Around Christmastime he always wondered where Alice Patricia was. He hated her, but he wondered where she was, what she was doing.
Probably still hooking someplace.
Probably L.A. She’d always talked about going out to California. Maybe San Francisco. Hooking someplace out there in California.
On Thanksgiving Day he’d sat alone in his garden apartment in Majesta and watched the Gruber’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Watched it on one of the local channels. Not as big or as famous as the Macy’s parade in New York, but what the fuck, it was at least the city’s own parade. Ate a frozen turkey dinner he’d heated up in his microwave oven. And wondered where Alice Patricia was.
And wondered what she was doing.
Blond hair and blue eyes.
A figure you could cry.
Whenever a blond, blue-eyed homicide victim turned up—like the one Carella and Brown had caught in October—Parker wondered where Alice Patricia was, wondered if she was lying dead in an alley someplace, her throat slit by some California pimp.
I’m only doing it as a sideline, she’d told him.
Well, listen, they’d warned him. This was when he was still working out of the Three-One downtown, not a bad precinct, still in uniform down there, learning what it was like to be a fuckin’ cop in this fuckin’ city. Filth and garbage, that was what you dealt with. Went home with the slink of it on your hands and in your nostrils. He’d met her in a bar, she was dancing topless there, the guys all warned him. These topless dancers, they said, you know what they are. They’re either turning tricks already, or else they drift into doing massage parlors part-time, and before you knew it, they were full-fledged hookers. He told them to go fuck themselves. Alice Patricia was maybe dancing topless, but she had ambitions and ideals, wanted to dance someday in a legitimate show, make it here and then move on to Broadway and the big time. Took ballet lessons and voice lessons and acting lessons, wanted to make it big. She wasn’t what they thought. Parker knew she wasn’t. When he married her, he didn’t invite any of the guys from the Three-One to the wedding.
It was going good, he thought it was going real good.
Then one night—he had the four to midnight—he went over to the club she was working at, a place called Champagne Bubbles or some such shit, and one of the girls told him Alice Patricia had gone out for an hour or so, and he said, ‘What do you mean she went out for an hour or so?’ This was now twelve-thirty, one o’clock in the morning, the place was almost empty except for some sailors sitting at the bar watching a girl Alice Patricia called the Titless Wonder. ‘This time of night she went out for an hour or so?’ Parker said. He knew what this city turned into after midnight. A fuckin’ moonscape full of predators crawling the streets looking for victims. Filth and garbage, the stink of it. ‘Where’d she go?’ he asked.
The girl looked at him.
She was topless. She kept toying with a string of pearls around her neck.
‘Where’d she go?’ he asked again.
‘Leave it be, Andy,’ the girl said.
He grabbed the string of pearls, ripped them from her neck. The pearls clattered to the floor, rolled on the floor. The sound of the pearls was louder than the sound of the taped music the girl onstage was dancing to.
‘Where?’ he said.
So, you know, he found her in a hot-bed hotel three blocks from the club. He was in civvies, he had changed in the locker room when his tour ended, the room clerk thought he was a detective when he showed his shield. This was a year before he’d made Detective/Third. He’d made Detective/Third after the divorce, when he had nothing to concentrate on but police work. The room clerk told him a blond, blue-eyed girl had come in with a black man about fifteen minutes ago. The room clerk told him they were in room 1301. Parker would remember the number of the room always. And the stink of Lysol in the hallway.
He beat the black man to within an inch of his life. Kicked him down the stairs. Told him to get his black ass out of this city. He went back to the room. Alice Patricia was still on the bed, naked, smoking a cigarette.
He said, ‘Why?’
She said, ‘I’m only doing it as a sideline.’
He said, ‘Why?’
‘For kicks,’ she said, and shrugged.
‘I loved you,’ he said.
It was already past tense.
Alice Patricia shrugged again.
He should have killed her.
He said, ‘This is it, you know.’
‘Sure,’ she said, and stubbed out the cigarette.
He walked out of the room and out of the hotel and into the city. He beat up two drunks who were singing at the tops of their lungs on Hastings Street. He threw an ash can through a plate glass window on Jefferson Avenue. He roamed the city. He was drunk himself when he got back to the apartment at four in the morning. He thought maybe he’d find Alice Patricia there. He thought if she was there, he would kill her. But she was already gone, took all of her clothes with her. Not even a note. Took his lawyer three months to find her. The divorce became final six months after that. And three months after that he made Detective/Third.
He still wondered about her whenever the holidays came around.
Hated her, but wondered about her.
Hated the fuckin’ holidays.
Hated the thought of snow maybe coming for Christmas.
He hated snow. It started out white and pure and ended up filthy.
He hated Christmas trees, too. All they did was make a garbage collection problem, even more work for the sanitmen, like the horseshit all over the streets. Right after Christmas you had a dead forest of fuckin’ Christmas trees, trailing tinsel, stacked up outside the buildings with the garbage. The garbage was bad enough in this city, he sometimes thought it was a city of uncollected black plastic bags. The leftover Christmas trees only made it worse. Saw them all over the city. Dead. Trailing tinsel. She used to dance with this little G-string that looked as if it was made of Christmas tree tinsel, all sparkly and bright, her hips rotating, dollar bills tucked into the waistband. I’m only doing it as a sideline. Could’ve been a big fuckin’ star. He’d have gone backstage, talked to the other people in the cast. Alice Patricia is my wife, he would’ve said. No kidding? Yeah, I’m a cop. No kidding?
He hated being a cop.
Hated the notes from this guy who had the squadroom in a fuckin’ tizzy. The Deaf Man. Who gave a shit about the Deaf Man? In Parker’s world they were all thieves, some of them smart thieves and some of them dumb ones. Maybe the Deaf Man was a smart one, but he was still a thief. So what was all this fuss about the notes he was sending? Smart-ass thief was all.
Parker wondered what it was like to be young.
Wondered what it would be like to be called Andrew again.
Alice Patricia used to call him Andrew.
He hated her.
Oh, Christ, how he loved her!