Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you gone a lot? Out of the apartment, I mean.”

  “I walk a lot,” she said. “I’m still learning the city, you see. I came here from Pittsburgh four years ago, but I was just beginning to know it when Peter…when the…when he…he got killed.”

  “I wonder if we can take another look at those paint cans,” Kling said.

  “I threw them out,” she said.

  “Why?” he said, surprised.

  “They…reminded me that Peter had a secret life, something I knew nothing about. I couldn’t stand looking at them any longer.”

  “When did you throw them out?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “I left them in the basement. We have a man…”

  She caught herself. She could no longer use the word “we” when discussing her family. Her husband was dead. Now it was the singular. I. She avoided that, too.

  “A handyman comes in three times a week. We leave…”

  It could no longer be avoided.

  “I leave things down there for him to get rid of.”

  “To get rid of how?”

  “Some things he puts out with the garbage. The rest he carts off himself.”

  “Where is he now? Your handyman?”

  “I saw him outside just a little while ago. Working in the yard.”

  “I don’t see what’s so important about those cans,” Parker said, “you should be bothering Mrs. Wilkins about them.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know you’d need them.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Parker said. “Mrs. Wilkins, I’m going to leave you my card. If you remember anything you think we should know…if, for example, anything about the handwriting rings a bell…we’ll be leaving this with you, by the way, it’s just a copy…you call me, okay? I’ll be here in a minute,” he said, and grinned like a shark.

  “Thank you,” Debra said, and accepted the card.

  “There’s just one more thing,” Kling said.

  She looked up from the card.

  “When we saw Mr. Colbert yesterday, he mentioned that your husband had left a will….”

  “Yes?”

  “You know about the will, do you?”

  “Yes?”

  “I know it hasn’t been probated yet….”

  “Now that…the…the funeral is over and I…”

  The lip quivering again, the eyes beginning to well with tears.

  “I plan to do that tomorrow,” she said.

  “Then…if the will’s going to be made public, anyway,” Kling said, “can you tell us who the beneficiaries are?”

  “There’s only one beneficiary,” she said. “I’m the sole beneficiary.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You have my card,” Parker said, and winked at her.

  In the hallway outside, Kling said, “Let’s go talk to that handyman.”

  “Why?” Parker said.

  “She cries too much.”

  “For Christ’s sake, her husband gotwhacked last week!”

  “And she’s his sole goddamnbeneficiary .”

  Parker looked at him.

  “How come she never saw those cans in his closet?” Kling asked.

  “She told you. She didn’tgo in his closet.”

  “Didn’t see him carrying them into the house, either, huh?”

  “You heard her, she’s out a lot. What are you saying, Bert? You sayingshe whacked him?”

  “I’m sayingopportunity .”

  “What the fuck does that mean, opportunity?”

  “Do you buy Wilkins as a writer?”

  “Why not? Lots of guys lead peculiar lives.”

  “A lawyer? Writing onwalls ?”

  “Lawyersespecially are very peculiar,” Parker said.

  “You don’t think it’s amazing she never noticed twenty-two cans of paint in her husband’s closet, huh?”

  Parker let this sink in.

  “You’re saying exactly what I said about the brother, right? She hears about this nut who killed…”

  “Right, and opportunity knocks,” Kling said. “She whacks the husband and then makes him look like one of the victims.”

  “You’re forgetting she’s the one who just nowsuggested a copycat, aren’t you?”

  “Which, if she killed him, was very smart of her.”

  Parker looked at him again.

  “Okay,” he said at last, “let’s go find them fuckin cans.”

  The handyman hadn’t thrown the paint cans into the garbage waiting for disposal because they looked brand-new and he figured that would be a tragic waste. At first he was reluctant to show the cans to the detectives because he was afraid they might take them away from him. Kling convinced him they only wanted to have a look at them.

  On the bottom of each can, there was a little sticker that read:

  They now knew where the paint had been purchased.

  Trouble was, there were eight SavMor Hardware stores in Isola alone, and another twelve scattered all over the city.

  AT THREE O’CLOCKthat afternoon, Eileen went downtown to talk to Karin Lefkowitz. Karin was her shrink. She went to see her because she was feeling guilty about Georgia Mowbry. She told Karin that she was the one who’d been working the door and yet it was Georgia who’d been shot and killed. It didn’t seem fair, she said.

  People kept telling Karin that she looked a lot like Barbra Streisand playing Lowenstein inPrince of Tides . Karin resented this because she didn’t know a single analyst who would have behaved as outrageously as that one had; in the picture, anyway; she hadn’t read the book. Besides, she didn’t think she looked or behaved atall like Barbra Streisand. Her nosewas a trifle long, true, but she didn’t have long fingernails and she didn’t wear high heels to work and she didn’t hire any of her patients to give her son football lessons. As a matter of fact, she didn’thave any children, perhaps because she wasn’t married. And what she wore to work was tailored suits and Reeboks. Anyway,she’d been here first.

  “Would you rather have been the one who got shot and killed?” she asked Eileen.

  “Well, no. Of course not.”

  “Then why do you feel guilty?”

  Eileen told her all over again how Georgia had come to the door…

  “Yes.”

  …to see if she needed anything or wanted to use the ladies’ room…

  “Yes.”

  “And just that minute the goddamn door opened and he shot her.”

  “So?”

  “So I think he was firing atme . I think he opened that door and let loose thinking he’d be shootingme . Killingme . Because he’d already killed the girl in the apartment and I’d been the one talking to him, so maybe he figuredI was the one responsible for what he’d done, who the hell knowswhat he was thinking, he was nuts.”

  “That’s right, you have no way of…”

  “But I was the target, I’m sure of that, not Georgia. He fired blind, he didn’t evenknow there were two of us out there when he opened that door. He was going forme , Karin. And Georgia got it instead. And now Georgia’s dead.”

  “Eileen,” Karin said, “let me tell you something, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “This one isn’t your freight.”

  “He wanted to kill…”

  “You don’t knowwhat he wanted to do!”

  “He couldn’t have known Georgia was…”

  “Eileen, I won’t let you get away with this. Damn it, Iwon’t . You can blame yourself for getting raped…”

  “Idon’t blame myself for…”

  “Not anymore you don’t! And you can blame yourself for shooting a man who was coming at you with a knife…”

  “Idon’t !”

  “Well, good, maybe we’re making some progress, after all,” Karin said dryly. “But if you think I’m going to let you spendanother century in here blaming yourself forthis one, you’re wrong. I
won’t do it. You can walk right out that door if you like, but Iwon’t do it.”

  Eileen looked at her.

  “Right,” Karin said, and nodded.

  “I thought you were supposed tohelp me deal with guilt,” Eileen said.

  “Only if it’s yours,” Karin said.

  THE LIBRARYclosest to the station house was on the corner of Liberty and Mason in an area that used to be called Whore Street but that now sported coffee-houses and boutiques and little shops that sold designer jewelry and antiques. The restoration attracted tourists to the Eight-Seven, and tourists attracted pickpockets and muggers. Carella and Brown liked it better when the short street was lined with houses of prostitution.

  The librarian in the reference room told them that the way it worked with back newspapers, it usually took three weeks to a month to get them on microfilm. So if they wanted anything fromFebruary , for example, it would already be on microfilm, but if they were interested inMarch’s papers, chances are they’d still be in the reference room.

  Sitting at a long table overhung with green shaded lamps, both men began poring over the newspapers for the past month, trying to zero in on any announced outdoor event that might qualify for whatever mischief the Deaf Man had in mind. This was still only April, and not many producers of alfresco extravaganzas were foolish enough to bank on the weather at this time of year, but…

  The circus had arrived on March twenty-first for a two-week run that would end this Saturday. Did a crowd in a tent qualify as a crowd without boundaries? Concerning such a crowd, Rivera had written, “it cannot be restrained bywalls .” Well, a tent didn’t have walls, did it? Was it possible that the circuswas the Deaf Man’s target? If so, his proposed happening would take place all the way downtown in the Old City, where the huge tent had been pitched close to the battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago.Le Cirque Magnifique was the name of the troupe. Direct From Paris, the advertisement read. Carella was copying the information in his notebook when Brown said, “How about this one?”

  Carella looked.

  The ad was headlined:

  There was a picture of Tony grinning out of the full-page ad, and beneath that the words:

  FRI.& SAT.,APR.3 & 4 • 8PM

  The location of the event was given as the Holly Hills Arena in Majesta.

  “Is an arena an open space?” Brown asked.

  “Well, it has no ceiling,” Carella said. “And there’ll be a hell of a crowd there, that’s for sure.”

  “But will it be anoutdoor crowd?”

  “Actually, I don’t think so. He says noboundaries , nowalls . An arena…”

  “The Deaf Man?”

  “No, Rivera. I’m sure a crowd in an arena wouldn’t be the kind of crowd he means.”

  They kept searching the entertainment pages.

  Liza Minnelli was scheduled to perform in the Coca-Cola Concert Series this coming Sunday night, the fifth of April. But that was at Isopera, the city’s opera house, very definitely a walled space and therefore specifically excluded by Rivera’s—and presumably the Deaf Man’s—definition.

  Peggy Lee was in town and so was Mel Tormé, each of them performing at separate clubs, again excluded by definition.

  “Does it have to be in town?” Brown asked.

  “Why?”

  “Here’s a couple over the bridge.”

  “I don’t think he’d be alerting us if…”

  “Yeah,” Brown said.

  “I mean, ithas to be something in the city, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s something on a cruise ship,” Carella said.

  “What kind of cruise?”

  “Around Isola. Big-name band cruise.”

  “Well, a ship doesn’t havewalls ,” Brown said. “But doesn’t thesize of the crowd mean something? He calls it amultitude , doesn’t he? Rivera? Amultiplying multitude. That doesn’t sound like a crowd on aship to me. That sounds more like…”

  “Hey,” Carella said.

  He was looking at a full-page ad in today’s morning newspaper. The headline on the ad read:

  The location of the event was the Cow Pasture in Grover Park. The concert would start at one o’clock this Saturday and end at midnight on Sunday. At the bottom of the ad was a single line that read:

  Produced by Windows Entertainment, INC

  THE WAY MEYERand Hawes figured this, the shifts at the Temple Street shelter were the same as those in the police department. They tried to time the stake-out, or the plant—or even thesit as it was called in some cities—so that they’d catch part of the four-to-midnight and also part of the graveyard shift. Their reasoning was that if people were walking out of the armory with armloads of goods paid for by the city, then they wouldn’t be doing so in broad daylight, nor would they be doing it when there was a lot of activity on the street. The armory wasn’t located in what you’d call a high-traffic area, but therewere some scattered shops and restaurants in the surrounding streets, and at least some kind of activity till around ten, ten-thirty, when it started getting quiet. They pulled up across the street at ten-fifteen that Thursday night, doused the headlights, and sat back to watch the passing parade.

  Hawes kept bitching about what they’d done to his teeth. He told Meyer he was afraid to call Annie Rawles because she’d notice right off his teeth didn’t have their usual sparkle. Meyer said he had to look at the bright side, making a pun Hawes didn’t get.

  “I don’tsee any bright side to this,” he said. “I let them talk me into removing theenamel from my teeth, and now they tell me it’ll never come back. What kind of bright side is that?”

  Meyer had his eye on the big brick building across the street. He was thinking this would make the third night they’d be sitting the place and if something didn’t come down soon, he was ready to call it quits. He frankly had his doubts about the reliability of Hawes’s informer, the crazy Frankie with the wild eyes and the watch cap.

  “How’d he know all this, anyway?” he asked.

  “The dentist? He said he’d done it for the Feebs once. What I should’ve said is I don’t want you to do anything to me you did forthem jackasses, is what Ishould’ve said. Now the enamel won’t grow back.”

  “I meant your informer,” Meyer said. “Frankie.”

  “He said he saw them walking out with the stuff.”

  “When?”

  “All the time, he said.”

  “At night, during the day?When , Cotton?”

  “What the hell areyou so cranky about? It’smy goddamn teeth.”

  “I’m thinking we’re wasting our time here, is why I’m getting a littleimpatient , let’s say, not cranky.”

  “Meyer, it stands to reason if they’re stealing the whole damn store, they’re doing it at night.”

  “They haven’t done it so far the pasttwo nights,” Meyer said.

  “Thursday’s a good night for stealing,” Hawes said mysteriously.

  Meyer looked at him.

  “He said they’re all in on it, all the square shields, they take turns divvying up the loot,” Hawes said. “They walk out with it a little at a time….”

  “Like what? A bar of soap every six months?”

  “No, like half a dozen blankets, a carton of toothpaste, like that. Spaced out. So the stuff won’t be missed.”

  “Is Laughton in on this?”

  “The supervisor? My guy didn’t say.”

  “Your guy,” Meyer said.

  “Yeah.”

  “A guy you meet inside there in the dead of night, he’s crazy as a bedbug, he’s all at once yourguy , as if he’s a respectedinformer ,” Meyer said, not realizing he’d just uttered an oxymoron.

  “Let’s say he seemed reliable,” Hawes said.

  “Why is Thursday such a good night for stealing?” Meyer asked.

  “Is that a riddle?” Hawes said.

  “You said Thursday…”

  “I give up,” Hawes said. “Whyis Thursda
y such a good night for stealing?”

  Someone was coming out of the shelter.

  A man wearing a brown jacket and dark trousers, hatless, carrying a big cardboard carton in his arms.

  “What do you think?” Meyer asked.

  “I don’t think he’s one of the guards.”

  “You only saw the ones on the graveyard.”

  “Want to take him?”

  “That box looks heavy, doesn’t it?”

  “Let’s wait till he clears the shelter. Otherwise we blow the plant.”

  They waited. The man was struggling with the weight of the carton, staggering up the street with it. They kept watching him till he turned the corner, and then they got out on either side of the car, and ran to the corner. He was halfway up the block now, walking in the middle of the sidewalk, still bent with his load. They came up behind him, one on each side, flanking him.

  “Police,” Meyer said softly.

  The guy dropped the box. Hawes wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d simultaneously wet his pants. The box clattered to the sidewalk as if it contained a load of scrap iron. Meyer pulled open the flaps and looked inside.

  “Where’d you get these?” Meyer asked.

  He was looking at half a dozen used pots and pans.

  “They’re mine,” the man said.

  He was unshaven and unshowered and he smelled like a four-day-old flounder. The brown jacket was stiff and crusted with grime. He was wearing high-top black sneakers worn through at the big toe on each foot. His trousers were too large for him, soiled at the cuffs, baggy in the seat, torn at each knee.

  At first glance, the carton seemed to contain only the cooking implements, which they guessed he’d stolen from the shelter’s kitchen. But this was only the top layer. As they dug deeper into the box, they discovered a stainless-steel fork, knife, and teaspoon, a coffee mug, a quart thermos bottle, a tiny reading lamp, three or four frayed paperback mystery novels, an umbrella, a plaid lap robe, an inflatable pillow, a folding aluminium chair with green plastic back and seat, a tattered pair of fur-lined gloves, a black leather aviator’s helmet with glass goggles, a stack of paper plates, a packet of paper napkins, an alarm clock with a broken dial, a desk calendar, a red plastic egg crate, a corded stack of newspapers, three pairs of socks, one pair of Jockey shorts, a comb, a hairbrush, a bottle of Tylenol, a deodorant spray can, a…