“Where on Lewiston? Our man’s leaving town tomorrow.”
The room went silent.
“I want you to treat this like a single case with Danny as the connecting link,” Byrnes said. “One of the guys in that poker game knew Danny, and another one may have killed Hale. Let’s find out who was in the damn game. And find out who that old man really was. He didn’t exist in a vacuum. Nobody does. If he had something somebody wanted, find out what the hell it was. If it was just the insurance policy, then stay with the Keatings till you nail them. I want the four of you who caught the squeals to work this as a team. Split the legwork however you like. But bring me something.”
Carella nodded.
“Meyer?”
“Yeah.”
“Artie? Bert?”
“We hear you.”
“Then do it,” Byrnes said.
“What about my dope bust?” Parker asked.
“Stay,” Byrnes said, as if he were talking to a pit bull.
There were several training exercises at the academy, each designed to illustrate the unreliability of eye witnesses. Each of them involved a variation on the same theme. During a class lecture, someone would come into the room, interrupting the class, and then go out again. The cops-intraining would later be asked to describe the person who’d entered and departed. In one exercise, the intruder was merely someone who went to one of the windows, opened it, and walked out again. In another, it was a woman who came in with a mop and a pail, quickly mopped a small patch of floor, and went out again just as quickly. In a more vivid exercise, a man came in firing a pistol, and then rushed out at once. In none of these exercises was the intruder accurately described afterward.
Brown, Kling, and the police artist interviewed fourteen people that Tuesday morning. Only one of them-Steve Carella-was a trained observer, but even he had difficulty describing the two shooters who’d marched into the pizzeria at ten minutes past nine the day before. Of all the witnesses who’d been there at the time, only two blacks and four whites remembered anything at all about the men. The white witnesses found it hard to say what the black shooter had looked like. If they’d been asked to tell the difference between Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Tyson, there’d have been no problem. Maybe. But when the police artist asked them to choose from representative eyes, noses, mouths, cheeks, chins, and foreheads, all at once all black men looked alike.
Then again, they might have had similar difficulty describing an Asian suspect.
In the long run-like many other decisions in America-the result was premised on race. The blacks had better luck describing the black suspect, and the whites had better luck with the white one. The detectives were less than satisfied with what the artist finally delivered. They felt the composite sketches were well… sketchy at best.
When Carella and Meyer walked in late that Tuesday morning, Fat Ollie Weeks was sitting alone in a booth at the rear of the diner, totally absorbed in his breakfast. Acknowledging their presence with a brief nod, Ollie stabbed a sausage with his fork and hoisted it immediately to his mouth. A ribbon of egg yolk dribbled from the sausage onto Ollie’s tie, where it joined a medley of other crusted and hardened remnants of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners devoured in haste. Ollie always ate as if expecting an imminent famine. He picked up his cup, swallowed a huge gulp of coffee, and then smiled in satisfaction and at last looked across the table at the two visiting cops. He did not offer his hand; cops rarely shook hands with each other, even during social encounters.
“So what brings you up here?” he asked.
“The murder yesterday,” Carella said.
“What murder?” Ollie asked. Here in Zimbabwe West, as he often referred to his beloved Eighty-eighth Precinct, there were murders every day of the week, every minute of the day.
“An informer named Danny Gimp,” Carella said.
“I know him,” Ollie said.
“Two shooters marched into Guide’s Pizzeria while we were having a conversation,” Carella said.
“Maybe they were after you,” Ollie suggested.
“No, I’m universally well-liked,” Carella said. “They were after Danny, and they got him.”
“Where’s Guide’s?”
“Culver and Sixth.”
“That’s your turf, man.”
“Lewiston isn’t.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“A pal of Danny’s was in a poker game a week ago Saturday,” Meyer said. “On Lewiston Avenue.”
“Met a hitter from Houston who later treated him to a little booze, a little pot, some casual sex, and a strip of roofers.”
“Uh-huh,” Ollie said, and signaled to the waitress. “So what’s that got to do with me?”
“Lewiston is up here in the Eight-Eight.”
“So? I’m supposed to know every shitty little card game in the precinct?” Ollie said. “Give me another toasted onion bagel with cream cheese,” he told the waitress. “You guys want anything?”
“Just coffee,” Meyer said.
“The same,” Carella said.
“You got that?” Ollie asked the waitress, who nodded and walked off toward the counter. “You think this card game’s gonna lead you to the shooters?”
