Janos smiled. ‘It’s God’s little waiting room for dying whores.’
‘Should be fun,’ said Riker. ‘Still wanna go?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Lieutenant Coffey watched the television set in the incident room. Stella Small was now the subject of a fifteen-minute news segment. The police were requesting public assistance in the hunt for a potential crime victim. ‘Prime-time news. This is too good to be true.’
‘Oh, they were happy to do it,’ said Detective Wang. ‘It’s ratings week. This’ll send advertising revenues through the roof. They loved the part about the serial hangman.’
The reporter on screen interviewed a bartender in Stella Small’s neighborhood. The tavern’s customers leaned into the shot and waved to the audience. The camera panned to the window, then out the door and into the street, turning left and right. The reporter asked, ‘Where is she now? Have you seen her?’ His voice had the tenor of a game-show host inviting the home viewers to play.
A banner ran across the bottom of the screen with telephone numbers for the police tip line as the picture changed to a group of small children in costumes. Coffey wondered how a local news station had obtained this video of a kindergarten play in Ohio. A child-size Stella Small wobbled onstage, precariously balanced atop a pair of grown-up’s high heels. The little girl promptly fell off her shoes and landed on her little backside, endearing her to two homicide cops and eight million New Yorkers. Tiny snow-white socks waved in the air while the child cried, ‘Mommy!’
‘Oh, no.’ Coffey knew where the film had come from. ‘It was that damn agent. She turned the reporters loose on Stella’s family.’
Ronald Deluthe parked the car some distance from the mouth of the tunnel, where a battalion of women were working the lanes of congested traffic. Slow-stepping in high heels, the whores flashed bosoms pearled with sweat. Cars crawled through the street market of skirts hiked up to buttocks, twin moons in every shade of skin, spangles and cheap wigs in copper and gold – red, red mouths.
Some of the women were diving into cars, heads down and disappearing from view, then emerging with cash.
‘Hookers never file complaints,’ said Riker, turning to the young cop behind the wheel. ‘And they never identify suspects. You know why? When the perps get out on bail, they beat the crap out of the women – or they kill them. Dead witness? Case dismissed. That’s our criminal justice system. So we need to convince the ladies they’ll never make a court appearance. But leave that to me, kid. I’ve got more experience lying to women.’
He loosened his tie and buttoned his suit jacket so the gun and holster would not show. ‘Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll pick out some likely whores. Then we’ll try to bag two or three.’
Riker stepped out on the pavement and raised the hood of Deluthe’s car, disguising it as a disabled vehicle. Then he wandered toward the women, weaving slightly and snapping his fingers, but not in time to the blaring music from a slow moving car, for he was playing the role of a harmless drunk out of tempo with the rest of the world, so as not to trigger the hookers’ cop radar.
Twenty minutes later, he had picked out three junkies, older prostitutes in Sparrow’s age bracket. They would be climbing the walls inside of an hour in custody, and a dope-sick whore was a talkative whore. One looked familiar, but if he had ever arrested her, she did not remember him either. He had asked no questions about Sparrow, for these women were streetwise, but he had managed to pick out regulars who had worked this part of town when Sparrow was last seen whoring.
The detective looked at his watch. Where was Deluthe? More than the allotted time had passed, and one of his best whores was getting away.
A red sedan crawled by, and a pair of high-heeled sandals clacked alongside the moving vehicle as a woman leaned down to smile at the driver, singing to him, ‘Hey, sweet thing.’ The prostitute rolled on to the hood of the car and rode it into the mouth of the tunnel, shouting into the windshield, negotiating her price with the driver.
Riker turned around to see the rookie cop make a hasty exit from his car. Now Deluthe remembered to slow his steps as he approached the women. What was he carrying? Riker squinted, and then his hand went to his own jacket pocket.
Empty.
The paperback western must have fallen out in the car.
Deluthe was trying not to stare at all the undressed skin, and this attracted immediate attention. Alerted now, the women lifted their heads, all but sniffing the wind for the smell of a cop. Some edged away, and some stayed to watch from a distance, wary and tense, ready to fly. And Riker knew he would be lucky to catch a single whore.
Could it get any worse? Oh, yeah.
There was only one stiff breeze in the entire month of August and it had to be tonight. Deluthe’s suit jacket was blown open. Three of the hookers could see the gun in his brand-new shoulder holster. And now they were melting away in the heat.
The whore-store was closing.
All the brunettes edged away, but one blonde sang out to other blondes as she strolled toward Ronald Deluthe.
Go figure.
Riker had seen hookers gang together by race, but never by hair color. Two more blondes were drifting toward the young detective. And now the dark-haired whores had forgotten their fear and proceeded to steal all the trade, picking off commuters, climbing in and out of cars, raking in cash by tens and fives.
Deluthe was deep in peroxide heaven and mounds of pale skin escaping from halter tops. The women stroked his hair, his chest and thighs. They smiled at him with broken teeth and gold teeth, with a ‘Hey, baby’ and ‘Hi, sugarman.’ One whore tapped the book in his hand, saying, ‘So – you know how this story ends?’
Riker’s jaw went slack as he watched Deluthe open the paperback western. The young cop then read aloud to a group of very attentive, nearly naked book fiends.
CHAPTER 11
Lieutenant Coffey closed the door of his office, wanting more privacy for this delicate telephone call to Ohio. He spoke gently to Stella Small the elder, while Stella Small the younger cried on an extension phone. The mother soon faded out of the conversation, but the grandmother remained on the line until weeping made talking impossible.
He set down the telephone and turned to the small television set in the corner of his office. The live coverage from Ohio had resumed as the two Stellas returned to the reporter in their living room. Beyond the couch where the women were seated, Coffey had a picture-window view of their trailer court. A circus of media were camped outside.
The reporter was asking the mother and grandmother about their telephone interview with Special Crimes Unit in New York. ‘Do the police believe they’ll find Stella before she dies?’
No mercy.
The lieutenant looked up at the glass partition and counted up the whores passing by his office, ten of them. Leading this parade was Ronald Deluthe. Riker was the last one through the stairwell door. All the detectives in the squad room were smiling, heads swiveling to follow the women, and Jack Coffey had no trouble reading their minds:
More blondes. God is good.
The lieutenant opened his office door and called out to Riker. ‘Charles Butler is here. He said you sent for him.’
Charles sat in a narrow darkened room rather like a theater audience. Rows of comfortable chairs were raised in tiers, and there was not a bad seat in the house. The stage was a large bright space on the other side of a one-way glass, where Ronald Deluthe was holding the door open for a group of blondes in various stages of undress. The women took chairs around a long table. He could see them all talking at once but heard nothing of their conversation.