Kling said.
âThanks for your time, Gabe. If you happen to hear anythingâ¦â
âWhat would I hear?â
âWell, you do have your finger on the community pulse. Maybe somebody saw something, heard something, feels itâs his duty to report it to a community leaderâ¦â
âThatâs yet more bullshit,â Foster said. âIâm still a suspect, right?â
âTeach you to sleep alone,â Carella said.
5
TO TELL THE Godâs 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 hadnât 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 hadnât come up with anything at allâwhich didnât surprise Ollie, those jackassesâbut which still left somebody out there who had smashed Ollieâs car window (in plain view of the deaf, dumb, and blind blues standing outside King Memorial, donât forget) and reached in to unlock the door and run off with Ollieâs precious manuscript. He didnât think anyone up here knew how to read, so he didnât suppose they could discern he or she was looking at something written by a police officer, which if it wasnât 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, heâd had no use for it until he placed his book inside it to carry to Kinkoâs. He figured the only use the thief had for the case was to hock it, so heâd already sent out a flier to all the hock shops in the Eight-Eight and neighboring precincts. Junkiesâif indeed a junkie had stolen itâwere 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 heâd thrown away his first feeble attempts at Bad Money, heâd 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 whoâd never been to school at all, it looked like, who were also not cops or private eyes or anything else, and who werenât 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 was their business. 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 heâd done was to scrap the literary approach heâd formerly been striving for in
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