“I told you. I got stung by a bee.”
“When?”
“When?”
Again the surprised look. What difference does it makewhenI got stung? Did you ever get stung by a bee? Then don’t ask mewhenI got stung!
“Yes,” Carella said. “When?”
“Last night, okay?”
“Looks older than that,” Kling said. “Did you see a doctor about it?”
“No. I put an ice pack on it.”
“Last night?”
“Yes,last night,” she said, her voice rising in indignation, a host of unspoken words once again flaring in her eyes and curling on her lip: Why are you asking me the same question over and over again, don’t youbelieveme? Why would I lie about a goddamn bee sting? How dare you notbelieveme? My mother has a condo in Fort Laud- erdale, my mother orders monogrammed stationery that costs a fortune!
All of this in her eyes and on her face.
“Who hit you?” Carella asked.
“NotLester, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Then who?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody, but not Lester, huh?”
“What is this? You don’t thinkIkilled him, do you?” she said, and tried a laugh. “Isthatwhat you think?” The laugh died, the indignation flared again in her green eyes. My mother hasattorneys,her eyes said. How dare you?
But somebody had smacked her in one of those lovely green eyes, and the flesh surrounding it was still discolored red and purple and blue.
“Who hit you?” Carella asked again. “Andwhen?”
“Myboyfriend,okay?” she shouted.
THE WAY SHEtells it, she was going steady with this boy from school…
“I go to Ramsey U,” she said, “I’m a sophomore there, an English major.”
…when she met Lester Henderson while he was giving a talk for the Political Science Department. She went up to chat with him afterward, and to get him to sign this book he’d written titledWhy the Law?,and to ask the questions she hadn’t had a chance to ask from the floor even though she kept waving her hand at the guy with the microphone. Mr. Henderson…
“I was still calling him Mr. Henderson then.”
…told her if she’d like to continue the discussion over a cup of coffee, he’d be happy to, and she said sure because he was so very cute and all in a dynamic, forceful, vibrant, vigorous sort of way, not like Lucas at all.
“Lucas is my boyfriend,” she said. “Wasmy boyfriend.”
“Lucas what?”
“Riley,” she said.
“Is he the one who hung the shiner on you?”
“Yes.”
“Last night?”
“No.”
“When?”
“Monday morning. After I got back to the city.”
“Why?”
“He found out about Lester.”
The way she explains it, she kept seeing Lucas because, after all, he’d pinned her and everything. But at the same time she was seeing Lester once or twice a week, sometimes three or four times, depending on how often he could get away from his wife, and how often she could tell Lucas she had to study for a Chaucer test or something. This had been going on since last November, you know, when Lester spoke at the school, just after Thanksgiving, between Thanksgiving and Christmas was when it started. But Lucas never suspected anything at all, well, you know Lucas, he’s so laid back about everything. Until Monday morning.
“On Monday, he came to my apartment…”
“What time was this?”
“Around eleven-thirty.”
“Came to your apartment, yes.”
“And told me he knew where I’d been that weekend…and…and started to hit me.”
“Did he know you’d been with Henderson?”
“Yes.”
“He told you that?”
“Not in those words.”
“What words?”
“He called him ‘That fucking cheap politician.’”
“But he knew it was Henderson.”
“Yes, he knew.”
“Where does your boyfriend live?”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
“Where does he live?”
“831 Granger. Near the school.”
• • •
FATS DONNERdidn’t call Ollie until twelve noon that Sunday. He announced himself to the desk sergeant as “William Donner,” which didn’t ring a bell until Donner said, somewhat impatiently and heatedly, “Fats Donner, tell him it’sFatsDonner,” at which time the sergeant recognized a snitch if ever there was one. He put Donner through at once.
“You should tell your people to be more alert,” Donner said.
“Why, what happened?” Ollie asked.
“I’m calling with valuable information, and the man doesn’t recognize my name?”
“Gee, I’m sorry about that,” Ollie said. “What have you got for me?”
“I’ve got Emmy,” Donner said.
ROSIE WASHINGTONwas not an easy person to keep in sight. A not uncommon mix of Hispanic and African blood, she was a good-looking, light-skinned woman in a community that boasted of many such racial blendings. If she were Chinese, it would be a different story. But the only Chinks up here ran laundries or places that gave women manicures, though Parker supposed the girls who worked in the nail parlors were all Koreans, same fuckin difference.
What Parker was trying to do was ascertain that the buy this coming Tuesday night would indeed take place in the basement of the building at 3211 Culver Av. Toward that end, he thought it might prove providential to put a discreet tail on the lady. His reasoning was that if three hundred large was about to change hands on Tuesday at midnight, the lady would at least case the joint first to make sure she wasn’t stepping into another setup like the one on the rooftop with the Miami spics. The Gaucho hadn’t actuallysaidthey were spics, but what else could dope buyers from Miami be? Anyway, Palacios was a spic himself, so what did you expect him to say? Mycompadresripped off a nice Spanish lady?
All things considered, Rosie Washington was in fact rumored to be a nice lady. That is to say, in a racket where sudden extermination was always a distinct possibility, she hadn’t killed anyone yet—or at least she hadn’t committed any murders the policeknewabout yet. This was not to say there weren’t a multitude of bodies at the bottom of the river or in the trunks of cars at the airport, or even buried in somebody’s basement, maybe even the basement in which the lady would be selling cocaine worth three hundred thousand dollars this Tuesday night. It merely meant that for someone who’d been in the business as long as Rosie had, she’d managed to stay remarkably beyond the reach of the law. Except for a minor possessions charge when she was nineteen years old
