“Well, I shouldn’t have wanted the woman to die, certainly,” Palmer said. “But I must admit we’re all much better off this way.” And raised his eyebrows again, and widened his eyes, no grin this time, just a look that said Well, don’t you agree? He closed the lid on his suitcase, jiggled the numbers on the combination lock, and dusted his hands in dismissal.
“There,” he said.
“What time do you leave on Sunday?” Brown asked.
“The eight o’clock flight.”
“Then there’s still time.”
“Oh? For what?”
To nail you, Brown thought.
“Catch a matinee,” he said. “Lots of Saturday matinees here.”
“London, too,” Palmer said, almost wistfully.
The person in charge of giving out the keys to the project’s recreation room was an old black man who introduced himself solely as Michael, no last name. People seemed to have no last names these days, Ollie noticed, not that he gave a damn. But it seemed to him a person should be proud of his last name, which was for Chrissake only his heritage. Instead, you got only first names from every jackass in every doctor’s office and bank. And now this keeper of the keys here, telling him his name was Michael, served him right he’d been born a shuffling old darkie.
“I’m looking for a Jamaican got a knife scar down his face, a tattooed star on his pecker, that plays the saxophone,” Ollie said.
The old man burst out laughing.
“It ain’t funny,” Ollie said. “He maybe killed two people.”
“That ain’t funny, all right,” Michael agreed, sobering.
“See him around here? Some lady told me he played his saxophone in here.”
“You mean the guy from London?” Michael asked.
They were all sitting in the squadroom, around Carella’s desk, drinking the coffee Alf Miscolo had brewed in the Clerical Office. Ollie was the only one there who thought the coffee tasted vile. Over the years, the others had come to believe the coffee didn’t taste too bad at all, was in fact the sort of gourmet coffee one might find in little sidewalk cafes in Paris or Seattle.
Ollie almost spit out his first sip.
He was there to tell them what he had learned downtown at Rockfort.
The four detectives listening to him were Carella, Brown, Meyer, and Kling, who’d been dogging various aspects of this case for what seemed forever but was in actuality only since October 29. Ollie felt somewhat like a guest on a talk show. Carella was the host, and the others were earlier guests who’d moved over to make room for Ollie when he’d come on to exuberant whistling and thunderous applause. Brown and Meyer were sitting on chairs they’d pulled over from their own desks. Kling was sitting on one corner of Carella’s desk.
This was a nice cozy little talk show here, with the temperature outside hovering at somewhere between twenty and twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, which came to six or seven below zero Celsius, more or less, good to be inside on a night like tonight. The clock on the squadroom wall read a quarter past five, or 1715, depending on your point of view. Ollie had called from downtown right after he’d spoken to Mr Michael and then again to the lady who’d offered him another banana, asking Carella to wait for him, he’d be right there. That had been at ten to four. The snow had delayed Ollie, what can you do, an act of God, he explained. It was still snowing, the flying flakes spattering against the squadroom windows like ghosts desperately seeking entrance.
“The way I understood it,” Ollie said, “Bridges was there with his cousin for a week or so at the beginning of November. Rec room guy remembers him coming in to practice his saxophone. I figure this was after he done the Hale murder and before he flew back home.”
“The rec room guy told you all this?”
“Not about the murder, that’s my surmise. He didn’t know anything about that.”
“Then what?”
“The cousin, the sax, him flying back home.”
“Did you talk to the cousin?”
“Knocked on the door, no answer. But I figured this was important enough to get moving on it right away. Which is why I’m here.”
“Who told you the sax player’s name was John Bridges?”
“The rec room guy.”
“And told you he’d flown back home to Houston?”
“Yes and no,” Ollie said, and grinned.
“Let us guess, okay?”
“He did not fly home to Houston, Texas.”
“Then where did he go?”
“Euston, England. Sounds the same, ah yes, but it’s spelled different.
E-U-S-T-O-N. That’s a locality, is what they call it in London. I went back to my lady who cooks fried bananas…”
“Huh?” Carella said.
“A lady in the project, her name is Sarah Crawford, she cooks great fried bananas.”
Ollie felt he now had their complete attention.
“She’s Jamaican, she told me all about Euston and also King’s Cross -which is a nearby ward, is what they call it in London-where there are lots of hookers, drug dealers, and train stations. She didn’t know Bridges personally, but his cousin told her he lived in Euston. So that’s it, ah yes,”
Ollie said. “You know anybody else from London?”
