Mischief

by Ed McBain

  The man from Haiti was carrying a green card that identified him as Jean-Pierre Chandron. Brown wondered if the card was a phony. You could buy any kind of card you needed for twenty-five bucks, sometimes less. You could also buy a bag of heroin for a mere five bucks these days and a puff of crack for seventy-fivecents! The Six-Bit Hit, it was called. You couldn’t buy acandy bar for six bits anymore, but you could start frying your brain for that amount of cash anytime you took a notion. What they did, they passed the crack pipe through a slot in a locked door after you dropped in your cash in quarters or even in nickels and dimes. Only thing they wouldn’t accept was pennies cause they were too bulky; otherwise, money was money.

  In much the same way that big manufacturers dumped their merchandise at ridiculously low prices in order to infiltrate new markets, the dope peddlers in this city were now dangling their bait to the uninitiated. Lookee here, man, you can fly to the moon for a scant six bits, wanna try, wanna buy, wanna fly? Or if you prefer heroin, we now have shit so pure you’d think it was virgin. You can snort it off a mirror, man, same as you do with coke, it’s that pure. You don’t have to worry about no needle, man, no fear of getting the old HIV, you caninhale this shit, man, and it’s only a nickel a bag, how can you refuse? The days of the dime bag are dead and gone, come join the party! The nickel bag is back, man, rejoice and carouse!

  “Why’d you go berserk in that store?” Brown asked the Haitian.

  The telephone rang.

  “Eighty-Seventh Squad, Car…”

  “Please don’t hang up again,” the Deaf Man said. “I’m trying to be of assistance here.”

  “I’ll just bet you are.”

  “I’m trying to prevent a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.”

  The same CID number was showing on the display panel. Carella wondered if he really was calling from the park. Although knowing him, he’d already moved his location. He was beginning to think the lieutenant was right, though. Just ignore the son of a bitch and…

  “I’ll make it easy for you,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Carella said.

  “No song and dance this time.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The title of the novel isThe Fear and the Fury . It’s science fiction. Do you like science fiction?”

  “Sometimes I thinkyou’re science fiction,” Carella said.

  “I don’t particularly admire the genre,” the Deaf Man said, “but I thought its simplicity might appeal to you. The author is a Bolivian named Arturo Rivera. The chapter you’ll want to read is the very first one in the book. It’s called ‘The Rites of Spring.’ I think you may find it interesting.”

  “Why should I…?”

  This time the Deaf Man hung up.

  “Does anybody around here speak French?” Brown asked the four walls.

  “Va te faire foutre,”the Haitian told him.

  Meyer and Hawes were just coming through the gate in the railing.

  “You speak French?” Brown asked them.

  “Oui,”Hawes said.

  “Then talk to this guy, willya?”

  “That’s my entire vocabulary,” Hawes said.

  “How about you?”

  “My wife speaks French,” Meyer said.

  “Lotta help that is.”

  Meyer went to the phone and dialed the Missing Persons Bureau, and asked to talk to Detective Hastings, the man he’d called earlier this morning. Behind him, Carella was trying some Italian on the Haitian, and Hawes was trying some Spanish, and Brown was trying to raise the patrol sergeant to see if any of his blues spoke French. Meyer waited.

  “Hastings,” a voice said.

  “Hi, this is Meyer at the Eight-Seven again, I called you around eight this morning, do you remember? To ask if you had anything on a John Doe named Charlie, guy around…”

  “I can hardly remember myown name that early in the morning,” Hastings said.

  “Guy around seventy-five years old, you remember we talked about it?”

  “Yeah, what about it? Westill don’t have anything on anybody named Charlie.”

  “You mentioned something about an epidemic, though, do you remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What’d you mean? About an epidemic.”

  “I got no idea.”

  “Well, why’d you use the wordepidemic ?”

  “Maybe cause it’salways an epidemic here. There are times I think everybody in this fuckincity is slowly disappearing from the face of the earth.”

  “But when I mentioned this guy Charlie was maybe seventy-five years old, you said, ‘What is this, an epidemic?’ Do you remember that?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, why’d you say it? Did you have another seventy-five-year-old John Doe?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, now I remember.”

  “Another John Doe?”

  “AJane .”

  “What about her?”

  “Some blues from the Eight Six found this old lady in the waiting room of the Whitcomb Avenue Station, took her over to the Chancery. I spoke to a doctor there wanted to know we had anything on her.”

  “When was this?”

  “Early Tuesday morning, musta been. Everybody calls first thing in the morning, whyis that? I’m tryin’a have my coffee, the phone starts ringin off the hook.”

  “So Tuesday this old lady gets dumped,” Meyer said, “and today it’s this guy Charlie. So that’s what you meant by an epidemic?”

  “Ofdumping , yeah. Not of missing persons. Missing persons, it’salways an epidemic.”

  “Do you remember who you spoke to at the Chancery?”

  “I’ve got it here someplace, hold on,” Hastings said.

  AT ELEVEN-FIFTEENthat morning, there were only three patients in the emergency room at Old Chancery Hospital. One of these was a pregnant woman who’d been shoved down a flight of steps by her boyfriend. The other two were heroin users who’d shot up on the new stuff coming in from Asia and Colombia and were suffering the toxic aftereffects of “pure” fixes. Actually, nothing sold on the street was evertruly pure; the more the drug was stepped on, the more profit there was for everyone down the line. But the new stuff was decidedly more potent than what the city’s estimated 200,000 heroin addicts were used to, and these two old needle buddies in the E.R. had been scared half to death by sudden symptoms of heroin poisoning. One of them had already begun to turn blue before they both decided in their infinite wisdom that it was time to seek medical assistance. Elman left them in the capable hands of his team of Indian interns and led Meyer upstairs to talk to the Jane Doe the hospital had inherited two days earlier. Elman planned to leave for Maine at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, before the start of the weekend rush of bruised and bleeding bodies. Meanwhile, here was a miraculously interested detective who might just possibly help them find out who the hell she was.

  “She keeps talking about somebody named Polly,” Elman said. “Doesn’t have any daughters, or so she says, which leads us to believe this Polly person may be a nurse of some sort. All the labels were cut out of her clothes, which may indicate they could have identified a nursing home, do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” Meyer said.

  But if she was missing from a nursing home, why hadn’t someone notified the police?

  “She’s diabetic, by the way. Whoever dumped her probably didn’t know that. Or maybe didn’t give a damn.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “No medication on her. Nothing in her pockets, that is. She wasn’t carrying a handbag.”

  “Whatwas she wearing?” Meyer asked.

  “Nightgown, slippers, panties, diaper, and robe.”

  “Labels removed from the slippers, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes they overlook that.”

  “Not this time. Here we are.”

  Elman entered the room the way doctors always entered a hospital room, never bothering to knock, just barging i
n without a by-your-leave. Never mind whether the patient might be moving his bowels or picking his nose, a sick person lost all privacy the moment he was admitted to a hospital.

  The woman who didn’t know her own name was sitting in a chair beside the bed, watching a soap opera on television. Daytime serials, they called them. Everything politically correct in this country. Meyer still wondered what the politically correct word forbald was. This woman had hair. Lots of it. All of it white. She did not turn from the television set when they walked in.

  “Excuse me,” Elman said, not because he’d walked in uninvited but because he wanted her attention. When she still didn’t turn from the set, he picked up the remote-control unit and clicked off the picture. She turned to him angrily, seemed about to protest, and then sighed heavily and sank back into her chair. In that instant, Meyer saw in her eyes the helpless resignation of an old woman accustomed to intrusions and commands.

  “There’s a police officer here who’d like to talk to you,” Elman said without apology. “Detective Meyer. From the Eighty-Seventh Precinct.”

  “How do you do, ma’am?” Meyer said.

  The woman nodded.

  “There are a few questions I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Looking him over.

  “Who’s Polly?” he asked.

  Straight out. Sometimes if you took them by surprise, they blurted out a memory they didn’t even know they possessed.

  “She takes care of me,” the woman said.

  “Where?”

  “Home.”

  But was she referring to home as inhouse , or home as innursing ?

  “Where’s that?” he asked. “Home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who brought you here, ma’am?”

  “Policemen.”

  “Where’d they find you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bewildered look on her face. Eighty, eighty-five years old, Meyer guessed. Too many new things happening to her all at once. Confused. Sitting there wanting to watch her TV show, which was something she knew and understood, but instead she had to talk to this person asking her questions she couldn’t answer.

  “Do you remember a railroad station?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember someone taking you to a railroad station?”

  “No. I remember lightning.”

  “If I described a man to you, would that help you remember?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard,” she said. “Remembering.”

  “He would’ve been forty or forty-five years old,” Meyer said, repeating what Charlie had told him this morning. “About five feet ten, with brown eyes and dark hair.”

  “Buddy,” she said.

  “She’s mentioned that name before,” Elman said. “Buddy. We think he’s a grandson.”

  “Buddy what, ma’am?” Meyer asked. “Can you tell me his last name?”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  “Was he wearing blue jeans and a brown jack…?”

  “I don’t remember what he was wearing.”

  “Yellow shirt…”

  “I told you I don’tremember ,” she said. Getting angry with herself. Getting angry with not being able toremember things.

  “Ma’am, do you know whether the railroad station is close to home?”

  “I was in a car,” she said suddenly.

  “Driving in a car with someone?”

  “Yes. Lightning.”

  “Driving from home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s that, ma’am?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  She was about to start crying. Frustration and anger were building tears behind her eyes. He did not want her to cry.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry we bothered you,” and picked up the remote-control unit and turned on her television show again. In the corridor outside, he asked Elman if he could have a look at the woman’s clothes. Elman took him downstairs to what Meyer guessed was the equivalent of the police department’s Property Clerk’s Office, asked the female attendant there to bring Mr. Meyer the clothing the Jane Doe in 305 had been wearing when the police brought her in, and then excused himself and went back to the emergency room.

  Sometimes a nursing home stenciled its name into the garments its patients wore, for identification when the clothes were sent out to be laundered. There were neither stencil marks nor laundry marks in the woman’s robe or nightgown, nothing in her panties, nothing in the diaper except a dried urine stain. The corner edges of labels were still stitched to each article of clothing, but the empty space between them indicated where the labels had been scissored out. In each of the bedroom slippers a sticky rectangular-shaped residue showed where the labels had been torn from the inner soles.

  For all intents and purposes, the woman was still anonymous.

  THE NAME ofthe second victim’s wife was Debra Wilkins.

  She was a petite blonde with green eyes and a Dutchboy bob, in her mid-thirties, they guessed. The driver’s license in her husband’s wallet had given Parker and Kling a name and an address; the telephone directory had given them a phone number. When they’d called her at a little before nine yesterday morning, she’d just been leaving for an exercise class. Instead, she came to meet them at the hospital morgue. They hadn’t been able to get much from her yesterday when she’d sobbingly—uncontrollably, in fact—identified the remains of her husband, Peter Wilkins.

  They sat now in the living room of the Wilkinses’ three-story brownstone on Albermarle Way, a cul-de-sac off Silvermine Road, on the northernmost edge of the precinct territory. Through the living-room windows, they had a clear shot of the River Harb as dusk settled on the water. It was time to get down to business.

  “Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, cautiously taking the lead, “I know this is a difficult time for you, but there are some questions we have to ask.”

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

  She’d just got back from the funeral home. Parker was thinking that her hysterics yesterday had given the killer a healthy lead. Couldn’ttalk to the goddamn woman. Every time they mentioned her husband, she’d begun wailing like a banshee. She seemed pretty much in control now. Sitting there in a simple blue suit, blue pantyhose, French-heeled blue pumps. Eyes rimmed with red, all those tears. Waiting attentively for Kling’s first question.

  “Mrs. Wilkins,” he said, “your husband was found near the…”

  Her lip began trembling.

  Careful, Kling thought.

  “Near the Reed entrance to the River Highway,” he said. “In front of an abandoned building at 1227 Harlow. That’s about a mile from here. Coroner’s Office has estimated the time of death…”

  He cleared his throat, kept his eye on that trembling lip. He didn’t want her to go to pieces again.

  “…at around midnight Tuesday. It was raining all that night, and it was still raining yesterday morning when we got to the scene. Ma’am, if you could tell us when you saw him last, and what he said to you before he left here, whether he gave you any…”

  “The last time I saw him was after dinner on Tuesday night. He left the apartment at around eight-thirty. There was a movie he wanted to see. Something that didn’t interest me at all. A cop movie,” she said.

  “What time did you expect him home?”

  “Eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  “But he didn’t come home.”

  “No. He didn’t come home.”

  Turning her head away.

  “That’s why I called the police.”

  Kling looked at Parker. Parker nodded. It was possible.

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “At midnight. I was really worried by then. I knew it was raining, but the movie theater’s only a few blocks from here, on Stemmler, and he could’ve walked it in ten minutes. And Peter isn’t the…wasn’t th
e sort of man who’d stop in a bar or anything on the way home. So I…I was worried. I called nine-one-one and described him and…and what he was wearing…and I told them he should have been home by then. I don’t know what they did about it.”

  What they’d have done, they’d have alerted the local precinct, which in this case was the Eight-Seven, where there wouldn’t have been a chance in hell that the patrol sergeant would instruct his blues to keep an eye out for a husband who was half an hour late getting home.

  “When you called yesterday morning,” Debra said, “I thought it…I thought you might have some news. I wasn’t expec…expecting what you…told me. That he was dead. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Controlling herself. Biting down hard on her lower lip again. She would not cry. She would help them. Kling admired that. Parker wondered if it was an act. In many respects, Parker and Kling were the perfect good cop/bad cop team. That was because neither of them had to act a part; Parker really was a bad cop and Kling really was a good one.

  “What was he wearing when he left here, can you tell us?” Kling asked.

  “Blue jeans. A T-shirt. A barn jacket. From J. Crew.”

  Exactly what he’d been wearing when they’d found him painted all silver and gold with three holes in his head.

  “Did he go to the movie alone?” Parker asked.

  “Yes?”

  Question mark at the end of her answer, askinghim the significance of such a question. Was he suggesting…?

  “Didn’t go with afriend or anything, huh?” Parker asked, skirting close to the edge of another Shavorskyism.

  “Alone,” Debra said.

  “Do you keep a car here in the city?” Kling asked.

  “No. We rent one when we need one.”

  “I was wondering how he ended up a mile from here. The rain and all.”

  “Didn’t go with a buddy or anything, did he?” Parker asked, getting back to it. “To the movie, I mean.”

  “No. He went alone.”

  “Lots of people don’t like going to the movies alone,” Parker said. “They go with a boyfriend,” he said, and paused. “Or a girlfriend,” he added, and looked at her.

  “He wentalone ,” she said again.

  “Your husband ever do any artwork around the house?” Parker said.