"There's no civilization anymore," Monoghan said. "Fucking savages nowadays," Monroe said, with more feeling than Carella had ever thought he'd possessed.
In the dim light of a cold grey dawn, the girl's face under the plastic freezer bag was as white as the ice on the alley floor.
They had wrapped her in the sheet before carrying her down to black Richard's car, and then had driven a mile uptown on St. Sab's, where they'd dragged her into the alley still wrapped in it. But black Richard knew cops had ways of tracing sheets and shit, and he'd convinced the others to roll her out of it before they left her there by the garbage cans, rats big as cats running all over the alley, made him shiver all over again just to think of them.
Fuckin honkies wanted no part of him once they'd used his car to drop the bitch off, but he reminded them it wasn't him had suffocated her, wasn't him had torn her open, was three fuckin rich guys named Richard, from a school named Pierce Academy, which was stitched on the front of all their fuckin P parkas the fuckin football on the back, dig? So either they helped him clean up the car and the apartment and get rid of the bloody sheet, or whut he was gonna do, ole black Richard here, would run straight to the cop shop. They believed him. Maybe cause he also showed them a switchblade knife bigger than any of their dicks and tole them he was gonna circumscribe them real bad if they tried to split on him now.
Ended up they'd tidied up the apartment like four speed queens come to work from a cleaning service.
Weren't no car washes open this time of night, day, whatever the fuck, and Richard didn't want to go to no garage, neither, blood all over the backseat that way, he never knew anybody could bleed that bad. He remembered a movie he'd seen one time, blood and shit all over a car from a shootin inside it, this wasn't like that, but there was plenty blood, anyway, and he didn't know any big-shot gangster he could call come set it straight.
All he knew was these honkies better help him or their name was shit.
In movies and on television, blacks and whites all pals and shit, that was all make-believe. In real life you never saw blacks and whites together hardly at all In that movie where the guy's brains were spattered over the car, this black guy and this white guy two contract hitters tighter'n Dick's hatband. But was make-believe, callin each other "nigger" and that, black guy callin the white guy "nigger," guy callin the nigger "nigger" right back, break the fuckin head any white man called Richard "nigger," never mind that movie bullshit! Was a white wrote that movie, the luck he knew about black What was real, my friend, was equality never come to pass here in this land of the free and home the brave, wasn't no black man ever trusted a man and vice versa, never. Richard didn't trust these three white bastards and they didn't trust him, but they needed each other right now cause a girl been killed in his apartment and they were the guy's who killed her. The white guys, not him. But it was his apartment, don't forget that. Cops had a way of never forgettin little black mishaps like that, fuckin cops.
So this was what you might call strange bedfellows here, which was what it actually was called in a book Richard read one time. Oh, he was literate, man, don't kid your fuckin self. Read books, saw movies, even went to see a play downtown one time had all blacks in it about soldiers. His opinion blacks were the best actors in the world cause they knew what sufferin was all about. That movie with the brains all over the car, was the black guy shoulda got the Cademy Award, never mind the white guy.
So here they were, the four of them, three white guys didn't know shit about anything, and one black guy teachin them all about survival here in the big bad city. Thing they didn't know was that soon as they cleaned up his car and got rid of the sheet they'd wrapped the bitch in, he was gonna stick it to them good.
The girl's name was Yolande Marie Marx. Her fingerprints told them that. She had a B-sheet not quite as long as her arm, but long enough for a kid who was only nineteen. Most of the arrests were for prostitution. But there were two for shoplifting and half a dozen for possession, all bullshit violations when she was underage that had got her off with a succession of slaps on the wrist from bleeding-heart judges. When she turned eighteen, she finally did three months at Hopeville, some name for a female correctional facility. She worked under the name Marie St. Claire, which alias was on the record. Her pimp's name was there, too.
The shift had changed without them.
