The Big Bad City Read online

  “Put down the piece, lady,” he said.

  The gun was shaking in her hand.

  “Put it down!” he shouted.

  “Shoot him!” Jerry yelled, and then began moaning again.

  Cookie Boy moved toward the blonde, his hand extended.

  “Please,” he said. “Give me the gun. Please, lady. No trouble. Please.”

  He wanted to tell her he’d been on television last night.

  “No, trouble, please,” he said, and the gun went off.

  Cookie Boy ducked, though he didn’t need to, turning away from the blast at the same time. The shot missed him by a country mile, but it took Jerry in the center of his chest, slamming him back against the dresser, where he knocked over a framed picture of Mrs. Cooper and her dark-eyed, mustached husband before he slid to the floor. This was Cookie Boy’s worst nightmare realized, a burglary gone sour, a kid collapsing to the floor with blood spurting from his chest and his eyes rolling back into his head, a fucking felony murder even if he wasn’t the one who’d pulled the trigger. He whirled on the woman again, the blonde, Mrs. Cooper, whatever the fuck her name was, and he said, “Give me the gun, lady! Now!” but the stupid cunt was on her knees in the center of the bed, her eyes wide, the gun shaking in both hands, the gun pointed right at his head, and he knew if she fired again she would kill him for sure.

  He made a flying leap for the bed and the blonde and the gun in her hands, grabbing for both hands, the right hand with her finger inside the trigger guard, the left hand wrapped around it, rolling over onto the bed with his hands covering both hers, the blonde naked, blood from his nose spattering her and the wall behind the bed, a shot went off, knocking plaster from the ceiling. He was almost crying now. The blonde had been caught in bed with a teenager and he was dead across the room now and she didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know what to do. He dared not let go of her hands because the gun was between them like an uninvited guest and her finger was still inside the trigger guard and her eyes were wild and her mouth was shaking and she was smeared with blood and crazy with fear, and the gun went off again.

  He felt her going limp against him.

  “Lady?” he said.

  And rolled her off of him.

  “Lady?” he said again.

  And looked into her dead blue eyes.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  He could not leave the apartment looking like this. There were two dead people here in the bedroom with him and his instinct was to get the hell out of here fast, but if he went into the street covered with blood this way, he’d stop traffic. But suppose the shots had been heard?

  He was trembling.

  His nose was still bleeding.

  He cupped his hand under it to keep the blood from spilling onto the sheets, but they were already covered with blood, his and the blonde’s, Mrs. Cooper, he had once known a redhead named Connie Cooper, oh Jesus, how had this gone so wrong?

  He kept waiting for a knock on the front door.

  Someone surely must have heard the shots.

  Wasn’t there a super in this building?

  But he couldn’t go out looking like this.

  So he waited.

  He could hear a clock ticking someplace in the apartment. He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to four. Was that all it had taken? Twenty minutes? All this blood in only twenty minutes? He had to get out of here before people started coming home from work, the husband with the mustache, Jesus, he had to get out of here!

  His nose was still bleeding.

  He found the bathroom, and wadded some toilet paper inside his upper lip the way his mother had taught him to do whenever he had a nosebleed, and then he took off all his clothes, dripping blood everywhere, and ran a shower. He washed himself clean and toweled himself off, and then he went back into the bedroom and searched the dresser for a pair of the husband’s undershorts, and socks, and a shirt. The kid with the freckles was lying on his back on the floor in front of the dresser. His cock looked all shriveled now. Cookie Boy found a pair of jeans in the closet and put those on, too. There was blood all over his Reeboks, so he borrowed a pair of loafers from the husband, which were too big for him, but that was better than too tight. He packed all his own clothes in the suitcase with his tools and the little white box of chocolate chip cookies.

  He knew he could not leave the box behind; it would irrevocably link him to a pair of murders. He wasn’t an amateur, he never took foolish risks, he wasn’t in this for the goddamn glamour and glory. He took a single cookie from the box, and closed the lid. He bit into the cookie, and then snapped the suitcase shut, and picked it up. It seemed suddenly heavy. As he left the room, he felt he was somehow breaking with tradition, and by so doing erasing a part of his past and therefore a part of himself.

  In the hallway outside the bedroom, he bit into the cookie again. Standing there surrounded by family photos recording a past not his own, he munched on the cookie, savoring its texture and flavor, pleased that he had baked it himself, sorry he could not share it. Surrounded by strangers frozen in time, he chewed on the cookie, and finally swallowed the last of it. Without looking back, he walked swiftly to the front door.

  His ear to the wood, he listened for several moments. Then he draped the chamois over the knob before opening the door. Pulled the door shut the same way. Wiped the outside knob just for good measure. Went down the stairs, and across the lobby, and into the street.

  It was beginning to cool off a little.

  He wondered if he’d be on television again tonight.

  7

  SO NOW THERE WERE THREE OF THEM IN THE SPACE OF FIVE DAYS, WHICH IF YOU AVERAGED THEM OUT CAME TO SOMETHING like 219 homicides a year in this precinct alone. This was about right in that some 981 murders were committed in the city the year before, and if the low-crime precincts averaged 15 or 20 a year that was a lot. Which didn’t make the boys of the old Eight-Seven any happier.

  The first nun joke surfaced at the meeting that Wednesday morning in Lieutenant Byrnes’s office. They all knew it would only be a matter of time before the nun jokes started, and they were somehow not surprised that Andy Parker told the first of them. They were all assembled in the loot’s office, waiting for him to come back from the toilet down the hall. Perhaps it was the lieutenant’s whereabouts that prompted the subject matter of the joke.

  “This nun is driving along in her car, and she runs out of gas,” Parker said, “have you heard this one?”

  Nobody had heard it.

  “So she walks half a mile or so to the nearest gas station and buys a gallon of gas, but the gas-station guy hasn’t got anything to put it in but a chamber pot. The nun doesn’t care, she just wants to get her car going again. So she carries the gas in the chamber pot back to the car, and she takes off the gas cap and is pouring the gas in when a guy passing by stops his car and says, ‘I sure wish I had your faith, Sister.’ ”

  “I don’t get it,” Kling said.

  “The guy thinks she’s pouring piss in the gas tank,” Parker said.

  “Why does he think that?” Willis asked.

  He was the shortest detective on the squad, intense and wiry, here in the lieutenant’s office this morning because he and Parker had caught the bloody bedroom squeal the night before.

  “Cause she’s pouring the gas from a pisspot,” Parker said.

  “I thought you said a chamber pot,” Meyer said.

  “That’s what a chamber pot is, a pisspot,” Parker said.

  “Let me get this straight,” Carella said. “Is this an English joke?”

  “It’s an American joke,” Parker said.

  “Then why’d you call it a chamber pot?”

  “Instead of a pisspot,” Kling said, agreeing.

  “If it’s an English joke,” Brown said, “you should have said petrol instead of gas.”

  “Also,” Meyer said, “why didn’t she just pee in the tank instead of going all the way to the gas station to get a pisspot to pee in?”<
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  “She doesn’t pee in the pisspot,” Parker said. “The gas station guy puts gas in it.”

  “He farts in it?” Carella said, and Parker finally got it.

  “You fuckin animals,” he said. “Guy can’t even tell an honest joke around here.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Kling said.

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Parker said.

  The door opened and Byrnes walked in. “Sorry I kept you waiting,” he said.

  “Were you down at the gas station?” Brown asked.

  “Pissing away a fortune?” Meyer said.

  “What’s this about?” Byrnes said.

  “English humor,” Carella said.

  “Very funny,” Byrnes said, and walked briskly to his desk. He was a burly man with iron-gray hair and an air of impatience, especially when two fresh bodies had shown up in his precinct the night before. “What’ve we got?” he asked.

  “Which case?” Parker asked.

  There were three cases on the table this morning. The murders the night before, the nun murder, and the Cookie Boy burglaries.

  “You’re up, so speak,” Byrnes said.

  “We figure the lady of the house was making it with the delivery boy from the liquor store up the street,” Parker said. “Might’ve been a three-way, we don’t know. Either that, or an intruder. There was a trail of blood going down the hall and all over the bathroom. We’ve got samples, we ever catch anybody.”

  “Where was the husband?” Byrnes asked.

  If there’d been a third party at the scene, this was the only question to ask.

  “At work downtown.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Hundreds.”

  “Scratch the husband. What else have you got?”

  “Lab should be getting back to us sometime today on the scene sweep. Woman on the third floor told us she heard what she thought were backfires at around three-thirty, four o’clock. Otherwise nobody heard anything or saw anything.”

  “Stay on the lab,” Byrnes said.

  “I’ve already got a call in to them,” Willis said.

  “What’s with Mr. Cookie Boy?” Byrnes asked.

  “Quiet yesterday. Maybe he’s resting,” Kling said.

  “We’ll be hitting the pawnshops again today,” Meyer said. “Some of the stuff on the list is unique …”

  “Like what?”

  “A carved lapis brooch. Lady gave us a good picture of it. Enameled Chinese beads. A wooden snuffbox. Stuff like that. If he’s already hocked any of it, we may get lucky.”

  “Important guy like him, he’s probably got a fence,” Parker said.

  “He’s important only because television’s making him a hero,” Byrnes said. “Otherwise, he’s a small-time punk.”

  “Tell me about it,” Meyer said.

  “What’s with the nun?”

  “Andy’s got a good nun joke,” Carella said. “Tell him your nun joke.”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Parker said.

  “It’s an English nun joke,” Kling said.

  “Petrol in a chamber pot,” Willis said.

  Parker shook his head in disgust.

  “The nun,” Byrnes prodded.

  “She was worried about money,” Carella said.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “This is recent.”

  “How recent?”

  “First revealed it to another nun on the eleventh.”

  “Also, she received some kind of letter,” Brown said.

  “What kind of letter?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Something predicting a decision she’d already made,” Carella said.

  “Predicting?”

  “Well … it does sound mystical, I know.”

  “What decision?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where is this letter?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Someone broke into her apartment the day after the murder,” Brown said. “Wiped the place out.”

  “Looking for the letter?”

  “Maybe.”

  “The killer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How’d you find out about this letter?”

  “Priest named Father Clemente mentioned it,” Carella said. “She told him about it.”

  “Where does the priest fit in?”

  “He’s a friend. She had a lot of friends. We’re working them now.”

  “What’s your thinking so far?”

  “Blackmail,” Brown said.

  “Blackmail? Why?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “What could anyone hope to extort from a nun?” Byrnes asked. “They’re poor, aren’t they?”

  “That’s the catch,” Brown agreed.

  “Anyway, you blackmail people only if they’ve got something to hide,” Byrnes said.

  “She did have something to hide,” Carella said.

  “What?”

  “Breast implants.”

  “How do you hide big tits?” Parker asked, and laughed at his own rich humor.

  “Is this a joke?” Byrnes said.

  “I wish,” Carella said.

  “Breast implants,” Byrnes said, and shook his head. “When did she have ’em done?”

  “Blaney thinks within the past three to four years.”

  “Was she a nun at the time?”

  “Been a nun for the past six.”

  “Working in The Vatican Follies,” Parker said, and laughed again.

  “Hit your list of doctors,” Byrnes said. “Reach back five, six years, find out who did the job. Find out why a nun wanted bigger tits to begin with. This is just what the archbishop needs, breast implants. He’s already screaming up a high mass.”

  “How wide do you want to go?”

  “Stick with the city for now. Where’s she from originally?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Try there next, see if that’s where she bought the tits. Then reach out to wherever she entered the church.”

  “San Diego.”

  “But start here, we’re not made of money. Andy, Hal, this bloodbath is just what television’s been looking for, let’s clean it up fast. Meyer, Bert, give them a hand on it. Put The Cookie Boy on the back burner. Small-time punk doesn’t deserve our attention right now.”

  But that was before the lab reported that the dirt and dust they’d vacuumed up from the Cooper bedroom and the hallway outside had included cookie crumbs and several small specks of chocolate.

  There were a hundred and fifty-nine board-certified plastic surgeons in Isola. Sixteen in Calm’s Point. Eleven in Riverhead. Nine in Majesta. Six in Bethtown. They sent out flyers to all of them, requesting information on a woman named either Mary Vincent or Kate Cochran who may have had breast implant surgery performed within the past five years.

  Then they sat back to wait.

  Wednesday was Dr. Michael Paine’s day off. No hospital, no office hours, just a day of leisure. Until the cops arrived. They found him in the locker room of the Tarleton Hills Country Club, where he’d just showered and changed into street clothes after four sets of tennis. He was now wearing beige linen slacks and a lime green T-shirt, tan Italian loafers, no socks. He seemed annoyed that the detectives had tracked him down here, but he asked nonetheless if they’d like a cup of coffee or something and then led them to the clubhouse overlooking the swimming pool. They sat at a green metal table shaded with a yellow umbrella.

  Paine was a good-looking man in his mid-forties, unfortunately named for a doctor, but then again he’d chosen his own profession, and it was a good thing he wasn’t a dentist. He asked if they’d rather have a drink instead, and when they declined, he ordered a gin and tonic for himself and two coffees for the gentlemen, please, Betsy. This was eleven o’clock in the morning. The pool at this hour was full of mothers and their screaming little kiddies. Both detectives had children of their own. Indulgently, they raised their voices to shout over t
he shrieking and splashing from the pool. The yellow umbrella cast a brilliant glow on the green metal tabletop.

  “It’s nice of you to make time for us on your day off,” Carella said.

  Paine merely nodded.

  “We just have a few questions we want to ask about the evening you spent with Mary Vincent.”

  “That would’ve been the fifteenth,” Brown said. “A Saturday night.”

  “Yes,” Paine said.

  “Six days before she was killed,” Carella said.

  Betsy arrived with the gin and the two coffees. Paine poured tonic water from the bottle. Brown put two teaspoons of sugar in his coffee, spiked it with milk. Carella drank his black. The kids in the pool were squealing up a symphony.

  “Can you tell us what occasioned that meeting?” Carella asked.

  “It wasn’t a meeting. We had dinner together.”

  “I meant …”

  “We met at a restaurant called II Mediterraneo. We went there often. Mary liked it a lot.”

  “Who paid for the meal?” Brown asked.

  “What?”

  Nun worried about money, Brown thought, who paid for dinner that night was a pretty good question.

  “Did she pay? Did you pay? Did you split the …”

  “I paid,” Paine said. “Whenever we had dinner together, I paid.”

  “Was having dinner with her a usual thing?”

  “We’d see each other …” Paine shrugged. “Once a month? Sometimes more often. We were good friends.”

  “How long have you known her?” Carella asked.

  “I met her at St. Margaret’s when she first began working there.”

  “About six months ago, would that be?”

  “Yes. More or less.”

  “How’d you happen to ask her out?” Brown asked.

  “Ask her out?” Paine said. “She was a nun.”

  Brown wondered why the good doctor was getting on his high horse. Man took someone to dinner once a month, sometimes more often, what the hell was it if not taking her out?

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “What would you call it?”