But somebody had smacked her in one of those lovely green eyes, and the flesh surrounding it was still discolored red and purple and blue.
“Who hit you?” Carella asked again. “Andwhen?”
“Myboyfriend,okay?” she shouted.
THE WAY SHEtells it, she was going steady with this boy from school…
“I go to Ramsey U,” she said, “I’m a sophomore there, an English major.”
…when she met Lester Henderson while he was giving a talk for the Political Science Department. She went up to chat with him afterward, and to get him to sign this book he’d written titledWhy the Law?,and to ask the questions she hadn’t had a chance to ask from the floor even though she kept waving her hand at the guy with the microphone. Mr. Henderson…
“I was still calling him Mr. Henderson then.”
…told her if she’d like to continue the discussion over a cup of coffee, he’d be happy to, and she said sure because he was so very cute and all in a dynamic, forceful, vibrant, vigorous sort of way, not like Lucas at all.
“Lucas is my boyfriend,” she said. “Wasmy boyfriend.”
“Lucas what?”
“Riley,” she said.
“Is he the one who hung the shiner on you?”
“Yes.”
“Last night?”
“No.”
“When?”
“Monday morning. After I got back to the city.”
“Why?”
“He found out about Lester.”
The way she explains it, she kept seeing Lucas because, after all, he’d pinned her and everything. But at the same time she was seeing Lester once or twice a week, sometimes three or four times, depending on how often he could get away from his wife, and how often she could tell Lucas she had to study for a Chaucer test or something. This had been going on since last November, you know, when Lester spoke at the school, just after Thanksgiving, between Thanksgiving and Christmas was when it started. But Lucas never suspected anything at all, well, you know Lucas, he’s so laid back about everything. Until Monday morning.
“On Monday, he came to my apartment…”
“What time was this?”
“Around eleven-thirty.”
“Came to your apartment, yes.”
“And told me he knew where I’d been that weekend…and…and started to hit me.”
“Did he know you’d been with Henderson?”
“Yes.”
“He told you that?”
“Not in those words.”
“What words?”
“He called him ‘That fucking cheap politician.’”
“But he knew it was Henderson.”
“Yes, he knew.”
“Where does your boyfriend live?”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
“Where does he live?”
“831 Granger. Near the school.”
• • •
FATS DONNERdidn’t call Ollie until twelve noon that Sunday. He announced himself to the desk sergeant as “William Donner,” which didn’t ring a bell until Donner said, somewhat impatiently and heatedly, “Fats Donner, tell him it’sFatsDonner,” at which time the sergeant recognized a snitch if ever there was one. He put Donner through at once.
“You should tell your people to be more alert,” Donner said.
“Why, what happened?” Ollie asked.
“I’m calling with valuable information, and the man doesn’t recognize my name?”
“Gee, I’m sorry about that,” Ollie said. “What have you got for me?”
“I’ve got Emmy,” Donner said.
ROSIE WASHINGTONwas not an easy person to keep in sight. A not uncommon mix of Hispanic and African blood, she was a good-looking, light-skinned woman in a community that boasted of many such racial blendings. If she were Chinese, it would be a different story. But the only Chinks up here ran laundries or places that gave women manicures, though Parker supposed the girls who worked in the nail parlors were all Koreans, same fuckin difference.
What Parker was trying to do was ascertain that the buy this coming Tuesday night would indeed take place in the basement of the building at 3211 Culver Av. Toward that end, he thought it might prove providential to put a discreet tail on the lady. His reasoning was that if three hundred large was about to change hands on Tuesday at midnight, the lady would at least case the joint first to make sure she wasn’t stepping into another setup like the one on the rooftop with the Miami spics. The Gaucho hadn’t actuallysaidthey were spics, but what else could dope buyers from Miami be? Anyway, Palacios was a spic himself, so what did you expect him to say? Mycompadresripped off a nice Spanish lady?
All things considered, Rosie Washington was in fact rumored to be a nice lady. That is to say, in a racket where sudden extermination was always a distinct possibility, she hadn’t killed anyone yet—or at least she hadn’t committed any murders the policeknewabout yet. This was not to say there weren’t a multitude of bodies at the bottom of the river or in the trunks of cars at the airport, or even buried in somebody’s basement, maybe even the basement in which the lady would be selling cocaine worth three hundred thousand dollars this Tuesday night. It merely meant that for someone who’d been in the business as long as Rosie had, she’d managed to stay remarkably beyond the reach of the law. Except for a minor possessions charge when she was nineteen years old and presumably still learning her trade, there was nothing on her in the files.
Parker hoped to change all that this Tuesday night.
Actually, following Rosie was not such a terrible chore. In fact, it was almost enjoyable. For a woman who was now forty-seven—according to her date of birth at the time of the single possessions bust—she had a very sweet little ass that was a definite pleasure to observe. Swinging up the avenue in a tight black skirt, she looked like any one of the hookers patrolling this turf. Then again, to ParkerallPuerto Rican girls looked like hookers.
But where was she going in such a hurry?
ROSITA WASHINGTONknew she was being followed.
This troubled her.
The buy was supposed to go down this coming Tuesday at midnight, and this was now already past twelve o’clock on Sunday afternoon and some clumsy cop who looked like a homeless person was on her tail. It was one thing to have to worry about the people supposed to be buying the product from you. It was another to have to worry that maybe the cops had found out. But how?
Two brothers coming toward her from the opposite direction smacked their lips and rolled their eyes and craned their necks at her as she went by. She wanted to tell them Yo, mind your fuckin manners, okay? but you never knew who was carrying a box cutter these days, or even a gun, so it was just better to keep your mouth shut and let them come in their pants.
She stopped to look in the window of a shop selling running shoes and barbells and all kinds of fitness shit, when all she wanted to do was take a quick peek up the street to see if Mr. Law was still on her ass. There he was, stopping to light a cigarette as if he was paying her no mind, oh my what a smart detective you are, mister. Made you the minute you picked me up outside my building, now the problem is how toshakeyou.
She went in the A & P up the street, and then hurried to the ladies’ room at the back of the store, figuring to stay in there awhile, let him believe he’d lost her. She’d have gone out the back way, but there wasn’t no back way cause there were too many thefts in the hood, you had only one way in and out most stores so you could keep an eye on a woman suddenly got pregnant with a sack of potatoes under her coat. He was waiting outside when she finally hit the street again, pretending to be studying the Mother’s Day display of flowering plants on a cart outside the store—was Mother’s Day already here? Man, the way these holidays snuck up on you! She marched right past him without skipping a beat, just as if he wasn’t there, and kept on walking till she got to a place sheknewhad a back door.