'I'll bet. Did you ever hear of a man named Danny Nelson?'
'Sorry, no.'
'Danny Gimp is another name he went by.'
'No. Never heard of him.'
'Would you be surprised if I told you he'd stiffed your boss on a minor-league dope deal. . .'
'My boss? Who's supposed to be my boss?'
'Enrique Ramirez. Who owns the pool hall you work for.'
'I don't know anybody named Enrique Ramirez, I already told you. Nor Danny Gump, neither.'
'Gimp.'
'I thought you said Gump.'
'Gimp. It means a guy who limps.'
'Has all this got to do with some sort of drug violation?' Reynolds asked.
'Two keys of cocaine,' Byrnes said, nodding. 'Worth forty-two large.'
'You know,' Reynolds said, 'I really think you people should either charge my client with a specific crime or else. . .'
'Ramirez paid a man named Danny Nelson to deliver two keys of coke to a dealer in Majesta,' Byrnes explained genially. 'Danny never showed up and neither did the coke. You don't do that to Enrique Ramirez.'
'I don't know anything about any of this,' Blaine said.
'I especially don't know this Enrique Ramirez person, who I guess you're saying is somehow involved with dealing dope.'
'El Jefe ? ' Byrnes said. 'Ever hear him called that?'
'No. Is that Spanish, what you said?'
'We think El Jefe hired you to kill Danny Nelson,' Byrnes said.
'Ooops, that's it, Lieutenant,' Reynolds said.
'No, that's okay,' Blaine said, grinning. 'I don't know any of these people he's talking about, so just relax, it's okay. I've got nothing to worry about here. Nice and easy, okay? Like you said, Lieutenant.'
Smack him right in the fuckin eye, Brown thought.
'On the morning of November eighth,' Byrnes said, 'did you tell a friend of yours you were going out for some pizza?'
Kling looked at him. So did Brown. The lieutenant had just come dangerously close to revealing Betty Young's identity. If Blaine walked out of here today . . .
'No,' Blaine said. 'What friend?'
'Excuse me, lieutenant. . .,' Kling said.
'What friend?' Blaine insisted.
'A friend you told you were going out for pizza, on the morning Danny Gimp . . .'
'Lieutenant. . .'
'Did you tell a friend you were going out for pizza?'
'This is Betty Young, right?' Blaine said.
Oh Jesus, Kling thought. The Loot just gave her up.
'Never mind who it is. Did you . . . ?'
'It's that fuckin bitch Betty, ain't it? Who else could it be? What else did she tell you?'
'I would suggest. . .'
'If you don't mind, Counselor. . .'
'Mr Blaine . . .'
'What did you mean when you said you were going out for pizza?' Byrnes asked.
'I meant I was going out for pizza, what the fuck's wrong with that? Oh, I get it. She spotted me on the tape, right? She's going for the re . . .'
'What tape?' Byrnes asked at once.
Blaine suddenly shut up.
'Are we finished here?' Reynolds asked.
'Unless Mr Blaine has something else he wants to tell us,' Byrnes said.
'We're finished here,' Blaine said.
'You heard him. In which case . . .'
'Like what?' Blaine said.
'Come on,' Reynolds said. 'Let's go.'
'No, like what?' Blaine insisted. 'What would I want to tell you?'
'That's up to you,' Byrnes said. 'You think it over. Meanwhile, we're gonna hold you here for a few hours while we assemble some witnesses from the pizzeria. Run a little lineup for them, see if they can recognize you a little better in person than on that tape you were just talking about. The law allows us . . .'
'That was it, am I right? She spotted me on the tape, that fuckin bitch.'
Kling was staring at the lieutenant.
They had asked Betty Young to trust them.
But the lieutenant had given her up.
'You want whose name went in with me?' Blaine asked. 'Is that it?'
It was contagious.
The black man who'd been Blaine's partner on the pizzeria shivaree was a dark-skinned Colombian named Hector Milagros. They arrested him in a diner at nine that morning, having breakfast alone in a corner booth. Milagros knew there was no sense trying to force his way out of a situation where his back was to a plate glass window
and he was looking at three nines as compared to his singleton thirty-eight. He asked them could he finish his eggs before they got cold. They told him they' d order more eggs for him up at the station house. Casually, he asked, 'Wass thees all abou, anyways, muchachosT
'We've been talking to an old friend of yours,' Brown said.
'Old shooting buddy of yours,' Kling said.
'Maxie Blaine,' Carella said. 'Remember him?'
'Mierda! ' Milagros said, and stabbed his fork into one of the egg yolks. Yellow ran all over his plate.
By the time the network news broke the following day, both Milagros and Blaine had been indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Daniel Nelson. Expecting they would both be held without bail, Betty Young showed little temerity about revealing herself as the person responsible for their arrest. Ever on the prowl for promotional opportunities, Restaurant Affiliates arranged for presentation of the $, reward check (blown up to gigantic viewing size) on that evening's six-thirty network news. It did not hurt that Betty Young was an attractive woman with a dazzling smile and a blameless bust. Winsomely grinning into the camera, she thanked RA, Inc. for the check she would use to buy nursing care for her bedridden mother in Florida and a new Chevy Geo for herself. She then expressed the fervent wish that those two ruthless killers would receive the maximum penalty—otherwise she'd be looking over her shoulder the rest of her life, she did not say to the television audience. Literary agents all over the city wondered if there was a book and subsequent movie in this. School children all over the United States wept sympathetic tears into their beers and went out to buy a nicer pizza, hopeful they'd accidentally stumble into a Guido' s killing of their own and glean a fifty-K reward as a result. Watching the show in bed, eating
Chinese food with Sharyn Cooke, Kling wondered aloud if Lieutenant Byrnes had done the right thing.
'Because you know, Shar,' he said, 'Pete had no idea Blaine would suddenly open up. No idea at all. He just threw her to the lions, was what he did. After she gave us her trust.'
'She didn't look so shy accepting that check,' Sharyn said.
He watched her manipulating the chopsticks. She worked them like a pro, clamping them onto morsels of food as if she'd been born in Beijing. He was almost hypnotized.
'What?' she said.
'I like the way you do that.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'You do it pretty good yourself, Big Boy,' she said.
