Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “If one of them was wrapped around a woman, she’s not one of my people,” Laughton said. “My shelter’s exclusively for men. Nine hundred and twenty cots out there, all for men.”

  With nine hundred and twenty blankets on them, Meyer thought.

  “I run one of the best shelters in this city,” Laughton said. “Other shelters, you have rats running across the floor all night long, keeping the men awake, biting them. Not here at Temple. I run a good shelter.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Meyer said.

  “Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here, not in my shelter. The guards I have here make certain that nothing like that happens to the men here. I have a top-notch notch psychiatrist assigned here. The social workers I have here are among the best in the city. This is more than just three hots and a cot here, this is a shelter with a heart. I’m very proud of my shelter here.”

  “Any idea how these blankets got on those two people?” Meyer asked.

  Laughton looked at him as if he’d just made a disparaging remark about this shelter he was very proud of here. He was a man in his late forties, Meyer guessed, virtually as bald as Meyer himself, but with a ferocious-looking handlebar mustache compensating for the lack of hair anywhere else on his head. Some five feet eight inches tall, give or take. His jaw swollen where the tooth had been pulled. Fierce blue eyes studying Meyer now, trying to decide whether the police were here to make some kind of trouble for him.

  “Wedo have occasional thefts,” he said. “The men here aren’t the cream of society, you know. They come and go. Some of them—manyof them—have criminal records. Things occasionally stick to their fingers. Anything that isn’t nailed down, in fact. Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such—as I told you, the guards here are very good—but occasionally thingswill disappear.”

  “Blankets?”

  “Blankets, yes. Occasionally. In fact,some homeless people come in herejust to steal blankets. And bedding. Especially during the wintertime. And spring’s been so late coming this year.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, yes, we’ve had blankets stolen. Occasionally.”

  “Assuming these blanketswere stolen…”

  “Well, how else would they have left the premises?”

  “Assuming that to be the case then…”

  “Yes?”

  Impatiently.

  Meyer was taking up too much of his time, and besides he had a goddamn toothache.

  Patiently, Meyer said, “Is there any way you can tellwhen these blankets might have been stolen?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing about them that would distinguish…”

  “Nothing.”

  “Have you had any blanket theftsrecently ?”

  “I wouldn’t know. We take inventory at the beginning of each month. We won’t be taking inventory again until the first of April.”

  “What did your inventory show at the beginning of March?”

  “We’d lost something like fourteen blankets the month before.”

  “Fourteen blankets were stolen…”

  “Or lost…”

  “During February alone?”

  “Yes.New blankets, too.”

  “Arethese blankets…?”

  “That figure is low, by the way, when you compare it with other shelters in the city. But excuse me, Detective Meyer, why are you…?”

  “Excuseme , but arethese blankets new?”

  “Yes, I would expect so.”

  “You cantell they’re new?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What do you mean by new?”

  “We received an allotment at the beginning of the year.”

  “Then thereis a way of determining when they were stolen. Or lost.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose…”

  “When in January did you receive your allotment?”

  “Around the fifteenth.”

  “How many blankets?”

  “Fifty. To replace what had been stolen in the past quarter.”

  “Fifty blankets had been stolen in the previous three months?”

  “Roughly that many. I put in for fifty in replacement. That was a round number.”

  “So you’d lost…what would you say…approximately sixteen, seventeen blankets a month.”

  “About that many, yes.”

  “And the city sent you fifty new blankets to replace them.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of those blankets do you have left now?”

  “I told you. We don’t take inventory till the first of each month.”

  “How many blankets were stolen…or lost…in January, would you remember?”

  “Twelve.”

  “And fourteen in February, you said.”

  “Fourteen, yes.”

  “Twenty-six altogether.”

  “Yes.”

  “A little less than it was in the last quarter.”

  “I suppose it is, actually.”

  “Well, it’s only thirteen a month so far…”

  “That’s right, actually, yes.”

  “So there’s been a drop from the previous quarter.”

  “Yes, it would seem so.”

  “Even though spring’s been a long time coming.”

  “We can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know,” Laughton said. “There are nine hundred and twenty cots in this shelter, and our security is second to none. But our main concern, security-wise, is keeping the shelter drug-free, and protecting the men who come to us for help. But…excuse me, Mr. Meyer. Surely the theft of a few blankets isn’t worth all this time, is it? And these two people who were abandoned…well, surely this is an everyday occurrence.”

  “Not if one of them dies,” Meyer said.

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANGat four o’clock the next morning, Eileen was dead asleep. She fumbled for the phone in the darkness, lifted the receiver, turned on the bedside light, and saw snow falling outside her window.Snow again?

  “Burke?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Deputy Inspector Brady on the other end.

  “Meet me at three-ten South Cumberland,” he said.

  “Hit the hammer.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  He knew she didn’t have a siren in her personal car, he was merely expressing the urgency of the situation, hit the hammer. There was no traffic, anyway, at this hour on a Sunday morning, she made it to the scene in ten minutes flat. A crowd of police personnel was standing in the falling snow near the emergency service truck and the dozen or more motor patrol cars angled in against the curb. Inspector Brady was nowhere in sight. She spotted Tony Pellegrino among the mass of black rain slickers and hoods, short and wiry and wearing jeans and a blue windbreaker with the wordPOLICE lettered across its back in white. She walked over to him and asked him what the situation was.

  She was dressed much as Pellegrino was, jeans and the blue uniform windbreaker with the identifying word across the back, no hat, red hair glowing in the light of the overhead street lamp. You weren’t supposed to try kidding a hostage taker into believing you were anything but a cop. The wordPOLICE across the back of the jacket let the taker know exactly where he stood; this wasn’t a game here, this was all about people who were being held captive, there were lives at stake here.

  The situation here involvedtwo lives, if you counted the taker’s. The team’s motto was Nobody Gets Hurt; the taker’s life was as important to them as was the life of any hostage. Pellegrino told Eileen that what had happened here, the taker was this guy who lived with his brother and the brother’s wife…the sister-in-law…and slept in the room next door to theirs, just down the hall. What happened was he woke up in the middle of the night to go take a pee, and all at once he went bananas and pulled a gun and threatened to kill both his brotherand the wife…the sister-in-law…if the brother didn’t leave the apartment right that minute.


  “The brother went out of there like a shot,” Pellegrino said. “Called nine-one-one from the phone booth on the corner. The Boss is in the building already, working the door. He said you should go up the minute you got here.”

  The Boss was Inspector Brady.

  “What apartment?” she asked.

  “Four-oh-nine. You can’t miss it. There’s a hundred cops in the hallway.”

  “Thanks, Tony,” she said, and walked away from him through the lightly falling snow. She found Brady on the fourth floor, just coming away from the door as she moved through the knot of uniformed emergency service cops. Brady had turned fifty-four last month, a tall trim man with bright blue eyes, a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head. His nose was a bit too prominent for his otherwise small features; it gave his face a cleaving appearance. Like a ship under sail, parting the wave of blue uniforms in his path, he came toward Eileen and said at once, “A bad one.”

  “Tony filled me in,” she said, nodding.

  “Guy’s got the hots for his sister-in-law, plain and simple,” Brady said. “He heard them making love during the night and that set him off. Now the brother’s out of the apartment, he’ll either rape her or shoot her or both.”

  “Older brother, younger, what? The taker.”

  “Older. He’s thirty-two, the brother’s twenty.”

  “How old’s the woman?”

  “If you can call her that,” Brady said. “She’s only seventeen.”

  Eileen nodded.

  “Want to try the door?” he asked. “Be very careful. He may be on something, it’s hard to tell.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “How far’d you get with him?”

  “Nowhere,” Brady said.

  This was a big admission for him. In the eight months since she’d begun working for Brady, nothing had changed her opinion of him as an egotistical sexist who used women on the door only when he felt a situation absolutely demanded it. For all his bullshit about hoping to expand the team so that it would one day include more than the two women now on it, he kept replacing burned-out male negotiators with new male negotiators, and when Martha Halsted flunked out the first time she had a real shot at the door, he began training not another woman but a man. The way Eileen saw it, Brady felt nobody did the job as well as he did, maleor female. But he normally put a woman on the door only when the taker inside wasanother woman. It was rare that he trusted a woman to negotiate with amale taker. So why Eileen today? Was it because there was a potential rape victim in the apartment? Or was it because Jimmy had a hard-on and Brady was tossing him a juicy redhead? Some things in the police department never changed. She’d started the job as a decoy with Special Forces, and sometimes she felt like a decoy all over again. Nowadays, the guys on the job didn’t piss in a female cop’s locker anymore, but—

  “Hello,” she said, “I’m Detective Eileen Burke, I’m a police-department negotiator.”

  7.

  THE LETTER FROM THE DEAF MANhad been delivered to the squadroom the day before, but Carella didn’t get to see it till eightA .M. that Sunday morning, when a uniformed cop from downstairs dropped it on his desk together with a lot of other stuff, including an announcement for the Detectives’ Benevolent Association’s Easter Ball. Carella wished that all he had on his mind was Easter, with spring just here and the streets covered with slush.

  The letter was addressed to him.

  Plain white envelope, no return address front or back.Detective Stephen Louis Carella typed on the front of the envelope, and then87th Detective Squad and the Grover Avenue address. It was postmarked Friday, March 27. He knew who had sent the letter even before he tore open the envelope flap.

  There was a typewritten note attached to a single sheet of paper. The note read:

  The sheet of paper clipped to the note had obviously been photocopied from the book the Deaf Man had earlier recommended. It read:

  “IFEAR ANexplosion” Tikona said. “I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.”

  “I, too, share this terrible fear, my son,” Okino said. “But The Plain is vast, and though the multitude multiplies, it can know no boundaries here, it cannot be restrained by walls. Such was the reason The Plain was chosen by the elders for these yearly rites of spring.”

  “I know you haven’t read the book,” Carella told Brown, “well, the first chapter, actually, is all he recommended…”

  “Our local friendly librarian,” Brown said.

  “It’s all about these rites of spring, the first chapter. And what he says is that there are…”

  “Who’s this you’re talking about?” Brown asked. “The Deaf Man or the author?”

  His shoes were wet from having trudged through the slush from the subway station to the precinct. His mother had told him that when your feet got wet and cold you felt cold all over. He didn’t feel cold all over, he just felt wet in thefeet , and that made him irritated. When he was irritated, he scowled like a bear. He was not scowling at Carella, he was merely scowling at his wet shoes and his wet feet and this dumb weather for the end of March. Hadn’t comein like any damn lamb, either.

  “The author,” Carella said. “Arturo Rivera.”

  “And he says?”

  “He says that thismultitude gathers on this big open plain ringed by mountains….”

  “We don’t have any mountains, this city,” Brown said.

  “I know. This is another planet.”

  “Another planet, huh? Sometimes I think this cityis another planet.”

  “What I think is he may be calling our attention to acrowd , you know?” Carella said. “A multitude?”

  “The Deaf Man, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Using Rivera as his spokesman.”

  “So you think he’s planning something that has to do with a crowd.”

  “Yeah, in an open space,” Carella said. “This vastplain , you know?”

  “Noplains in this city, either,” Brown said. His wet feet were beginning to irritate him more and more. He wondered if he had a pair of clean socks in his locker.

  “What was that business about an explosion?”

  “He fears an explosion.”

  “Who, the Deaf Man?”

  “No, no…”

  “Then who? Rivera?”

  “No, this guy Tikona.”

  “Read that part out loud, will you?” Brown said.

  Carella cleared his throat and began reading.

  “ ‘I fear an explosion,’ Tikona said. ‘I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.’ ”

  “He fears an explosion ’cause the crowd’s getting too big, right?”

  “The multitude, right.”

  “So all we got to do isfind this multitude.”

  “This whole damncity is a multitude,” Carella said.

  “Find the multitude,” Brown said, “and then stop him from doing whatever it is he plans todo with the multitude.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said glumly.

  “Nobody said he’d make it easy,” Brown said.

  “He himself said so.”

  “No, Steve. He only saideasier. Noteasy. With him, nothing’s ever easy. What size socks do you wear?”

  “I RECOGNIZEyour obvious qualifications,” the Deaf Man was saying, “but the problem is you’re a woman.”

  “Some people might consider that a sexist attitude,” Gloria said.

  “It’s just that I’ve never seen a female garbage man.”

  “What’s garbage got to do with a good wheel man? I’m either a good wheel man, or I’mnot a
good wheel man. You knew I was a woman when you asked me to come for the interview. So I come here at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, whenmost people are in church, for Christ’s sake, and you tell me…”

  “I was expecting a differentsort of woman,” he said.

  He had not been expecting a thirty-two-year-old blonde with eyes the color of seaweed, some five feet nine inches tall and looking tall and slender and firm in a jump suit and high-heeled pumps. Sitting on the couch in his living room, facing Grover Park and a gunmetal sky. Oh to be in England, he thought, now that spring is here.

  “Whatsort of woman were you expecting?” Gloria asked, raising one eyebrow and hitting the word hard.

  “Someone more masculine,” he said. “Someone who might possibly pass for a man. I suppose I should have asked for a description on the phone, but fair employment practices seemed to preclude that,” he said, and smiled charmingly.

  He’s so full of shit, Gloria thought.

  But she wanted the job.

  “Someone more masculine, huh?” she said.

  “Someone who could pass for a truck driver,” he said. “Someone…beefier. With less refined features…”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Shorter hair…”

  “I can cut my hair.”

  “Yes, but you can’t gain forty pounds in the next six days.”

  “Is that when it’s going down?”

  “The fourth of April, yes.”

  “A Saturday,” she said, and nodded.

  “How do you happen to know that?”

  “I have this trick I do,” she said.

  “What trick?” he asked, his interest immediately captured.

  “You give me any date, and I can tell you what day of the week it falls on.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Secret,” she said, and smiled. “Have you got a calendar?”

  “Yes?”

  “Go get it.”

  “Sure,” he said, and walked over to his desk and opened the drawer over the kneehole, and took from it a leather-bound appointment calendar. Without opening it, he said, “Christmas. December twenty-fifth.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, “give me a hard one.”

  “Do Christmas first.”