“You think they were doing a two-on-one?” Byrnes asked, using one of the more voguish terms that sometimes crept into his vocabulary.
“We don’t know yet,” Meyer said.
“What the hell do you know?” Byrnes asked heatedly, and then gained control of himself once again. “Have some candy, for Christ’s sake!” he said. “I’ll get fat as a horse here.”
“Pete,” Carella said, “this is a complicated one.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a complicated one. Don’t I know a complicated one when I see a complicated one?”
“Maybe it is a crazy,” Brown suggested.
“That’s the easy way out,” Byrnes said, “blaming it on a crazy. You want to know something? In my book, anybody who kills anybody is a crazy.”
The detectives had no quarrel with him there.
“Okay,” Byrnes said, “start vacuuming the street. Or, better yet, call some of our snitches, see if they can come up with a line on that goddamn gun. Bert, Artie, run your computer check on that holdup... have you been to that guy’s shop yet? Edelman’s?”
“Not yet,” Brown said.
“Go there, go through everything in the place. You come across even a speck of white dust, shoot it over to the lab for a cocaine test.”
“We’re not sure cocaine is the connection,” Meyer said.
“No? Then what is? The girl was doing coke and supplying half the cast with it—”
“Not that many, Pete.”
“However goddamn many! I don’t care if she was the star of that show, which I gather she wasn’t. On my block, she was delivering dope, and that made her a mule. We know Lopez was in the business of selling cocaine, he had six grams and eleven hundred bucks in his pocket when he was killed. So find out some more about little Miss Goody Two Shoes. Where’d she get the stuff she was spreading around the cast? Was she turning a profit or just doing a favor? And put the blocks to this producer, whatever the hell his name is, Carter. If he was sleeping with both that other dancer and the dead girl, I want to know about it. That’s it. Call Danny Gimp, call Fats Donner, call any snitch who’s in town instead of in Florida, where I should be. I want this case moved off the dime, have you got that? The next time the Chief calls me, I want to tell him something positive.”
“Yes, Pete,” Carella said.
“Don’t ‘Yes, Pete’ me. Just do it.”
“Yes, Pete.”
“And another thing. I’m not buying this as a crazy until you guys can convince me there was absolutely no connection between the three victims.”
Byrnes paused.
“Find that connection,” he said.
They arranged to meet on a bench in Grover Park, not too far from the skating rink and the statue of General Ronald King, who had once stormed a precious hill during the Spanish-American War, thereby shortening the tenure of the foreign tyrants who (according to William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) were oppressing the honest Cuban cane cutters and fishermen. A bygone Mayor had commissioned the statue of the general, not because of his indisputable gallantry, but only because King (like the Mayor himself) was reputed to have been a card mayvin whose specialty had been poker and whose favorite game within the genre had been something called “Shove,” which was also the Mayor’s favorite. For his patience in standing out there in bronze in all sorts of weather, the general had been further honored by the city’s Hispanic (though not Cuban) population, who scrawled their names in spray paint across his bold chest and who occasionally pissed on his horse’s legs.
School had been canceled today because of hazardous road conditions. As Carella waited for Danny Gimp on the bench near the statue of the general, he could hear the voices of young boys playing ice hockey on the outdoor rink. He was frozen to the marrow. He was not normally a philosophical man, but as he sat huddled inside his heaviest coat — and his jacket beneath that, and a sweater beneath that, and a flannel shirt beneath that, and woolen underwear beneath that — he thought that winter was a lot like police work. Winter wore you down. The snow, and the sleet, and the freezing rain, and the ice just kept coming at you till you were ready to throw up your hands in surrender. But you hung in there somehow until the spring thaw came and everything seemed all right again — till next winter.
Where the hell was Danny?
He saw him limping slowly up the path, turning his head this way and that to check the snow-covered terrain, just like an undercover agent out in the cold, which — to tell the truth — Danny sometimes fancied himself to be. He was wearing a red-and-blue plaid mackinaw and a red watch cap pulled down around his ears, and blue woolen gloves and green corduroy trousers tucked into the tops of black galoshes, a somewhat garish costume for someone trying to appear inconspicuous. He walked directly past the bench on which Carella sat freezing (there were times when he carried this spy stuff a bit too far), walked almost to the statue of the general, peered around cautiously, and then came back to the bench, sat beside Carella, took a newspaper from the side pocket of his mackinaw, opened it to hide his face, and said, “Hello, Steve. Cold, huh?”
Carella took off his glove and offered his hand to Danny. Danny lowered the newspaper, took off his glove, and reached out for Carella’s hand. They shook hands briefly and put on their gloves again. There were not too many detectives who shook hands with informers. Most cops and their informers were business associates of a sort, but they did not shake hands. Not many cops held snitches in very high regard. A snitch was usually someone who “owed” something to the cops. The cops were willing to look the other way in return for information. Some of the snitches who provided information were among the city’s worst citizens. But if politics made strange bedfellows, criminal investigation made even stranger ones. Hal Willis’s favorite snitch was a man named Fats Donner, whose penchant for twelve-year-old girls made him universally despised. But he was a good and valuable informer. Of all the snitches Carella worked with, he liked Danny Gimp best. And he would never forget that once upon a time, more years ago than he cared to remember, Danny had come to see him in the hospital when he was recovering from a bullet wound. That was why he always shook hands with Danny Gimp. He would shake hands with Danny Gimp even if the Commissioner were watching.
“How’s the leg?” he asked.
“It hurts when it’s cold,” Danny said.
“Just once,” Carella said, “I would like to meet someplace that isn’t Siberia.”
“I have to be careful,” Danny said.
“You can be careful inside.”
“Inside there are ears,” Danny said.
“Well, let’s make this fast, okay?”
“It’s your nickel,” Danny said, inappropriately in that they were not on the telephone, and anyway a nickel telephone call had gone the way of the buggy whip.
“I’m looking for a .38 Smith and Wesson that was used in three murders,” Carella said.
“When was this?” Danny asked.
“The first one was a week ago today, the ninth. The second one was last Friday night, the twelfth. The last one was on Saturday night, the thirteenth.”
“All of them up here?”
“Two of them.”
“Which two?”
“A coke dealer named Paco Lopez — ever hear of him?”