Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “Sure, breaking into an apartment, opening a wall safe, like that. But the biggest thing I ever stole—I’m talking aboutsize now, physicalsize, not value—the biggest thing was a bronze lamp supposed to come from some Egyptian museum, it turned out it was as queer as a turnip, it brought me twenty bucks from my fence. This big bronze thing like an elephant. Twenty bucks, can you believe it? I nearly got a hernia carrying it out. But a garbage truck? I never stole a garbage truck in my life.”

  “Maybe you can just borrow one.”

  Another smile. Big fuckin joke here, stealing a garbage truck.

  “Big risk, a garbage truck,” Carter said, and gave him The Look again.

  “Yes. That’s why I’m willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars for this part of the job alone.”

  Carter swallowed.

  “What does therest of the job entail?” he asked.

  FOX HILLwas a town in Elsinore County on Sands Spit, some sixty-odd miles outside the city. The town had originally been named Vauxhall by the British, after the district of that name in the borough of Lambeth in London, but over the years the name had become Americanized—some might say bastardized—to its present form. The county had also been named by a British colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman. Nobody knew who had named Sands Spit.

  Fox Hill had been a sleepy little fishing village until as recently as forty years ago, when an enterprising gentleman from Los Angeles came east to open what was then called the Fox Hill Inn, a huge rambling waterfront hotel that had since fallen into different hands and been renamed the Fox Hill Arms. The building of the hotel had also been responsible for the building of a town around it, rather the way a frontier fort in the dear, dead days eventually led to a settlement around it. Fox Hill was now a community of some forty thousand people, thirty thousand of them year-round residents, ten thousand known alternately as “the summer people” or, less affectionately, “the Sea Gulls.”

  Herman Friedlich was a year-round resident.

  At five forty-fiveP .M. on that Friday, the twenty-seventh day of March, Friedlich called the Fox Hill Police Department to say that he’d left his 1987 smoky-blue Acura Legend coupe outside the Grand Union supermarket while he went inside for a bottle of milk, and when he came out the car was gone.

  The police officer to whom he’d reported this was Detective Sergeant Andrew Budd.

  “Was the car locked?” Budd asked.

  “No, I was just going in for a minute,” Friedlich said. “I got caught on the damn checkout line.”

  You jackass, Budd thought.

  6.

  THING SIL LIKED TO DO BESTwas work by the window. Sit by the window, look down at the street, watch the people going by, write his words about the people. He still lived in Diamondback, better apartment than he used to live in with his mother and three sisters when he was just coming along. Close to the uptown edge of the park here. Look out the window, watch the people, write about the people. Difference between a rock group, no matter how lofty they played, and a rap crew was that the rapper was a social commentator, the rapper was writing about the people, telling the people what it was like to beblack . You got some of your white rappers, theytried , man, they got the beat right and they got the wordsalmost right, but the protest was plastic, man, they didn’t know what it waslike .

  If you weren’t black, you didn’t know what it waslike to be black, you couldn’t even begin toimagine what it was like. So whatever you wrote sympathetic about being black, why this was suspect, man, because without the pain thing you just didn’t grab themain thing. Being black was all about pain. Striving to rise above the daily pain. Or giving in to the pain, letting it take over, letting it lead you to ways that were unproductive, man, the choice was always there. This was what he tried to write in his songs, how the people had inside them the power to rise above the pain,be something. So when he wrote something like…

  Dig the pig, man…

  Dig the big pig, man…

  See how he strut, man…

  Kickin yo butt, man.

  Wanna be a pig, man?

  Wanna join the force, man?

  Wanna take thelifeforce outta yo ownforce?

  Wanna kick some butt, man, wanna kiss some butt, man?

  Go put on theblue,man, cover up the black,man fo’ get that you a black man, juss go be a pig,man…

  When he wrote something like that, he wasn’t saying the police were no good, he was only saying that for a black man to join the police was for theblack man to become a traitor to his own people because it was the police holding down the people, it was the police looking the other way while the dealers did their thing on every street corner in every black hood in this city, looking the other way while the kids got poisoned and the fat fuckin wops in Sicily and the fat fuckin spics in Colombia got richer and fatter doing their thing.

  Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer in the world didn’t know how this thing worked. More cocaine in America now than there was vanilla ice cream, the nation’sfavorite flavor…

  You dig vanilla?

  Now ain’t that a killer!

  You say you hate chocolate?

  I say you juss thoughtless.

  Cause chocolate is the color

  Of the Lord’s first children

  Juss go ask the diggers…

  The men who find the bones

  Go ask them ’bout chocolate…

  Go ask them ’bout niggers…

  That was another one of his songs. Got up to seventeen on the charts, never went higher because they didn’t understand the archeological shit in it, the proof that the first man on earth was a black man, standing tall and proud a hundred light years from a gorilla. You got your kids dropping out of school in the seventh grade, the fuck they knew about scientists digging up the bones of the first man and he’s a black African like you and me.

  No pain back then.

  Just went around doing your thing, hunted, fished, picked berries from the bushes and plants from the ground, moved with your group from place to place, living off the land, no drug dealer standing on a street corner offering you goodies cheap, this was before pain was invented. Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer alive who didn’t know how the triangle worked. America was saturated with cocaine now, there was hardly room for anybody else to snort even another tiny littlespeck of cocaine up his nose or inhale another puff of crack, which was base cocaine, as if you didn’t know, man. Everybodywanting to do coke wasalready doing coke, just ask your kid sister. That’s why you could get a six-bit hit now, try to get new customers that way. He sometimes thought the entire country was one big fuckin crack house spreading from New York to L.A. and every place in between. Which is where the triangle came in. The Colombians needed new markets for their goods, so what better place to go than Europe? Spit Shine played a gig in London at the Palladium last fall, Sil asked one of the other musicians—a brother who lived in Bloomsbury, whereverthat was—asked him if there was any crack in London, the brother said the police here hadheard of it but they’d never actuallyseen it. The brother was on hashish. Heroin, man. Hoss was still the big thing in Europe.

  So that was the arrangement, that was the triangle. The Mafia was bringing in opium from the East and turning it into heroin, and the Colombian cartel was growing the coca plant and turning it into cocaine. So down the line all these ships arrive in Sicily and they offload cocaine and onload heroin. In Europe, the cocaine is turned into crack—look whatwe got, kiddies, a whole new thing for you to try along with democracy! And in the United States, a bag of H is sold for five slim ones, reviving a market that had begun to die when crack became all the rage. In no time at all, brothers and sisters would be begging for it all over again. Unless someone like Sil explained in his words that the only thing the wops and the spics had to offer the black man was contempt. The same contempt the Jew had for anyone who wasn’t lily-white vanilla. Sil wouldn’t be surprised if when they got to the bottom of the triangulation,
it turned out a Jew was running the whole show. Try to tellany white man about a black man’s pain. Try even explaining it to somebody black as you were, but with a name like Gomez or Sanchez, which took the curse off it, made it sound like you were descended from Spanish nobility instead of somebody carried here in chains on a slave ship. The pain. Try to explain it. Write about it.

  He wrote on a lined yellow pad, looking out his window. It was another sunny day like yesterday. Saturday morning, lots of people out there enjoying the sun, heading out to do their chores…

  Dealer standing there on the corner of Ainsley where it joined the park…

  People jogging or cycling in the park…

  Not too many whites ventured this far uptown in the park.

  His pencil was poised over the pad.

  He saw a black woman in jogging shorts and a tank top walk into the park and then begin running the moment she was inside the wall, almost as if a starter’s pistol had been fired.

  He began writing:

  Black woman, black woman, oh yo eyes so black,

  Tho yo skin wants color, why is that, tell me that.

  Why is that, black woman, don’t confuse me tonight…

  THEY HAD BURIEDPeter Wilkins at ten-thirty this morning, and now the funeral party was back in the three-story brownstone on Albermarle Street, partaking of the coffee, sandwiches, and cakes that relatives and neighbors had set out on the long dining-room table. There were perhaps two dozen people gathered in the living room when Kling arrived at a little before noon. He located Debra Wilkins standing in a circle of several other people, one of whom he determined was the minister who’d delivered the graveside eulogy and who was now modestly accepting compliments on how wonderful it had been.

  Debra’s green eyes were streaked with red, and her eyelids were swollen. She stood listening to the others, nodding, a pained, numbed look on her face. Kling caught her eye. Recognizing him, she came to him at once.

  “Have you…has there been any…?” she started, and he told her immediately that there hadn’t been any significant developments in the case, and he knew this was a bad time, but there were some questions he would like to ask her, if that was all right with her. Otherwise, he could come back some other time. She said now would be fine, and asked him if he would like a cup of coffee, something to eat. He told her No, thanks, this would just take a few minutes. They sat on chairs that had been arranged against the wall at the far end of the room. Everywhere around them there was the hushed conversation peculiar to these ritual gatherings. The people in this room were here less to honor the dead than to pay tribute to the living. Life goes on, these tribal meetings said. That was their essence and their importance. But the voices here were not raised in celebration; they were simply lowered in recognition. Kling, too, lowered his voice.

  “Mrs. Wilkins,” he said, “when I called you yesterday, you told me you’d never heard the name Timothy O’Laughlin, and you were positive he wasn’t anyone your husband had known. I’m beginning to think thereis no link between the victims, they were simply chosen at random, which is why I’d like to know a little more about where your husband actuallywent the night he was killed.”

  Debra nodded. This was still very difficult for her. He hated having to talk to her just now, but time was rushing by, and whoever had killed three people was still out there someplace.

  “You said he was going to a movie…”

  “Yes.”

  “Told you he was going to a movie…”

  “Yes.”

  “I checked the schedule for the theater you gave us, and the show he would have caught—if he left here at eight-thirty—the next show would have been at nine, and it would’ve let out at eleven. Coroner’s Office has estimated the postmortem interval…they have ways of determining the time of death, you see, I don’t even know how they figure it myself, and I’ve been a cop for a long time now. I hate to be talking about this, Mrs. Wilkins, but I have to, I hope you understand that.”

  “Yes, please don’t worry. I want to help in any way I can.”

  “Well, thank you, I appreciate that. But they can’t beexact about how many hours elapse since the time of death, even though they usually come pretty close. So when they say the time of death was around midnight, it could just as easily have been eleven, when the movie let out. The thing that keeps bothering me is why he went all the way over to Harlow Street, over there near the parkway. I asked the coroner if the body might have been moved…yes, they can determine that, too, in some instances,” he said, “don’t ask me how. It has something to do with the position of the body, the way the blood gathers in certain parts of the body, which—if the body is thenmoved and placed in another position—the earlier lividity, I think they call it, wouldn’t jibe with the new position. I’m not a doctor, I’m sorry, I just take for granted whatever they tell me on the autopsy report.”

  “I understand.”

  “But in this case, they weren’t able to tell whether the murder had taken place where your husband was found or whether he was transported there. There wasn’t much blood on the sidewalk, which there would’ve been if that was where he’d been shot, but it was raining all night, and it could’ve got washed away. In any case, they don’t know if that was the murder scene or not. The coroner couldn’t tell from just the autopsy, and the techs didn’t find anything at the scene that would have indicated the body was moved. So we’ve got to assume that’s where the murder was committed, which brings me back to why he went all the way over there to Harlow Street from Stemmler Avenue—in the pouring rain, no less.”

  “I can’t understand it,” she said.

  “He wasn’t carrying any paint when he left the apartment, was he?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t notice. I was in the bathtub when he left.”

  “Ah,” Kling said.

  “He poked his head in, said he’d be back a little after eleven, and I said okay, see you later, something like that, and he was gone. I was getting ready for bed, you see. I usually take a bath around eight-thirty, nine o’clock, and then get in bed and read till the news comes on at ten. I’m usually asleep by eleven.”

  “But not that night.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You told us you called the police at midnight….”

  “Yes, when Peter hadn’t come home.”

  “Were you waiting up for him?”

  “Yes. That is, I was in bed, but I knew he’d be coming home, so I wasn’tsleeping , if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, I meant awake. I didn’t mean sitting up in the living room or anything.”

  “I was awake, yes,” she said. “But in bed.”

  “And when hedidn’t come home, you called the police.”

  “Yes.”

  “At around midnight, you said.”

  “I think it wasexactly midnight. The clock was bonging. The one in the living room.”

  “Did you ever see those cans of paint in his closet? I mean, before we found them the other day.”

  “Never.”

  “Do you have your own closet?”

  “Yes.’’

  “Never hung anything in his closet? Put anything in his closet?”

  “Never.”

  “So those cans were as much a surprise to you as they were to us.”

  “A total surprise.”

  “He wasn’t working on any art project of any kind, was he?”

  “No. He didn’t have any inclinations along those lines.”

  “Or a woodworking project. Something he might have planned to paint later on.”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Kling said, “it’s hard to believe your husband was one of these writers…these graffiti writers…but I can’t think of anything else that would have taken him over to Harlow Street. You don’t have anyfriends on Harlow Street, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. That stretch near the highway approach isn’t a partic
ularly nice area.” He thought for a moment, looked at her, and said, “Mrs. Wilkins, I know my partner was a little clumsy about this the other day, but it’s something I have to ask you now. Do you have any reason to believe your husband might have been involved with another woman?”

  “A woman who lives onHarlow Street?” she asked, beginning to bristle.

  “A woman who lives anywhere,” Kling said levelly.

  “I have no reason to believe that,” Debra said.

  “Do you have any idea atall as to why he would have gone over to that wall on Harlow Street?”

  “None.”

  “Agraffiti -covered wall.”

  “I don’t know why he went there.”

  “In the rain.”

  “In the rain,” she repeated. “He told me he’d be coming home straight after the movie. He told me he’d be home a little after eleven. I don’t know how he ended up dead…in the rain…on that street. I just don’t know,” she said, and began crying.

  Kling waited.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I know how difficult…”

  “Debra?”

  The voice was soft, polite, seemingly unwilling to intrude. Kling turned. He saw a slender man some five feet eleven inches tall, wearing a brown suit and brown shoes, a white button-down shirt, and a striped gold-and-brown tie. Some thirty-five years old, Kling guessed. Unhandsome, his plain, craggy face somehow conveying a sense of dependability. He had a mustache, and he was wearing eyeglasses. Behind the glasses, his eyes were the color of the dark suit. It looked as if he, too, might have been crying. The look in his eyes certainly gave that impression. There was ineffable sadness there, unbearable grief. When he spoke again, it was in that same soft voice, as if he were whispering in church.

  “I have to go now, Debra,” he said.

  He extended both hands to her. Took her hands in his.

  “You know how sorry I am,” he said.

  She nodded.

  They embraced.

  She was crying again.