There was a Robert Coombs in Riverhead, and another Robert Coombs in Bethtown.
There were 164 McNallys scattered all over the city, more than enough to have started a revival of the clan, but none of them were named Dorothea, and there was only one listing for a McNally, D. — on South Homestead, off Skid Row.
“How do you want to hit them?” Carella asked.
“Let’s save Bethtown till tomorrow morning. Have to take a ferry to get out there, and God knows how they run on Sundays.”
“Okay,” Carella said. “Why don’t I take the Coombs in Riverhead, and go straight home from there?”
“Fine. I’ll take the McNally woman.”
“How come you’re getting all the girls lately?”
“It’s only fair,” Brown said. “We never get them on television.”
It was a city of contrasts.
Follow Esplanade Avenue uptown to where the Central & Northeastern railroad tracks came up out of the ground and, within the length of a city block, the neighborhood crumbled before your eyes, buildings with awnings and doormen giving way to grimy brick tenements, well-dressed affluent citizens miraculously transformed into shabby, hungry, unemployed victims of poverty. Take any crosstown street that knifed through the 87th Precinct, follow it across Mason, and Culver, and Ainsley, and you passed through slums that spread like cancers and then abruptly shriveled on the fringes of fancy Silvermine Road, with luxurious, exclusive, wooded, moneyed Smoke Rise only a stone’s throw away. Head all the way downtown to The Quarter, and find yourself a bustling middle-class bohemian community with its fair share of faggots and artsy-craftsy leather shops, its little theaters and renovated brownstones glistening with sandblasted facades and freshly painted balustrades and fire escapes, shuttered windows, cobblestoned alleys, spring flowers hanging in gaily colored pots over arched doorways with shining brass knobs and knockers. Then follow your nose west into Little Italy, a ghetto as dense as those uptown, but of a different hue, take a sniff of coffee being brewed in espresso machines, savor the rich smells of a transplanted Neapolitan cuisine merged with the aroma of roasting pork wafting over from Chinatown, not a block away, where the telephone booths resembled miniature pagodas and where the phones — like their uptown cousins — rarely worked. (How nice to have an emergency number with which to dial the police, three fast digits and a cop was on your doorstep — if only the phones would work.) Then walk a few blocks south, crossing the wide avenue where the elevated train structure used to stand, its shadow gone now, the flophouses and soup kitchens, the wholesale lighting fixture, restaurant supply, factory reject, party favor, and office equipment establishments draped with winos and exposed in all their shabby splendor to the June sunshine.
D. McNally lived in a building two blocks south of the wide avenue that ran for better than half a mile, the city’s skid row, a graveyard for vagrants and drunks, a happy hunting ground for policemen anxious to fill arrest quotas — pull in a bum, charge him with vagrancy or disorderly conduct, allow him to spend a night or two or more in jail, and then turn him out into the street again, a much better person for his experience. Brown walked past two drunks who sat morosely on the front stoop. Neither of the men looked up at him. Sitting on the curb in front of the building, his feet in the gutter, was a third man. He had taken off his shirt, black with lice, and he delicately picked the parasites from the cloth now, squashing them with his thumbnail against the curbstone. His skin was a pale sickly white in the glare of the sunshine, his back and arms covered with sores.
The entryway was dark; after the brilliant sunshine outside, it hit the eyes like a closed fist. Brown studied the row of broken mailboxes and found one with a hand-crayoned card that read D. McNally, Apt. 2A. He climbed the steps, listened outside the apartment door for several moments, and then knocked.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said.
“Miss McNally?”
“Yes?” she said, and before Brown could announce that he was The Law, the door opened. The woman standing in the doorway was perhaps fifty years old. Her hair had been dyed a bright orange, and it exploded about her chalk-white face like Fourth-of-July fireworks, erupting from her scalp in every conceivable direction, wildly unkempt, stubbornly independent. Her eyes were a faded blue, their size emphasized by thick black liner. Her lashes had been liberally stroked with mascara, her brows had been darkened with pencil, her mouth had been enlarged with lipstick the color of human blood. She wore a silk flowered wrapper belted loosely at the waist. Pendulous white breasts showed in the open top of the wrapper. Near the nipple of one breast, a human bite mark was clearly visible, purple against her very white skin. She was a short, dumpy woman with an overabundance of flabby flesh, and she looked as though she had deliberately dressed for the role of the unregenerate old whore in the local amateur production of Seven Hookers East.
“I don’t take niggers,” she said immediately, and started to close the door. Brown stuck his foot out, and the closing door collided with his shoe. Through the narrow open crack, D. McNally said again, emphatically this time, “I told you I don’t take niggers.” Brown didn’t know whether to laugh himself silly or fly into an offended rage. Here was a run-down old prostitute who would probably flop with anyone and everyone for the price of a bottle of cheap wine, but she would not take Negroes. He decided to find it amusing.
“All I want’s a blow job,” he said.
“No,” D. McNally said, alarmed now. “No. Go away!”
“A friend of mine sent me,” he said.
From behind the door, D. McNally’s voice lowered in suspicion. “Which friend?” she asked. “I don’t suck no niggers.”
“Lieutenant Byrnes,” Brown said.
“A soldier?”
“No, a policeman,” Brown said, and decided to end the game. “I’m a detective, lady, you want to open this door?”
“You ain’t no detective,” she said.
Wearily, Brown dug into his pocket and held his shield up to the crack between door and jamb.
“Why didn’t you say so?” D. McNally asked.
“Why? Do you suck nigger detectives?”
“I didn’t mean no offense,” she said, and opened the door. “Come in.”
He went into the apartment. It consisted of a tiny kitchen and a room with a bed. Dishes were piled in the sink, the bed was unmade, there was the stale stink of human sweat and cheap booze and cheaper perfume.
“You the Vice Squad?” she asked.
“No.”
“I ain’t hooking no more,” she said. “That’s why I told you to go away. I been out of the game, oh, must be six, seven months now.”
“Sure,” Brown said. “Is your name Dorothea McNally?”
“That’s right. I put ‘D. McNally’ in the phone book and in the mailbox downstairs because there’s all kinds of crazy nuts in this city, you know? Guys who call up and talk dirty, you know? I don’t like that kind of dirty shit.”
“No, I’ll bet you don’t.”
“When I was hooking, I had a nice clientele.”
“Mm-huh.”
“Gentlemen.”
“But no niggers.”
“Look, you didn’t take offense at that, did you?”
“No, of course not. Why should I take offense at a harmless little remark like that?”
“If you’re going to make trouble just because I said...”
“I’m not going to make any trouble, lady.”
“Because if you are, look, I’ll go down on you right this minute, you know what I mean? A cock’s a cock,” Dorothea said, “white or black.”
“Or even purple,” Brown said.