by Parnell Hall
“His editor.”
“Yeah, her. Talked to both of them this afternoon. For my money, I can’t see either one of them doin’ it. But that don’t mean they didn’t. Aside from them, I still got those two would-be writers to track down.”
“Wannabes.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what she calls them. Wannabes.”
“Not any more, she doesn’t. So I gotta track them down—not that either one sounds promising. For my money, this Noah Sprague’s our man.”
“You’ve got absolutely nothing on him.”
“Yeah, but I will. You’re still doin’ this Caller ID shit, right? I’ll pick him up tomorrow morning when he leaves his house. If he makes a call, he’s mine.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not? You’re still on the job, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Didn’t you say the calls come through nine fifteen?”
“Usually. Actually, today they didn’t. There was just the one call—the one on the tape. What happened with that, by the way?
“Happened with it?”
“Yeah. You get anything?”
“What’s to get? It’s a voice on a tape. You get another voice, you try to match ’em up. You can’t do much with one. The trouble is, it’s a whisper. My guy in the bookstore—he doesn’t sound a thing like him. Got a whiny, candy-ass voice. But let him whisper—I think it’s a good shot.”
“You’re really tailing him tomorrow?”
“Sure thing. You wanna wrap this case up as quick as you can, don’t you?”
I smiled at Thurman. A shit-eating grin.
Clearly MacAullif hadn’t told him I was working for five hundred bucks a day with no completion bonus.
25.
HE EVEN DROVE ME HOME. Jesus Christ, a ride home from Sergeant Thurman? Pinch me, I must be dreaming.
He dropped me off on Broadway, a block from my house. He would have driven me to my door, but I had to go to the fruit stand. I bought a quart of milk on the corner, then walked over to West End.
I passed my car on the way. It was where Alice and I had left it earlier that afternoon, on the north side of 104th. Which was too bad, because tomorrow was Thursday.
I must explain. We have alternate side parking in New York City. The north side of the street is the Monday, Wednesday, Friday side, and the south side is the Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday side. Actually, with the financial crunch, parking has been suspended on Wednesday and Saturday for years to save the city the cost of cleaning the street, which is what alternate side parking was all about to begin with. The signs still say Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, because the cost of replacing them was prohibitive, and would have wiped out what the city was saving by not cleaning the street. Everyone just knows that Wednesday and Saturday don’t count.
Anyway, how alternate side parking works is, for three hours everyone on the bad side of the street double-parks on the good side, so the street sweeper can come through.
I was on the good side, which was bad. I was on the uptown side of the street, which was no parking Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Which meant it was on the good side of the street, and didn’t have to be moved. Which was bad, because Alice had to move it to drive Tommie to the East Side Day School. Alternate side parking hours in our neighborhood are 8:00 to 11:00. By 7:30, everyone is double parked, and if you’re on the good side of the street, you can’t get out. On the other hand, if the car was on the bad side of the street, Alice and Tommie could get in the car at five to eight, and take off. But with the car on the good side, I’d have to be out of the house by 7:00 to move it to make sure it wasn’t blocked. Which was a pain in the ass, but something I was used to doing.
But only if I had to.
I would much rather not.
Which is why, when I spotted a parking space on the south side of the street right across from me, I reacted like Pavlov’s dog.
Holy shit, there’s an extra half hour’s sleep right across the street.
I quickly slipped my keys out of my pants pockets and unlocked the car door.
That’s when I noticed something was wrong.
Son of a bitch, they’d done it again! Smashed the back window! Damn it to fucking shit hell!
Sorry for the invective, but this was one of the occupational hazards of living in New York City and parking your car on the street. On the one hand, you save the three hundred bucks a month you’d have to pay for a garage. On the other hand, you pick up your share of parking tickets, and your car gets broken into every now and then.
The car thieves used to pick the door lock, but lately they’d taken to smashing glass. The window they broke was always the same, the small triangular one behind the rear door. Evidently, being small it was easier to smash, and doing so allowed them to reach a hand in and unlock the door.
The really aggravating part was they never stole anything, because there was never anything to steal, but each time they did I had to replace the glass at sixty-five bucks a whack at the auto glass place at 23rd Street and the West Side Highway. This made the fourth or fifth time in the last few years, and it was happening with such regularity that I was beginning to suspect the auto glass place, which had my name, address, and license plate number, after all, of sending guys to my neighborhood every now and then to smash the window so they could fix it again.
While I was standing there thinking that, my alarm went off on account of I put my key in the door. I unlocked the door, punched in the numbers on the code alarm, shutting it off. The alarm would have gone off when the window was smashed too, but shut itself off after one minute. That’s because I’m a responsible citizen who has the type of alarm whose purpose is to frighten off the car thief, not to wake the neighborhood, like the ones that go off at two in the morning and keep on for hours, owned by irresponsible citizens that the majority of New Yorkers have dubbed with the affectionate term of assholes.
Anyway, I looked at the backseat of my car, which was covered with little chunks of safety glass, the window having shattered into a million pieces. I’d have to clean it up before Alice took Tommie to school. And she’d have to be the one to fix the window this time, since I’d be on the job.
That train of thought reminded me of my original intention. Broken window or not, the car needed to be on the other side of the street.
I started to get in and felt something.
Holy shit. The car thief had left something on the seat. What the hell could that be?
I hopped out of the car again—actually, I’d never really gotten in—but I stood up and looked down at the seat.
It was a newspaper, folded up. But not the way a newspaper folds. It was wrapped around something.
A bomb?
I mean, let’s get paranoid here. But the thought actually crossed my mind, could this be a bomb? Should I call the bomb squad? Should I get the hell out of here? Should I turn and run?
But, no, I’d almost sat on the thing, and it didn’t feel like a bomb. There’d been a give to it. An almost soft and squishy feel. And now I noticed a faint odor.
An odor?
Which, as I leaned closer, was actually rather strong.
What the hell?
Well, no guts, no glory.
I took a breath, reached in.
Grabbed the edge of the newspaper.
Spread it open.
Peered inside.
I gawked.
It was a pile of dead fish.
26.
“SERGEANT THURMAN WANTS TO BE MY friend.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. I think he likes me. The way I see it, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
MacAullif squinted sideways, favored me with his most pained and put-upon look. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I gave him a rundown of my meeting with Sergeant Thurman. “Well,” I said. “Whaddya think?”
MacAullif shrugged. “Well,�
� he said, “it’s a first date. You wanna take it slow.”
“Fuck you. Whaddya think of the case?”
“You mean, what do I think of Sergeant Thurman’s opinion of the case?”
“I guess that’s what I mean.”
“Sure you do. Pardon me, but didn’t we just have this discussion yesterday? Weren’t you in here telling me you had to talk to me about the case because you couldn’t talk to Sergeant Thurman?”
“Oh. Well ...”
“So now you’re in here telling me you can talk to Sergeant Thurman, you did talk to Sergeant Thurman, you were up practically all night talking to Sergeant Thurman, and now you wanna talk about that.”
“When you put it that way ...”
“When I put it any way at all, I just can’t win with you, can I?”
“Well, now there,” I said, “it sounds like you’re just jealous I’m talking to another officer.”
“Right,” MacAullif said. “That’ll be the day. You wanna talk to Sergeant Thurman, talk to Sergeant Thurman, just don’t do it in my office ’cause I happen to have work to do.”
“Fine,” I said. “The only problem is, I can’t talk to Sergeant Thurman right now, because he happens to be out chasing down a suspect.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. The guy I told you about. From the signing. He’s following him around to see where he goes.”
“You mean to see if he makes the phone call?”
“Exactly. Only problem is, there wasn’t any call this morning.
“How do you know?”
“I’m on the beeper. The minute they get the phone call, I’ll get a page.”
“How come you’re not stakin' out phone booths?”
“I was. When the nine fifteen call didn’t come through, I hung it up and came here.”
“To tell me about Sergeant Thurman?”
“That’s just part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Someone gave me some fish.”
“Huh?”
I told MacAullif about finding the dead fish in my car. “So what do you make of that?”
“What do you make of it?”
“Well, it’s like in The Godfather. A Sicilian message.”
“Right,” MacAullif said. “But that wasn’t just fish. That was wrapped up with the guy’s bulletproof vest. What was his name?”
“Luca Brasi.”
“Right. That was the message. Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. What were these fish wrapped up in?”
“The New York Post.”
“Rupert Murdoch sleeps with the fishes? Doesn’t fly.”
“I know. So what do you make of it?”
“There’s two possibilities. One, someone’s trying to scare you. Two, your car was robbed by an absentminded son of a bitch just caught a mess of fish.”
“I find that hard to swallow.”
“No shit. So you consider the warning. You say, is this cause and effect? Did someone put fish in my car because I’m involved in a murder case?”
“Is that how it plays for you?”
“It doesn’t play at all. It’s the most incredible piece of bullshit you’ve ever brought me. It is as unlikely as you having coffee with Sergeant Thurman. The odds of either event are miserable. The odds of both happening in a single evening are astronomical. Are you sure you’re not making this up?”
“MacAullif.”
He looked at me, cocked his head. “You’re not kidding, are you? You’re actually shaken up by this? Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be here. This bullshit about Sergeant Thurman notwithstanding. Is that what’s happening here? You getting freaked out about a load of fish?”
“Hey, give me a break,” I said. “Yesterday was not aces to begin with. It started out with me looking at a dead body. One I’d seen alive just the day before.”
“I wasn’t attacking your manhood,” MacAullif said. “Just making an observation. The fact is, it shook you up. And rightfully so. You tell Thurman about the fish?”
“I haven’t seen Thurman since last night. Like I said, he’s out tailing a suspect.”
“Uh-huh. You gonna tell him when you see him?”
“Damn.”
“What is it?”
“You always put your finger on it, MacAullif. That’s exactly the point. I don’t really want to tell Thurman.”
“Why?”
“Because he won’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? Someone put a load of fish in your car.”
“Yeah, but he won’t know what to make of it.”
“So what? Neither do you.”
“What are you getting at?”
MacAullif opened his top drawer, took out a cigar, began drumming it on the desk. “What am I getting at? Damned if I know. But you tell me this and a red flag goes up. You want to keep this from Thurman because you don’t think he’ll interpret it correctly. Well, big deal. On that basis, you should keep the whole fuckin case away from Thurman. But no, you’re talkin' to him about that just fine. I would say, you don’t want him to see what a pussy you are, scared of a couple of fish.”
“Thanks a lot, MacAullif,” I said. “You’ve cleared everything up for me.”
“You don’t like that assessment?” MacAullif said. “Lemme try another one. You’re scared to death the guy might actually do something about the fish, and then you’d feel indebted to him.”
I shuddered. “Christ, what a scary thought.”
“Yeah,” MacAullif said. “Anyway, has schmoozing with Sergeant Thurman in any way altered your opinion of his abilities, or the likelihood of his solving this particular case?”
“Give me a break. The way I see it, the only chance he’s got at all of solving the case is if the guy he’s tailing happens to make another phone call or confesses.”
“Hardly a ringing endorsement,” MacAullif said. “So the bottom line is, you’re not going to tell Sergeant Thurman your fish story, so you bring it to me. What did you do with the fish, by the way?”
“Threw them in the garbage,”
MacAullif made a face. “So this is how you preserve the evidence. Thank god you’re not a cop.”
“I wasn’t going to worry my wife and kid by obsessing over a bunch of dead fish.”
“Maybe not, but what were they like?”
“Like?”
“Yeah. Can you describe the fish? What kind were they?”
“I don’t know. I think they were bluefish.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I think. I mean, a fish is a fish.”
“Yeah, well, were they whole fish? Had they been cleaned and gutted? Were they packed in ice?”
“Whole fish. Wrapped in newspaper.”
“Were they cold?”
“They were dead.”
“Were they cold like they’d been packed in ice, then taken out of ice, or packed in ice that had melted?”
“They were cold like room temperature cold. If they’d been packed in ice, it was too long to tell.”
“Uh-huh,” MacAullif said. “Well, that’s one thing you could do.”
“What?”
“Trace the fish.”
“Huh?”
“Well, why not? Assuming they were put in your car deliberately, you got someone wanted, to fill your car with fish. Think what that means. The person has to know it’s your car. And, he has to know where your car is. When did you leave your car in this spot?”
“Yesterday afternoon. After I left your office, I went back to my clients, heard the tape recording, found out I had a signing to go to that night. In between, I went home to change, tell my wife I was involved in a murder, little things like that. Only she couldn’t get a parking space after picking up the kid at school, so when I get home the cars on Broadway at a meter. I met her on her way to move it.”
“What time was that?”
“About four in the afternoon.”
“Any trouble getting a spot?”<
br />
“No more than usual. Took us about fifteen minutes, driving around.”
“This is four in the afternoon?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Then there’s a couple of things that you can do. One, you check fish markets in your neighborhood, see if anyone bought a bunch of fish around then.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s a Saturday Night Live sketch. Go into a fish market, ask ’em if they sold any fish. All they sell is fish.”
“Yeah,” MacAullif said, “but if you think about it, it’s not that bad. All they sell is fish, but this is a particular sale. Most people buy a fish, they’d like it cleaned. Or a larger fish, they want a piece. This is a guy buys several whole fish, wants ’em just like they come. Betcha there are not that many orders just like that,” MacAullif pointed with the cigar. “Plus, whaddya wanna bet this guy doesn’t ask for a particular fish—like he doesn’t say, You got any sea bass, or whatever—he just looks around at what’s there and says, Give me four of those.”
I frowned. “Yeah. Maybe.”
MacAullif grimaced. “Aw, you’re such a pain in the ass. You hate it because you think you’ll feel stupid doin’ it. That every store you go in that isn’t the one, you’ll feel stupider still. That’s the part you never get. That ninety percent of legwork is strikin’ out. Well, fuck it. I’m not sayin’ you have to do this. I was only sayin you can.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Fine. Thanks for the hint. What was your other idea?”
“I forget.”
“You’re not gonna tell me because I didn’t like your idea about the fish?”
“I hate to cause you any grief.”
“Fuck you, MacAullif. What’s the other one?”
“Taxicab.”
“Taxicab?”
“Yeah. You drove around for fifteen minutes parking your car. If this is not coincidence you were given the fish, then the fish giver knew where your car was parked. And how would the fish giver know that unless he saw you park it there? For him to have seen you park it there is either a monstrous coincidence, or he must have been following you. When you go to Broadway, you’re on foot, so we can assume he’s on foot. When you get in the car, he hails a cab. So you’re lookin’ for a cab someone hailed on Broadway yesterday afternoon made figure eights around your neighborhood fifteen minutes and stopped on the same block as your car.”
