"Last Sunday night."
"Almost a week ago."
"Almost."
"What does that make it, Charlie?"
Bent took a little celluloid bank calendar from his notebook.
"The twenty-second," he said.
Five days after Carella's father got killed.
"So they came up to you …"
"Yeah, and they told me they kind of liked my looks," she said, and shrugged modestly, "and would I be interested in a three-way. So I told them I usually get more for a three-way, and they asked me how much, and I told them a nun' fifty and they said that sounded okay, and we went to this little hot-bed place the girls use, it's near that big hall on Casper, where they cater weddings and things? Right next door to it? So that's how it started," she said, and shrugged again.
"How'd you end up in an abandoned building on Sloane?"
"Well, it turns out these guys were loaded …"
There'd been twelve hundred dollars in Tony Carella's cash register.
"… and they liked crack as much as I do. Well, I mean, who don't? I had my way, I'd marry crack. So we had a nice little arrangement, you know what I mean? I'd do whatever they wanted me to do, and they supplied me with crack."
A simple business arrangement. Basic barter. A usual arrangement at that. Sex for dope. And because everyone was stoned or about to get stoned, it was rarely if ever safe sex. When crack's on the scene, nobody's worrying about a rubber. Which is why you had a lot of crack addicts getting pregnant. Which is why you had a lot of tormented crack babies crying for cocaine. What goes around comes around.
"I don't know where they got all that money …" she said.
Killed a man for it, Wade thought.
". . . but listen, who cares?"
Twelve hundred dollars, he thought.
"I do you, you do me, one hand washes the other, am I right? No questions asked, just beam me up, Scottie."
Just beam you up, he thought.
"How'd you end up on Sloane Street?" he asked.
"I think they were on the run."
"What do you mean?"
"I think they done a job that night. They called me up, told me they didn't want to come home. They were afraid …"
"Which is where?"
"So we like went to this crack house, you know, but the guy on the door looks at us through the peephole, he says 'How the fuck / know who you are?' Like we're cops, right?" she said sarcastically. "I been hookin' since I was thirteen, I suddenly look like I'm undercover, right? Sonny and Diz, too, you ain't gonna mistake either one of them for nothing but an ex-con. So the guy at the door gives us all this bullshit and we're forced to score on the street. Which is no big deal, I mean I do it all the time, you can buy crack on any street corner, look who I'm tellin'. But it would've been easier we could've smoked there in private without having to find a place to go. 'Cause we couldn't go back to the pad, you know. 'Cause Sonny and Diz thought the cops would come lookin' for them there."
"And where's that?" Bent asked.
"So that's how we ended up on Sloane, in that building, Jesus, what a place! Rats the size of alligators, I swear to God. So that was you guys, huh?"
"Yeah, that was us," Wade said.
"Scared the shit out of us," Dolly said, and giggled the way she had that night. "We went down the fire escape."
"We figured."
"I almost broke my neck."
"Where're Sonny and Diz now?"
"I already told you everything I know about them."
"Except where they are."
"I don't know where they are."
"You said you were living together …"
"But not no more."
"You said you had a pad …"
"Yeah, that was then."
"Dolly . . ." Wade said warningly.
"I mean it," she said. "I don't know."
"Okay," he said, "let's go up the station house, okay?"
"No, wait a minute," she said. "Please."
The Q amp;A took place in Lieutenant Byrnes's office at twenty minutes to ten that night. That was how long it took everyone to assemble. Nellie Brand had to come all the way uptown from her apartment on Everetts. The police stenographer with his video camera had to come all the way uptown, too, from the Headquarters Building on High Street. Pauline Weed's attorney, a man named Henry Kahn, had to come all the way crosstown from his office on Stockton. Brown, Carella, and Byrnes were the only ones who'd just had to walk down the hall from the squadroom to the Interrogation Room.
