‘Shar, we have to talk.’
‘I can’t talk yet,’ she said.
‘Shar…’
‘I’m still too hurt.’ Heat rising.
‘You don’t know how much you hurt me,’ she said. “ Fire truck going by somewhere on the street. Siren blaring.
‘Please don’t call me for a while,’ she said.
There was a click on the line.
For a while, he thought.
He guessed that was a hopeful sign.
* * * *
Alicia was certain someone was following her. She’d confided this to her boss, who told her she was nuts. ‘Who’d want to follow you?’ he’d said, which she considered a bit of an insult. Like what? She wasn’t good-looking enough to be followed?
Alicia was fifty-five years old, a tall Beauty Plus blonde (what they called Honey Melt, actually) with excellent legs and fine breasts, a woman who’d provoked many a construction-worker whistle on the streets of this fair city - so what had Jamie meant by his remark? Besides, she was being followed, she was certain of that. In fact, she checked the street this way and that the minute she stepped out onto the sidewalk that Friday evening.
Beauty Plus was located in a twenty-seven-story building on Twombley Street midtown. The Lustre Nails Care Division was located in a string of eight offices on the seventeenth floor of the building. Fanning out from these offices every weekday were the twenty-two sales reps Beauty Plus hoped would vigorously sell its nail-care products to the four-thousand-plus manicure salons all over the city. Alicia had written out her day’s report by a quarter to five, had mentioned to Jamie Dewes that she hoped she wouldn’t be followed again tonight (hence his snide remark) and was stepping out onto the sidewalk at a few minutes past five.
The June heat hit her like a closed fist.
She looked up and down the street again. No sign of whoever it was she felt sure was following her. She stepped out in a long-legged stride, heading for the subway kiosk on the next corner.
* * * *
Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks had lost ten pounds. This caused him to look merely like a hippopotamus. Patricia Gomez thought he was making real progress.
‘This is truly remarkable, Oll,’ she told him. ‘Ten pounds in two weeks, do you know how wonderful that is?’
Ollie did not think it was so wonderful.
Ollie felt hungry all the time.
Patricia was still in uniform. She told Ollie she’d signed out late because her sergeant had something brilliant to say about the way the team had handled a joint operation with Street Crime. Seemed a confidential informant wasn’t where he was supposed to be when the bust went down, some such bullshit. Her sergeant was always complaining about something or other, the old hairbag. Ollie told her he’d have a word with the man, ah yes, get him off her case. Patricia told him to never mind. They were strolling up Culver Av, in the Eight-Eight territory they called home during their working day. If she wasn’t in uniform, he’d have been holding her hand.
‘Are you nervous about tonight?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why should I be nervous?’
Actually, he was nervous.
‘You don’t have to be,’ she said, and took his hand, uniform or not.
* * * *
On the way to Calm’s Point, Alicia kept eyeing the subway crowd. The man who’d been following her was bald, she was sure of that. More of a Patrick Stewart bald than a Bruce Willis bald. Tall slender guy with a slick bald pate, had to be in his mid-to-late fifties.
He scared hell out of her.
She’d spotted him on two separate occasions now, just quick glimpses, each time ducking out of sight when she’d turned to look.
There was only one bald guy in the subway car, and he had to be in his seventies, sitting there reading a Spanish-language newspaper.
* * * *
Ollie guessed he expected everybody to be speaking Spanish. Her mother’s name was Catalina, and her two sisters were Isabella and Enriquetta. Her brother - who played piano - was named Alonso. First thing the brother said was, ‘Hey, dude, I hear you play piano, too.’
‘Well, a little,’ Ollie said modestly.
‘He learned “Spanish Eyes” for me,’ Patricia said, beaming.
‘Get out! her sister said.
‘I mean it, he’ll play it for us later.’
‘Well,’ Ollie said modestly.
‘Come,’ Patricia’s mother said, ‘have some bacalaitos.’
Ollie almost said he was on a diet, but Patricia gave him an okay nod.
* * * *
The owner of the Korean grocery store around the corner from her apartment greeted Alicia warmly when she stopped in to pick up some things for dinner. He told her he had some nice fresh blueberries today, three-ninety-nine a basket. She bought half a pound of shiitake mushrooms, a dozen eggs, a container of low-fat milk, and two baskets of the berries.
It was while she was making herself an omelet that she heard the bedroom window sliding open.
* * * *
‘Oh, Spanish eyes…’
This was the Al Martino version of the song, not the one the Backstreet Boys did years later. Ollie had been studying it for weeks now. His piano teacher insisted he had it down pat, but this was the first time he’d ever performed it in public, in front of Patricia’s whole family, no less.
They were all gathered around the upright piano in the Gomez living room. A framed picture of Jesus was on the piano top. The picture made Ollie nervous, staring at him that way. What made him even more nervous was Patricia’s father. Ollie got the feeling her father didn’t like him too much. Probably thought Ollie was going to violate his virgin daughter, though Ollie guessed she wasn’t one at all.
Patricia and her mother knew the words by heart. It was Patricia’s mother, in fact, who’d taught her the song. Her sister Isabella seemed to be hearing it for the first time. She seemed to like it, kept swaying back and forth to it. When they’d met tonight, Ollie told her his sister’s name was Isabel, too, and she’d said, ‘Get out!’ She looked a little like Patricia, but Patricia was prettier. Nobody in the family was as good-looking as Patricia. In fact, nobody in this entire city was as good-looking as Patricia.
Tito Gomez, the father, kept scowling at Ollie. The brother was doing a good imitation of his father, too.
Patricia and her mother kept singing along.
Isabella kept swaying to the music.
In the kitchen, asopao de polio was cooking.
* * * *
At first, Alicia thought she was hearing things. She’d turned on the air conditioner and closed all the windows the minute she’d come into the apartment, but now she heard what sounded like a window going up in the bedroom. There were two windows in the bedroom, one of them opening on the fire escape, the other with an air-conditioning unit in it. She did not want to believe that someone had just opened the fire-escape window, but…
‘Hello?’ she called.
From outside, she heard the sudden rush of traffic below. Would she be hearing traffic if the window wasn’t… ?
‘Hello?’ she said again.
‘Hello, Alicia,’ a voice called.
A man’s voice.
She froze to the spot.
She’d sliced the mushrooms with a big carving knife, and she lifted that from the counter now, and was backing away toward the entrance door to the apartment when he came out of the bedroom. There was a large gun in his right hand. There was some kind of thing fastened to the barrel. An instant before he spoke, she recognized it as a silencer.
‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘Chuck?’
And shot her twice in the face.
2.
THE TWO DETECTIVES met for lunch in a diner on Albermarle, two hours after Carella received the telephone call. He figured he knew what Kramer wanted. He wasn’t wrong.