"Yeah."
"Called Fat Ollie Watts!"
"Yeah. Pretty close, don't you think?"
"Close? It's right on the fuckin nosel"
"Well, no. Watts isn't Weeks."
"It ain't, huh?"
"It's even spelled differently."
"Oh, is that right?"
"I wouldn't worry about it."
"On your block, Fat Ollie Watts ain't Fat Ollie Weeks, huh? Then what is it?"
"It's Watts."
"Who the fuck is this guy?"
"Fat Ollie Watts," Meyer said. "I just told you."
"Not him\ The guy who wrote the fuckin book\ Don't he even know I exist?"
"Gee, I guess not."
"He's writing a book about cops and he never heard of me? A real person! He never heard of Oliver Wendell Weeks!"
"Oh, come on, Ollie, relax. This is just another
Thomas Harris ripoff serial-killer novel. I wouldn't worry about it."
"Does this fuckin guy live on Mars, he never heard of me?"
"He lives in Ireland, I told you."
"Where in Ireland? In some booth in a pub? In some stone hut by the side of the road? In some fuckin smelly bogl"
"Gee, I'm sorry I even mentioned it."
"What's this guy's name?"
"I told you. Fat Ollie . . ."
"Not him," Ollie said. "The writer. The fuckin writerl"
"I'll tell you the truth," Meyer said, grinning, "I've already forgotten it."
And hung up.
The two men met in a bar at five that afternoon. Both were officially off duty. Carella ordered a beer. Ollie ordered a Harvey Wallbanger.
"So what's this about?" Carella asked.
"I told you on the phone."
"Some girl got stabbed . . ."
"Black girl named Althea Cleary. Eight times, according to the ME. Knife was still in her chest. Weapon of convenience. Matches the set in her kitchen. Thing that made me think of you was Blaney telling me . . ."
"Which Blaney?"
"I don't know. How many Blaneys are there?"
"Two. I think."
"Well, this was one of them," Ollie said. "He told me the girl had maybe been doped. With guess what?"
Carella looked at him.
"Yeah," Ollie said.
"Rohypnol?"
"Rohypnol. Hey, bartender!" he yelled. "Excuse me, but did you put any vodka in this fuckin drink?"
"I put vodka in it," the bartender said.
"Cause what I can do, I can take it down the police lab, we'll run some toxicological tests on it, see if there's any alcohol in it at all."
"Everything's in it supposed to be in it," the bartender said. "That's a good strong drink you got there."
"Then whyn't you make me another one just like it, on the house this time, it's so fuckin good."
"Why on the house?" the bartender asked.
"Cause your toilet's leakin and your bathroom window's painted shut," Ollie said. "Those are both violations."
Which they weren't.
"You're sure she was doped?" Carella said.
"According to Blaney."
"And he's sure it was roofers?"
"Positive."
"What you're suggesting is a link to my case."
"By George, I think you've got it."
"You're saying because they were both doped . . ."
"Yep."
". . . and later murdered, there's a link."
"Which don't seem like too extravagant a surmise."
"I think it's a very far reach, Ollie."
"Here's your Wallbanger," the bartender said, and banged it down on the bar.
Ollie shoved his chair away from the table and walked over to pick it up. Watching him, Carella thought he moved surprisingly fast for a fat man. Ollie lifted the glass, sipped at it, smacked his lips, said, "Excellent, my good fellow, truly superior," and came back to the table. "It ain't a far reach at all," he told Carella.
"No? You're saying the same person who hanged my guy may have stabbed your girl."
IOO
"I'm saying there's a pattern here. In police work, we call it an M.O."
"Gee, thanks."
"Happy to inform," Ollie said, and raised his glass in a silent toast, and drank. "There ain't no vodka in this one, either," he said and looked into the glass.
Carella was thinking.
"Questions," he said.
"Shoot."
"Do you have any evidence at all that Allison Cleary . . . ?"
"Althea."
". . . knew John Bridges?"
"None at all. But they could have met."
"How?"
"Guy's up from Houston, right? Out on the town, from what it appears, am I right? With a little help from his friends, he does a hanging, then goes out to play some cards on the weekend. Meets our little faggot friend Harpo, introduces him to his friends, too, here, pal, take these with you, they'll help your sex life, tee hee. Meaning, if Harpo is ever bisexually inclined, he can drop a few tabs in a young lady's drink, induce her to slobber the Johnson. Which is exactly what Bridges or whoever he is done two nights later to little Althea Cleary."
"Where do you think they met?"
"Lady lives upstairs from her has cappuccino with her every now and then. Tells me the girl works nights for the telephone company. Okay, I'm prowling her pad, I find a social security card in her handbag. You want to know where she worked?"
"You just told me. The telephone company."
"Yeah, but not AT&T. What I done, I checked the ID number on her social security card with Soc Sec Admin. Employer contributions on her behalf were made for the
past six months to a go-go joint called The Telephone Company on The Stem downtown. Wanna go dancin, Steve-a-rino?"
The last plane to Houston that Wednesday night, a non-stop Delta flight scheduled to arrive at Houston-Intercontinental at : p.m., closed its doors at : p.m. sharp.
There were no Jamaicans on it.
A dive called The Telephone Company, Carella didn't know what to expect. Maybe something on the style of the Kit Kat Klub of Cabaret fame, telephones on all the tables, numbered placards indicating which table was which, girls phoning from table to table, "This is table twenty-seven, calling table forty-nine. Sitting all alone like that. . ." and so on.
But when they got there at ten o'clock that night, the only telephones in sight were the house phone sitting behind the bar and a pay phone on the wall to the right of the entrance door. The joint was located on Lower Stemmler, all the way downtown, where The Stem became a narrower passage lined with meatpacking houses, the occasional restaurant, and an assortment of clubs featuring masturbaters in drafty dungeons; cross-dressers wearing smeared lipstick, high heels, and crude tattoos; raving teeny boppers in spangles and pinkish-green hair; pneumatic West Coast starlets thrilling to the big bad city or—as was the case here in The Telephone Company—an assortment of topless girls wearing thong panties and gyrating on a crescent-shaped stage.
The detectives roamed around like casual customers. Smoke drifted in bluish-gray layers in the beam of follow spots illuminating half a dozen girls slithering restlessly
across the stage, eyes slitted, tongues wetting glossy lips, imitation sex oozing from every pore with each insinuating spike-heeled step they took. If a man signaled from one of the tables below the stage, a wink of the eye or a flick of the tongue acknowledged that the girl would join him on the dance break, to negotiate whatever suited his fancy behind the plastic palms in a back room called The Party Line. One peek into that room told the detectives exactly what was going on back there. A bouncer gave them a look, but said nothing to them.
A dozen or so men sat at tables below the stage, drinking, chatting among themselves, trying to look bored by the exhibition of all that flesh up there because demeaning these women was part of the joy of participation. Even the men who would never dream of taking one of these girls into the back room for actual sex knew that just sitting here while the girls displayed themselves was a way of telling them they could be had for a price—were, in fact, being had for a price, witness the ten-dollar bills tucked into G-string bands. The girls, on the other hand, perhaps to convince themselves they hadn't already been broken by this city or the men in this city, told themselves that only a jackass would part with ten bucks to watch a girl bouncing her tits or bending over to spread the cheeks on her ass.