The Frumious Bandersnatch (16 page)

“I'm saying I don't know
what
they got or didn't get. Footprints or whatever. That's why I'm waiting for the report. The perps were wearing gloves, so the likelihood of latents is nil. But they came down these highly polished steps into the ballroom, and they moved across a dance floor with another sensitive surface…”

“That's the kind of stuff I mean,” Endicott said. “Your first hand impressions of the scene. To supplement whatever you've got in writing. When do you think you can get down here?”

“Down where?” Carella asked.

“Why, Federal Square, Steve.”

“How about first thing tomorrow morning?” Carella said.

“How about right now?” Endicott said. “The Squad's all here…”

The Squad? Carella thought.

“…and we'd love to get a jump on this before those sons of bitches call tomorrow. Think you can stop by your office first, see if that MCU report is in, and then head right on down here? It's One Federal Square, nineteenth floor. We'll be waiting,” he said, and hung up.

Carella looked at the phone receiver.

The Squad, he thought. Is that what the Joint Task Force calls itself, The Squad?

He put the receiver back on the cradle.

The Squad.

“I have to go in again,” he told Teddy.

It was not the first time she'd ever heard those words, but she pulled a face anyway.

THERE WAS ONLY
one building in Federal Square, and it was appropriately addressed One Federal Square. A forty-story limestone structure lit from below with daggers of light, it would have looked imposing, and a bit intimidating, even if it were not the sole edifice on a plot of ground some fifty yards square.

The Joint Task Force, a team of six crack FBI agents and an equal number of elite police detectives, occupied floors nineteen and twenty of the building. You could not enter those floors without a key. Carella did not have a key, which was why someone was meeting him downstairs in the lobby.

The someone was Detective-Lieutenant Charles “Corky” Corcoran.

In this whole wide world, there is no one with the surname Corcoran who does not also possess the nickname Corky. That is an indisputable truth. Male or female, if you are a Corcoran, you are also a Corky. Charles Farley Corcoran had been “Corky” when Carella met him some twenty-odd years ago at the Police Academy, and Carella guessed he was still Corky tonight, though there was clipped to his suit jacket pocket an ID card and a gold, blue-enameled detective shield hammered with the word
LIEUTENANT
. Beaming a toothy smile, blue eyes crinkling in a face stamped with the map of Ireland, he extended his hand and said, “Steve, long time no see.”

His grip was firm and dry and warm. He looked as fit and as young as he had, lo those many years ago, when they were both rookies climbing ropes and firing pistols in the Academy.

“Welcome to The Squad,” he said.

The Squad, Carella thought. Supreme egotism in that the designation completely dismissed every detective squad in this city and declared itself
The
Squad,
The
One and Only Squad. Welcome.

“Nice to be here,” Carella said.

He was thinking he had not got to bed till almost eight-thirty this morning after being up all night on the kidnapping. He had been awakened by Byrnes at twelve-thirty and had spent the rest of the day either in court chasing court orders, or up in Loomis' office supervising the installation of the telephone-surveillance equipment. It was now ten-thirty
P.M.
, and he was beginning to feel just a wee bit weary.

The usual modulation from night shift to day shift took place over a period of two days. You worked the midnight-to-eight
A.M.
shift for a full month, then you took two full days off and came back to work at eight in the morning, the theory being that you'd caught up on your sleep by that time, just like a business traveler adjusting to jet lag.

Sure.

“You're looking good, Steve.”

“Thanks. Do I still call you Corky?”

“Most people call me Charles these days,” Corcoran said. “Or Lieutenant.” Still smiling, he said, “Come meet the team,” and led Carella across a vast lobby paved with massive blocks of unpolished marble to a bank of elevators simply marked 19–20. There were only two buttons and a keyway in the elevator that arrived. Corcoran took a key ring from his pocket, slid a small key into the keyway, twisted it, and hit the button for 19.

“I understand you've done some good work on this case,” Corcoran said.

“Thank you,” Carella said.

The elevator whirred silently up the shaft. The door slid open onto the nineteenth floor. The men stepped out into a corridor that ran past a warren of tiny work cubes, occupied with men and women at computers. Carella followed Corcoran to an unmarked door at the end of the hall. He opened the door and allowed Carella to precede him into a room.

There were six smiling men in the room.

Carella recognized only Barney Loomis, who was wearing a brown jacket over beige slacks, a brown turtleneck sweater, and brown loafers. Three of the other five men were both wearing dark blue suits, white shirts, blue ties, and highly polished, black, lace-up shoes. Carella figured them for FBI. They even looked somewhat alike, all three of them square-jawed and dark-haired, sporting the sort of conservative haircut made famous by Senator Trent Lott, although presumably their own barber was not in Washington, D.C.

The Trent Lott Cut was a precision-tooled hair style that fit its wearer's head like a carefully stitched toupee. This tailored-rug look was softened somewhat on the trio of agents—Carella guessed one of them was Endicott—because they were each in their thirties and were therefore presumed to be hipper than they actually were, especially since they carried nine-millimeter Glocks and FBI shields. The other two men could only be city detectives. Something in the way they carried themselves, something in their somewhat unpressed look, city detectives for sure. So what Carella had here was three smiling Feebs, two smiling dicks—well, three, when you counted Lieutenant Charles “Corky” Corcoran, standing behind him and presumably smiling as well—and last but not least…

“Detective Carella,” Barney Loomis said, also smiling and stepping away from the other men, his right hand extended. “Glad you could come down.”

Carella took his hand.

One of the FBI agents stepped away from the other blue suits. “I'm Stan Endicott,” he said. “Special Agent in Charge. Welcome aboard.”

Carella had been taught by a sergeant at the Academy never to trust a smiling man with a gun in his hand. He wondered if that same sergeant had ever said anything about a roomful of smiling men in suits, all of whom were packing if the bulges under their jackets were any indication.

“Meet the rest of the team,” Endicott said, and introduced first his lookalike in the blue suit, “Special Agent Brian Forbes,” and then another FBI agent whose name flew by like the Twentieth Century, and then the pair of city dicks, one of them a Detective/First, the other a Detective/Second. Carella thought he recognized one of the names as belonging to a man who'd made spectacular headlines breaking up either a dope ring or a racketeering scheme or something of the sort—but what had Endicott meant by “Welcome aboard?” Or Corcoran by “Welcome to The Squad?”

Everyone was still smiling.

“I brought that stuff you asked for,” Carella said, and walked over to the large conference table in the center of the room and put down his dispatch case. Through the huge windows facing South, he could see across the square to the new red brick Police Headquarters building, ablaze with light even at this hour. He snapped open the latches on the case, lifted the lid, and removed from it first a sheaf of his own and Hawes' typed DD reports…

“Our reports on the crime scene witnesses,” he said.

…and then the reports Meyer and Kling had filed on their visits to the marina and their interview with the marina watchman…

“These are about the boat and the stolen Explorer.”

…and then the report Willis had typed up on his and Parker's visit to Polly Olson.

“Also,” he said, “the report from Mobile was waiting when I got there. I haven't looked at it yet. I can leave it here with the other stuff, if you like.”

“He still doesn't get it,” Corcoran said, smiling.

Carella wondered if his fly was open.

“What?” he said.

“You'll be working with us,” Endicott said.

Carella figured they must be shorthanded. Some detective out sick or on vacation. Supposed to be twelve men on the Joint Task Force, only six of them in the room here, still smiling like drunken sailors.

“We thought Mr. Loomis should be working with someone he liked and trusted.”

“Actually, I asked if that would be possible,” Loomis said, and nodded.

“Will that be okay, Steve?” Endicott asked.

“Well…sure,” Carella said.

“Now you're pissing with the big dogs,” Corcoran said, grinning, and clapped Carella on the back.

Hard.

 

FAT OLLIE WEEKS
was watching a cable television channel whose slogan was “Equal and Equitable,” which they hoped conveyed the promise of commensurate and unbiased reportage on any subject their reporters tackled. Tonight's burning question was “Gay or Fey?” and its subject matter was the Tamar Valparaiso video Bison Records had generously provided.

The moderator was a man named Michael Owens, who was familiarly called “Curly” Owens by his colleagues because he happened to be bald. This reverse spin was something called “irony,” a favorite figure of speech practiced in English-speaking countries where it was thought clever to express a meaning directly contrary to that suggested by the words themselves. Curly was, in fact, the very opposite of hirsute, his condition exacerbated by daily shavings and waxings that gave his head the appearance of an overripe melon.

His two guests tonight were at opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum in that one of them was a minister who represented a Christian Right activist organization that called itself the “Citizens for Values Coalition,” or the CVC, and the other was a homosexual who was speaking for a group that called itself “Priapus Perpetual,” or PP for short.

Ollie didn't choose to waste time watching a fag who called his prick a pee pee debating a priest who was probably a fag himself, but he happened to be eating at the kitchen table right then, and the clicker was on the coffee table in front of the TV set, and he didn't feel like walking into the adjoining room to go switch channels. Besides, he had just watched the clip from the Valparaiso video, and he had to agree that the little lady was splendidly endowed, ah yes, so maybe these two jackasses would have something interesting to say about her obviously fey assets. Ollie supposed the word “fey” had something to do with female pulchritude, otherwise why had it been positioned opposite the word “gay”?

“Well, you've seen the video,” Curly told his guests. “So which is it? Gay or Fey?”

The minister's name was Reverend Karl Brenner. He was a man with a long sallow face and snow white hair, wearing for tonight's show Benjamin Franklin spectacles and a rumpled, dark gray suit with a white collar, the fuckin hypocrite, Ollie thought. Brenner himself thought the words “gay” and “fey” were synonymous; he had no idea what they were supposed to be debating here. If a man was fey, he was, ergo, gay. And the African-American man on the video was obviously both fey
and
gay.

The representative of Priapus Perpetual was named Larry Graham. He knew that the widely accepted meaning of “fey” was “strange or unusual” but he himself had been considered strange or unusual long before he became gay. Dressed tonight in a purple turtleneck sweater over which he had thrown a beige cashmere jacket, he sat looking smug and self-satisfied, the little fag, Ollie thought. Actually, Graham was as bewildered as the reverend was, even though he realized the question wasn't being asked about the black dancer who'd played the Bandersnatch, but rather about Tamar Valparaiso herself, whose father had warned “Beware the Jabberwock, my
son,
” mind you, and had later exulted, “Come to my arms, my beamish
boy,
” don't forget.

As Graham saw it, the question being asked was: Who or what is this person with the exuberant breasts in a torn and tattered costume? A girl or a boy? A daughter or a son? A male or a female? In short, gay or fey? A revealed homosexual or merely a female eccentric, a whimsical adolescent girl, or—dare one even suggest it—a visionary? A Joan of Arc, mayhaps, wielding an invisible vorpal sword?

“What do you say, gentlemen?” Curly asked, and then immediately said, “Ooops, excuse me, Larry,” and then, compounding the felony, said, “But that's what the debate tonight is all about, isn't it?
Is
the person on that tape supposed to be homosexual, like Larry Graham here, who admits it freely? And if so…”

“Of course he is,” Graham said.

“Reverend?”

“Are we talking about the African-American in the mask? If so, he is very
definitely
homosexual.”

“And how do you know
that?
” Graham asked at once.

“Well, the very way he
moves,
” Brenner said.

“He moves like a dancer,” Graham said.

“Fred Astaire didn't move that way. Neither did Gene Kelly.”

“Besides, we're not talking about the
dancer.
The question does not refer to the
dancer.
”

“It certainly doesn't refer to the
girl,
” Brenner said.

“That's exactly the metaphor,” Graham said.

The Reverend Brenner didn't know what metaphor meant, either. He thought it meant simile. If so, was this little homosexual person here implying that the girl being assaulted was somehow a simile for a homosexual?

“I do not see any connection,” he said. “The problem with organizations like yours, Mr. Graham, is that you presuppose everyone in the world is either
already
homosexual or else would like to
become
homosexual. That is the implicit threat to family values, and the entire reason for the existence of groups like CVC…”