It was indeed.
But on the twenty-fifth day of March—the very day Peter Wilkins was found dead on Harlow Street, the day before Parker and Kling discovered the treasure trove of cans in the Wilkins apartment—someone had in fact purchased twenty-two cans of the paint at $2.49 a can, which came to a total of $54.78 plus tax.
The girl at checkout counter number six remembered the day well.
“It was still raining,” she said. “There was a lot of rain that day. This must’ve been around twelve, one o’clock in the afternoon, the lunch hour. We get lots of people in here during the lunch hour. He had his cart full of…”
“He?”Parker said. “It wasn’t a woman?”
“Not unless she had a mustache,” the girl said.
THE OFF-TRACK betting parlor at a little past two that afternoon was thronged with men and women waiting for the start of the fourth at Aqueduct. Meyer and Hawes had chosen this particular location because Margaret Shanks had described a man who sounded remarkably like the security guard who’d been touting Pants on Fire the night Hawes spent at the Temple Street shelter. She’d told them the man’s name was Bill Hamilton. Whether he’d show here this afternoon at the parlor on Rollins and South Fifth was anybody’s guess. A call to Laughton, the shelter’s supervisor, had informed them that this was Hamilton’s day off. A visit to the home address Laughton had supplied proved fruitless. So here they were now in the betting parlor Hamilton had called “the really ritzy one,” rubbing elbows with a white, black, and Latino crowd both detectives might charitably have described as seedy.
There was a television monitor in each corner of the room on the wall that faced the street, the screens now showing the odds for the fourth race, which was scheduled to go off at twenty past two. The favorite, the 6F horse, was paying seven to two. The long shot, the 2B horse, was paying thirty to one. On both side walls, racing forms were posted behind glass panels, and there were posters advising the prospective gambler on how to bet in five easy steps, and other posters listing the track codes for some sixteen or seventeen tracks, AQU for Aqueduct, BEL for Belmont, SAR for Saratoga, LAU for Laurel, and so on, and yet other posters detailing the bet codes, W for Win, P for Place, S for Show, WP for Win/Place Combination, and so on.
There was a pay phone on one of the walls, with a small green sign over it askingGAMBLING PROBLEM ? and then suggesting that anyone with such a problem should dial the 800 number listed below. The sign did little to dissuade the three dozen men and two women who were milling about the room, glancing up at the changing odds on the two monitors and noisily debating, in English and in Spanish, which horses to bet. Some of the gamblers were already placing their bets at any of the seven windows on the rear wall, where hanging plaques announcedCASHING /SELLINGand a handwritten sign cautionedNO VERBAL BETS .
The horses were being led onto the track now, the man doing the live calls from the main office downtown on Stemmler Avenue announcing each horse and rider as they came onto the screen, “The number three horse is Trumpet Vine, the rider is Fryer,” or “Number six, Josie’s Nose, the jockey is Mendez,” or “Number nine, Golden Noose, Abbott in the saddle,” and so on.
Meyer and Hawes kept watching the front door.
Some five minutes later, the man downtown announced that betting on the fourth race would close in less than four minutes, and this caused a flurry of activity at the betting windows, people glancing over their shoulders for a last fast look at the changing odds, writing out their betting tickets with the pencils provided, paying their money, and then beginning a drift toward the television monitors as the man downtown told them betting would close on the fourth race in less than two minutes.
Hamilton came in just as the horses broke from the gate. The moment Hawes spotted him, he nudged Meyer. Hamilton wasn’t wearing his security guard uniform this time around, sporting instead a brown leather jacket over blue jeans and tasseled loafers, and carrying a racing form in his right hand. He greeted someone he knew, shook hands with someone else, and was looking up at the monitor in the left-hand corner of the room when Meyer and Hawes came up to him.
“Mr. Hamilton?” Meyer said.
“Bill Hamilton?” Hawes said.
“Yeah?”
“Police,” Meyer said, and flashed the tin.
On the television screens, the horses were thundering around the track, the announcer’s excited voice calling the race, “Coming up on the outside, number four…”
“What?” Hamilton said.
“Police,” Hawes said.
“Keep going!” one of the gamblers shouted.
“Pushing through on the rail, it’s number nine…”
“Police? What is this, a joke?”
“No joke,” Hawes said.
“Into the stretch, it’s one and four and nine and…”
Not a man or woman in that place turned away from the screens as the horses galloped into the home stretch. There was a real-life drama going on behind them right here in their friendly neighborhood betting parlor, two cops in plainclothes throwing around badges and bracing a good old gambling buddy, but not a soul in the joint gave a damn. They were watching the horses. The horses were all.
“Whip him, whip him!”
“Heading for home, it’s one, and nine, and three…”
“Is it all at once against the law to bet the ponies?” Hamilton asked, and grinned broadly, playing to the oblivious crowd.
“No, it’s all at once against the law to kill little old ladies,” Meyer said.
MORT ACKERMAN was a portly man wearing a brown suit and smoking a huge brown cigar. He looked more like a banker than a promoter, but the sign on his office door readWINDOWS ENTERTAINMENT ,INC ., and the posters all over his walls attested to his successful promotion of more performers than Carella or Brown knew existed.
Sitting in a black leather swivel chair, he blew out a ring of smoke and said, “I’ll tell you something. An outfit crazy enough to do a show outdoors in April , it deserves somebody setting fire to the stage. If that’s what you think’s gonna happen. FirstBank has no business doing this thing, in this city, in April , no business at all. It isn’t as if they come from Florida, these people, they don’t know what the climate here is like. These are people who know this city, this is the only place they have their banks, is in this city. Look at the weather we’ve had the past few weeks. If it doesn’t rain this weekend, it’ll be a miracle. But if what you say is true, there’s gonna be a fire…”
“We didn’t say that, Mr. Ackerman,” Brown said. “We asked you what precautions you’ve taken in the event of a fire.”
“Which means you’re expecting a fire, am I right? What I’m saying is, if there’s a fire and it rains, we got nothing to worry about, am I right? The rain’ll put out the fire.”
Both detectives had seen roaring blazes that the most torrential downpours and a multitude of ladder companies had been unable to extinguish. Neither of them believed there was much opportunity for a gigantic fire in a ten-acre meadow in the middle of a huge park, but the Deaf Man had written “Burn this!”—and when the Deaf Man wrote, they listened.
“So what precautions have you taken?” Carella asked. “Aside from praying for rain?”
“That’s very comical,” Ackerman said, and took his cigar from his mouth and pointed it at Carella in recognition. “The truth is, the fire department comes around to check every time there’s one of these events, indoors or out, and we always get a clean bill of health and a fare-thee-well,” he said, waving his cigar in the air like a magic wand and leaving behind it a trail of smoke like glitter dust. “They don’t come around till everything’s set up, though, because what’s the sense of inspecting an empty meadow in a park where there’s hardly what you’d call a severe threat of fire on any given day of the week, am I right? So,” he said, waving his magic-wand cigar again, “why don’t you come back tomorrow, and that should calm your nerves about whether or not we’re gonna have a holocaust in the middle of the city this weekend. How does that sound to you?”