“You can check it,” Carella said, “but I think it’ll be a waste of time. We’ve got ourselves a plenitude of blondes—”
“Not to mention a plethora of daisies,” Meyer said.
“And we don’t even know which of them were real blondes. So even if one of the guests did check into a room with Santo, how’s the hotel register going to indicate that fact? All we’ll know is that somebody who was at the ball happened to stay at the hotel that night. What we won’t know—”
That was when the telephone rang.
It was a Detective Alex Leopold of Midtown South calling to say he’d caught their flier on the suspect .38, and thought there might be a connection between their case and the one he was handling — a hooker shot to death on the sidewalk late Friday night, with a weapon Ballistics said had been a .38 Smith & Wesson.
Alex Leopold was a dyspeptic little man (little for a police detective; actually, he was five feet ten inches tall) who immediately told Carella and Meyer that he wished he was still back at the 11th Precinct in Calm’s Point. In the 11th, you didn’t get hookers killed on a Saturday night. In the 11th, which was the precinct enclosing exclusive Calm’s Point Heights (“Cee Pee Aitch,” as it was known affectionately to any foot patrolman lucky enough to claim the area as his beat), the most vigorous crime reported in a month of Sundays would have been the burglarizing of a famous novelist’s apartment, or the kidnapping of a prize pooch from the town house of a suburban artist who used the Cee Pee Aitch address as a pied-à-terre in the city. Cee Pee Aitch still had gaslit lampposts in its quaint old cobblestoned streets. Cee Pee Aitch did not have hookers in its quaint old cobblestoned streets; in the 11th, Alex Leopold would have been surprised indeed to have found a dead one on his doorstep.
The hooker found dead this past Friday night (well, really 4:12 A.M. on Saturday morning, but dark in the streets, and night in the streets, and whereas the D.D. report was dated 9/16, Leopold thought of it as 9/15 in his mind) hadn’t exactly been found on his doorstep, but too close for comfort nonetheless, the Midtown South station house being on Jefferson and Purdy, three blocks from where Clara Jean Hawkins was left bleeding on the sidewalk with a fatal bullet-hole tunnel drilled through her chest and her heart, another hole in her larynx, and yet another in her face, just to the right of her nose. Leopold had taken the squeal at 4:15 A.M., three minutes after a citizen called on the 911 emergency number to report somebody bleeding on the sidewalk. By the time he got to the scene, Forbes and Phelps from Homicide were already standing there in the rain, bitching. In all the years Leopold had worked out of the 11th, he had never handled a homicide. He had worked there for twenty-two years. He made the mistake of mentioning this to either Phelps or Forbes, he couldn’t tell them apart and didn’t care to, and they immediately categorized him as a sissy cop from a silk-stocking precinct, which wasn’t far from the truth, but which irked the shit out of him at 4:15 A.M. on a rainy Friday night/Saturday morning with a black girl full of holes lying dead on the sidewalk.
The only identification in her handbag was a Social Security card with her name on it: Clara Jean Hawkins. No driver’s license, no credit cards, no electric or telephone company bills, just the Social Security card. At the scene, Forbes or Phelps, or perhaps both, suggested that maybe the girl was a hooker — what with it being four o’clock in the morning and all — but Leopold put this notion aside, accustomed as he was to the exalted crimes in the 11th. He routinely did what had to be done, and then went back to the office to consult the city’s telephone directories. There were seventy-eight listings for Hawkins in the Isola directory alone. Determined to call each and every one of them — it was by then ten past five in the morning, when most decent citizens were asleep — he began dialing and struck pay dirt at 5:27 A.M. when a sleepy-voiced woman named Dorothy Hawkins said yes, she knew Clara Jean Hawkins, Clara Jean was her daughter.
Now, at a quarter past noon, some fifty-five hours after Leopold had located the girl’s mother, he gave his report to Carella and Meyer. “Turned out she hasn’t been living at home for the past few months now,” he said. “Her mother says she was a hooker, lived in a pad run by a pimp named Joey Peace. I never heard of him, I’m from the 11th.”
“I never heard of him, either,” Meyer said.
“Just goes to show,” Leopold said, and wagged his head philosophically.
“Did you try to get a line on him from the I.S.?” Carella asked.
“No record. Not under the Peace alias, anyway. That’s got to be an alias, don’t you think? Joey Peace? That can’t be the man’s kosher handle.”
“Did you try the phone book?” Carella asked.
“Yeah, no Peace. The dead girl’s mother doesn’t know who he is, she only heard her daughter mention the name. Doesn’t know who any of the other girls are, either, the three others who are supposed to be living in the apartment with her daughter and this Peace character. So where do I go from here? I’ve got a positive make on the girl, and I know what she did for a living — according to her mother, anyway. But that’s all I know so far, and all I’m likely to know unless your case can throw some light on mine.”
“Few possibilities we ought to check out first,” Carella said.
“Like what?” Leopold asked.
“Well,” Carella said, “I think we ought to drop in on the various hot-bed hotels in the Midtown South area, find out if anyone recognizes the girl’s name or her picture, see if we can’t get a line on her pimp that way. Under ordinary circumstances, we wouldn’t get any cooperation. But this is a homicide, they may be willing to tell us what they know. Next, I think we ought to check out the massage parlors. Same questions — Do you know anybody named Clara Jean Hawkins? Do you know anybody named Joey Peace? — tell them right out the girl is dead and we’re trying to find her killer, hint it might be some psycho sex-fiend customer, scare them a little. Next, it wouldn’t hurt to chat up some of the active pimps in Midtown South, I’m sure there’s a file on them in your office — I’m surprised, in fact, that you haven’t got at least a card on this Joey Peace. Anyway, let’s find out who’s working the precinct, and chat them up, no threats of arrest, nothing like that, just a nice curbside heart-to-heart, all we want to know is who’s Clara Jean Hawkins, and who’s this guy Joey Peace. We might hit pay dirt, who knows? So okay? First the hotels and massage parlors, and then the pimps themselves. Meanwhile, we’ll put out a flier on Joey Peace, just an info request to all precincts. One of them might have something on him in their Lousy File. I’m really glad you called, Leopold. We’d about come to a dead end.”
“Yeah,” Leopold said. There was a dazed expression on his face. He wasn’t quite sure he was so glad he’d called.
9
There is nothing cops like better than continuity, even if it takes a couple of corpses to provide it. Before Alex Leopold raised his baffled head, Carella and Meyer were looking for a connection between the dead George Chadderton and his missing brother, Santo. Now, thanks to a few .38-caliber Smith & Wesson slugs, they were looking for a connection between a dead calypso singer and a dead hooker, both of them black, both of them from Diamondback, both of them possibly killed with the same weapon. Now that the preliminary connection had been made, Carella asked Ballistics to compare the bullets that had slain Clara Jean Hawkins with the bullets that had slain George Chadderton in an attempt to pinpoint positively whether or not the same weapon had been used in both murders. He asked for a rush on the comparison tests, and Gombes promised he’d get back to him by four that afternoon, saying he would ordinarily have tackled the job sooner except that they’d just got what seemed like a breakthrough in a sniper case that had been baffling the Three-Six for months, and he had to get to that first. He called back at ten minutes to five. He called to report that the same gun, most likely a .38 Smith & Wesson, either the Regulation Police or the Terrier, had very definitely been used in both murders. He asked Carella if there was anything else he could do for him at the moment. Carella told him no, and thanked him, and then hung up and sat staring at the phone for several moments.