"Is that what he bet on the Steelers?"
"Twenty big ones. Gave him a a-half-point spread. Cowboys took it by sixteen." "So what happened last Friday night?"
"The bookie told him to come up with the bread Sunday morning or he was going to be swimmin with the goddamn fishes."
"How'd he react to that?"
"Said he had to make a phone call."
"Did he?"
"Yeah, from the phone right there on the wall." "What time was this?"
"Around one-fifteen in the morning. A few minutes after the cops raided the Alhambra' the club up the street. Where they hold the cockfights."
"How'd you know that?"
"One of the owners came in. His bird had just got chewed up, he was practically weeping at the table. He told me he had a gun, he was thinking of shooting himself."
"His name wouldn't be Jose Santiago, would it?" This city was full of mind readers.
"Yeah" Himmel said. "How'd you know that?"
"Lucky guess," Hawes said. "What time did he come in?"
"Santiago? Eleven-thirty, twelve o'clock. Right after the bust went down. I was sitting there waiting for Larry."
"Who's that?"
"The guy owed the twenty."
"I thought you didn't know his name."
"That was before everything got hypothetical." "Larry what?"
"It's Lorenzo, but everybody calls him Larry.," "Lorenzo what?"
"I can't even pronounce it."
"I'm telling you I can't. I wrote it down first time he placed a bet, it's one of those fuckin wop tongue twisters."
Carella sighed.
"Where'd you write it down?" "On the slip." "The betting slip?"
"No, a lady's pink slip, lace-trimmed."
The detectives looked at him. He knew he was a smart-ass. He grinned. Nobody grinned back. shrugged.
"Yes, the betting slip," he said. "Long since "Never wrote the name down again?"
"Never. Couldn't have if I wanted to. It was along. Besides, I had his phone number. A man don't his marker, I give him a call, I say, Joey, you owe a little something, am I right? It usually scares them."
"Did it scare Lorenzo?"
"He came up here to see me one o'clock in the morning, didn't he?"
"And made his phone call fifteen minutes later that right?"
"Yeah. We didn't have much to talk about' mentioned him swimming with his little fishies."
"You didn't happen to overhear his end of the conversation, did you?"
"Yeah, but it was all in Italian."
"You think he called an Italian-speaking person, that it?"
"I don't know who he called. I know he was Italian."
"What happened next?"
"He came back to the table, said he'd have money by Sunday. Then he asked did I perhaps know where he could buy a gun."
"So you recommended Santiago," Carella said. "Yeah, that's right," Himmel said, looking
"You didn't witness the gun changing hands, did you?" Hawes asked.
"No. But hypothetically, Larry bought it."
"What time did he leave here?" "One-thirty or so."
"One more thing," Carella said.
"His phone number, right?" Himmel said. Still six steps ahead of them.
At six-oh-four that Monday morning, the desk sergeant at the Eight-Eight called Ollie Weeks at home to tell him something had come up that might relate to the triple homicide he was investigating. He didn't know whether he should be waking Ollie up or not... "Yeah, well you did," Ollie said.
" but some guy named Curly Joe Simms had called to say he was having a cup of coffee in the Silver Chief Diner on Ainsley, and a waitress named Sally told him a detective named Oliver Weeks was in there asking about three kids pissing in the gutter, and Curly Joe had seen these three kids with a person named Richie Cooper, who was a good friend now deceased. So if this detective wanted to talk to him..."
"What's his number?" Ollie asked.
The phone company told Hawes that the call from the wall phone of The Juice Bar at 1:17 A.M. on January nineteenth had been made to a telephone listed to a subscriber named Svetlana Helder at 1217 Lincoln Street in Isola.
This was puzzling.
Why had Larry Whoever called a woman who was murdered the very next night with a gun he'd purchased not five minutes after he'd got off the phone with her?
Meanwhile, Carella was dialing the number the Banker had given them. This was now a quarter past six in the morning. A woman's sleepy voice "Pronto."
"Signora?" he said.
"St'?"
"Voglio parl are con Lorenzo, per piacere."
" "
"Non c e.
In the next five minutes, in tattered Italian shattered English, the woman whose name was Carmela Buongiorno and who said she was landlady of a rooming house on Trent Street, blocks from where Svetlana had been Carella that Lorenzo Schiavinato had been living there since October the twenty-fourth, but had moved out last Sunday. She did not know where he was now.
seemed to be a nice man, was something the "Che succese?" she asked. "What happened?"
"Niente, signora, niente," Carella said.
Nothing, signora, nothing. But something indeed happened.
Murder had happened.
And Lorenzo Schiavinato had purchased the weapon the night before someone used it on Dyalovich.
They now had his full name. They ran it through the computer. There was niente, signora. Niente.
Ollie figured Curly Joe Simms would turn out to be a bald guy and he wasn't disappointed. He made a note to mention to Meyer Meyer, up at the Eight-Seven, that he would start calling himself Curly Meyer. Curly Joe was wearing yellow earmuffs and a brown woolen coat buttoned over a green muffler. His eyes kept watering and he kept blowing his nose as he explained to Ollie that he was a night person, which meant that he only slept during the daytime. He was beginning to get a little drowsy right now, in fact, but he. felt it was important to do his civic duty, wasn't it? Ollie was a little drowsy, too, but only because he'd just got up half an hour ago. At six forty-two in the morning, there weren't too many places open near the 88th Precinct station house. They met in the coffee shop of the Harley Hotel on Ninety-second and Jackson. The Harley was a hotbed dive catering to hookers and their clientele. A steady stream of girls walked in and out of the coffee shop while Ollie and Curly Joe talked.
Curly Joe was bothered that someone had drowned poor Richie Cooper.
"Richie was a close friend of mine," he said.
So close you didn't know he hated being called Richie, Ollie thought, but did not say. The man had come all the way over from Ainsley and Eleventh, six in the morning, he deserved a hearing, even if he was bald. Ollie ate another donut and listened.
Curly Joe sipped at his coffee and told him how on Saturday night he was sitting with Richie in one of the window booths at the Silver Chief Diner, both of them having coffee, when all at once Richie jumps up and yells, "Look at that, willya?"
"Look at what?" Curly Joe said. "Out there. Those three guys." Curly Joe looked.
Three big guys in hooded parkas were at the curb, pissing in the gutter. This was not an unusual sight up here, so Curly Joe couldn't understand why Richie was so upset by it. But he certainly was annoyed, jumping up out of the bar and putting on his black leather jacket... "He was dressed all in black,"." Curly Joe "Black jeans, black shirt, black boots, the jacket..."
"Yeah, go on," Ollie said. putting on the jacket, and tossing a couple of bucks on the table as his share of the bill, and storming out of the diner and walking over to the three guys who were still standing there, shaking their dicks. From where Curly Joe watched from the diner window, he saw, but could not hear, conversation taking place between the four of them. Richie dressed all in black and appearing before them like an avenging angel of death. They almost all of them peed on his boots, he was standing that close
-Now what do you call this?