Mischief

by Ed McBain

  The Deaf Man’s source had worked with Florry on four break-ins over the past six months, and he’d told the Deaf Man that Florry knew everything there was to know about sound systems, that he worked well under pressure, and could also recite the names of all the hit songs and albums of every rock group there’d been for the past thirty years. The Deaf Man had been impressed—but he hadn’t realized then that Florry Paradise would still be wearing beads and a ponytail and a fringed deerskin vest while he reminisced about the good old days at Woodstock.

  “I need an enormously sophisticated system,” he said.

  “What are we talking about?” Florry asked. “Rap or real music?”

  “Voice,” the Deaf Man said.

  “You mean rap? This is for amplifyingrap music?”

  “No. It’s for amplifying avoice .”

  “Well, that’s what rapis , am I right? Voices and drums, am I right? Like in the jungle.”

  “Yes, but this won’t be rap. This will be a recordedvoice . I’d need you to make the recording….”

  “On tape? Or do we burn an EPROM?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” the Deaf Man admitted. Nor did he know how you burned one.

  “It’s an electronic chip. We’d digitally store the voice on it.”

  “Well, whatever you think best.”

  “But this won’t be rap, huh?”

  The Deaf Man was ready to strangle him.

  “Because this is arap concert, am I right?” Florry said. “The one coming up in the park?”

  “Rapand rock.”

  “How big is that lawn?”

  “A bit over ten acres.”

  “They’ll be using stuff’ll blow away everything in sight. Woodstock, they didn’t even have any delay towers. You weren’t there, you really missed something. I got laid eight times in two days, did I tell you? The sound system there was primitive compared to what we got today. The stuff they’ll be using in the park’ll carry sound all over those ten acres and then some. You want this voice to go out over the speakers, is that it?”

  “I want to drown out anything else that’s going on at the time. When we start the tape, or the chip, or whatever…”

  “Will this be a delayed start, or what?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’d like. I don’t want to be anywhere near the lawn when the tape starts.”

  “That’s easy enough, I can rig that for you. You know…well, it depends, of course.”

  “What were you about to say?”

  “If you really want to do this right, let’s just knock out their signal and substitute yours for it.”

  “That would be perfect.”

  “But this would have to be after all their equipment is in place, you understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll probably be placing the stage, two, three days before the event. Do their equipment check the day before. What kind of fuzz will I have to worry about?”

  “There shouldn’t be any additional police presence in the days preceding the concert. There’ll be a larger presence on the day itself…”

  “Naturally.”

  “…but the only thing we’ll have to worry about then is getting the tape started on cue….”

  “That’ll be automatic.”

  “Good.”

  “So how many cops while I’m in there messing around?”

  “I have no idea. My guess is you’ll have to worry more about private security guards. But I don’t think anyone will bother you. It’s been my experience that if a workman simply goes about his business, no one will bother him.”

  “Mine, too. But these various groups, their own people might like challenge me, you know? Who’re you, man? What’re you doing here, man?”

  “Tell them you’re with the parks department, setting up some noise-monitoring equipment for the parks commissioner. Tell them anything you like, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, truly.”

  “Just so they don’t go running to the cops, hey, there’s this honkie settin up shit here, he don’t belong to none of our groups.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Cause then, all of a sudden, I got fuzz wanting to know who I am and what I’m doing and I’m standin there with like my finger up my ass.”

  “Would you like me to arrange some false identification for you?”

  “A laminate would be terrific.”

  “What’s a laminate?”

  “Like a card covered with plastic, you wear it around your neck at these events, nobody bothers you.”

  “Where would I get such a thing?”

  “The promoter’s usually in charge of handing them out, they’re valuable as gold. Anybody asts you anything, you flash the laminate, they say Pass, friend, I go about my work. That’sif anybody asts me anything. Otherwise, I mind my own business, like you said, I don’t look for no trouble, I don’t get none.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “A laminate should be easy.”

  “Maybe,” the Deaf Man said. He wasn’t at all sure it would be that easy. “Is there anything else you’ll need?”

  “Yeah,” Florry said. “Money. We haven’t discussed money yet.”

  “For wiring the job, fifty thousand.”

  “That sounds low. In fact, that soundsvery low, all the risks.”

  “I don’t see any risks. If I can get the laminate for you…”

  “Even with the laminate, I still see there could be risks. I’m in there working into these other guys’ shit, I can see risks.”

  “You understand that the fifty is just for the wiring. On the day of the concert…”

  “It’s still low for the wiring. Cause frankly, that’s the most exposure, when I’m out there placing the stuff. The day of the concert, I’m with you and the others, we’re like mutual protection. But when I’m placing the stuff and there’re cops wandering around looking over the progress of the work and whatnot, this is when there’s exposure, and exposure is risk. So I don’t know how much you had in mind for the day of the concert…”

  “I had thirty in mind.”

  He really had fifty in mind.

  “Thirty’s fine for what has to be done that day,” Florry said, “if it’s as simple as you say it’s gonna be, but for the rigging beforehand I’d need at least another eighty.”

  “Sixty is as high as I can go,” the Deaf Man said.

  “Seventy-five’s my bottom line.”

  “Let’s compromise at seventy and we’ve got a deal.”

  “Seventy for the rigging plus thirty for later on.”

  “A hundred altogether, yes.”

  “Okay, we’ve got a deal at a hundred.”

  Which was what the Deaf Man had planned to pay all along.

  “When do you want to burn the EPROM?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Then let’s get it out of the way tomorrow sometime, okay? Can you stop by the shop like around eleven?”

  “Eleven sounds fine.”

  “Bring me ten K in cash,” Florry said, “the rest payable right after the gig. I should actually charge you more up front, cause that’s where the biggest risk is, when I’m in there fuckin up their work. But I’m being a good guy cause I think I’m gonna enjoy the challenge.”

  “Thanks,” the Deaf Man said.

  Dryly.

  AT SIX P.M.on that rainy evening of March twenty-fifth, Sylvester Cummings, otherwise and preferably known as Silver Cummings, met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

  Her name was Chloe Chadderton.

  They sat in a bar atop one of the city’s more elegant midtown hotels, Silver’s agent having made the reservation, thereby paving the way for his appearance. Otherwise, the headwaiter might not have admitted a young black man wearing dreadlocks and what looked like carpenter’s overalls over a red T-shirt, not to mention footwear that had the appearance of used combat boots.

  Chloe was more appropriately attired, wea
ring a simple brown woolen dress—this was springtime, yes, but the weather outside warranted clothing more suited to Scotland in the month of January—high-heeled brown pumps to match, a heavy gold bracelet on her right wrist, and a dangling gold medallion that nestled in the hollow of her throat. If Silver had been pressed to say what color she was, he would have said “Uptown ripe,” what the slave owners down South used to call “high yeller,” which exact words he had used in one of his songs to pillory modern-day bigotswherever they lived. Silver’s own color was a rich chocolate brown, which he hoped Chloe found attractive because thirty seconds after they’d met he was madly in love.

  The one thing a rapper could never be accused of was being tongue-tied. He was close to that now.

  “It was really nice of me to…ofyou to come meet me,” he said.

  Chloe thought he was sort of cute, stammering and lowering his head that way, like a schoolboy. She figured him for twenty-three, twenty-four years old, some four or five years younger than she was—but since George’s death, she’d dated men who were even younger than that. On the phone Silver had sounded very businesslike. Introduced himself as the writer for Spit Shine, which group she’d heard of, told her he was interested in acquiring the rights to one of George Chadderton’s songs, who should he talk to up there at Chloe Productions, Inc.? She’d told him she was George Chadderton’s widow, and she was the person he should talk to, and he suggested that they meet for a drink, he’d tell her what he had in mind.

  Reason he had asked her to have a drink with him instead of going up there to her office was he didn’t know how she’d take to the idea of a rap crew doing only her late husband’slyrics and throwing his music in the garbage can. Hestill didn’t know how she’d react. But the lyrics were all he wanted, never mind that calypso shit.

  Rain snakes slithered down the long window beside their table. Sunset wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes yet, but the city already looked dark and forbidding and there were lights on in all the office and apartment buildings. Chloe was drinking a Johnny Walker Black on the rocks, Silver was drinking a Perrier and lime. Needed to keep his head clear. He really wanted that song, wanted to get it in rehearsal for the concert coming up.

  “The song I’m interested in,” he said, “is ‘Sister Woman.’”

  “Good song,” she said. “George wrote it just before he got killed. Well, the lyrics, anyway.”

  He could’ve jumped on this at once, this business about the lyrics, but instead he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know there’d been that kind of trouble.”

  “Well, it’s a long story,” she said. “Some crazy woman was keeping his brother prisoner…it was really too weird. Anyway, he left this notebook full of lyrics, and I thought something could he done with them. So I hired this person to put some calypso music to them….”

  “There’s no composer listed on the…”

  “I paid him outright. A thousand bucks.”

  Smart lady, he thought.

  “Copyrighted it all under the name of Chloe Productions. Wrapped an album deal that netted me three.”

  Well,not so smart, he thought.

  “Not enough to retire on, but it got me through a long cold winter. How much did you plan to pay for using the song?”

  Straight to the point. Had it been another long cold winter? Even so, spring was here. Wasn’t it?

  “We’d only want to use the lyrics,” he said. “Spit Shine. We’re a rap group….”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “We don’t do calypso stuff.”

  “I didn’t think you did.”

  “So all we’d want would be the lyrics. Cause they make the kind of point we’re int’rested in makin.”

  “Um-huh. So how much would these lyrics be worth to you? Did you plan to record this, or just perform it live?”

  “We’d use it in the concert first—we’re doin a concert on the fourth, though you’d never know it.”

  “The Fourth of July?” she said. Eyes opening wide. Gorgeous sloe eyes the color of coal. Narrow oval face. Good firm breasts in the fitted brown dress. Medallion hanging in the hollow of her throat. Long, graceful neck, he wanted to kiss her behind each ear.

  “No, no,” he said. “Next month. The fourth.”

  “So there’s some kind of urgency,” she said.

  “Well, we’d have to put it together, rehearse it…”

  “Put it together how?”

  “As rap,” he said. “Give it the rhythms rap needs. This isn’t just a matter oftalkin the lyrics, you know, they got to be paced, they got to be skittered.”

  “Where’s this going to be?” she asked. “The concert.”

  “In the park here. Grover Park.”

  “Be a lot of people?”

  “It’s a free concert,” he said, figuring he’d cut her off at the pass before she got any grandiose ideas.

  “You want the songfree then?” she asked. “Because it’s a freeconcert ?”

  “No, we’d pay you for the use.”

  “How much?”

  He figured he was dealing small time here. The lady needed money, that was the long and the short of it. He didn’t know she was in fact dead broke and considering a life not dissimilar to the one Sister Woman lived in the song.

  The music company aside—it was virtually defunct, anyway—Chloe was still doing what she’d been doing at the time of her husband’s murder, dancing almost naked on bartops, men tucking dollar bills into her G-string, sometimes five, rarely more than that unless you went in the back room with them. In the back, you danced naked for them, you let them touch your breasts, kiss your nipples, slide their hands up your legs to your garters, all this was a simple step above performing forty-dollar hand jobs behind the plastic greenery, which she had never done because she knew that once you crossed the Rubicon into performing an actual sex act, the progression after that—and the justification for it—was easy. Massage parlor work, escort work, outright prostitution. She had girlfriends who’d gone that route, girls who used to dance alongside her on the bar. They told her she was dumb not doing it herself. She had considered it. She was still considering it. But here was a man interested in her dead husband’s work….

  “What about the other songs on the album?” she said.

  “Not interested in anything but the hooker song,” he said, and shook his head. “I’d like to put it in the group’s li’berry.”

  “Say it was yours?”

  “No, no.”

  “Say you wrote it?”

  “No, I wouldn’t rip it. We’d give your husband credit.”

  “Fuck my husband,” she said, startling him. “All I’m interested in is what’ll bring the most money. You want to buy the copyright, fine, say the song is yours, that’s fine, too, the lyrics are yours, whatever youwant , but that’ll cost you. You want to perform it one time, that’s another matter. Then you’d have to come back to me next time you want to do it. I’ll level with you, Mr. Cummings….”

  “Silver,” he corrected.

  “Sounds like the Lone Ranger’s horse,” she said.

  He flared for a moment. And then burst out laughing. She watched him. Even white teeth, strong jaw, he really was quite attractive.

  “Make it Sil then,” he said, still laughing. “That’s what all my friends call me.”

  “Sil,” she said, “I need some real cash. I want to keep this apartment I’m in, but the lease runs out the end of April and I know they plan to raise the rent, and the truth is I’m still doing the kind of work I was doing when my husband got killed, but I don’t much…”

  “What kind of workdo you do?” he asked.

  She looked him dead in the eye.

  “I’m a dancer,” she said.

  But didn’t tell him she danced naked for men who touched her breasts and her legs, and even kissed her nipples….

  “But I’m not enjoying it…”

  Which was the truth.

  “…so I’d like to start m
y own business, open a beauty salon in Diamondback, there’s always room for another beauty salon.”

  “I would guess you know a great deal about beauty,” he said, intending a compliment and hoping she took it as such, relieved when she said, “Why, thank you, Sil,” sounding enormously surprised.

  “A great deal,” he repeated, like a politician emphasizing key words in his speech.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but I need cash if I’m going to go out on my own, do you understand what I mean?”

  She did not say that some of her girlfriends were pulling down five, six hundred dollars a day, five days a week, twenty-five hundred to three thousand a week, something like a hundred and fifty thousand a year, she did not tell him that. Nor did she tell him how tempted she was lately, or how trapped she was beginning to feel. She did not want to become a whore. She did not.

  Outside the windows, night had already claimed the city.

  “How much are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Twenty thousand,” she said.

  Which was outrageous.

  “You’ve got it,” he said.

  THE TWO POLICE OFFICERSin Adam One were taking another quick run at the sector before they parked awhile to fool around a little. Necking on the job, not to mention reciprocal masturbation, was specifically forbidden by police-department regulations, but boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and the police officers in Adam One were respectively named Adam O’Hare, no relation to the car, and Josie Ruggiero, and they had been playing around on the job and running around on their respective spouses for the past month and a half now. Their burgeoning affair had started with a little hand-holding on the front seat, the walkie-talkie squawking between them, and had rapidly progressed to a little kissy-facey and then a little touchy-feely, and it would be merely a matter of time now before they found themselves a deserted stretch of turf on the graveyard shift and went “all the way,” as such mischief was known in the trade.

  It was now a quarter past five on this rainy morning. It would be dark until sixA .M., and they were not due back at the Eight-Seven till a quarter of eight, at which time they would turn in the car and be relieved by the next shift. Relief of quite another sort was what they had in mind at the moment, however. As soon as they completed this routine pass at the sector, they would drive over to the posted Quiet Zone surrounding St. Sebastian’s Hospital. Considering what their present separate but identical states of mind were urgently demanding, the dark, tree-lined streets there would perfectly serve their needs. Rarely if ever, and certainly not at this hour of the morning, was the area frequented by through traffic; the posted speed limit was ten miles per hour and there were traffic lights on every corner, blinking to the deserted streets. Park in the empty visitors’ parking lot, douse the headlights, anyone saw a patrol car sitting there in the rain, they’d think it was a radar speed trap instead of two horny cops unzipping each other’s flies.