On the morning after the killings, Donald Walker awakened in a reversal of the usual order of things—from a rather pleasant dream into a living nightmare. In the dream he had actually gone to a job interview instead of to a robbery. A nice man had shaken his hand and told him he was exactly the kind of fellow the firm had been looking for. He would have a big office and sit behind a desk and wear a sharp suit and talk on the telephone and have lunch at fancy restaurants. In the dream he was just telling his wife about the job and receiving her praises, when the cockroach walked across his face.
He sat up with a stifled scream, clawing at his face with both hands. Junkies often have the experience of cockroaches crawling over their skin and often—at a particular stage of withdrawal—it is difficult to determine which are real and which are not. Walker leaped off the bed. He had fallen, fully dressed, into a drunken stupor the night before. He yanked off one sneaker and held it high, then pulled the grayish sheets and tatty chenille coverlet off the bed and shook them. No target appeared. Then he felt the tiny legs crawling down the back of his neck. Cursing, he began swatting at his back with the sneaker but the maddening tickle continued. Now it started on his legs. He was crawling with them. He dropped the sneaker, tore off his pants, and fell to the floor on his back, swatting at his legs and writhing, soaked with foul sweat, until he resembled a dying roach himself.
The violent motion was too much for his stomach. It had taken half the quart of Scotch to knock him out last night, and a sour bile now rose into his throat. He staggered to the washbasin and vomited. Now the chills started. He wrapped himself in the sheets, bedspread, and thin blanket, and shivered. He was entering deep withdrawal, freezing and burning at the same time, itching, sniveling, bowels frozen. Yet the physical agony was nothing compared to what was going on in Donald Walker’s mind. It was reality, seen for the first time in many months without the intervention of heroin. Such a view is grim enough for the upright citizen, which is why they sell beer, Valium, and Gothic romances. But the reality that junkies make for themselves is unspeakable.
Donald Walker, now. He was going to lose his house. His wife would probably kick him out when she found out about his habit. He’d told somebody at the plant—he didn’t remember who—he would take his shift, because the guy took his last week when Walker was too stoned to work, but no way was he going to work today, and maybe have to take Monday off too. Oh shit, he promised Emma he would take the boy for asthma shots today, but the doctor probably wouldn’t see him. Walker had been taking the money Ella gave him for the doctor, money she got from her mother, and giving about half, well maybe a little more than half, to Paradise for smack. He had just helped a crazy man rob a store and probably kill somebody. The crazy man was going to kill him, his wife, and his kids if Walker didn’t do exactly what he said, which was stay put in this shitty little room crawling with roaches and stinking of vomit, whisky, and Walker’s desperate fear.
On the other hand, every cloud has a silver lining. Stack had money and dope for him. Junkies may have lots of problems, but junk cures them all. This thought struck Walker with the force of revelation. He leaped to his feet, splashed water on his face, dressed, and stumbled down three flights of stairs to the peeling cave that served the Olympia Hotel as a lobby. There was a pay phone against one wall. Walker fumbled a quarter in the slot. A dial tone! Maybe his luck was changing. He dialed the number written on the scrap of paper Stack had given him last night.
A woman’s voice answered. “Is Stack there?” he asked.
“Stack? There ain’t no …” Her voice cut off, and after a few seconds of silence, Walker heard Stack’s whispery voice.
“This is Stack. Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Stack, Donald. Stack, when you gonna get here? I need some help, man.”
“Yeah, well Donald, help is on the way.”
“No, I’m really sick, man. You gotta help me, like you said. I gotta get out of this shit hole …”
“Don’t you go nowhere, boy! You go back to your room, have a little drink. I’ll get something ’round to you before you know it. Just stay put, hear? Now, Donald, what room you in?”
“Uh, Ten. You gonna be here soon? Stack, they got roaches here, I can’t stand it much more, you got to come soon… . I need some help, Stack …”
The voice in Louis’s ear degenerated into an inarticulate whine. He broke the connection and dialed a number.
“Elvis? Listen here. It’s going down, now. Get over to my place, we gonna make a delivery. OK, man, see you soon.”
This business accomplished, Man Louis hung up the phone and resumed what he had been doing before Walker called. He lay back on his king-sized waterbed, naked. “Girl, get busy,” he said. The woman on the bed, also naked, obediently lowered her mouth to his groin. Louis’s sexual activities were ordinarily restricted to the periods immediately following his robberies. At such times he would call up this particular woman, DeVonne Carter, who would come to his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, remove her clothes and put herself at his disposal for from three days to a week. She was a big woman, with the hard rounded body of a nineteenth-century fountain statue, and she felt she had found a good deal. Louis paid her rent and gave her spending money, in return for which she had to come when called, leave when bidden, keep her body clean and free of venereal disease, and her mouth shut. Louis’s tastes were odd, but bearable; at least they didn’t draw blood. Remaining silent was something of a burden, since she was a naturally friendly and gregarious person, but this too could be borne. She was used to men making the rules.
DeVonne had scarcely finished her latest service when the door buzzer sounded. Louis rolled away from her, got off the bed, put on a terry cloth bathrobe, and strode through the living room to his front door. He peered through the fish-eye lens set in the door and observed Elvis’s distorted image. He opened the door, admitted his accomplice, and then relocked it elaborately, two dead bolts and a police lock.
Elvis glanced around the living room with pleasure. It had deep white shag rugs, pale leather couches facing across a wood and glass coffee table. Big color TV, big stereo. The most fascinating thing about the room, however, was the bookcase, which covered the entire wall facing the windows. Elvis had never seen so many books in a private residence; there were hundreds of them, neatly racked and arranged by subject and author. The first time he had visited the apartment he blurted out, “Shee-it, man! You read all them books?”
To which Louis had replied with a superior smile, “Yeah, I read them. Some of ’em twice.”
Louis was at the bookcase now, taking down a hardbound copy of The Shame of Our Prisons. He carried it over to the coffee table and sat down on one of the couches, motioning Elvis to take a seat opposite him. Louis opened the book, to reveal a cut-out section in its center. In the cutout was a plastic bag, a package of glassine envelopes of the type used by stamp dealers, and a pair of surgical gloves. Louis pulled on the gloves and unrolled the plastic bag. He tapped a tea-spoonful of white powder into one of the glassine envelopes.
“What’s all this, Man?”
“It’s headache powder, what you think?” Louis held the envelope up to the light and tapped it so that the powder fell into a corner and then folded it into quarters. “This is gonna get rid of our little headache. Come on, I’ll get the rest of the stuff.”
Louis went into the bedroom. He left the door open for a moment and Elvis caught a glimpse of a chocolate-brown woman sitting naked on the bed. She caught him staring and flashed a broad and antic grin over Louis’s shoulder as he reemerged. He was carrying the attaché case. Opening it on the coffee table, with the rubber gloves still on, he removed the bank cash bag he had taken from the liquor store. He took out all the cash except a dozen miscellaneous small bills and put in the packet of white powder. He placed the bank bag inside a paper bag and handed it to Elvis.
He said, “Take this down to that hotel where that Snowball’s stayin’ and give it to him. Olympia Hotel, Room Ten. He won’t ask no questions when he see that bag o’ shit. Make sure he shoot up, then get out of there and go back to your own place. And don’t touch nothin’, especially not the damn cash bag. Let him take it, and then take the paper bag with you.”
“What, you put some rat poison in the shit?”
Louis grinned. “No baby, there’s nothing in that bag but shit. Pure shit, that’s all it is. No quinine, no milk sugar, no nothin’. He shoot up what he usually do, figures maybe it be bumped six, seven, ten times—but this ain’t been bumped at all. Cost me a fuckin’ load but it’s worth it, you dig? That boy go out like a light. The cops find him, coupla days, maybe a week, all swole up with the needle still in his arm, what they gonna think? Hey, what the goddam medical examiner gonna think? Heroin overdose, open and shut.”
Elvis was slow, but he could follow this. “And he got the bag from the store on him, so they gonna think …”
Louis’s grin widened. “You got it, Pres. You caught on, good for you. Now look, here’s the most important thing. He got a little piece of paper with my phone number on it. Get that from him before you give him the bag. Before, dig? Don’t worry, he give you the key to his momma to get his hands on what you holdin’. OK, take off. I don’t want him jumpin’ out no windows or goin’ nowhere.” He reached into the attaché case again and brought out a roll of cash. “Oh yeah, here’s your share of the job.” He counted off five hundred dollars.
Elvis had never had five hundred dollars in his life. It took all the cool he could muster not to giggle like a schoolboy. He pocketed the loot without a word, gave Louis what he imagined was a gangsterish sort of nod, took the bag, and left the apartment. As he left, he thought of what he had seen in Louis’s bedroom. Fine set of jugs on that girl, he thought. Got to get me one, get some kinda fine setup to put her in. That Louis, now he some kinda dude, he thought. So he strolled toward the subway, money in his jeans, the future bright before him, on his way to commit his very first murder, innocent as a clam.
It took Elvis nearly two hours to get to Tenth Avenue and 23rd Street. He ran into some guys he knew from the street on the way to 137th Street IRT station, and had to jive with them awhile. Then they walked up the avenue a little way, scoping out the girls, and then went into a hat store and tried on some hats. Elvis finally bought a Borsalino for sixty dollars, got to flash his roll, show some class. Sincere, but not efficient, was Elvis.
Two hours was too much for Donald Walker, though. Two minutes was too much, if it came to that. The insides of his veins were twitching like poison ivy. He knew he was going to die. Lying on the tangled sheets, looking at the spotted ceiling, his mind lost all comprehension of time; he was a hungry infant at 3:00 A.M. He might have been in that room for a week or a month. Like an infant, he now thought of his mother. Once again, he made his wracked body leave the foul room and move down to the pay phone in the lobby. He dialed his mother’s number; no answer. He was abandoned. He snuffled back his runny nose as tears of frustration ran down his face and bathed the mouthpiece of the telephone.
No mother. Poor Donald! Then he thought of his wife. Same difference. He dialed again, the number of the real estate office in Jackson Heights where his wife worked as a secretary-receptionist. Contact.
“Hello?”
“Ella,” he croaked, “Ella, I …”
“Hello? Donald, is that you? Is something wrong?”
“Ella, I need … I’m sick, baby.”
“Oh no! What’s wrong? Are you in Stamford? Where’s Billy?”
After a chilling silence, the croaking voice resumed.
“Ella, I didn’t go to Stamford. Shit, Ella, I’m in big trouble, I need help!”
“Trouble? What are you talking about, Donald? What kind of trouble? What did you do?”
“Can’t tell you, baby, he kill me. I need … I need some, uh, money.”
“What? Who’s going to kill you? Oh, Donald, Jesus, you didn’t do anything stupid, did you?”
“Ella, don’t ask no questions, just get over here with some money.”
“Money! Donald, you come home this minute, you hear! I want to know what you’ve been doing. I can’t believe this …”
“I can’t, dammit! He gonna kill me. I’m sick, godammit to hell!”
Here he gave a groan of such mortal agony that even over the wires his wife realized that whatever her husband had gotten into was outside the zone of ordinary domestic troubles.
“OK, Donnie, be calm, honey. What do you want me to do?”
“Bring some money, anything, and some clothes. I’m at the Olympia Hotel on Tenth Avenue. Room Ten. And hurry, Ella, huh?” The line went dead. After that, Ella Walker went to the ladies’ room, sat in a booth, and cried for a while. Then she washed her face and returned to her desk. As she had learned to do from earliest childhood, she now turned to her family in time of trouble. With trembling hand she punched out the number of the Midtown South Precinct and asked to speak with her brother, Detective Second Class Emerson Dunbar, Homicide.
When his sister called, Sonny Dunbar was walking down Eighth Avenue in the lower Forties, with the beginnings of a nasty headache, doing his job, but not liking it very much. His job at that moment was looking for a skell named Dingleberry, who, according to a snitch named Rufus, had been seen lately in the company of a prostitute named Booey Starr, or (if you were her mother), Francine Williams, now deceased. Since Booey had probably not hit herself in the head with a claw hammer twenty or so times, her death had been duly judged a homicide and added to the 153 open cases that were Dunbar’s particular responsibility.
Dunbar had been a New York cop for fifteen years, a detective for ten. Before that he had jumped out of some airplanes for the U.S. Army and before that he had gone to high school in Queens, about two miles from where he now lived, in St. Albans. His high-school career had been undistinguished, except on the football field, where he turned out to be very good at stopping other players from catching footballs, or if they did catch them, stopping them from running very far. He was an All-State safety on two teams, got the usual offers from faraway schools and turned them all down.
This was remarkable, but Sonny Dunbar had always taken the long view. He hated classrooms, and knew he wasn’t good enough for a sure slot in the pros. He didn’t care to be another Big Ten black jock with a meaningless B.A. in phys ed. So he enlisted, spent three years with the airborne as an MP, figured he was tough enough for anything after that, and joined the cops.
He had put on about ten pounds in the years since, which hardly showed on his wide-shouldered, six-two, two-hundred-pound frame. He didn’t like the way some cops let themselves get sloppy, and he had a reputation on the squad as something of a dude, not as splendid, perhaps, as the members of the special narcotics squads, but his wardrobe came out of his own pocket. It helped that his wife was an executive with a restaurant chain.
Today he was wearing a cream-linen jacket, tan slacks, lemon-yellow shirt, and a dark-blue silk tie. He had cordovan tassel loafers (no gumshoes for him) on his feet and a cream fedora on his head. And sunglasses; Sonny Dunbar was definitely Broadway. He had left his car at a cab stand on 43rd and was cutting across Eighth to a drug store for an Alka-Seltzer. Moving fast, he was just about to enter its doorway when the thought hit him that he had a roll of film in the car that he had promised to bring in for developing two days ago. Almost without any conscious effort, he hit the pivot and began moving in the opposite direction, and a kid in sneakers carrying a large leather handbag crashed into him at full speed.
Dunbar staggered, but the kid went sprawling and banged his head on a parking meter. Dunbar was about to apologize and help the kid to his feet, when he noticed the big handbag. Although many young men in that area of New York carried handbags, this particular young man did not look like that kind of young man. He was wearing a dirty brown jacket, jeans, and the expensive athletic footwear that street cops call “perp shoes.”
Dunbar’s impression that the kid was a Times Square bandit was soon confirmed by a distraught woman, blonde, and well dressed in an arty way, who came dashing unsteadily up the street in heeled boots. “There he is! He took my bag,” she shouted. “Somebody get a cop! Oh, thank God!” She addressed this last remark not to heaven but to her handbag, which she clutched to her breast like a lost child. “Thank God! My entire LIFE is in this bag.” She noticed Dunbar, who was staring glumly at the fallen robber. “Say, mister, did you catch him? Listen, can you hold onto him while I go and call the cops?”
Dunbar thought, just my luck, a solid citizen. He said, “Well, Miss, that won’t be necessary. I happen to be a police officer.” He pulled out his gold shield and showed it to her.
The woman laughed. “Unbelievable!”
“Yeah, ain’t it, though,” answered Dunbar, with very little enthusiasm. He wrote down the woman’s name and address and then hauled the young robber to his feet. The kid tried to shake off Dunbar’s grip.
“Hey, man, wha chu doin’? I din do nothin’.” Dunbar pushed him against a wall, back cuffed him in one smooth motion, and then patted him down, extracting a large sheath knife from his jacket pocket.
“Right, mutt, you din do nothin’, but I’m going to arrest you for purse snatching anyway. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, after the perp had been booked and caged at the Midtown South Precinct, Dunbar was rummaging through his desk for a package of Alka-Seltzer, when Petromani, the desk sergeant, came into the squad room. “Sonny, call your sister Ella. What’re you looking for?”
“Alka-Seltzer. My head’s coming off. You got any?”
“I got aspirin and Tylenol. I got Empirin and I think I got something for menstrual cramps. Listen, you should call your sister, she sounded really uptight.”
“Yeah, the toilet probably won’t flush. My brother-in-law is not what you call a take-charge individual, so she still calls me when something goes wrong.” He reached for the phone.
Petromani said, “I heard the story on that collar you made. It’s great the way you detectives track down criminals by putting together all these tiny clues …”
Dunbar grinned. “Aww, it was just perseverance, solid old-fashioned police work, and fucking bad luck. I’m going to waste half tonight in the complaint room.” Petromani waved and left. Dunbar dialed his sister’s office. The phone rang just once and his sister’s voice said, “Barnes and Franklin, good morning.”
“It’s Sonny. What’s up, girl?”
“Oh, Sonny, thank God! I’m worried out of my head.”
“What is it, the kids?”
“No, they’re fine. It’s Donnie. I got the scariest phone call from him. He says he’s in this hotel, and he’s sick, and he told me to bring him money and clothes. Sonny, I never heard him sound like that before.”
“Was he drunk? Did you tell him to come home?”
“That’s the first thing I told him. But he said somebody was going to kill him if he left the hotel. I didn’t know what to do.” She started to cry.
“OK, calm down, sugar. It’s probably nothing much. Maybe he got fired and wants to soften you up. You know how Donnie is.” Dunbar had little respect for his brother-in-law, but he was grateful to him for paying attention to the youngest and least attractive of the four Dunbar sisters, marrying her, and giving her the home and children she had always wanted. He sort of liked the little jerk in spite of himself. Donnie was a baby, but he could be funny and charming, in his way.
Ella blew her nose and said, “No, he sounded bad, Sonny. I hate to bother you and all, but could you go over and see him?”
“Sure, fine. Where’s he at?”
“It’s the Olympia Hotel, Room Ten. It’s on …”
“I know where it is. Listen, don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it. And I’ll call you when I find out what’s going on. OK? Good. So long, baby.”
Dunbar hung up and ran his hand over his face. If Donnie was holed up in a skell joint and shooting gallery like the Olympia, something might be very wrong indeed. He rose and left the precinct, first stopping off to hit up Petromani for three Tylenols.
The lobby of the Olympia Hotel smelled exactly like those pink cakes of disinfectant they clip into urinals in gas station toilets, but stronger. It was furnished with two patched orange plastic lounges and a kidney-shaped gold Formica coffee table. Nobody was lounging over coffee though. The desk clerk was sacked out in the space behind his little barred window.
Room 10 was on the second floor. Dunbar knocked on the door, which was immediately flung open. The detective had some difficulty in recognizing the rattled creature in the doorway as his brother-in-law; but Donald recognized the cop. He cried out “No!” and attempted to slam the door in Dunbar’s face, but the bigger man blocked it with his shoulder and easily pushed his way into the room.
“Donnie, cut that out! What the hell is going on here? Ella’s worried sick.”
But Dunbar knew what was going on. He had been in innumerable little stinking rooms like this. Donald was crumpled on the bed, moaning. Dunbar sat down beside him, grabbed Donald’s wrist and looked at the inside of his arm. “How long you been shooting dope, Donald?”
“She shouldna called you. I tol her …”
“Answer me!”
Donald raised his head. “Not long, not long. I swear it, Sonny. I ain’t hooked, I just pop some now and again, I swear …”
“Shit you ain’t hooked. You a smackhead, boy. You were, I mean, cause starting now you are off. Now get up and wash that snot off your face. I’m taking you home. We’ll figure out something to tell Ella.” Dunbar got off the bed.
Donald shrank away. “No! I can’t, he kill me for sure. He said he gonna kill the kids, he …”
“What’re you talking about? Who said?”
“Nobody! Nothin’ … I can’t tell you.”
Dunbar reached down and grabbed Donald by the front of his T-shirt, pulling his face close to his own. Donald’s breath was fetid. “Goddamit! Don’t give me that shit! Who’s gonna kill you? What you been up to, huh? Talk!” He threw Walker back on the bed like a rag doll, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
Slowly, in disconnected sentences, the story emerged, helped by sharp questions from Dunbar. “Alright, you drive these two guys to the supermarket. Then what?”
“Well … I was late, and the supermarket guy was gone, so I thought, that’s it, we can go home. But then Stack, he sees this liquor store, an he makes me park, then he takes his case an… .”
“Wait! Where was this liquor store?” Dunbar had a sickening feeling that he knew what the answer would be.
“I dunno, Madison, I think, around Fiftieth.”
“Madison, between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“Oh, Donnie, you dumb asshole! Do you know your friend wasted two people in that store? Blew one guy’s head off with a shotgun and killed a seventeen-year-old kid.”
“I din do nothin’! I swear, Jesus, I never even touched the gun. Sonny, as God is my secret judge, all I done was drive the car.”
“Donnie, let me explain something. The law don’t care about that. The law says that if a murder is committed in the course of a crime, everybody involved in the crime can be charged with murder, just the same as whoever did the killing itself. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Sonny, hey, that ain’t right! I tol you I din do nothin’.”
“Yeah, baby, but that’s the way it is. Now look, Donnie, we’re in a bad situation here. You just told me about being hooked up in a crime. I’m a cop, right? That means I got to do something …”
“You gonna arrest me!”
“No, but I got to get you to somebody who is gonna arrest you. It’s hard to explain, but my ass’ll be in sling, if you don’t do what I say.”
“Your ass! What about me? Shit, I thought you was gonna help me get away.”
“Oh, shit, Donnie! Think for once! I can’t cover up two fucking murders. I’m a goddamn homicide detective. Somebody else catches you, and they will, Donnie, and this comes out, and it will, I’m out of a job. Then who’s gonna watch out for you and Ella and the kids, with you in jail? Tell me that!”
Donald was silent at this. Then he let out a long shuddering sigh and got unsteadily to his feet. In a dull, small voice he said, “OK, Sonny, tell me what you want me to do.”
“First, get yourself cleaned up. Then I’ll take you up to Midtown South. You walk in and tell the desk you want to talk to Detective Slocum. Tell him everything you told me, and whatever else he wants to know. He’s a good guy. I’ll take care of Ella and getting you a lawyer.”
“Will I go to jail?”
“Well, for a while. But we can probably swing bail.”
“No. I don’t want to be out.” He looked straight at Dunbar with red-rimmed eyes. “I’m scared, Sonny. That man scares the livin’ shit out of me. I better stay in jail.”
Elvis missed them by about ten minutes. He strolled into the lobby with his new Borsalino cocked over one eye and went directly to Room 10. He knocked a couple of times, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a piece of celluloid that had come, conveniently, with his new hat. Look like old Snowball went out for a while, he thought. This was definitely the right room, though. He recognized the bottle of Scotch that Louis had given Walker. He was not inclined to wait around in the smelly room for Walker’s return, however, and so he left the cash bag on the little shelf above the sink. He was about to close the door, when he remembered Louis’s lecture on fingerprints. OK, he had the paper bag, he hadn’t touched anything in the room, not even the inside doorknob. He shoved the door closed with his foot and carefully wiped the outside knob with his shirttail. Whistling as he walked off, he felt very clever indeed.