“You want to spend the night with just me alone?” the girl whispered.
“What do you mean?” Colley said.
“You could also spend the night with me and my girl friend together.”
“So you know where we can find him?” the cop said.
“Who’d he kill?” the bartender asked.
“A detective,” the cop said.
“That’s a shame,” the bartender said. His tone made it clear that it wouldn’t bother him if every detective in the city got killed tomorrow, together with the entire uniformed force. “That really is a shame.”
“Did you say somebody killed a detective?” the hooker asked, leaning over Colley to address the cop.
“Yeah,” the cop said, turning to her. “Liquor-store holdup on White Plains Avenue. We got a positive make from the other officer who was in there. So what do you say?” he asked the bartender. “You know him, or not?”
“No, I don’t know him,” the bartender said.
The cop turned to the hooker. “I hope you’re not soliciting in here, sister,” he said.
“Brother,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean by the word soliciting.”
“Yeah, okay,” the cop said, and he and his partner turned and started for the door. Over his shoulder, to no one in particular, the partner said, “Keep your nose clean.”
“So what’ll it be?” the hooker asked Colley. “Me and Cynthia for the night?”
“What?” Colley said. “Who’s Cynthia?” In the mirror over the bar, he was watching the cops cross the room. “Cynthia. My girl friend.”
“Right, right,” Colley said. His forehead was covered with sweat. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it. The cops were opening the door, the cops were going out onto the sidewalk. He got off the stool, hastily patted the hooker’s hand, said, “Some other time, honey,” and was walking away from the bar when the bartender said, “Hey, there’s a check, you don’t mind.”
“Right,” Colley said. “Sorry.” He took out his wallet. The hooker was scowling at him. “How much is that?” Colley asked the bartender.
“Frank, what’d he have at the table?” the bartender yelled to the waiter.
“What do you mean, some other time?” the hooker said. She sounded like Flip Wilson doing Geraldine. “Whutchoo mean, some other time?”
“Some other time,” Colley said. “Really, I’m busy tonight. How much is that, huh?” he said impatiently.
“Hold your horses,” the bartender said. The waiter was standing at the service bar now, looking through his checks. He finally found Colley’s and handed it to the bartender. “And you had a double here at the bar,” the bartender said.
“Right,” Colley said. “And take out for whatever the lady’s been drinking, okay?”
“Thanks,” the hooker said. It sounded like “Drop dead.”
The bartender made change for a twenty. Colley pushed a two-dollar tip across the bar.
“Big spender,” the hooker said.
Half a dozen police cars were in the street outside, and uniformed cops were all over the sidewalks, walkie-talkies in their hands, stopping people and asking them questions. He had never seen so many cops in his life except that time when he was still a kid living in Harlem, and a spic was holed up in an apartment in Spanish Harlem, somewhere between Park and Madison. He’d walked over with a friend of his and there was a regular siege going on, the cops with bullhorns and tear gas and shotguns, all of them wearing bulletproof vests, the spic in the apartment up there shooting down into the street. They finally got him out. The crowd in the street seemed disappointed. Here was a guy holding off what seemed like the whole damn police department, and these people in the street weren’t too fond of cops to begin with, and they wanted the spic to stay up there forever, show the cops who was boss. But of course the cops killed him, and that was that, the party was over; the crowd began to disperse even before the ambulance attendants came out with his body on a stretcher, rubber sheet thrown over it.
Colley was beginning to understand the enormity of what he had done.
Rape an old lady, cut out her heart, hang her from a lamppost by her thumbs, police department got officially outraged. “Heinous crime,” the Chief of Detectives said. “We are putting on it not only our Homicide Division, but we are pressing into service detectives and patrolmen from all over the city, including Staten Island, not to mention off-duty and vacationing policemen, be they plainclothes or uniformed.” Next day, if they didn’t catch the guy, the whole thing began to cool. By the third day the cops were yawning and asking each other how the Yankees were doing. But kill a cop? Kill one of their own? If you had a race riot here on this street, you’d get a handful of cops telling everybody to calm down while bricks were flying from the rooftops. But kill a cop? Look at the bastards. Had to be at least fifty of them going up to people and asking...
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
The cops in the street here had something the detectives in the bar didn’t have a few minutes ago. Colley saw now that a man in plainclothes was leaning against the fender of a ’74 Chevy, handing out flyers, and he didn’t have to guess what was on those flyers, he goddamn well knew. One of them had got away either from the detective who was handing them out or from one of the patrolmen who’d been given it. The escaped flyer was sticking to the wet sidewalk not three feet from where Colley stood, and staring up at him was a picture of himself as he’d looked four years ago, when he’d got busted for holding up that tailor shop. They’d taken him first to the Forty-sixth Precinct, where he’d been booked, and then downtown to a cell in the Criminal Courts Building, where they’d snapped his picture the next morning. In the pictures, there were numbers across his chest. His hair was longer then, and he had sported a mustache in those days; he had begun growing the mustache right after Terry left for Vermont. But the face was unmistakably his, a little fuller perhaps, he’d lost a lot of weight in prison. All a cop had to do was subtract the mustache and a few pounds, trim the hair a bit, and there was Nicholas Donato himself in person — right here in an armed camp of policemen who’d love nothing better than to shoot him dead on the spot.
A cop was approaching him, possibly because he was standing there in the middle of the sidewalk looking down at his own picture plastered to the cement. The cop had a walkie-talkie in his right hand, and in his left hand the flyer. They were keeping in close touch on this operation because they were dealing with a mad cop killer here. They wanted to make sure this fiend didn’t shoot all of them in the back while they were asking people in the street if they had seen Nicholas Donato, this man here in this mug shot taken four years ago.
“Excuse me, sir,” the cop said.
Colley looked up. He did not have his gun with him; his gun was in his mother’s apartment. If he’d had the gun, he would have opened fire at once, and then run — take his chances, what the hell.
“Yes?” he said.
Another cop was coming up to where Colley and the first cop were standing on the sidewalk. “You get one of these flyers, Mike?” the second cop said.
“Yeah,” the first cop said.
“Ugly son of a bitch, ain’t he?” the second cop said, and laughed.
“Sir,” the first cop said, “we’re looking for a man named Nicholas Donato, he lives on this street with his mother. Would that name mean anything to you?”
“No,” Colley said. “It don’t mean nothin to me.” He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose, and then he kept wiping the nose, cleaning it, practically polishing it, just so he could keep the handkerchief covering the lower part of his face.
“This is a picture of the man,” the cop said. “It was taken four years ago, he might not have the mustache now. Would you recognize him?”