Mischief

by Ed McBain

  The telephone operator said that if they got caught, they should be forced to wear uniforms with stenciling that read I AM A VANDAL while publicly and under guard they cleaned off all the walls in the city.

  The obstetrician said that like Norman Mailer, he considered graffiti an art form with macho qualities, and aesthetic and political values. Besides, what ever happened to free speech in this country?

  The woman protesting pornography said that graffiti was a mild abuse when compared to the millions of women who became the victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault inspired by pornographic magazines.

  The construction worker said that anybody caught spraying buildingsshould be shot.

  The letter carrier said he had work to do.

  Parker agreed with the construction worker, but he couldn’t very well say this to Cathy because, after all, her sonhad been shot while spraying a building. He wasn’t even sure she had seen the afternoon paper, which painted a somewhat unflattering picture of young Alfredo Herrera, intimating that because he and his mother had come from a town called Francisco de Macoris—a place with a reputation for exporting drug dealers to this city and importing dope money back to the Dominican Republic—why then wasn’t it possible that Herrera himself had been part of the notorious Los Cubanos drug ring? Parker tended to agree that all spics were in some way related to the drug trade, but he couldn’t say this, either, because after all Catalina Herrera was herself a spic, even if she called herself Cathy.

  He decided instead to wave over at a man he’d met only briefly in court once when they were both testifying on the same case, a deputy inspector sitting in full regalia with three suits who looked important, too, all of them digging into the huge portions of steak and eggs before them.

  “Inspector,” Parker said, and nodded chummily, and the inspector looked back sort of bewildered, but returned the nod, and Parker said to Cathy, “Good friend of mine,” and then, “Would you care for something to drink before lunch?”

  EILEEN KEPT WAITINGfor the door to open again.

  She was still standing in the hallway outside apartment 409, just to the left of the doorframe. Inspector Brady had figured out a plan to get the girl out of the apartment. Once she was out, they would talk to Jimmy about putting down the gun. Meanwhile, the important thing was to get her out of there safely. Jimmy’s feelings about her seemed ambivalent at best; Michael Goodman, the negotiating team’s psychiatrist, figured he could jump either way. Tom, the younger brother, had vehemently denied ever having laid a hand on his wife; Brady was inclined to believe him. More likely was his story that the sounds of their lovemaking had infuriated Jimmy. If this was true, Goodman was fearful that Jimmy would act out the fantasy he himself had created, that of his sister-in-law as the victim of physical abuse. The girl was handcuffed to the bed in there and no one knew how long it would be before Jimmy moved into action, one way or another. Goodman felt rape was a distinct possibility.

  Eileen just wished she thought better of Brady’s plan.

  He had asked her to tell Jimmy—if and when he opened the damn door again—that her boss wanted only to protect the girl at all costs, which he was sure Jimmyalso wanted. Toward that end, he was willing to recommend an investigation of possible assault by the brother, and to turn young Lisa over to a social agency that would help her to construct a healthful way of dealing with the battered-wife syndrome. In the meantime, because Jimmy had embarked upon this present course of action—the inspector’s exact words—only to protect his sister-in-law fromfurther abuse, Brady would recommend dropping any charges against him.

  All of this was premised on the wife abuse being a reality. If, instead and in fact, Jimmy had been lusting for young Lisa all along and had finally been driven over the edge by the sounds of passion next door—which both Bradyand Goodman believed to be the actual case—then why would Jimmy come out of that apartment, why would he now be willing to release the object of his desire? None of it made any sense to Eileen.

  Jimmy had made no demands of them. He hadn’t asked for a limo to the airport and a jet plane to Rio, he hadn’t even asked for a cheeseburger and a bottle of beer. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone with the girl. This they were denying him. He had threatened to kill the girl if they did not leave him alone with her. She doubted if he really planned to do this; he was, after all, still talking to them. But she couldn’t see how the inspector’s offer in any way jibed withJimmy’s stated wishes. Wouldn’t it be better, not to mention safer, if they offered to leave him alone with the girl once she wasout of the apartment? Promise him the honeymoon suite at the nearest hotel, just get them both the hell out of there.

  You weren’t supposed to lie to them, you weren’t supposed to say I’ll get you this or that and then not deliver while there were still hostages in there. But this would be different—or so she told herself—this would be saying, Look, you come out of there with the girl, we’ll deliver you in a limo to such and such a luxury hotel, where a room’s been reserved for you and Lisa, you can go there to talk this over, work something out, what do you say? Nab him the minute he walked out of the apartment. Provided he first put down the gun. That had to be part of the deal. First you put down the gun. Then you come out with the girl. Nobody gets hurt. We leave you alone with her to work it out. No gun. That’s what you want, anyway, isn’t it? To be left alone with the girl?

  Georgia Mowbry was coming down the hall toward her. Brady’s top female negotiator, on the job long before Eileen joined the team. Was he pulling her from the door? Turn it over to someone more experienced? She hoped not. Georgia was a big rangy woman who’d recently frizzed and bleached her hair a sort of honey-blonde color. She was wearing jeans and the same blue department jacket Eileen was wearing. Stopping to say hello to one of the E.S. men, she exchanged a few words with him, and then continued down the hall to where the door to 409 was still adamantly closed.

  “Lieutenant wants to know if you need anything,” she said.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Cup of coffee, anything?”

  “Thanks, I’m okay, Georgia.”

  “How about the ladies’ room? You want to go down the hall, I can…”

  Both women heard the click of the lock. They both turned toward the door. It opened a crack. The night chain caught it. What happened next happened so quickly that neither of them even had time to catch her breath. There was suddenly the blunt muzzle of a pistol in the crack between door and jamb, and then there was a sudden flash of yellow at the muzzle, and the shocking sound of the gun’s explosion, and the bullet took Georgia in the right eye and sent her flying backward into the corridor. Moments later, unconscious, she began vomiting.

  THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’Sdeputy chief surgeon was a woman named Sharyn Cooke. The unfortunate spelling of her name was due to the fact that her then sixteen-year-old, unwed mother didn’t know how to spell Sharon. This same mother later put Sharyn through college and then medical school on money earned scrubbing floors in white men’s offices after dark. Sharyn Cooke was black, the first woman of her color ever to be appointed to the job she now held.

  Her skin was the color of burnt almond, her eyes the color of loam. She wore her black hair in a modified Afro, her high cheekbones and generous mouth giving her the look of a proud Masai woman. She had turned forty this past October fifteenth, birth date of great men—and women, too—and was still getting accustomed to the fact. At five-nine, she always felt cramped in the new compact automobile she’d bought, and was constantly adjusting the front seat to accommodate her long legs. She was fiddling with the seat again on her way home from church that Sunday at twelve-twenty, when the police radio erupted with the words “Cop shot, cop down, confirmed shooting, going to Buenavista!” She hit the hammer and slammed her foot down on the accelerator. A moment later, her beeper went off. She lifted it from the seat, glanced at the number calling, punched it into her car phone, hit the SEND button and—still racing through the streets o
f Isola at seventy miles an hour—got Deputy Inspector Brady.

  “Yes, hello, Inspector,” she said.

  “Doc,” he said. “I’ve got a cop shot.”

  It was common knowledge in the department that the commander of the hostage negotiating team had lost his very first female negotiator to a woman who was wielding a meat cleaver. There’d been a hell of a fuss downtown over the fatal string of events—one of the taker’s kids dead even before the negotiating team got there, then a police officer killed, and then the taker herself killed when the E.S. stormed the door. For a while, the entire program was in jeopardy, all the hard work Chief McCleary had done getting it started, all the advances Brady had made when he took over, everything almost went up the chimney in smoke. Took Brady a long time to get over it. Even when he felt confident that the program wouldn’t be scratched, it was forever before he put another woman on the team. There were two women working for him now, an old pro—well, thirty-six years old—named Georgia Mowbry, and Eileen Burke, a new addition.

  What had happened in the building at 310 South Cumberland was almost a replay of what had happened all those years back when Brady lost Julie Gunnison to a murderer with a cleaver in her hands. TheE.S. cops had rushed the door the moment the guy inside fired at Georgia. They asked no questions. They knocked the door off its hinges and then six of them opened fire simultaneously with their heavy-caliber guns, blowing the guy halfway across the apartment. In the bedroom, they found his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law handcuffed to the bed and bleeding from two bullet wounds in her chest. She was dead. Probably had been dead long before the negotiating team even got there.

  Hostage dead, taker dead, police officer critically wounded.

  Almost a replay.

  Except that back then, the police officer had died, too.

  Brady didn’t want to lose Georgia Mowbry now.

  He told Sharyn to make damn sure they didn’t lose her.

  Sharyn told him she’d make sure everybody did the best job possible. She herself was a board-certified surgeon—which meant she’d gone through four years of medical school, and then five years as a resident surgeon in a hospital, after which she’d been approved for board certification by the American College of Surgeons. She still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief she worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week in the Chief Surgeon’s Office for an annual salary of $68,000. In this city, some twenty to thirty police officers were shot every year. Part of Sharyn’s job was to make certain these injured officers received the best possible hospital care.

  Georgia was in coma when Sharyn arrived at Buenavista Hospital at twelve-thirty-two that afternoon. She strode into the emergency room, identified herself, and then asked, “Who’s in charge?”—the way she always did. The brass hadn’t yet assembled. They would be here later, she knew, everyone from the Commish on down if this turned out to be a serious one. For now, there was a battery of nurses, the trauma team, a doctor named Harold Adderley, who introduced himself as the chief resident surgeon, and a junior resident surgeon named Anthony Bonifacio.

  Adderley told her that Detective Mowbry had been shot in the right eye, the bullet exiting on the right lateral side of the skull. X rays showed bullet fragments in the brain and fracture on the right side of the skull. She’d been sedated with phenobarbital, and they were administering Decadron intravenously to prevent brain swelling. They were now waiting for her blood pressure and vital signs to stabilize before they did a CAT scan. Adderley expected this would be in the next ten to fifteen minutes.

  “Is the O.R. ready for her?” Sharyn asked.

  “We’ll move her in as soon as we get the results.”

  “Who’s standing by?”

  “Pair of neurosurgeons, an ophthalmologist, and a plastic surgeon.”

  “How does the eye look?” Sharyn asked.

  “Bad,” Adderley said.

  BERT KLINGwas sitting in his pajamas at the small round table in his tiny kitchen, eating bran flakes with strawberries that had cost him an arm and a leg at the Korean market around the corner, listening to music on the radio, when the news came on at one o’clock that Sunday afternoon. An announcer said that a police officer had been seriously wounded not half an hour ago…

  Kling glanced up from his bowl of cereal.

  …and was now in critical condition at Buenavista Hospital.

  He looked at the radio.

  “The officer, a member of the hostage negotiating team…”

  He put down his spoon.

  “…was shot in the head while negotiating with a man inside an apartment on Cumberland Avenue.”

  Eileen, Kling thought.

  Don’t let it be her, he thought.

  “In Majesta this morning,” the announcer said, “two young men flying pigeons on a rooftop…”

  He got up from the table at once, turned off the radio, went into the bedroom, picked up the receiver from the bedside phone, and immediately dialed Buenavista, the best hospital in the vicinity of Cumberland. They’d have taken her there in a patrol car with the siren screaming, a radioed 10-13 alerting any other car or beat officer on the route to block traffic, expedite transport to the hospital, and provide a motor escort where possible. Nobody knew how to take care of their own like cops.

  “Buenavista Hospital, good afternoon,” a woman said.

  “This is Detective Bert Kling,” he said, “Eighty-Seventh Precinct. A shooting victim was just brought in, an officer on the hostage negotiating…”

  “One moment, please.”

  He waited.

  “Emergency Room,” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes, this is Detective Bert Kling, I’m looking for information on the shooting victim that was just brought in.”

  “Which shooting victim did you want?” the man asked, making it sound as if adozen of them were lying around there.

  “This one’s a police negotiator,” Kling said.

  “You’ll have to talk to your own people about that,” the man said abruptly, and hung up.

  Kling looked at the phone receiver. He put it back on its cradle, took off his pajamas, and—without bothering to shower or shave—pulled on a pair of Jockey shorts, jeans, a T-shirt that had the words 87TH PRECINCT SOFTBALL TEAMlettered on the front in green, a pair of loafers without socks, and an overcoat, and then immediately left the apartment.

  THE FIRST PERSONhe saw when he walked into the waiting room was Eileen Burke. He went to her at once.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  In that brief exchange, any bystander would have known immediately that these two had once been lovers.

  “I thought it was you,” he said. “I came right over.”

  Confirming it.

  “Georgia Mowbry,” she said.

  “How bad is it?”

  “I think it’s pretty bad.”

  There were other police officers in the waiting room. First Deputy Commissioner Anderson and Chief of Detectives Fremont were standing near the nurse’s station, talking earnestly to Inspector Brady. The First Dep was wondering out loud what they should put out to the media. He was concerned because the injured police officer was a woman. He wanted to make certain they didn’t get any negative feedback about placing female officers in extremely dangerous situations. After recent disclosures of what had happened to women members of the armed forces during Desert Storm, everybody was suddenly wondering whether women could cut the mustard. This was why they hadn’t yet released the officer’s name. Georgia Mowbry was a wife and a mother. If the department wasn’t careful, the media would have a field day with this one. They were still wondering what to do when Adderley came into the room, Sharyn at his side. He didn’t have to signal for attention. All eyes turned to him the moment he made his entrance.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, and then, seeing that there were women present as well, “ladies, we now have the results of the CAT scan, and I’d like to pass those on to you. There
’s a bullet wound and concomitant skull fracture in the right temporoparietal region. The orbit of the eye was blown out, there’s orbit fracture and hematoma in the orbit. The eye itself has collapsed. At the moment, it’s hanging by the optic nerve and some minor blood vessels in the canal. The scan gave us a good blueprint, and Detective Mowbry will be moved into the operating room for craniotomy as soon as she’s been prepped. I think that’s everything, unless Dr. Cooke has something to add.”

  “I just wanted to say that Dr. Adderley and I will be joining the others in the O.R. as soon as we’re finished with the briefing here,” Sharyn said. “I must caution you,” she said, and hesitated. “This is a hazardous procedure, it might be touch and go all the way.”

  Touch and go, Eileen thought.

  “How long will the operation take?” Brady asked.

  “Depends,” Sharyn said. “Five, six hours, wouldn’t you say?” she asked Adderley.

  “At least,” Adderley said.

  “What are her chances?” the First Dep asked.

  “In a trauma of this sort, all bets are off,” Adderley said.

  “Let me put it this way,” Sharyn said. “Withoutthe surgery, her chances are nil.”

  Kling was staring at her.

  T/P/O meant Time and Place of Occurrence.

  MOS meant Member of the Service.

  GSW meant Gun Shot Wound.

  VS meant Vital Signs.

  By the time this report was filed, Georgia Mowbry had already been on the operating table for three hours.

  THEY HAD REMOVEDa portion of her skull to allow for expansion of the brain. The pistol Jimmy had used first on his sister-in-law and next on Georgia was a .22 caliber Llama. It could have been worse; he could have used a .357 Magnum. But the trauma was severe nonetheless, and in all such cases blood rushes to the injured area, causing swelling that, if it is not decompressed, can result either in death or irreparable damage to the brain. This was one of the risks Adderley hadn’t been willing to discuss.