face. He was wearing jeans, a Ramsey U sweatshirt, high-topped workmen’s shoes, and a baseball cap turned backwards, the peak at the back of his head, the band on his forehead. They found him at last in the library at Ramsey U, and they asked him to come outside with them, please, and then walked him over to the school’s football field, empty on Sunday except for some kids in jogging clothes running around the perimeter.
They sat in the stands under a clear blue sky.
The breeze was mild, the sun was shining.
But Lucas Riley had swatted a nineteen-year-old girl last Monday morning at eleven-thirty after he discovered she’d spent the weekend with Lester Henderson. And Henderson had been killed an hour or so before that.
“So tell us about it,” Carella said.
“I lost my temper.”
“Twice?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Did you lose your temper with the councilman, too?”
“I never met the slimy bastard.”
“How’d you find out about them?”
“Her girlfriend.”
“Carrie’s girlfriend?”
Lucas nodded. “I called her Saturday night, I thought maybe Carrie was there studying with her, she told me she had a lot of studying to do that weekend. So Maria said No, she wasn’t there, and she sounded sort of hesitant, you know, the way people do when they’re hiding something, holding something back? So I said What is it, Maria? and she opened up, told me Carrie’d been seeing this older man since just after Thanksgiving, told me she was tired of making alibis for her, told me Carrie was upstate right that minute with the son of a bitch! I wanted tokillhim!”
The detectives looked at him.
He seemed to realize what he’d just said, and immediately added, “But I didn’t.”
“You beat her up instead,” Kling said.
“I only hit her once.”
“Where were you before then?”
“Like say between ten and ten-thirty that morning?”
“I had an early class.”
“How early?”
“Nine o’clock. It let out at eleven. I went straight to Carrie’s afterward. She was still unpacking from her big trip.”
“Where’d this class meet?”
“Morten Parker Hall. Room 713.”
“What’s the instructor’s name?”
“Dr. Nagel.”
“What’s his first name?”
“She’s a woman. Phyllis, I think. Or Felice, I’m not sure.”
“Does she keep attendance?”
“I’m sure she does.”
“What sort of class is it?” Carella asked.
“Romantic Poetry,” Lucas said.
ROSITA THOUGHTthese three people were total dummies, and she could not imagine how they’d managed to come up with three hundred thousand dollars, but they assured her they already had the money, and it was now merely a matter of ascertaining that she could deliver the product.
“How do we know you evenhavethe jelly beans?” their apparent leader said.
His name was Lonnie Doyle, or so he’d said, she never believed any names that were exchanged in drug transactions. She herself had told them her name was Rosalie Wadsworth, which was close to Rosita Washington, but no cigar, thank you. She did not think Lonnie Doyle could possibly be this man’s real name, but then again maybe he was stupid enough to have given her a square handle, who could tell when you were dealing with dummies?
One sure sign that these people were not playing with a full deck was the way they kept referring to the cocaine as “jelly beans.” They were sitting at a back table in a little cuchi frito joint on Culver, maybe two or three other people in the place, plus the guy behind the counter. There was not the remotest possibility that anyone had planted a bug here, but they were usingcode,anyway, could you believe it! Jelly beans!
“I will have the jelly beans,” Rosita said. “And they will be very high-grade jelly beans.”
Jesus, she thought.
Another one of the dummies, a guy who’d introduced himself as Constantine Skevopoulos, a phony name if ever there was one, asked if these “jelly beans” would be in the quantity specified? He was a twitchy little man with a silly grin. “Quantity specified” were the exact words he used. Dopey little grin on his face. Quantity specified.
“Thejellybeans will…” Rosita started, and rolled her eyes, and because she knew there couldn’t in a million years be a bug in this place, and since she knew Juanito behind the counter there was a little deaf in the bargain, she said flat out, “The coke will come in tenkilo lots at twenty thousand a lot, for a total of three hundred thousand dollars.”
The one named Harry Curtis looked suddenly alarmed, either by her having used the word “coke” or else by the enormity of the purchase price, which Rosita had to admit was a thousand more per lot than the going price, but hey these were dummies. Harry Curtis—if that was his real name, which she felt sure it wasn’t—was a huge man. He sat hunkered over the table like a grizzly bear, his eyes popping wide open when he heard Rosita talking about cocaine so openly. The other two looked startled as well, glancing around the room as if expecting an immediate raid, the dummies.
“So if we understand the purchase price,” Rosita said, “and if we know how manyjelly beansyou’ll be buying,” stressing the words, rolling her eyes again, “all we need to settle, once and for all, is where the transaction will take place.”
“Don’t say the address out loud,” Constantine said, twitching and grinning.
“Write it down,” Lonnie said.
“On a piece of paper,” Harry said.
Where else? Rosita thought. On the wall?
She opened her handbag, tore a sheet of paper from her address book…
“Letter it,” Harry said.
“So we can read it,” Lonnie said.
Constantine nodded and grinned.
In a large bold hand, Rosita lettered the address onto the sheet of paper: 3211CULVER AVENUE
And then, just to show these dummies they were truly stupid to be worrying about a bug in a cuchi frito joint, she read the address out loud, anyway.
“Thirty-two eleven Culver Avenue,” she said. “The basement. Be there. And bring the money.”
The three men hurried out of there as if their pants were on fire. Rosita lingered over her Coke—the soft drink, not the jelly bean—and then left the shop, passing a girl sitting at a table nearby. The girl was wearing a flared skirt and a white blouse, white ankle socks and brown loafers. She could have been your average Irish teenager were it not for the apathetic look that betrayed her for a drug addict. Rosita recognized the look at once; dope was her business. She nodded understandingly, perhaps even sympathetically, and walked past the girl and out of the shop.
The girl did not nod back.
The girl was Aine Duggan.
IT WAS NOTuntil ten past one that Parker realized Rosita had shaken the tail. He debated going into the shop and confronting Palacios with the accusation that he’d aided and abetted the very person Parker was
