In Majesta that Wednesday night, in Port Royal, at seven minutes past seven, with the sun already gone for almost an hour, a fifteen-year-old girl who called herself “Italian” even though her parents and grandparents had been born in this country, sat on the front stoop of her apartment building, enjoying the sweet fresh smell of the city now that the rain had stopped. The night was mild, it seemed to Carol Girasole that spring was honestly here at last.
At eight minutes past seven, eighteen-year-old Ramón Guzman walked up to Carol where she sat on the front stoop, bowed from the waist, said, “Haw do you do, miss?” in faintly accented English, stood up, grinned, punched her in the eye, shouted “April Fool!” and ran off.
Carol started yelling blue murder. Nothing like this had ever happened to her in her life! The nerve! A spic coming up to her and punching her for no good reason! Running off into the night, Ramón thought that what he’d just done was very comical, perhaps because he’d had a little too much to drink. He was still laughing to himself when he reached his own street and went upstairs to the apartment he lived in with his mother and three sisters. Five minutes later, he heard a great commotion downstairs and went to the window to look out.
The girl he had punched was standing outside the building with five grown men who’d formed a sort of circle around Geraldo Jiminez, it looked like, and they were yelling “You the April Fool kid? You the one hit this girl?” Geraldo, who was sixteen years old, and skinny as a needle, had just got here from Santo Domingo two months ago, and he didn’t speak enough English to know what “April Fool” meant, so he just kept shaking his head and saying no, not understanding what these men were so upset about, but figuring if he just shook his head and kept saying no over and over again, they’d realize there was some kind of mistake here. But the men kept yelling, “Wha’d you do, April Fool? You hit the girl here, huh?” and Geraldo said,“No hablo inglés,” and one of the men yelled, “Don’t lie!” and someone else hit him, and then they were all hitting him and Carol said, very softly, “I don’t think that’s him,” but they kept hitting him with their fists, yelling, “You lying spic bastard!” and “Hit a girl, huh?” and “April Fool, huh?” all the while hitting him. And then one of the men broke a bottle on his head, and when Geraldo fell to the sidewalk, they began kicking him. They kicked him everywhere, his head, his chest, his stomach, his groin, everywhere. Carol said, more softly this time, “I don’t think he’s the one,” but they kept kicking him till he lay still and silent and bleeding on the sidewalk.
Ramón watched all this from his window.
Then he took off his clothes and went to sleep in his undershorts in the room he shared with his three sisters.
IN ISOLA at nine o’clock that night, Sharyn Cooke and three other surgeons stood around Georgia Mowbry’s bed in the recovery room at Buenavista Hospital, talking quietly about their next move. This was now almost forty-eight hours since she’d been wheeled out of the operating room and she was neither responding to verbal stimuli nor voluntarily moving any of her extremities. At the same time, her fever stubbornly refused to drop and her white blood-cell count continued rising. Most alarming, though, was a significant increase in intracranial pressure, which almost certainly indicated free bleeding and the consequent danger of a blood clot. The surgeons could see no course except to go in again and find whatever was causing the problem. Dr. Adderley ordered Georgia prepped at once for emergency craniotomy.
At twenty minutes to ten, they opened her skull again.
An expanding blood clot killed her three minutes later.
PARKER FIGURED that the way to seduce a girl was to tell her how brave you were. Let her know you’d been in some very dangerous situations where you’d behaved courageously and fearlessly and with good humor, and she would then equate this with the size of your cock. So he told her first that he had flown an airplane in the war, but he didn’t bother to mention which war because he’d never flown an airplane in his life and he didn’t want her to start asking technical questions about this or that.
Then he told her he’d joined the police force after his honorable discharge and had made detective six months later—which was another lie since it had taken him three years to get the gold shield even though he’d had a rabbi in the Chief of Detectives’ Office putting in the good word. He told her he loved detective work because it gave him an opportunity to help the poor and oppressed by righting wrongs and by making certain the victimizers of this world got put behind bars where they belonged. He halfway believed this. About the victimizers, not the poor and oppressed bullshit. Far as Parker was concerned, nobody was poor and oppressed unless he chose to be poor and oppressed. He was saving the best part for last. The best part was the only true part.
They were sitting in the living room of her apartment on Chelsea Street, this was now almost eleven o’clock. He’d left Kling at five-thirty, later than he normally cared to work, he normally liked to quit for the day at three-forty-five on the button. But there’d been a lot of paper work to file on the new jackass got himself killed on Hall Avenue—scratchinga window, no less. Only good thing about the new murder was it gave him an excuse to call Cathy again, ask her a few more questions on the phone and then ask her if, by the way, she’d like to grab a quick bite, nothing fancy, maybe a pizza or something—brunch on Sunday had cost him seventy-five bucks for the two of them, with nothing but a stroll in the park and a handshake after—and then catch a movie later. Cathy told him she was just finishing typing a screenplay, what a coincidence, would six o’clock be okay? The movie had let out at ten, and she’d asked him to come back here for coffee, which he figured was a very good sign. So now he was laying the groundwork.
The porcupine story was always a good one because it was true and also because it showed him in a brave and also humorously sympathetic light. The way the porcupine story went—he had told it to so many different women on so many different occasions that he knew it by heart and never varied the details of it, listen, if something wasn’t broke, why fix it? The way it went, he was in the squadroom all alone one day when this lunatic…
“This was before I got transferred to the Eight-Seven. I was working out of the Six-Four in Calm’s Point, a very tough precinct. I was on the graveyard shift, this was maybe three, four o’clock in the morning, still as death up there, this guy walks in with a porcupine on a leash.”
He waited for her amused expression, women always thought a porcupine on a leash was something cute. Unless the thing’s owner had a gun in his hand. Which this guy had in his hand. The first thing Parker wondered was how he’d got past the desk sergeant. This was before bomb threats were common in this city; there weren’t patrolmen posted outside the front doors of station houses back then. But anyone walking in still had to stop at the muster desk, state his business, big sign advising them to do so. Especially a guy with a fuckin porcupine on a leash!
He risked the word fuckin with her.
Waited for her reaction.
Nothing.
He considered that a good sign.
Anyway, the guy had to’ve told the desk sergeant what his business was, and the sergeant had probably sent him upstairs, maybe the porcupine had rabies or something, whatever these things got. But the guy certainly hadn’t told the sergeant he had a gun in his pocket, which he took out the minute he walked into the squadroom.