“Just walked in out of the blue, is that it, John?”
“That’s what it was, Mr. Wiggins.”
“She ever been in here before?”
“Don’t recollect seeing her.”
“Or another blonde looked just like her?”
“I’d’ve remembered somebody looked like that,” John said.
“Neither one of them come in here, ast did a man named Wiggy Wiggins frequent this place?”
“No, neither one of ’em, Mr. Wiggins.”
“Man named Wiggy the Lid? Did either one of ’em come in here, ax for me by that name?”
“Nobody come in here axin for you by no name at all.”
“Cause I think she come in lookin for me, John.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“I think she knew I’d be here, come in here lookin for me specific.”
John the bartender clucked his tongue in sympathy.
“Found out somehow that I drop in here every now and then, come in here toget me, John.”
John the bartender clucked his tongue again.
“You didn’t happen to see me get in that limo with her, did you?”
“Well, yes, I was watchin thu the winder.”
Wiggy opened his eyes wide.
“You didn’t happen to see the license plate, did you?”
John the bartender grinned from ear to ear.
IN THE NEXT three bookshops on the list Ollie had obtained from Wadsworth and Dodds, the two detectives learned a few things about the publishing business in general and his prospective publisher in particular.
“A sales rep’ll make fifty to seventy K a year,” the first of the booksellers told them. His name was Oscar Haynes. He asked them to call him Oz. Ollie figured him for a fag because he was wearing a purple shirt.
“To cover the U.S., you’ve got to hire, what, twenty to thirty reps?” Oz said. “That comes to big bucks. Frankly, I don’t see how a small firm like W&D can afford that kind of coverage.”
“They’ve only got five reps,” Ollie said.
“Even so, that comes to two hundred and fifty K minimum,” Oz said. “That’s a lot of bread.”
In the second bookstore, they learned from a bookseller whose last name was African and unpronounceable—he asked them to call him Ali—that most publishers have a two-season list, and it was therefore not unusual for Jerome Hoskins to make calls here only twice a year. “Unless a house has a big bestseller, where there’ll be reorders, a rep has no reason to come by again. W&D has never had a bestseller in its history, take it from me.”
“Never?”Ollie said, dismayed.
“Not that I know of. You want my opinion, W&D publishes books nobody wants to read.”
In the third and last of the bookshops, they learned that a firm the size of Wadsworth and Dodds usually employs a distribution company to peddle its books. “A distributor will handle sales for a hundred or so small companies,” the bookseller told them. His name was David. He was black, too, and he was wearing a pink shirt. Ollie figured him for another fag. Ollie was beginning to think the entire industry was populated with faggot Negro booksellers. “I’m surprised W&D has its own reps, really,” David said.
“Did Jerome Hoskins stop by here on the twenty-third?” Carella asked.
“If he did, it had to be after five o’clock. That’s when I closed.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” Ollie asked.
“September sometime. October. Around then.”
“Ever see him with any other W&D reps?”
“Nope.”
“Man named Randolph Biggs? Ever meet him? From Texas?”
“Nope.”
It was time for lunch and all they’d learned about Hoskins was that he hadn’t visited any of his bookshop customers on the twenty-third. Which meant he’d been up here for some other reason. Some other reason that had got him shot in the head and dumped in a garbage can.
“Total fucking loss,” Ollie said.
“Not entirely,” Carella said. “We now know Wadsworth and Dodds is a two-bit publisher that never had a bestseller in its history.”
“Who gives a shit?” Ollie said. Actually, he was heartbroken; he’d been hoping his first novel would sell millions of copies.
“But they hired five sales reps, anyway,” Carella said. “At fifty to seventy grand a pop. To peddle a list of books nobody wants to read.”
“Let’s go eat,” Ollie said.
SINCE THE ABILITY to fix tickets for traffic violations was essential to Wiggy the Lid’s business, one of the people on his payroll was a sergeant in the Motor Vehicles Bureau. He called the man—whose name was Evan Grimes—at one o’clock that afternoon, and asked if he could trace a car for him, and then gave him the license plate number John the bartender had seen through the window of the Starlight on Christmas night. Grimes got back to him ten minutes later. He told him that the car was registered to a company called West Side Limousine, and he gave Wiggy an address and a telephone number he could call. He also advised Wiggy not to call him at work again and hung up abruptly, which was tantamount to a gladiator thumbing his nose at the emperor. Wiggy called him back, at work, an instant later.
“Let me splain the rules of the game, shithead,” he said.
Grimes listened.
Carefully.
Then he personally called the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission and asked if a trip sheet had been filed by West Side Limo for a pickup at the Starlight Bar on St. Sebastian and Boyle around oneA.M . on December twenty-sixth. “License plate would’ve been WU 3200,” Grimes said, “I don’t have the car number.” The guy at T&L asked him to wait while he checked, and then came back on the line some five minutes later.
“I think I got what you want,” he told Grimes. “But I don’t have it as the Starlight Bar. I’ve got it as 1271 St. Sebastian.”
“What time would that have been?”
“Ten past one.”
“That’d be it. Who ordered the car?”
“Company named Wadsworth and Dodds. You need an address?”
“Please,” Grimes said.
Which is how, within minutes of each other that Thursday afternoon, three people converged on the old landmark building off Headley Square.
One of them was Wiggy Wiggins himself.
The other two were Detectives Steve Carella and Ollie Weeks.
ACTUALLY, THEY RODE UP in the elevator together.
Wiggy knew these two dudes were cops the minute they stepped into the car. He could smell cops from a hundred miles away. Even if he hadn’t seen the butt of a nine-millimeter pistol showing under the fat one’s jacket, he’d have spotted him for plainclothes. The other one, tall and slender, had Chinese eyes that didn’t hide the look of awareness about him, as if he was expecting a crime to erupt around him any minute and was getting ready for it to happen. The fat one was saying that was the worse pastrami sandwich he’d ever had in his life. Half of it was on his jacket, from the looks of it, mustard stains on one of the lapels, ketchup stains on the other. Wiggy looked up at the ceiling.