OH SHIT, Suzie thought, it’s about to get complicated again.
Just when I dared hope things would stay clear and simple forever, Harry brings his dumb-ass friends home with him again, and they’re sitting there in the living room playing cards at eight o’clock at night, and talking about their next brilliant scheme to make a million dollars without having to work for it.
The last time they had a great idea was four weeks ago, when they decided to stick up a floating crap game in Diamondback. Twelve humongous black guys in the game, any one of them could’ve broken these three wimps in half without lifting a finger, they decide to go stick it up. What happened was it was raining that night, and the game got called off, which was lucky for her husband and his pals, or there would’ve been three broken heads around here. So now they were planning another one of their grand capers, but maybe—if they got lucky again—it would rain again and save them a lot of heartache and grief.
She sometimes wondered why she stayed married to Harry Curtis. Sometimes wondered, in fact, why she’d married him in the first place. Well, she always did go for big men. Suzie Q, they used to call her when she was in her teens—well, some of her friends still called her that. Short for Suzie Quinn. Now she was Susan Q. Curtis, twenty-three years old and married to a man who was twice her age and big all over, including his ideas.
The thing of it was that Harry Curtis thought all black people were stupid, and all you had to do was trick them out of their money, usually by sticking a gun in their face. It really was a good thing him and his bright cronies hadn’t held up that crap game because from what Luella told her down at the beauty parlor where she worked, the people in that game were truly Diamondback “gangstas,” Luella’s word, a bit of information her brilliant husband shrugged off when she later told him about it.
It was Suzie herself who had casually mentioned the time and location of the crap game to Harry, who in turn had mentioned it to his two brainy buddies, who had decided that here was a score worthy of their combined talents. Never mind she also later mentioned the guys in the game were gangstas, that didn’t scare them off, oh no, they were three big macho men with three big pistolas, and they weren’t afraid of no niggers up there in Diamondback. Lucky thing it rained that night. Though now Suzie wondered what kind of gangstas these guys could’ve been if they’d got scared off of their game by a little rain. Well, a lot of rain.
She could hear their voices coming from the other room.
“Cocaine,” one of them was saying. Lonnie. Her husband’s oldest friend. Went to high school together, went to jail together, but that was another story. And besides, it was only for a year and a half after all was said and done. And they’d met some nice people there.
“See your five and raise you five,” her husband said.
“High grade snow,” Lonnie said.
“What does that make it?”
This from Constantine, the one with the dopey grin and the fidgety shoulders. Constantine in motion was a wondrous thing to behold.
“It makes it a ten-dollar raise,” Harry said.
“Too steep for me,” Constantine said.
“Asking price, three hundred thou,” Lonnie said. “Call.”
“So it’s just you and me, Lon,” Harry said, and chuckled. She guessed maybe that was one of the reasons she married him. That deep low chuckle of his. And also his size, of course.
“Where we gonna get three hundred thou?” Constantine asked. She could visualize his shoulders twitching. As if he was trying to shake off bugs.
“We don’t hafta get it,” Lonnie said.
“Beat kings full,” her husband said.
“Four deuces, sport,” Lonnie said.
“Then how we gonna buy the coke?” Constantine asked.
“Weain’tgonna buy it,” Lonnie said. “We gonnastealit.”
Of course, Suzie thought.
Otherwise it would be too damn simple, am I right?
10
ON FRIDAY MORNING, AFIS—the Automated Fingerprint Identification Section—identified the larger of the prints, the man’s prints, as belonging to Lester Lyle Henderson, who had served a stint with the U.S. Air Force during the Gulf War. Some of the smaller prints matched the ones Pamela Henderson had allowed them to take. For the other small prints, presumably left by the Carrie who’d written the letters, there was nothing.
The lab downtown identified the plain white envelopes as a product of the Haley Paper Company, available in any variety store, any office supply store, any supermarket across the entire nation. Carella suddenly felt like the FBI trying to track down the envelopes used by whoever’d been mailing anthrax hither and yon.
The monogrammed stationery was another matter.
The lab identified it as a quality paper made by Generation Paper Mills in Portland, Maine, a supplier to Carter Paper Products in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the manufacturer of an exclusive line of stationery called Letter Perfect, which was carried by only two department stores and seven specialty shops in the city. Both department stores were located in the midtown area. Carella and Kling went to visit them first.
Except for charge customers, neither of the stores kept sales records going back earlier than a year ago. Within the past year, there was no record of any customer—cashorcharge—having ordered Letter Perfect stationery with the monogram JSH. One of the stores did not keep charge records for more than two years. The other did not keep them for more than eighteen months. In any case, it would take some time to peruse the earlier files; they would have to get back to Carella.
The prospect was even dimmer at the seven specialty shops. None of them remembered a customer with the initials JSH, and none of them had time to go through their back records just now. They promised to call the detectives if anything turned up.
Carella still felt like the FBI.
THE OFFICES OFCouncilman Lester Lyle Henderson were close to City Hall, in a part of town still referred to as the Old City. Here stood the ocean-battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago, the massive cannons atop it seeming to control the approach from the Atlantic even now, though their barrels had long ago been filled with cement. Here at the very tip of the island, you could watch the Dix and the Harb churning with crosscurrents where the two rivers met. The streets down here had once accommodated only horse-drawn carriages, and were now too narrow to permit the passage of more than a single automobile. Where once there had been two-story wooden taverns, a precious few of which still survived, there were now concrete buildings soaring into the sky, infested redundantly with lawyers and financiers. And yet—perhaps because the Atlantic was right here to touch, rumbling majestically off toward the Old World that had given the city its life—there was still the feel here of what it must have been like when everyone was still very young and very innocent.
There was no sense of the Old World in Henderson’s offices. Neither was there the slightest whiff of innocence. Youth, however, was in rich abundance. The girl sitting behind the reception desk couldn’t have been older than twenty-three. Pert and blond, wearing a very short green mini and a white-buttoned navy blue blouse, she sensed immediately that Kling was the single guy in this dynamic duo, and turned her full attention to him.
“How can I help you?” she asked, smiling radiantly.
She sounded Southern. North Carolina? Georgia? Kling wondered what she was doing in a politician’s office up north.
“We’re here for Alan Pierce,” Kling said.
“Is he expecting you?”
“He is.”
“And you are?” she asked.
Kling felt as if he’d just asked her to dance at the senior prom, and she wanted to know which home room
