Evan Hunter - Candyland

"So what's this about Cathy?" T.J. asks.

They figure Consuelo called ahead, told her to expect a visit from the Law. They're not surprised. T.J.'s apartment is on the third floor of a building on East Sixth Street, just off Avenue A. At ten to eleven that morning, they can hear the sounds of summer traffic below. The windows are wide open, but there isn't the faintest hint of a breeze. On CNN, a black guy and a blonde woman who looks cross-eyed are exchanging views on whether or not JFK, Jr. should have taken the plane up when weather conditions were so bad.

"Somebody raped and strangled her," Emma says.

T.J. takes the comment casually, not a flicker of emotion crossing her face as she continues folding the laundry. She glances at the TV screen again. They are showing for the umpteenth time the photograph of John John saluting his father's coffin.

"I once had a guy said he worked for the State Department in Washington," she comments idly.

"Tell us about this drunk a few weeks back," Emma says.

"What drunk?"

"Guy who got rough with you and Cathy."

"As if I remember," T.J. says.

"This would've been two, three weeks ago," Emma prompts.

"You know how many drunks we've had up there since?" T.J. asks, and looks up at her. There is in that look her entire autobiography. There is nothing sexy or inviting about this person wearing blue jeans and a tight cotton sweater. She is simply a barefoot, freckle-faced, overweight woman of about thirty, with reddish-brown hair, sweating profusely as she folds her laundry on a stiflingly hot Thursday morning in an apartment without air-conditioning. One would never guess she sells blow-jobs uptown. Her hands are her only delicate feature. She spreads the laundry, flattens it under long slender coaxing fingers, folds, flattens, folds again. She is wearing a wedding band on her right hand. Emma wonders if she's a widow. Or is she divorced? Does she have children who now live with her ex-husband's mother?

"You did a three-way with him and Cathy, remember?" Emma says.

Again the look from T.J. The look says Do you know how many three-ways I've done with Cathy over the past three weeks? Do you know how many three-ways I've done in my lifetime? I'm thirty years old, the look says, I've been a hooker since I was seventeen, do you know how many fucking three-ways I've done? Please. This is what Emma reads in the look. She almost wants to get out of here. The hell with it, she thinks. We'll get the information somewhere else. But where?

"Try to remember," she says. "Detective Morgan and his partner were there that night, does that help you?"

"You were flirting with my partner," Morgan says, and winks at her.

"Oh sure, flirt with a fuckin Vice cop," T.J. says. She picks up a stack of folded towels, carries them to a closet, opens the door, puts them on a shelf inside, and comes back to the table where the rest of the laundry is piled.

"He found you very attractive," Morgan says, and winks again.

"Yeah, thousands of men find me very attractive," T.J. says drily. "That's why I have a million dollars socked away. Cause all the men who come up the XS find me very attractive."

"This guy picked you out of the crowd, didn't he?" Morgan says.

"Proves my point," T.J. says, continuing the vaudeville routine. "He was drunk."

Emma has heard this kind of banter before between cops and cheap thieves, Hey, Willie, when did they let you out? Hello, Officer Muldoon, you're puttin on a little weight. Good old buddies. Two sides of the same coin, heads or tails. She has heard cops say that without crooks they'd be out of a job. She has heard cops say they feel more at ease with law breakers than with honest citizens who come in with a complaint. Civilians, we call them, she thinks. And wonders when she herself stopped being a civilian and became a cop.

"Do you remember him?" she asks.

"Had a little mustache, didn't he?" T.J. asks Morgan.

"Don't ask me," Morgan says, "I never saw him. We got there after he split."

"Par for the course," T.J. says, grinning. "Never a cop around when you need one. I think he had a little mustache," she tells Emma.

"Was he white or black?" Emma asks.

"I don't do black men," T.J. says.

"How come?" Morgan asks.

"Big whangers."

"That's hearsay, Your Honor."

"Oh yeah? Try sticking one up your ass sometime."

"Watch it," Morgan says, "there's a lady present," and winks at T.J. yet another time.

"I got hurt one time doing a black guy," she says. "That was it for me, man. Never again."

"What else besides the mustache?" Emma asks.

"He was about Jimmy's size," she says, and looks Morgan over. "Five-ten maybe, a buck ninety or so."

"You're short an inch and five pounds," Morgan says.

"Close though."

"How old?" Emma asks.

"Late thirties, early forties."

"What color hair?"

"Brown."

"Eyes?"

"Who notices eyes, this business?"

"And you say he had a mustache."

"I'm pretty sure. A little mustache."

"Tell me what happened?"

"Cathy already told Jimmy what happened."

"I'd like to hear it, too," Emma says.

Morgan looks at her. Shrugs. Nods to T.J. that it's okay to repeat the story. Two old buddies here. Opposite sides of the same coin. Without hookers, there'd be no Vice cops.

"He must've come in sometime after midnight," T.J. says. "He'd been drinking a lot, he picked Cathy cause she was little Heidi, you know, and me cause I look like Judy. I guess he likes virgins. Judy Garland," she explains. "People say I look like Judy Garland."

"I can see the resemblance," Morgan says. He does not wink this time. He's not exactly sulking, but his body language is telling Emma You want to handle this, go right ahead, girlfriend. One day I'll piss in your shoes.

"We went up to this big room we have on the third floor," T.J. says, "the girls call it The Honeymoon Suite, we use it for three-ways a lot. There's a big king-sized bed with this beautiful painting over it, it's like a naked gypsy girl."

Now, as her delicate slender hands fold and flatten and fold the blouses and jeans and panties and slips, she remembers that the drunk called himself Stanley—

"These guys never use their real names," she says.

— and told them he was an actor, he'd been in a lot of movies, he said. Well, he didn't look like any movie star she or Cathy had ever seen, but they went along with it, anyway, what the hell. This was after the party was over and all—

"Complete satisfaction," she says drily, and rolls her eyes in a mock swoon.

— and they were just sitting around bullshitting and waiting for his hour to be up, he had about five minutes left on the clock, he was already dressed and ready to leave. She remembers Cathy asking him what movies he was in, and he told her he was in The Sixth Sense, was his most recent one, the scene in the restaurant where Bruce Willis is with his wife, did they see… that movie? Stanley was one of the people eating at a table in the restaurant. But he was also in Saving Private Ryan, the scene at the beginning where everybody on the beach is getting killed, he was one of the soldiers on the beach.

"So Cathy, the big mouth, says, “What you mean is you're an extra, ain't that it?” and the guy, being drunk and all, gets on his high horse and says, “No, I'm an actor! Those scenes required a great deal of preparation,” and Cathy busts out laughing. So he slaps her. So I tell him, “Hey, Mr. Hanks, keep your fuckin hands to yourself, okay?” So he slaps me, too. Well, we both jump off the bed, and run for the hall, with him chasing right behind us. He grabs Cathy by the hair, she has this long blond hair, and he starts calling her a cunt and a whore and whatever else he can think of, bitch, slut, and really hitting her, like hard, I mean, never mind the slaps. Cathy starts screaming bloody murder, we both start screaming, in fact, and Stanley panics and runs out of there. I mean, he's out of there, down the stairs and out in the street, I mean out !. We called the cops, anyway. A day late and a dollar short, right?"