He had by that time spent most of the afternoon with Leopold and Meyer, doing all the leg work he’d earlier suggested. Together they had hit all of Midtown South’s hot-bed hotels and massage parlors, and had talked to most of the pimps in the precinct’s Lousy File, but they still had not come up with a make on Joey Peace. Sighing, Carella picked up the phone again and called first Danny Gimp and then Fats Donner, both highly valued police informers, to ask if they know a hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins or a pimp named Joey Peace. Fats Donner, who was rather more sexually oriented than Danny Gimp, laughed when he heard the pimp’s name, and then asked if it was spelled P-I-E-C-E, which he thought might be a singularly good name for a pimp. He had nonetheless never heard of a gentleman of leisure who called himself by such a moniker. Neither had Danny Gimp. Both men promised to go on the earie, but each expressed doubt that he’d come up with anything. “Very often,” Fats said in his most unctuously oily, pale blubbery way, “a pimp will use a nickname known only to the girls in his own stable. This as protection against other pimps, not to mention the law.” Carella thanked him for the invaluable insight into the world’s oldest profession, and then hung up.
He was feeling testy and irritable. According to George Chadderton’s appointment calendar, the singer had seen Clara Jean Hawkins a total of four times before each of them was killed, and was scheduled for another meeting with her on the day after the murders. The first two calendar entries had called her “Hawkins,” and the remaining three had called her “C.J.” It was possible that these androgynous jottings, considering the lady’s occupation, were designed to throw Chloe Chadderton off the track. But if the singer had been enjoying the dead girl’s professional services, why would he have risked listing his appointments with her at all? If their relationship had been purely sexual, would he, for Christ’s sake, have put it in writing? Frowning, Carella went to where Meyer was typing up his report on the visit to Mrs. Hargrove.
“I think it’s time we had a meeting on this damn case,” he said.
It was, in fact, time to put on the old thinking caps, time to become deductive detectives, time to become reasoning raisonneurs, time to look into that old crystal ball and dope this thing out. So they got together in a police ritual as old as time, hoping to snowball the case — throw in ideas and suppositions, shoot down some theories, elaborate on others. The men involved in the crap game were Carella and Meyer, the detectives officially assigned to the Chadderton case; Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, who was in command of the squad and who had every right to know what his men were up to; Detective Cotton Hawes, whose puritanical upbringing often succeeded in bringing back to stark Bostonian reality any theory that was veering too far from magnetic north; and Detective Bert Ming, whose boyish good looks masked a mind as innocent as a baby’s backside.
“He’s got to be new on the job,” Meyer said.
“No arrests yet,” Carella said.
“Which is why there’s nothing on him down at I.S.,” Kling said.
“Or in the various Lousy Files around town,” Carella said.
“And which is why he’s only got four chicks in his stable,” Hawes said, totally unaware that he’d mixed a metaphor. He was perched on the edge of Meyer’s desk, the rain-soaked windows tracing a slithering pattern across his face, lending to it a somewhat frightening look. The look was strengthened by the fact that Hawes had a white streak running through his red hair, just above the left temple, a memento from a knife-wielding building superintendent away back then when Hawes was but a neophyte cop who never mixed his metaphors.
“Nothing in the phone book, huh?” Kling asked.
“Nothing.”
“Okay,” Byrnes said, somewhat brusquely, “so far you’re handling Leopold’s case brilliantly. You’re tracking down the pimp the girl worked for, wonderful, you’ll probably find him one of these days, and maybe you’ll learn he didn’t like the way she was doing her nails or combing her hair, so maybe he put a couple of .38 slugs in her last Friday night, great. If you’re right, you’ve solved Leopold’s case and he’ll get a promotion to detective/first, great. Meanwhile, what are you doing to find Chadderton’s killer?”
Byrnes delivered this somewhat lengthy (for Byrnes) speech in a tone of voice entirely devoid of sarcasm. His blue eyes were without the slightest trace of malicious amusement, his mouth betrayed neither smirk nor snarl, his words were in fact as mild as the balmy zephyrs of spring, which warm breezes all the detectives gathered around Meyer’s desk would have preferred to the blustery rain outside the squadroom this very moment. But they all knew Byrnes pretty well, they had all over the years grown accustomed to his flat delivery and his no-nonsense appearance, the iron-gray hair and the blue eyes that followed you like tracer bullets in the night. They heard each word fall soddenly now, like the raindrops outside, ploppity-plop-plip onto Meyer’s desk top and onto the worn green linoleum around the desk, ploppity-plip-plop all over their case like a big puppy pissing on paper under the kitchen sink.
“Well, what we thought...” Carella said.
“Mm, what did you think?” Byrnes asked, again without sarcasm, but somehow his words kept dampening things.
“We thought the connection between the girl and the pimp...”
“Mm-huh?”
“Is... uh... Chadderton wrote a song about a hooker.”
“He did, huh?” Byrnes said.
“Yes, sir,” Carella said. “In which he exhorts her—”
“Exhorts?” Byrnes said.
“Yes, sir. Exhorts, right?” Carella said to Hawes.
“Sure, exhorts.”
“Exhorts her to quit being a whore, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” Byrnes said.
“So what we thought...” Meyer said.
“What we thought,” Carella said, “is that if this Joey Peace is the one who killed the girl, then since it’s the same gun and all, since Ballistics has nailed it as the same gun, then maybe he also killed George Chadderton because Chadderton was trying to convince the girl to get out of the life and all.”
“Where does it say that?” Byrnes asked.
“Say what?”
“That Chadderton was trying to convince the Hawkins girl to get out of the life.”
“That’s just a supposition,” Carella said.
“Ah,” Byrnes said.
“But he did write a song about a hooker,” Hawes said.
“Where does it say the song’s about this particular hooker?” Byrnes said.
“Well... I don’t know,” Hawes said. “Steve, is it about this particular hooker?”
“Not according to Harding.”
“Who’s Harding?” Kling asked.
“Chadderton’s business manager. He says Chadderton’s songs weren’t about anybody in particular.”