re her pimp, right?”

  “I know her.”

  “How about the pimp part?”

  Jamal nodded, shrugged, wagged his head, waggled his fingers, all intended to convey uncertainty, they guessed. They looked at him silently, waiting for elaboration. He was wondering what Yolande had done this time. Why had they punched up her B-sheet? He said nothing. Wait them out, he thought. Play the game.

  “When did you see her last?” Hawes asked.

  “Why?” Jamal said.

  “Can you tell us?”

  “Sure, I can tell you. But why?”

  “Just tell us, okay?”

  “I drove her down by the bridge around ten o’clock.”

  “Put her on the street at ten?”

  “Well … yeah.”

  “Which bridge?”

  “The Majesta Bridge.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “Little black skirt, fake-fur jacket, black stockings, red boots, red handbag.”

  “See her after that?”

  “No. Is she in jail?”

  The detectives looked at each other. As Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to a crossroads, take it.” They took it.

  “She’s dead,” Carella said, and tossed a photograph onto the desk. The photo had been taken in the alley on St. Sebastian Avenue. It was a black-and-white picture with the address of the crime scene camera-lettered in white at the bottom of the picture, the date and time in the right-hand corner. Jamal looked at the picture. So that was it. Dead hooker, you go to her pimp.

  “So?” Hawes said.

  “So, I’m sorry. She was a good kid. I liked her.”

  “Is that why you put her on the street in her underwear last night? Twelve fuckin degrees out there, you liked her, huh?”

  “Oh, did she freeze to death?” Jamal asked.

  “Don’t get smart,” Hawes warned.

  “Nobody twisted her arm,” Jamal said. “What was it? An overdose?”

  “You tell us.”

  “You think I did her? What for?”

  “Where were you around seven this morning?”

  “Home in bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, I was with my friend. You saw her. That’s who I was with.”

  “Carlyle Yancy, is that her name?”

  “That’s what she told you, isn’t it?”

  “Is that her real name?”

  “She’s never been busted, forget it.”

  “What’s her real name?”

  “Sarah Rowland.”

  “We’ll check, you know.”

  “Check. She’s clean.”

  “From what time to what time?” Carella asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was she with you.”

  “She got home around three-thirty. I was with her from then till you came busting down my door. We were waiting for Yolande, in fact.”

  “We’ll check that, too, you know.”

  “She’ll tell you.”

  Meyer turned to Carella.

  “You looking for a bullshit gun bust?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for a murderer,” Carella said.

  “Then go home, there’s nothing but a 265.01 here.”

  He turned to Jamal.

  “You, too,” he said. “We’ll keep the piece, thanks.”

  6

  When you pull the boneyard shift, you quit work at eight, nine in the morning, sometimes later if a corpse turns up in your soup. Say you’re lucky and you get home at nine, nine-thirty, depending on rush-hour traffic. You kiss the wife and kiddies, have a glass of milk and a piece of toast, and then tumble into bed by ten, ten-thirty. After a few days, when you’ve adjusted to the day-for-night schedule, you can actually sleep through a full eight hours and wake up feeling refreshed. This would put you on your feet again at six, six-thirty in the evening. That’s when you have your lunch or dinner or whatever you might choose to call it at that hour. You’re then free till around eleven p.m. At that time of night, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour, forty-five minutes to get to the precinct.

  While you’re asleep or spending some time with your family or friends, the precinct is awake and bustling. A police station is in operation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. That accounts for its worn and shoddy apple-green look. Criminals never rest; neither does a police station. So while Carella and Hawes slept, the day shift worked from 7:45 in the morning to 3:45 in the afternoon, when the night shift took over. And while Carella was having dinner with Teddy and the twins, and Hawes was making love with Annie Rawles, the night shift learned some things and investigated some things but only some of these had to do with their two homicide cases.

  During the hours of nine-fifteen that Sunday morning, when Carella and Hawes left the squadroom, and eleven forty-five that night, when they reported back to work again, things were happening out there.

  They would learn about some of these things later.

  Some of these things, they would never learn about.

  At nine-thirty that Sunday morning, two of the Richards were in the empty lot across the street from the abandoned produce market, waiting for the other two Richards to come back with fresh pails of water. They had done a good job of cleaning the trunk of the black Richard’s car, but now they wanted to make sure there weren’t any bloodstains anyplace else. The other two had gone for fresh water and fresh rags at a car wash some three blocks away, under the expressway. This part of Riverhead was virtually forlorn at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning. Hardly a car passed by on the overhead expressway. Empty window frames with broken shards of glass in them stared like eyeless sockets from abandoned buildings. The sun was shining brightly now, but there was a feel of snow in the air. Richard the Lion-Hearted knew when snow was coming. It was a sense he’d developed as a kid. He hoped snow wouldn’t screw up what he had in mind. He was telling Richard the Second how he saw this thing.

  “The girl dying was an accident,” he said. “We were merely playing a game.”

  “Merely,” Richard the Second said.

  “She should’ve let us know if she was having difficulty breathing.”

  “That would’ve been the sensible thing to do.”

  “But she didn’t. So how were we to know?”

  “We couldn’t have known.”

  “In a sense, it was her own fault.”

  “Did you come?” Richard the Second asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard.”

  “Three hundred bucks, it would’ve been nice to come.”

  “I think he took the money, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Richard. Took her money and the jumbos he’d given her earlier. Nine hundred bucks and ten jumbos. You didn’t see her bag anywhere around, did you? When we carried her down to the car?”

  “No, I didn’t, come to think of it.”

  “I’m sure he stole her bag with the money and the jumbos in it. Which is how we’re going to tie him to this thing.”

  “Tie him to what thing?”

  “The girl’s accident. Yvonne. Whatever her name was.”

  “Claire, I think her name was. I wish I could’ve come before she passed out.”

  “Well, that
was her fault.”

  “Even so.”

  “We have to find that bag, Richard.”

  “Which bag is that?”

  “It’s not in the car, I looked. It has to be in his apartment.”

  “Which bag, Richard?”

  “The one with the money and the jumbos in it. Once we find it, we can link him to the accident.”

  “How?”

  “If he stole the bag, his fingerprints’ll be on it.”

  “He might’ve wiped them off.”

  “They only do that in the movies. Besides, he wouldn’t have had time. We were all of us together, don’t you remember? Wrapping her in the sheet, getting her downstairs into the trunk? He wouldn’t have had time.”

  “She was heavy.”

  “She was.”

  “She looked so small. But she was heavy.”

  “Deceptive, yes.”

  “I still don’t understand about the bag.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “How will it link him to the accident?”

  “Well, his prints are on it.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “The prints will link him to it.”

  “But if we go to the police with her bag …”

  “No, no, no, we can’t do that.”

  “Then what?”

  “We leave it alongside the body.”

  “You think it’s still there? She’s probably in the morgue by now, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not talking about her body, Richard.”

  Paul Blaney was trying to determine which had come first, the chicken or the egg. Had the white female corpse on his autopsy table suffocated to death, or had her death been caused by severe hemorrhaging from the genital area? He had already determined that there was a sizable amount of cocaine derivative in the girl’s bloodstream. The girl had not died of an overdose, that was certain, but the detectives nonetheless would want to know about the presence of the drug, which could mean that the murder was drug-related—so what else was new? He wasn’t confident that the detectives would care a whit whether she was so badly injured below that she had bled to death or whether the bag over her head had caused her to suffocate. But it was Blaney’s job to determine cause of death and to establish a postmortem interval.

  He was not paid to speculate. He was paid to examine the remains and to gather the facts that led to a scientific conclusion. Suffocation in his lexicon was described as “traumatic asphyxia resulting when obstructed air passages prevent the entrance of air into the lungs.” But if the girl had suffocated, then where were all the telltale signs? Where was the cyanosis of the face, the blue coloration he always found somewhat frightening, even after all these years of performing autopsies? Where were the small circular ecchymoses on the scalp, those tiny bruises indicative of strangulation, smothering, or choking? Where were the minute blood spots in the whites of the eyes? Lacking any of these certain indications, Blaney cut open the girl’s chest.

  What black Richard was thinking as he lugged the water back from the car wash was he would go to the police and tell them these four rich kids from a prep school in Massachusetts someplace, Connecticut, wherever, a school named Pierce Academy—stitched right there on the front of their parkas—these three rich white football players had come to him to see did he have any dope to sell, which of course he did, you all know I deal a little dope every now and then, who’s kidding who here? I’m not here to lie to you, gents, I’m here to help you.

  Cops lookin at him like Sure, the nigger’s here to help us. Started as a mere clocker in the hood, and now he’s dealing five, six bills a day, he’s here to help us. Get lost, nigger.

  Hey, no. I seen these boys do a murder.

  Ah?

  Ears perkin up now.

  “What’re you smiling at?” Richard the Third asked. Hulking along in his blue parka with the big white P on the back, little football right under the P, carrying two pails of water, same as black Richard himself. Both of them with clean rags from the car wash stuffed in they pockets. Shagging along under the expressway. If it was nighttime stead of mornin right now, they could both get killed, this neighborhood.

  “Whut I’m thinking,” Richard said, “is soon as we finish here, you go your way, I go mine.”

  And never the twain shall meet, he thought.

  “It was a shame what happened to the girl,” the other Richard said.

  “Mm.”

  “But it wasn’t our fault.”

  Sure as shit wasn’t my fault, Richard thought. You were the ones holdin her down, doin her with the bag. Which is why I’ll feel safe goin to the police. By then, my car be all spic-and-span, my apartment clean as a whistle, my bedsheets burned to ashes along with all the rags we used. Get that little bonfire started soon as we finish with the car. Watch it all go up in smoke. Then kiss the boys goodbye and go straight to the cops.

  “Still,” the other Richard said, “I feel sort of sorry for her.”

  Oh, man, you don’t know how sorry you gonna feel, Richard thought. Cause what I’m goan do is sell you to the police. I’m going to trade you ass for money, white boy, whatever the traffic will bear. Cause this is going to be a big bust, three rich white kids from a fancy prep school suffocating a white hooker? Oh, this is a dream bust, cops up here in the asshole of the universe would kill for a bust like this one, never mind just layin out three, four large from a slush fund they keep handy for hot information like this. Might be worth even five grand, information like this, three rich white kids? I can see the motherfuckin cops salivatin.

  Just got to keep clear of it, is all.

  Keep myself out of it.

  Make it plain I had nothin to do with it.

  I only seen them do it.

  Which, anyway, is the truth.

  “I wish you’d stop smiling that way,” Richard said. “You look like a hyena.”

  Oh yes, Richard thought.

  There was something that kept troubling Jamal about the picture the cops had shown him. Well, sure, Yolande being dead and all, that was very troubling. Laying on her back there in the alley, skirt hiked up over all that blood on the inside of her legs, plastic bag over her head, that was troubling. To see her that way. Beautiful young girl, dead that way. Man, you never knew.

  But there was something else troubling him about that picture and he didn’t realize what it was until he was back in the apartment again, telling Carlyle all about his encounter with The Law.

  “Thing they do,” he said, “they tries to wait me out, like I don’t know they got some reason to have me up the precinc, like I’m some dumb nigger fum Alabama visitin Granma the big city. They finey gets aroun to Yolande …”

  “Are you telling me she’s dead?” Carlyle asked.

  Sitting at the kitchen table eating one of the croissants he’d brought back from the All Right Bakery on the Stem. Sipping coffee the color of her skin. Café au lait was what you could call Carlyle Yancy, who was Sarah Rowland when he first met her fresh and sassy at nineteen. Twenty years old now, a firecracker pussy and a dedicated crack addict, thank you, Jamal Stone.

  “Yes, she is dead,” Jamal said, affecting a pious tone and a mournful look. Carlyle kept eating her buttered croissant. She appeared thoughtful for a moment, bad failing for a hooker. You never wanted them to start thinking about the perils of the occupation. But then she gave a slight shrug and took another bite of the croissant. Jamal went back to his tale of Derring-Do in the Face of Imminent Arrest and Incarceration.

  “They had these two big dudes from headquarters there, I knew this was something big even before they brung up Yolande’s name. Then they lays her B-sheet on me, and asts when I seed her last and whut she was wearin an all that shit, and they thows a disgustin pitcher of her dead in a alley on St. Sab’s, bleedin from her snatch.”

  “Urgh,” Carlyle said, and bit into the croissant again.

  “Yeah,” Jamal said, “with a plastic bag over her fuckin head.”

/>   Carlyle got up and went to the stove. She was wearing just this little silk wrapper he’d got her from Victoria’s Secret, floral design on it, all lavender looking, and high-heeled bedroom slippers, she looked as delicious as any of the croissants on the table. Man, he loved this girl. Yolande had been a good moneymaker, but this one he loved. Even if she never again made a dime for him, he’d keep her and take care of her. Well, maybe. He watched her as she poured more coffee into her cup. Watched her tight little ass, actually. Wouldn’t care if she never brought home a nickel, this one.

  Which was when he realized what was wrong with the picture the cops had shown him.

  “The bag,” he said.

  Carlyle turned from the stove, puzzled.

  “Yolande’s bag. That red bag she has.”

  “The patent leather,” Carlyle said, nodding.

  “She was carryin it last night.”

  Carlyle sipped at her coffee.

  “But it wasn’t in the pitcher.”

  “What picture?”

  “The one they showed me. Ain’t them crime scene pitchers spose to show jus how everything was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They can’t touch no thin before they take they pitchers, can they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So where was the bag?”

  “Whoever done her must’ve taken it,” Carlyle said.

  “Yeah, with my fuckin money in it,” Jamal said.

  He started making his calls at ten minutes past ten.

  “Hello,” the recorded voice said, “welcome to the Mayor’s Action Center, the front door to city government. If you are calling from a touch-tone phone and you want to continue in English, press One.”

  He had dialed 300-9600, and now he pressed One.

  “We aim to guide you if you don’t know where to go, to listen thoughtfully to your opinions, and to help you if you have a problem. We can’t promise to always solve what’s wrong, but we can promise to do our best. By pressing selected buttons on your phone, this twenty-four-hour-a-day service can answer many of your questions without your speaking to an operator. It also allows you to leave your opinion of city policies. To speak directly to one of our representatives between the hours of nine and five, press Zero at any time. However, if you choose this option, please understand that you may need to hold for a while.”