“Is that what you mean?” La Paz asked.
“You tell me,” Carella said.
“I don’t know anything about any beach parties out on Sands Spit.”
“Wednesday night beach parties,” Carella said.
“No, I don’t know anything about them.”
“Do you know where Clara Jean Hawkins went every Wednesday night?”
“Yeah, to see her mother. Her mother’s sick, she used to go see her every Wednesday night, stayed over till Thursday.”
“You didn’t mind that?”
“Middle of the week’s sort of slow anyway,” La Paz said, and shrugged.
“What time would she get back on Thursday?”
“Time enough. She’d be out on the street maybe ten, eleven o’clock at night. I had no complaints about her visiting her mother, if that’s what you’re trying to establish here.”
“I’m not trying to establish anything,” Carella said. “Just cool it.”
“Just cool it, you punk,” Ollie said. “He ain’t trying to establish anything.”
“He’s saying I didn’t like her going to see her mother—”
“That ain’t establishing anything,” Ollie said. “Just answer the man’s fuckin questions and keep your mouth shut. Go ahead, Steve.”
“Have any harsh words with her lately?”
“No, we got along fine.”
“Same as you got along with the other girls?”
“Same.”
“Same as Sarah Wyatt?”
“Sarah’s different.”
“How so?”
“We got a thing going, Sarah and me.”
“But not you and Clara Jean, huh?”
“No, not me and C.J., no. In the beginning, yeah, but not recently.”
“In the beginning, she just adored you, huh?” Ollie said.
“Yeah, we had a thing going.”
“That how you turned her out? Or was it smack?”
“No, she wasn’t doing smack.”
“Just fell in love with you, that it?”
“More or less.”
“Easy to see why, you’re so gorgeous.”
“She thought so,” La Paz said.
“Oh, I think so too, honey,” Ollie said, and waved a limp wrist at him. “You fuckin little pimp, you turned the girl out as a whore, you realize that? Don’t that mean nothin to you?”
“It didn’t hurt her,” La Paz said, and shrugged.
“No, it didn’t hurt her at all,” Ollie said. “All it done was kill her.”
“Hookin didn’t kill her.”
“What did?” Carella asked at once.
“How do I know?”
“Why are you hiding?” Carella asked.
“Cause I knew about the moonlighting.”
“Make up your mind,” Carella said. “You just told us you didn’t know anything about it.”
“About what? I ain’t followin you,” La Paz said.
“About the Wednesday night beach parties.”
“What’s that got to—?”
“He’s talking about the moonlightin, you dumb shit,” Ollie said. “The Wednesday night parties. The parties you don’t know anything about even though you know the fuckin girl was moon-lightin. Now which is it? Did you know or didn’t you know?”
“I knew she was moonlighting, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know it was a steady party, anything like that. I just thought she was holding out on me.”
“How’d you feel about that?” Carella asked.
La Paz shrugged.
“Just didn’t matter, huh?” Ollie asked.
“I had a choice,” La Paz said. “I could’ve beat the shit out of her and risked her crossing the street to some other dude, or I could’ve looked the other way. What was she skimming, when you got right down to it? A bill a week, something like that?”
“Two bills,” Carella said.
“So even two bills,” La Paz said, and shrugged. “Was it worth losing her for a lousy two bills?”
“How much was she bringing in?” Meyer asked.
“Fifteen hundred, two grand a week, somewhere in between there. So should I risk that for a lousy two bills?”
“All your girls bringing that in?” Ollie asked.
“Yeah, somewhere in there.”
“How many girls you got?”
“Four with C.J. Three now.”
“So you were making something like six, seven grand a week, huh?”
“Eight grand, some weeks.”
“You know how much I make a year, you fuckin shithead? I’m a detective/second, you know how much I make a year, you know how much me and these two guys standin here make each year, huh? You got any idea?”
“No, I got no idea,” La Paz said.
“Twenty-three fuckin thousand dollars a year, that’s how much we make, you little pimp.”
“Who told you about C.J.’s moonlighting?” Carella asked.
“Twenty-three thousand a year,” Ollie said, shaking his head.
“Sarah Wyatt,” La Paz said.
“But she didn’t know it was a beach party, huh?”
“No, sir, she didn’t.”
Carella and Meyer looked at each other. Carella sighed. Meyer nodded.
“Hey, you guys,” Ollie said, “don’t cry, huh? I hate to see grown men cry. You, you little shithead,” he said to La Paz, “get your ass out of my precinct. I see your pimp ass up here ever again, you’ll wish you were back in Mayagüez or wherever the fuck you came from.”
“Palmas Altas,” La Paz said.
“Same fuckin thing,” Ollie said. “Out,” he said, and jerked his thumb toward the door.
“Let me get dressed first,” La Paz said.
“Make it fast,” Ollie said, “before my friends here decide to bust you just for the hell of it.”
The moment La Paz reached for his shirt, Ollie turned and winked at Meyer and Carella. Neither of the men winked back. They were both thinking their case was as dead as all three victims.
13
The Elsinore County cops did not know they had a fourth victim in the tandem cases being investigated jointly by Midtown South and the Eight-Seven. The Elsinore County cops thought of their corpse as a first victim. They found the body that Thursday night at 10:00 P.M. The dead man’s name was Wilbur Matthews. Before his demise, he’d been a locksmith living behind the shop he owned in the town of Fox Hill, previously known as Vauxhall after that district in the borough of Lambeth in London — everywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States was the influence of colonial Great Britain still felt.
Fox Hill had been a sleepy little fishing village until as recently as thirty years ago, when an enterprising gentleman from Los Angeles came east to open what was then called the Fox Hill Inn, a huge rambling waterfront hotel that had since fallen into other hands and been renamed the Fox Hill Arms. The building of the hotel had also been responsible for the building of a town around it, rather the way a frontier fort back in the dear, dead days eventually led to a settlement around it. Fox Hill was now a community of some forty thousand people, thirty thousand of them year-round residents, ten thousand known alternately as “the summer people” or, less affectionately, “the Sea Gulls.” The locksmith Wilbur Matthews had been a year-round resident. A quick glance at the meticulous records he kept in his shop’s locked filing cabinets showed that he had installed some three thousand locks in the past five years (his active records went back only that far) and had repaired another twelve hundred during that same time, some of them automobile locks, but most of them locks on homes.
Wilbur Matthews was well liked in the community. Lock yourself out of your car or your house at two in the morning, all you had to do was call old Wilbur, and he’d get himself dressed and come help you, just like doctors used to do. Wilbur’s wife had died back during the last big hurricane, not from the hurricane itself, not from drowning or anything, but just naturally, in her bed, sleeping like a babe. Wilbur had lived alone since. He was a churchgoing man (the First Presbyterian on Oceanview and Third) and a God-fearing man, and there wasn’t a person in all Fox Hill who’d have said a mean word about him. But someone had shot him twice in the head, and the Elsinore County cops just couldn’t figure out why.