He’d been eating when the inspiration came to him. He yanked a paper napkin out of the holder on the pizzeria table, took a pen from his pocket, outlined a rectangle on the napkin…
…and then began lettering inside it:
And that was it.
He had found a title, he had found an approach, he was on his way.
“It was in the dispatch case you gave me,” Ollie said, “he prob’ly thought it was something else. Up the Eight-Eight, the only thing anybody carries in a dispatch case is hundred-dollar bills or cocaine. He prob’ly thought he was making a big score.”
“Well, hey,” Isabelle said, “your bignovel!”
He would have to tell her sometime that skinny people shouldn’t try sarcasm.
“Also they’re tryin’a take away this big homicide I caught.”
“Maybe they’ll show more respect once your bignovelis published.”
“It’s not that big,” Ollie said. “If you mean long.”
“Anyway, what’s the big deal? Print another copy.”
“Do what?”
“Print another copy. Go to your computer and…”
“What computer?”
“Well, what’d you do? Write it in longhand on a lined yellow pad…”
“No, I…”
“Write it in lipstick on toilet paper?” Isabelle asked, and laughed at her own witticism.
“No, I typed it on atypewriter,” Ollie said. “You know, Isabelle, somebody should tell you that sarcasm doesn’t work when a person weighs thirty-seven pounds in her bare feet.”
“Only large persons should try sarcasm, you’re right,” Isabelle said. “What’s a typewriter?”
“You know damn well what a typewriter is.”
“Are you saying you don’t have acopyof the book?”
“Only the last chapter. The last chapter is home.”
“What’s it doing home?”
“I may need to polish it.”
“Polish it? What is it, the family silverware?”
“Nothing’s finished till it’s finished,” Ollie said.
“So as I understand this, everything but the last chapter of your book was stolen from your car this morning.”
“Five-sixths of my novel, yes.”
“What’s it about?”
“About thirty-six pages.”
“Isn’t that short for a novel?”
“Not if it’s a good novel. Besides, less is more. That’s an adage amongst us writers.”
“Didn’t you writers ever hear of carbon paper?”
“That’s why there are Kinko’s,” Ollie said, “so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Besides, I didn’t have time for carbon paper. And I didn’t know some junkie hophead was going to break into my car and steal my book. It so happens I’m occupied with a little crime on the side, you know,” he said, gathering steam. “It so happens I’m a professionallawenforcement officer…”
“Gee, and here I thought you were Nora Roberts…”
“Isabelle, sarcasm really…”
“Or Mary Higgins Clark…”
“I am Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks,” he said, rising from the table and hurling his napkin onto his plate. “And don’t you ever forget it!”
“Sit down, have some dessert,” she said.
DETECTIVE STEVE CARELLAfirst heard about Fat Ollie Weeks being assigned to the Henderson homicide on Tuesday morning, when Lieutenant Byrnes called him into his corner office and tossed a copy of the city’s morning tabloid on his desk.
“Did you see this?” he asked.
The headline on the front page read:
88TH PCT
CATCHES
HENDERSON
HOMICIDE
The subhead read:
LOCAL FUZZ
LAND BIG FISH
“Seems Fat Ollie caught the squeal,” Byrnes said.
“Good for him,” Carella said.
“Bad for us,” Byrnes said. “Henderson lives in the Eight-Seven. Lived,” he corrected. “Over in Smoke Rise.”
Smoke Rise was a walled and gated community of some seventy-five homes, all of them superbly located on sculpted terraces that overlooked the River Harb. The residents of Smoke Rise enjoyed the exclusive use of an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a health club, and tennis courts lighted at night. There was a private school on the property as well, the Smoke Rise Academy, for grades one through eight, boasting its own soccer and baseball teams, their gray-and-black uniforms seeming to conjure the very image of rising smoke.
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, Carella had caught a kidnapping there, at the residence of a man named Douglas King, whose estate lay within the confines of the Eight-Seven, at the farthermost reaches of the precinct territory in that nothing but the River Harb lay beyond it and the next state. In this exclusive corner of the Eight-Seven, Smoke Rise provided the ultra-urban face of the city with an atmosphere at once countrified and otherworldly. Smoke Rise signified wealth and exclusivity.
It was here, on a tree-shaded street named Prospect Lane, that City Councilman Lester Henderson had lived with his wife and two children. And it was not seven miles away and a hundred miles distant—at the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback, a black and Hispanic section of the city coiling like a rattlesnake on the fringes of civilization—that Henderson had been shot to death yesterday morning.
“Means we can expect Ollie any minute,” Byrnes said.
Both men looked at each other.
Carella actually sighed.
• • •
OLLIE DID NOT, in fact, show up at the precinct until twelve noon that Tuesday, just in time for lunch. Ollie’s internal mechanism always told him when it was time to eat. Ollie sometimes believed it told him it wasalwaystime to eat.
“Anybody for lunch?” he asked.
He had opened the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside, and was waddling—the proper word, Carella thought—across the room toward where Carella sat behind his desk. On this bright April morning, Ollie was wearing a plaid sports jacket over a lime green golfing shirt and blue Dacron trousers. He looked like a Roman galley under full sail. By contrast, Carella—who was expecting the imminent appearance of a burglary victim he’d scheduled for an interview—looked sartorially elegant in a wheat- colored linen shirt with the throat open and the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, and dark brown trousers that matched the color of his eyes. Ollie noticed for the first time that Carella’s eyes slanted downward, giving his face a somewhat Oriental appearance. He wondered if there was a little Chink in the armor back there someplace, huh, kiddies?
“How’s my eternally grateful friend?” he asked.
He was referring to the fact that around Christmastime, he had saved Carella’s life—twice, no less.
“Eternally grateful,” Carella said. In all honesty, he didn’t enjoy the idea of being indebted to Ollie in any which way whatever. “What brings you to this part of town?” he asked. As if he didn’t know.
