Ed McBain_87th Precinct 48

by Nocturne

  “So what you’re saying …”

  “I’m saying someone with fish oil on his or her hands held the coat in the manner I just described. Talk to you,” he said, and hung up.

  Fish oil, Willis thought. And chicken feathers.

  He was glad this wasn’t his case.

  9

  Anything happen while we were gone?” Carella asked.

  “Same old shit,” Willis said. “How are the roads?”

  “Lousy.”

  The clock on the squadroom wall read eleven-forty p.m. It was twenty minutes to midnight. Cotton Hawes was just coming through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. Beyond the steel mesh on the high squadroom windows, it was still snowing. This meant they could add a half hour, maybe forty minutes to any outside visits they made.

  “Frozen tundra out there,” Hawes said, and took off his coat. Carella was leafing through the messages on his desk.

  “Chicken feathers, huh?” he asked Willis.

  “Is what the man said,” Willis answered.

  “And fish stains on the mink.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of fish, did Grossman say?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You should have. Just for the halibut.”

  Willis winced.

  “Meyer and Kling tossed the piano player’s apartment again,” he said. “Zilch.”

  “That means a hundred and twenty-five K is still kicking around someplace.”

  “For what it’s worth, Kling thinks the burglar theory’s the one to go with.”

  “That’s why we’re looking for whoever stole that gun,” Hawes said.

  “If somebody stole it,” Carella said.

  “Otherwise, Pratt’s our man.”

  “Alibi a mile long.”

  “Sure, his wife.”

  “Gee, detective work is so exciting,” Willis said, and put on his hat and walked out.

  “Chicken feathers,” Carella said.

  “What did he say about the shit?”

  “Anybody’s guess.”

  “We can dismiss illegal hunting …”

  “Nobody hunts chickens.”

  “So that leaves theft from a chicken market.”

  “Not too many chicken markets around these days.”

  “Lots of them in Riverhead and Majesta. Some of the ethnics like their chickens fresh-killed. Hangover from the old country.”

  “Don’t Orthodox Jews kill their chickens fresh?”

  “You think it was a dead chicken in the Caddy?”

  “Or chickens. Plural.”

  “Then how come no bloodstains?”

  “Good point. So it was a live chicken.”

  “Or chickens.”

  “You know how to make Hungarian chicken soup?”

  “How?”

  “First you steal a chicken.”

  “Okay, let’s say somebody stole a chicken.”

  “Took it for a ride in the backseat of Pratt’s Caddy.”

  “Would you make that movie?”

  “I wouldn’t even go see that movie.”

  “But, okay, just for the halibut, let’s say somebody was hungry enough or desperate enough to steal a chicken from a chicken market …”

  “Do pet shops sell chickens?”

  “Chicks.”

  “In January?”

  “Around Easter.”

  “Anyway, a chick ain’t a chicken.”

  “No, this had to be a chicken market.”

  “How about a petting zoo? Where they have goats and cows and chickens and ducks …”

  “Do people pet chickens?”

  “They cook chickens.”

  “So, okay, first you steal a chicken.”

  “They also sacrifice chickens.”

  “Voodoo.”

  “Mm.”

  Both men fell silent.

  It was midnight.

  Blue Monday.

  And still snowing.

  “Let’s ask around,” Hawes said.

  The technician who had thought vile thoughts about Fat Ollie Weeks nonetheless got back to him just as he was leaving the squadroom at a few minutes past midnight. Except for the names on desktop plaques and bulletin-board duty rosters, the squadroom here at the Eight-Eight was an almost exact duplicate of the one at the Eight-Seven, or, for that matter, any other police station in the city. Even the newly constructed buildings began to look shoddy and decrepit with time, an apple-green pallor overtaking them seemingly at once. Ollie looked at the speckled face of the wall clock, remembering that he’d told the tech he wanted the stuff by a quarter to, and thinking he was lucky Ollie was still here, otherwise it would have been his ass. He ripped open the manila envelope and yanked out the report.

  No latents at all on the champagne bottles and the knife used to slit the estimable Jamal’s throat. No latents on any of the bathroom fixtures or any of the doorknobs in the apartment, either. Meaning that if there had been any other person or persons in the room, then he, she, or they had seen a lot of movies and knew enough to wipe up after themselves. So the only thing they could compare against the corpses’ fingerprints—which the tech had dutifully lifted from the two stiffs in the bathroom, copies of which were included in the packet—was the prints on the red patent-leather clutch. The smaller prints on the bag matched the prints of the woman named Yolande Marie Marx, whose Ohio driver’s license Ollie had found in the red patent-leather clutch. Apparently, Yolande was now lying in the morgue at Buenavista Hospital; the fingerprints the tech had lifted from her bag identified her as a white, nineteen-year-old shoplifter and prostitute with an arrest record that went back several years. The other prints on the bag matched the late Richie Cooper’s. According to the report, Jamal Stone hadn’t touched the bag.

  Ollie kept reading.

  Of hairs, there had been many, and only some of them matched those plucked from the heads of the poor unfortunate victims. Some of the hairs were blond, and they matched samples taken from the head of the dead girl. Fibers vacuumed in the apartment matched fibers from the short black skirt and red fake-fur jacket she’d been wearing at the time of her death.

  There were other fibers and other hairs.

  There were a significant number of dark blue wool fibers. They did not match any fibers from the clothing of the two victims.

  There were red hairs.

  And black hairs.

  And blond hairs.

  Some of them were head hairs.

  Some of them were genital hairs.

  All of them were hairs from white human beings.

  All of them were male hairs.

  Three white males, two dead black dudes, and a dead white hooker, Ollie thought, and farted.

  El Castillo de Palacios would have been ungrammatical in Spanish if the Palacios hadn’t been a person’s name, which in this case it happened to be. Palacio meant “palace” in Spanish, and palacios meant “palaces,” and when you had a plural noun, the article and noun were supposed to correspond, unlike English where everything was so sloppily put together, thank God. El Castillo de los Palacios would have been the proper Spanish for “The Castle of the Palaces,” but since Francisco Palacios was a person, El Castillo de Palacios was, in fact, correct even though it translated as “Palacios’s Castle,” a play on words however you sliced it, English or Spanish. And worth repeating, by the way, as were many things in this friendly universe the good Lord created.

  Francisco Palacios was a good-looking man with clean-living habits, now that he’d served three years upstate on a burglary rap. He owned and operated a pleasant little store that sold medicinal herbs, dream books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards and the like. His silent partners were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a store behind the other store, and this one offered for sale such medically approved “marital aids” as dildos, French ticklers, open-crotch panties (bragas sin entrepierna), plastic vibrators
(eight-inch and ten-inch in the white, twelve-inch in the black), leather executioner’s masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, leather anklets studded with chrome, penis extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized female dolls, condoms in every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben-wa balls in both plastic and gold plate, and a highly popular mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Suc-u-lator, in case you missed all this while you were out in the fragrant cloisters reading your vespers.

  Selling these things in this city was not illegal; the Gaucho and the Cowboy were breaking no laws. This was not why they ran their store behind the store owned and operated by Francisco. Rather, they did so out of a sense of responsibility to the Puerto Rican community of which they were a part. They did not, for example, want a little old lady in a black shawl to wander into the backstore shop and faint dead away at the sight of playing cards featuring men, women, police dogs and midgets in fifty-two marital-aid positions, fifty-four if you counted the jokers. Both the Gaucho and the Cowboy had community pride to match that of Francisco himself. Francisco, the Gaucho, and the Cowboy were, in fact, all one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or even in some quarters a rat.

  El Castillo de Palacios was in a ratty quarter of the Eight-Seven known as El Infierno, which until the recent influx of Jamaicans, Koreans, Haitians, Vietnamese and Martians had been almost exclusively Puerto Rican, or—if you preferred—“of Spanish origin,” which was both clumsy and cumbersome but favored over the completely phony “Latino.” On the politically correct highway, both of these categorizing expressions fell far behind the ever-popular (by fifty-eight percent) simple descriptive term “Hispanic.” Ten percent of the Hispanics queried didn’t care what they were called, so long as it wasn’t “spic” or late for dinner.

  El Infierno meant guess what?

  The Inferno.

  It was.

  Palacios was just closing up when they got there at about twenty past midnight after a snowy fifteen-minute ride crosstown which under ordinary circumstances would have taken five minutes. Palacios wore his black hair in a high pompadour, the way kids used to wear it back in the fifties. Dark brown eyes. Matinee-idol teeth. It was rumored in the Inferno that Palacios had three wives, which—like the tax-fraud violation the police held dangling over his head—was against the law. All of which Hawes and Carella and every other cop in the precinct (and every other human being in the world) already knew, but so what? Nobody was counting, and nobody was sending anyone to jail just yet—provided the information was good.

  It was.

  Symbiosis, Hawes thought.

  A nice word and a cozy arrangement.

  Hawes sometimes felt the entire world ran on cozy arrangements.

  “Ai, maricones,” Palacios said, “qué pasa?”

  He knew the cops could send him up anytime they felt like. Meanwhile, he could be friendly with them, no? Besides, maricon meant “homosexual,” and maricones was the plural of that, which he didn’t think they knew. They did know, but they also knew it was a friendly form of greeting among Hispanic men, God knew why, and God protect any non-Hispanic if he used it in greeting.

  They got straight to the point.

  “Voodoo.”

  “Mm, voodoo,” Palacios said, nodding.

  “Anything go down this past Friday night?”

  “Like what?”

  “Any Papa Legbas sitting on the gate?”

  “Any Maîtresse Ezilis tossing their hips?”

  “Any Damballahs?”

  “Any Baron Samedis?”

  “Any chickens getting their throats slit?”

  “You know some voodoo, huh?”

  “Un poquito,” Hawes said.

  “No, no, muchisimo,” Palacios said, praising him as extravagantly as if he’d just translated Cervantes.

  “So,” Carella said, cutting through the bullshit, “anything at all this past Friday?”

  “Talk to Clotilde Prouteau,” Palacios said. “She’s a mamaloi …”

  “A what?”

  “A priestess. Well, sometimes. She also conjures. I sell her War Water and Four Thieves Vinegar, Guinea Paradise and Guinea Pepper, Three Jacks and a King, Lucky Dog, jasmine and narcisse, white rose and essence of van van—whatever she needs to conjure. Tell her François sent you. Le Cowboy Espagnol, tell her.”

  The three of them were sitting at a table somewhat removed from the piano and the bar, Priscilla trying to control her anger while simultaneously venting it, Georgie and Tony trying to catch her whispered words. This was Sunday night—well, Monday morning already—and Priscilla’s night off, but the bar was open and the drinks were free and this was a good quiet place to talk on a Sunday, especially when it was snowing like mad outside and the place was almost empty.

  Priscilla was steamed, no doubt about it.

  She had been steamed since eight p.m. when the boys finally got back to the hotel with an envelope they’d retrieved from the pay locker at the Rendell Road Terminal. The envelope had contained a letter that read:

  My dearest Priscilla:

  In the event of my death, you will have been directed to this locker where you will find a great deal of cash.

  I have been saving this money for you all these years, never touching it, living only on my welfare checks and whatever small amounts still come in on record company royalties. It is my wish that the cash will enable you to further your career as a concert pianist. I have always loved you.

  Your grandmother,

  Svetlana

  In the envelope, there was five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

  “Five thousand?” Priscilla had yelled. “This is a great deal of cash?”

  “It ain’t peanuts,” Georgie suggested.

  “This is supposed to take care of me?”

  “Five grand is actually a lot of money,” Georgie said.

  Which it was.

  Though not as much as the ninety-five they’d stolen from the locker.

  “Five thousand is supposed to buy a career as a fucking concert pianist?”

  She still couldn’t get over it.

  Sitting here at ten minutes to one in the morning, drinking the twenty-year-old Scotch the bartender had brought to her table, courtesy of the house, Priscilla kept shaking her head over and over again. The boys sympathized with her. Priscilla looked at her watch.

  “You know what I think?” she asked.

  Georgie was afraid to hear what she was thinking. He didn’t want her to be thinking that they’d opened that envelope and stolen ninety-five thousand dollars from it. Priscilla didn’t notice, but his knuckles went white around his whiskey glass.

  He waited breathlessly.

  “I think whoever delivered that key went to the locker first,” she said.

  “I’ll bet,” Georgie said at once.

  “And cleaned it out,” she said.

  “Left just enough to make it look good,” Tony said, nodding.

  “Exactly,” Georgie said.

  “Made it look like the old lady was senile or something,” Tony said. “Leaving you five grand as if it’s a fortune.”

  “Just what he did,” Priscilla said.

  “Well, it is sort of a fortune,” Georgie said.

  Priscilla was getting angrier by the minute. The very thought of some blond thief who couldn’t even speak English cleaning out the locker before delivering the key to her! Tony kept fueling the anger. Georgie kept listening to him in stunned amazement.

  “Who knows how much cash could’ve been in that locker?” he said.

  “Well, after all, five grand is quite a lot,” Georgie said, and shot Tony a look.

  “Could’ve been twenty thousand in that locker,” Tony suggested.

  “More,” Priscilla said. “She told me I’d be taken care of when she died.”

  “Could’ve been
even fifty thousand in that locker,” Tony amended.

  “There was five, don’t forget,” Georgie said.

  “Even a hundred, there could’ve been,” Tony said, which Georgie thought was getting a little too close for comfort.

  Priscilla looked at her watch again.

  “Let’s go find the son of a bitch,” she said, and rose graciously. Flashing a dazzling smile at the seven or eight people sitting in the room, she strode elegantly into the lobby, the boys following her.

  They found Clotilde Prouteau at one a.m. that Monday, sitting at the bar of a little French bistro, smoking. Nobody understood the city’s Administrative Code prohibiting smoking in public places, but it was generally agreed that you could smoke in a restaurant with fewer than thirty-five patrons. Le Canard Bleu met this criterion. Moreover, even in restaurants larger than this, smoking was permitted at any bar counter serviced by a bartender. There was no bartender on duty at the moment, but Clotilde was covered by the size limitation, and so she was smoking her brains out. Besides, they weren’t here to bust her for smoking in public. Nor for practicing voodoo, either.

  A fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman with a marked French accent and a complexion the color of oak, she sat with a red cigarette holder in her right hand, courteously blowing smoke away from the detectives. Her eyes were a pale greenish-gray, accentuated with blue liner and thick mascara. Her truly voluptuous mouth was painted an outrageously bright red. She wore a patterned silk caftan that flowed liquidly over ample hips, buttocks and breasts. Enameled red earrings dangled from her ears. An enameled red pendant necklace hung at her throat. Outside a snowstorm was raging and the temperature was eight degrees Fahrenheit. But here in this small smoky bistro a CD player oozed plaintive Piaf, and Clotilde Prouteau looked exotically tropical and flagrantly French.

  “Voodoo is not illegal, you know that, eh?” she asked.

  “We know it.”

  “It is a religion,” she said.

  “We know.”

  “And here in America, we can still practice whatever religion we choose, eh?”

  The Four Freedoms speech, Carella thought, and wondered if she had a green card.

  “Francisco Palacios tells us you sometimes do the ceremony.”