6
REEKING OF GARLIC AND UNIDENTIFIABLE EFFLUVIUM, DETECtive Fat Ollie Weeks oozed into the squadroom, spotted Meyer Meyer sitting alone at his desk, and announced, “Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well,” in his world-famous imitation of W. C. Fields, which was more and more beginning to resemble Al Pacino doing the blind marine in Scent of a Woman. Meyer looked up wearily.
In all truth, Ollie resembled W. C. Fields more than he did Al Pacino, not for nothing was he called Fat Ollie Weeks. This Wednesday morning, the eighth day of April, a gray and dismal but not yet wet reminder of the day before, Ollie was wearing a white button-down-collar shirt open at the throat, a brownish sports jacket with mustard stains on it, rumpled darker brown slacks, and a pair of scuffed brown loafers which, Meyer noted with surprise, had a penny inserted in the leather band across each vamp, would wonders never.
“How’d you like Schindler’s List?” Ollie asked pointedly.
“I didn’t see it,” Meyer said.
“You didn’t go see a picture about your own people?” Meaning Jews, Meyer figured.
He did not feel he had to explain to a bigot like Ollie that the reason he hadn’t gone to see the movie was that he thought it might be too painful an experience. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who in countless articles preceding the release of the film had confessed that making the movie had put him in touch with his own Jewishness, or words to that effect, Meyer had been in touch with his own Jewishness for a very long time now, thank you. And unlike Spielberg, Meyer did not believe that the Holocaust had been in any danger of becoming “a footnote to history” before this particular movie came along. No more than dinosaurs were a footnote to history before Jurassic Park roared into theaters all over the world. There were Jews like Meyer who would never forget the Holocaust even if there hadn’t been a single Hollwood movie ever made about it.
Meyer’s nephew Irwin, who had been known affectionately as Irwin the Vermin when he was but a prepubescent child, had since grown into a somewhat rabbinical type given to rolling his eyes and davening even when asking someone to please pass the salt. He had seen Schindler’s List and had pontificated that this wasn’t a movie about the Holocaust here, this was a movie here about a man finding in himself depths of feeling and empathy he had not before known he’d possessed. “What this movie is about is a flower growing up through a concrete sidewalk, cracking through that sidewalk and spreading its petals to the sunshine, is what this movie is all about,” Irwin had proclaimed at Aunt Rose’s house last night.
Meyer had said nothing.
He was thinking that here was a Jew who’d gone to see a movie which, according to its director, had been designed to make people remember there’d been such a thing as the Holocaust, and instead it had caused Irwin to forget there’d been a Holocaust and to remember instead that flowers could grow through sidewalks.
Now here was Fat Ollie Weeks, in all his fetid obesity, standing before Meyer’s desk like a fat Nazi bastard, demanding to know why Meyer had chosen not to go see a movie that might cause him to weep.
“You think all that really happened?” Ollie asked.
Meyer looked at him.
“All that stuff?” Ollie said.
“What brings you here?” Meyer asked, attempting to change the subject.
“The stuff they say the Nazis did to the Jews?” Ollie persisted.
“No, they made it all up,” Meyer said. “What brings you here?”
Ollie looked at him for a moment, as if trying to decide whether this wise Jew here was putting him on or what, telling him the whole fuckin Hologram had been invented, whereas Ollie knew there wasn’t a Jew in the world who believed that, who was he trying to kid here? Or maybe he’d finally seen the light himself, and realized governments could stage things like fake moon landings and six million Jews getting exterminated. He let the whole thing go because, to tell the truth, he didn’t give a shit one way or the other, six million Jews getting killed on the moon, or six fake astronauts flying over Poland.
“I think we’re gonna be working together again,” he said, and leaned across Meyer’s desk and nudged him in a ham-fisted gesture of camaraderie. Meyer instinctively backed away from the unctuous reek. How had he got so lucky? he wondered. There he’d been, sitting behind his desk, minding his own business, a good-looking man if he said so himself, thirtysomething but still hale and hearty although entirely bald, tall and burly with bright inquisitive blue eyes — if, again, he said so himself — wearing suspenders that matched the cornflower blue, a gift from his wife Sarah at Christmas, or Chanukah, or both, because each was celebrated in turn at the Meyer household, when all at once comes a two-ton tank smelling of diesel oil and farts, announcing that they’d be working together again, of vay’z mir.
“On what?” Meyer asked.
“On this girl got stabbed and slashed twenty-two times-and incidentally murdered, by the way-in apartment 6C at 1214 Carter Avenue in the Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happens to be where I work, ah yes,” he said, falling into his W. C. Fields mode again. “Whereas I under-stand, m’boy, that the vie was previously stabbed right here in the old Eight-Seven, although a mere superficial wound, ah yes.”
“What are you saying?”
“Michelle Cassidy.”
“Was murdered?“
“Twenty-two times over.”
“When?”
“Sometime last night. When she didn’t show for rehearsal this morning, somebody at the theater called nine-one-one, and they dispatched a car from the Eight-Eight.”
“Michelle Cassidy? The actress Kling and Carella…?”
“Is that who was working it?”
“Yeah,” Meyer said. “In fact, they got a search warrant this morning to…”
“What search warrant?”
“To toss the agent’s office.”
“What agent?”
“The one living with her.”
“They shouldn’ta done that,” Ollie said, and scowled darkly. “This is my case.”
Ollie was annoyed that they’d gone around him-a — difficult task under any circumstances — to obtain their warrant while his people were still conducting a search of the crime scene. Carella explained that when they’d applied for the warrant, they hadn’t known the apartment on Carter Avenue had become a crime scene. They were merely looking for a weapon possibly used in an assault, and they reasoned that Milton wouldn’t have left that weapon in the apartment he shared with the assault victim. It was Carella’s guess that the warrant would have been denied if Michelle Cassidy hadn’t been mentioned in it some half dozen times; even judges of the superior court watched television and read newspapers.
“Point is…” Ollie said.
“Point is, we’ve got the knife,” Nellie Brand said.
They had called her in because the court-ordered search of Johnny Milton’s office on Stemmler Avenue had yielded surprisingly good results. Nellie was an assistant district attorney, dressed for work this morning in a smart suit the color of her sand-colored hair, a blouse a shade lighter, darker brown panty hose, and brown leather shoes with French heels. Carella liked her style. She always looked breezy and fresh to him.