"You saying a name?"
"You saying Sonny?"
"I don't want to look at no pictures," Assanti said.
"Are you saying Sonny?"
"Was that his name? Sonny?"
"You know these guys?"
"Was one of them named Sonny?"
"Nobody's gonna hurt you, Dominick."
"Was his name Sonny?"
"Sonny what?"
"We won't let anybody hurt you, Dominick."
"Sonny what?"
He looked at them for a long time. He was clearly frightened, and they thought for sure they were going to lose him just the way they'd lost the guy coming out of the liquor store.
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He did, in fact, shake his head as if to say he wasn't going to tell them anything else, but he was only shaking it in denial of something inside him that was telling him he'd be crazy to identify anyone who had killed a man.
"The one with the gun," he said softly.
"What about him, Dominick?"
"His name was Sonny."
"You know him?"
"No. I heard the other guy calling him Sonny. When they were running by. Come on, Sonny, move it. Something like that."
"Did you get a good look at them, Dominick?"
"I got a good look."
"Can we show you some pictures?"
He hesitated again. And again he shook his head, telling himself he was crazy to be doing this. But he sighed at last and said, "Yeah, okay."
"Thank you," Wade said.
The only white man he could trust with this was Carella. There were things you just knew.
"My goddamn skin," Brown said, as if Carella would understand immediately, which of course he didn't.
"All that crap I got to use," Brown said.
Carella turned to look at him, bewildered.
They were in the unmarked car, on their way downtown, Brown driving, Carella riding shotgun. So far, it had been an awful morning. First the disappointing promises-promises conversation with Lieutenant Nelson at the Four-Five and then Lieutenant Byrnes of their very own Eight-Seven asking them into his office and telling them he'd had a call from a lawyer named Louis Loeb, who'd wanted to know why a grieving widow named Margaret Schumacher had been harassed in her apartment yesterday morning by two detectives respectively named Carella and Brown.
"I realize you didn't harass her," Byrnes said at once. "The problem is this guy says he's personally going to the chief of
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detectives if he doesn't get written apologies from both of you."
"Boy," Carella said.
"You don't feel like writing apologies, I'll tell him to go to hell," Byrnes said.
"Yeah, do that," Brown said.
"Do it," Carella said, and nodded.
"How does the wife look, anyway?" Byrnes asked.
"Good as anybody else right now," Brown said.
But, of course, they hadn't yet talked to anyone else. They were on their way now to see Lois Stein, Schumacher's married daughter, Mrs Marc with-a-c Stein. And Brown was telling Carella what a pain in the ass it was to be black. Not because being black made you immediately suspect, especially if you were big and black, because no white man ever figured you for a big, black cop, you always got figured for a big black criminal, with tattoos all over your body and muscles you got lifting weights in the prison gym.
The way Brown figured it - and this had nothing to do with why being black was such a very real pain in the ass - drugs were calling the tune in this America of ours, and the prime targets for the dealers were black ghetto kids who, rightly or wrongly (and Brown figured they were right) had reason to believe they were being cheated out of the American dream and the only dream available to them was the sure one they could find in a crack pipe. But a drug habit was an expensive one even if you were a big account executive downtown, especially expensive uptown, where if you were black and uneducated, the best you could hope for was to serve hamburgers at McDonald's for four-and-a-quarter an hour, which wasn't even enough to support a heavy cigarette habit. To support a crack habit, you had to steal. And the people you stole from were mostly white people, because they were the ones had all the bread. So whenever you saw Arthur Brown coming down the street, you didn't think here comes a protector of the innocent sworn to uphold the laws of the city, state, and nation, what you thought was here comes a big
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black dope-addict criminal in this fine country of ours where the vicious circle was drugs-to-crime-to-racism-to-despair-to-drugs and once again around the mulberry bush. But none of this was why it was a supreme pain in the ass to be black.
"You know what happens when a black man's skin gets dry?" Brown asked.
"No, what?" Carella said.
He was still thinking about Brown's vicious circle.
"Aside from it being damn uncomfortable?"
"Uh-huh," Carella said.
"We turn gray is what happens."
"Uh-huh."
"Which is why we use a lot of oils and greases on our skin. Not only women, I'm talking about men, too."
"Uh-huh."
"To lubricate the skin, get rid of the scale. What was that address again?"
"314 South Dreyden."
"Cocoa butter, cold cream, Vaseline, all this crap. We have to use it to keep from turning gray like a ghost."
"You don't look gray to me," Carella said.
'"Cause I use all this crap on my skin. But I got a tendency to acne, you know?"
"Uh-huh."
"From when I was a teenager. So if I use all this crap to keep my skin from turning gray, I bust out in pimples instead. It's another vicious circle. I'm thinking of growing a beard, I swear to God."
Carella didn't know what that meant, either.
"Up ahead," he said.
"I see it."
Brown turned the car into the curb, maneuvered it into a parking space in front of 322 South Dreyden, and then got out of the car, locked it, and walked around it to join Carella on the sidewalk.
"Ingrown hairs," he said.
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"Uh-huh," Carella said. "You see a boutique? It's supposed to be a boutique."
The shop "was named Vanessa's, which Lois Stein explained had nothing to do with her own name, but which sounded very British and slightly snobbish and which, in fact, attracted the upscale sort of women to whom her shop catered. She herself looked upscale and elegantly groomed, the sort of honey blonde one usually saw in perfume commercials, staring moodily out to sea, tresses blowing in the wind, diaphanous skirts flattened against outrageously long legs. Margaret Schumacher had told them her stepdaughter was thirty-seven years old, but they never would have guessed it. She looked to be in her late twenties, her complexion flawless, her grayish-blue eyes adding a look of mysterious serenity to her face.
In a voice as soft as her appearance - soft, gentle, these were the words Carella would have used to describe her - she explained at once how close she had been to her father, a relationship that had survived a bitter divorce and her father's remarriage. She could not now imagine how something like this could have happened to him. Her father the victim of a shooting? Even in this city, where law and order -
"Forgive me," she said, "I didn't mean to imply . . ."
A delicate, slender hand came up to her mouth, touched her lips as if to scold them. She wore no lipstick, Carella noticed. The faintest blue eye shadow tinted the lids above her blue-gray eyes. Her hair looked like spun gold. Here among the expensive baubles and threads she sold, she looked like an Alice who had inadvertently stumbled into the queen's closet.
"That's what we'd like to talk to you about," Carella said, "how something like this could've happened." He was lying only slightly in that on his block, at this particular time in space, anyone and everyone was still a suspect in this damn thing. But at the same time ...
"When did you see him last?" he asked.
This because a victim - especially if something or someone had been troubling him - sometimes revealed to friends or