Meyer waited for a lull.
"We checked Tilly's record," he said at last, "and apparently the driver he beat up ...”
"A man named Hector Ruiz," Carella said.
"... went back to Puerto Rico shortly after Tilly got convicted.”
"Yeah?”
"That's the information we have," Meyer said.
"So?”
"Did you know Ruiz?”
"I knew him.”
"Is it true he went back to Puerto Rico?”
"Why you want to know?”
"Mister, what's troubling you?" Carella said.
"Nothing's troubling me. I get two cops in here asking about an employee, I'm naturally ...”
"Oh?" Meyer said.
"Is Ruiz still an employee?" Carella said.
"He's driving for us again, yes. Which is why I want to know ...”
"When did he get back?" Carella asked.
"October sometime, musta been.”
"Just about when Tilly got out of the slammer,”
Meyer said to Carella.
"Is that when he started working here again?”
Carella asked.
"October, November, in there," Guido said.
"Did he know Tilly was out of jail?”
"I never asked him.”
"Did Tilly ever come around here again? After he got out?”
"Not that I saw him.”
“Ruiz ever mention Tilly to you?”
"Never.”
"Does he have many pickups on Ainsley Avenue? Up in Diamondback?”
"None that I know of.”
"Any idea what he'd be doing up there? If it was him up there?”
"Whyn't you ask him yourself?" Guido said, and gestured through the glass panel toward where a black stretch limo was just pulling into the garage.
Meyer and Carella started for the stairs just as the front door of the limo opened. A tall, burly man wearing a chauffeur's livery and cap stepped out onto the concrete. He took off the hat almost immediately, revealing a shock of intensely black hair that matched the thick mustache under his nose. He was walking toward a door marked MEN when Carella and Meyer came out onto the street-level floor.
"Mr. Ruiz?" Carella said.
"Hector Ruiz?" Meyer said.
"Police officers," Carella said, flashing the tin. "We'd like to ask you ...”
Ruiz took one look and began running.
Straight out the middle arched door in the bank of three, hanging an immediate right toward the gas station, turning the corner there, and running for the river as Meyer and Carella came out of the building.
They pounded along behind him, closing the gap as they cut through the gas station, angling off the corner just as Ruiz had, shortest distance between two points, Ruiz some fifty feet ahead of them now and still headed for the river.
There was a lot of early-morning boat traffic plying its way up and down the river or back and forth between Isola and Calm's Point. Behind Ruiz and across the river, the city's skyscrapers stretched upward toward a bleak gray sky.
Smoke billowed up on the air from rooftop chimneys. Smoke floated up from the stacks of tugboats and ferries. Smokelike vapor trailed from the mouths of the men as they ran along the river's edge, passing joggers moving in both directions, none of them paying the slightest bit of attention to the man in black and the two men chasing him.
Ruiz was young and fast, and they never would have caught up with him if he hadn't taken a quick look back over his shoulder to see how close they were. In that instant-less than an instant, thirty seconds, ten seconds, the time it took for him to snap a backward glance at them and then turn his head forward again-he collided with a jogger coming from the opposite direction on his blind side. The jogger was a woman wearing red, and for an instant there was a checkerboard effect, Ruiz and the woman meeting in startled red-and-black collision, arms and legs flying as they both tumbled to the sidewalk.
"You stupid bastard!" the woman screamed.
But Ruiz was already scrambling to his feet.
He snapped another look over his shoulder.
This time he saw a .38 Detective Special three feet from his nose.
If a man began running when you yelled cop, that didn't necessarily mean he'd done anything. In certain parts of this city, the very sight of a blue uniform was enough to cause frantic scampering in all directions. So the detectives weren't particularly interested in learning why Ruiz had begun running the moment they'd announced themselves. On the other hand, Ruiz seemed perfectly willing to offer various inventive explanations for his curious behavior.
He first told them that he'd suddenly remembered leaving his wallet in a diner where he'd stopped for a cup of coffee before driving into the garage. Their sudden appearance had nothing to do with his sudden flight. It was just that he remembered about the wallet. This despite the fact that his wallet was in his back pocket, the sucker pocket in that any pickpocket could have relieved him of it by slitting the bottom of the pocket with a razor blade, but that was neither here nor there.
He then said it wasn't that wallet he was talking about, it was the wallet he usually kept in the limo's glove compartment, a wallet into which he normally placed all the signed vouchers from his trips. Not a wallet, really. More like a pouch.
A soft leather pouch. This was what he'd thought he'd left in the diner, which turned out to be a mistake because there it was, right where it was supposed to be, right there in the limo's glove compartment.
On the way uptown to the station house, he told them that as a young boy he'd been frightened by two detectives who set fire to the mattress of the hooker who used to live next door to his family in apartment 44 at 7215 Corchers Boulevard in Majesta. He'd been afraid of detectives ever since. And now, in the ten A.M. privacy of the squadroom, surrounded by more detectives than he'd ever hoped to see in his entire lifetime, Ruiz told them that he'd begun running because he thought they were going to question him about the gypsy cab drivers who were getting shot all over this city, "This is some crazy city, eh, man?" he said, and smiled like one of the banditos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
None of the detectives smiled back.
There were four of them, each one bigger than the other. Meyer, Carella, Hawes, and Brown.
All of them looking stern and disapproving.
"This ain't right, you know?" Ruiz said.
"Draggin' me in here, I d'in do nothin'.was "We think you did something," Hawes said.
Ruiz figured he was the meanest one in the bunch. Even meaner than the black cop. They were both about the same size. He wouldn't want to tangle with either one of them. He figured the bald cop was the easy mark. It was the bald cop who'd read him his rights and asked if he'd wanted an attorney. He told them he didn't need no attorney if he didn't do nothin'. He figured that was the smart way to play it. You ask for a lawyer, they right away think you done something. "Tilly," Carella said. "Roger Turner Tilly.”
He was thinking Ruiz could come up with a thousand and one explanations for why he'd run, and maybe nine hundred and ninety-nine of them would have at least a slight bearing on the truth, but a possible reason he wasn't yet mentioning was that he'd shot Tilly in the back of the head and strung him up from the ceiling. Which was a very good reason to run when cops came around asking questions.
"I don't know this name," Ruiz said.
"Hoo boy," Brown said.
"Let's start by telling the truth, okay?”
Hawes said. "We'll all save a lot of time that way, okay, Hector?”
"Tilly," Ruiz said, nodding, seemingly thinking it over. "Roger Tilly, huh?”
"Roger Turner Tilly," Hawes said.
"The man who broke your nose and both your arms last March," Carella said.