Nocturne (10 page)

“Yes.”

Actually
Jamal
lived in Diamondback. All
she
did was live with Jamal. Jamal Stone, no relation to Sharon, who had built a career by flashing her wookie. Yolande flashed
her wookie a thousand times a day. Too bad she couldn’t act. Then again, neither could a lot of girls who were good at flashing
their wookies.

“How come you live up there?” Liebowitz asked.

“I like paying cheap rent,” she said.

Which wasn’t exactly true.
Jamal
paid the rent. But he also took every penny she earned. Kept her in good shit, though. Speaking of which, it was getting
to be about that time. She looked at her watch. Twenty-five to six. Been a hard day’s night.

“Worth your life, a white girl living up there,” Liebowitz said.

Nice Jewish girl, no less, Yolande thought, but did not say because she couldn’t bear seeing a grown man cry. A nice Jewish
girl like you? Giving blow jobs to passing motorists at fifty bucks a throw. A
Jewish
girl? Suck your
what
? She almost smiled.

“So what are you then?” Liebowitz asked. “A dancer?”

“Yeah,” she said, “how’d you guess?”

“Pretty girl like you, this hour of the night, I figured a dancer in one of the topless bars.”

“Yeah, you hit it right on the head.”

“I’m not a mind reader,” Liebowitz said, chuckling. “You were standing in front of the Stardust when you hailed me.”

Which was where she’d given some guy from Connecticut a twenty-dollar hand job while the girls onstage rattled and rolled.

“Yep,” she said.

Tipped the manager two bills a night to let her freelance in the joint. Pissed the regulars working there, but gee, tough
shit, honey.

“So where you from originally?” Liebowitz asked.

“Ohio,” she said.

“I knew it wasn’t here. You don’t have the accent.”

She almost told him her father owned a deli in Cleveland. She didn’t. She almost told him her mother had once been to Paris,
France. She didn’t. Yolande Marie was her mother’s idea. Yolande Marie Marx. Known in the trade as Groucho, just kidding.
Actually known in the trade as Marie St. Claire, which Jamal had come up with, lot of difference it made to the johns on wheels.
My name is Marie St. Claire, case you’re interested. Nice to meet you, Marie, take it deeper.

She had nightmares about a john pulling up in a blue station wagon and she leans in the window and says, “Hey, hiya. Wanna
party?” and she gets in the car and unzips his fly and it’s her father. Dreamt that on average twice a week. Woke up in a
cold sweat every time.
Dear Dad, I am still working here in the toy shop, it’s a shame you never get out of Cleveland now that Mom’s bedridden, maybe
I’ll be home for Yom Kippur
. Sure. Take it deeper, hon.

“So do you have to do anything
else
at that bar?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know,” Liebowitz said, and looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Besides dancing?”

She looked back at him. He had to be sixty years old, short bald-headed little fart could hardly see over the steering wheel.
Hitting on her. Next thing you knew he’d offer to barter. Fare on the meter was now six dollars and thirty cents. He’d agree
to swap it for a quickie in the backseat. Nice Jewish man. Unzip his fly, out would pop her father.

“So do you?”

“Do what?”

“Other things beside dancing topless.”

“Yeah, I also
sing
topless,” she said.

“Go on, they don’t sing in those places.”

“I do.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, no. You want to hear me sing, Max?”

“Nah, you don’t sing.”

“I sing like a bird,” Yolande said, but did not demonstrate. Liebowitz was thinking this over, trying to determine whether
or not she was putting him on.

“What else do you
really
do?” he asked. “Besides sing and dance? Topless.”

She was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea to turn another trick on the way home. But not for the six-ninety now
on the meter. How much cash you carrying, Zayde? she wondered. Want a piece of nineteen-year-old Jewish-girl ass you can tell
your grandchildren about next Hanukkah? She thought of her father again, decided no. Still, talk old Max here into a hundred
for a quick blow job, might be worth it. Twice the going price for a street girl, but oh such tender goods, what do you say,
Granpa?

“What’d you have in mind?” she asked coyly.

The black man in the black jeans, black leather jacket, black boots, and black watch cap appeared in front of them like an
avenging angel of death. They almost all three of them peed on his boots, he was standing that close.

“Now what do you call
this
?” he asked rhetorically.

“We call it pissing in the gutter,” Richard the Second said.

“I call it disrespect for the neighborhood,” the black man said. “That what the letter P stand for? Pissing?”

“Join us, why don’t you?” Richard the Third suggested.

“My name is Richard,” Richard the First said, zipping up and extending his hand to the black man.

“So is mine,” Richard the Second said.

“Me, too,” Richard the Third said.

“As it happens,” the black man said, “
my
name is Richard, too.”

Which now made four of them.

Bloody murder was only an hour and sixteen minutes away.

Abdul Sikhar lived in a two-bedroom Calm’s Point apartment with five other men from Pakistan. They had all known each other
in their native town of Rawalpindi, and they had all come to the United States at different times over the past three years.
Two of the men had wives back home. A third had a girlfriend there. Four of the men worked as cabdrivers and were in constant
touch by CB radio all day long. Whenever they babbled in Urdu, they made their passengers feel as if a terrorist act or a
kidnapping was being plotted. The four cabbies drove like the wind in a camel’s mane. None of them knew it was against the
law to blow your horn in this city. They would have blown it anyway. Each and every one of them could not wait till he got
out of this fucking city in this fucking United States of America. Abdul Sikhar felt the same way, though he did not drive
like the wind. What
he
did was pump gas and wash cars at Bridge Texaco.

When he answered the door at ten to six that morning, he was wearing long woolen underwear and a long-sleeved woolen top.
He looked like he needed a shave but he was merely growing a beard. He was twenty years old, give or take, a scrawny kid who
hated this country and who would have wet the bed at night if he wasn’t sleeping in it with two other guys. The detectives
identified themselves. Nodding, Sikhar stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him, whispering that he did not
wish to awaken his “mates,” as he called them, an archaic term from the days of British rule back home,
those
bastards. When he learned what their business here was, he excused himself and went back inside for a moment, stepping into
the hallway again a moment later, wearing a long black overcoat over his long johns, unlaced black shoes on his feet. They
stood now beside a grimy hall window that sputtered orange neon from someplace outside. Sikhar lighted a cigarette. Neither
Carella nor Hawes smoked. They both wished they could arrest him.

“So what is this about a pistol?” he asked. “Everyone wishes to know about this pistol.”

“The feathers, too,” Carella said.

“And the bird shit,” Hawes said.

“Such a mess,” Sikhar agreed, nodding, puffing on the cigarette, holding it the way Peter Lorre did in
The Maltese Falcon
. He himself looked something of a mess, but perhaps that was because the developing beard looked like a smudge on his face.

“What kind of feathers were they, would you know?” Hawes asked.

“Pigeon feathers, I would say.”

“Why would you say that?”

“There are many pigeons near the bridge.”

“And you think some of them got in the car somehow, is that it?”

“I think so, yes. And panicked. Which is why they shit all over everything.”

“Pretty messy in there, huh?” Carella said.

“Oh yes.”

“How do you suppose they got out again?” Hawes asked.

“Birds have ways,” Sikhar said.

He looked at the men mysteriously.

They looked back mysteriously.

“How about the gun?” Carella said.

“What gun?”

“You know what gun.”

Sikhar dropped the cigarette to the floor, ground it out under the sole of one black shoe, and took a crumpled package of
Camels from the right-hand pocket of the long black coat. “Cigarette?” he asked, offering the pack first to Carella and next
to Hawes, both of whom refused, each shaking his head somewhat violently. Sikhar did not get the subtle message. He fired
up at once. Clouds of smoke billowed into the hallway, tinted orange by the sputtering neon outside the window. For some peculiar
reason, Carella thought of Dante’s
Inferno
.

“The gun,” he prompted.

“The famous missing pistol,” Sikhar said. “I know nothing about it.”

“You spent an hour or so in that car, didn’t you? Cleaning up the mess?”

“A terrible mess,” Sikhar agreed.

“Did the birds get anywhere near the glove compartment?”

“No, the mess was confined exclusively to the backseat.”

“So you spent an hour or so in the backseat of the car.”

“At least.”

“Never once went into the front seat?”

“Never. Why would I? The mess was in the backseat.”

“I thought, while you were cleaning the car …”

“No.”

“… you might have gone up front, given the dashboard a wipe …”

“No.”

“The glove compartment door, give everything a wipe up there, too.”

“No, I didn’t do that.”

“Then you wouldn’t know whether the glove compartment was unlocked or not, would you?”

“I would not know.”

“What time did you start work on the car?”

“When I got there. Jimmy showed me the mess and told me to clean it up. I got immediately to work.”

“What time was that?”

“About seven o’clock.”

“On Saturday morning.”

“Yes, Saturday. I work six days a week,” he said pointedly, and looked at his watch. It was now close to six o’clock on Sunday
morning. Dawn would come in an hour and fifteen minutes.

“Anybody else come near that car while you were in it?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Jose Santiago.”

The thing Richard the Fourth did up here in Diamondback was sell crack cocaine to nice little boys like the three Richards
he was now leading up the street to an underground bar where he promised them there’d be girls aplenty. Richard’s family name
was Cooper, and he was sometimes called Coop by people who wanted to get friendly with him, not knowing he despised the name
Coop. This was the same as some jackass coming up to some dude and slamming him on the back and yelling in his face, “Hey,
remember me, Sal?” Only his fuckin name ain’t
Sal
, dig? Richard’s name was Richard, and that was what he preferred being called, thank you. Certainly not Coop, nor Rich or
Richie neither, nor even Ricky or Rick. Just plain
Richard
. Like the three Richards with him now, who he was telling about these quite nice jumbo vials he happened to have in his pocket,
would they care for a taste at fifteen a pop?

The crack and the money were changing hands, black to white and white to black, when the taxi pulled up to the curb, and a
long-legged white girl in a fake-fur jacket and red leather boots stepped out. The driver’s window rolled down. The driver
looked somewhat dazed, as if he’d been hit by a bus. “Thanks, Max,” the girl said, and blew him a kiss, and was swiveling
onto the sidewalk, a slender, red, patent-leather bag under her arm, when Richard Cooper said, “Hey, Yolande, you
jess
the girl we lookin for.”

Fifty-six minutes later, she was dead.

S
he has done three-ways before, but this is what at first promises to be a four-way and then possibly a
five
-way if Richard puts in
his
two cents. She knows Richard from the hood, he deals good shit. In fact, he used to be in business together with Jamal for
some time before they went their separate ways. She is not particularly eager for this to turn into a
five
-way with Richard in the equation, but as Jamal is fond of saying, “Business is business and never the twain shall meet.”

At the same time, it’s been a very busy night, thank God, and she’s really very sleepy, and would like nothing better than
to go back to the pad and present to Jamal the spoils of the night, so to speak, and then cuddle with him a little, he is
very good at cuddling when you lay almost two thousand bucks on him. But Richard here is talking six hundred for the three
preppies here, two hundred apiece for the next few hours, and giving her the nod to indicate he might wish to wet
his
wick a bit, too, in which case he will throw into the pot five jumbos.