According to Colby Strothers, Lorraine Greer worked as a waitress at the Steamboat Cafe.
The detectives got there at twenty minutes past four.
The manager told them the girls on the day shift would be leaving as soon as they set the tables, filled the sugar bowls and salt and pepper shakers, made sure there was enough ketchup out, generally got things ready for the next shift. That was part of the job, he explained. Getting everything ready for the next shift. He pointed out a tall young woman standing al the silverware tray.
'That's Lorraine Greer,' he said.
Long black hair, pale complexion, bluish-gray eyes that opened wide when the detectives identified themselves.
'Miss Greer,' Carella said, 'we're trying to locate someone we think you know.'
'Who's that?' she asked. She was scooping up knives, forks and spoons from the silverware tray. Dropping them into a basket that had a napkin spread inside it. 'Don't make me lose count,' she said. Meyer figured she was multiplying the number of her tables by the place settings for each table, counting out how many of each utensil she would need.
'Scott Handler,' Carella said.
'Don't know him,' she said. 'Sorry.'
She swung the basket off the stand bearing the silverware tray, and began walking across the restaurant. The detectives followed her. The floor - the deck - rolled with the motion of the river. Carella was trying to figure why Strothers might have lied to them. He couldn't think of a single reason.
'Miss Greer,' he said, 'we feel reasonably certain you know Mr Handler.'
'Oh? And what gives you that impression?'
Fork on the folded napkin to the left of the plate. On the right, she placed a knife, a tablespoon, a teaspoon, in that order. Working her way around the table. Six place settings. Eyes on what she was doing.
'We talked to a young man named Colby Strothers . . .'
'Don't know him, either. Sorry.'
River traffic moving past the steamboat's windows. A tugboat. A pleasure craft. A fireboat. Lorraine's eyes sideswiped the entrance door amidships. Both detectives caught the glance.
'Mr Strothers told us . . .'
'I'm sorry, but I don't know either of those people.'
Eyes checking out the door again.
But this time . . .
Something flashing in those eyes.
Both detectives turned immediately.
The young man standing in the doorway was perhaps six feet two inches tall, with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a narrow waist. He was wearing a red team jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband, brown leather gloves, brown trousers, brown loafers. He took one look at them standing there with Lorraine, and immediately turned and went out again.
'Handler!' Carella shouted, and both detectives started for the door. Handler - if that's who he was - had already crossed the gangplank and was on the dock when they came out running. 'Police!' Carella shouted, but that didn't stop him. He almost knocked over a teenybopper eating a hamburger, kept running for the streetside entrance to the area, and reached the sidewalk as Carella and Meyer came pounding up some twenty yards behind him. Handler - if that's who he was - then made a left turn and headed downtown, paralleling the river.
The streetlights were already on, it was that time of day when the city hovered between dusk and true darkness. A tugboat hooted on the river, an ambulance siren raced through the city somewhere blocks away, and then there was a sudden hush into which Carella again shouted, 'Police!' and the word shattered the brief stillness, the city noises all came back again, the sounds of voices and machines, the sound of Handler's shoes slapping against the pavement ahead - if that's who he was.
Carella did not like chasing people. Neither did Meyer. That was for the movies. In the movies, they filmed a chase in forty takes that were later edited to look like one unbroken take where the hero cop is running like an Olympics gold-medal track star and the thief is running like the guy who won only the bronze. In real life, you did it all in one take. You went pounding along the sidewalk after a guy who was fifteen to twenty years younger than you were, and in far better physical condition, and you hoped that his red team jacket wasn't for track or basketball. In real life, the calves of your legs began to ache and your chest caught fire as you chased after someone you knew you'd possibly never catch, watching the back of that disappearing red jacket, barely able to make out the white lettering on it, The Prentiss Academy, which in the gloom and with your thirty-something-eyes you couldn't have deciphered at all if you weren't already familiar with it. In real life, you watched the beacon of that red jacket moving further and further-
'We're losing him!' Carella shouted.
But then suddenly, Harold, in this city of miracle and coincidence, a police car came cruising up the street from the opposite direction, and Handler - if that's who he was - spotted the car, and made an immediate hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and began running diagonally across the traffic. Toward them. On the other side of the street. Running for the corner, where he undoubtedly planned to turn north. They anticipated his route, though, and came racing for the same corner, Carella getting there an instant before he did, Meyer getting there an instant later, so that they had him boxed between them. He saw the guns in their hands. He slopped dead. Everyone was out of breath. White puffs of vapor blossomed on the air.
'Scott Handler?' Carella said.
That's who he was.
* * * *
The two women were white hookers of a better grade than those Hamilton's people placed on the street every day of the week. Hamilton had in fact ordered these two from a lady named Rosalie Purchase, which happened to be her real name. Rosalie was a dame in her sixties whose call-girl operation had survived the inroads of the Mafia, the Chinese, and now the Jamaican and 'other exotic punks,' as she defiantly called them. Rosalie dealt in quality flesh. Which might have accounted for her survival. In a day and age when two buck whores were turning vague tricks for holier-than-thou ministers in cheap roadside motels, it was nice to know that if a real sinner wanted a racehorse, Rosalie Purchase was there to provide one.
Rosalie wore hats as a trademark.
On the street, in the house, in restaurants, even in church.
The cops called her Rosalie the Hat.
Or alternately Rosalie the Hot, despite the fact that she had never personally performed even the slightest sexual service for any one of her clients. If, in fact, she had any clients. For a lady who'd been openly running a whore house for a good many years now, it was amazing how little the police had on her. For all the police could prove, Rosalie might just as easily have been a milliner. Nobody could understand why she had never been busted. Nobody could understand why a wire had never been installed on her telephone. There were rumors, of course. Hey, listen, there are rumors in any business.