Nocturne (19 page)

“It’s standard departmental issue,” the technician said, offended.

“Stand on
this
awhile,” Ollie said, and clutched his own genitals with his right hand and then released them at once. “I want to know was
there anybody
else
in this dump besides those two ugly bastards in the bathroom. Cause there’s nothing I’d like better than to nail
another
son of a bitch up here in Diamondback. You got that?”

The technician was glaring at him.

“I go off at a quarter to twelve,” Ollie said. “I want to know before then.”

The technician was still glaring at him.

“You got it?” Ollie said, glaring back.

“I’ve got it,” the technician snapped. “You fat tub of shit,” he muttered, which he was lucky Ollie didn’t hear.

Along about then, Steve Carella was just waking up.

Georgie and Tony had a serious problem on their hands.

“The thing is,” Georgie said, “the old lady probably didn’t even
remember
putting that money in the locker.”

“An old lady,
how
old?” Tony asked. “How
could
she remember?”

“You see the envelope it’s in?”

The envelope was in the inside pocket on the right-hand side of his jacket. It bulged out the jacket as if he was packing,
which he was not. Georgie only carried a gun when he was at the club protecting Priscilla. Carrying a gun was too dangerous
otherwise. People would think you were an armed robber or something. Georgie preferred subtler ways of beating the System.
Beating the System was what it was all about. But now, Priss Stetson had in some strange mysterious way
become
the System.

“Even the envelope looks ancient,” Georgie said, lowering his voice.

The men were in the bus terminal restaurant, eating an early dinner and trying to figure out what to do about this large sum
of money that had come their way. The place wasn’t too crowded at a little past seven. Maybe a dozen people in all. Black
guy and what looked like his mother sitting at a nearby table. Three kids in blue parkas, looked like college boys, sitting
at another table across the room. Old guy in his sixties holding hands with a young blonde maybe thirty or forty, she was
either his daughter or a bimbo. Two guys hunched over racing forms, trying to dope out tomorrow’s ponies.

It had been snowing since two this afternoon. Beyond the restaurant’s high windows, sharp tiny flakes, the kind that stuck,
swirled dizzily on the air, caught in the light of the streetlamps. There had to be six inches on the ground already, and
the snow showed no sign of letting up. Inside the restaurant, there was the snug, cozy feel of people hunched over good food
in a safe, warm place. Outside, buses came and went. The hundred thou in the yellowing envelope was burning a hole in Georgie’s
pocket.

“The question here,” he said, “is what is our obligation?”

“Our
moral
obligation,” Tony said, nodding.

“
If
the old lady forgot the money was there.”

“My grandmother forgets things all the time.”

“Mine, too.”

“She says it, too. I mean, she
knows
it, Georgie. She says if her head wasn’t on her shoulders she’d forget where she put it.”

“They forget things. They get old, they forget things.”

“You know the story about the old guy in the nursing home?”

“Yeah, you told us.”

“No, not that one.”

“Parkinson’s? You told us.”

“No, this is another one. This old guy is in a nursing home, the doctor comes in his room, he says, ‘I’ve got bad news for
you.’ The old guy says, ‘What is it?’ The doctor says, ‘First, you’ve got cancer, and second, you’ve got Alzheimer’s.’ The
old guy goes, ‘Phew, thank God I don’t have cancer.’ ”

Georgie looked at him.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“The old guy already forgot,” Tony explained.

“Forgot what?”

“That he has cancer.”

“How can a person forget he has cancer?’

“Cause he has Alzheimer’s.”

“Then how come he didn’t forget he has Alzheimer’s?”

“Forget it,” Tony said.

“No, you raised the question. If he can forget he has
one
disease, how come he doesn’t forget he’s got the
other
disease?”

“Cause then it wouldn’t be a joke.”

“It isn’t a joke, anyway.”

“A lot of people think it’s a joke.”

“If it isn’t funny, how can it be a joke?”

“A lot of people think it’s funny.”

“A lot of people are pretty fuckin
weird
, too,” Georgie said, and nodded in dismissal.

Both men sipped at their coffee.

“So what do you want to do here?” Tony asked.

“About the envelope?” Georgie asked, lowering his voice.

“Yeah.”

Both of them whispering now.

“Let’s say the old lady put it there ten years ago, forgot it was there.”

“Then why did she send Priss the key?”

“Who knows why old ladies do things? Maybe she had an apparition she was about to get knocked off.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter either way. The old lady’s
dead
, how can she tell Priss what was in that locker?”

“Her note didn’t say anything about what was in the locker. All it said was go to the locker, that’s all.”

“What it said
exactly
was go to locker number one thirty-six at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal.”

“Exactly.”

“What I’m saying,” Georgie said, “is if Priss knew there was a hundred large in that locker, you think she’d have trusted
us
to come for it?”

“Us? She’d have to be out of her mind.”

“Exactly the point.”

“What you’re saying is she
didn’t
know.”

“What I’m saying is she
doesn’t
know.”

Silence. The clink of silverware against coffee cups and saucers. The trill of the black woman’s laughter at the nearby table.
The buzz of conversation from the college boys on the other side of the room. Other voices. And the loudspeaker announcing
the arrival of a bus from Philadelphia at gate number seven. At the center of all this, the core of Tony’s and Georgie’s thoughtful
silence.

“
We’re
the only ones who know,” Tony said at last.

“So why should we turn it over to her?” Georgie asked.

Tony merely smiled.

The next bus back to school wouldn’t be leaving for an hour yet. This gave them plenty of time to work out what in the film
industry was called a back story.

What seemed perfectly apparent to them was that the only people with whom they’d had any contact after the bouncer tossed
them out of the Jammer were all now dead. This was definitely in their favor. If they hadn’t even
talked
to anyone after telling the bouncer to go fuck himself, then there wasn’t anyone alive who could say they were uptown in
Diamondback getting involved with three people who would later cause trouble for each other, the girl by refusing to mention
she was suffocating, the two black drunks getting into a fight over her money and her stash, one of them ending up drowned,
the other stabbed, boy.

“What about the cabdriver?” Richard the Second asked.

“Uh-oh, the cabbie,” Richard the Third said.

“What about him?” Richard the First said. “He picked us up downtown, he dropped us off uptown. So what?”

Two guys who looked like gangsters in a Martin Scorsese movie were walking past the table, on their way out of the restaurant.
The boys lowered their voices, averted their eyes. In this city, it was best to be circumspect. Witness what had happened
uptown when they’d got too chummily careless with three people who’d turned out to be unwholesome types.

“See that bulge under his coat?” Richard the Third whispered as soon as the men pushed through the door into the terminal
proper. Outside, despite the snow, buses kept coming and going. The two men disappeared in the swirling flakes.

“How’d you like to meet one of
those
guys in a dark alley?” Richard the Second said.

None of the Richards seemed to realize that they themselves were now prime candidates for guys you would not care to meet
in a dark alley. Or anywhere else, for that matter. They had killed three people. They qualified. But the odd thing about
what had happened was that it now seemed to be something they’d read about or watched on television or seen on a stage or
in a movie theater. It simply did not seem to have happened to
them
.

So as they discussed whether or not the cabdriver who’d driven them to Diamondback posed any kind of a threat, they dismissed
from their reasoning the
reason
for their concern. They had been sitting in the back of a dark cab, he could not have seen their faces clearly. There had
been a thick plastic partition between them and the driver’s seat, further obscuring vision. They had placed the fare and
a reasonable tip into the little plastic holder that flipped out toward them. The only words that passed between them and
the cabbie was when Richard the First told him their destination. Ainsley and North Eleventh, he’d said. The driver hadn’t
even muttered acknowledgment.

The way Richard the First figured it, and he told this to the other two Richards now, the camel jockeys in this city were
involved solely with calculating how many more months they’d have to work here before they saved enough to go back home. This
was why they never spoke to anyone. Never even nodded to indicate they’d heard you. Never said thank you, God forbid. They
were too busy reckoning the nickels and dimes they’d need to build their shining palaces in the sand.

“He won’t be a problem,” Richard the First said.

But none of them acknowledged the events that had
followed
that fateful ride uptown. None of them even whispered the possibility that they may have been
seen
by someone as they entered black Richard’s building in the company of that unfortunate girl who’d later been too timid or
stupid to mention or even indicate that she was having trouble breathing. Acknowledging the
cause
of their concern would concede implication.

No.

The boys were clean.

Their bus would leave in forty-five minutes.

They would be back at school in an hour and forty-five minutes.

Everything there would be white and still and clean.

“Nothing happened,” Richard the First said aloud.

“Nothing happened,” the other two Richards said.

“Swear,” Richard the First said, and placed his clenched fist on the tabletop.

“I swear,” Richard the Second said, and covered the fist with his hand.

“I swear,” Richard the Third said, and likewise covered the fist.

The loudspeaker announced final boarding of the seven-thirty-two bus to Poughkeepsie.

The boys ordered another round of milk shakes.

Two pieces of significant information came into the squad-room in the final hour of the night shift. Detective Hal Willis,
sitting in his shirtsleeves in the overheated room, watching the snowflakes swirling outside, took both calls. The first came
at a quarter past eleven. It was from a detective named Frank Schulz who asked to speak to either Carella or Hawes, and then
settled for Willis when he said he’d give them the information.

Schulz was one of the technicians who’d examined the Cadillac registered to Rodney Pratt. He informed Willis, by the way,
that the limo had already been returned to the owner, receipt in Schulz’s possession, did Willis want it faxed over or could
Schulz drop it in the mail, the receipt? Willis told him to mail it.

“What we got was a lot of feathers,” Schulz said. “Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the difference between down and
contour feathers …”

“No, I’m not,” Willis said.

“Then I won’t bother you with an explanation because we’re both busy men,” Schulz said, and then went on to give a long, erudite
dissertation on feather sacks and quills and shafts and barbs and barbules and booklets and knots, all of which differed in
various orders of birds, did Willis happen to see the movie Alfred Hitchcock wrote?

Willis didn’t think Hitchcock had written it.

“The determination of which feathers came from what order of bird is important in many investigations,” Schulz said.

Like this one, Willis thought.

“I don’t know whether the Caddy was being used for any illegal activity, but that’s not my domain, anyway.”

Domain, Willis thought.

“Suffice it to say,” Schulz said, “that the feathers we recovered from the backseat of the car were chicken feathers. The
shit is anybody’s guess.”

“Chicken feathers,” Willis said.

“Pass it on,” Schulz said.

“I will.”

“I know you’re busy,” Schulz said, and hung up.

The second call came from Captain Sam Grossman some ten minutes later. He told Willis that he’d examined the clothing of the
murder victim Svetlana Dyalovich and had come up with nothing of any real significance except for what he’d found on the mink.

Willis hoped he was not about to hear a dissertation on the pelts of slender-bodied, semiaquatic, carnivorous mammals of the
genus
Mustela
. Instead, Grossman wanted to talk about fish. Willis braced himself. But Grossman got directly to the point.

“There were fish stains on the coat. Which in itself is not unusual. People get all sorts of stains on their garments. What’s
peculiar about
these
stains is their location.”

“Where were they?” Willis asked.

“High up on the coat. At the back, inside and outside, near the collar. From the location of the stains, it would appear that
someone had held the coat in both hands, one at either side of the collar, thumbs outside, fingers inside.”

“I can’t visualize it,” Willis said, shaking his head.

“Have you got a book handy?”

“How about the Code of Criminal Procedure?”

“Fine. Pick it up with both hands, palms over the spine, fingers on the front cover, thumbs on the back.”