Tricks (87th Precinct), page 15
“It’s okay.”
“Come on, Howie, tell me the truth.” Teasing him now. “You really dig the girls here, don’t you?”
“They’re okay. Some of them.”
“Which ones?”
“Some of them. Lots of these girls, you know, they’re in this against their will, you know.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I mean, they were forced into it, you know.”
“You sure you were a Vice cop, Howie?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, you sound almost human.”
“Well, it’s true, you know. A lot of these girls would get out of it if they knew how.”
“Tell me the secret. How do I get out of it, Howie?”
“There are ways.”
A big, wiry, gray-haired guy walked over from the bar. Had to be in his mid-fifties, grizzled look, sailor’s swagger. Wearing jeans and white sneakers, blue T-shirt, gold crucifix hanging on a chain outside the shirt, metal-buttoned denim jacket open over it. Right arm in a plaster cast and a sling. Shaggy gray eyebrows, knife scar angling downward through the right brow and partially closing the right eye. Brown eyes. Thick nose broken more than once. Blue watch cap tilted onto the back of his head. Shock of gray hair hanging on his forehead. He pulled out a chair, sat, and said, “Buzz off, Preacher.”
Howie looked at him.
“Buzz off, I wanna talk to the lady.”
“Hey mister,” Eileen said, “we’re—”
“You hear me, Preacher? Move!”
Howie shoved back his chair. He glared angrily at the guy with the broken arm, and then walked across the bar and out into the street. Annie was already up and after him.
“Thanks a lot,” Eileen said. “You just cost me—”
“Shanahan,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Put your hand on my knee, talk nice.”
The midgets came in at a minute before 11:00.
Shotgun Zuckerman was ready to close the store.
They came in yelling “Trick or treat!”
Alice opened fire at once.
(“It was us taking all the risk,” she said at the Q & A later. “Never mind what Quentin told us. If anybody pegged us for little people, we were finished. It was better to kill them. Easier, too.”)
Zuckerman didn’t even have a chance to reach for the shotgun. He went down dead in the first volley.
Meyer and Carella broke out of the stockroom the moment they heard the bell over the door sound. By the time they came through the curtain shielding the front of the store from the back, Zuckerman was already dead.
In the station wagon outside, the blonde began honking the horn.
“Police!” Meyer shouted, and Alice opened up with a second volley.
This wasn’t a cops-and-robbers movie, this was real life.
Neither of the detectives got off a shot.
Meyer went down with a bullet through his arm and another through his shoulder.
Carella went down with a bullet in his chest.
No tricks. Real blood. Real pain.
Three of the midgets ran out of the store without even glancing at the cash register. The only reason Alice ran out after them, without first killing the two cops on the floor, was that she thought there might be more cops in the place.
This came out during the Q & A at ten minutes past 2:00 on the morning of All Hallows’ Day.
The more Parker presented himself as a fake cop, the more he began feeling like a real cop. Everybody at the party kept telling him he could pass for a detective anywhere in the city. Everybody told him his shield and his gun, a .38 Smith & Wesson Detective Special, looked very authentic. One of the women—a sassy brunette dressed as a Las Vegas cigarette girl, in a flared black skirt and a flimsy top, high-heeled black shoes, and seamed silk stockings—wanted to hold the gun but he told her cops didn’t allow straights to handle dangerous weapons. He had deliberately used police jargon for “honest citizens.” In this city, a straight was anyone victimized by a thief. In some cities, victims were called “civilians.” In any city, a thief was anyone who wasn’t a cop, a straight, or a civilian. To the cops in this city, most thieves were “cheap” thieves.
A homosexual wearing a blond wig, a long purple gown, and amethyst earrings to match, objected to the use of the word “straight” to describe an honest citizen. The homosexual, who said he was dressed as Marilyn Monroe, told Parker that all the gays he knew were also honest citizens. Parker apologized for his use of police terminology. “But, you see,” he said, “I ain’t a real cop.” And yet he felt like one. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt like a bona fide detective on the world’s finest police force.
It was peculiar.
Even more peculiar was the fact that he was having such a good time.
Peaches Muldoon had a lot to do with that.
She was the life of the party, and some of her exuberance and vitality rubbed off on Parker. She told everyone stories about what it was like growing up as a victim on a sharecropper’s farm in Tennessee. She told them incest was a way of life on the farm. Told them her first sexual experience was with her father. Told them her brother’s first sexual experience—other than with the sheep who was his steady girlfriend—had been with his sister Peaches Muldoon one rainy afternoon when they were alone together in the house. She told everyone that she’d enjoyed her brother more than she had her father. Everyone laughed. They all thought she was making up victim stories. Only Parker knew that the stories were true; she’d told him ten years earlier that her priest-killing son was the bastard child of her relationship with her brother.
The stories Peaches told encouraged Parker to tell some stories of his own. Everyone thought he was making them up, the way Peaches had made up her stories about the Tobacco Road dirt farm. He told them the story about the woman who’d cut off her husband’s penis with a straight razor. He said, “I substituted the word penis for cock, because I didn’t want to offend anybody here who might be a vigilante for the Meese Commission.” Everyone laughed at the story and also at his comment about the Meese Commission. Somebody wondered out loud if the attorney general considered it pornographic that the unauthorized sale of arms to Iran had provided unauthorized funds for Nicaraguan rebels.
This was straying into intellectual territory beyond Parker’s scope.
He laughed, anyway.
Pornography was something he dealt with on a daily basis, and he believed straights ought to keep their noses out of it, period. Complicated and illegal arms deals were something else, and he never wondered about them except as they might effect his line of work. When you dealt with cheap thieves day and night, you already knew that they weren’t only in the streets but also in the highest reaches of government. He didn’t say this to anyone here at the party because he was having too good a time, and he didn’t want to get too serious about cause and effect. He didn’t even think of it consciously as cause and effect. But he knew, for example, that when a star athlete was exposed as a coke addict, the kids playing pickup ball in the school yard thought, “Hey, I gotta try me some of that shit.” He also knew that when somebody high up in government broke the law, then your punk dealing grams of crack in the street could justify his actions by saying, “See? Everybody breaks the law.” Cause and effect. It only made Parker’s job harder. Which was maybe why he didn’t work too hard at the job anymore. Although tonight, playing at the job, he felt as if he was working harder at it than he had in years.
It was really very peculiar.
He told everybody that one day he was going to write a book about his experiences.
“Ah-ha!” somebody said, “you’re a writer!”
“No, no, I’m a cop,” he protested.
“So how come you want to be a writer?” someone else said.
“’Cause I ain’t got the guts to be a burglar,” Parker said, and everyone laughed again.
He’d never realized he was so witty.
At a little after 11:00, Peaches suggested that they move on to another party.
Which is how Parker got to meet the wheelman and one of the midgets on the liquor-store holdups.
There were a lot of things bothering Brown about the Sebastiani case.
The three most important things were the head and the hands. He kept wondering why they hadn’t turned up yet. He kept wondering where Jimmy Brayne had dropped them.
He also wondered where Brayne was right now.
The blues from the Two-Three, armed with the BOLO that had gone out all over the city, had located the blue Citation in the parking lot of an A & P not far from the River Dix. The techs had crawled over the car like ants, lifting latent prints, collecting stain samples, vacuuming for hairs and fibers. Anything they’d got had already been bagged and sent to the lab for comparison with whatever had been recovered from the Econoline van. Brown had no illusions about the lab getting back to them before sometime Monday. Meanwhile, both cars had been dumped—which left Brayne without wheels. His last location had been in the 23rd, where he’d dropped the Citation, way over on the south side of the city. Was he now holed up somewhere in that precinct? Had he cabbed east, west, or north to a hotel someplace else? Or was he already on an airplane, bus, or train heading for parts unknown?
All of this bothered Brown.
He also wondered why Brayne had killed his mentor and employer.
“You think they’re making it?” he asked Hawes.
“Who?”
“Brayne and the woman.”
“Marie?”
The possibility had never occurred to Hawes. She had seemed so honestly grieved by her husband’s disappearance and death. But now that Brown had mentioned it—
“I mean, what I’m looking for is some motive here,” Brown said.
“The guy could’ve just gone berserk, you know. Threw those tricks all over the driveway, ran off in the Citation…”
“Yeah, I’m curious about that, too,” Brown said. “Let’s try to dope out a timetable, okay? They come into the city together, Brayne in the van, Marie and her husband in the Citation…”
“Got to the school around a quarter past three.”
“Unloaded the car and the van…”
“Right.”
“And then Brayne went off God knows where, said he’d be back at five, five-thirty to pick up the big stuff.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, they finish the act around five-fifteen. Sebastiani changes into his street clothes, goes out back to load the car while Marie’s getting out of her costume. She comes out later, finds the stuff all over the driveway and the Citation gone.”
“Right.”
“So we got to figure Brayne dumped the van on Rachel Street sometime between three-thirty and five-fifteen, grabbed a taxi back to the school, and cold-cocked Sebastiani while he was loading the car.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Hawes said.
“Then he chops up the body—where’d he do that, Cotton? Blood stains in the Citation’s trunk, you know, but nowhere else in the car.”
“Coulda done it anywhere in the city. Found himself a deserted street, an abandoned building…”
“Yeah, you could do that in this city. So he chops up the corpse, loads the pieces in the trunk, and starts dropping them all around town. When he gets rid of the last one, he leaves the car behind that A and P and takes off.”
“Yeah.”
“So where’s the motive?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s an attractive woman,” Brown said.
Hawes had noticed that.
“If she was playing house with Brayne in that apartment over the garage…”
“Well, you’ve got no reason to believe that, Artie.”
“I’m snowballing it, Cotton. Let’s say they had a thing going. Brayne and the woman.”
“Okay.”
“And let’s say hubby tipped to it.”
“You’re thinking movies or television.”
“I’m thinking real life, too. Hubby tells Brayne to lay off, Brayne’s still hungry for her. He chops up hubby, and him and the woman ride off into the sunset.”
“Except Brayne’s the only one who rode off,” Hawes said. “The woman’s—”
“You think she’s home yet?” Brown asked, and looked up at the clock.
Ten minutes past 11:00.
“Half hour or so to Collinsworth,” Hawes said. “She was catching the ten forty-five.”
“Whyn’t we take a ride out there?” Brown said.
“What for?”
“Toss that apartment over the garage, see we can’t find something.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe where Brayne’s heading. Or better yet, something that links him to the woman.”
“We’ll need a warrant to toss that garage.”
“We haven’t even got jurisdiction across the river,” Brown said. “Let’s play it by ear, okay? If the lady’s clean, she won’t ask for a warrant.”
“You want to call her first?”
“What for?” Brown said. “I love surprises.”
Kling waved so long to them as they headed out of the squadroom. He looked up at the clock. The graveyard shift should be here in half an hour or so—O’Brien, Delgado, Fujiwara, and Willis. Fill them in on what had gone down on the four-to-midnight, grab one of the sedans, and head for Calm’s Point. Make himself invisible in the Zone, just another John looking for a little Friday-night sport. But keep an eye out for Eileen.
He thought she was dead wrong about this one.
His being there in the Zone could only help an undercover situation that had been hastily planned and recklessly undermanned.
This time, he was the one who was dead wrong.
They sat at the table talking in whispers, just another hooker and a potential trick. Negotiating the deal, Larry figured. Never seen the guy with the broken arm in here before, wondered who’d be on top in the sack, might get a little clumsy with that arm in a sling. Wondered about that and nothing else. The place was still busy, there was booze to be poured.
“Howie Cantrell is his real name,” Shanahan whispered. “Used to be with Vice in Philly, that’s all straight goods. Went off his rocker six years ago, first started beating up hookers in the street, then began preaching salvation to them. The Philly PD didn’t so much mind the beatings. Worse things than beatings go down in Vice. But they didn’t like the idea of a plainclothes minister on the force. They sent him up for psychiatric, and the shrinks decided he was under considerable stress as a result of his proximity to the ladies of the night. Retired him with full pension, he drifted first to Boston, then here, started his missionary work all over again in the Zone. Everybody calls him the Preacher. He looks for the young ones, spouts Jesus to them, tries to talk them out of the life. Takes one of them to bed every now and then, for old times’ sake. But he’s harmless. Hasn’t raised a hand to anybody since Philly let him go.”
“I thought he was our man,” Eileen said.
“We did, too, at first. Dragged him in right after the first murder, questioned him up and down, but he was clean as a whistle. Talked to him again after the second one, and again after the third. Alibi’s a mile long. We shoulda warned you about him. Be easy to make the mistake you made. How’s it going otherwise?”
“I almost lost my virginity, but Alvarez bailed me out.”
“Who’d he send?”
“Guy named Ortiz. Narcotics.”
“Good man. Looks eighteen, don’t he? He’s almost thirty.”
“You coulda told me I’d have help.”
“We’re just full of tricks,” Shanahan said, and smiled.
“You gonna plant yourself in here?” Eileen asked.
“Nope. I’ll be outside. Watching, waiting.”
“Who grizzled up your hair?” she asked.
“The Chameleon,” he said, and grinned.
“I hope you can see through that eye.”
“I can see just fine.”
“And I hope our man doesn’t want to arm wrestle,” she said, glancing at the cast.
Across the room, Annie was coming back into the bar. She walked to where Larry was standing, put four dollars on the bar top and said, “Your end, pal.”
“Why, thank you, honey,” he said, “much obliged,” and tucked the bills into his shirt pocket, figuring the four represented twenty percent of whatever she’d got for her last trick. I do love an honest hooker, he thought, and immediately wondered if she’d short-changed him.
Annie wandered over to where Eileen and Shanahan were sitting.
“Your blond friend went home,” she said. “Caught a bus on the corner.”
“That’s okay,” Eileen said, “I’m still waiting for Mr. Right.”
Annie nodded, and then walked over to a table on the other side of the room. She wasn’t alone for more than a minute when a big black guy sat down next to her.
“She needs help,” Eileen whispered.
“Bring her outside,” Shanahan said, and then rose immediately and said in a voice loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear, “I’ll see you around the corner, honey.”
Eileen went over to Annie and the black man.
“I got a one-armed bandit waiting in a car around the corner,” she said. “He’s looking for a hands-on trio, me driving, him in the middle, both of us dancing his meat around the block. You interested in a dime for ten minutes’ work?”
“Dimes add up,” Annie said, and immediately got to her feet.
“Hurry on back, hear?” the black man said.
“I did not appreciate all the shooting,” Quentin Forbes said, looking petulant. He was still wearing the dress, pantyhose, and low-heeled walking shoes he’d worn while driving the station wagon, but the long blond wig was hooked over the arm of a ladder-backed wooden chair. “There was no need for such violence, Alice. I warned you repeatedly…”
“It was only insurance,” she said, and shrugged.
“The costumes were all the insurance we—”
“The costumes were bullshit,” Alice said.
She was a beautiful little blonde woman in her late thirties, blue eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth, perfect legs and breasts, four feet two inches tall and weighing a curvaceous seventy-one pounds. In the circus, she was billed as Tiny Alice. This went over big with homosexual men. She had changed out of the clown costume they’d worn on the last two holdups, and was now wearing a dark green dress and high-heeled pumps. To Forbes, she looked wildly sexual.
