There was also a letter in the envelope.
This didn't interest them as much as the money did, but they read it, anyway, though not in the men's room.
It was Richard the Third who found the bag. 'Bingo!' he yelled.
Where he found the bag was under black Richard's mattress, the dope. Did he think they were so dumb they wouldn't look under the mattress, where for Christ's sake everybody in the entire world hid things? What he must have done, they figured, was slide it in between the mattress and the bedsprings while they were ripping off the sheets to wrap her in.
Nobody had yet touched the bag.
Richard the Third was still standing beside the bed with his parka on because it was freezing cold in this part of the city unless you turned on a kerosene heater or a coal stove, grinning from ear to freckle-faced ear, holding up the corner of the mattress to reveal the red patent-leather bag nestled there all shiny and flat.
Richard the Second took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his parka and pulled them on with all the aplomb a surgeon to perform surgery.
Gingerly, he lifted the bag from where it rested on the bedsprings. He unsnapped the flap, opened the bag, and reached into it.
There was nineteen hundred dollars in cash in the bag.
Plus the ten jumbo vials black Richard had paid the girl for his piece of the action.
Plus nine hundred dollars in traveler's checks respectively signed by Richard Hopper, Richard Weinstock, and Richard O'Connor. They each had separately pocketed the checks at once, and then debated whether or not to leave all the money and crack in the bag, or to take some of it for all the trouble they'd gone through. It was Richard the First who suggested that a good way to extricate themselves entirely was to link the dead girl to the two dead men. If they left her handbag in the bathroom, the presence of such a large amount of cash, not to mention the sizable stash of crack, would lend credibility to the police theory that the hooker had been killed in a robbery. Or what he hoped would be the police theory.
All three of them went into the bathroom.
Jamal, whose name they didn't yet know, was still lying on his back on the floor with his throat slit. He had stopped bleeding. Black Richard was lying on the bottom of the tub. Richard the Second suggested that they leave the bag open on the floor, with a lot of hundred-dollar bills and a few jumbo vials spread on the tiles, as if the two of them had been fighting over it before they killed each other.
Richard the Third looked puzzled. 'What is it?' Richard the First asked. 'What's the scenario here?' 'Scenario?'
'Yes, how did this happen?'
'I see his point,' Richard the Second said.
'What point? They were fighting over the bag. They killed each other.'
'How can a person stab another person while that person is drowning him?'
'That's not how it happened.'
'Then how did it happen?'
Richard the First thought this over for a moment. 'They were fighting over the bag,' he said again. The other two waited.
'Richard stabbed him, whoever he is.'
They still waited.
'Then he got in the tub so he could wash off the blood.'
'With his clothes on?'
'He was drunk,' Richard the First said. 'That's why he got in the tub with all his clothes on. In fact, that's how he drowned. He was trying to wash himself, but he fell in the tub. He was drunk!'
He looked at the other two expectantly. 'Sounds good to me,' Richard the Second said. 'Just might fly,' Richard the Third said.
Grinning, Richard the First winked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.
It was snowing when they left the apartment for the bus terminal.
The time was ten minutes past two.
Detective First Grade Oliver Weeks known far and wide, but particularly wide, as Fat Ollie Weeks though never to his face got into the act because two dead bodies were found in an apartment in Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happened to be his bailiwick.
The discovery was made by a woman who lived on Richard Cooper's floor, who happened to be by his door when she saw it standing wide open. She called into him, and then stepped inside and saw a mess there, clothes thrown all over which way, drawers pulled out, and figures somebody's been in there and ripped him off, so she went downstairs to tell the super. This was seventeen minutes past five, about a half hour after Ollie and his team had relieved the day watch. super went upstairs with her and found the two bodies in the bathroom and ran right down again to dial Nine-One-One. The responding blues radioed precinct with a double DOA and Ollie and an Eight-Eight detective named Wilbur Sloat, who sounded black but who was actually a tall, thin blond man with a scraggly blond mustache, rode over there to Ainsley and North Eleventh. They got there at a quarter to six.
Since Ollie was a bigot in the truest sense of the word that is to say, he hated everyone he was
naturally tickled to death to see two of the precinct's more contemptible black specimens dead by their own hands. For such was what it appeared to be at first glance.
'Make either one of them?' Sloat asked.
He was a new detective, and he affected mannerisms and speech he heard on cop television shows. Ollie would have liked it better if Sloat had stayed back in the squad room answering telephones and picking his nose. Ollie was aloner. He preferred being aloner. That way, you didn't have to deal with assholes all the time.
The one with his throat slit, he recognized at once as a small-time pimp named Jamal 'The Jackal' Stone, formerly known as Jackson Stone before he picked himself a name he thought sounded African. Jamal, my ass. Ollie had recently read in Newsweek magazine that forty-four percent of all persons of color in America preferred being called 'black,' whereas only twenty-eight percent liked to be called African American So why did all these niggers (Ollie's own choice of appellation by a personal margin of one hundred percent) give themselves African names and run around celebrating African holidays and wearing fezzes and robes, what the hell was it?
The way Ollie looked at it, a simple fact of American life was that one out of every three black males was currently enmeshed in the criminal justice system. That meant that thirty-three and athird percent of the black male population was either in jail, on parole, or awaiting trial. So, yeah, if a white guy crossed the street when he saw three black men approaching him, it was because one of them might be
Johnnie Cochran, sure, and another might be Darden, okay, but the third one might be O Simpson.
So here were two dead black men in a bathroom. Big surprise.
The way Ollie saw it, there were two instituti that should be reinstated all over the world. One of them was dictatorship and the other was slavery. He told Sloat who the one on the floor was. 'Got himself juked real good,' Sloat said Juked, Ollie thought. Jesus.
The one in the tub he didn't recognize under allthat water, which distorted his good looks. But when the M.E. had him pulled out of the tub so he could examine him, Ollie pegged him at once, as a two-bit drug dealer named Richard Cooper, who once broke both a man's legs for calling him Richie. M.E. wouldn't even speculate that the cause of death was drowning, having been burned on a similar call years ago where it turned out a man had been before someone shoved his head facedown in a toilet bowl. The one on the floor had definitely been slashed, though, so the M.E. had no trouble determining that the cause of death was severance of the carotid artery.
The two Homicide detectives working the night shift were called Flaherty and Flanagan. Ollie told them he knew both of the victims, one of them by his ugly face, the other by his ugly reputation. Sloat suggested that perhaps they'd got into a fight over the handbag there on the floor, one thing leading to another, and so on and so forth, the same old story.
Same old story, Ollie thought. Fuckin dope's been a detective hardly three months, he's talkin about the same old story.
'A clutch,' Flaherty said.
'Well, I don't know whether they were grabbing each other or not,' Sloat said. 'I'm only suggesting they may have done each other.'
