But suppose they could? Suppose somehow ... He'd given the woman a phony name, same as she'd given him, he couldn't even remember what name he'd given her. So there was no danger there. But suppose she'd identified him? Look, it was impossible that they'd been able to track down a cheap whore he'd met in a shitty little bar. But suppose they had, and suppose they'd shown her the ring, and suppose she told them yes this man gave me the ring, this man whatever his name was, whatever name I gave her, traded the ring for my services. And this man was missing the pinkie on his right hand, suppose she'd mentioned that? Suppose she'd been as revulsed by that missing pinkie as most women seemed to be? Suppose she'd remembered that one thing about him, never mind anything else, never mind people telling him he looked a little like a young John Travolta, just remember the fucking missing pinkie! Well, so what? He didn't have a criminal record, so no one was going to be able to tap into a computer and call up all the burglars in the world who had a pinkie missing on the right hand. So fuck you, lady, you remembered the missing pinkie, so who cares? The only thing they could possibly trace were his fingerprints if he'd left any in that apartment. Go back to his army records, hello, fella, come right along.
He wished he could remember whether or not he'd wiped that apartment clean before he'd left it. He must have. He always did.
The call from the Mobile Crime Lab came at six-thirty that night, just as Meyer was taking his nine-millimeter service pistol from his locked desk drawer in preparation for heading home. The technician calling was a man named Harold Fowles who, together with his partner had dusted and vacuumed and otherwise scrutinized the Cooper apartment for hairs, latent prints, semen stains, and the like.
"I'm the one found the cookie crumbles, remember?" he asked.
"Yes, I do," Meyer said. "How are you, Harold?”
“Fine, thanks. Well, a little hot, but otherwise fine.”
“So what've you got for me?”
"Well, we went over the latents, and all of them match prints of either the woman or her husband or the kid was banging her, and other members of the family, too, we had a lot of cooperation here, and the maid, and the super who was in there a few weeks ago to unclog the toilet. All people who had legitimate access to the apartment. No wild prints is what I'm saying.
Nothing that didn't belong there, so to speak. Okay." Meyer waited.
"We know the guy went in through the dining room window just off the fire escape," Fowles said. "There were wipe marks outside and inside the window, and imprints of his feet in me carpet same-c t, the floor and then walked across the room. He left the window open behind him. We also know he went out of the apartment by way of the front door. It was unlocked and there were wipe marks on both the inside and the outside knobs.
Okay. Something occurred to me." Meyer waited.
"If he went to all the trouble of wiping everything clean, then he wasn't wearing gloves. Maybe he was afraid someone would spot him with gloves on in this heat, who knows, I'm not a criminal. But if he wasn't wearing gloves, and if he didn't go out the same way he went in, which I'm positive is the case, then there was one thing he couldn't have wiped.”
“What was that?" Meyer asked. "The ladder.”
“What ladder?”
"The fire-escape ladder. The one he had to jump up for. I went back there this afternoon. I recovered some nice latents from the bottom rung where he pulled the ladder down and also some good ones from the rungs above it, which he left when he was climbing to the first-floor landing. I'm running them through the system now. If the guy's got any kind of record, criminal or military, maybe we've got something. It may take a while, but ...”
"I'll give you my home number," Meyer said.
Sonny finally caught up with him at ten that night in a private club called Siesta, all the way uptown in a section of the city called Hightown. Here in the shadow of the bridge connecting Isola to the. state next door, you had more damn drug dealers than you could find in the entire nation, all of them Dominican, all of them linked to the Colombian cartel. This was dangerous tuff, man. Worth your life to look cockeyed at a man standing on a street corner here, lest he believe you were invading his tuff. Sonny couldn't understand what Juju was doing all the way up here where Spanish was the language and a person's sensitivity could easily turn into a challenge. He was glad he had the Eagle tucked in his belt. He drove around the block three times, looking for a space, and finally parked in front of the club in a zone clearly marked to "ARYaNG. Fuck it, he thought, and went inside.
The owner of the club was a man named Rigoberto Mendez. Sonny introduced himself and told him he was looking for his good friend Juju Judell. A CD player was oozing dreamy close dancin music when Sonny stepped into the place. The sweet scent of marijuana floated on air thick with smoke, and skinny girls in clingy, tight summer dresses swayed in the arms of dudes black and tan. Juju sat at a table in the corner chatting up a tall black girl with bleached blonde frizzy hair and earrings long as fingers hanging from her ears, low-cut dress about to pop with righteous fruit within. He had an eye for the women, Juju did.
"Well now looka here," he said as Sonny approached, and rose from the table, extending his hand, shaking it warmly, "Sonny Cole, meet Tirana ... I didn't catch the last name, honey.”
"Hobbs," she said, a little disdainfully, it seemed to Sonny, as if she was looking down her nose at him, for what reason he couldn't fathom.
"Tirana Hobbs," he said, "how you doing, honey?" and extended his hand, which she didn't take, so he figured he'd be taking her to bed tonight, Juju notwithstanding. He pulled up a chair. Tirana was sitting across from him at the small round table, Juju on his right.
All their knees almost touched under the table.
"Choo drinkin, man?" Juju asked, and signaled to a man wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with an NFL logo on it. "They got ever' thing juss name it.”
"What's that you're drinkin there, Tirana?" Sonny asked, trying to be friendly, trying to let her know she was gonna end up in bed with him, so let's cut the thaw, honey, no sense playin games here.
"Gee," she said, "what can it possibly be comes in a brown bottle and pours out yellow with foam on it?" To demonstrate, she poured more beer into her mug. Sonny grinned.
I'll have a beer, too," he said. He wanted to keep a clear head for what was coming later. Started drinking anything harder, he'd liable to fuck up. "So how you been, Juje?" he said.
"What's that stand for, anyway?" Tirana asked. She had yellow eyes, Sonny noticed, sort of glassy now, as if she'd been smoking before he got here. Maybe that's why she sounded so harsh. Grass sometimes did that to people. They either got mellow or they got mean. He didn't mind a mean girl, long as she understood who had the cock.
"Juju stands for Julian Judell," he said.
"That's a nice name," Tirana said. "Why'd you shorten it to Juju?”
"Didn't do it myself, honey. Kids started sayin it and it stuck.”
"Tirana's a nice name, too," Sonny lied. He thought it was one of those bullshit names lots of black mothers picked outta some African baby-name book.
"Where'd you get such a pretty name?”
“It was supposed to be Tawana.”
"Oh? Yeah? Tawana?”
"My mother didn't know how to spell it. She thought what they were sayin on the TV was Tirana. You remember Tawana Brawley, the one got raped by all those white guys smeared her with shit later?”