“Eat it!” Bop said.
“Man, what you…?”
Bop swung the muzzle sideways across Milagros’s mouth. There was the sound of something snapping. There was a spray of blood. Teeth clicked loose and spilled onto the air.
“Jesus Chri…”
“Shhh,” Bingo said.
“Eat it,” Bop said again, and slid the barrel of the gun into Milagros’s mouth.
“Quiet now,” Bingo said.
Milagros began to blubber. His eyes were wide. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth, around the barrel of the nine.
“Who sent you to kill him?”
Milagros shook his head.
“No, huh?” Bop said, and cocked the pistol. “Who?” he insisted.
Milagros shook his head again.
“You ought to go see your dentist again,” Bingo said, and nodded.
Bop swung the gun against Milagros’s mouth.
He almost choked on his own teeth.
The jailer didn’t see what had happened to Milagros until he made his rounds at midnight. Long before then, he had clicked open Milagros’s cell from his end of the corridor and had watched the two detectives approaching the steel door with its bulletproof viewing window, and had let them out into the small holding room, and then out of the complex itself. Now, as he came down the corridor, the old man in the cell next to Milagros’s was sitting upright on his cot, his eyes wide, but saying nothing. The jailer knew right away something was very wrong.
Milagros was lying on the floor of his cell.
There was blood on the floor, and scattered teeth, and what looked and smelled like vomit. There was also another smell because Milagros had soiled himself while the two detectives were methodically knocking every tooth out of his mouth, but the jailer didn’t yet know the full extent of what had happened here, he saw only the blood and a handful of teeth in the spill of light from the after-hours illumination in the corridor.
The jailer had read enough newspapers in the past few months.
He didn’t even go into Milagros’s cell. He went back down the corridor, past the cell of the old man with the wide accusative eyes, and he unlocked the steel door at the far end, and locked it again behind him, and walked directly to the wall phone by the officers’ station, and called his immediate superior, the Security Division captain on duty.
The jailer’s story was that two detectives had come into the lockup showing a piece of paper authorizing them to question Hector Milagros. He couldn’t remember their names. He’d asked them to sign in, and he assumed they both had; he hadn’t looked at the log book afterward. He told the captain they’d been in the prisoner’s cell for about half an hour, and that he hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary during that time. Then again, there was a thick steel door at the end of the corridor. He said he couldn’t remember having seen either of the detectives down here before, nor could he remember what either of them looked like, except that one had a mustache.
The duty captain figured the man was covering his own ass.
He read newspapers, too.
Lest anyone later accuse him of having delayed while a story was being concocted, he called an ambulance at once, and had the prisoner expressed to nearby St Mary’s, the same hospital Sharyn Cooke had moved Willis from not four nights earlier. Then he telephoned the deputy warden of Security Division, who listened to the story from his bed at home, alternately expressing surprise and grave concern. The deputy warden in turn woke up the warden, who was commanding officer of the entire facility. The warden debated waking up the supervisor of the Department of Corrections, but finally called him at home. The Police Commissioner himself was awakened at close to three in the morning. It was he who informed the media at once, before anyone began thinking a cover-up was taking place here.
Gabriel Foster didn’t hear the news until he turned on his television set the next morning.
That same morning, Carella first called Cynthia Keating’s attorney to tell him he hoped he didn’t have to yank her before a grand jury to get a few simple questions answered, and when Alexander started getting snotty on the phone, Carella said, “Counselor, I haven’t got any more time to waste on this. Yes or no?”
“What questions?” Alexander asked.
“Questions pertaining to the rights she inherited from her father.”
“In my office,” Alexander said. “Ten o’clock.”
They got there at five minutes to.
Alexander was wearing chocolate-brown corduroy trousers, tan loafers, a beige button-down shirt, a green tie, and a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He looked like a country gentleman expecting the local pastor for tea. Cynthia was wearing a pastel-blue cashmere turtleneck over a short miniskirt, navy blue pantyhose, and high-heeled navy patent pumps.
