Fiddlers

Ollie guessed he expected everybody to be speaking Spanish. Her mother’s name was Catalina, and her two sisters were Isabella and Enriquetta. Her brother - who played piano - was named Alonso. First thing the brother said was, ‘Hey, dude, I hear you play piano, too.’

‘Well, a little,’ Ollie said modestly.

‘He learned “Spanish Eyes” for me,’ Patricia said, beaming.

‘Get out! her sister said.

‘I mean it, he’ll play it for us later.’

‘Well,’ Ollie said modestly.

‘Come,’ Patricia’s mother said, ‘have some bacalaitos.’

Ollie almost said he was on a diet, but Patricia gave him an okay nod.

* * * *

The owner of the Korean grocery store around the corner from her apartment greeted Alicia warmly when she stopped in to pick up some things for dinner. He told her he had some nice fresh blueberries today, three- ninety-nine a basket. She bought half a pound of shiitake mushrooms, a dozen eggs, a container of low-fat milk, and two baskets of the berries.

It was while she was making herself an omelet that she heard the bedroom window sliding open.

* * * *

‘Oh, Spanish eyes…’

This was the Al Martino version of the song, not the one the Backstreet Boys did years later. Ollie had been studying it for weeks now. His piano teacher insisted he had it down pat, but this was the first time he’d ever performed it in public, in front of Patricia’s whole family, no less.

They were all gathered around the upright piano in the Gomez living room. A framed picture of Jesus was on the piano top. The picture made Ollie nervous, staring at him that way. What made him even more nervous was Patricia’s father. Ollie got the feeling her father didn’t like him too much. Probably thought Ollie was going to violate his virgin daughter, though Ollie guessed she wasn’t one at all.

Patricia and her mother knew the words by heart. It was Patricia’s mother, in fact, who’d taught her the song. Her sister Isabella seemed to be hearing it for the first time. She seemed to like it, kept swaying back and forth to it. When they’d met tonight, Ollie told her his sister’s name was Isabel, too, and she’d said, ‘Get out!’ She looked a little like Patricia, but Patricia was prettier. Nobody in the family was as good-looking as Patricia. In fact, nobody in this entire city was as good-looking as Patricia.

Tito Gomez, the father, kept scowling at Ollie. The brother was doing a good imitation of his father, too.

Patricia and her mother kept singing along.

Isabella kept swaying to the music.

In the kitchen, asopao de polio was cooking.

* * * *

At first, Alicia thought she was hearing things. She’d turned on the air conditioner and closed all the windows the minute she’d come into the apartment, but now she heard what sounded like a window going up in the bedroom. There were two windows in the bedroom, one of them opening on the fire escape, the other with an air-conditioning unit in it. She did not want to believe that someone had just opened the fire-escape window, but…

‘Hello?’ she called.

From outside, she heard the sudden rush of traffic below. Would she be hearing traffic if the window wasn’t… ?

‘Hello?’ she said again.

‘Hello, Alicia,’ a voice called.

A man’s voice.

She froze to the spot.

She’d sliced the mushrooms with a big carving knife, and she lifted that from the counter now, and was backing away toward the entrance door to the apartment when he came out of the bedroom. There was a large gun in his right hand. There was some kind of thing fastened to the barrel. An instant before he spoke, she recognized it as a silencer.

‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘Chuck?’

And shot her twice in the face.

2.

THE TWO DETECTIVES met for lunch in a diner on Albermarle, two hours after Carella received the telephone call. He figured he knew what Kramer wanted. He wasn’t wrong.

‘The thing is,’ Kramer was telling him, ‘we don’t catch many homicides up the Nine-Eight. This is more up your alley, you know what I mean.’

Low crime rate in the Nine-Eight, was what Kramer was saying. As compared to the soaring statistics uptown in the asshole of creation, was what Kramer was saying. What’s another homicide more or less to you guys, Kramer was saying. Carella was inclined to tell him, Thanks, pal, but our platter is full right now. If only it weren’t for the First Man Up rule.

Kramer wouldn’t have called if the Ballistics match hadn’t come through so fast. You get a blind man shot dead outside a nightclub Wednesday night, and then Friday night, at the other end of the city, you get a woman killed cooking an omelet in her own apartment, there’s no connection, right? Unless Ballistics calls early Monday morning to tell you the same nine-millimeter Glock was used in both shootings. That can capture a person’s attention, all right. It had certainly caught Kramer’s, who was now munching on a ham and egg sandwich while trying not to be too aggressive about the department’s time-honored First Man Up rule. Hence his song and dance about the Nine-Eight’s inexperience with matters homicidal.

‘So what do you say?’ he asked Carella. ‘I’ll turn over our paper to you, the Eight-Seven can pick it up from there. This should be a snap for you guys, you already got a gun match.’

A snap, Carella thought, and wondered how many nines were loose in the city.

‘I’d have to check with the Loot,’ he said, ‘see if he thinks we can take on another homicide just now.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Kramer said, and then casually added, ‘but he’s familiar with FMU, of course.’ And further added, ‘Which is the case here. You caught your blind guy two days before we caught the omelet lady. So what do you say?’ Kramer asked again.

He knew he had Carella dead to rights on FMU. He was just being polite.

Carella hoped he’d at least pay for the lunch.

* * * *

‘Way I understand this,’ Parker said, ‘is we’re now the garbage can of the Detective Division, is that it?’

There were only five men in the lieutenant’s office and Parker had the floor. He was dressed this Monday afternoon the way he usually dressed for work: like a bum. Unshaven. Blue jeans and a T-shirt. Short-sleeved Hawaiian-print shirt over that, but only to hide the automatic holstered at his right hip.

‘I wouldn’t put it exactly that way,’ Carella said.

‘No? Then what does it mean when any murder done with a Glock gets dumped on us?’

‘Not every Glock. Just the ones that match the blind-man kill.’

‘Which we caught,’ Lieutenant Byrnes explained again. Bullet-headed, gray-haired, square-jawed, he looked like an older Dick Tracy sitting behind his comer-office desk. ‘Which means First Man Up prevails,’ he explained further.

‘Like I said,’ Parker continued, undeterred. ‘We’re the DD’s garbage can.’

‘How many have there been so far?’ Genero asked. Curly-haired, brown-eyed, the youngest man on the squad, he always sounded tentative. Or maybe just stupid.

‘Just two, counting the omelet lady.’

‘That ain’t so many,’ Genero said. ‘Can you run them by us?’ he said, trying to sound executive.