Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, into the very wet handkerchief now.

  “Hey, no,” he said again, but without as much conviction as last time.

  The coffee came. He watched as she spooned four teaspoons of sugar into it, they had sweet tooths, these Latinos. Just a dollop of milk, she liked it dark. She was under control again. He hoped that this time he could get some answers from her before she turned on the tears again.

  “Did he belong to a gang?” he asked.

  Flat out. Get to it. Get it over and done with.

  “No,” she said.

  “Anybody putting any pressure on him to join one?”

  “Not that I know about.”

  “I have to ask this, was he into dope?”

  “What do you mean? Using dope? No, Alfredo never…”

  “Using it, dealing it, I have to ask. Was he in any way connected with narcotics?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Positive.”

  Brown eyes flashing something very close to anger now.

  “Did you know he was a wall-writer?”

  “No. A what? What’s that, a wall-writer?”

  “A graffiti artist. A person who sprays graffiti on walls. With paint.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “We’re pretty sure that’s what he was doing when he got shot. Unless somebody went to a lot of trouble putting his fingerprints on the spray can, your son’s. Ever see him leaving the house with a spray can?”

  “No.”

  “Ever see any spray cans around the house? This one was red, ever see any red spray cans around? These cans that spray paint?”

  “No, never.”

  “Ever hear the name Spider?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know that’s what your son was called on the street?”

  “No.”

  “But you say he didn’t belong to a gang.”

  “He did not belong to a gang.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Her eyes said You better.

  “Will you need help with funeral arrangements?” he asked.

  For Christ’s sake, don’t bust out crying again, he thought.

  “I’ll give you a hand with that, you need help,” he said.

  “Por favor,”she said, and lowered her head to hide the tears that were brimming in her eyes again.

  Parker felt something like genuine sympathy.

  THIS WAS A CITYon the thin edge of explosion.

  Everywhere you looked, you saw anger seething just below the surface.

  The Deaf Man liked that.

  One out of every two teenagers in this city owned a handgun. You saw some kids up to some kind of mischief in the street, you didn’t tell them to behave themselves, you had to be crazy to do that because if there were four of them, two of them might be the ones packing the guns. You had to be very careful about people getting angry in this city.

  You hailed a taxicab in this city, and you didn’t see the guy standing on the corner with his hand raised to call the same cab, and the cab stopped for you instead of him, and the guy came running over yelling, “You fucking asshole, didn’t you see I had my hand up?” and when you told him, “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you, take the cab,” he said, “Don’t lie to me, you fucking asshole, you saw me all the time,” not happy with your giving him the cab, not happy with your apology, wanting to extend the argument, wanting to geteven somehow for something you didn’t even do,hurt you somehow for some imagined offense you hadn’t committed.

  This was a city waiting to erupt.

  Good, the Deaf Man thought.

  You’re waiting on a street corner for the light to change, and finally the signal turns toWALK and you start across the street and a limo makes a left turn into the block, almost knocking you over when he’s supposed to stop for a pedestrian crossing with the light and you raise your eyebrows and spread your hands as if to say Hey, come on, gimme a break, willya, and he leans over the seat and yells through the window on the passenger side, “What the fuck youwant me to do, you cocksucker, drive up on the sidewalk?”—but it’s best not to argue. He’s not a teenager, he’s maybe thirty-three, thirty-four years old, but the anger is there and who knows whether or nothe’s got a gun in the glove compartment, teenager or not.

  Ready to flare.

  Ready to take offense.

  Ready to strike out.

  The Deaf Man liked all that.

  THAT NIGHT,as the temperature began to drop again, two kids were larking around under the lamppost on the corner of Mason and Sixth. One of the kids was eleven years old. The other was twelve. They were just clowning around, making a little mischief on a night at the beginning of spring, you know how kids are. The guns they were packing were made of plastic, super squirt guns with a capacity of two gallons, capable of shooting water fifty feet or more. The kids were running around the lamppost, squirting water at each other, their breaths feathering out of their mouths on the frosty air. It was a cold night, but spring was already three days old, and the sap was beginning to run someplace in America, so they were running around having a good time, what the hell. Giggling as they ran around the lamppost squirting each other with water, these huge jets of water gushing out of the plastic guns every time they squeezed the trigger, yelling and screaming like Indians surrounding the cavalry in the days of the Wild West. But this wasn’t the Wild West, this was the big bad city. And there was anger in this city.

  The man who happened to be walking by had his hands in his pockets and his head was bent and he wasn’t paying any attention to the kids and their game because he had problems of his own. The first he even knew they existed was when some drops of water splashed onto his sleeve. He turned with an angry scowl on his face, started to say “What the fuck…?” and that was when the second jet of water hit him in the face. He turned at once, furiously screaming “You fuckin little shits,” and a gun came out of his jacket pocket. This gun was not made of plastic, this gun was made of steel, this gun was a Colt .45 caliber automatic, and he fired it three times, killing the eleven-year-old on the spot, and shooting the twelve-year-old through the left lung.

  He ran off into the night while the kid who was still alive twisted on the sidewalk, gasping for breath and coughing up blood and crying for his mama.

  OUT ON THE SPIT,there’d been lightning, and the old lady in the backseat had begun whimpering each time the lightning flashed. Here in the city, there wasn’t any lightning at all, but she was still mewling back there. Rocking back and forth where she sat against the window on the right-hand side of the car, keening like a widow at an Irish wake, but softly and weakly, as if she didn’t have the strength to let out a real cry of terror. He kept his eye on her in the rearview mirror, alternating his gaze from the road ahead to where she sat whimpering and looking bewildered.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he told her. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. This is for your own good.”

  The old lady said nothing, just kept whimpering in that soft weak way, rocking, rocking.

  “This is an act of love,” he told her.

  Whimpering. Whimpering.

  “That’s why I’m doing this. You’ll be better off, wait and see.”

  Fuck am I trying to explain anything to her, he thought. She doesn’t even know her ownname anymore. Still, she had to understand this wasn’t an act of cruelty. He wouldn’t do anything cruel to her or anyone else. Wasn’t in his nature to do anything cruel or even thoughtless. This was a merciful act here, what he was doing.

  “This is a merciful act,” he told her.

  “Where are we?”

  Her words came out of the blackness behind him, as startling as a gunshot explosion, surprisingly strong and clear and demanding.

  “If I told you, would you know?” he asked, and grinned into the rearview mirror.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “You familiar with the city
?”

  “No,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Would you remember if I told you?” he said, and grinned into the mirror again.

  “Do I know you? Are you my grandson?”

  “You remember your grandson, huh?” he said.

  “Buddy,” she said, and nodded.

  “You remember Buddy, huh?”

  “Or Ralph. Are you Ralph?”

  “That’s a dog’s name, Ralph. Here, Ralph,” he said, and laughed aloud.

  “You must be Buddy then,” she said.

  “Whatever you say, Grandma. We’re almost there now, so you just take it easy, don’t trouble your head with anything at all. This is something good I’m doing for you, you’ll thank me later on, you’ll see.”

  “Ralph wasn’t a dog,” she said.

  “Here, Ralph,” he said, and laughed again.

  “I think he drowned,” she said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “I wish I could remember things.”

  “I wish I couldforget things,” he said. “You don’t know how lucky you are. People who love you, who are willing to do this for you, make life comfortable for you, you don’t know how lucky, really.”

  “Iam lucky,” she said.

  “I know, Grandma. What have I been telling you? I know you’re lucky.”

  “I am.”

  “Almost there now. I’ve got a nice blanket here on the seat beside me, I’ll wrap it around you later, keep you nice and warm. Spring’s never coming this year, is it?”

  “Did I say good night to Polly?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I’mthe one who can’t remember,” she said, and began chuckling. He laughed with her. Together, as the car moved through the empty hours of the night, they laughed together in the dark.

  The railroad station at two in the morning was deserted and dark except for a single light that burned inside the locked and empty waiting room. He had reconnoitered the station and he knew that the waiting room was locked from 10:30P .M. to 4:30A .M., fifteen minutes before the first morning train came through. He also knew there was a Mickey Mouse lock on the door—well, nothing tosteal in there, why bother with anything fancier than a simple spring bolt? There were three cars parked in the lot adjacent to the station. He found a spot close to the waiting room, parked near the meter there, opened the driver’s side door, told her, “I’ll be right back,” and stepped out of the car. He debated whether he should put a quarter in the meter, and decided he’d better just in case some cop happened to cruise by while he was inside the waiting room. He deposited the quarter, twisted the knob, nodded, and then walked up the steps to the platform and around to where there was a door facing the tracks. There was another door on the other side of the waiting room, but it was visible from the street, and he didn’t want anyone spotting him while he worked the lock. Wouldn’t be any trains coming through this time of night, he’d checked the schedule. Swiftly, silently, he loided the lock with his American Express credit card, opened the door, and left it ajar.

  She was sitting in the backseat where he’d left her. She was whimpering again. He opened the front door on the passenger side, took the plaid blanket from the seat, draped it over his arm, and then opened the door where she was sitting.

  “Time to go, Grandma,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything as he lifted her from the seat and into his arms, so frail, almost weightless, rested her head against his shoulder as he carried her up the steps to the platform, whimpering into his shoulder. He moved swiftly to where he’d left the door ajar, carried her into the waiting room, and gently kicked the door shut behind him.

  “Nice and warm in here,” he said.

  She kept whimpering.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

  He carried her to the bench along the streetside wall of the room, the far end of the bench where there was a little nook formed by the armrest, and he lowered her to the seat and said, “You’ll be comfortable here. There’ll be a light burning all night long, nothing for you to be afraid of here, someone’ll be in around four, they’ll take good care of you, don’t worry.”

  She just kept whimpering.

  “So I’ll be running along now,” he said.

  Whimpering.

  “Goodbye, Grandma,” he said, and left her alone in the room with the dimly burning light.

  OLD CHANCERY HOSPITAL—familiarly called the Chancery, or sometimes theLast Chancery—was on Old Chancery Road, three blocks from the Whitcomb Avenue Station on the Harb Valley line, which ran all the way upstate to Castleview. Two radio motor patrol cops from the Eight-Six had responded to a call from the stationmaster at 4:35 this morning. They had picked up the old lady and—on the orders of their sergeant—had dropped her off at the Chancery’s emergency room some ten minutes later. It was now five o’clock on this early Tuesday morning, the twenty-fourth of March. The doctors who stood around the bed in the old lady’s room on the third floor of the hospital were trying to elicit some answers that would get her off their hands and back where she belonged, wherever that might be.

  Granny dumping was not a new problem for them. It had started at the Chancery some ten years ago, when the first of the elderly victims had shown up sitting in a wheelchair outside the emergency room, an unsigned, hand-lettered note pinned to her chest:I AM ABIGAIL .I HAVE ALZHEIMER ’S DISEASE.PLEASE HELP ME . During that first year, five to ten elderly people were abandoned at the hospital each and every month, a trend that peaked some three years later, after which the number dropped to two or three a month.

  “Do you know your name?” Frank Haggerty asked.

  He was the hospital’s Chief of Staff, one of the two medical men who stood around the bed, a man some sixty-three years old with a mane of white hair, riveting blue eyes, and a skin prematurely wrinkled by years of indifferent exposure to the sun. With him in the old lady’s room were his E.R. Chief and his Director of Social Services. This was the sixth case of abandonment the hospital had experienced in the past month, up from four the month before. Granny dumping was back—with a vengeance. Haggerty couldn’t afford any more of these incidents; the city had cut its hospital budget by thirty-five percent last year and the Chancery was a city hospital. It was now working with a skeleton staff more appropriate to a clinic in Zagreb than to a hospital in one of the world’s largest and most influential cities.

  “Ma’am?” he said. “Can you tell us your name?”

  The old woman shook her head.

  She’d been carrying no identification. All of the labels had been cut out of her clothes: the nightgown and robe she was wearing, the panties underneath those, even her diaper.

  “Do you know where you live?” Max Elman asked.

  The other doctor, E.R. Chief, forty-seven years old, brown eyes, black hair, dark complexion, looking more like one of the Indian residents working under him than he did an American Jew. His wife was a doctor, too, working at a hospital in Calm’s Point. The only way they really got to see each other was to retreat to the little farmhouse they’d bought in Maine; they particularly liked it during the winter months, go ask.

  “With Polly,” the woman said.

  “Who’s Polly?” the third man asked.

  He was the only civilian in the room, even though, like the two others, his title wasDoctor . Dr. Gregory Sloane, whose master’s had come from the USC School of Social Work, and whose doctorate in Social Medicine had come from Ramsey University, right here in the city. At thirty-eight, he was the youngest of the three men, twice divorced and going bald, a not-unrelated physical phenomenon; his hair had begun falling out when his first wife, Sheila, left him for a man who scouted ballplayers for a major-league team. He guessed that along about now, she’d be with him in some backwater town someplace, watching would-be stars shagging pop flies. Buck, his name was. The scout.

  “Polly,” the old lady said. “That’s who.”

  “Is she your daughter?”

  “Do
n’t have any.”

  “No daughters?” Sloane asked.

  “You deaf?” she said.

  Four out of five American families were caring at home for their sick or elderly parents. Women constituted seventy-five percent of these caretakers, who sometimes got stuck with aging uncles or aunts as well, relatives who’d been dumped on them when a spouse died or a son suddenly ran off to Outer Mongolia. Millions of American women who’d once thought they might begin pursuing their own lives once their children were grown and out of the nest now discovered they’d been sadly mistaken: They were doomed to care for their parents even longer than they’d had to care for the children. Which was why they’d asked if Polly was a daughter.

  “How about sons?” Elman asked. “Have you got any sons, ma’am?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said.

  “Any grandchildren? Would you remember any grandchildren?” Haggerty asked.

  “Ralph,” she said.

  “Ralph wha…?”

  “That’s not a dog’s name,” she said.

  “Ralph what, would you remember?”

  “Here, Ralph,” she said.

  “What’s his last name, do you know?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “He drowned.”

  “Any other grandchildren? Any boys or girls you can…?”

  “Buddy,” she said.

  “Buddy what? What’s his last name?”

  “I can’t remember. Where am I?”

  “Old Chancery Hospital,” Haggerty told her.

  There were four million Alzheimer’s sufferers in the United States of America. This number was expected to triple within the next twenty-five years. But not all cases of abandonment were Alzheimer’s victims; some of them were suffering from other chronic illnesses, some of them were merely old and frail. The woman seemed to be an Alzheimer’s victim. The care of an Alzheimer’s patient was at best trying on a family, at worst debilitating, a round-the-clock regimen of incessant attention that more often than not led to stress, despair, burnout, and eventual physical, emotional, and financial breakdown. It was easy for these men to understand why Polly—or whoever—had wanted out.