“Where’d they live?” Carella asked.
“On Ainsley. We still got a handful of Anglos living up here... the rent’s cheap, they’re mostly people trying to make it, you know? Like starving painters, or musicians, or these guys who make statues, you know?”
“Sculptors,” Meyer said.
“Right, sculptors,” Quadrado said. “That’s a good way of putting it.”
“Let me get this straight,” Carella said. “You’re saying that a year ago—”
“Around then.”
“Lopez was living with a blonde cocaine dealer—”
“No, not then.”
“He wasn’t living with her?”
“He was living with her, but she wasn’t dealing coke. Not then.”
“What was she doing?”
“Trying to make it. Same as anybody else.”
“Trying to make it how?”
“I think she was a dancer or something.”
Carella looked at Meyer again.
“I think she finally moved away because she got a part in a show,” Quadrado said. “Last summer sometime. Moved back downtown, you know?”
“And surfaced again dealing coke,” Carella said.
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“The coke? Musta been last fall sometime. October, sometime.”
“Began supplying Lopez with coke.”
“Yeah.”
“Who told you this?”
“Judite.”
“Are you sure the girl wasn’t coming up here to buy coke?”
“No, no. She was an ounce dealer, she was selling it. That’s how come Judite figured she could pick up the trade now that Lopez was dead and gone. Same customers, same ounce dealer.”
“How often did she come up here?”
“The blonde? Every week.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“I know it because that’s what Judite told me.”
“And this started in October sometime?”
“Yeah, that’s when Lopez went into business. Again, this is all according to Judite. I got no personal knowledge of it myself.”
“When did she come up?”
“On Sundays, usually.”
“To deliver the coke.”
“And maybe a little something else besides.”
“What do you mean?”
“Renew old times, you know? In the sack.”
“With Lopez?”
“According to Judite. Who knows if it’s true or not? You get a chick taking all kinds of shit from a guy, she begins to imagine things, you know? She starts finding panties that ain’t hers under every pillow, you know what I mean? She starts smelling other women on her sheets. It gets to her. Listen, my cousin was a little nuts, I’ll tell you the truth. You have to be a little nuts to take up with a guy like Lopez.”
“But you don’t know the girl’s name, huh?”
“No.”
“Do you know the name of the show she was in?”
“No.”
“But you’re sure she used to live with Lopez.”
“Positive. Not at first. She had an apartment in this building where there’s a couple other Anglos. But then she moved in with him. Yeah, I’m sure of that. I mean, that I seen with my own eyes.”
“What did you see?”
“Him and her coming in and going out of the building together, all hours of the day and night. Look, it was common knowledge Lopez had himself a blonde chick from downtown.”
“What building was this?” Meyer asked.
“The building he was living in.”
“When he got shot?”
“No, no. That’s where he was living with Judite. That was on Culver. This was on Ainsley.”
“Do you know the address?”
“No. It’s near the drugstore there. On the corner of Ainsley and Sixth, I think it is. The Tru-Way drugstore.”
“Would you recognize the girl if you saw her again?”
“The blonde? Oh, sure. Nice-looking chick. What she saw in Lopez is another mystery, right?”
“Alonso, would you do us a favor?” Meyer said. “Would you come over to the station house with us? For just a minute?”
“Why? What’d I do?” Quadrado said.
“Nothing,” Meyer said. “We want to show you some pictures.”
12
Arthur Brown did not want to be doing what he was doing. Arthur Brown wanted to be watching television with his wife.
He did not want to be wading through all this stuff he and Kling had got, first, from Marvin Edelman’s widow, and next, from Marvin Edelman’s safety deposit box. If Arthur Brown had wanted to become an accountant, he would not have taken the patrolmen’s test all those years ago. Accounting bored Brown. Even his own accounting bored him. He normally asked Caroline to balance the family checkbooks, something she did marvelously well.
It was twenty minutes past 11:00.
The news would be over in ten minutes, and Johnny Carson would be coming on. Brown sometimes felt that the only two things uniting the people of the United States were Johnny Carson and the weather. Nothing short of a nuclear war could make everyone in the good old US of A feel more united than Johnny Carson and the weather. This winter, the weather was rotten all over the country. If you flew from here to Minneapolis, the weather would be the same. It gave you a feeling that here and Minneapolis were one and the same place. It united the people in adversity. If you flew from here to Cincinnati, the weather would be rotten there, too, and you’d step off the plane and immediately feel this enormous sense of brotherhood. Then, when you got to the hotel room and ordered your drink from room service, and unpacked your bag, and turned on your television set, why there would be old Johnny Carson at 11:30 P.M. sharp all over the country, and you knew that in Los Angeles they were watching Johnny Carson at the very same time, and in New York they were watching him, and in Kalamazoo, and Atlanta, and Washington, DC, they were all watching Johnny Carson, and it made you feel like an essential part of the greatest people on earth, all of them sitting there with their fingers up their asses, watching Johnny Carson.
Brown figured that if Johnny Carson ran for the presidency, he would win hands down. What he wanted to do right now — well, ten minutes from now — was watch Johnny Carson. He did not want to be cross-checking the contents of Marvin Edelman’s safety deposit box against Marvin Edelman’s bank statements and canceled checks for the past year or so. That was something for an accountant to be doing. What a cop should be doing was sitting on the sofa with his arm around Caroline while they watched Lola Falana, who was scheduled to be Johnny’s guest tonight, and whom Brown considered the most beautiful black woman in the world — next to Caroline, of course. He had never mentioned to Caroline how beautiful he thought Lola Falana was. After all these years on the force, he had learned that you never opened a door until you knew for certain what was behind it, and he wasn’t quite sure what might be lurking behind Caroline’s door these days. Brown had once mentioned that Diana Ross wasn’t bad looking, and Caroline had thrown an ashtray at him. He had threatened to arrest her for attempted assault, and she had told him he could damn well glue the ashtray together himself. That had been a long time ago, and he hadn’t tried opening that particular door since. He had the feeling he might find the same familiar tigress behind it.
He was very happy that Mrs. Edelman had found the duplicate key to her husband’s safety deposit box, because the discovery had saved him and Kling the trouble of going all the way downtown to apply for a court order to open the box, which application might or might not have been granted depending on which magistrate they’d have come up against that afternoon. Some of the judges downtown, you got the feeling they were on the side of the bad guys. You got a judge like Walking Wilbur Harris, you could go into his courtroom with a guy holding a machete in one bloody hand and a severed head in the other, and old Wilbur would cluck his tongue and say, “My, my, we’ve been a naughty boy today, haven’t we? Prisoner released on his own recognizance.” Or he’d set a ridiculous bail like ten thousand bucks for somebody who’d killed his mother, his father, his Labrador retriever, and all his pet goldfish. You got a judge like Walking Wilbur, it sometimes made you feel you were on the job for no reason at all in the world. You worked your tail off out there, you made your collar, and Wilbur let the man walk, sometimes clear to China, never to be heard from since. So what was the use? He was happy he hadn’t had to go downtown today to beg for a court order to open that box.