'Well, a hundred, a hun'twenty ...'
'Okay, and if she got fifty for each trip to the back room . . .'
'Sixty be more like it.'
'Okay, that netted her forty on each trip. That's a
hun'twenty plus the G-string money comes to two-forty. What time do you girls start?'
'Nine.'
'If she left at two, that was five hours,' Ollie said. 'Divide two-forty by five, you come up with forty-eight bucks an hour. She coulda made more workin at McDonald's.'
'Not hardly.'
'You consider forty-eight an hour good wages?'
'Most nights we do better.'
'If two-forty was all she'd earned last night, why'd she leave half an hour before closing?'
'Maybe she was tired.'
'Or maybe she'd arranged for somebody to meet her outside and take her home,' Carella said. 'Is that possible?'
'Anything's possible,' Ruby said.
'What'd these guys look like?' Ollie asked. 'The ones who went back with her.'
'Who knows what any of these creeps look like?'
'Any of them look Jamaican?'
'Whuf s a Jamaican look like?'
'This one was light-skinned, with blue-green eyes and curly black hair. Around six-two or -three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a charming lilt to his speech.'
'If I'd seen anybody like that aroun here,' Ruby said, 'Fda axed him to marry me.'
That Wednesday night, the airwaves were full of stories about Danny Gimp and his two murderers. Slain stool pigeons do not normally attract too much attention. Unless they're killed in a place as public as a pizzeria, in broad daylight, during a week when television was panting for something sensational to captivate the
no
imagination of the ever-salivating American viewing audience. The hanging death of a nondescript old man in a shabby little apartment in a meager section of the city was nothing as compared to two bald-faced gunmen striding into a pizzeria during the breakfast hour and blazing away like Butch and Sundance, albeit one had been black.
In a city divided by race, even the racial symmetry was reason for jubilance. For here, if nowhere else, a black man and a white man seemed to have worked in harmonious accord to rid the earth of that vilest of all human beings, the informer. Danny Gimp, unremarkable and unregarded while alive, became in death something of an inverted martyr, a man made suddenly famous by his extinction. In a world where wars were given mini- series titles, Danny and his two bold slayers stepped out of reality into the realm of truth made to seem fictitious, achieving in the space of several days a notoriety reserved for mythical bad guys and their destroyers. Killers though they were, The White Guy and The Black Guy had slain The Rat. One would have thought, from the interest generated on television, that once the salt-and-pepper assassins were apprehended, they'd be awarded medals and a ticker tape parade down Hall Avenue.
That Wednesday night, all five networks featured stories about Danny Gimp, the black and white shooters, and the similarly hued pair of detectives—Brown and Kling—who had responded to the call. The talking heads on the cable channels, babbling away on shows joining in their titles the words 'pizza,' 'shootout,' 'terror,' 'confrontation,' and 'ambush' in various unimaginative combinations, endlessly debated whether a police informer was truly a 'rat' as the term was commonly understood, why illegal guns seemed to proliferate at such an alarming rate in American cities, and whether it was politic or merely politics to have a black-and-white
in
detective team investigating a case involving a black and a white shooter.
Thursday came and Thursday went.
So did Friday and Saturday.
And Sunday.
And all at once it was a new week.
In days of yore, the police department used to run a lineup every Monday to Thursday morning. Detectives from squads all over the city would gather in the gymnasium at headquarters downtown, where the Chief of Detectives paraded any felony offender arrested the night before. This was done solely to acquaint the people in law enforcement with the people doing mischief in their town, the premise being that the bad guys would continue being bad all their lives and it was a good thing to be able to recognize them on the street.
Nowadays, lineups were held only for purposes of identification, the suspected perp standing on a lighted stage with five innocent people, two of whom were usually squadroom detectives, the victim sitting behind a one-way mirror hoping to pick out a winner. But there was also another type of lineup, and it took place on television news programs whenever the tapes from hidden surveillance cameras were shown. On the five o'clock news that Monday night, the surveillance tapes from the pizzeria cameras were run for the first time, revealing in all their glory the two bold gunmen who had sprinted into the place and sprayed it with bullets. Danny Nelson's assailants were identifiable chiefly by race, but otherwise blurry to anyone who didn't really know them. In any event, no one came forward.
In a brilliant public-relations move, however, Restaurant Affiliates, Inc.—the company that owned the Guide's Pizzeria chain—now posted a $, reward for any information leading to the capture and conviction of the two gunmen who'd shot up their fine establishment
on Culver Avenue. That RA, Inc. seemed more interested in the damage done to their place of business than to the untimely demise of Danny Nelson went unnoticed by television viewers and newspaper readers alike. Informers were admittedly the scum of the earth, the campaign suggested, but public places should not be submitted to wanton violence. Linking pizza to after-school sports and public prayer, the TV commercials and newspaper ads called for swift apprehension of the culprits and stricter gun control everywhere in this wild and woolly nation. In conjunction with the police, an line was set up and strict confidence was guaranteed any caller. A newspaper columnist wryly commented that Charlton Heston had stopped eating pizza in favor of a Japanese dish called Shogun Sushi, a weak pun on 'shotgun,' but this was the afternoon paper. The column caused no end of amusement among the executive types up at RA, Inc.
Still no one came forward.
In a bit more than three weeks' time, the Danny Gimp case passed from intense media scrutiny to total oblivion.
Thanksgiving Day seemed almost an afterthought.
r
Chapter Five
He had drank too much, and had argued with his uncle Dominick too loudly about whichever war was current wherever in the world. His uncle's attitude was always and ever 'Let's bomb the shit out of them!' Carella had heard these words from him ever since he was old enough to understand, and his mother had always warned, 'Dom, the children,' but that hadn't stopped Uncle Dominick who looked like an enforcer for the mob, and who—for all Carella knew, but never asked—might very well have been one in his younger days.
They had got back home to Riverhead at about nine that night and the twins had reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that there was no school tomorrow, so they'd allowed them to stay up for a Thanksgiving special on NEC. Carella was still grumbling about his thick-headed uncle and Teddy was signing that maybe he
