by Nocturne
Karen looked puzzled.
“For example,” Priscilla said, “did you ever happen to notice a tall blond man visiting my grandmother’s apartment?”
“No,” Karen said. “In fact, I did not.”
“How well did you know the old lady?” Georgie asked kindly.
Karen looked at the clock.
Then she gave them much the same information she’d given the police, telling all about her and Svetlana sipping tea together in the late afternoon, listening to her old 78s …
“It reminded me of T. S. Eliot somehow,” she said again, and smiled at Georgie, who didn’t know who T. S. Eliot was.
She told them, too, about accompanying Svetlana to her internist’s office one day …
“She had terrible arthritis, you know …”
… and another time to an ear doctor who told her she ought to see a neurologist. Because of the ringing in her ears, you know.
“When was this?” Priscilla asked.
“Oh, before Thanksgiving. It was awful. She was crying so hard in the taxi, I thought her heart would break.”
“And you’re sure you never saw her with a tall blond man?”
“Positive.”
“Never, huh?”
“Never. Well, not with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think he went inside.”
“Inside?”
“Her apartment. But one morning, when she was sick …”
“Yes?” Priscilla said.
“He brought fish for the cat.”
“Who did?” Tony asked.
“A tall blond person.”
“His name wouldn’t have been Eliot, would it?” Georgie asked shrewdly.
“I have no idea what his name was.”
“But he brought fish to her apartment?” Tony said.
“Fish. Yes.”
“But didn’t go in?”
“Well, actually, I don’t really know. I was leaving for work when he knocked on her door. Svetlana answered, and he said … mm, yeah, that’s right, wait a minute. He did give her his name, but I don’t remember it. It was something very foreign. He had a foreign accent.”
“Russian?” Priscilla asked.
“I really don’t know. He said he was here with the fish for Irina.”
“For Irina. So he knew the cat’s name. Which means he knew my grandmother, too. But he didn’t go in? When she opened the door?”
“Well, in fact I really can’t say. I was already starting down the stairs.”
“What kind of fish?” Georgie asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Where’d he get this fish?”
“Well, I would guess at the fish market, wouldn’t you?”
“What fish market?” Priscilla asked.
“Where Svetlana went for the cat every morning.”
“And where’s that?” Priscilla asked, and held her breath.
“Let’s try a timetable on this thing, okay?” Byrnes said. He was getting exasperated. He didn’t like little old ladies in faded mink coats smelling of fish getting shot with a gun stolen from a limo that had transported a fighting rooster uptown. He didn’t like animals, period. Turtles, canaries, dogs, cats, fish, roosters, cockroaches, whatever.
“Where do you want us to start, Pete?” Carella asked.
“The gun.”
“Belongs to a man named Rodney Pratt. Licensed. Keeps it in the glove compartment of his limo. Car breaks down Thursday night, he takes it to the nearest garage off the Majesta Bridge. Place called Bridge Texaco. Forgets the gun in the glove box.”
“Okay, next.”
“How do you know he’s not the murderer?” Parker asked.
“We know,” Hawes said, dismissing the very idea.
“Gee, excuse me for fucking breathing!” Parker said.
“Next,” Carella said, “they work on the car all day Friday. One of the mechanics, guy named Jose Santiago, borrows the car, quote unquote, to drive his prize rooster uptown that night to a cockfight in Riverhead.”
“Excuse me while I puke,” Parker said.
“Puke,” Kling suggested.
“A fuckin bird in the backseat of a limo?”
“So puke,” Kling suggested again.
“Santiago’s bird loses. He finds the gun in the glove box, decides to shoot the winning bird, changes his mind when the Four-Eight raids the place. He goes to a nearby after-hours joint called The Juice Bar …”
“I know that place,” Brown said.
“… where this tall blond son of a bitch we’re trying to find is meeting with a bookie named Bernie Himmel who tells him he’s gonna be swimming with the fishes unless he pays him by Sunday morning the twenty grand he lost on the Cowboys-Steelers game.”
“Swimming with the fishes,” Hawes corrected.
“What?”
“He stressed the word ‘swimming.’ ”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“He told Schiavinato he’d be swimming with the fishes.”
“As opposed to what?” Meyer said. “Dancing with them?”
“I’m only telling you what I heard.”
“Let me hear the rest of the timetable,” Byrnes said.
“Okay. Saturday night, a quarter to twelve, we get a DOA at 1217 Lincoln Street, old lady named Svetlana Helder, turns out to be Svetlana Dyalovich, the famous concert pianist.”
“I never heard of her,” Parker said.
“Two to the heart,” Hawes said.
“I saw that picture,” Kling said.
“Was that the name?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Next morning, around seven, we get a dead hooker in an alley on St. Sab’s.”
“Any connection?”
“None.”
“Then why bring her up?”
“A policeman’s lot,” Carella said, and shrugged.
“He also called them the blond guy’s fish,” Hawes said.
“I’m lost,” Parker said.
“So am I,” Byrnes said.
“Himmel. The bookie. Bernie the Banker. He said they didn’t have much to talk about after he mentioned Schiavinato swimming with his little fishies.”
“I’m still lost,” Parker said.
“Yes, can you please tell us what the hell you’re driving at?” Byrnes asked.
“His little fishies. Not the little fishies, but his little fishies. Schiavinato’s little fishies.”
Everybody was looking at him.
Only Carella knew what he was saying.
“The cat,” Carella said.
“Not the goddamn cat again,” Byrnes said.
“She went out every morning to buy fresh fish for the cat.”
“Where’d you say her apartment was?” Parker asked, suddenly catching on.
“1217 Lincoln.”
“Simple,” Parker said. “The Lincoln Street Fish Market.”
“Selling fish,” Meyer said, nodding. “As opposed to swimming with them.”
13
At eight-fifteen that morning, the Lincoln Street Fish Market was not quite as bustling as it had been between four and six a.m. when fish retailers from all over the city arrived in droves. As Priscilla and the boys pulled up in a taxi, only housewives and restaurant owners were examining the various catches of the day, all displayed enticingly on ice—well, enticingly if you liked fish.
The market was a sprawling complex of indoor and outdoor stalls. On the sidewalk outside the high-windowed arching edifice fishmongers, wearing woolen gloves with the fingers cut off, woolen caps pulled down over their ears, and bloodstained white smocks over layers of sweaters, stood hawking their merchandise while potential customers picked over the fish as if they were inspecting diamonds for flaws.
It was a clear, cold, windy, sunny Monday morning.
“Where do we start?” Georgie asked.
He was hoping to discourage her. He did not want her to meet the man who’d d
ropped off that key to the bus terminal locker. He did not want her to learn that nobody had been in that locker except him and Tony here, who was backing away from the fish stalls as if his grandmother had cooked fish for him whenever he visited her on a Friday, which she had, and which he’d hated. He learned after her death that she’d hated fish, too. His mother, on the other hand, never had to cook fish in her entire lifetime because the church changed its rules. His mother was a staunch Catholic who practiced birth control and didn’t believe in confession.
Priscilla looked bewildered.
She had never been to this part of the city before, certainly never to a fish market here, had never seen so much damn fish ever, and could not imagine how she could even hope to find a tall blond man among all these men wearing hats and smocks and gloves.
The bitter cold did not help.
Priscilla was wearing a mink, dark and soft and supple in contrast to the ratty orange-brown coat her grandmother had been wearing when someone shot her. The fur afforded scant protection against the harsh wind blowing in over the river. Georgie and Tony were wearing belted cloth coats and woolen mufflers, their fedoras pulled down low on their foreheads, their hands in their pockets, just like movie gangsters. Wind wailing around them, the three walked the four dockside blocks, studying the men behind each of the outdoor stalls and ice bins, searching for telltale blond sideburns at the rolled edges of obiquitous woolen caps.
At the end of twenty minutes of close scrutiny, they were happy to be entering the long enclosed market. After the howling wind outside, even the indoor din seemed welcoming, fishmongers touting pompano and squid, sea bass and flounder, mackerel and shrimp, sole and snapper. They were coming down the center aisle, tall windows streaming wintry sunlight, stalls of iced fish on either side of them, Georgie blowing on his hands, Tony wearing a pained look in memory of his grandmother, Priscilla holding the collar of the mink closed with one hand because to tell the truth it was almost as cold inside here as it was outside, when all at once …
Behind the stall on the right …
Just ahead …
They saw a hatless man with muddy blond hair …
Standing some six feet two inches tall …
Wearing a white smock over a blue coat and a red muffler …
Bearing a marked resemblance to Robert Redford, and lifting a nice fat halibut off the ice to show to a female customer.
Hawes and Carella were just pulling up outside.
“Blond hair and blue eyes,” Hawes said.
“Must be from Milan,” Carella said.
“Or Rome. Rome has blonds, too.”
“Redheads,” Carella said.
A gust of wind almost knocked Hawes off his feet.
“Which first?” Carella asked. “Inside or out?”
Ask a stupid question.
Hawes reached for the doorknob.
At the downtown end of the enclosed market, four city blocks from where the detectives went in, Priscilla was just asking Lorenzo Schiavinato if he knew her grandmother Svetlana.
“Non parlo inglese,” Lorenzo said.
Thank God, Georgie thought.
“He doesn’t speak English,” he translated for Priscilla.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
“I don’t speak Italian,” Georgie said.
“I do,” Tony said, and Georgie wanted to kill him.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
Tony’s grandmother was from Siciliy, where they did not exactly speak Dante’s Italian. The dialect Tony now used was the one he’d heard at Filomena’s knee while she was cooking her abominable fish. First he asked Lorenzo his name.
“Mi chiamo Lorenzo Schiavinato,” Lorenzo said.
“His name’s Lorenzo,” Tony translated. “I couldn’t make out the last name.”
Small wonder, Georgie thought.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother.”
“Where are you from?” Tony asked.
“Milano,” Lorenzo said.
Where they spoke Florentine Italian, and where the Sicilian dialect was scarcely understood. Lorenzo was, in fact, squinting his very blue eyes in an effort to understand Tony’s Italian, which itself was a bastardization of the dialect his sainted grandmother had spoken.
It occurred to Georgie that the so-called “Italian” conversation between them was taking place in a fish market reputedly run by the mob, whose Italian was limited to a few basic words like “Boff on gool,” which itself was a bastardization of the time-honored “Va fa in culo,” better left uninterpreted in the presence of a fine lady like Priscilla Stetson.
Who now said, rather impatiently this time, “Ask him if he knew my goddamn grandmother.”
In Sicilian Italian, Tony asked if Lorenzo perchance had known Priscilla’s grandmother.
In Florentine Italian, Lorenzo asked who perchance her grandmother might have been.
“Svetlana Dyalovich,” Tony said.
And Lorenzo began running.
From where the detectives were coming down the center aisle of the indoor market, checking out the men selling fish from stalls and barrels and bins and ice chests on either side of them, they saw a tall blond man running toward them, chased by Svetlana’s granddaughter and the two goons who’d braced them at the club on Saturday night.
If the tall runner was, in fact, Lorenzo Schiavinato, then he was the one who’d bought the gun that killed Priscilla’s grandmother. Despite what was known in the trade as “background”—the number of innocent bystanders at any given scene—the fact that Lorenzo had purchased the murder weapon was justification within the guidelines for Carella and Hawes to draw their own guns. Besides, the man was running. In this city, unless you were running to catch a bus, the very act was suspicious.
The guns came out.
“Stop!” Hawes shouted. “Police!”
“Police!” Carella shouted. “Stop!”
Lorenzo wasn’t stopping.
A hundred and eighty pounds of muscle and bone plowed right through them, knocking Hawes off his feet, tossing Carella back onto a stall of very nice iced salmon, and causing a mustached man in a brown derby to throw his hands over his head in fright. Both detectives recovered at once, Carella first, Hawes an instant later.
“Stop!” they shouted simultaneously.
Hawes was in a crouch, pistol leveled, holding his gun steady in both hands.
Carella was standing beside him, gun extended in both hands, ready to fire.
“Stop!” he shouted.
Lorenzo kept running.
Hawes fired first. Carella fired an instant later. Carella missed. Hawes did, too. He fired again. This time, his shot took Lorenzo in the left leg, sending him tumbling. Everywhere around them, the background was screaming. The mustached man in the brown derby was running in the opposite direction, away from the shooting, waving his hands hysterically in the air. He tripped over Georgie, who had thrown himself flat on the floor the moment he’d heard shots, the way his uncle Dominick had taught him to do. Lorenzo was trying to crawl away, dragging his wounded leg behind him. Hawes kicked him and then stepped on his back, holding him down while Carella cuffed him.
“Ask him if he knew my grandmother,” Priscilla said.
“Few things we’d like to ask you, too,” Carella said.
Everyone was breathing very hard.
Fat Ollie Weeks was asking the computer for any tri-state area high school, prep school, parochial school, Christian academy or so-called alternative school whose name began with the letter P.
There were fifteen such private schools in the metropolitan area alone.
Thirty-eight in the entire state.
Of the public schools, there were a hundred and forty-six, thirty of them beginning with the word “Port.” Port This, Port That, more damn coastal towns than Ollie knew existed.
In the two neighboring states combined, there were thirty-nine private schools and a hundred and ninety-eight public schoo
ls that began with the letter P.
All of the public schools in this city were designated with the letters P.S. before the name, and so the computer belched out what looked to Ollie like more high schools than he could possibly cover in ten years of investigation. He limited the search to proper names alone and came up with sixty-three schools that had the letter P in their names.
Some of these schools were named for areas of the city, like Parkhurst or Pineview or Paley Hills. Others had been named after people. The computer did not differentiate between given names and surnames. The letter P appeared in Peter Lowell High, but it also appeared in Luis Perez High. But Ollie had been born and raised in this fair city, and he knew that kids never said they went to Harry High or Abraham High, but instead said they went to Truman High or Lincoln High. So he figured if the letter on those parkas stood for a person after whom a school had been named, then it sure as hell was the surname. Running down the printed list by hand, he limited the city’s sixty-three public schools to a mere seventeen. He was making progress.
By the time he was ready to begin making his phone calls, his trimmed-down list seemed like a reasonable one.
Sort of.
The way the joke goes, a woman is telling another woman about her son in medical school, and she keeps referring to him as a doctor. The other woman says, “By you, your son is a doctor. And by your son, your son is a doctor. But by a doctor, is your son a doctor?”
By Byrnes, Carella was Italian. And by Hawes, Carella was Italian. But by an Italian, was Carella Italian?
Lorenzo Schiavinato asked for an interpreter.
The interpreter’s name was John McNalley.
He had studied Italian in high school and college because he’d wanted to become an opera singer. He never did get to sing at La Scala or the Met because he had a lousy voice, but he did have a certain facility with language, and so—in addition to interpreting for the police and the courts, he also worked for many publishers, translating worthy books from the French, Italian and Spanish.
He still wanted to sing opera.
McNalley informed Lorenzo that he was being charged with murder in the second degree. In this state, you could be charged with Murder One only if you killed someone during the commission of a felony, or if you’d been earlier convicted of murder, or if the currently charged murder was particularly cruel and wanton, or if it was a contract killing, or if the victim was a police officer, or a prison guard, or a prisoner in a state pen, or a witness to a prior crime, or a judge—all of whom, according to one’s personal opinion, might deserve killing.
