"I used to work out of a precinct down there," Willis said.
"Near the Old Seawall?"
"Yeah. Nice precinct. Dead as a doornail at night."
"Where do you work now?" Riley asked.
"The Eight-Seven. Uptown. Near Grover Park."
The kettle whistled. Riley spooned instant coffee into each of the mugs, and then poured hot water into them. "You take cream or sugar?" he asked.
"Black, thanks," Willis said, and picked up one of the mugs. "So you never met this Jerry McKennon, huh?" he asked.
"Never heard of him till a few minutes ago."
"Miss Hollis never mentioned him?"
"No. Why? Did she know him?"
"Yes."
"Mmm. Well, I'm sure Marilyn must know a lot of people. She's a very attractive woman."
"How long have you known her?"
"Must be six months or so."
"How would you define your relationship, Mr. Riley?"
"How do you mean? On a scale of one to ten?"
Willis smiled again. "No, sir. I meant in terms of involvement… commitment… whatever you'd want to call it."
"Marilyn doesn't get involved. She doesn't commit, either. Maybe she doesn't have to. Lots of girls in this town, they're looking for a breadwinner. Marilyn's got a rich father in Texas, she doesn't have to worry about money. She sees a man because she has a good time with him. I'm not talking sack time now. That's a given. If a man and a woman don't get along in the sack, they don't get along anyplace else, do they? I'm talking about being with a person. Talking, sharing things, laughing together."
"That's involvement, isn't it?" Willis said.
"I call it friendship."
"Is that what Marilyn calls it?"
"I like to believe she considers me a very good friend."
"Do you know any of her other friends?"
"Nope."
"Never met any of them."
"Nope."
"Man named Chip Endicott?"
"Nope."
"Basil Hollander?"
"Nope."
"How about her father? Ever meet him?"
"Nope."
"Do you know his name?"
"Jesse, I think. Or Joshua. Maybe Jason. I'm not sure."
"Do you know where he lives in Texas?"
"Houston, I think. Or Dallas. Or San Antone. I'm not sure."
"Mr. Riley, where'd you stay when you went up to Snowflake?"
"A place called the Summit Lodge. I can give you the number if you plan to check."
"I'd appreciate having it," Willis said.
"This wasn't any suicide, was it?" Riley said. "This was murder, plain and simple."
Willis said nothing.
He was thinking it wasn't so plain and it wasn't so simple.
Vice President in Charge of Marketing for Eastec Systems.
You visualized a giant corporation on the order of IBM or General Motors. You visualized an executive with area maps all over the walls of his enormous office, different colored pins marking the hordes of salesmen in each territory.
Sure.
In this city, where a garbage man was a Sanitation Engineer and a prostitute was a Sex Counselor, Jerry McKennon was Vice President in Charge of Marketing for what appeared to be a two-bit operation.
Avenue J was in a part of the city the cops used to call Campbell's City, in reference to the alphabet soup marketed by that company, but which over the years had come to be known as the Soup Kitchen. Tucked into a downtown poverty pocket that rivaled any in Calcutta, the lettered avenues ran east-west for a goodly stretch of Isola, and north-south from A through L where the Soup Kitchen ended at the River Dix. Across the river you could see the smoke stacks of the factories in Calm's Point.
At the turn of the century, the dingy tenements in this area had been inhabited by immigrants flocking to America to mine the promised gold in the streets. They found instead the manure dropped by horses pulling ice wagons, milk wagons, lumber wagons, and streetcars. Upward mobility and a strong will to survive took them farther uptown into ghettos defined by their countries of origin, and finally out of the inner city itself into the relatively suburban areas of Riverhead, Calm's Point, Majesta, and Bethtown.
In the Forties and Fifties, a new wave of immigrants—who were nonetheless bona fide citizens of the United States—moved into the tenements, and the sound of Spanish replaced that of Yiddish, Italian, Polish, German and Russian. The Puerto Ricans who came seeking the same gold the earlier settlers had sought found not horseshit but instead a withering prejudice that equated anyone Spanish-speaking with criminal activity. There had been prejudice in this city before. Prejudice against the first Irish who came here to escape the potato famine, prejudice against the Italians who were escaping the blight on their precious grape crop, prejudice against Jews escaping religious persecution, prejudice—always and for any number of rationalizing reasons—against the blacks who inhabited the Diamondback slum uptown. But the prejudice now was deeper, perhaps because the Puerto Ricans steadfastly clung to their old traditions and their native tongue.
It was therefore a matter of high irony when the Puerto Ricans themselves turned so vehemently against the flower children who moved into the tenements—many of them abandoned by then—in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies. It was not uncommon back then for pot-smoking kids to look up in astonishment when a band of Soup Kitchen natives (by now they were natives, though scarcely thought of as such by other Americans) burst into an apartment to rob—ah, yes, the old self-fulfilling prophecy—and rape and occasionally to murder. "Peace," the flower children said, "Love," the flower children said while their skulls were being opened. The hippies eventually vanished from the scene. They left behind them, however, a legacy of drug use, and nowadays the alphabet avenues were a happy hunting ground for pushers and junkies of every stripe and persuasion.
Eastec Systems had its offices in a dilapidated building on the southern side of Avenue J. A nail-filing, gum-chewing receptionist looked at Carella's shield and ID card in something close to awe, pressed a button on the base of her phone, and then told him that Mr. Gregorio would see him at once. Carella walked down a corridor to a door with a black plastic name plate on it: RALPH GREGORIO, PRESIDENT. He knocked. A man's voice said, "Come in." He opened the door. Green metal furniture and filing cabinets. Dusty Venetian blinds on the windows fronting the street. Behind the desk, a chubby man in his early forties, shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks flushed, wide grin on his face, hand extended.
"Hey, paisan," he said, "what can I do for you?"
Carella did not enjoy being called paisan. Too many Italian-American mobsters had called him paisan, usually in conjunction with a plea for a favor premised on a shared ethnic background.
He took the preferred hand.
"Mr. Gregorio," he said, "Detective Carella, Eighty-seventh Squad."
"Sit down, sit down," Gregorio said. "This is about Jerry, right?"
"Yes."
"Terrible shame, terrible," Gregorio said. "I saw it on television, they gave him, what, thirty seconds? Terrible shame. He killed himself, huh?"
"When's the last time you saw him?" Carella asked, ignoring the question.
"Friday. End of the day Friday."
"Did he seem despondent at that time?"
"Despondent? No. What despondent? Jerry? No. I got to tell you, this comes as a complete surprise, him taking his own life."
"He began working here shortly before Christmas, is that right?"
"That's right, who told you that? Well, I guess you have ways of knowing, eh, paisan?" Gregorio said, and winked.