Darcy’s older brother was a man named Bosley “Buzz” Welles, who worked as a computer programmer for the IBM branch office in Columbus. She’d had no steady boyfriends when she was living at home, but she was an attractive popular girl who had many friends of both sexes. So far as Mr. and Mrs. Welles knew, she had not been dating anyone since she’d started her freshman year at Converse in September. Her parents told the reporter that she had recently been contacted by the magazine Sports USA regarding an article they were preparing on promising young women athletes, and was in fact scheduled to be interviewed on the night she was murdered. Mr. and Mrs. Welles did not remember the name of the man who was to conduct the interview. On his own initiative, the reporter had called the editorial offices of Sports USA in New York, and had been told that they knew of no such article in preparation.
“Is it possible, then,” the reporter editorialized in the distinctive style of his paper, “that the Road Runner Killer is representing himself as someone who works for Sports USA, thereby gaining the confidence of his young victims before leading them to slaughter?”
You bet your ass, Ollie thought, reading the article.
He was sitting beside Carella in a car they’d checked out not ten minutes earlier, heading downtown. Hawes was sitting in back. He did not like having his usual seat usurped by Ollie, but at the same time he did not envy Carella having to sit so close to him. He noticed that Carella had opened the window on the driver’s side of the car. Wide.
“Listen to this,” Ollie said, and began reading aloud. “‘If this is indeed the case...’”
“If what is indeed the case?” Hawes asked.
“Somebody palming himself off as a reporter from Sports USA,” Ollie said, and began reading aloud again. “If this is indeed the case, the baffled policemen of this city might make note of it. And they might do well to warn any young female athletes at universities or colleges against accepting at face value anyone who represents himself to them as a reporter or journalist.”
Alf Miscolo, in the Clerical Office of the Eight-Seven, had already typed up and photocopied a letter dictated by Lieutenant Byrnes for hand-delivery to every college and university in the city. The detectives had, in fact, debated whether the letter should go out to high schools as well.
“There’s more,” Ollie said. “This guy here, he all of a sudden remembers this is supposed to be an interview with Mom and Dad, and not a story giving advice to the police department. You ready? ‘Mr. and Mrs. Welles were sobbing again as we ended our telephone conversation. The wires between here and Columbus hummed with their grief, a grief shared by parents all over this city, a grief that seemed to echo the words: ‘Find the Road Runner Killer.’”
“Beautiful,” Hawes said.
“Page opposite has pictures of the other two girls,” Ollie said, “hanging from lampposts like Christmas ornaments. Whole fuckin’ paper is full of the murders. They even got comments from the cops in New York who were handling the ‘Son of Sam’ killings, and a story by the reporter who covered it there, trying to find comparisons in M.O.s. It’s headlined ‘Psycho Similarities.’ I’m surprised they didn’t dig up Jack the Ripper. If this doesn’t drive our man underground, nothing will. I’m glad the parents didn’t remember his name, the name he gave the girl. Otherwise Corey McIntyre out in L.A.’d find himself splashed all over this rag.”
Ollie folded the newspaper and threw it into the backseat. It hit Hawes’s knee and fell to the floor of the car.
“Give ’em time,” Hawes said. “They’ll get to it.”
“They wanna be cops,” Ollie said, “why don’t they join the force? They wanna be reporters, they should shut the fuck up and not stick their noses in police work. You’re coming to Haley, you know that?” he said to Carella.
“I know it.”
“Which garages did you hit already?” Ollie asked.
“I’ve got the list,” Hawes said.
“’Cause this one is supposed to be right around the corner from the restaurant, near Jefferson.”
“I thought we hit everything in a five-block radius,” Hawes said.
“Yeah, well maybe you missed one, huh, Red?” Ollie said.
Hawes didn’t like anyone to call him “Red.” He preferred Lefty to Red. He preferred Great Bull Moose Farting to Red.
“My name’s Cotton,” he said mildly.
“That’s a dumb name,” Ollie said.
Hawes silently agreed with him.
“I think I’ll call you ‘Red,’” Ollie said.
“Okay,” Hawes said. “And I’ll call you ‘Phyllis.’”
“Phyllis?” Ollie said. “Where’d you get Phyllis from? Phyllis? There’s a space,” he said to Carella.
“I see it,” Carella said.
“In case you didn’t,” Ollie said. “Way you guys missed a garage right around the corner from the restaurant, who knows if you can see parking spaces or not?”
Carella pulled into the space. He threw down the visor with its attached notice that this was a police officer on a duty call, just in case some overzealous patrolman hadn’t met his quota of parking tickets today. The three detectives got out of the car. Carella locked all the doors. He knew some cops from the Six-One who’d had their car stolen from the curb while they were inside a liquor store investigating an armed robbery.
“So where are we?” Ollie said. “Restaurant’s on Ulster and South Haley, this is what?”
“Ulster and Bowes.”
“So what we should do,” Ollie said, “is go back to the restaurant, use that as our starting point. Then we go up to the corner closest to Jefferson and fan out left and right from there. He said right around the corner, didn’t he? Near Jefferson?”
“That’s what he said,” Carella said. “But right around the corner could mean anything.”
“What could right around the corner mean but right around the corner?” Ollie said. “Am I right, Red? Or am I right?”
Hawes winced.
“Ollie,” he said, “I really don’t like being called ‘Red.’”
“So I’ll call you ‘Cotton,’ will you like that better?”
“I would.”
“Okay, okay. But if I had a dumb name like ‘Cotton,’ I’d prefer being called almost anything else, I got to tell you. Am I right, Steve-a-rino? Or am I right?”
Carella said nothing.
The detectives walked back to the restaurant.
“Fancy joint,” Ollie commented. “Guy must have plenty of bread, he takes his victims here before he zonks them. Okay, now to the corner. You guys with me? I want to show you how to find a garage.”
The garage was not right around the corner.
It was a block up from the corner, and then a half-block to the north, toward Jefferson Avenue. It was one of the garages Carella and Hawes had hit on the night of the Welles murder. They had spoken then to a little Puerto Rican parking attendant named Ricardo Albareda who could not remember seeing a young girl in a red dress with a man wearing a dark brown suit, a tan tie, and brown shoes. They had gone on to give Albareda the same description the waiter at Marino’s had given Hawes: five feet ten or eleven, 170 pounds, brown hair and brown eyes, a mustache. Albareda still couldn’t remember the couple.