“We’ll get the ad,” Sophie said. “Don’t worry.”
“We better,” Jeeb said. “So far, they headlined three other groups, and we get a half-inch near the bottom with groups like Moses Roses.”
“Who’s Moses Roses?” Sophie asked.
“Who the fuck knows?”
“We get the right ad or we walk,” Silver said, “plain and simple.”
“That’s the onliest way, Sil,” Grass agreed, as if it was his thought and not Jeeb’s. Man.
“Tell us your new idea,” she said, and grinned at him, all eyes.
“We do a love song,” Sil said.
THE PLACE parker decided to take Cathy Herrera to brunch was a steak joint frequented by high-ranking police officers, very few of whom Parker knew. But he thought he would impress her by suggesting that he hobnobbed with rank.
Yesterday, the city’s two tabloids had both done a number on the spray-paint killer, one in its morning edition, the other in its afternoon edition. The morning paper had zeroed in on Peter Wilkins, the dead lawyer, with the headline:
SECRET SPRAYER
…which related to the page-four profile they did on the successful litigator who went around at night spraying graffiti on the walls of buildings.
The afternoon paper’s headline read:
SPRAYER
PREY
BETTER
PRAY
(…who’s next?)
The inside story was subtitledDESTINY WITH DEATH. A lame journalistic exercise, it attempted to show how three people of diverse backgrounds—an attorney, a veteran graffiti writer, and an immigrant novice—had met the same fate at the hands of someone the newspaper called “an obsessed vigilante.” In addition, several men and women in the street had been interviewed regarding the prevalence of graffiti in the city, the question posed to them being:What should we do about graffiti writers? These expert criminologists—a telephone operator, a letter carrier, a construction worker, an obstetrician, and a woman protesting pornography in magazines—had varying views.
The telephone operator said that if they got caught, they should be forced to wear uniforms with stenciling that read I AM A VANDAL while publicly and under guard they cleaned off all the walls in the city.
The obstetrician said that like Norman Mailer, he considered graffiti an art form with macho qualities, and aesthetic and political values. Besides, what ever happened to free speech in this country?
The woman protesting pornography said that graffiti was a mild abuse when compared to the millions of women who became the victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault inspired by pornographic magazines.
The construction worker said that anybody caught spraying buildings should be shot.
The letter carrier said he had work to do.
Parker agreed with the construction worker, but he couldn’t very well say this to Cathy because, after all, her son had been shot while spraying a building. He wasn’t even sure she had seen the afternoon paper, which painted a somewhat unflattering picture of young Alfredo Herrera, intimating that because he and his mother had come from a town called Francisco de Macoris—a place with a reputation for exporting drug dealers to this city and importing dope money back to the Dominican Republic—why then wasn’t it possible that Herrera himself had been part of the notorious Los Cubanos drug ring? Parker tended to agree that all spics were in some way related to the drug trade, but he couldn’t say this, either, because after all Catalina Herrera was herself a spic, even if she called herself Cathy.
He decided instead to wave over at a man he’d met only briefly in court once when they were both testifying on the same case, a deputy inspector sitting in full regalia with three suits who looked important, too, all of them digging into the huge portions of steak and eggs before them.
“Inspector,” Parker said, and nodded chummily, and the inspector looked back sort of bewildered, but returned the nod, and Parker said to Cathy, “Good friend of mine,” and then, “Would you care for something to drink before lunch?”
EILEEN KEPT WAITING for the door to open again.
She was still standing in the hallway outside apartment 409, just to the left of the doorframe. Inspector Brady had figured out a plan to get the girl out of the apartment. Once she was out, they would talk to Jimmy about putting down the gun. Meanwhile, the important thing was to get her out of there safely. Jimmy’s feelings about her seemed ambivalent at best; Michael Goodman, the negotiating team’s psychiatrist, figured he could jump either way. Tom, the younger brother, had vehemently denied ever having laid a hand on his wife; Brady was inclined to believe him. More likely was his story that the sounds of their lovemaking had infuriated Jimmy. If this was true, Goodman was fearful that Jimmy would act out the fantasy he himself had created, that of his sister-in-law as the victim of physical abuse. The girl was handcuffed to the bed in there and no one knew how long it would be before Jimmy moved into action, one way or another. Goodman felt rape was a distinct possibility.
Eileen just wished she thought better of Brady’s plan.
He had asked her to tell Jimmy—if and when he opened the damn door again—that her boss wanted only to protect the girl at all costs, which he was sure Jimmy also wanted. Toward that end, he was willing to recommend an investigation of possible assault by the brother, and to turn young Lisa over to a social agency that would help her to construct a healthful way of dealing with the battered-wife syndrome. In the meantime, because Jimmy had embarked upon this present course of action—the inspector’s exact words—only to protect his sister-in-law from further abuse, Brady would recommend dropping any charges against him.
All of this was premised on the wife abuse being a reality. If, instead and in fact, Jimmy had been lusting for young Lisa all along and had finally been driven over the edge by the sounds of passion next door—which both Brady and Goodman believed to be the actual case—then why would Jimmy come out of that apartment, why would he now be willing to release the object of his desire? None of it made any sense to Eileen.
Jimmy had made no demands of them. He hadn’t asked for a limo to the airport and a jet plane to Rio, he hadn’t even asked for a cheeseburger and a bottle of beer. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone with the girl. This they were denying him. He had threatened to kill the girl if they did not leave him alone with her. She doubted if he really planned to do this; he was, after all, still talking to them. But she couldn’t see how the inspector’s offer in any way jibed with Jimmy’s stated wishes. Wouldn’t it be better, not to mention safer, if they offered to leave him alone with the girl once she was out of the apartment? Promise him the honeymoon suite at the nearest hotel, just get them both the hell out of there.
You weren’t supposed to lie to them, you weren’t supposed to say I’ll get you this or that and then not deliver while there were still hostages in there. But this would be different—or so she told herself—this would be saying, Look, you come out of there with the girl, we’ll deliver you in a limo to such and such a luxury hotel, where a room’s been reserved for you and Lisa, you can go there to talk this over, work something out, what do you say? Nab him the minute he walked out of the apartment. Provided he first put down the gun. That had to be part of the deal. First you put down the gun. Then you come out with the girl. Nobody gets hurt. We leave you alone with her to work it out. No gun. That’s what you want, anyway, isn’t it? To be left alone with the girl?