Nocturne (6 page)

“No.”

“Or coming out of her apartment?”

“No.”

“Was the door to the apartment open or closed?”

“Closed.”

“What’d you do, Mr. Turner?”

“I went right downstairs and knocked on the super’s door.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t trust the police.”

“What then?”

“I stayed in the street, watched the show. Cops coming, ambulances coming. Detectives like you. A regular show. I wasn’t the
only one.”

“Watching, do you mean?”

“Watching, yes. Is it getting too hot in here for you?”

“A little.”

“If I turn this off, though, we’ll be freezing again in five minutes. What do you think I should do?”

“Well, whatever you like, sir,” Hawes said.

“Jenny liked it warm,” Turner said. He nodded. He was silent for several moments, staring at his hands folded on the kitchen
table. His hands looked big and dark and somehow useless against the glare of the white oilcloth.

“Who else was there?” Carella asked. “Watching the show?”

“Oh, people I recognized from the building mostly. Some of them leaning out their windows, others coming downstairs to see
things firsthand.”

“Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

“Oh, sure, all those cops.”

“
Aside
from the cops or the ambulance peop—”

“Lots of others, sure. You know this city. Anything happens, a big crowd gathers.”

“Did anyone you didn’t recognize come
out
of the building? Aside from cops or …”

“See what you mean, yeah. Just let me think a minute.”

The gas jets hissed into the stillness of the apartment. Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed. Outside on the street,
a siren doo-wah, doo-wahed to the night. Then all was still again.

“A tall blond man,” Turner said.

As he tells it, he first sees the man when he comes out of the alleyway alongside the building. Comes out and stands there
with the crowd behind the police lines, hands in his pockets. He’s wearing a blue overcoat and a red muffler. Hands in the
pockets of the coat. Black shoes. Blond hair blowing in the wind.

“Beard? Mustache?”

“Clean-shaven.”

“Anything else you remember about him?”

He just stands there like all the other people, behind the barricades the police have set up, watching all the activity, more
cops arriving, plainclothes cops, they must be, uniformed cops, too, with brass on their hats and collars, the man just stands
there watching, like interested. Then the ambulance people carry her out of the building on a stretcher, and they put her
inside the ambulance and it drives off.

“That’s when he went off, too,” Turner said.

“You watched him leave?”

“Well, yes.”

“Why?”

“There was a … a sort of sad look on his face, I don’t know. As if … I don’t know.”

“Where’d he go?” Hawes asked. “Which direction?”

“Headed south. Toward the corner. Stopped near the sewer up the street …”

Both detectives were suddenly all ears.

“Bent down to tie his shoelace or something, went on his way again.”

Which is how they found the murder weapon.

T
he gun they’d fished out of the sewer was registered to a man named Rodney Pratt, who—on his application for the pistol permit—had
given his occupation as “security escort” and had stated that he needed to carry a gun because his business was “providing
protection of privacy, property, and physical well-being to individuals requiring personalized service.” They figured this
was the politically correct way of saying he was a private bodyguard.

In the United States of America, no one is obliged to reveal his race, color, or creed on any application form. They had no
way of knowing Rodney Pratt was black until he opened the door for them at five minutes past three that morning, and glowered
out at them in undershirt and boxer shorts. To them, his color was merely an accident of nature. What mattered was that Ballistics
had already identified the gun registered to him as the weapon that had fired three fatal bullets earlier tonight.

“Mr. Pratt?” Hawes asked cautiously.

“Yeah,
what
?” Pratt asked.

He did not have to say This is three o’fucking clock in the morning, why the fuck are you knocking my door down? His posture
said that, his angry frown said that, his blazing eyes said that.

“May we come in, sir?” Hawes asked. “Few questions we’d like to ask you.”

“What
kind
of questions?” Pratt asked.

The “sir” had done nothing to mollify him. Here were two honkie cops shaking him out of bed in the middle of the night, and
he wasn’t buying any sirs, thank you. He stood barring the door in his tank top undershirt and striped boxer shorts, as muscular
as any prizefighter at a weigh-in. Hawes now saw that the tattoo on his bulging right biceps read
Semper Fidelis
. An ex-Marine, no less. Probably a sergeant. Probably had seen combat in this or that war the United States seemed incessantly
waging. Probably drank the blood of enemy soldiers. Three o’clock in the morning. Hawes bit the bullet.

“Questions about a .38 Smith & Wesson registered to you, sir.”

“What about it?”

“It was used in a murder earlier tonight, sir. May we come in?”

“Come in,” Pratt said, and stepped out of the door frame, back into the apartment.

Pratt lived in a building on North Carlton Street, at the intersection of St. Helen’s Boulevard, across the way from Mount
Davis Park. The neighborhood was mixed—black, white, Hispanic, some Asians—the rents price-fixed. These old prewar apartments
boasted high ceilings, tall windows and parquet floors. In many of them, the kitchens and bathrooms were hopelessly outdated.
But as they followed Pratt toward a lighted living room beyond, they saw at a glance that his kitchen was modern and sleek,
and an open-door glimpse of a hall bathroom revealed marble and polished brass. The living room was furnished in teakwood
and nubby fabrics, throw pillows everywhere, chrome-framed prints on the white walls. An upright piano stood against the wall
at the far end of the room, flanked by windows that overlooked the park.

“Have a seat,” Pratt said, and left the room. Hawes glanced at Carella. Carella merely shrugged. He was standing by the windows,
looking down at the park four stories below. At this hour of the night, it appeared ghostly, its lampposts casting eerie illumination
on empty winding paths.

Pratt was back in a moment, wearing a blue robe over his underwear. The robe looked like cashmere. It conspired with the look
of the apartment to create a distinct impression that the “security escort” business paid very well indeed these days. Hawes
wondered if he should ask for a job recommendation. Instead, he said, “About the gun, Mr. Pratt.”

“It was stolen last week,” Pratt said.

They had seen it all and heard it all, of course, and they had probably heard
this
one ten thousand, four hundred and thirteen times. The first thing any criminal learns is that it is not his gun, his dope,
his car, his burglar’s tools, his knife, his mask, his gloves, his bloodstains, his semen stains, his
anything
. And if it is his, then it was either lost or stolen.

Catch a man red-handed, about to shoot his girlfriend, a gun in his fist, the barrel in the woman’s mouth, and he will tell
you first that it isn’t his gun, hey, what kind of individual do you think I am? Besides, we’re only rehearsing a scene from
a play here. Or if they won’t quite appreciate that one in Des Moines, then how about she was choking on a fish bone, and
I was trying to hook it out with the gun barrel while we were waiting for the ambulance to take her to the hospital? Or if
that sounds a bit fishy, how about she
asked
me to put the barrel in her mouth in order to test her mettle and her courage? Anyway, this isn’t even my gun, and if it
is my gun, it was stolen or lost. Besides, I’m a juvenile.

“Stolen,” Carella said, turning from the windows. No intonation in his voice, just the single unstressed word, spoken softly,
and sounding like a booming accusation in that three
a.m
. living room.

“Yes,” Pratt said.
“Stolen.”

Unlike Carella, he did stress the word.

“When did you say this was?” Hawes asked.

“Thursday night.”

“That would’ve been …”

Hawes had taken out his notebook and was flipping to the calendar page.

“The eighteenth,” Pratt said. “A hoodoo jinx of a day. First my car quits dead, and next somebody steals my gun from the glove
compartment.”

“Let’s back up a little,” Hawes said.

“No, let’s back up a
lot,”
Pratt said. “Reason you’re putting me through this shit three
a.m
. in the morning is I’m black. So just do your little ritual dance and get the hell out, okay? You’ve got the wrong party
here.”

“We may have the wrong party,” Carella said, “but we’ve got the right
gun
. And it happens to be yours.”

“I don’t know anything about what that gun was doing earlier tonight. You say it killed somebody, I’ll take your word for
it. I’m telling you the gun has not been in my possession since Thursday night, when my car quit and I stopped at an all-night
gas station to have it looked at.”

“Where was that?”

“Just off the Majesta Bridge.”

“Which side of it?”

“This side. I’d driven a diamond merchant home and was coming back to the city.”

The locution marked him as a native. This sprawling city was divided into five separate distinct geographical zones, but unless
you’d just moved here from Mars, only one of these sectors was ever referred to as “the city.”

“Started rattling on the bridge,” Pratt said. “Time I hit Isola, she quit dead. Brand-new limo. Less than a thousand miles
on it.” He shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Never buy a fuckin American car,” he said.

Carella himself drove a Chevrolet that had never given him a moment’s trouble. He said nothing.

“What time was this?” Hawes asked.

“Little before midnight.”

“This past Thursday.”

“Hoodoo jinx of a day,” he said again.

“Remember the name of the gas station?”

“Sure.”

“What was it?”

“Bridge Texaco.”

“Now that’s what I call inventive,” Hawes said.

“You think I’m
lying
?” Pratt said at once.

“No, no, I meant …”

“When did you discover the gun was missing?” Carella asked.

Get this thing back on track, he thought. Pratt wasn’t quite getting all this. He thought two white cops were here hassling
him only because he was black when instead they were hassling him only because he owned a gun used in a murder. So let’s hear
about the
gun
, okay?

“When I picked the car up,” Pratt said, turning to him. He still suspected a trap, still figured they were setting him up
somehow.

“And when was that?”

“Yesterday morning. There weren’t any mechanics on duty when I pulled in Thursday night. The manager told me they’d have to
work on it the next day.”

“Which they did, is that right?”

“Yeah. Turned out somebody’d put styrene in my fuckin crankcase.”

Carella wondered what styrene in the crankcase had to do with buying an American car.

“Broke down the oil and ruined the engine,” Pratt said. “They had to order me a new one, put it in on Friday.”

“And you picked the car up yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Ten o’clock in the morning.”

“So the car was there all night Thursday and all day Friday.”

“Yeah. And two hours yesterday, too. They open at eight.”

“With the gun in the glove compartment.”

“Well, it
disappeared
during that time.”

“When did you realize that?”

“When I got back here. There’s a garage in the building. I parked the car, unlocked the glove compartment to take out the
gun, and saw it was gone.”

“Always take it out of the glove compartment when you get home?”

“Always.”

“How come you left it at the garage?”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was pissed off about the car quitting on me. It’s force of habit. I get home, I unlock the box, reach
in for the gun. The garage wasn’t home. I just wasn’t thinking.”

“Did you report the gun stolen?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Hawes asked.

“I figured somebody steals a piece, I’ll never see it again, anyway. So why bother? It’s not like a TV set. A piece isn’t
gonna turn up in a hockshop. It’s gonna end up on the street.”

“Ever occur to you that the gun might be used later in the commission of a crime?”

“It occurred to me.”

“But you still didn’t report its theft?”

“I didn’t report it, no.”

“How come?”

This from Hawes. Casually. Just a matter of curiosity. How come your gun is stolen and you know somebody might use it to do
something bad, but you don’t go to the cops? How come?