“What time?”
“Early. Around eleven o’clock, I guess it was.”
“Did you score?”
“Snow’s hinderin’ the traffic,” she said. She was not talking about automobile traffic. “You get your junk comin’ up from Florida, minute they hit North Carolina, they’re ass-deep in snow. I tell you two things it don’t pay to be in this weather, man. One’s a hooker, the other’s a junkie.”
Brown could think of a lot of other things it didn’t pay to be in this weather.
“Bert?” he said.
Kling looked at the two kids.
Then he said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
They walked down to the street in silence. The two old men were still standing around the gasoline drum, trying to warm themselves. When Kling started the car, the heater began rattling and clanging.
“They look clean, don’t you think?” Brown asked.
“Yeah,” Kling said.
“Didn’t even know the man’s name,” Brown said.
They drove downtown in silence. As they were approaching the station house, Brown said, “It’s a goddamn crying shame,” and Kling knew he wasn’t talking about the fact that they’d come up blank on the Edelman killing.
10
The superintendent of Sally Anderson’s building had been pestered by cops ever since her murder, and now there was a monk to contend with. The super was not a religious man, he did not give a damn about Heaven or Hell, and he did not feel like cooperating with a monk while he was sprinkling rock salt on the pavement outside the building, trying to melt the sheet of ice there.
“What’s she got to do with you?” he asked Brother Anthony.
“She ordered a Bible,” Brother Anthony said.
“A what?”
“A Bible. From the Order of Fraternal Pietists,” he said, figuring that sounded very holy.
“So?”
“I am of that order,” Brother Anthony said solemnly.
“So?”
“I would like to deliver her Bible. I’ve been upstairs to the apartment listed in her mailbox, and there’s no answer. I was wondering if you could tell me—”
“You bet there’s no answer,” the super said.
“That’s right,” Brother Anthony said.
“Ain’t never gonna be no answer up there,” the super said. “Not from her, anyway.”
“Oh?” Brother Anthony said. “Has Miss Anderson moved?”
“You mean you’re not in touch?”
“In touch?”
“With God?”
“With God?”
“You mean God doesn’t send down daily bulletins?”
“I’m not following you, sir,” Brother Anthony said.
“Doesn’t God have a list he sends down to you guys? Telling you who expired and where she was sent?” the super said, flinging rock salt onto the sidewalk with atheistic zeal. “Whether it was Heaven or Hell or in between?”
Brother Anthony looked at him.
“Sally Anderson is dead,” the super said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Brother Anthony said. “Dominus vobiscum.”
“Et cum spiritu tuo,” the super said; he had been raised as a Catholic.
“May God have mercy on her eternal soul,” Brother Anthony said. “When did she die?”
“Last Friday night.”
“What was the cause of her death?”
“Three bullet holes was what was the cause of her death.”
Brother Anthony’s eyes opened wide.
“Right here on the sidewalk,” the super said.
“Do the police know who did it?” Brother Anthony asked.
“The police don’t know how to blow their noses,” the super said. “Don’t you read the papers? It’s been all over the papers.”
“I wasn’t aware,” Brother Anthony said.
“Too busy with your Latin, I suppose,” the super said, hurling rock salt. “Your kyrie eleisons.”
“Yes,” Brother Anthony said. He had never heard those words before. They sounded good. He decided to use them in the future. Toss in a few kyrie eleisions with his Dominus vobiscums. Et cum spiritu tuo. That was a good one, too. And then it occurred to him that this was a remarkable coincidence here, Paco Lopez buying a couple of slugs on Tuesday night, and his supplier taking three of them on Friday night.
Suddenly, this did not seem like such small potatoes anymore. All at once, the two murders seemed like the kind of action the big-time spic drug dealers in this city were into. He wondered if he wanted to get involved in such goings-on. He certainly did not want to wake up dead in the trunk of an automobile in the parking lot at Spindrift Airport. Still, he sensed he had stumbled onto something that might just possibly net him and Emma some really big bucks. Provided they played it right. Provided they did their sniffing around without getting their feet wet. At first, anyway. Plenty of time to move in once they knew what was going on.
“What did she do for a living?” he asked the super, figuring if this Anderson girl had been into something big with Lopez, then maybe one or more of her business associates were into the same thing. It was someplace to start. Such remarkable coincidences didn’t fall into his lap every day of the week.
“She was a dancer,” the super said.
A dancer, Brother Anthony thought, visualizing somebody teaching the tango up at Arthur Murray’s. Once, a long time ago, when he was married to a lady who ran a luncheonette upstate, she had convinced him to go with her to a dance studio. Not Arthur Murray’s. Not Fred Astaire’s, either. Something called — he couldn’t remember. To learn the cha-cha, she’d been crazy about the cha-cha. Brother Anthony got an erection the first time he was alone in the room with his instructor, a pretty little brunette wearing a slinky gown, looked more like a hooker than a person supposed to teach him the cha-cha. The girl told him he was very light on his feet, which he already knew. He had his hands spread on her satiny little ass when his wife walked in and decided maybe they should stop taking cha-cha lessons. Step Lively, that had been the name of the place. That was a long time ago, before his wife met with the untimely accident that had cost him a year in Castleview on a bum manslaughter rap. All water under the bridge, Brother Anthony thought, kyrie eleison.
“In that big musical downtown,” the super said.
“What do you mean?” Brother Anthony asked.
“Fatback,” the super said.
Brother Anthony still didn’t know what he meant.
“The show,” the super said. “Downtown.”
“Where downtown?” Brother Anthony asked.
“I don’t know the name of the theater. Buy yourself a newspaper. Maybe they got one printed in Latin.”
“God bless you,” Brother Anthony said.
The phone on Kling’s desk began ringing just as he and Brown were leaving the squadroom. He leaned over the slatted rail divider and picked up the receiver.
“Kling,” he said.
“Bert, it’s Eileen.”
“Oh, hi,” he said. “I was going to call you later today.”
“Did you find it?”
“Just where you said it was. Back seat of the car.”
“You know how many earrings I’ve lost in the back seats of cars?” Eileen said.
Kling said nothing.
“Years ago, of course,” she said.
Kling still said nothing.
“When I was a teenager,” she said.
The silence lengthened.
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you found it.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Kling asked.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be coming down this way for anything, will you?”
“Well—”
“Court? Or the lab? DA’s Office? Anything like that?”