“You aced me, you fat hump,” Donner said, and bit into his pizza.
• • •
VERONICA D’ALLESANDROwas still onstage when Ollie got to Clarendon Hall at ten-thirty that night. He showed the manager his police identification and told him it was urgent that he speak to Miss D’Allesandro as soon as she came off. The manager thought this was about another terrorist attack.
Ever since the Israeli violinist was killed by a suicide bomber here last December, everyone in the city was on edge. The World Trade Center attacks hadn’t helped much, either. Nor had what happened at the Pentagon. This was a nation of people walking on eggs. You saw anybody who looked like an Arab, you wanted to call the FBI. Ollie hated Arabs as much as he hated Jews or anybody else in this world. Ollie was an equal opportunity bigot. He felt anyone who didn’t look or sound the way he himself did deserved a swift kick in the ass. The manager’s name was Horowitz, which Ollie would have considered a major coincidence if he’d been at all familiar with classical music, which he wasn’t. All he heard was a money-lending Jewish name, and suspected Horowitz would charge admission to go backstage. He was surprised when the man took him at once to the singer’s dressing room.
Veronica D’Allesandro looked like that lady in all the Marx Brothers films, Geraldine Dumont or whatever her name was. A pouter pigeon chest with pearls hanging down its front, her hair clipped close to her head in what used to be called a bob, a pretty face for a woman her age. Ollie told her how much he’d enjoyed her performance, which he hadn’t even heard, and then asked her if perchance she had purchased from a Jewish pawnbroker named Irving Stein a tan pigskin Gucci dispatch case…
“Why yes!” she said, her eyes opening wide in surprise.
Ollie figured he’d impressed her.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Miss Doll-a-sandri,” he said, “but that case was stolen and is…”
“No!” she said.
“Ah, but yes,” he said. “It is evidence sought in an auto smash-and-grab that took place on April twenty- second, the day before you purchased it.”
“Oh dear,” she said.
“I’m afraid I must reclaim that case,” Ollie said. “Would you happen to…?”
“But I paid for it!”
“Seven dollars, if I’m correct.”
He was already reaching for his wallet.
“Yes, seven dollars,” she said, shaking her head in wonder.
Ollie figured he was still impressing her.
“The Department is required to reimburse you for reclaimed evidence,” he said, which wasn’t true. “Would you happen to have the case here with you?”
“Yes. I bought it for my music. I was carrying my music in it.”
“An appropriate use, ah yes,” Ollie said, and counted out seven singles and handed them to her. “I hope you haven’t handled it too much, we’ll be looking for fingerprints.”
“Oh dear,” she said again.
“Yes, dear,” Ollie said, and smiled cordially. “The case, please.”
The Reve du Jour Underwear Factory was a squat brick structure nestled among a line of similar but taller buildings on Riverview Place, at the edge of the River Dowd. I know you are familiar with many languages, Commish, this being a rainbow coalition city of many desperate or even disparate tongues. But in case you do not know what “Reve du Jour” becomes when it is translated from the original Spanish, which runs rampant in this city, then let me give you a bit of assistance.
“Reve du Jour” means “River of Joy.”
It was my guess, as I approached the building, that perhaps the owner or owners had derived the name from the proximate closeness of the factory to the river, but that was mere speculation, and detectives are not paid to speculate. Besides, a person—even a Spanish person—would never in a million years consider the Dowd a “river of joy,” since it was more polluted than an Irishman on St. Patty’s Day—no offense, Commish, just a little metaphor there, or perhaps a simile.
A girl with short black curly hair and dark brown eyes was sitting behind the reception desk. She was not wearing a bra, which was surprising to me since this was an underwear factory. I must tell you that it is very difficult for a girl to find a proper bra these days, which is perhaps why the young lady behind the desk wasn’t wearing one. The trick is to find something that enhances and supports simultaneously, but that also makes it look like you’renotwearing a bra. At the same time, it can’t be too revealing. That is to say, it shouldn’t show your nipples and all through your outer garments. That may sound like mere girl talk, but believe me, I spend half my off-duty time searching for the right bra to enclose and enfold my not inconsiderate breasts. What I’m saying is that either the girl behind the desk was not wearing a bra, or else she was wearing a very good bra that made it look as if she wasn’t wearing one.
I introduced myself to her and asked if I might speak to the owner of the establishment, please.
“Mais oui, madame,”she said, in what I took to be French, which surprised me, when one considered the Spanish origins of the company name. “Will you ’ave a seat, if you please?”
You have to understand that the reception room of RUF was decorated with mannequins of women wearing bras and panties and garter belts and slips and camisoles and merry widows in reds and blacks and whites and blues and pinks and even purples. I took a seat on a sofa behind which were life-sized photographs on the wall of young women modeling many of the items the mannequins around the room were actually wearing. In effect, then, I was surrounded by a sea of female pulchritude and vertiginous femininity, so to speak, partially though scantily dressed or undressed, that would have turned the heads of many of my colleagues up the squadroom. There are times I am grateful for my gender and not easily distracted, believe me.
I was here to learn why Mr. Mercer Grant, not his real name, had brought up the little matter of the RUF, which I wassupposedto believe represented an African group that called itself the Revolutionary United Front, but which—I had learned through the kind auspices of one Mortimer “Needle” Loop—actually stood for a Spanish lingerie company called the Revedu Jour Underwear Factory. I was here to learn whether or not the people who owned this place knew anything at all about the disappearance and possible murder of one Marie Grant, not her real name, or her relationship with her husband’s cousin, whose real name was also not Ambrose Fields.
In short, I felt I was hot on the scent of getting to the bottom of all this—no pun intended, Commish, in that the lady in the photograph behind me was bending over from the waist in a thong bikini that exposed her buttocks in a way that might have seemed enticing to many males.
I could have sworn the receptionist said, “Mercer will see you now,madame.”
But no, what she’d actually said was“Monsieurwill see you now,madame.”
She indicated a red door set between a photograph of a very tall leggy blonde wearing a white camisole and white lace panties and a very tall leggy brunette wearing a black bra and black lace panties. I opened the door and entered a hallway hung with similar photographs of similar models wearing lingerie and scarce else, and walked to another red door at the end of the corridor. I knocked on the door.
A voice I thought sounded familiar said, “Yes, come in, please.”
I opened the door and found myself face to face with Monsieur Mercer Grant.
He grinned, exposing the gold-and-diamond tooth at the front of his mouth.
“So, Detective Watts,” he exclaimed. “We meet again.”
And that was when someone hit me on the back of the head with something very hard, and I swam downwards into oblivion on a sea of utter blackness.
And that was all she wrote.
Or so Emilio thought.
A HASTY RAINbroke over the city early Monday morning, followed by a rainbow that took the citizens by surprise, causing them to follow its arc by eye, hopeful they would catch a glitter that would signify a pot of gold at its end. Ollie considered the rainbow a good omen. Surely, there would be fingerprints all over the dispatch case. Surely some of those fingerprints would be Emilio Herrera’s. And just as surely, a he-she hooker and petty thief would have run afoul of the law long before now; Herrera would have a record; Herrera would have a last known address.
Ollie immediately checked with AFIS to see if any of the prints triggered a hit. His own prints were on the
