pulled a cork from a bottle and shamrocks fell all over the table. She was wearing this afternoon a flared skirt and a white blouse, white ankle socks and brown loafers. She looked like an Irish teenager instead of a junkie, except that she also looked so friggin tired.
“No, that’s what I thought, too,” he said, “but I looked in the phone books, and there ain’t no O’Malley’s.”
“You look in all the phone books?”
At eleven that Friday morning, they were sitting in the park counting the time to their next fixes. When they first started using, they would try all kinds of shit. It was like a big supermarket of drugs out there. The hubba, of course, so cheap, so convenient, somebody shoulda put that on the TV as a commercial, So Cheap, So Convenient, Come Get Your Crack Cocaine Right Here, Kiddies. Or Just Say No, if that’s your choice, tee-hee. But they also smoked gremmies, which were coke and weed rolled in a cigarette, or sherms, which were these cigarettes laced with PCP. If Emilio remembered correctly, they even did some fry before they started slamming their drug of choice, good old hop, directly in the vein, honey.
It was Aine went on the street first.
Good-looking Irish girl, shapely white legs, red hair hither and yon, she looked like a virgin Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated skirt and jacket with a gold-thread crest on it, Saint Cecilia of Our Infinite Sorrows, all she needed was books under her arm, some virgin. By that time, she’d been had fore and aft, upside down and backwards.
Emilio started a little later, and wasn’t doing too well peddling ass till he discovered he looked better in a skirt than he did in jeans. Shaved his legs, bought first a red wig, thinking him and Aine could go on the street together like Miss Dolly Ho and her sister Polly. But the fake red wig didn’t go with his dark complexion or her real red hair, in fact made him look like a male wearing a very bad rug instead of a juicy female tart who just happened to have a cock under his or her skirt. He tried on a lot of other wigs, even some pink and purple ones before he settled on the blond. Business picked up almost at once, though he wasn’t necessarily having more fun.
“I tried every book I had,” he said. “No O’Malley’s.”
“Which books do you have?”
Addicts tended to be somewhat precise, Emilio noticed. They would often argue a point like monks in a seminary or judges on some high tribunal. Emilio didn’t particularly like this about addicts, even though he recognized it as one of his own faults.
“I have the Riverhead book, and the one here for the city.”
“That leaves out three very big parts of this town,” Aine said.
“I know, but I have a feeling this bar is right here someplace.”
“What gives you that feeling, man?”
“First thing, I ripped off this bag outside the King. Next thing…”
“What bag?”
“Had confidential information in it. Next thing, there’s this lady detective in it talking about diamonds, and she’s locked in a basement…”
“Whoa now.”
“Where’d I lose you, Ahn?”
“There’s this lady detective in abag?”
“No, in her report. And her precinct is a few blocks away from this bar she called O’Malley’s. Also, did you ever hear of a precinct called the Oh-One?”
“No. The Oh-One? No. What’s the Oh-One?”
“I’m thinking the First Precinct.”
“No. The First Precinct is the First Precinct. I never heard it called the Oh-One. Never. That makes it sound like there’s a decimal point in front of it, the Oh-One.”
“Also, if there’s an Oh-One, there’s also an Oh-Two, and an Oh-Three, and so on. Which as you know, there ain’t,” Emilio said. “So I figure Livvie made up this fake what you might call terminology to throw any evil-doer off the track.”
“Any evil-doer, huh?”
“Somebody tryin’a get those diamonds.”
“Diamonds, huh?”
“You help me find them, Ahn, we’ll both go down to Rio together.”
“Why Rio?”
“It’s nice down there, I hear. Also, they have carnival.”
“I have carnival right here every time I shoot up.”
“You used to be a bartender, am I right?”
“You know I used to be a bartender.”
“So where’s there a bar two blocks from a police station?”
“Everywhere,” Aine said.
AT FIVE O’CLOCKthat Friday evening, Josh Coogan seemed surprised to find two men who identified themselves as police detectives waiting for him on the steps outside his building.
“I thought this was the fat guy’s case,” he said.
“We’re working it together,” Carella told him.
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“Alan Pierce gave us your address.”
“So what’s up?”
“We want to ask you some more questions.”
“What about? I already spoke to the fat guy, you know.”
“Briefly, yes,” Kling said.
“Well, I thought I answered all his questions.”
“We’re sorry to be bothering you again, but we thought…”
“I mean, am I a suspect in this thing?”
The question they all asked sooner or later.
But Coogan had about him the air of confidence most college kids exude—especially those pursuing arts programs. They didn’t yet realize they would never become a Hemingway or a Picasso or a Hitchcock or a Frank Lloyd Wright. The world was still their oyster. Kling, who’d never been to college, and Carella, who’d never finished college, envied the attitude. But they had both read Fat Ollie’s report, and they remembered him describing Coogan as “flustered and unsure of himself.” He did not appear that way tonight.
“Do you know anyone named Carrie?” Carella asked.
“No. Is that a man or a woman?”
“It’s a nineteen-year-old girl,” Carella said.
“No, I don’t know her. Am I supposed to know her?”
“Lester Henderson was supposed to know her.”
“Does that mean what I take it to mean?”
“What do you take it to mean?”
“Was he messing around with a nineteen-year-old girl?”
“You tell us.”
“Let me say I wouldn’t be surprised. He definitely had an eye for the women.”
“Did you everseehim with a nineteen-year-old girl?”
“Our office is full of nineteen-year-old girls. But if you mean…”
“Any of them named Carrie?”
“No.”
“Did any letters addressed to the councilman and marked ‘Personal and Private’ ever cross your desk?”
“No. His mail went to him directly.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“In spite of the anthrax scare?”
