“Not to my knowledge.”
“This wouldn’t have to be professionally,” Carella said.
“I’m not sure I…”
“Personally. This would have been someone he knew personally.”
“You’d have to ask Pamela about that. She’d be more familiar with their personal acquaintances.”
“She doesn’t know anyone named Carrie,” Carella said.
“I don’t, either. I’m sorry.”
“You were Mr. Henderson’s aide…”
“Yes.”
“His assistant.”
“Yes.”
“His right hand man.”
“Yes?”
“He would have told you if he knew someone named Carrie, wouldn’t he?”
“I suppose so. Gentlemen, I’m still not sure I under…”
“How do you suppose a letter without a return address on it got through to Mr. Henderson?”
“I have no idea. Everything coming into the office is screened. No one in public life takes any chances nowadays.”
“Would anyone besides Mr. Henderson have had access to an envelope marked ‘Personal and Private’?”
“An envelope with no return address on it?” Carella said.
“Well…Josh maybe.”
“Coogan?”
“Yes.”
“We’d like to talk to him. Is he here?”
“No, I’m sorry, he’s not.”
“When will he be back?”
“He won’t. He’s gone for the day. You have no idea how many calls we’ve had following Lester’s murder. Both of us have been running around like crazy.”
“I’m sure,” Carella said. “Can we reach him at home?”
“I’ll give you his address, sure,” Pierce said. “But you’d have a better shot at the school.”
“The school?”
“Ramsey U. He takes film courses there at night. He wants to be a director.”
“What time is he usually there?”
“Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Seven to eleven.”
“Today’s Friday,” Kling said.
“So it is,” Pierce said, and both cops suddenly disliked him intensely.
“Just one other question,” Carella said. “When you were upstate with Mr. Henderson, did you at any time see him in the company of a nineteen-year-old girl?”
“Not that I can recall. Do you mean at any of our meetings? Most of the women were older than…”
“No, I mean alone. Alone with a nineteen-year-old girl.”
“No. Never. Lester? Never.”
“Thank you,” Carella said.
In the corridor outside, Kling said, “He’s lying about the girl.”
“I know,” Carella said.
AINE DUGGANpronounced her name Anya Doogan. This was surprising to Emilio, but then again he wasn’t Irish. She told him onetime, while they were both stoned on crack when it was still fashionable, that Aine was an old Celtic name. He believed her. She certainly looked Irish. Or even Celtic, what with her bright green eyes, when she wasn’t stoned, and hair that had a burnt October look, somewhat like what he imagined Livvie’s hair to be. He had known Aine for it had to’ve been seven, eight years now, when crack was all the rage and you could get high for a few bucks, man, those were the days. That was before either of them started hooking.
Back then, Aine was still bartending and Emilio was working as a dishwasher at the same little Italian restaurant down near the Quarter. But even after they both began using, there always seemed to be enough money for their daily needs plus a movie every now and then or a rock concert out on The Bight, crack was so friggincheapthen. It was one of the busboys first turned them on to crack. Emilio hardly ever saw Aine socially anymore. No time for music or flicks anymore, too busy out there rushing the buck.
She looked tired these days.
Twenty-five years old, she looked tired.
He wondered if he looked the same way.
“What I’m searching for is a bar named O’Malley’s,” he said.
“Must be ten thousand bars named O’Malley’s in this city,” Aine said.
She still talked with a Calm’s Point accent, the Irish variety, not the Italian or black style. On the telephone, Emilio always could tell if he was talking to a Spanish person like himself or somebody Irish or Italian or black or Jewish. Some people said you couldn’t tell a book by its cover, but that was all democracy bullshit. On the telephone, the minute anybody opened his mouth, Emilio nailed him. When Aine opened her mouth, it was like you pulled a cork from a bottle and shamrocks fell all over the table. She was wearing this afternoon a flared skirt and a white blouse, white ankle socks and brown loafers. She looked like an Irish teenager instead of a junkie, except that she also looked so friggin tired.
“No, that’s what I thought, too,” he said, “but I looked in the phone books, and there ain’t no O’Malley’s.”
“You look in all the phone books?”
At eleven that Friday morning, they were sitting in the park counting the time to their next fixes. When they first started using, they would try all kinds of shit. It was like a big supermarket of drugs out there. The hubba, of course, so cheap, so convenient, somebody shoulda put that on the TV as a commercial, So Cheap, So Convenient, Come Get Your Crack Cocaine Right Here, Kiddies. Or Just Say No, if that’s your choice, tee-hee. But they also smoked gremmies, which were coke and weed rolled in a cigarette, or sherms, which were these cigarettes laced with PCP. If Emilio remembered correctly, they even did some fry before they started slamming their drug of choice, good old hop, directly in the vein, honey.
It was Aine went on the street first.
Good-looking Irish girl, shapely white legs, red hair hither and yon, she looked like a virgin Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and jacket with a gold-thread crest on it, Saint Cecilia of Our Infinite Sorrows, all she needed was books under her arm, some virgin. By that time, she’d been had fore and aft, upside down and backwards.
Emilio started a little later, and wasn’t doing too well peddling ass till he discovered he looked better in a skirt than he did in jeans. Shaved his legs, bought first a red wig, thinking him and Aine could go on the street together like Miss Dolly Ho and her sister Polly. But the fake red wig didn’t go with his dark complexion or her real red hair, in fact made him look like a male wearing a very bad rug instead of a juicy female tart who just happened to have a cock under his or her skirt. He tried on a lot of other wigs, even some pink and purple ones before he settled on the blond. Business picked up almost at once, though he wasn’t necessarily having more fun.
“I tried every book I had,” he said. “No O’Malley’s.”
“Which books do you have?”
Addicts tended to be somewhat precise, Emilio noticed. They would often argue a point like monks in a seminary or judges on some high tribunal. Emilio didn’t particularly like this about addicts, even though he recognized it as one of his own faults.
“I have the Riverhead book, and the one here for the city.”
“That leaves out three very big parts of this town,” Aine said.
“I know, but I have a feeling this bar is right here someplace.”
“What gives you that feeling, man?”
“First thing, I ripped off this bag outside the King. Next thing…”
“What bag?”
“Had confidential information in it. Next thing, there’s this lady detective in it talking about diamonds, and she’s locked in a basement…”
“Whoa now.”
“Where’d I lose you, Ahn?”
“There’s this lady detective in abag?”
“No, in her report. And her precinct is a few blocks away from this bar she called O’Malley’s. Also, did you ever hear of a precinct called the Oh-One?”
“No. The Oh-One? No. What’s the Oh-One?”
“I’m thinking the First Precinct.”