“Did you see anything going down across the street?”
“Nossir.”
“Hear a shot?”
“Nossir.”
“See anyone approaching the cab there?”
“Nossir.”
“Or getting out of the cab?”
“I was busy in here,” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Meyer asked.
“Whut’s my name got to do with who got aced outside?”
“Nothing,” Meyer said. “I have to ask.”
“Deaven Brown,” the counterman said.
“We’ve got a detective named Arthur Brown up the Eight-Seven,” Meyer said, still smiling pleasantly.
“That right?” Brown said indifferently.
“Here’s Mobile,” Carella said, and all three men hastily downed their coffees and went outside again.
The chief tech was a Detective/First named Carlie...
“For Charles,” he explained.
...Epworth. He didn’t ask if anyone had touched anything, and Monroe didn’t volunteer the information either. The MCU team went over the vehicle and the pavement surrounding it, dusting for prints, vacuuming for fibers and hair. On the cab’s dashboard, there was a little black holder with three miniature American flags stuck in it like an open fan. In a plastic holder on the partition facing the back seat, there was the driver’s pink hack license. The name to the right of the photograph was Khalid Aslam. It was almost four A.M. when Epworth said it would be okay to examine the corpse.
Blaney was thorough and swift.
Pending a more thorough examination at the morgue, he proclaimed cause of death to be a gunshot wound to the head—
Big surprise, Monroe thought, but did not say.
— and told the assembled detectives that they would have his written report by the end of the day. Epworth promised likewise, and one of the MCU team drove the taxi off to the police garage where it would be sealed as evidence. An ambulance carried off the stiff. The blues took down the CRIME SCENE tapes, and told everybody to go home, nothing to see here anymore, folks.
Meyer and Carella still had four hours to go before their shift ended.
“Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” the man behind the computer said. “Must be a Muslim, don’t you think?”
The offices of the License Bureau at the Taxi and Limousine Commission occupied two large rooms on the eighth floor of the old brick building on Emory Street all the way downtown. At five in the morning, there were only two people on duty, one of them a woman at another computer across the room. Lacking population, the place seemed cavernous.
“Most of the drivers nowadays are Muslims,” the man said. His name was Lou Foderman, and he seemed to be close to retirement age, somewhere in his mid-sixties, Meyer guessed.
“Khalid Aslam, Khalid Aslam,” he said again, still searching. “The names these people have. You know how many licensed yellow-cab drivers we have in this city?” he asked, not turning from the computer screen. “Forty-two thousand,” he said, nodding. “Khalid Aslam, where are you hiding, Khalid Aslam? Ninety percent of them are immigrants, seventy percent from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. You want to bet Mr. Aslam here is from one of those countries? How much you wanna bet?”
Carella looked up at the wall clock.
It was five minutes past five.
“Back when I was driving a cab,” Foderman said, “this was during the time of the Roman Empire, most of your cabbies were Jewish or Irish or Italian. We still got a couple of Jewish drivers around, but they’re mostly from Israel or Russia. Irish and Italian, forget about it. You get in a cab nowadays, the driver’s talking Farsi to some other guy on his cell phone, you think they’re planning a terrorist attack. I wouldn’t be surprised Mr. Aslam was talking on the phone to one of his pals, and the passenger shot him because he couldn’t take it anymore, you said he was shot, correct?”
“He was shot, yes,” Meyer said.
He looked up at the clock, too.
“Because he was babbling on the phone, I’ll bet,” Foderman said. “These camel jockeys think a taxi is a private phone booth, never mind the passenger. You ask them to please stop talking on the phone, they get insulted. We get more complaints here about drivers talking on the phone than anything else. Well, maybe playing the radio. They play their radios with all this string music from the Middle East, sitars, whatever they call them. Passengers are trying to have a decent conversation, the driver’s either playing the radio or talking on the phone. You tell him please lower the radio, he gives you a look could kill you on the spot. Some of them even wear turbans and carry little daggers in their boots, Sikhs, they call themselves. ‘All Singhs are Sikhs,’ ” Forderman quoted, “ ‘but not all Sikhs are Singhs,’ that’s an expression they have. Singhs is a family name. Or the other way around, I forget which. Maybe it’s ‘All Sikhs are Singhs,’ who knows? Khalid Aslam, here he is. What do you want to know about him?”
Like more than thousands of other Muslim cab drivers in this city, Khalid Aslam was born in Bangladesh. Twelve years ago, he came to America with his wife and one child. According to his updated computer file, he now had three children and lived with his family at 3712 Locust Avenue in Majesta, a neighborhood that once — like the city’s cab drivers — was almost exclusively Jewish, but which now was predominately Muslim.
Eastern Daylight Savings Time had gone into effect three weeks ago. This morning, the sun came up at six minutes to six. There was already heavy early-morning rush-hour traffic on the Majesta Bridge. Meyer was driving. Carella was riding shotgun.
“You detect a little bit of anti-Arab sentiment there?” Meyer asked.
“From Foderman, you mean?”
“Yeah. It bothers me to hear another Jew talk that way.”
“Well, it bothers me, too,” Carella said.
“Yeah, but you’re not Jewish.”
Someone behind them honked a horn.
“What’s with him?” Meyer asked.
Carella turned to look.
“Truck in a hurry,” he said.
“I have to tell you,” Meyer said, “that blue star on the windshield bothers me. Aslam being Muslim. A bullet in the back of his head, and a Star of David on the windshield, that bothers me.”
The truck driver honked again.
Meyer rolled down the window and threw him a finger. The truck driver honked again, a prolonged angry blast this time.
“Shall we give him a ticket?” Meyer asked jokingly.
“I think we should,” Carella said.
“Why not? Violation of Section Two Twenty-One, Chapter Two, Subchapter Four, Noise Control.”
“Maximum fine, eight hundred and seventy-five smackers,” Carella said, nodding, enjoying this.
“Teach him to honk at cops,” Meyer said.
The driver behind them kept honking his horn.
“So much hate in this city,” Meyer said softly. “So much hate.”
Shalah Aslam opened the door for them only after they had both held up their shields and ID cards to the three inches of space allowed by the night chain. She was wearing a blue woolen robe over a long white cotton nightgown. There was a puzzled look on her pale face. This was six-thirty in the morning, she had to know that two detectives on her doorstep at this hour meant something terrible had happened.
There was no diplomatic way to tell a woman that her husband had been murdered.
Standing in a hallway redolent of cooking smells, Carella told Shalah that someone had shot and killed her husband, and they would appreciate it if she could answer a few questions that might help them find whoever had done it. She asked them to come in. The apartment was very still. In contrast to the night before, the day had dawned far too cold for May. There was a bleak chill to the Aslam dwelling.