Frank’s stuff lit up the sky like neon.
Wiggy had been taught to distrust every white man in the universe. He turned to Tigo and said in something like astonishment, “Why, the honkie’s honest!”
But Wiggy also served a much higher cause.
Himself.
And he, too, had a decided edge.
4 .
OLLIE WEEKS HAD CALLED his sister to tell her he might not be able to make it there on Christmas Day cause he’d caught a leg being chewed on by a lion, and she’d said, “You ought to find yourself another job.” Typical Isabelle Weeks remark, the jackass.
Now, to make matters worse, here was a dead guy stuffed in a garbage can, with a bullet hole at the back of his head. Your classic Mafia-style murder, except that the gangs up here in the Eight-Eight were all either black or Hispanic. Ollie could remember a time when the Mob ruled this part of the city, and all the Negroes and spics were running around doing the legwork for them while the Wops pulled in all the hard cash. Now it was different. The Wops should have learned to speak Spanish or so-called black English, which meant saying, “I done gone sell some dope to school chillun.”
Ollie loved using the word “Negro” because he knew it pissed off “people of color,” as they sometimes chose to be called. “Blacks” was another favorite, they should make up their fuckin minds. Same thing with the spics up here, which word he didn’t dare use to their faces or they would cut him up and serve him from acuchifrito stand. They didn’t know whether to call themselves “Hispanics,” which sounded too much like “spics,” or “Latinos,” which sounded like a team of tango dancers. Ollie thought maybe they should concentrate instead on calling themselves “American,” huh? and not flying Puerto Rican or Dominican Republic flags from their car antennas. Or marching in Columbus Day parades, the Wops. Or St. Patrick’s Day parades, the Irish micks, getting drunk and puking all over the city streets, while cops got paid time and a half for overtime. Ollie hated all this high-profile nationalism for countries that weren’t the U.S. of A. If they liked Santo Domingo or San Juan or Islamabad or Jerusalem or Dublin or Calcutta so fuckin much, they should go back home instead of leaving dead bodies in garbage cans. Ollie hated everyone and everything except food.
They had stuffed the corpse in the garbage can feet first, knees up, which was considerate of them. It meant that you could look the dead man right in the eyes. Looked like some kind of sculpture you could find in one of the elite, highbrow, so-called art museums downtown. Ollie could remember a time when a person could stroll along the avenue and buy an artistic landscape in real oil paints for twenty-five bucks. Nowadays, you got a dead man in a garbage can who looked like he was alive and posing for someartiste except that he had a bullet hole at the base of his skull.
The medical examiner had come and gone, offering his learned opinion that the guy in the garbage can was indeed dead and that the possible cause of death …
“Possible,” he’d actually said.
. . was a bullet wound in the head.
With the help of the Mobile Unit techs—who had arrived some ten minutes ago and were dusting the alleyway as if it would reveal anything surprising about the corpse in the garbage can—Ollie lifted him out, and spread him on the alley floor. He was aware of the fact that in about ten minutes, an ambulance would arrive to pick up the body and carry it to the morgue, where they would cut it open to make sure the guy hadn’t been poisonedbefore he got shot, a distinct possibility in police work, where nothing was as it appeared to be, ah yes, m’dear. Sometimes, Ollie eventhought like W. C. Fields.
The dead man was carrying a wallet with a lot of identification in it. There was a driver’s license that gave his name as Jerome L. Hoskins (no relation to the disease, Ollie hoped) and his address as 327 Front Street in Calm’s Point—shit, he’d have to make a trip all the way to a section of the city for which he had no particular fondness. There was an American Express credit card made out to Jerome L. Hoskins, and MasterCard and Visa cards made out to the same name. There was a MetTrans card for the subway and bus lines in this considerate city, and also a health plan card from an outfit called MediPlan, whose main offices were in Omaha, Nebraska, wherever that was. There was seven hundred dollars in hundred-dollar bills in the wallet, plus three twenties, a ten, and eight singles. A little card said that the person to notify in case of an emergency was Clara Hoskins at the same address in Calm’s Point, who could be reached at 722-1314. Great. He justloved breaking the news to somebody’s wife, mother, or sister.
A handful of change was in the right hand pocket of the stiff’s trousers, along with what appeared to be a house key, a mailbox key, and a car key with a big gold L for Lexus in a circle on its black plastic head. The luxury car maybe spelled dope, though the vehicle of choice these days was a Range Rover, there being not much difference between big-city dope dealers and Hollywood producers, ah, yes. Strengthening the possibility of the stiff being drug-connected (as who wasn’t up here these days?) was a carry pistol-permit tucked into one of the wallet flaps.
The carry was for a P-38 Walther, however, a somewhat ancient weapon for anyone in the drug trade, but perhaps the man was merely a diamond merchant who’d wandered uptown in search of black pussy and flirted by mistake with the girlfriend of a Negro warlord named High Five or some such. The gun itself was in a shoulder holster under the man’s hand-tailored suit jacket. He was wearing no overcoat; when you’re about to shoot a man at the back of his head, you don’t dress him for the cold weather outdoors.
Well, Ollie guessed he had to talk to this Clara Hoskins, whoever she might turn out to be, find out if she was home, and then go all the way out to Calm’s Point to give her the sad tidings, ah yes. He gave one of the techs his card, and asked him to call if he came up with any valuable fingerprints, Fat Chance Department. He also advised them to keep an eye out for a meat wagon from St. Mary Boniface, which should be along any minute now. He could tell the techs didn’t like fat people. Hell with them.He didn’t like nerds who tiptoed around alleyways treating garbage as if it was some priceless piece of evidence instead of the messy shit it actually was.
“Have a merry Christmas,” he told them.
“You, too,” one of the techs said cheerlessly.
A fart on thee, Ollie thought, and smiled in farewell.
This was now twenty-seven minutes past ten on Sunday morning, the twenty-fourth day of December—Christmas Eve, by Ollie’s own reckoning, ah yes.
His jackass sister was probably in church.
CARELLA’S PHONE DIRECTORY for law enforcement agencies gave him a number for the U.S. Treasury Department at 427 High Street, all the way downtown, close to where the old police headquarters building used to be located. A recorded message told him the offices were closed for the holiday and would not reopen until Tuesday morning, December 26.
On the offchance that Special Agent David A. Horne might be listed in one of the city’s five telephone directories, Carella tried the Isola book first and came up with dozens of listings for the surname Horne, but none for a David A. Horne. He began dialing, anyway. On his twelfth try, he hit paydirt.