There were a significant number of dark blue wool fibers. They did not match any fibers from the clothing of the two victims.
There were red hairs. And black hairs. And blond hairs.
Some of them were head hairs.
Some of them were genital hairs.
All of them were hairs from white human beings. All of them were male hairs.
Three white males, two dead black dudes, and a dead white hooker, Ollie thought, and farted.
El Castillo de Palacios would have been ungrammatical in Spanish if the Palacios hadn't been a person's name, which in this case it happened to be. Palacio meant "palace" in Spanish, and palacios meant "palaces," and when you had a plural noun, the article and noun were supposed to correspond, unlike English where everything was so sloppily put together, thank God. El Castillo de los Palacios would have been the proper Spanish for "The Castle of the Palaces," but since Francisco Palacios was a person, El Castillo de Palacios was, in fact, correct even though it translated as "Palacios's Castle," a play words however you sliced it, English or Spanish. And worth repeating, by the way, as were many things in this friendly universe the good Lord created.
Francisco Palacios was a good-looking man with clean-living habits, now that he'd served three years upstate on a burglary rap. He owned and operated a pleasant little store that sold medicinal herbs, books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards and the like. His silent partners were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a store behind the other store, and this one offered for sale such medically approved "marital aids" as dildos. French ticklers, open-crotch panties bra gas sin entrepierna), plastic vibrators (eight-inch and in the white, twelve-inch in the black), leather executioner's masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, leather anklets studded with chrome, extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized dolls, condoms every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben-wa balls in plastic and gold plate, and a highly mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Sue-u-lator, in case you missed all this while you were out in the fragrant cloisters reading your vespers.
Selling these things in this city was not illegal; the Gaucho and the Cowboy were breaking no laws. This was not why they ran their store behind the store owned and operated by Francisco. Rather, they did so out of a sense of responsibility to the Puerto Rican community of which they were a part. They did not, for example, want a little old lady in a black shawl to wander into the back store shop and faint dead away at the sight of playing cards featuring men, women, police dogs and midgets in fifty-two marital-aid positions, fifty-four if you counted the jokers. Both the Gaucho and the Cowboy had community pride to match that of Francisco himself. Francisco, the Gaucho, and the Cowboy were, in fact, all one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or even in some quarters a rat.
El Castillo de Palacios was in a ratty quarter of the Eight-Seven known as El Infierno, which, until the recent influx of Jamaicans, Koreans, Haitians, Vietnamese and Martians had been almost exclusively Puerto Rican, or if you preferred "of Spanish origin," which was both clumsy and cumbersome but favored over the completely phony "Latino." On the politically correct highway, both of these categorizing expressions fell far behind the ever-popular (by fifty-eight percent) simple descriptive term "Hispanic." Ten percent of the Hispanics queried didn't care what they were called, so long as it wasn't "spic" or late for dinner.
El Infierno meant guess what? The Inferno. It was.
Palacios was just closing up when they got there at about twenty past midnight after a snowy fifteen-minute ride cross town which under ordinary circumstances would have taken five minutes. Palacios wore his black hair in a high pompadour, the way kids used to wear it back in the fifties. Dark eyes. Matinee-idol teeth. It was rumored in the town that Palacios had three wives, which like the violation the police held dangling over his head against the law. All of which Hawes and Carella and every other cop in the precinct (and every other being in the world) already knew, but so what? Nobo was counting, and nobody was sending anyone to just yet-provided the information was good.
It was.
Symbiosis, Hawes thought.
A nice word and a cozy arrangement.
Hawes sometimes felt the entire world ran on arrangements.
