“The exorcism.”
“It’s ongoing,” Pavlicek said, looking off.
“So, Billy, how’s your family?” Yasmeen catching his eye—Let it be—then downing her third or maybe fourth shot.
“Good, you know, I mean my father’s not getting any better, but . . .”
“My dad once tried to talk me into letting him come to live with us? I had his ass in a home before he got the first sentence out.”
“You’re all heart there, Yazzie,” Whelan said.
“What do you mean, I’m all heart? The guy was a psycho. He used to get drunk and burn us with cigarettes. I got a heart. Why do you always want to make me feel so bad?”
“Yasmeen, I’m kidding.”
“No, you’re not,” she slurred. Then, after a too-long beat: “Fucking Whelan. You always make me feel bad. What did I ever do to you?”
She then proceeded to descend into one of her legendary sulks, Billy knowing from experience that there was a good chance they wouldn’t hear from her for the rest of the evening.
Yasmeen was the only woman Billy knew who could match his wife mood swing for mood swing. They even looked alike, although Yasmeen’s coloration came from her Syrian father and Turkish mother, which had made being constantly addressed as mami and automatically spoken to in Spanish out on the street agitating enough for her to more than once ask for a transfer to a more upscale precinct. But she was a fierce friend, dressing down his first wife in the street directly in front of the demonstrators who had driven her to leave him after his shooting—well, that wasn’t such a hot idea—then, years later, when Carmen was going through a particularly black spell, taking in their kids for an entire summer until his wife was back on her feet.
So Billy would put up with any kind of stormy behavior that came his way, but with Yasmeen now brooding in her tent and Pavlicek halfway to a morose coma of his own, the table suddenly had the energy of a brownout.
“Can I tell you something?” Billy began, trying to plug the gap. “You talk about exorcisms, I never told this to anybody before because it embarrassed me, but about six months into trying to nail Curtis Taft? Carmen convinced me to consult a psychic.”
“Get out,” Whelan stepping in like a straight man.
“Some old Italian lady up in Brewster, I mean, I was so desperate at that point . . . So I call her up, go to her house, I swear she looked just like Casey Stengel. Hey, how you doing, thanks for seeing me, and I walk into the living room, the walls are covered with appreciation letters from different police departments around the country, maybe a few from Canada, another from some town in Germany. It was pretty impressive until you go up close and read one: ‘It has come to my attention that you might possibly have been of some assistance in the as yet unsolved homicide death of fill-in-the-blank. Thank you for your time and enthusiasm. Sincerely, Elmo Butkus, Chief of Police, French Kiss, Idaho.’ But whatever, I’m there. I sit on the couch, she’s in a rocking chair, I was told to bring some objects belonging to the vics, so I hand over a barrette belonging to the four-year-old, Dreena Bailey, Memori Williams’s iPod, and Tonya Howard’s Bible. I tell her what we think happened, Taft coming in there around sunrise, three shots and just walking out, going home, getting back in bed with his still-asleep girlfriend.
“She says to me, ‘OK, here’s how it works. I’m gonna sit here and think about what you just told me, and I’m gonna get a little worked up and I’ll say things, a word, a phrase, and you write everything down. Whatever I say.’ And then she says, ‘Now, the things I’ll be saying? I don’t know what any of it means, they’re like pieces of a puzzle that you got to put together, OK? You’re the detective, not me, OK?’
“I say OK.
“‘And oh, wait,’ she says, ‘by the way, I never charge cops for helping them, that’s my civic duty, all I ask in return is a letter from you on your police department stationery thanking me for my assistance.’ I say, ‘Yeah sure no problem, let’s go, let’s go.’ And then she starts rocking in the chair, rubbing Dreena’s barrette, and lets it rip. ‘Four years old, that poor little kid, she never had a chance, she’ll never see her mother again, or play jump rope, that evil cocksucker, that fucking . . . BUTTER!’
“I almost jumped out the window she shouted it so loud, but I write down ‘Butter,’ then she’s off again. ‘What kind of cold-blooded scumbag would take the life of . . . RUNNING WATER!’ OK, writing it down, ‘Running water.’ I mean, everything in the world is near running water, a river, a sink, a sewer, I mean, are you serious? Then she starts going on about Memori. ‘Fourteen-year-old girl, her whole fucking life in front of her, this vicious pig, this miserable piece of shit, this . . . TIRES!’
“OK, ‘Tires.’
“‘He snuffs the life out of three young ladies and then what does he do? He goes home and crawls back in bed with his new girlfriend, like he just got up to take a piss, and can you imagine what a piece of work that stupid bitch . . . BROKEN TOILET!’
“And, I swear on my children, when she said that, ‘Broken toilet,’ I just about pissed myself.”
“Yeah?” Whelan apparently his only listener.
“Listen to me,” Billy said, leaning forward. “The bodies were discovered by Tonya Howard’s new boyfriend when he came to the house about five, six hours later, and by the time we got there, rigor was going pretty good. We found Memori and Tonya in the living room and we thought that was it, but when I opened the bathroom door . . .” Billy wiped his dry mouth. “See, when Taft lived with Tonya, whenever he would discipline the little one he’d always take her into the bathroom, and that’s where he took her to shoot her that morning, and after he shot her he stuck her head and shoulders in the toilet. Like I said, rigor had set in and we couldn’t get her out, so we had to use a sledgehammer to shatter the porcelain. So, ‘Broken toilet,’ the lady said. Don’t ask me how.”
“Then what happened.”
“I brought her back to the projects and let her into the apartment, see if she could maybe pick something up in the air.”
“Did she?”
“Nope.”
“What did she say when she saw the broken toilet?”
“Just nodded, like, ‘I told you so.’”
“She got you on the running water, too,” Whelan said, “if you want to be technical about it.”
“That too, I guess.”
“You write her that letter?”
“I’m working on it.”
“The thing about the younger brother,” Pavlicek suddenly said, addressing his clasped hands. “The one who went away for it? Truly stupid people are the toughest to interview because they can’t tell when you’ve talked them into a corner. ‘Forensics says he was killed with a golf club, Eugene. Is there a golf club in the house?’
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘Well, we found one.’
“‘OK.’
“‘We found your fingerprints on it.’
“‘OK.’
“‘So how could you not know there was a golf club in the house?’
“‘I don’t know.’
“‘Do you like to play golf?’
“‘No.’
“‘So then, once again, I have to ask, how’d your fingerprints come to be on the shaft?’
“‘I don’t know . . .’”
Pavlicek took a breath, his gaze going from his hands to his untouched shot glass. “I remember, I tried to get Jeffrey’s goat, so I ask him, ‘It can’t be easy living with a retard for a brother.’ You know what he says to me? ‘You should try it.’”
He reached for his Midleton’s, threw it back.
“A real sweetheart,” he muttered, then shut himself down, not once in his story having raised his eyes to his friends, leaving Billy to wonder whether maybe Bannion’s murder had him deeply crashing, like a postpartum Ahab if the author had allowed him to kill the whale and go home to his family.
“Fuck you, with your ‘I’m all heart,’” Yasmeen bawled, suddenly deeply drunk and in tears. “Why do you always have to make me feel so bad?”
Before Whelan could respond, she tilted into Billy, slurred in his ear, “Sometimes I can still taste you,” then lowered her forehead to the table and went to sleep.
“I think for Jeffrey,” Pavlicek said to no one, “Thomas Rivera, his brother Eugene, the whole thing was like snapping a tablecloth.” Then, thickly, “If anybody had it coming, right?”
Billy and Whelan looked at each other blankly before raising their eyes to the waiter, who had finally come by to pass out menus and announce the specials.
Billy’s first run of the night didn’t come in until just before dawn, an assault in a flower shop on a beat-up stretch of upper Broadway where Harlem became Hamilton Heights, the roughness of the neighborhood offset by its heart-stoppingly abrupt view of the Hudson River, which seemed to leap up to meet the cresting avenue. Given the limbo hour, Billy’s partner of choice was Roger Mayo, a hollow-eyed, scoop-chested chain-smoker in his eighth year on Night Watch, a borderline mute, a mystery, no one in the squad having any idea where he came from or where he went afterward. But Mayo was also a natural nocturnal, someone Billy could count on not to fall face-first into the lap of a suspect halfway through an interview at six in the morning, which was not nothing.
Wading to the sidewalk through double- and triple-parked cruisers, they passed the open back doors of an ambulance and saw a young chunky Latina sitting inside, a sepia necklace of fingerprints around her throat.
“How she doing?” Mayo asked an EMT.
“She’s pissed.”
Leaving Mayo to take her statement, Billy headed to the scene of the crime, the florist shop a cramped, ramshackle affair with wind-riddled, rotten wooden moldings around the door frame and the sole display window. The low-ceilinged selling floor was covered with cracked linoleum, and the near-empty flower refrigerator was overhung by a roughly built half-loft, the squeak and groan of shifting feet up there nearly drowning out the soft jazz playing somewhere behind a battery of poinsettias and greeting card spin racks down below.
Climbing a short flight of raw pine stairs, Billy found himself in a cell-like, three-walled bedroom, cops and medics obscuring his view of the perp, Wallice Oliver. The guy was a frail, bare-chested seventy-year-old with a pharaonic goatee, wheezing asthmatically as he sat slumped on the side of a narrow bed. The towel draped around his neck made him look like a geriatric boxer.
As an EMT inserted a spirometer in Oliver’s mouth to gauge his lung capacity, Billy took inventory of his surroundings. In one corner a gold saxophone perched upright in its stand; in another stood a spindly desk, its blotter covered with a scatter of prescription bottles, a jar of olive oil, an ankh, a crucifix, and a Star of David. Scotch-taped to the walls were two photographs of Oliver as a younger man, one of him onstage with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the other of him performing in Sun Ra’s Arkestra.
Billy made his way through the milling uniforms to the bed.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“I already said all that.” Oliver reared back to peer up at him.
“Just one more time.”
“She come in once, like around Valentine’s Day,” pausing to take a hit of Primatene Mist, “says she was looking to buy a plant for her mother, young girl, looked around, didn’t buy nothing though, walked out, then came back a hour later, asked if I needed any help in here, and to tell you the truth I just barely support myself with this, you know? So she leaves again, then comes back a third time that night, knocks on the door right as I’m turning out the lights, steps inside, drops to her knees, puts me in her mouth, says, ‘Daddy, you let me live up there, you can have me anytime you want.’ Next thing I know I’m a man again, but she’s Satan and everything in my life’s all fucked up. I had a wife was a schoolteacher, a nice crib, moved out on them both to be up here under a seven-foot ceiling with her. I can’t even straighten my back no more, and I tell you I will put up with a lot of meanness just to have a hard dick again, but the things she said to me tonight?” Oliver bowed his head, kneaded his waxy, amber fingers. “I have never been hurt by words like that in my life.”
Leaving the scene an hour later, the rising sun accentuating the emptiness of the street, Billy heard his cell go off, Stacey Taylor again, this time a text:
i know u r screening my calls dont