Mischief

by Ed McBain

  Still nodding, she accepted the rose.

  He sat across the room now, in the big easy chair before the imitation Tiffany floor lamp they’d bought when they were first furnishing the house. He was reading, his brow furrowed in concentration. He must have felt her steady gaze upon him. He lifted his eyes. From across the room, she smiled and signedI love you. He returned the smile. Returned the words. Mouthed them and signed them.I love you . And went back to the book.

  She had not yet told him what she planned to do tomorrow morning.

  THE FIRST CHAPTERof the book was thirty-five pages long. He had read it through once after dinner, and was now reading it for the second time, and hestill didn’t understand why the Deaf Man had asked him to look at it. Well, The Rites of Spring, sure. He was planning a spring surprise of some sort. Planning tospring a surprise, so to speak. But that was too obvious, since spring was already here. And obviousness simply wasn’t the Deaf Man’s way. Direction by indirection was more his style. Tell them exactly what he planned to do but in a way that made it all seem unfathomable.

  The book had originally been published in South America. Carella had no way of knowing whether the English translation was any worse than the Spanish original had been. To him, the book seemed atrocious, but then again he wasn’t used to reading science fiction, if that’s what this was. The novel’s opening chapter began with the premise that the creatures on a planet named Obadon feared nothing more than the approach of the planting season. Rivera then went on to explain how this fear of the magic of growth led the entire population of the planet to gather on a wide open plain every year, to participate in what for time immemorial had been called The Festivities.

  “Here on this dusty red plain ringed by the mountains of Kahnara, here beneath the four glistening moons of the season, the Obadons gathered to shout and to chant and to stamp their feet against the swollen soil…”

  God, this is awful, Carella thought.

  “…so that their timeless fear of the magic of growth could once more be exorcized by a magic of their own, a magic born of ecstatic fury, presaging the moment when the plains would run red with water turned muddy and nascent.”

  Carella read the paragraph again.

  What the hell was the Deaf Man trying to tell him?

  THERE WEREN’T ANYreal writers anymore in this city, not what you could call genuine artists, there were only guys writing gang shit or dope shit, it was disgusting the way things had disintegrated the past twenty years. Nowadays, you did a whole subway car, the fuckin transit police had it acid-cleaned the very next day, it hardly paid getting the name out anymore.

  Timmo considered himself one of the last great writers.

  Way he put up his tag it was TMO, wrote it in one quick motion, index finger on the spray can button, paint jetting out, so it looked like:

  Everybody knew this was Timmo writing.

  Back in the old days, when he was doing maybe two, three trains a week—not a wholecar , man, that took time—but doing a piece with the three letters TMO or sometimes a top-to-bottom with the same tag, writing in a style that was instantly recognizable by other experienced writers and also by the newer writers coming along, what you called toys. People biting his style was kind of flattering, Timmo guessed, but it always pissed him off, made him want to go find the guy stealing from him, look in his face, tell him you want to bite my style, man, come bitethis . I see anything you throw up, I go over it, man, I cross it out, you dig? You get a background payback, man, each and every time.

  That was in the old days.

  That was when you went in a train yard with four, five other writers, you did a whole car that night, brought along a suitcase full of paint and something to eat and drink, some pot, gloves because it could get messy. You looked for a coalminer, one of the older cars that were harder to clean afterward, instead of the stainless-steel dingdongs. You looked for a yard that wasn’t hot, it became a communal kind of thing, three, four writers working on the same car, you each threw up your tag when the car was finished, you sometimes waited till the sun came up so you could see what you’d done during the night, it was satisfying. It was making a thing of beauty out of a rusting piece of shit.

  There was one yard they all stayed away from back then, this was the yard they called the Screamer because there was supposed to be the ghost of a writer there who stepped on the third rail and died screaming in the night. Nobody wanted to go anywhere near that yard even though there were coalminers laid up all over the place there and all you had to do to get in was climb over this cyclone fence had no razor wire on it. His style back then was a combo of Bubble and Calm’s Point, what he called Bubble Point, and what a lot of writers bit from him cause it was an easy style to imitate, he guessed, though it had taken him a while to evolve. The style was easily adaptable to two-tone pieces, color-blended burners, 3-D pieces, you threw up your marker in the corner afterward, everybody knew your name.

  His style nowadays was more a wild style, he wasn’t interested in anything but getting the name up, TMO, spray it all over the city so they’d know he was still out here, man. He’d racked up the paints he was carrying tonight, some of the old traditions were still alive, any writer didn’tsteal his paints wasn’t a writer worth shit. Your experienced writer was an experienced racker, too. That didn’t make him one of thesegang assholes whose main occupation was dealing dope and beating up people and spraying walls to mark their territory. Like, man, you are now enteringDEADLY SAVAGE turf! OrKiller Psyche Tribe territory, whatever dumb names they called themselves. You saw MM21 sprayed on a wall or markered on a train, no style at all, you knew it stood for the Macho Men from Twenty-first Street, they were telling you beware, man, this is the land of the super assholes! Cross out a gang tag, you were in serious trouble. Dealers, too. Dealers used their tags to mark drug territory. Don’t come sellin’ your shit on this corner, it belongs to Taco, you see the tag, man? No place left for a genuine writer to go anymore, no place at all.

  Except that in the night…

  Night like tonight…

  You could still feel free and easy in the night.

  Find yourself a wall wasn’t too crowded, take your time doing a two-tone burner in Bubble Point. Be like old times. Free and easy in the empty hours of the night, smoke a little, drink a little, look over the piece, define it, refine it, and sign it TMO. For Timmo. Yeah.

  The wall he had in mind was one he’d passed by late yesterday afternoon, almost virgin. Three or four bubble tags on it, no gang markers. He’d racked up a can of blue and a can of yellow, which when you put them close together you got a greenish look he favored. He had two rolled joints in the bag with the paint, and a ham sandwich he’d bought in the deli on Culver and Tenth, and a can of Coke, he was like set, man.

  Five minutes later, he was like dead, man.

  5.

  HER ALARM CLOCKhad a two-position switch. The first position caused the bedside lamp to flash when the alarm went off. The second position flashed the lamp and simultaneously turned on a vibrator under her pillow. Normally, the flashing lamp was enough to awaken her, but this morning she was taking no chances; the switch was set to the second position. The combination of flashing lamp and vibrating pillow woke her up in five seconds flat. She hit the OFF button before all that shaking and blinking woke up Carella, who grunted, muttered something unintelligible, and rolled away from the light an instant before it quit.

  The LED display on the clock read 3:01A .M.

  It was still dark an hour later, when she left the house and began walking to the elevated subway station four blocks away. She was thinking that this section of Riverhead was still relatively safe, but she wasn’t used to being abroad alone—or even a broad alone, she thought, and smiled—at this hour of the night. She walked as fast as she could, somehow comforted by the lights burning in the surrounding apartment buildings, even at this ungodly hour. People were awake. People were preparing to start the day. I’mnot alone, she thought, ev
en though she hadn’t been out of the house at this hour since her high school prom, which she’d attended with the former Salvatore Di Napoli.

  She expected the platform to be empty, but there were several other men and women standing on it waiting for the next train to come in, some of them wearing what she had been advised to wear, blue jeans and sneakers, and—at least in the case of one woman whose coat was hanging open—a blue T-shirt like the one the clinic had given Teddy yesterday, and which she was also wearing today. Lettered onto the front of the shirt were the words:PRO -CHOICE. She unbuttoned her coat now, revealing the shirt, and smiled at the woman in greeting. The woman smiled back. Both of them looked up the track for any sign of an incoming train. Nothing yet. Teddy figured the ride downtown would take about forty-five minutes, most of it on elevated tracks before the train plunged underground at the Grady Street station in lower Riverhead. She was due at the clinic at five sharp.

  There was a scene in the movieViva Zapata! that Teddy never tired of seeing, even though the musical accompaniment that was an integral part of it was lost on her. It was the long passage where Zapata and his brother are marching to the capital, or wherever they’re going, this was Marlon Brando when he was young and handsome and Anthony Quinn when he was young and possibly even more handsome. And as they march along with a straggling little band of followers, both of them looking fiercely determined, peasants keep coming out of the hills to join them, and all of the peasants are wearing white trousers and shirts and big sombreros, and they keep pouring down out of the hills with machetes in their hands, joining this straggling little band of maybe ten, twenty people until finally there’s an army of tenthousand behind them, all of them in those identifying white trousers and shirts.

  It was like that on the subway this morning.

  As the train rattled its way through the dark on the overhead tracks, the cars began filling with people on their way to work, yes, but they also began filling with people wearing the clinic’s blue shirt with thePRO-CHOICE lettering on its front. Men and women alike, all of them wearing the shirt, until the little band of stragglers who had boarded the train at Teddy’s stop became an army in uniform by the time the train reached the College Street station on Isola’s Upper South Side. Well, not an army the size ofZapata’s , notthat overwhelming mass of white flowing down out of the hills to join him, no, nothing quite that grand or impressive, but impressive enough to Teddy’s eyes; at least a hundred people came up out of the College Street kiosk that morning, emerging from the dimness of the underground tunnel into the pale promising light of morngloam.

  Sunrise was still an hour away as they gathered at the clinic to await the onslaught of the most fanatic faction of the anti-abortion movement, a self-styled “rescue” group funded by reactionaries and led by a pair of Catholic priests who in the past several years had been jailed far more often than they’d offered the host. Their tactics had been explained to Teddy yesterday at the last of the training and orientation meetings. As she assembled with the others, she felt totally prepared for anything that might come today.

  She was wrong.

  “DID YOUR SONknow anyone named Timothy O’Laughlin?” Parker asked.

  That was the name of the dead writer the blues had found at three o’clock this morning, just about when Teddy’s alarm was starting to blink and shake her awake. It was now a little past eight, and Catalina Herrera was trying to get back to her typewriter. Her son had been buried yesterday, and it was time now to begin attacking the pile of manuscripts and correspondence that had accumulated on the small desk she’d set up near the kitchen window. Barefoot and wearing a black skirt and a white blouse recklessly unbuttoned some four buttons down from the top to expose the slopes of her generous breasts, she stood silhouetted in the window that now streamed early morning sunlight. It looked as if spring might actually have arrived at last. It was time to get on with her work. Time to try to get on with living her life again.

  “No, I don’ know thees name,” she said.

  “Timmo?” he said. “Does that ring a bell?”

  “No, I don’t know thees, too,” she said.

  The charming Spanish accent. Parker loved it. Listening to her voice, he smiled—though a third victim was certainly nothing to smile about.

  He and Kling had been called at home at twenty minutes past three this morning because the guy lying on the sidewalk near the graffiti-covered wall of what used to be the Municipal Fish Market in the northeast corner of the precinct had been shot twice in the head and once through the hand and then spray-painted afterward. The bullet through the hand was probably the result of his having thrown it up in self-defense, thinking perhaps he was Superman and could stop speeding bullets. Whether or notthree shots had been fired or merelytwo —with the same bullet going through the hand and then the upper lip—was a matter of conjecture. As had been the case with the previous two victims, there hadn’t been any spent cartridges or bullets recovered at the scene, so nobody knew what kind of gun had been used except that it definitely wasn’t an automatic, which would have spewed cartridge cases like cherry pits. Each of the victims had been shot at close range. The bullets had gone right on through, so either the techs weren’t doing their jobs right or else the shooter had picked up after himself, like a conscientious citizen scooping up dog doo. Gathering bulletsand cartridge cases if the gun had been an auto, bullets alone if it had been a revolver. A hunter and gatherer was the Graffiti Killer, as the tabloids had begun calling him.

  “Mrs. Herrera,” Parker said, “we now have…do you mind if I call you Catalina?” he said, pronouncing it “Cat-uh-leen-uh” and not the way she herself would have pronounced it, “Cah-tah-leen-ah.”

  “Cathy,” she said, surprising Kling.

  Parker blinked.

  “My friends call me Cathy,” she said.

  “Cathy, good,” Parker said, and nodded. “What I was saying, Cathy, is that we now have three victims of this person, including your son, which by the way I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral yesterday.”

  “De nada,”she said.

  So damn cute, the way they talked, he thought. The women.

  “But we were busy trying to get a line on the second one,” he said, “who doesn’t seem to fit the picture, although we found cans of spray paint in his house. I never heard of acloset graffiti writer, did you, Bert?” Parker asked, pulling him into it, showing with a grin what a jovial and well-meaning fellow he was, unlike other police detectives Cathy may have known. Kling did not enjoy being an accomplice. Parker wanted to hit on the woman, let him do it on his own time.

  “We found the paint in hiscloset , you see,” Parker explained, though Kling guessed little Cathy here didn’t know what a closetanything was, no less a closet graffiti writer. Still, Parker had explained his little joke, which showed his heart was in the right place. “But the guy’s a lawyer, the second one,was a lawyer, thirty-eight years old, it turned out, with a wife thirty-five. You don’t expect a person like that to be writing graffiti, do you?”

  “Of cours’ nah,” Cathy said.

  Holmes to Watson, Kling thought. Watson agreeing with the master sleuth’s theory. In an accent you could slice with a machete.

  “Your son never mentionedhis name, did he happen to?”

  “Wha’wass hees name?”

  God, Parker loved the way she talked.

  “Peter Wilkins,” he said.

  “No. I never heard this name before.”

  He was beginning to get bilingual, understanding every word she spoke. He wondered what she spoke in bed. He hoped she spoke Spanish. He wanted her to tell him all sorts of things in Spanish. Like how much she loved his cock in her Spanish mouth.

  “So your son never mentionedeither of them, is that right? What we’re looking for, Catalina,Cathy, is some kind of connection between the three of them, someplace we can hang our hats, is what we call it in police work,” he said, and smiled again.

  Jee-sus! Kling thought. />
  “I don’t know anything to help,” she said.

  It seemed clear to Kling that the woman had nothing further to contribute along these lines. The possibility was less than remote that her son had knowneither of the other two victims, one of them a lawyer, the other a veteran writer with a Criminal Mischief record. That’s what writing graffiti was called in the law books—Criminal Mischief. Three degrees of it.

  Crim MisOne was defined as:With intent to do so and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that one has such right, damaging property of another: 1. In an amount exceeding $1,500; OR 2. by means of an explosive. This was a Class-D felony punishable by sentences ranging from a one-year minimum in prison to a seven-year max, unless you happened to be a sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-old toddler, in which case you could be sent to a reformatory instead.

  The other two degrees of Criminal Mischief were determined by the value of the property damaged, more than $250 in the case of Crim MisTwo , a Class-E felony, and less than $250 in the case of Crim MisThree , a mere Class-A misdemeanor. A Class-E felony was punishable by a min of one and a max of four with the same reformatory provision for so-called minors. A Class-A misdemeanor was punishable by no more than a year in prison or a thousand-dollar fine.

  Kling was thinking that signs advising graffiti writers of the prison sentences they faced should be posted all over town.

  Parker was saying, “What I’d like you to do, Cathy—when you finish your work here, I don’t want to interfere with your work, I see you have a lot of work to do—I want you to make a list for me of all of your son’s friends, so I can look them up and see whether there’s a possibility here of one of them being the person responsible.”