Nocturne (27 page)

“The blond guy?” Priscilla asked.

“No, Bernie.”

“He was angry yesterday?”

“No, he was angry Friday. Yesterday, he was all smiles.”

“So as I understand this,” Georgie said, interpreting for Priscilla, “on Friday night the blond guy and Bernie the bookie
just sat over there and talked, and Bernie was pissed off about something, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Anna said.

“But money changed hands yesterday and Bernie the bookie was all smiles. Is that also correct?”

“Matter of fact, yes,” Anna said.

“You know what this indicates to me?” Georgie said.

“What?” Priscilla asked.

“A man paying off a marker.”

“That’s what it looks like to me, too,” Tony said, nodding sagely.

Priscilla nodded, too, and then turned back to Anna.

“But you never got the blond guy’s name,” she said.

“Matter of fact, I didn’t,” Anna said.

“And you don’t know Bernie’s last name.”

“Just his first name.”

In which case, let us be on our way, Georgie thought.

“But maybe Marvin knows,” Anna said.

Matter of fact, he did.

Three black guys who looked like they were homeless bums were warming themselves up around a fire in an oil drum on the corner
of Ainsley and Eleventh. Ollie felt like arresting them. He was cold and he was tired after a full eight-hour shift, not to
mention trotting here and there around the city afterward trying to get a line on who iced the hooker and her two black buddies.
Three-thirty in the fuckin morning, he
really
felt like arresting them.

“You guys,” he said, approaching the blazing oil drum. “You know arson’s against the law?”

“Nobody committin no arson here, suh,” one of the men said. He was a grizzled old bum looked like that black guy in the prison
picture, whatever it was called,
The Scrimshaw Reduction
, about this black guy who used to drive around this old Jewish southern lady before he got sent up. The old bum standing
with his hands stretched out to the fire looked just like that guy in the picture. The other two looked like ordinary black
bums you’d see standing around any fire three-thirty in the morning. Nobody looked at Ollie. They all just kept staring into
the flames, hands reaching toward them.

“So is this your usual corner here?” Ollie asked. “This lovely garden spot here?”

He was being sarcastic. This was an unusually filthy stretch of Ainsley Avenue. Because of yesterday’s storm—and because this
was Diamondback, where nobody gave a damn about refuse collection, anyway—overflowing garbage cans stood against the tenement
walls and marauding rats the size of buffalo were boldly shredding stacks of black plastic bags. The noise of the rats was
frightening in itself. Over the crackle of the fire in the oil drum, Ollie could hear their incessant squealing and squeaking
and scratching. He felt like shooting them.

“Everybody hard of hearing here?” he asked.

“This’s our regular corner here, yessuh,” the one from the
Scrimshaw
picture said. Ollie didn’t know who he hated most, the ones who bowed and scraped or the ones with attitude. There wasn’t
much attitude around this fire tonight. Just three cold homeless bums afraid to go crawl into their cardboard boxes lest one
of their brothers did them in the night.

“You happen to be here Saturday night around this time?” he asked. “Little later, actually?”

None of the men said anything.

“Hey!” Ollie shouted. “Anybody
listening
to me here?”

“What time would that’ve been, suh?” the older bum said. Doing his Uncle Tom bit for the benefit of the dumb honkie cop.

“This would’ve been six o’clock in the morning, suh,” Ollie said, mimicking him. “This would’ve been a taxicab letting out
a white blonde in a short skirt and a red fur jacket who was being met by three white guys in blue parkas and a black guy
in a black leather jacket. So were you here at that hour,
suh
, and did you happen to see them?”

“We was here,” he said, “and we happen to see em.”

Carella and Hawes got to The Juice Bar about five minutes after Priscilla and the boys left. Marvin the bartender and Anna
the hatcheck girl both felt it was déjà vu all over again. Just a few minutes ago, three people who might have been under-covers
had been here asking about a tall blond man, and now here were two more very
definite
detectives flashing badges and asking about the same tall blond man. They told Carella and Hawes exactly what they had told
Priscilla and the boys.

So now five people were looking for a bookie named Bernie Himmel.

The cops had an edge.

At this hour, The Silver Chief Diner was mostly populated with predators. The morning shifts would not begin till eight, and
any honest person with a night job—office cleaners and hospital personnel, transit employees and cops, night watchmen, bakery
crews, cabdrivers, short-order cooks, hotel workers, toll takers—was still busy earning a living. Here in the diner, there
were mainly prostitutes and pimps, burglars and muggers, dealers and users, the occasional noncriminal sprinkling of drunks,
insomniacs, or writers with blocks. Ollie separated the wheat from the chaff at once. The minute he walked in, every thief
in the joint recognized him for what he was, too. None of them even glanced in his direction.

He went straight to the counter, took a stool, and ordered a cup of coffee from a redheaded girl in a pale green uniform.
Her name tag read
sally
.

“You serve Indian food here?” he asked.

“No, sir, we sure don’t,” Sally said.

“Native American food?” he asked.

“Nor that neither,” she said.

“Then how come you call yourself the Silver Chief?”

“It’s spose to be like a train,” she said.

“Oh yeah?”

“That’s what it’s spose to be, yes, sir.”

“What part of the South you from, Sally?”

“Tennessee,” she said.

“You serve grits here, Sally?”

“No, sir.”

“You serve hominy?”

“No, sir.”

“How about a nice hot cup of coffee then? And one of those donuts there.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Ollie looked the place over again. Each time his gaze fell upon someone who’d been out victimizing tonight, eyes turned away.
Good, he thought. Shit your pants. Sally came back with his coffee and donut.

“I’m a police officer,” he said, and showed her his shield. “Were you working here on Saturday night around this time, a little
bit later?”

“I was,” she said.

“I’m looking for a blond girl was wearing a black mini and a red fur jacket.”

He didn’t mention that she was dead.

“
Fake
fur,” he said. “Fake blonde, too.”

“We get lots of those in here,” Sally said, and with a faint tilt of her head indicated that lots of
those
were in here right this very minute, sitting at tables hither and yon behind Ollie.

“How about Saturday night? Remember a blonde in a red fur jacket?”

“I sure don’t,” Sally said.

“How about three white guys in blue hooded parkas?”

“Nope.”

“Or a black guy in a black leather jacket.”

“We get thousands of black guys in black leather jackets.”

“These three white guys would’ve been peeing in the gutter.”

“Where?”

“Outside there,” Ollie said, jerking his head over his shoulder toward the front windows of the diner.

“This weather?” Sally said, and laughed.

Ollie laughed, too.

“Need Willie warmers,
this
weather,” Sally said.

“Black guy would’ve run out the diner, told them to stop peeing.”

“Can’t blame him,” Sally said, and began laughing again.

Ollie laughed, too.

“How do you know all this fascinating stuff?” Sally asked.

Ollie figured she was flirting with him. Lots of women preferred men with a little girth, as he called it.

“Three black guys outside told me,” he said.

“Oh,
those
three.”

“You know them?”

“They’re out there every night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, they’re crazy.”

“Yeah? Crazy?”

“Yeah, they just got out of Buenavista a few months ago.”

“Buenavista, huh?”

“Yeah. What they do, these mental hospitals, they medicate all these psychos till they’re stabilized. Then they let them loose
on the streets with prescriptions they don’t bother filling. Before you know it, they’re acting nutty all over again. I saw
a man talking to a mailbox the other day, would you believe it? Holding a long conversation with a mailbox. Those three guys
out there stand around that fire all night like it’s some kind of shrine. The one who looks like Morgan Fairchild …”

“
That’s
his name!” Ollie said, and snapped his fingers.

“He’s the nuttiest of them all. Anything he told you, I’d take with a grain of salt.”

“He told me these three white guys were peeing in the gutter when this black man in a black leather jacket came running out
of here to stop them.”

“Naw,” Sally said. “Don’t believe it.”

“Were you working here alone on Saturday night?” Ollie asked slyly.

He spent the next fifteen minutes talking to another waitress, the short-order cook, and the cashier, who was also the night
manager. None of them had seen three white guys in hooded parkas peeing in the gutter. And whereas all of them had seen half
a
dozen
black guys in black leather jackets, none of them had seen one running out into the street to prevent mass urination.

Five minutes after Ollie left, Curly Joe Simms walked in.

There was no one named Bernie Himmel or Bernard Himmel listed in any of the phone directories for the city’s five separate
sectors. On the off chance that Marvin the bartender had got Bernie the bookie’s family name wrong, they even checked all
the listings under
himmer
and
hammil
, but found no matching first name. There were two listings for
b. hemmer
, but these turned out to be women, big surprise, who did not appreciate being awakened at a quarter to four in the morning.

“So that’s it,” Georgie said. “Let’s forget it for now. Go home, get some sleep.”

“No,” Priscilla said.

She had just had an idea.

The computer listed a Bernard Himmel, alias Bernie Himmel, alias Benny Himmel, alias Bernie “The Banker” Himmel, a thirty-six-year-old
white male who had taken two prior falls for violation of Section 225.10 of the state’s Penal Law, titled Promoting Gambling
in the First Degree, which read:

A person is guilty of promoting gambling in the first degree when he knowingly advances or profits from unlawful gambling
activity by 1) Engaging in bookmaking to the extent that he receives or accepts in any one day more than five bets totaling
more than five thousand dollars; or 2) Receiving, in connection with a lottery or policy scheme …

And so on, which second provision did not apply to either of Bernie’s arrests and subsequent convictions.

Violation of 225.10 was a class-E felony, punishable by a term of imprisonment not to exceed four years. The first time around,
Bernie was sentenced to one to three and was back on the street again, and at the same old stand again, after serving the
requisite year. The next time, he drew two to four as a so-called predicate felon and was paroled after serving the minimum.
The address he’d registered with his parole officer was 1110 Garner Avenue, not a mile away from The Juice Bar, where apparently
he’d set up business again.

Carella and Hawes got to Garner at four
a.m
.

If Himmel
was
in fact taking bets again, then he was breaking parole at best and would be returned to prison to serve the two years he
still owed the state. If, in addition, he was once again arrested and charged and convicted, then he would technically become
a so-called
persistent
felony offender, and could be sentenced for an A-1 felony, which could mean fifteen to twenty-five years behind bars. Neither
Carella nor Hawes had ever heard of anyone in this city or this state taking such a fall on a gambling violation. But Bernie
the Banker Himmel was still looking at the two years owed on the parole violation, plus
another
two to four as a predicate felon with a new gambling violation. Such visions of the future could make any man desperate.
Moreover, only two mornings ago, Carella and Hawes had knocked on a door and been greeted with four bullets plowing through
the wood. They did not want to provoke yet another fusillade.

Without a no-knock arrest warrant, they were compelled to announce themselves. Gun-shy, they flanked the door. Service revolvers
drawn, they pressed themselves against the wall on either side of it. Carella reached in to knock. No answer. He knocked again.
He was about to knock a third time when a man’s voice said, “Who is it?”

“Mr. Himmel?”

“Yes?”

“Police,” Carella said. “Could you come to the door, please?”

Still standing to the side of it. Hawes on the other side of the jamb, facing him. Cold in the hallway here. Not a sound from
inside the apartment. Not a sound anywhere in the building. They waited.

“Mr. Himmel?”

No answer.

“Mr. Himmel? Please come to the door, sir.” They waited. “Or we’ll have to go downtown for a warrant.” Still no answer. “Mr.
Himmel?”

They heard footsteps approaching the door.

They braced themselves.

Lock clicking open.

The door opened a crack. A night chain stopped it. The same voice said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Himmel?”

“Yes?”

“May we come in, sir?”

“Why?”

“We’d like to ask you some questions, sir.”

“What about?”

“Well, if you’d let us in, sir …”

“No, I don’t think so,” Himmel said, and slammed the door in their faces. The lock snapped shut. They waited. In a moment,
they heard the unmistakable sound of a window going up.