That Wednesday night, all five networks featured stories about Danny Gimp, the black and white shooters, and the similarly hued pair of detectives -Brown and Kling-who had responded to the call. The talking heads on the cable channels, babbling away on shows joining in their titles the words “pizza,” “shootout,” “terror,” “confrontation,” and “ambush” in various unimaginative combinations, endlessly debated whether a police informer was truly a “rat” as the term was commonly understood, why illegal guns seemed to proliferate at such an alarming rate in American cities, and whether it was politic or merely politics to have a black-and-white detective team investigating a case involving a black and a white shooter.
Thursday came and Thursday went.
So did Friday and Saturday.
And Sunday.
And all at once it was a new week.
In days of yore, the police department used to run a lineup every Monday to Thursday morning. Detectives from squads all over the city would gather in the gymnasium at headquarters downtown, where the Chief of Detectives paraded any felony offender arrested the night before. This was done solely to acquaint the people in law enforcement with the people doing mischief in their town, the premise being that the bad guys would continue being bad all their lives and it was a good thing to be able to recognize them on the street.
Nowadays, lineups were held only for purposes of identification, the suspected perp standing on a lighted stage with five innocent people, two of whom were usually squadroom detectives, the victim sitting behind a oneway mirror hoping to pick out a winner. But there was also another type of lineup, and it took place on television news programs whenever the tapes from hidden surveillance cameras were shown. On the five o’clock news that Monday night, the surveillance tapes from the pizzeria cameras were run for the first time, revealing in all their glory the two bold gunmen who had sprinted into the place and sprayed it with bullets. Danny Nelson’s assailants were identifiable chiefly by race, but otherwise blurry to anyone who didn’t really know them. In any event, no one came forward.
In a brilliant public-relations move, however, Restaurant Affiliates, Inc.-the company that owned the Guide’s Pizzeria chain-now posted a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the capture and conviction of the two gunmen who’d shot up their fine establishment on Culver Avenue.
That RA, Inc. seemed more interested in the damage done to their place of business than to the untimely demise of Danny Nelson went unnoticed by television viewers and newspaper readers alike. Informers were admittedly the scum of the earth, the campaign suggested, but public places should not be submitted to wanton violence. Linking pizza to after-school sports and public prayer, the TV commercials and newspaper ads called for swift apprehension of the culprits and stricter gun control everywhere in this wild and woolly nation. In conjunction with the police, an 800 line was set up and strict confidence was guaranteed any caller. A newspaper columnist wryly commented that Charlton Heston had stopped eating pizza in favor of a Japanese dish called Shogun Sushi, a weak pun on “shotgun,” but this was the afternoon paper. The column caused no end of amusement among the executive types up at RA, Inc.
Still no one came forward.
In a bit more than three weeks’ time, the Danny Gimp case passed from intense media scrutiny to total oblivion.
Thanksgiving Day seemed almost an afterthought.
He had drank too much, and had argued with his uncle Dominick too loudly about whichever war was current wherever in the world. His uncle’s attitude was always and ever “Let’s bomb the shit out of them!” Carella had heard these words from him ever since he was old enough to understand, and his mother had always warned, “Dom, the children,” but that hadn’t stopped Uncle Dominick who looked like an enforcer for the mob, and who-for all Carella knew, but never asked-might very well have been one in his younger days.
They had got back home to Riverhead at about nine that night and the twins had reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that there was no school tomorrow, so they’d allowed them to stay up for a Thanksgiving special on NBC. Carella was still grumbling about his thick-headed uncle and Teddy was signing that maybe he should take a nice hot shower before he went to bed because tomorrow was another day, and he wasn’t off from school, and there would always be another war to fight in this sorry world of ours and more people out of whom to bomb the S-H-I-T, which word she spelled out letter by letter with her fingers lest Carella miss the point that he was beginning to annoy her. He came out of the shower looking wet and contrite and in need of a haircut, which she hadn’t noticed before.
