Hail to the Chief Read online

  'Steve, this is Dave Murchison on the desk downstairs.'

  'Yeah, Dave?' Carella said.

  'I got a girl on the line, says she wants to talk to whoever's handling the ditch murders. I guess that's you.'

  'Put her on,' Carella said, and moved a pad into place near the telephone.

  'Hello?' a girl's voice said. She was either whispering or she had a bad cold, Carella couldn't tell which.

  'This is Detective Carella,' he said. 'Can I help you, miss?'

  'Detective who?' she whispered.

  'Carella. Who's speaking, please?'

  'Midge.'

  'What's your last name, Midge?"

  'Never mind,' the girl said. 'I have to make this fast. I'm alone right now, but they'll be back. If they catch me calling you…'

  'Who are you talking about, Midge?'

  'The ones who killed those people in the ditch. I didn't know there was a baby involved. The minute Johnny told me there was a baby involved…'

  'Johnny who?'

  'Never mind. He told me about it even before I seen the pictures in the paper. I told him I was gonna call up and say who done it. He said they would break my arms and legs.'

  'Who, Midge?'

  'The black man in the ditch was Lewis Atkins, he was president of a club called the Scarlet Avengers. The girl was his wife… Are you listening?'

  'I'm listening, Midge,' Carella said.

  'It was their baby got killed. That wasn't right. I told Johnny it wasn't right, and he said he'd take it up with the council.'

  'What's Johnny's last name?'

  'I don't want him to get in trouble,' the girl said. 'He got in trouble once before when he stood up for me. I don't want that to happen again.'

  'Who were the other people in the ditch? Can you tell me that?'

  'The Spanish guy was president of the Death's Heads. His real name is Eduardo Portoles, but he signs himself Edward the First. The girl, I'm not sure. I think her name was Constantina, but I'm not sure.'

  'Who killed them, Midge?'

  There was no answer.

  'Midge, where are you calling from?'

  There was still no answer. Carella realized all at once that the line was dead. He had not heard the click of a receiver being replaced on its cradle. Someone had either cut the wire or yanked the phone from the wall.

  We had trouble with Johnny and his chick before, so this was nothing new. Only this time it was a little more serious.

  The first trouble with them was when Midge got pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. I know abortions are legal in this state, but to me that's murder. Midge belonged to our women's auxiliary, and that made her a member of the clique, and that meant she abided by the rules, and the rules say no killing except in self-defense. I want to make that clear. All the stuff that happened with the Scarlets and the Heads, and all the stuff that happened later, was in self-defense. It was done for the general good of the members. To protect the clique. What we done to Midge was also done to protect the clique. We went easy on her because she's a girl.

  The first static was about the abortion, back in April of last year, long before I was re-elected. I got nothing to say about what goes on personally between the members and their chicks, so long as there's no public display in the clubhouse. Okay, Johnny should've been more careful, but he wasn't. So Midge got pregnant and she come to me and said she was thinking of going down the clinic and having an abortion. I got to explain this girl Midge. First of all, she's got a big mouth. Not only big, but loud. And she's always on the telephone. I thought I was the world's telephone champ, but Midge has me beat solid when it comes to talking. Anyway, I don't use the phone for common gossip. I'll call somebody to congratulate them, like one of the guys in the clique who done a good job, I'll call to tell him how I appreciate it. Or, like, I used to call the radio stations. This was a couple of months ago, before one of the stations sent a reporter up here to talk to guys on all the clubs, and he talked to every one of the clubs but us. So naturally they bad-mouthed us, when they didn't know a thing about how we operate or what we're trying to do. I don't call the radio stations no more, but I used to call disc jockeys, you know, and tell them I was president of a club up in Riverhead, and we were listening to his show right that minute and thought he was doing a great job, and would he play this or that song for us? It was friendly, you know? Now I got nothing to do with those radio guys, not since they started saying bad things about us. And, I'll tell you, they better watch out what they say in the future. I mean, if this thing gets in the papers - you think it'll get in the papers? - they better watch what they say. We got plenty of members. Plenty.

  But Midge used to get on that phone just for gossip. Like something would happen, we'd do something, and right away she was on the hot line spreading it to the other girls in the clique. She was a big mouth, plain and simple. And she was always hugging everybody, throwing her arms around them the minute they came through the door, and calling everybody 'Sweetheart,' or 'Honey,' or 'Darling.' It was disgusting. I never liked that chick. I put up with her only because I thought Johnny was a valuable man. We should have been stricter with her, and maybe we should've taken care of him at the same time. Saved ourselves a lot of headaches later on. But nobody's perfect. I try to handle things as they come up, and they don't always come up according to the game plan. That's the time to weave and dodge and figure things out on your feet. That's the time it pays to be the coolest man around, no panic.

  I told her, last April, no abortion. She wanted to know what she was supposed to do. She was only fifteen years old, she didn't want no kid, and Johnny's mother wouldn't let them get married. I told her put the kid up for adoption. I also told her she better go buy some pills or a diaphragm or a coil or whatever (which wasn't talking dirty, I was talking to her like a doctor or a priest) and avoid that kind of accident in the future. She had the baby in November, and the adoption people took it away without her ever seeing it. She didn't even know whether it was a boy or a girl. Big mouth, of course, went all over the neighborhood saying I had stolen her baby from her. I almost rapped her in the mouth when word got back to me. Johnny told me to forgive her because she was a very excitable type and them taking the baby away from her like that was very emotionally upsetting. I told Johnny it was her who wanted to kill the baby in the first place, so what was she yelling about now? Johnny said he would talk to her and calm her down. But, man, when you got a big mouth like Midge, there's nothing you can do with her except take care of her.

  Which is what we done when we found her on the telephone.

  It was Johnny, you know, who raised all the fuss in the council when he found out Chingo had accidentally killed the baby. It later turned out that Johnny was only saying what Midge told him to say. Like, you know, there was a whole psychological thing going on there, and it traced right back to her having put up her own baby for adoption. Don't ask me about it because I don't understand none of this psychological stuff too good. There was one time when I got in trouble, I was forced to go see a shrink because I was on probation, you know? Man, I didn't learn nothing from that guy. Later on, when I was first nominated for president of the clique, somebody raised the idea - like a smear tactic, right? - that I had been seeing this shrink, and maybe I wasn't qualified to be president, and all that. Like a president is supposed to make quick, cool decisions and not be unbalanced, and this guy who raised the idea (I forget his name, he moved to Chicago with his mother) said like maybe I was crazy because I had been seeing this shrink to satisfy my probation officer. I won the election anyway. And I got re-elected, too.

  But what I'm saying is that Midge got all mixed up in her head about the baby Chingo had accidentally killed, and the baby the adoption agency had taken away from her in November, and she started nagging Johnny to raise it in the council - not that I know what he expected to accomplish. The baby was already dead, no? And then, when he went back to her and told her I'd put him down, told him to take a walk and co
ol off, well, the thing kept stewing inside her until finally she decided to call the cops. Two of the guys were up this other chick's house - Ellie, her name is. They felt like having some pizza, so Ellie and the two of them went downstairs to get it, and they left Midge alone with the telephone. She can't resist a telephone. She sees one sitting there, man, she gets the itch to pick it up and dial it, and start shooting off her big mouth. So the minute she was alone she called the cops and was reeling off the names of the people in the ditch when The Bullet come back in because he forgot his cigarettes, and he heard what she was doing, and he pulled the phone out of the wall.

  We made her stand before the inner council. It was tough on Johnny, because this was his chick, and she done something real wrong, and he was one of the guys who had to decide what the punishment would be. We could've done whatever we wanted with her. Her mother is dead, you know, and her father's a wino who raped her when she was eleven, and who she was scared to even be in the same building with. Most of the time she slept in the clubhouse, even though the only heat there is from these kerosene burners we put around. It's an abandoned building, did I tell you that? I guess I told you that. So we could've done whatever we wanted, there was nobody to know, and nobody to care - except maybe Johnny. We could've had her killed. She was threatening the security.

  The council voted to cut out her tongue.

  Johnny asked for clemency, and I granted it. The council didn't like my veto, but if the council's wrong, I don't care how they vote. Around Christmas time they voted that the money in our treasury should be turned over to this neighborhood group that was trying to fix up one of the empty lots as a park. Paint the walls of the buildings around it, you know, and put in benches and maybe even plant some grass. There was two hundred and sixty dollars in the treasury, and I couldn't see wasting it on an empty lot when we still needed more guns and ammunition for the clique's defense. So I said no. I'm the president, and I got the power of veto. But the council overroded my veto, and voted the money again, so you know what I did? I told Big Anthony, who's the treasurer and who's in charge of the clique's bankbook, to go to the bank and take out the money, just leaving a couple of bucks in it to keep the account active. And he brung me two hundred and fifty-five dollars, and I impounded the funds. I still got the money. It's in a safe place and I won't touch a dime of it, because it belongs to the clique. But I ain't turning it over to those neighborhood do-gooders, neither, no matter what the council voted.

  Why I vetoed their wanting to cut out Midge's tongue had nothing to do with Johnny's pitch for clemency. What I figured was that she already done the damage, she already talked to the cops. Which meant that they'd be coming around looking for her, trying to get the rest of the story from her. So either we had to kill her to shut her up completely, or we had to get her out of sight. In matters of security, I usually show no mercy, I mean it. And this was a matter of security, no question about it. But I guess I was feeling generous that day. I could've said 'Get rid of her,' and Chingo or The Bullet would've dumped her in the river without batting an eyelash. But instead, there's this place that Big Anthony's aunt has in the next state, just over the Hamilton Bridge, and she goes there in the summertime, she grows corn there, it's a nice little place. In the winter, though, it's closed up, but Big Anthony has a key and we sometimes go out there with the chicks and make a fire and sit around. I told Big Anthony to pick another member, anyone he wanted, and take Midge out there and keep her there for a week or so, till things cooled down. I also told him twenty lashes on her back every morning and every night, and she better not scream. If she screamed - and Midge was standing there through all this - I wanted to know about it, and then I'd forget how decent I was being and I'd tell the council to go ahead and do to her what they wanted.

  She got the message. Or at least it looked that way. But even in spite of what we were forced to do later, I think I done the correct thing at the time. I could just as easy have lost my cool and told the council to go ahead, do what they wanted. But I didn't. Which is why I'm the leader, and they're the council. When you're the leader, you got to know when to use the power you got, and when not to. You got to be absolutely hard sometimes, and sometimes you got to be moderate. It's a balance you achieve, you know what I mean? When I got re-elected I made a little speech up the clubhouse. I told the members I wanted them to pray that I'd have God's help in making decisions that were right for them.

  I myself pray to God every night that I'll always do the right thing. And I think my people must pray for me, too, like I asked them to. Because I did do the right thing about Midge, even though I never could stand her, and even though later on, it might have looked like the wrong decision.

  Chapter Four

  There were five sections to the city, and Riverhead was one of them. It was separated from Isola by the Diamondback River, which flowed from the River Harb, snaked southward and then westward, and then emptied into the River Dix on the southern side of the island. There were no rivers in Riverhead itself. There were several reservoirs, and two lakes, and a brook called Five Mile Pond. The brook was not five miles long, nor was it five miles wide, nor was it five miles from any significant landmark. The origin and evolution of the name were obscure. It was probably called Five Mile Pond for much the same reason that Riverhead, which did not have a river in it, was called Riverhead.

  Once upon a time, when the world was young and the Dutch were snugly settled in the city, the land adjacent to Isola was owned by a patroon named Pieter Ryerhert. Ryerhert was a farmer who at the age of sixty-eight grew tired of rising with the chickens and going to bed with the cows. As the metropolis grew, and the need for housing beyond Isola's limited boundaries increased, Ryerhert sold or donated most of his land to the expanding city, and then moved down to Isola, where he lived the gay life of a fat, rich burgher. Ryerhert's Farms became simply Ryerhert, but this was not a particularly easy name to pronounce. By the time World War I rolled around, and despite the fact that Ryerhert was Dutch and not German, the name really began to rankle, and petitions were circulated to change it because it sounded too Teutonic, and therefore probably had Huns running around up there cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. It became Riverhead in 1919. It was still Riverhead - but not the Riverhead it had been then.

  Except for the easternmost part, where Carella still lived, most of the area had begun deteriorating in the early 1940's, and had continued its downward plunge unabated over the years. It was, in fact, difficult to believe that West Riverhead was actually a part of the biggest city in the richest country in the world - but there it was, folks, just a brisk short walk over the Thomas Avenue Bridge. Half a million people lived on the other side of that bridge in a jagged landscape as barren as the moon's. Forty-two percent of those people were on the city's welfare rolls, and of those who were capable of holding jobs, only twenty-eight percent were actually employed. Six thousand abandoned buildings, heatless and without electricity, lined the garbage-strewn streets. An estimated 17,000 drug addicts found shelter in those buildings when they were not marauding the streets in competition with packs of vicious dogs. The statistics for West River-head were overwhelming; their weight alone would have seemed enough to have reduced that section of the city to rubble - 26, new cases of tuberculosis reported each year; 3,412 cases of malnutrition; 6,502 cases of venereal disease. For every hundred babies born in West Riverhead, three died while still in infancy. For those who survived, there was a life ahead of grinding poverty, helpless anger, and hopeless frustration. It was no wonder that the police there had dossiers on more than 9,000 street-gang members. It was these dossiers that caused Carella and Kling to cross the Thomas Avenue Bridge on Thursday morning, January 10.

  They had spoken to a detective named Charles Broughan of Riverhead's 101st, who immediately recognized the names of the gangs Midge had given Carella on the telephone, and told them to come right on up. They were, of course, familiar with West Riverhead because as working cops their investiga
tions almost always took them beyond the boundaries of their own precinct. But neither of the two men had been up there for several months now, and were somewhat shocked by the rapid rate of disintegration. Even the front of the decrepit brick building next door to the 101st had been spray-painted with graffiti, a seeming impossibility for a street where cops constantly came and went, day and night. Sly 46, Terror 17, Ape 11, Louis HI, Angel Marker 24, Absolute I, Shaft 18 - on and on, the pseudonyms trailed their curlicues and loops, and dotted their i's, and crossed their t's, in reds and yellows and blues and purples, overlapping, obliterating the brick and each other to create a design as complex as any Jackson Pollock painting.

  Carella could not understand the motivation. Presumably, this was a new form of pop art, in which the signature of the painter became the painting itself, the medium became the message. But assuming the message was a bid for recognition in a city that imposed anonymity, then why didn't the artist sign his own name, rather than the nickname by which he was known only to his immediate friends? (One of the names sprayed in yellow paint was indeed Nick 42, a real 'Nick' name, Carella thought, and winced.) Of course, spraying the sides of buildings with virtually impossible-to-remove paint was not exactly a legal enterprise, so perhaps the sprayers were using aliases rather than pseudonyms, a subtle distinction recognized only by serious poets writing pornography on the side. Carella shrugged and followed Kling into the precinct.

  Most of the older precincts in the city resembled each other the way distant cousins do. The detectives identified themselves at the familiar high wooden muster desk, with its polished brass railing bolted to the floor and its sign advising all visitors to inquire at the desk, and then followed a hand-lettered sign that read DETECTIVE DIVISION, up the iron-runged steps, past chipped and peeling walls painted apple-green back during the Spanish-American War when the nation was young and crime was on the decrease, and then down a narrow corridor in which there were frosted-glass doors lettered in black - INTERROGATION ROOM, CLERICAL, LOCKER ROOM, MEN'S ROOM, LADIES' ROOM - and came up against a slatted wooden railing that divided the corridor from the Detective Squadroom of the One-Oh-One. It was like coming home.