Ed McBain - Fat Ollie's Book

“It’s a known fact that he was targeting Diamondback for extinction,” Foster said. “If I’m not mistaken, Detective Carella, you yourself investigated a case just recently where the drug problem up here played an important role. Well, Henderson was all for toughening the state’s already Draconian drug laws, laws that are methodically clearing young black people off the streets…”

Here comes a speech, Kling thought.

“…and throwing them into already overcrowded prisons that are costing taxpayers a fortune to maintain. Instead of helping these youths to become productive members of a thriving community, we are instead turning them into criminals. I pointed this out to Lester, and I casually mentioned that only a racist pig would pursue a course as politically motivated as the one he was promoting. That was when he tried to pop me.”

“Small wonder,” Carella said. “So where were you around ten-thirty Monday morning, Gabe?”

“Oh dear,” Foster said.

“Oh dear indeed.”

“I fear I was asleep in my own little beddie-bye, all by my little self.”

“Which would have been where?”

“1112 Roosevelt Av. Apartment 6B.”

“And what time did you getoutof your little beddie-bye?”

“I came to the office here at eleven. I had a scheduled eleven-thirty interview with a reporter.”

“What time did you leave the apartment?” Kling asked.

“Around ten-thirty. Whenever the weather is good, I walk to work.”

“So you weren’t anywhere near King Memorial at ten-thirty Monday morning, is that right?”

“Nowhere near it at all.”

“Be nice if someone had been in bed with you,” Carella said.

“Yes, it’s always nice to have someone in bed with you,” Foster said.

“But no one was.”

“No one at all.”

“What’dyou say your address was again?” Kling asked.

“1112 Roosevelt.”

“That’s between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s further uptown.”

“Near King Memorial?”

“A few blocks away, yes.”

“Where exactly?” Carella asked.

“Between Thirty-first and -second.”

“The Hall’s on St. Sab’s, corner of Thirtieth,” Kling said.

“So it is,” Foster said.

“If you’d walked one block over, you could’ve passed it on your way to work.”

“IfI’d walked one block over,” Foster said. “But I came straight down Roosevelt. Same way I always do.”

“You walk the ten blocks down to Twenty-first here…”

“Yes, and then I walk the block crosstown to St. Sab’s.”

“Nice walk.”

“If the weather’s nice, yes.”

“It certainly was nice Monday,” Kling said.

“It certainly was,” Carella said.

“Fellas, let’s cut the idle bullshit, okay?” Foster said. “You know I didn’t kill that prick, so it doesn’t matterwhereI was Monday morning. I could’ve been home in bed with the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or I could’ve been right outside King Memorial tying my shoelaces. I may have done some foolish things in my lifetime, but killing a man a week after we had a brawl is definitely not one of them.”

“I tend to agree,” Carella said.

“Me, too,” Kling said.

“But we have to ask,” Carella said.

“You know how it is,” Kling said.

“Thanks for your time, Gabe. If you happen to hear anything…”

“What would I hear?”

“Well, youdohave your finger on the community pulse. Maybe somebody saw something, heard something, feels it’s his duty to report it to a community leader…”

“That’s yetmorebullshit,” Foster said. “I’m still a suspect, right?”

“Teach you to sleep alone,” Carella said.

TO TELL THEGod’s honest truth, Ollie was more interested in finding whoever had stolen his book than he was in finding whoever had murdered Lester Henderson. Toward that end, he had already coerced the Mobile Crime Unit into coming all the way uptown to dust his car for prints, the operative theory being that the perp hadn’t been wearing gloves on a nice spring day, and had therefore left tell-tale evidence all over the place.

Sure.

That was for fiction.

The MCU boys hadn’t come up with anything at all—which didn’t surprise Ollie, those jackasses—but which still leftsomebodyout there who had smashed Ollie’s car window (in plain view of the deaf, dumb, and blind blues standing outside King Memorial, don’t forget) and reached in to unlock the door and run off with Ollie’s precious manuscript. He didn’t think anyone up here knew how to read, so he didn’t suppose they could discern he or she was looking at something written by a police officer, which if it wasn’t returned pronto, could put his or her ass in a sling.

The dispatch case bearing the manuscript had been a gift from Isabelle two Christmases ago. Like everything else his dumb sister ever gave him, he’d had no use for it until he placed his book inside it to carry to Kinko’s. He figured the only use the thief had for the case was to hock it, so he’d already sent out a flier to all the hock shops in the Eight-Eight and neighboring precincts. Junkies—if indeed a junkie had stolen it—were territorial by nature and basic by instinct.

In the three months it had taken him to write the book, he had learned a lot about so-called mystery fiction. After he’d thrown away his first feeble attempts atBad Money,he’d started all over again by reading most of the crap on the bestseller list, much of it written by ladies who were not now, nor had ever in their entire lives been cops or private eyes or medical examiners or game wardens or bounty hunters, or any of the other things they professed to be. He then began reading all the book reviews posted on Amazon Dot Com.

Before he himself got on the Web, he used to think Amazon Dot Com was a very large broad named Dorothy Kahm. Now he knew better. To him, the reviews on this bookselling site seemed like the book reports he had to write when he was in the sixth grade. In fact, the reviews on Amazon seemed to be written by soccer moms who’d never been to school atall,it looked like, who were also not cops or private eyes or anything else, and who weren’t very good writers in the bargain. He wondered why Amazon, presumably in the business of selling books, would post bad reviews about books they were trying to sell, but hey, that wastheirbusiness. Besides, these so-called book reviews were very informative to Ollie.

What he learned from them was that any book with more than half a dozen characters in it, or more than a single plot line, was too confusing to be understood by some hick down there in Green Beans, Georgia, or out there in Saddle Sores, Texas. The answer was simplicity. Keep it simple. If simpletons were out there reading mystery fiction or detective fiction or crime fiction or thrillers or whatever anyone chose to call these so-called stories, then anybody actually writing the stuff had better learn how to keep it simple. Simplicity for the simpletons.

Simple.

So what he’d done was to scrap the literary approach he’d formerly been striving for inBad Money.For example, in the original version of his book, there had been high-flown language like:

The sound of music came from somewhere inside the apartment. Its noisome beat filled the hallway tremblingly.

In the next version, Ollie changed this to:

Loud music hammered the halls.

Period.

Simple.

He thought he had found his voice.

There was no sense trying to explain “voice” to anyone who wasn’t a writer. He had once tried to define it for his jackass sister Isabelle, and she had immediately said, “Oh, are you gonna be a singer now?” To a writer, voice had nothing to do with singing. Voice was as intangible as mist on an Irish bog. Voice was something that came from the very heart and soul. Voice was the essential essence of any novel, its perfume, so to speak. Try explaining that to a jackass like Isabelle.