Confusion was the order of the day at the Regal garage when Meyer and Carella got there at seven-thirty that morning. Cabs were rolling in, cabs were rolling out. Assistant managers were making arrangements for tomorrow’s short-terms, and dispatchers were sending newly gassed taxis on their way through the big open rolling doors. This was the busiest time of the day. Even busier than the pre-theater hours. Nobody had time for two flatfoots investigating a homicide.
Carella and Meyer waited.
Their own shift would end in — what was it now? — ten minutes, and they were bone-weary and drained of all energy, but they waited patiently because a man had been killed and Carella had been First Man Up when he answered the phone. It was twelve minutes after eight before the manager, a man named Dennis Ryan, could talk to them. Tall, and red-headed, and fortyish, harried-looking even though all of his cabs were on their way now, he kept nodding impatiently as they told him what had happened to Khalid Aslam.
“So where’s my cab?” he asked.
“Police garage on Courtney,” Meyer told him.
“When do I get it back? That cab is money on the hoof.”
“Yes, but a man was killed in it,” Carella said.
“When I saw Kal didn’t show up this morning...”
Kal, Carella thought. Yankee Doodle Dandy.
“...I figured he stopped to say one of his bullshit prayers.”
Both detectives looked at him.
“They’re supposed to pray five times a day, you know, can you beat it? Five times! Sunrise, early afternoon, late afternoon, sunset, and then before they go to bed. Five friggin times! And two optional ones if they’re really holy. Most of them recognize they have a job to do here, they don’t go flopping all over the sidewalk five times a day. Some of them pull over to a mosque on their way back in, for the late afternoon prayer. Some of them just do the one before they come to work, and the sunset one if they’re home in time, and then the one before they go to bed. I can tell you anything you need to know about these people, we got enough of them working here, believe me.”
“What kind of a worker was Aslam?” Carella asked.
“I guess he made a living.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, it costs eighty-two bucks a shift to lease the cab. Say the driver averages a hundred above that in fares and tips. Gasoline costs him, say, fifteen, sixteen bucks? So he ends up taking home seventy-five, eighty bucks for an eight-hour shift. That ain’t bad, is it?”
“Comes to around twenty grand a year,” Meyer said.
“Twenty, twenty-five. That ain’t bad,” Ryan said again.
“Did he get along with the other drivers?” Carella asked.
“Oh, sure. These friggin Arabs are thick as thieves.”
“How about your non-Arab drivers? Did he get along with them?”
“What non-Arab drivers? Why? You think one of my drivers done him?”
“Did he ever have any trouble with one of the other drivers?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever hear him arguing with one of them?”
“Who the hell knows? They babble in Bangla, Urdu, Sindi, Farsi, who the hell knows what else? They all sound the same to me. And they always sound like they’re arguing. Even when they got smiles on their faces.”
“Have you got any Jewish drivers?” Meyer asked.
“Ancient history,” Ryan said. “I ain’t ever seen a Jewish driver at Regal.”
“How about anyone who might be sympathetic to the Jewish cause?”
“Which cause is that?” Ryan asked.
“Anyone who might have expressed pro-Israel sympathies?”
“Around here? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Did you ever hear Aslam say anything against Israel? Or the Jewish people?”
“No. Why? Did a Jew kill him?”
“What time did he go to work last night?”
“The boneyard shift goes out around eleven-thirty, quarter to twelve, comes in around seven, seven-thirty — well, you saw. I guess he must’ve gone out as usual. Why? What time was he killed?”
“Around two, two-thirty.”
“Where?”
“Up on Ainsley and Twelfth.”
“Way up there, huh?” Ryan said. “You think a nigger did it?”
“We don’t know if who did it was white, purple, or black, was the word you meant, right?” Carella said, and looked Ryan dead in the eye.
And fuck you, too, Ryan thought, but said only, “Good luck catching him,” making it sound like a curse.
Meyer and Carella went back to the squadroom to type up their interim report on the case.
It was almost a quarter to nine when they finally went home.
The day shift had already been there for half an hour.
Detectives Arthur Brown and Bert Kling made a good salt-and-pepper pair.
Big and heavyset and the color of his surname, Brown looked somewhat angry even when he wasn’t. A scowl from him was usually enough to cause a perp to turn to Kling for sympathy and redemption. A few inches shorter than his partner — everybody was a few inches shorter than Brown — blond and hazel-eyed, Kling looked like a broad-shouldered farm boy who’d just come in off the fields after working since sunup. God Cop-Bad Cop had been invented for Kling and Brown.
It was Brown who took the call from Ballistics at 10:27 that Friday morning.
“You handling this cabbie kill?” the voice said.
Brown immediately recognized the caller as a brother.
“I’ve been briefed on it,” he said.
“This is Carlyle, Ballistics. We worked that evidence bullet the ME’s office sent over, you want to take this down for whoever’s running the case?”
“Shoot,” Brown said, and moved a pad into place.
“Nice clean bullet, no deformities, must’ve lodged in the brain matter, ME’s report didn’t say exactly where they’d recovered it. Not that it matters. First thing we did here, bro...”
He had recognized Brown’s voice as well.
“...was compare a rolled impression of the evidence bullet against our specimen cards. Once we got a first-sight match, we did a microscopic examination of the actual bullet against the best sample bullet in our file. Way we determine the make of an unknown firearm is by examining the grooves on the bullet and the right or left direction of twist — but you don’t want to hear all that shit, do you?”
Brown had heard it only ten thousand times before.
“Make a long story short,” Carlyle said, “what we got here is a bullet fired from a .38-caliber Colt revolver, which is why you didn’t find an ejected shell in the taxi, the gun being a revolver and all. Incidentally, there are probably a hundred thousand unregistered, illegal .38-caliber Colts in this city, so the odds against you finding it are probably eighty to one. End of story.”
“Thanks,” Brown said. “I’ll pass it on.”
“You see today’s paper?” Carlyle asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Case made the front page. Makes it sound like the Israeli army invaded Majesta with tanks, one lousy Arab. Is this true about a Jewish star on the windshield?”
“That’s what our guys found.”
“Gonna be trouble, bro,” Carlyle said.
He didn’t know the half of it.
While Carella and Meyer slept like hibernating grizzlies, Kling and Brown read their typed report, noted that the dead driver’s widow had told them the Aslams’ place of worship was called Majid Hazrati-Shabazz, and went out at eleven that morning to visit the mosque.
If either of them had expected glistening white minarets, arches, and domes, they were sorely disappointed. There were more than a hundred mosques in this city, but only a handful of them had been originally designed as such. The remainder had been converted to places of worship from private homes, warehouses, storefront buildings, and lofts. There were, in fact, only three requirements for any building that now called itself a mosque: that males and females be separated during prayer; that there be no images of animate objects inside the building; and that the quibla — the orientation of prayer in the direction of the Kabba in Mecca — be established.