The Big Bad City (7 page)

Angela’s three-year-olds were babbling in their own secret code, he remembered Mark and April when they were that age, inseparable, a gang in miniature. Twelve years old now. April blossoming into a young woman, already taller than her brother, Mark, who was essentially still a boy. Sunrise, sunset, where had the time flown? Mark favored his father, poor kid. April was the image of Teddy, who was now signing to Angela—and Angela was trying to understand—that her court appearance was scheduled for tomorrow morning at nine, and she was scared to death they’d find her guilty and send her to jail.

“They won’t, Mom,” Mark said at once, forgetting to sign, and then tapped her arm, and when she turned, reassured her in the language that had been in his hands from when he was a small boy.

“No one’s going to find you guilty,” Carella said aloud, simultaneously signing it, even though he knew this was no mere bullshit violation. Assault Three was a misdemeanor for which Teddy could spend a year in jail if she was convicted. The accident leading to the assault charge had occurred so long ago that neither of them could remember exactly when, but court calendars being what they were, it was only coming to trial tomorrow morning.

“Who’s the judge?” Lowell asked.

“Man named Franklin Roosevelt Pierson, do you know him?”

“Yes. He’s fair and honest. What’s this all about, anyway?”

Teddy began signing, and Carella began talking at the same time, so she yielded to him for the sake of expediency since Lowell didn’t understand sign language at all.

What had happened was that a woman had backed her red Buick station wagon into the grille of Teddy’s little red Geo. The district attorney was insisting that a) Teddy had caused the accident, and b) Teddy had kicked the woman, and c) Teddy had taken advantage of her husband’s position as a police detective to intimidate the arresting officer at the scene. The only truth to any of this was that Teddy had, in fact, kicked the woman, but only after she’d taken Teddy by the shoulders and shaken her the way some nannies do with infants.

April had heard all this before, so she turned to her aunt and asked her if she knew about this new nail polish that dried in ninety seconds flat. If this were a sitcom, Mark would have told her she was too young to wear nail polish, and April would have warned him to shut up, brat. But this was real life here on Grandma’s lawn, and Teddy had let her daughter wear lip gloss for the occasion and Mark said, “Yeah, that’s cool, Sis, I saw it on television.”

Carella knew that it could go badly for Teddy tomorrow morning because the plaintiff was a black woman and so was the judge, and nobody in this city liked to see a person of color pushed around by a white cop, even if it was only a white cop’s white wife. He did not mention a word of this to Teddy. He planned to be at the trial tomorrow morning, dead nun or not. Even in police work, there were priorities.

“Who’s representing you?” Lowell asked.

Proper nouns were the most difficult words to sign. Especially when your listener couldn’t read your fingers. Teddy turned helplessly to Carella.

“Jerry Flanagan,” he said.

“Good lawyer,” Lowell said.

Unlike you, Carella thought.

Maybe it made a person cranky—twelve years old, or going on forty, or well over the hill at seventy—to be sitting opposite the district attorney who with an ironclad chain of evidence on the murder weapon had allowed a man to walk, had so bungled the case that a jury had let a murderer walk out of that courtroom, the man who’d killed Carella’s father, well, listen, who the hell cared?

Could you just imagine sitting at a dinner party with Carella on your right, and he’s telling you all about how justice had not been served in the case of his father’s murder, a killer had been allowed to walk free, oh, what a delightful dinner companion
this
would be, are all police detectives as entertaining as you?

Maybe it had to do with getting to be forty.

Or maybe it had to do with guilt.

Carella himself had
arrested
the son of a bitch, you see, Carella could have blown the man’s brains out in a deserted hallway with no one to witness except another cop who was urging him to pull the trigger, Do it,
do
it, but he had not done it, he had not killed the man who’d killed his father because he’d felt somewhere deep inside him that
becoming
a beast of prey was tantamount to having
been
that beast all along.

And now the guilt.

In the guilt game, Italians were second only to Jews. He never thought of himself as Italian, however,
because, gee, you see, he’d been
born
here in these United States of America, you see, and an Italian was somebody who lived in Rome, or was he mistaken? He never thought of himself as an Italian-American, either, because that was someone who’d come to this country from Italy, correct? An immigrant? As, for example, his father’s father, whom he’d never met because the man had died before Carella was born.
He
was the Italian-American, the hyphenate, the man who’d come all those miles from a walled mountaintop village midway between Bari and Naples, Italian at the start of his long journey, Italian when he’d reached these shores and this big bad city, becoming Italian-
American
only after he’d recited the pledge of allegiance under oath.

Carella’s father was an American, born and bred in this country. And the man who’d killed him was American as well. Whatever his distant heritage had been, he’d been born here, and raised here, and he’d acquired his gun here in this land of the free and home of the brave, but only when you had a pistol in your hand. This American had learned to use his pistol here, and he had used it on Carella’s father, another American, bang, bang, you’re dead.

I should have killed him, Carella thought.

Because this is the way it turns out.

You are here on a sweltering Sunday in August, and your sister has brought to the table the man who let your father’s murderer walk, and she is sleeping with this man, she is
fucking
him in the dead of night, and all your mother can talk about is a nun with fake tits.

He guessed he was getting to be forty.

He wondered if he’d suddenly start chasing nineteen-year-old girls.

He looked across at his wife.

She winked at him.

He winked back.

He would kill himself first.

Sunday evening turned a rosy pink and then a deeper blush and then a reddish-lavender-blue and then purple and black, the golden day succumbing at last to night.

It was time to go buy a gun.

Stringent laws or not, it was as easy to buy a gun here in this city as it was in the state of Florida. That’s because laws were made for honest people. Honest people knew that if you wanted to purchase a handgun in this city, you first had to get a permit from the police department’s Pistol Licensing Division. The PLD issued four different types of permits. Owners of businesses that had been robbed, or persons who made night deposits at banks could apply for a “carry” permit. A “premise” permit could be issued for keeping a gun in a home or a business location. “Special” permits could be granted to out-of-state residents, and “target” permits to gun-club members. In this city, it was illegal to own or carry a handgun without a permit. But the police estimated that there were at least two million handguns out there—despite the fact that fewer than fifty thousand permits had been issued. Thieves didn’t need permits. Thieves knew a hundred and one ways to buy an illegal piece.

One of those ways was Little Nicholas.

At eleven o’clock that Sunday night, Sonny went to see him.

·  ·  ·

Little Nicholas did business in the rear of a laundromat he owned and operated on Lyons and South Thirty-fifth. The washing and drying machines closed down at ten-thirty, which is why Sonny didn’t go by until eleven. He had called ahead, and he was expected. Even so, Little Nicholas was extremely cautious about opening the back door of the Soapy Suds until he’d turned on the outside floods and ascertained through a peephole that his visitor was indeed Samson Wilbur Cole.

“Hey, man,” he said, and instantly closed and double-locked the door behind Sonny. The two men shook hands. Little Nicholas’s grip was thick and sweaty. He was wearing a white tank-top undershirt and shorts roomy enough to accommodate
two
men his size, a length of clothesline threaded through the loops and tied at the gathered waist. Sonny guessed he was about five-eight and weighed in at three-fifty.

“Got some nice new merchandise up from Georgia yesterday,” Little Nicholas said. “One of my mules made a quick run down there and back. Picked up a silver-plated Mac-11, a pair of Glock-17s, a 5.56 semi, a Colt .45 with a laser scope, and four .25-caliber Ravens. What are you looking for?”

“Got to do me some hunting,” Sonny said.

“Then you need stopping power,” Nicholas said. “We’re talking a nine. Your nine is anything that uses a .357 or a 9-millimeter cartridge.”

“I know what a nine is.”

Was a nine stopped Carella’s father.

“So show me,” Sonny said.

Part of the ritual here was who could outlip who. The price often rose or fell on who had the biggest mouth.

“Your nine did three hundred and two homicides in this city, last year alone,” Nicholas said.

“Nobody’s thinking of any homicide here.”

“Course not. Just thought you’d like to know. How much money are we talking here?”

“Money’s no object.”

“I heard that tune before. Till I state the price.”

“State it.”

“I got nines ranging from seven hundred to a thou. Your uglies are more expensive. The Cobray M-11 and the Tec-9’ll run you around twelve, fifteen hundred, depending. But you can’t hide an ugly, cept under an overcoat, and you’re not about to wear a coat in this heat, are you? Or did you plan to go huntin after it cools down a little?”

“I’ll be needin the gun now.”

“So you want somethin you can tuck in your waistband or a holster, am I right?”

“Yes,” Sonny said.

“But not one of your junk guns, cost you a low of fifty, a high of two-fifty.”

“You talking your Raven and such?”

“Your Raven, your Jennings weapons, all the cheap Saturday-night specials.”

“I want a gun can do the job.”

“Your junk gun’ll give you control but not much else.”

“Show me what you got in a nine.”

“Happy to,” Nicholas said, and waddled over to a wall covered with half a dozen cabinet doors. “You got anything against Jews?” he asked.

“No more’n against any other man.”

“You got a quarrel with the state of Israel?”

“None a’tall.”

“Cause I have some real fine Israeli nines, if you’re interested. You ain’t an Arab, are you?”

“Can’t you tell?” Sonny said, and Nicholas chuckled.

“These are kosher weapons, man,” he said, and threw open one of the cabinet doors. From one of the shelves, he picked up a pistol that looked like a Buck Rogers ray gun. “This is your Uzi nine,” he said. “Shorter and lighter version of the Uzi sub. Take it in your hand, man, go ahead.”

“Feels clunky,” Sonny said.

“By comparison with your Beretta, yeah. I got the 1951 Model Ber, you want to see it. But the piece you’re holdin has a mag capacity of twenty rounds. Your Ber don’t even come close.”

“I just don’t like the look of it,” Sonny said.

“You plan to fuck the gun or shoot it?”

“How much is it, anyway?”

“I can let you have this beautiful weapon for eleven hundred dollars, what do you say?”

“I say what else have you got?”

“I even mention the name, you goan wet your pants.”

“Try me.”

“The Desert Eagle.”

“I’m still dry,” Sonny said.

“You crack me up,” Nicholas said, chuckling again. He opened another cabinet door, and reached in for what looked to Sonny like a Colt .45 with a longer barrel. “Ten and a half inches long,” Nicholas said, handing the gun to him. “Man, this is one fuckin burner.”

Sonny turned it over and over in his hands.

“Check out the balance, man.”

Sonny hefted the gun.

“Weighs less than four pounds,” Nicholas said. “Light, but one of the biggest motherfuckin semis there is.”

Sonny gripped the gun, held it at arm’s length, sighting along the barrel.

“Comes in three popular calibers,” Nicholas said. “The fifty fires a cartridge half an inch in diameter. That is one fuckin bone-cruncher, man.”

Sonny went “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh,” like a kid with a toy pistol.

“You want to, you could knock down a elephant with that piece. If that’s what you plan on huntin.”

Sonny turned the gun on Nicholas, and went “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh” again.

“Leaves an entry wound the size of a lemon,” Nicholas said, “exit wound looks like a cantaloupe. You can mount this fuckin piece on a
tank
, it’d feel right at home.”

“What does the magazine hold?”

“Seven, eight, or nine rounds, depending on the caliber. Your fifty holds seven. What do you think?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” Sonny said.

“Okay, my ass, it’s a fuckin
Lexus!”

“How much you askin for it?”

“I can let it go for fourteen large.”

“I can do better retail.”

“Okay, thirteen-fifty, but that’s it.”

“Eleven,” Sonny said.

“Twelve-fifty. And I’ll throw in a box of fifties. Twenty rounds to a box, soft point or hollow point, take your choice.”

“Twelve and the ammo.”

“I’m losing money.”

“Take it or leave it,” Sonny said.

“Cause I love you,” Nicholas said, and the men shook hands on a done deal.

It was already ten minutes past midnight on Monday morning, the twenty-fourth day of August.

Teddy Carella was eating like a wolf.

Sitting opposite Carella at a table in a small Italian restaurant not far from one of the criminal courts buildings where they’d spent all morning, she could not stop eating. Nor could she stop talking about the trial. Carella sat watching her moving mouth and flying fingers, amazed by how she managed to combine a feeding frenzy with a continuous narrative stream, the fork in her right hand never skipping a beat while the fingers of her left hand sloppily signed the story of their day in court this morning, no small feat.