Fiddlers

wouldn’t last forever, but then again, nothing ever did.

She was waiting on the steps outside her building when the taxi pulled up. Charles asked the driver to keep the meter running, and then he got out of the car and was walking toward her, a grin on his face, when all at once everything seemed to happen in a rush. In that single instant, he was transported back to Nam, the way in Nam things suddenly erupted everywhere around you, and you didn’t realize at first that this was really happening to you, that this attack was directed at you.

The man who seemed to materialize out of nowhere was perhaps six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a massive chest, a six-hundred-pound gorilla wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, black running shoes, striding toward where Reggie was standing on the front steps of her building, turned away from him, looking at Charles as he approached from the opposite direction, a smile forming on her mouth when she recognized him and started down the steps. Just then the man in the black T-shirt seized her right wrist, and yanked her full off the steps and onto the sidewalk. As Charles watched in shocked disbelief, the man smacked her across the face, so hard that she would have fallen over backward had he not been holding tight to her wrist.

‘Lost your way?’ he asked sweetly, and smacked her again.

‘You!’ Charles yelled, pointing his finger at him. In the next instant, he was running toward the man, who was now dragging Reggie behind him on the sidewalk. She was wearing a shiny silver dress, cut high on the thigh, high-heeled, silver-toned, patent-leather slippers. She dug in her heels, resisting, but the man had her tight by the wrist, and when she tried to pull away, he smacked her again, and then again. By this time, Charles was on him.

‘Oh?’ the man said, and shook Charles off like a dog shedding water. Charles rushed him again. The man hit him full in the face, hard. His nose began spurting blood. ‘You son of a bitch!’ Reggie yelled, and yanked off one of the silver-toned slippers and swung the heel at his head. The man brushed the blow aside. He was bringing back his arm to hit Reggie again, when suddenly he saw the gun in Charles’s hand.

‘Hey now,’ he cautioned, but Charles was already firing.

Reggie screamed.

Charles kept firing until the gun was empty.

The taxi roared away from the curb.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Reggie whispered.

Charles grabbed her hand.

Together, they ran off into the night.

* * * *

The brilliant fiddlers of the Eighty-seventh Squad were burning the midnight oil. More accurately, it was now 12:02 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the twenty-ninth of June, and they were burning with the need to tell each other how clever they’d been in coming up with a name for the guy they suspected had drilled five victims with the same nine-millimeter Glock. Yes, they had all, each and separately, come up with a name, ta-ra! Or variations on a name, actually, but certainly one and the same name; whether it was Carlie, Chuck, or Charlie, the given name was undoubtedly Charles, and the surname most definitely was Purcell.

But more than that - and Hawes took credit for this one, because it was Jennifer Purcell who’d told him her uncle Charles might still be living out on Sands Spit - they found a telephone listing for a Charles Purcell in a little town called Oatesville, not an hour outside the city in Russell County. Their law enforcement directory gave them a listing for the Sheriff’s Department in Russell County. Hawes made the call, speaking to a deputy sheriff named Lyall Farr, and requesting a 410 Graham Lane drive-by, with a P&D on Charles Purcell, murder suspect. Farr said they’d do the courtesy pick-up, but delivery to the city was out of the question as Russell was extremely shorthanded at the moment. Hawes settled for a Pick-Up and Hold. Twenty minutes later, Farr called back to say the house was dark and locked, so what now? Hawes told him to break in, there was a murder suspect living there. Farr told Hawes there was no way Russell would break in without a No-Knock warrant. Besides, the next- door neighbor had seen Purcell leaving with a suitcase at the beginning of the month, said he planned to spend some time in the city.

‘House has been empty since then,’ Farr told him.

‘In the city where?’ Hawes asked.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Spending some time where in the city?’

‘Didn’t say. Looks to me like you’re a day late and a dollar short.’

Or so it seemed until the phone call came at 12:47 A.M., from a Detective David Bannerman of the Eighty- sixth Squad, not two miles away from the old Eight-Seven.

* * * *

Bannerman told them that at first it had looked like a Domestic Dispute. Lady taking the air on the front steps of her building, husband or boyfriend walks up to her, starts yelling at her, slapping her around. Family quarrel, pure and simple, something for routine handling by the blues on patrol.

Then all at once it turned into something else. Guy getting out of a taxi pulls a gun, goes after the goon doing the slapping, empties the gun into him. Seventeen slugs, leaves the goon looking like Swiss cheese on the sidewalk. So now this is beginning to have all the earmarks of a gangland slaying, right? You empty a gun into somebody? You want to make sure he’s dead, right? Also, the goon turns out to have a record goes back to when he’s still a juve, this has to be gang shit, correct?

‘We got a description of the shooter from one of the witnesses,’ Bannerman said. ‘He was about six feet tall, slender, wearing a dark blue suit and a tie. He was bald. Entirely bald. No sideburns, nothing. Witness said he looked very white. Pale. Almost Oriental. Or ascetic, was her exact word. Pale and ascetic. Like a holy man. The Dalai Lama? She referred to the Dalai Lama, you know what he looks like? Neither do I. But like that. A holy man.’

‘Some holy man,’ Carella said.

He was wondering why Bannerman was giving him this long song and dance.

‘So we figured some wiseguy went after this Benjamin Bugliosi - is the vic’s name - and did him in good. But that was before Ballistics called ten minutes ago…”

Uh-oh, Carella thought.

‘… and told us the gun used to dust Bugliosi was the same Model 17 used in the five homicides you guys are already investigating. So FMU prevails, pal, and you now got yourselves six vics - which rhymes when you come to think of it. Mazeltov.’

‘Thanks,’ Carella said.

The clock on the squadroom wall now read 1:27 A.M.

* * * *

As revealed on the computer, Benjamin ‘The Bug’ Bugliosi’s B-sheet listed his first offense as a simple assault when he was sixteen. Kindly, understanding judge, suspended sentence. His most recent brush with the law - his twelfth, by the way - was six years ago, another assault this time, aggravated this time. Seems he’d been working as a bouncer for a private ‘club’ called Sophisticates, a thinly disguised whore house cum escort service, when a drunk and obstreperous client tried to insert the muzzle of a pistol into the vagina of one of the club’s virginal maidens. Bugliosi threw the man down the stairs and then repeatedly banged his head against the foyer wall before heaving him out onto the sidewalk and kicking his head to a bloody pulp. In the rain, no less. Tsk-tsk. No wonder he’d subsequently served time at Castleview Prison upstate.

The record further revealed that he’d been paroled last November, was apparently gainfully employed again, and was dutifully reporting for each of his scheduled parole-office visits. The parole office was closed at this hour, and would not open again till nine in the morning. The FBI profile on serial killers maintained that the murders only grew more vicious as time went by…

(Seventeen slugs this time around.)

If Purcell was indeed a serial killer…

(There were now six vics.)

‘Let’s see if Bugliosi went back to work for Sophisticates,’ Carella said.

* * * *

It had been a long while since either Carella or Meyer had been inside a whore house at two thirty in the