Also last night, a body came floating in downstream of the Hamilton Bridge on the River Harb, and it was identified as that of a small-time drug dealer and part-time pimp known as Julian "Juju" Judell, who had been arrested for illegal possession only a week earlier, and was out on bail waiting trial when someone shot him and tossed him in the river. Half his face had been blown away with a high-caliber weapon.
The other half had been gnawed away by river rats before the body was discovered under the pilings off Hector Street.
None of this happened in the Eighty-seventh Precinct.
It was a big city.
But on Saturday morning at eight o'clock sharp, because both cops and lab technicians get to work early, Harold Fowles called the Eight-Seven and asked to speak to Detective Meyer Meyer, who had got in some twenty minutes earlier and was drinking a cup of coffee at his desk. Foles reported that they'd come up roses on the felony-murder suspect, and he give Meyer a name for the man whose fingerprints he'd lifted from the fire escape. He also gave him an address that was three years old and probably no longer valid.
The good day was starting to go bad.
Sonny was starting to was except What realize that when he was home with the wife and kiddies, Carella was joined at the hip to his partner, the big black cop whose name Sonny didn't even know. So unless he wanted to shoot up the whole fuckin police department and Carella's family besides, he had to catch him either going in the house or coming out of it. Alone. Had to catch the man by his lonesome or a lot of innocent people would suffer.
Sonny had no desire to hurt any innocent person.
It never once occurred to him that Carella's father had been an innocent person who'd been gunned down minding his own business during a holdup.
It never occurred to him that Juju Judell had been an innocent person merely imparting wisdom about the ways cops carded grudges over the years. It never occurred to him that Carella the target of all this surveillance and scrutiny was himself an innocent person who had, in fact, not blown Sonny away when he'd had the opportunity to do so. None of this occurred to him. His focus now was in getting the job done. Because, you see, it was beginning to trouble him, the glimpses he had of this man kissing his wife goodbye when he left the house in the morning, the glimpses he had of this man laughing and joking with his partner, the glimpses he had of this man leaving the station house at night, his brow furrowed, his face troubled, like he was deep in thought. This man was beginning to seem like someone he knew, someone he might have hung with, the way he felt certain his black partner hung with him when they weren't out chasing people like Sonny. If circumstances had been a little different he wouldn't have shot this man's father he couldn't even remember now the series of events leading to the shooting and wouldn't now have to take out Carella himself because he represented a lifelong threat.
That was the whole damn thing of it.
The man had to go because Juju was right, Sonny'd never be able to breathe easy while he was still alive. At the same time, if circumstances were just a little different .
Fuck that noise, circumstances were not a little different!
Circumstances were what they were. Circumstances were what they'd been for Sonny from the day a doctor smacked his black ass and brought him into this fucking white world. The thing had to be done. And it had to be done fast. Before Sonny went all pussy. Before it started going bad.
He didn't know that it had already started going bad up there in Hightown, where the owner of a social club named Siesta had told a detective from the Eighty eight Precinct that the last person they'd seen Juju with was a man named Sonny Cole.
The fingerprints belonged to a man named Leslie Blyden He was twenty-seven years old, and had served with a mechanized cavalry division during the Gulf War. He'd got his right hand caught between a drive wheel and a crawler track, crushing the poke and necessitating amputation. He'd earned a Purple Heart, a medical discharge, and a plane ride back home. His last known address was on Beasley Boulevard in Majesta, but tlae super mere salt no ,c t,y ua ,l"". was living there now. The super himself was new, so he couldn't tell them when Mr. Blyden had moved away.
Blyden was not a common name. Only six of them in the Isola directory, none of them Leslies. Four in Riverhead, ditto. Another half dozen in Calm's Point, only two in Majesta. None of them were Leslies. But one of the three Blydens listed in the Bethtown directory was a person named Leslie. Male or female, they couldn't tell, but they guessed a woman would have used the letter L instead of her full name. They dared not call ahead to find out. If Leslie Blyden was their man, he had killed two people. Besides, it was a good day for a ferry ride.
It would start turning bad for them in about forty minutes.
Thomas Hollister, the man who'd played bass guitar for The Five Chord nee The Racketeers, had stopped calling himself Totobi Hollister the moment he recognized that if you deliberately chose a name that branded you as an African-American, you were limiting your job possibilities.
Tote Hollister was fine for a bass guitarist in a rock band, but it was not so fine for a lawyer. The minute the band broke up, Hotlister had gone back to school, getting his law degree last year from Ramsey University, right here in the city. He'd been working for the firm of Gideon, Weinberg and Katzman since last July, more than a year now.
"When did the band break up?" Brown asked. "Minute we finished the tour that summer. Katie decided she'd had enough, told us so long, boys. Without Katie, we were just another garage band.”
The men were sitting in a small pocket park across the street from Hollister's office. He had come in on a Saturday to finish some work in preparation for the start of a Monday morning trial. A slight, slender man, he was wearing designer sunglasses and a tan tropical suit that complemented his coconut-shell color. He was lighter than Brown.
Hell, Brown's wife said every brother in the city was lighter than he was. Brown took this as a compliment. He enjoyed looking mean and tough. He enjoyed the hell out of being a big black cop.
"Why'd she decide to quit, do you know?" Carella asked.
"Well ... I'm not sure I know why," Hollister said. "Did you ever talk about it?”
“Never.”
"We understand you were close to her," Carella said.
"I think we were. You know how it is," he said to Brown. "There are limitations.”
Brown nodded: "Be nice if there weren't, but there are," Hollister said. "As it was, we were very good friends. Which in itself was a miracle. Poor black kid from the ghetto, upper-middle-class white girl from Philadelphia? Her father a college professor, her mother a psychiatrist? Hell, my mother packs groceries in a supermarket. My father drives a bus. It probably wouldn't have gone farther, anyway. At least we ended up good friends.”
"Would you have liked it to go farther?" Carella asked.
"Yes. Sure. In fact, I think I might have been in me, too. It's funny, you know. There are no color lines in the music business. You make good music, it doesn't matter who or what you are.
If there's any prejudice at all, it's the other way around. Black musicians, white musicians, there's always a sort of rivalry as to who's better. Like you invented harmony, man, but we invented rhythm.
Look, I'm not saying anything would have developed between Katie and me if we hadn't been traveling through Dixie. It just made it more difficult. It pointed up our differences instead of our samenesses, do you see what I mean? We were both damn good musicians. That should have been the point.”
Behind them, a wall of water flowed down a high wall, creating an artificial waterfall that seemed to cool the day and possibly might have. The air stirred. Mist touched their faces. They did not want Hollister to go into the same sort of reverie Roselli had indulged in yesterday. At the same time, they wanted to know what had happened down South that had caused Katie Cochran to leave the band when the tour was over.