Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “Not me,” Hawes said.

  “You fuzz then?”

  “Sure,” Hawes said and rolled his eyes.

  Gleason studied him, still not certain.

  “Lydia brace you yet?” he asked.

  “Who the fuck’s Lydia?”

  “The tattooed lady.”

  “Guy in army undershorts?”

  “Queer as a fuckin geranium.”

  “He told me I was in his cot.”

  “Hewishes .”

  Hawes began walking away. Gleason fell in beside him again. “I’m here all the time,” he said. “How come I never seen you here before?”

  “I like it better on the street,” Hawes said.

  “What street? What’s your corner?”

  “Lewis and North Pike.”

  “Then what you doin herenow ?”

  “I came south for the winter.”

  “Too bad it’s already spring, man.”

  “Too bad it’s none of your fuckin business,” Hawes said.

  “Yousure you ain’t fuzz?” Gleason asked.

  Hawes turned to him, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “Say it just one more time, man.”

  Gleason nodded.

  “I think you are,” he said, and walked off.

  THE CLUBwas called Eden’s Acre.

  It opened for business at twelve noon, at which time free lunch was served in what was called the Snake Pit. Chloe didn’t start work till around ten each night, and then she worked straight through till four in the morning, when the club closed. On a good night, she averaged something like a hundred and fifty bucks. A lot of the girls made twice that amount. But Chloe wasn’t doing hand jobs in the Pit.

  The first thing you saw when you walked into Eden was a stage shaped like a half-moon on the left side of the room. Flanking the stage on either side was a giant television monitor showing pornographic movies in full color. Some ten to twelve live girls in various stages of undress were dancing on the stage. Eden claimed that a hundred girls danced for the club, which was true. A hundred girlsdid work here, but there were never a hundred girls in the place all at once. Instead, there were four shifts: noon to four, four to eight, eight to midnight, and midnight to four. The girls could work whichever shifts or combinations of shifts they wanted, three or even four shifts a day if they so chose. Usually, most of the girls worked some six hours a day, overlapping one shift into another. The busiest shift was the eight to midnight. Sometimes on the eight to midnight, there were forty or fifty girls milling around the place topless.

  The club advertised itself as a totally nude club, but you never saw anyone strolling around bare-assed here. What the girls did, they tugged aside the leg holes of their panties while they were dancing, exposing their genitals to the men sitting at the bar drinking nonalcoholic drinks at five bucks a throw plus tip. In this city, you couldn’t serve alcoholic drinks in a so-called totally nude club. The waitresses were quick to tell you that they worked on tips here. The dancers didn’t have to tell you because you could see the bills tucked into the waistbands of their bikinis or, if the girls were wearing garter belts and sheer silk stockings, the bills were visible inside the stockings, where men tucked them while simultaneously copping a feel of sweating naked flesh.

  The stage was some twenty feet deep, which gave the girls plenty of room to maneuver from back to front where the half-moon became a bartop flanked by those huge television screens flashing men and women in various compromising positions. The girls danced right onto the bar top, gyrating into the faces of the customers, shaking their silicone breasts and tugging aside their panties to show the real thing, quite often shaved. All of the dancers on the stage were available for private one-on-one sessions in the Snake Pit. Little Lucite holders spaced along the bar top advised:

  Tickets cost ten dollars for three minutes, twenty dollars for seven minutes, and so on. For fifty dollars, you could be alone with the dancer of your choice for a full twenty minutes. The way it worked, the dancers on the bar top wiggled and jiggled in your face while you kept slipping dollar bills into their panties or stockings, and when they took their break they circulated around the room, working it, sidling up to you and saying Hi, mind if I join you, and pulling up a chair. A waitress came over very quickly, asking if you’d like to buy the lady a cocktail—they called them cocktails even though there wasn’t any booze in them—and this would cost you five bucks plus the tip, of course, and the girl would climb onto your lap and wiggle around there, sipping at her drink and chatting you up for a while before she asked if you’d like to go back to the Pit with her. If you said Yeah, that sounds nice, she’d lead you over to a cash register where you then purchased your ticket or tickets and then you went back with her to this dimly lighted room some twenty feet wide by thirty feet long.

  One side of the room—the side on which you entered—was entirely open except for two dozen or more plastic shrubs and trees lined up in a double row where the wall might have been. Through the fake leaves and fronds and stalks you could still see the stage and the girls dancing on it and the monitors displaying fellatio and cunnilingus and other refined sexual acts while you were back there in the Pit enjoying your one-on-one.

  In the corner to your right as you came in, a fully clothed man and a girl wearing only a bra, panties, and spike heels sat at a card table. The dancer you’d chosen handed your ticket or tickets to the man—the tickets rather resembled utility bonds, though they were longer and narrower—and he scribbled her initials on the back of each ticket, and then she came over to you, smiling, and took your hand again. There was plush carpeting on the floor of the room, and the carpeting continued up from the floor to cover the banquettes that lined the other three sides of the room. Fastened to the floor at spaced intervals in front of the banquettes were carpet-covered platforms some three feet square and a foot and a half high. If you were sitting on the banquette, a girl dancing on one of these platforms had her crotch virtually level with your face.

  For ten dollars, the girl danced on the platform for three minutes, first taking off her bra top, and then lowering her panties for you more recklessly than she had on stage. This was theTABLE TOP DANCING promised in the little Lucite holders outside. Twenty dollars bought seven minutes ofCLOSE DANCING, which required the man at the card table to strategically place three or four of the fake plants and trees around you and the girl on the platform so that you could nuzzle her breasts and clutch her buttocks and kiss her nipples if you were so moved. For twenty minutes ofDIRTY DANCING, you and the girl moved to the far end of the room, where you were surrounded by a virtualjungle of plastic plants that thoroughly screened you from view. You sat on the banquette, the girl sat on the platform before you, unzipped your fly, slid your penis out of your trousers, and masturbated you to climax.

  So far, Chloe Chadderton hadn’t done any dirty dancing, even though she knew this was where the real money was. The trouble with the three-minute or seven-minute stints was that you had to do alot of them to make any money. A girl’s take was half the price of the ticket. Five bucks on a ten-dollar ticket, ten bucks on a twenty-dollar ticket, and so on, all the way up the line. You did a three-minute dance, you got five bucks plus tip, which was usually a deuce, although some cheap bastards slipped you a single. But then maybe it’d beanother half hour before some other guy wanted to go back with you, so if you made twenty, thirty bucks an hour, that was a lot.

  On the other hand, if you talked some guy into the dirty dancing, you got half of the fifty, which was twenty-five first crack out of the box, plus he usually tipped another ten or sometimes even twenty, from what the girls told her, which meant in twenty minutes a girl could make something like forty bucks for a mere hand job. So even if you did onlyone of those in an hour, you multiplied that by six hours, which was how long Chloe worked each night, and you went home with close to two-fifty for a night’s work, which was a hell of a lot better than the five and dime, Jimmy Dean.

  Tonight, as Chloe
stood on the platform doing a seven-minute close dance for a white Yuppie wearing a three-piece suit and sweating profusely as he touched her breasts and her hips and her thighs and tried to slip his hand into the panties low on her crotch, her mind was a hundred miles away. Silver had called her this afternoon, to ask her to dinner tonight. She’d told him she was busy. He’d said, “How about tomorrow night then?” She said she had another date, but maybe she could break it. She’d cornered Tony Eden né Ederoso sitting at his card table in the Pit the minute she’d come in tonight, asked him if he could do without her tomorrow. Most times, there were plenty of girls ready to work the eight to midnight, but Tony didn’t like to find himself in a position where there’d be a hundred guys in the place and only a handful of dancers. He said he’d let her know what it looked like later on tonight. Ten minutes ago, he told her it’d be okay.

  First thing tomorrow morning, she’d call Sil, tell him it was okay for dinner.

  “And by the way,” she’d say, “when do you think I’ll be getting my check?”

  He’d promised her twenty thousand for the rights to “Sister Woman,” but so far she hadn’t seen a nickel. The big concert in the park was scheduled for this coming weekend. His crew would be performing the song then, but meanwhile no bread. Until his call asking her to have dinner with him, she’d thought this was a strictly business thing, lawyers’d draw up the papers, she’d sign them, the check would change hands, good luck and goodbye. Now a dinner invitation. But still no check. She wondered if dinner was some kind of stall. But he wouldn’t just do the song withoutpaying her for it, would he? Wouldn’t that be dangerous for a group as well known as Spit Shine? She’d talk to him about the check tomorrow morning. The check was her way out of this. Before it got too late.

  “Careful, man,” she told the Yuppie. “I don’t dance dirty.”

  AT SIX-THIRTYthat morning, the first of the shelter’s hot meals was served. It consisted of orange juice, coffee, scrambled eggs with bacon, two slices of white bread, and a pat of butter. The eggs were somewhat runny, but otherwise breakfast was pretty good. Somewhat better than jail-house grub, somewhat worse than what Hawes used to eat when he was in the navy. The meals were served in the big dining hall on the second floor of the armory. Upstairs, fluorescent lighting bathed the tables and benches. Later on in the day, the windows would stream natural light that would be denied to the level below by the new floor installed when the place was turned into a shelter. Once upon a time, the armory had been a wide open space where reserve soldiers drilled. Now, it was a two-level sanctuary for the homeless. It was estimated that a third of those men and women had mental problems. The man with the crazy eyes was sitting opposite Hawes at the table.

  “So how do you like it here?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Hawes said.

  “Good grub, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jerry Hudson.”

  “I’m Frankie. You got to be careful here, Jerry.”

  Hawes nodded.

  “Lots going on here, you got to be careful.”

  “Like what?” Hawes asked.

  “Dope, all kinds of shit. They look the other way. The guards. The psychologist is crazy, did you know that? The social worker, too. They’re all crazy here.”

  Yep, Hawes thought.

  “They got a ring here.”

  “Um-huh.”

  “They steal things,” Frankie said.

  “Who does?”

  “The guards.”

  “What do they steal?”

  “All kinds of things. Food. Medicine. Soap. Toothpaste. Blankets. Everything,” Frankie said.

  9.

  APRIL FOOLS’ DAYcame in with a spectacular sunrise over the city’s rooftops, but by eight o’clock on that first day of the month, the sky was already gray and menacing, and by nine it was raining again. Some people maintained that the choice of this particular date for the playing of pranks had something to do with the vernal equinox, when Old Mother Nature impishly playedweather tricks on mere mortals. Whatever the origin, All Fools’ Day, as it was alternately called, had been celebrated for centuries all over the world—and today it was raining. Again.

  And today, again, another of the Deaf Man’s letters was delivered by hand to the muster desk downstairs. The messenger was a sixteen-year-old kid cutting high school classes. He told Sergeant Murchison that a tall blond guy with a hearing aid had given him ten bucks to take the envelope in here and hand it to the fat guy behind the desk. Murchison told him to get the hell out of here, and then he sent one of his patrolmen upstairs with the envelope.

  Meyer and Hawes had begun a hastily conceived surveillance of the shelter the night before, some fifteen hours after the guy with the crazy eyes had told Hawes about all the nefarious goings-on there. But despite Frankie’s grave warnings, they’d observed nothing out-of-the-way. No square shields leaving the building carrying heaps of blankets or cartons of soap. They planned to continue sitting the place tonight, despite the rain. There was not a cop alive who liked surveillance, especially when it was raining.

  Meyer was telling a joke when the patrolman walked in.

  “This guy is giving a lecture on supernatural phenomena,” he said, his blue eyes already twinkling in anticipation. “And when he finishes the lecture he asks the crowd if any of them have ever been in the presence of a ghost. The hands go up, and he counts them, and he says, ‘That’s about right, I usually get a response of about fifty percent to that question. Now how many of you who just raised your hands have ever beentouched by a ghost?’ The hands go up again, and he counts them, and says, ‘That’s about right, too, sixteen, seventeen percent is what I usually get. Now how many of you have ever hadintercourse with a ghost?’ Well, this old guy in his nineties raises his hand, and the lecturer asks him to please come up to the stage, and the guy dodders to the front of the auditorium, and climbs the steps, and the lecturer says, ‘Sir, this is really astonishing. I give these lectures all over the world, and this is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who’s actually hadintercourse with a ghost.’ The old man says, ‘What? Would you say that again, please?’ And the lecturer yells, ‘THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’VE EVER MET ANYONE WHO’S ACTUALLY HADINTERCOURSE WITH A GHOST!’ and the old guy says, ‘Oh, excuse me, I thought you said intercourse with agoat !’”

  “That’s a Deaf Man joke for sure,” Brown said, laughing.

  Which was exactly when the patrolman walked in with the letter.

  No one bothered worrying about fingerprints anymore; they’d gone that route with the Deaf Man in the past, and it was a fruitless one. The patrolman handed the envelope to Carella, to whom it was addressed, and then hung around to see what this lunatic was up to this time; word was spreading around the precinct that the Deaf Man was back. Carella tore open the flap, took out a note stapled to another sheet of paper, and read the note first:

  The larger sheet of paper had obviously been photocopied from Rivera’s book. It read:

  FROM WHERE ANKARAstood on the rock tower erected to the gods at the far end of the vast plain, he could see the milling throng moving toward the straw figure symbolizing the failure of the crop, the frightening twisted arid thing the multitude had to destroy if it were to strangle its own fear. The crowd moved forward relentlessly, chanting, stamping, shouting, a massive beast that seemed all flailing arms and thrashing legs, eager to destroy the victim it had chosen, the common enemy, a roar rising as if from a single throat, “Kill, kill,kill!”

  “He’s gonnakill somebody,” Brown said.

  “Somebody in acrowd ,” Meyer said.

  “On a vastplain ,” Carella said.

  “Either that or he’s trying to fool us again,” Hawes said.

  “Try not to be fooled this time,” Carella quoted.

  “You know what they call him in France, don’t you?” Meyer asked.

  “Who? The Deaf Man?”

  “No. The person who gets f
ooled. On April Fools’ Day. They call himpoisson d’ avril .”

  “I thought you didn’t speak French,” Brown said, remembering his Haitian.

  “My wife does,” Meyer said, and shrugged.

  “What’s that mean, anyway?” Hawes asked.

  “April fish.”

  “You think something big’s gonna happen outside today?” Brown asked. “Something with a huge crowd ready to explode?”

  “A crowd ready tokill, ” Hawes said.

  “Let’s check the newspaper,” Carella said.

  “Go brush your teeth,” Meyer told Hawes.

  They checked the paper.

  There were no advertisements for any big outdoor event happening that day.

  Good thing, too.

  It would have been washed out.

  APRIL FOOLS’ DAY.

  Raining to beat the band.

  The Romans used to celebrate something called the Festival of Hilaria, which somewhat resembled it. But that was on the twenty-fifth of March. In India, too, there was a festival called Holi, during which similar high jinks occurred before its conclusion on the thirty-first of March. Here in America, here in this city, the jokes started early.

  The city for which these men worked was divided into five separate geographical sections. The center of the city, Isola, was an island, hence its name: “isola”means “ island” in Italian. In actual practice, however, theentire city was casually referred to as Isola, even though the other four sections were separately and more imaginatively named.

  In Isola that morning, a seventy-six-year-old priest named the Reverend Albert J. Courter of the St. Mary of Our Sorrows Church on Harrington and Morse was wearing clerical garb and waiting for the J train on the Morse Street platform when he was suddenly attacked by two men who stole his wallet, his rosary, and a medal identifying him as a member of the Order of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers.

  The first of the men said, “Good morning, Father,” as the priest came up the steps to the platform. The next thing the priest knew, another man grabbed him in a choke hold from behind, causing him to lose consciousness for several moments. While he was lying on the platform, they began ripping his pockets. He regained consciousness just as they were running off.