Nocturne

'What did you want to know?'

'Tall blond man wearing a dark blue coat and a scarf. Walked in around eleven, walked out a couple of minutes later. Did you see him?'

'Not when he walked in,' Ramon said. He still sounded miffed, Georgie thought. wondering why his dumb story about a tall guy playing a small sax and a short guy playing a big one wasn't quite wowing the crowds here in the big city. Hell with you, Georgie thought. Just don't tell anything'll lead her to the blond guy.

'But you did see him,' Priscilla said.

'Yeah, when he came out. Cause he asked me to get him a cab.'

'What'd he sound like?' 'Sound like?' 'His accent.'

'Oh. Yeah. That's right.' 'Was it a Spanish accent?' 'No. Definitely not.'

'He didn't speak Spanish to you, did he?'

'No. It was English. But with an accent. Like you say.'

'Russian?'

'Italian, maybe. I'm not sure.' 'Did you get him a cab?' 'Yeah.'

'Do you know where he was going?' 'As it happens, yes,' Ramon said. They waited breathlessly.

Master of suspense, Georgie thought.

'The doormen at the Powell are trained to ask our guests their destinations, and to relay this information to the cabdriver,' Ramon said, as if reciting from the hotel's brochure. 'Many of our guests are foreigners,' he said. 'They will have an address scribbled on a piece of paper, and will have no idea where that address might be. Japanese people, for example. Arabs. Germans. We try to help them out. As a Courtesy,' he said. 'These people who can barely speak English.'

But the blond guy did speak English, Georgie said.

'So where was he going?' Priscilla said impatiently.

Georgie hoped he wouldn't remember.

'I remember because I played there once,' he said.

'Where?' Priscilla insisted.

'A place called The Juice Bar,' Ramon said. an after-hours club on Harris Avenue. In Near the Alhambra Theater.'

At two-thirty that morning, Luis Villada was outside the Alhambra Theater when Danny arrived with the two detectives. Danny with them all around, told them he was sure they had no further use for his services, hailed a cab and downtown without so much as a backward glance. Hawes was ever more certain that the man didn't like him.

Luis looked the two detectives over.

He was not afraid of telling them anything they wanted to know about Friday night because in the city already knew what had gone down. least every cop in Emergency Service and every cop in the Four-Eight Precinct and every cop on Riverhead Task Force, not to mention twenty from the ASPCA, which not very many German, or Arabian tourists knew stood for American Society for the Prevention of cruelty to Animals. As if cock fighting was being animals. Besides, they couldn't charge him anything more than they already had. As a he'd been arrested for one misdemeanor count

to animals and another misdemeanor count for )ating in animal fights.

'They kept us in the theater overnight,' he said,

tickets.'

Not a trace of an accent. Carella figured him for third-generation Puerto Rican.

'They let us go after they gave us dates for court appearances,' he said. 'I have to go downtown on

february twenty-eighth.'

He looked the cops dead in the eye.

'Danny says you have something for me,' he said.

Hawes handed him an envelope.

Luis didn't bother to open it or to count what was inside it. Hey, if you couldn't trust cops, who could you trust? Ho ho ho. He pocketed the envelope and an walking them down along dark alley smelling of piss, toward the back wall of the theater, where he there was a door the police had broken down night and couldn't padlock afterward. The door in splinters, small wonder. Nailed to the lintel was printed CRIME SCENE notice, which should have

:l anyone from seeking entry, door or no door.

Luis believed that printed notices from the police were to be ignored, and so he stepped over the ng bottom panel of the door and into a ss deeper than the one outside. The detectives d him in. Hawes turned on a penlight. vejor, Luis said. Hawes flashed the light around. They moved deeper into the theater. Luis began talking.

He seemed to think he'd been given a miilion-dollar publishing advance to cover a sporting event, rather than a mere three hundred for information about whatever he'd seen and this past Friday night. Like an eyewitness ab to describe a major disaster like an earthquake, avalanche, or a plane crash, he began setting the scene by describing the excitement of the night, the sheer excitement of being there on this special occasion. penlight Carella offered him, he led them through abandoned movie theater that had served as the Where once there had been upholstered seats, were now bleachers surrounding a carpeted Dried blood stained the carpet.

'The walls are on rollers,' Luis explained. 'If police come, the promoters slide them back to look like a prizefight is going on. They have two in boxing trunks and gloves in the back office. lookout sounds the alarm, the walls move. out, boxers are in the ring hitting each other, nice and legal. Cockfighting shouldn't be against the law, anyway. It's legal in some states, like Louisiana, Oklahoma, I forget the other two. It's legal in four states altogether. So why should it be against the law here? Farmers in the South get to cockfights, but here in a sophisticated city like this one, it's against the law. Shit, man! I go to a cockfight to enjoy myself, and all of a sudden I'm charged two misdemeanors, I can go to jail for a year on What for? What crime did I commit? This was a social gathering here.'

The social gathering, as he tells it to them, began at nine o'clock on Friday night, when the spectators,

some two hundred and fifty of them, began gathering at this theater on Harris Avenue in the Harrisville section of Riverhead, both avenue and neighborhood named for along-ago councilman named Albert J. Harris. The fight was supposed to take place on Saturday night, at another Venue, but someone leaked it to the police and so the date and the place were changed although, as it turned out, someone leaked this to the police as well.

This is an important event tonight because it's the first big fight of the season, which begins in January and runs through to July. Roosters don't molt during these months. When they're molting, blood flows into their quills, causing them to become vulnerable and incapable of fighting... 'Did you see that movie The Birds?' Luis asked. 'There was a line in it where the girl says that birds get a hangdog expression when they're molting. That was a very funny line Hitchcock wrote. Because how can birds get hangdog expressions?'

Carella shook his head in wonder.

'Anyway, there was only one other event after the holidays, and then came this one on Friday night, which was supposed to be the next night, but the promoters sold a lot of tickets in advance, and it was just a matter of letting people know the date had been changed and instead of the athletic club on Dover

Plains, it was now the Alhambra here on Harris. The tickets cost...'

... twenty dollars each, which is practically giving the seats away. The promoters don't expect a lot of money on the gate. What's twenty two-fifty? Five K? So what's that? Where the real money is selling food and alcohol. And, of course, the betting. Thousands of dollars are wagered on each of the fights. During a typical night, there can be anywhere from twenty to thirty matches, depending on the ferocity and duration of each contest. The average match will run minutes, but some will end in five and more popular ones with the crowd can last as long as half an hour or even forty minutes, the birds tearing themselves apart in frenzy.

There is a huge indoor parking garage across the street from the Alhambra, and it is here that the customers park their cars, hidden from the eyes of prying police officers though on this Friday informers have already been paid, and a massive is in preparation even before the first of them arrives. Inside, there is joviality and conviviality, atmosphere reminiscent of the old days on the where cock fighting is still a gentleman's sport. can remember attending his first fight when he was seven years old. His father was a breeder of fighting birds, and he recalls feeding them special diets of meat and eggs supplemented with vitamins for their stamina and strength.