Ajmal told them that his good friend Salim was loved and respected by everyone. This was what friends and relatives always said about the vie. He was a kind and gentle person. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was thoughtful and generous. He was devout. Ajmal could not imagine why anyone would have done this to a marvelous person like his good friend Salim Nazir.
“He was always laughing and friendly, a very warm and outgoing man. Especially with the ladies,” Ajmal said.
“What do you mean?” Carella asked.
“He was quite a ladies’ man, Salim. It is written that men may have as many as four wives, but they must be treated equally in every way. That is to say, emotionally, sexually, and materially. If Salim had been a wealthy man, I am certain he would have enjoyed the company of many wives.”
“How many wives did he actually have?” Meyer asked.
“Well, none,” Ajmal said. “He was single. He lived with his mother.”
“Do you know where?”
“Oh yes. We were very good friends. I have been to his house many times.”
“Can you give us his address?”
“His phone number, too,” Ajmal said. “His mother’s name is Gulalai. It means ‘flower’ in my country.”
“You say he was quite a ladies’ man, is that right?” Carella asked.
“Well, yes. The ladies liked him.”
“More than one lady?” Carella said.
“Well, yes, more than one.”
“Did he ever mention any jealousy among these various ladies?”
“I don’t even know who they were. He was a discreet man.”
“No reason any of these ladies might have wanted to shoot him?” Carella said.
“Not that I know of.”
“But he did say he was seeing several women, is that it?”
“In conversation, yes.”
“He said he was in conversation with several women?”
“No, he said to me in conversation that he was enjoying the company of several women, yes. As I said, he was quite a ladies’ man.”
“But he didn’t mention the names of these women.”
“No, he did not. Besides, it was a man I saw getting out of his taxi. A very tall man.”
“Could it have been a very tall woman?”
“No, this was very definitely a man.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Tall. Wide shoulders. Wearing a black raincoat and a black hat.” Ajmal paused. “The kind rabbis wear,” he said.
Which brought them right back to that Star of David on the windshield.
Two windshields.
This was not good at all.
This was a mixed lower-class neighborhood — white, black, Hispanic. These people had troubles of their own, they didn’t much care about a couple of dead Arabs. Matter of fact, many of them had sons or husbands who’d fought in the Iraqi war. Lots of the people Carella and Meyer spoke to early that morning had an “Army of One,” was what it was called nowadays, who’d gone to war right here from the hood. Some of these young men had never come back home except in a box.
You never saw nobody dying on television. All them reporters embedded with the troops, all you saw was armor racing across the desert. You never saw somebody taking a sniper bullet between the eyes, blood spattering. You never saw an artillery attack with arms and legs flying in the air. You could see more people getting killed right here in the hood than you saw getting killed in the entire Iraqi war. It was an absolute miracle, all them embedded newspeople out there reporting, and not a single person getting killed for the cameras. Maybe none of them had a camera handy when somebody from the hood got killed. So who gave a damn around here about a few dead Arabs more or less?
One of the black women they interviewed explained that people were asleep, anyway, at two in the morning, wun’t that so? So why go axin a dumb question like did you hear a shot that time of night? A Hispanic man they interviewed told them there were always shots in the barrio; nobody ever paid attention no more. A white woman told them she’d got up to go pee around that time, and thought she heard something but figured it was a backfire.
At 4:30 A.M., Meyer and Carella spoke to a black man who’d been blinded in Iraq. He was in pajamas and a bathrobe, and he was wearing dark glasses. A white cane stood angled against his chair. He could remember President Bush making a little speech to a handful of veterans like himself at the hospital where he was recovering, his eyes still bandaged. He could remember Bush saying something folksy like, “I’ll bet those Iraqi soldiers weren’t happy to meet you fellas!” He could remember thinking, I wun’t so happy to meet them, either. I’m goan be blind the ress of my life, Mr. Pres’dunt, how you feel about that?
“I heerd a shot,” he told the detectives.
Travon Nelson was his name. He worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant all the way downtown. They stopped serving at eleven, he was usually out by a little before one, took the number 17 bus uptown, got home here around two. He had just got off the bus, and was walking toward his building, his white cane tapping the sidewalk ahead of him...
He had once thought he’d like to become a Major League ballplayer.
...when he heard the sharp crack of a small-arms weapon, and then heard a car door slamming, and then a hissing sound, he didn’t know what it was...
The spray paint, Meyer thought... and then a man yelling.
“Yelling at you?” Carella asked.
“No, sir. Must’ve been some girl.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Cause whut he yelled was ‘You whore!’ An’ then I think he must’ve hit her, cause she screamed an’ kepp right on screamin an’ screamin.”
“Then what?” Meyer asked.
“He run off. She run off, too. I heerd her heels clickin away. High heels. When you blind...”
His voice caught.
They could not see his eyes behind the dark glasses.
“...you compensate with yo’ other senses. They was the sound of the man’s shoes runnin off and then the click of the girl’s high heels.”
He was silent for a moment, remembering again what high heels on a sidewalk sounded like.
“Then evy’thin went still again,” he said.
Years of living in war-torn Afghanistan had left their mark on Gulalai Nazir’s wrinkled face and stooped posture; she looked more like a woman in her late sixties than the fifty-five-year-old mother of Salim. The detectives had called ahead first, and several grieving relatives were already in her apartment when they got there at six that Saturday morning. Gulalai — although now an American citizen — spoke very little English. Her nephew — a man who at the age of sixteen had fought with the mujahideen against the Russians — translated for the detectives.
Gulalai told them what they had already heard from the short-order cook.
Her son was loved and respected by everyone. He was a kind and gentle person. A loving son. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was thoughtful and generous. He was devout. Gulalai could not imagine why anyone would have done this to him.
“Unless it was that Jew,” she said.
The nephew translated.
“Which Jew?” Carella asked at once.
“The one who killed that other Muslim cab driver uptown,” the nephew translated.
Gulalai wrung her hands and burst into uncontrollable sobbing. The other women began wailing with her.
The nephew took the detectives aside.
His name was Osman, he told them, which was Turkish in origin, but here in America everyone called him either Ozzie or Oz.