“That’s up to you,” Byrnes said. “You think it over. Meanwhile, we’re gonna hold you here for a few hours while we assemble some witnesses from the pizzeria. Run a little lineup for them, see if they can recognize you a little better in person than on that tape you were just talking about. The law allows us…”
“That was it, am I right? She spotted me on the tape, that fuckin bitch.”
Kling was staring at the lieutenant.
They had asked Betty Young to trust them.
But the lieutenant had given her up.
“You want whose name went in with me?” Blaine asked. “Is that it?”
It was contagious.
The black man who’d been Blaine’s partner on the pizzeria shivaree was a dark-skinned Colombian named Hector Milagros. They arrested him in a diner at nine that morning, having breakfast alone in a corner booth.
Milagros knew there was no sense trying to force his way out of a situation where his back was to a plate glass window and he was looking at three nines as compared to his singleton thirty-eight. He asked them could he finish his eggs before they got cold. They told him they’d order more eggs for him up at the station house. Casually, he asked, “Wass thees all abou, anyways, muchachos?”
“We’ve been talking to an old friend of yours,” Brown said.
“Old shooting buddy of yours,” Kling said.
“Maxie Blaine,” Carella said. “Remember him?”
“Mierda!” Milagros said, and stabbed his fork into one of the egg yolks. Yellow ran all over his plate.
By the time the network news broke the following day, both Milagros and Blaine had been indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Daniel Nelson.
Expecting they would both be held without bail, Betty Young showed little temerity about revealing herself as the person responsible for their arrest.
Ever on the prowl for promotional opportunities, Restaurant Affiliates arranged for presentation of the $50,000 reward check (blown up to gigantic viewing size) on that evening’s six-thirty network news. It did not hurt that Betty Young was an attractive woman with a dazzling smile and a blameless bust. Winsomely grinning into the camera, she thanked RA, Inc. for the check she would use to buy nursing care for her bedridden mother in Florida and a new Chevy Geo for herself. She then expressed the fervent wish that those two ruthless killers would receive the maximum penalty-otherwise she’d be looking over her shoulder the rest of her life, she did not say to the television audience. Literary agents all over the city wondered if there was a book and subsequent movie in this. School children all over the United States wept sympathetic tears into their beers and went out to buy a nicer pizza, hopeful they’d accidentally stumble into a Guido’s killing of their own and glean a fifty-K reward as a result. Watching the show in bed, eating Chinese food with Sharyn Cooke, Kling wondered aloud if Lieutenant Byrnes had done the right thing.
“Because you know, Shar,” he said, “Pete had no idea Blaine would suddenly open up. No idea at all. He just threw her to the lions, was what he did. After she gave us her trust.”
“She didn’t look so shy accepting that check,” Sharyn said.
He watched her manipulating the chopsticks. She worked them like a pro, clamping them onto morsels of food as if she’d been born in Beijing. He was almost hypnotized.
“What?” she said.
“I like the way you do that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You do it pretty good yourself, Big Boy,” she said.
“I keep dropping rice.”
“Just don’t get it all over the bed.”
“She really does have a bedridden mother in Florida, you know?”
“Reason she needs the Geo,” Sharyn said. “Drive on down there to visit the old lady.”
“Stop for a pizza on the way,” Kling said.
“Fifty thousand bucks is gonna buy a whole lot of pizza,” Sharyn said, and pincered a mushroom and popped it into her mouth. “I never won anything in my life, did you?” she said. “I grew up with my mother playing the numbers every day of the week, most she ever won was five, ten dollars.
I never won a nickel.”
“I won a bicycle once.”
“When?”
“When I was twelve. At a street carnival.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. One of these roulette-wheel kind of things. I still remember the number.”
“What was the number?”
“Seventeen. It was black with white trim.”
“The number?”
“The bike.”
“Just like us,” Sharyn said.
“But you know,” he said, “she didn’t win anything. This was a reward.”
“Right, for ratting on him,” Sharyn said.
“We try to discourage that sort of thinking,” Kling said.
“What sort?” Sharyn said. “And who’s ‘we’?”
“The police. The sort of thinking that equates performing a public duty with ratting on somebody.”
“Gee, is that whut you po-licemens try to do?” she said, and put her plate and chopsticks on the night table on her side of the bed, and finished her cup of tea and then slid over to him and kissed him on the mouth.
She tasted of every black woman he had ever known.
