In street parlance over the years, cocaine had been known under various names: C, coke, snow, happy dust, sleigh ride, gold dust, Bernice, Corrine, girl, flake, star dust, blow, white lady, and — of course — nose candy. When combined with heroin, it was called a speedball, although the street jargon for this combination had recently changed to “Belushi Cocktail.” Whatever you chose to call it, cocaine was a headache. Up in the Eight-Seven, the heroin dealers had taken to giving their wares “brand” names. You bought your little glassine bag, and it came with a label pasted on it, and the label read Coolie High or Murder One or Rush or Jusey Whales or Quick Silver or Rope of Dope or Cousin Eddie or Bunny or Stay High or Crazy Eddie Shit or Good Pussy, hardly names that would ever be considered by General Foods. But since the people selling dope were criminals, and since there truly was no honor among thieves, within hours after a reputable dealer’s terrific stuff hit the street with a brand name like “Devil,” for example, or “Prophecy” or “New Admissions,” some slimy little pusher at the bottom of the ladder would be selling you a bag with the same brand name on it, but with the heroin cut almost to nothing — a “beat bag,” as it was known to addicts and dealers alike. But that was heroin.
Cocaine was something else.
The most recent federal report handed around the squadroom estimated that an approximate sixty metric tons of cocaine had been smuggled into the United States in the past year, at a wholesale value of $50 billion.
Cocaine was fashionable.
That was the biggest problem with cocaine. You didn’t have to be a raggedy-pantsed slum kid to snort a line. You could be running a big Hollywood studio, making multimillion-dollar decisions about the next movie you’d be foisting on an unsuspecting public, and that night you could sit around your Malibu beach house listening to the pounding of the surf and the pounding of your own head as you inhaled coke from the little gold spoon you wore on a slender gold chain under your custom-tailored silk shirt. In fact, if you wanted to start doing cocaine, it helped to be among the nation’s biggest wage earners. Every working cop knew the mathematics of cocaine. Every working cop was also an expert on the metric system of weights and measures. To understand the economy, you had to know that an ounce of cocaine was the same thing as 28.3 grams, and a kilo was the equivalent of 35.2 ounces, or 2.2 pounds by avoirdupois measure. Your average Colombian coca farmer sold his leaves to a trafficker for about $1 a pound — $2 a kilo, give or take a penny. By the time this raw material was transformed into cocaine hydrochloride, and then diluted again and again — “stepped on” or “whacked” or “hit” — and then sold in little packets about the size of the one you might find in a sugar bowl, a gram could cost you anywhere between $100 and $125, depending on the quality. The astronomical bucks to be realized in the cocaine trade were attributable to the extraordinary number of middlemen between the source and the consumer, and the ruthless dilution — all the way down the line — from a high of 90 to 98 percent pure in South America to a low of 12 percent pure on the city’s streets.
Both Meyer and Carella had mixed feelings about a possible cocaine connection to the murders. On the one hand, they were eager to close out the Lopez/Anderson/Edelman (and possibly Quadrado) file. On the other hand, if the murders had anything to do with the South American gangsters who operated out of Majesta across the river, in a neighborhood dubbed Baby Bogotá by the police — well, they just weren’t sure that was a can of peas they particularly cared to open. Organized crime wasn’t their bag, and the Colombian underworld was perhaps something more than a pair of flatfoots from an undernourished precinct could cope with effectively. As they knocked on the door to Timothy Moore’s second-floor apartment on Chelsea Place, they were hoping he would be able to tell them Sally Anderson was into some big-time drug dealing that was netting her the “extra” cash the black dancer Lonnie had hinted at — but they were also hoping the lead was a false one; better a bona fide crazy than a Colombian hit man.
There was music playing behind the door. Classical music. Lots of strings. Both of the detectives were musical ignoramuses; neither of them could identify it. The music was very loud. It flooded out past the wooden door and into the corridor. They knocked again.
“Hello!” a voice yelled.
“Police!” Carella yelled back.
“Okay, hold on!”
They held on. The music was all-pervasive, strings giving way to brasses and then to what Carella guessed was an oboe. Beneath the melodious din, he heard a lock being turned. The door opened. The music swelled more loudly into the hallway.
“Hey, hi,” Timothy Moore said.
He was wearing a gray sweat shirt imprinted in purple with the name and seal of Ramsey University. He was also wearing brown corduroy trousers and frayed house slippers.
“Come on in,” he said. “I just got home a few minutes ago.”
Home appeared to be a three-room apartment, living room, bedroom, and kitchen; in this section of town, so close to the school, it was probably costing him something like $600 a month. The entrance door opened onto the small living room, furnished with a thrift-shop sofa, chairs, and lamp, and unpainted bookcases brimming with thick tomes Carella assumed were medical texts. A human skeleton hung on a rack in one corner of the room. On an end table near the battered sofa, a telephone rested alongside the portable radio that was blaring the symphony or concerto or sonata or whatever it was. The radio was one of those little Japanese jobs like Genero’s, similar in every respect except one: Genero’s was usually tuned to a rock station. Beyond the sofa, a door opened into a bedroom with an unmade bed. On the opposite wall, another door opened into the kitchen.
“Let me turn this down,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio. As he lowered the volume, Carella wondered why he simply didn’t turn it off. He said nothing.
“There,” Moore said.
The volume was still loud enough to make it annoying. Carella wondered if Moore was a little hard of hearing, and then wondered if he wasn’t overreacting. All Teddy had to learn was that he’d been annoyed by the listening habits of someone who might be a bit deaf.
“We didn’t want to bother you at the school,” he said over the sound coming from the radio. Clarinets now, he guessed. Or maybe flutes.
“I wonder if you could lower that a bit more,” Meyer said, apparently unburdened by any guilt over hurting the feelings of the possibly handicapped.
“Oh, sorry,” Moore said, and went immediately to the radio again. “I have it on all the time, I sometimes forget how loud it is.”
“There’ve been studies,” Meyer said.
“Studies?”
“About the rock-and-roll generation growing up deaf.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Meyer said. “From all the decibels.”
“Well, I’m not deaf yet,” Moore said, and smiled. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A drink?”
“Nothing, thanks,” Carella said.
“Well, sit down, won’t you? You said you tried me at the school—”