“We don’t catch many of them onshore, either,” Hawes said.
“I know, anything we catch—other than immediately address-able—we’re supposed to notify the onshore locals. But ain’t a kidnapping federal stuff?”
“It could become,” Carella said.
“I mean, wouldn’t this be considered ‘Special Maritime and Territorial’ jurisdiction?”
“I really don’t know,” Carella said.
“I know the Great Lakes are covered,” McIntosh said, “and the St. Lawrence River, and prob’ly the Mississippi and the Hudson…”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Anyway, what I did was raise the Coast Guard, who I figured would know.”
“Did they?”
“No.”
“The way I figure it,” Carella said, “there’s a state line down the middle of the river, and if the boat crossed that, then the Feds come in automatically.”
“Sometimes they come in if the case is really high profile,” Hawes said. “Like if this rock singer is somebody really important.”
“Who is she, anyway?” McIntosh asked.
“Somebody named Tamar Valentino,” Hawes said.
“Never heard of her.”
“Me, neither.”
“So scratch the FBI.”
“Unless the boat crossed that state line,” Carella said.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” a man in a white uniform said, breaking into the little intimate law enforcement circle. “I’m Charles Reeves, Captain of theRiver Princess. I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a hundred and twelve guests aboard this vessel and we’ve been sitting here dead in the water ever since the incident occurred, waiting for some sort of clear indication that we can begin moving her back to port. Is there anyone here who can…?”
“You can move her,” Carella said.
“You are, sir?”
“Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Eighty-seventh Squad.”
“And you are authorized to…?”
“It’s our case, yes,” Carella said, and thought, So far. “This is my partner. Detective Cotton Hawes.”
“Then I’ll get the engines started,” Reeves said dubiously.
“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hawes said.
“We should be docking in about half an hour,” Reeves said. “Will you be finished here by then?”
“Finished?”
“What I’m asking is will I be able to disembark the passengers? The yacht was only leased for the night, you know, not the entire month of May.”
Carella looked at him.
“I mean, we all have jobs to do,” Reeves said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before on any vessel I’ve commanded. Never.”
“It’ll be all right, sir,” Carella said. “Why don’t you go get your engines started?”
Reeves hesitated a moment longer, as if there were something more he wished to say. Then he merely nodded and went off toward the pilot house.
“You don’t plan to talk to all hundred andtwelve of these people, do you?” McIntosh asked.
Carella was wondering the same thing.
EVERYBODYwanted to go home.
What had started out as a nice party on a nice boat on a nice river had turned into some kind of Fellini nightmare with people in masks running around doing violence to the same pretty young girl.
Nobody seemed to agree on exactly quite what had happened.
Given that eye witnesses were notoriously unreliable, this bunch seemed to be more untrustworthy than most. Perhaps they’d been plied with too much alcohol before the occurrence (though the promised champagne toast had to be forsaken, given the unforeseen circumstances) or perhaps the lighting had been too dim or the power of suggestion too strong. Tamar and the young black dancer had, after all, been engaged in some pretty realistic although terpsichorean violence, and all at once twoother black guys…
The witnesses were all convinced the kidnappers were black…
…came marching down the grand stairway there, brandishing machine guns, and yelling for nobody to fucking move.
Even Jonah Wills, Tamar’s dance partner, was convinced the two guys who’d kidnapped her were black. Perhaps this was because they were both entirely dressed in black: black denims and black sweatshirts and black running shoes and black leather gloves. Their AK-47s were black, too, which might have contributed to the overall impression of black power. Then, too, Jonah himself was black—although this wasn’t an accurate description of his color, which was more closely related to the mahogany of the stair rail than the color of anthracite, say, or obsidian—and his presence on the dance floor, muscles rippling and gleaming, wearing a mask quite different from the Hussein and Arafat masks the intruders were wearing, might also have contributed to the consensus of opinion that there were nowthree black men molesting this poor blond white girl wearing hardly anything at all.
Or perhaps the words “Don’t nobody fucking move!” hadn’t sounded ofay enough to this largely white crowd, although in truth the black-to-white ratio here tonight was larger than you’d find at similar glittery events hither and yon throughout this fair city. Then again, this was the music industry here.
Even so, everybody wanted to go home.
Having inherited this cockamamie case from Parker—who was already nursing his third beer in a bar around the corner from his apartment, and chatting up a blonde he didn’t realize was a hooker—Carella and Hawes were reluctant to let anyone go just yet, not until they had a clearer picture of just what the hell had happened here. They were mindful of the fact that the FBI might be coming in behind them, and they didn’t want to hear the usual crap the Feebs laid down about “inefficient and insufficient investigation at the local level.” So they went through the facts—or the perceived facts—again and again until they were able to piece together a more or less scenario-by-committee, not unlike many of the movies one saw these days, where a hundred and twelve writers shared screen credit, except that it was by now almost two in the morning.
The party guests unanimously understood that the black guy in the mask that kept changing color and shape throughout the course of the song was supposed to be some kind of mythological beast, some kind ofBandersnatch, in fact, since that was the name of the song, though the mandid warn his son to beware the Jabberwock, my son, didn’t he? So maybe the beast was aJabberwock or even aJubjub bird. Whatever the damn thing was, it was something to beshunned, man, as subsequent events were all too soon to demonstrate.
Most of the guests agreed, too, that the police should have been called while Tamar’s partner was throwing her all over the dance floor and tearing her already flimsy nightgown, or whatever it was, to tattered ribbons, never a cop around when you needed one. Neo-realism was one thing, but here was this big muscular guy tossing around this little thing who couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds, if that, in an utterly convincing attempt to rape her. It didn’t help that she was blond and he was black, the stereotype reinforced. What he was doing to her on that dance floor was intolerable.
So it was with considerable relief that the audience, black and white alike, saw Tamar wrap her tiny defenseless little hands around thin air, saw her grasp whatever imaginary something she was grasping (a vorpal sword, as it turned out), and rise up against this viciousanimal, was what he was! who was determined to violate and despoil this flower of virgin maidenhood. “One two! One two!” they all agreed, “and through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead,” they further agreed, “and with its head, he went galumphing back.”