Chapter Four
There were three airports servicing the metropolitan area. The largest of them, out on Sands Spit, flew three direct flights and six connecting flights to Houston on most weekdays. The airport closest to the city flew nine direct flights and eleven connecting flights. Across the river, in the adjoining state, direct flights went out virtually every hour, starting at : a.m. Twenty-one non-stop and connecting flights left from that airport alone. Altogether, a total of fifty flights flew to Houston almost every day of the week. It was a big busy city, that Houston, Texas.
Starting early Wednesday morning, the tenth day of November, twelve detectives began surveillance of the check-in counters at Continental, Delta, US Airways, American, Northwest, and United Airlines, looking for a Jamaican with a knife scar who might be headed for either Houston-Intercontinental or Houston-Hobby on a direct flight, or on any one of the flights connecting through Charlotte, Dallas/Fort Worth, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. None of the men boarding any of the flights even remotely fit the description Harpo Hopwell had given them.
There were still a lot more flights going out that day.
'Who's in charge here?' the assistant medical examiner wanted to know.
Ollie merely gave him a look: he was the only person here with a gold and blue-enameled detective's shield pinned to his jacket lapel, so who the hell did the man think was in charge? The only other cops at the scene were a pair of blues, both of them standing around looking bewildered, their thumbs up their asses. Did the man think uniforms were now handling homicide investigations?
Or maybe the man had forgotten that he and Ollie had worked together before. Ollie could not imagine this; he did not consider himself an eminently forgettable human being. Did the man work with detectives as fat as Ollie every day of the week? The man had to know that the fat detective in the loud sports jacket was the one in charge here. Or was he pretending not to know Ollie because he didn't want Ollie to think the only reason he remembered him was because he was fat? If so, that was stupid. Ollie knew he was fat. He also knew that behind his back people called him Fat Ollie. He considered it a measure of respect that nobody ever called him this to his face.
'Oh, hello, Weeks,' the ME said, as if noticing him for the first time, which was tantamount to suddenly noticing a hippopotamus at the dinner table. 'What've we got?'
'Dead black girl in the kitchen,' Ollie said.
The ME's name was Frederick Kurtz, a Nazi bastard if Ollie had ever met one. Even had a little Hitler mustache under his nose. Little black satchel like some mad doctor at Buchenwald. Wearing a rumpled suit looked as if he'd slept in it all this past week. Had a bad cold, too. Kept taking a soiled handkerchief from his back pocket and blowing fresh snot into it, the fuckin Nazi. Ollie followed him into the kitchen.
The girl lay on her back in front of the sink counter, the knife still in her. This was going to be a real tough call. It would take a fuckin Nazi rocket scientist to diagnose this one as a fatal stabbing. Nobody had yet taken the knife out of her because rule number one was you didn't touch anything till the ME officially pronounced the vie dead. Ollie waited while Kurtz circled the body like a vulture, trying to find a comfortable position from which to examine the dead girl. He put his satchel down on the floor beside her, and leaned over close to her mouth, as if hoping to catch a shimmer of breath from her lips. Ollie was thinking if the girl was still breathing, she'd be sanctified before nightfall. Be the first black saint from this city. Kurtz placed his forefinger and middle finger on the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse in the carotid artery. Fat Chance Department, Ollie thought.
'Reckon she's dead?' he asked, trying to sound like John Wayne, but succeeding only in sounding like W. C. Fields. Ollie sometimes tried to do Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro, but somehow all his imitations came out sounding like W. C. Fields. He didn't realize this. He actually considered his imitations right on the money, and often thought of himself as the man with the golden ear. Kurtz knew sarcasm when he heard it, however, even when it came from a fat dick who neither looked nor sounded like a cowboy. He didn't answer Ollie. Instead, he put his stethoscope to the girl's chest, already knowing she was dead as a doornail, to coin a medical phrase, and went about his examination pretending Ollie wasn't there, something difficult to do under any circumstances. A voice from the bedroom doorway startled Kurtz, echoing as it did his own earlier question,
'Who's in charge here?' Monoghan asked.
Same stupid question from another jackass who should know better, Ollie thought. In this city, the
detective catching the squeal was the cop officially investigating the case from that moment on. Detective Monoghan, his partner Detective Monroe, and various other detectives from the Homicide Division were sent to the scene of any murder in their bailiwick, to serve in a so-called advisory and supervisory capacity. The reason for their existence was that this city was a bureaucratic monolith that cost more to run than the entire nation of Zaire.
In this city, ten people were necessary to do the job of one person. What this city did was hire high school drop-outs, put them in suits, and then teach them how to greet the public with blank stares on their faces. In this city, if you needed a copy of, say, your birth certificate or your driver's license, you stood on line for an hour and a half while some nitwit pretended to be operating a computer. When he or she finally located what you were there for, you had to go over to the post office and stand on line for another hour and a half to purchase a money order to pay for it. That was because in this city, municipal employees weren't allowed to accept cash, personal checks, or credit cards. This was because the city fathers knew the caliber of the people who were featherbedding throughout the entire system, knew that cash would disappear in a wink, knew that credit cards would be cloned, knew that personal checks would somehow end up in private bank accounts hither and yon. That's why all those people behind municipal counters gave you such hostile stares. They were angry at the system because they couldn't steal from it. Or maybe they were pissed off because they couldn't qualify for more lucrative jobs like security officers at any of the city's jails, where an ambitious man could earn a goodly amount of unreportable cash by smuggling in dope to the inmates.
Monoghan and Monroe were necessary to such a system.
Without two jackasses here to tell an experienced detective like Ollie how to do his job, the system would fall apart in a minute and a half. The Homicide dicks knew damn well who was in charge here. Oliver Wendell Weeks was in charge here. It bothered them, too, that in days of yore, the Homicide Division in this city had merited the measure of respect it now enjoyed only on television. Nowadays, Homicide's proud tradition was vestigial at best. All that remained of its elegant past were the black suits Homicide cops still wore, the color of death, the color of murder itself.
Both Monoghan and Monroe were wearing black on this dismal November afternoon. They looked as if they were on their way to a funeral home to tell some Irish mick like themselves how sorry they were that Paddy O'Toole had kicked the bucket, poor drunken soul. The consistent thing about Ollie Weeks was that he hated everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. Ollie was a consummate bigot. Without even knowing it.
'These two Irishmen walk out of a bar?' he said.
'Yeah?' Monoghan said.
'It could happen,' Ollie said, and shrugged.
Neither Monoghan nor Monroe laughed.
Kurtz, the fuckin Nazi, laughed, but he tried to hide it by blowing his nose again, because to tell the truth these two big Irish cops scared hell out of him. He guessed Ollie was of English descent, or he wouldn't have told such a joke to two Irishmen dressed like morticians and looking somewhat red in the face to begin with.
'What is that, some kind of ethnic slur?' Monoghan asked.
'Some kind of stereotypical innuendo?' Monroe asked.
'Is she dead or not?' Ollie asked the ME, changing
the subject because these two Irish jackasses seemed to be getting touchy about their drunken cronies.
'Yes, she's dead,' Kurtz said.
'Would you wish to venture a guess as to the cause?' Ollie said, this time trying to sound like a sarcastic British barrister, but it still came out as W. C. Fields.
