by Ed McBain
“What about the old lady?” Meyer said.
“Well, if we find anything in the car, I’m ready to shoot for Murder Two.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Some you win, some you lose,” Nellie said, and shrugged. “Let’s go do it. I’ve got to get out of here.”
COLBERT WASstill sitting at the long table in the interrogation room when Parker and Kling got back to him at six-twenty that evening. He looked up when they walked in, grinned at Kling, and said, “Okay to go home now?”
“Few more questions, counselor,” Kling said. “Then you can tell us everything you know about this.”
“Oh, really? This had better be good.”
“You’re pretty sure we won’t find that gun, aren’t you?”
“I told you. Go get your warrant.”
“That’s just what we plan to do. To search the premises at 1137 Albermarle Way.”
Colbert blinked.
And recovered immediately.
“Why would a judge grant such a request?”
“Oh, I think we can make a pretty strong case for tossing the Wilkins apartment,” Parker said. “That’s where the paint cans were. With your fingerprints all over them. Maybe the gun’s there, too.”
“It’s no crime to buy paint. You can’t link that paint to any crime.”
“Unless the murder weapon is in that apartment.”
“Buying paint isn’t a crime.”
“Murder is. Why’d you put that paint in your partner’s closet? To make sure everybody thought…?”
“I put it there because I didn’t have room for it in my own apartment. All I have is a studio downtown.”
“The day after your partner got killed…”
“Yes…”
“…while allegedly spraying a wall withgraffiti …”
“That had nothing to do with…”
“You run out to buy twenty-twocans ofspray paint, and you store them…”
“I needed that paint for…”
“Yeah, you needed it to prove Wilkins was really a graffiti artist instead of a big-shot downtown lawyer.”
“There was some furniture I wanted to…”
“Isthe gun in that apartment, Mr. Colbert?”
Colbert said nothing.
“Throw her to the lions,” Parker suggested.
Colbert was silent for several moments.
Then he said, “What’s in it for me?”
“You talk to us, maybe we’ll talk to the D.A.”
“No maybes.”
“We’ll ask for a federal prison instead of a state pen,” Parker said.
Colbert knew the code. It was as simple as black and white. And he was white.
“It was her idea,” he said.
Q:Tell us how it started.
A:It started in bed. Where does anything start?
Q:Bed where?
A:In a motel across the river. The next state.
Q:When?
A:Before Christmas.
Q:You and Debra Wilkins in bed together. In a motel room.
A:Yes.
Q:How long hadthat been going on?
A:Since shortly after she married Peter.
Q:All right, what happened in that motel room?
A:She told me about his will.
Q:About her being sole beneficiary of the will?
A:Yes. I hadn’t known that. She’d seen a draft copy, it hadn’t yet been witnessed. Actually, several people in our office witnessed it the very next day. But she told me she stood to inherit some money….
Q:How much money? Are we talking millions here, thou…
A:Millions? No, of course not. Thousands, yes. Maybe a few hundred thousand, something like that. The money was a secondary consideration. She was planning to leave him, anyway, you see. But this meant she’d walk out of the marriage with a little something. This wasn’t money, you see. This was love.
Q:You loved each other, is that what you’re saying?
A:Yes. That’s why we worked out the plan.
Q:Which was?
A:To kill him.
Q:Did you, in fact, kill Peter Wilkins?
A:It was her idea.
Q:But are you the one who actually shot him?
A:Yes.
Q:And killed him.
A:He was the second one.
Q:Who was the first one?
A:The Spanish kid. I forget his name. I read his name in the paper the next day. I didn’t know who he was when I shot him. I only learned his name later. Like with the others. Carrera? Was it Carerra?
Q:Herrera.
A:Whatever.
Q:When you say the others…?
A:The other graffiti writers. We wanted to make it look like someone was after graffiti writers. That was Debra’s idea. People hate graffiti writers, you know. It’s easy for people to believe that someone would go after graffiti writers. I was in Toulouse last summer, in France. And there was graffiti on the walls there, too. Not the political slogans youused to see in Europe, but the same kind we have here. The markers, the tags in spray paint. It’s disgusting. People hate it there, too. People hate it everywhere. Debra’s idea was a very good one. We even thought people might begincheering whoever was doing it. Confuse the issue even more, you see.Really hide what we were doing.
Q:Hide the fact that you were out to kill Peter Wilkins…
A:Yes.
Q:…so his wife would inherit under his will.
A:No, no. So she’d be free to marryme . I told you, this wasn’t money. It was love.
Q:So her husband goes to the movies…
A:No, no, that was our story.
Q:Hedidn’t go to the movies?
A:No, he was home. I told him I was coming over, there was a case we were working on. I killed him in the house there, and then wrapped him in a blanket, and carried him down, and drove him over to Harlow Street. Found a good wall there…
Q:A good wall?
A:Covered with graffiti. Dropped him in front of the wall. The idea was to make it look like someone was killing graffiti writers, you see. That’s why I bought that paint the next day. Because there was all this skepticism in the papers about a lawyer being a graffiti writer, remember? I bought the paint to nail it home. That Peter was asecret writer. That’s why I left the note when I did the one outside the bookstore. To nail the point home. To make it look like some crazy person was committing the murders.
“You succeeded,” Kling said.
IN THE CORRIDOR OUTSIDE,he said, “Even if the gunisn’t in there…”
“It’s in there, all right,” Parker said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have told us a fuckin thing.”
“But even if itisn’t ,” Kling insisted, “the apartment is where Wilkins caught it, there’ll be allkinds of forensic evidence. The minute we find the gun, the door’s wide open. We bust the wife as an accomplice and call it a day. Which’ll be nice for a change, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Thatnobody walks,” Kling said, and grinned like a schoolboy.
THE GARBAGE TRUCKSwere lined up in rows behind a cyclone fence topped with razor wire. Fifty, sixty trucks in there behind the fence. The trucks were white, the color favored by the city’s sanitation department, perhaps because it represented pristine cleanliness. Unfortunately, the city’s various graffiti writers had already got to the trucks, spraying them from top to bottom and creating instead an image of urban decay. At one o’clock in the morning, the lot was silent and dark.
The wire didn’t bother Carter. He had no intention of climbing the fence. He wasn’t going to cut a hole in it, either, because you can’t drive a garbage truck though a hole in a fence. To drive the garbage truck out, Carter had to roll back the sliding gate, which was fastened to a post with a thick chain and a heavy padlock.
Carter was going for the padlock.
A padlock is merely a flat lock, and a lock is a lock, and anybody who knows how to pick one lock knows how to pick any other lock. He
worked in the dark with his set of picks, jiggling and juggling, working the lock like a woman, urging her to open for him. No security here. He guessed they figured they didn’t need anything but the razor wire and the big macho padlock to keep out any graffiti writers. He had the lock open in four minutes. He rolled back the gate, walked swiftly to the nearest truck all beautifully decorated with spray-paint shit, crossed the ignition wires under the hood, climbed into the cab, put the gears in reverse, made a huge turn, and then drove right on out through the gate.
He didn’t turn on the headlights until he was four blocks from the lot.
By then, he was home free.
FLORRY WAS WEARINGhisALL ACCESS laminate in the sky-blue color of the day, but he had all the others in his jacket pocket just in case one of the security guards gave him any bullshit about the color having changed at midnight. This was now two in the morning, and the concert site was as still as a graveyard. He walked onto the site familiarly, not expecting to be stopped by the security guard at the entrance, nodding to him, in fact, but not explaining why he was there, never explain, never apologize, just march in.
Whistling softly to himself, he walked directly to the control tower some hundred and fifty feet back from the stage. This was where all the really expensive equipment was; he expected to get stopped here, and he was.
“What’s up?” the guard there said, even though he could plainly see the blue laminate pinned to Florry’s jacket.
“Sound,” Florry said, and held up the black bag in his hand.
Keep it simple, he thought.
“Want to open it for me?” the guard said.
“Sure,” Florry said pleasantly, and unzipped the bag.
The guard flashed his torch into it.
He was looking in at a black metal box some ten inches wide by fourteen inches long by two inches high.
He was looking in at tomorrow’s utter confusion.
“Fuck’s that?” he asked.
“Micro-amplifier,” Florry said.
Which it wasn’t.
“Little late, ain’t it?” the guard said.
“Musicians,” Florry said, and rolled his eyes.
“Okay, go on,” the guard said, and watched while Florry headed straight for the console. He kept watching as Florry poked around the board here and there like somebody who knew what he was doing, and then he got bored and strolled over to where another guard was standing near the sound stack on the right side of the stage.
That was when Florry really got to work.
It took him five minutes to locate the four matrix output cables going from the console to the processing rack. It took him another five minutes to unplug the outputs from the console and patch in his black box. A minute later, he had the box snugly tucked in among the other equipment in the electronic racks.
Whistling, he waved to the two guards near the stage, said good night to the guard at the entrance, and left the site.
From a telephone booth on the corner where he’d parked his car, he phoned the Deaf Man to tell him everything was set for tomorrow.
“Thank you,” the Deaf Man said.
CARELLA COULDN’T SLEEP.
Old songs kept running through his head, songs to which he didn’t know the words, or only knew some of the words, songs he couldn’t quite remember, snatches of melody blurred by time, an incessant concert he couldn’t completely hear, songs from very long ago, hissing and echoing from a static-ridden radio to blend together in what he recognized was a low-key nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless.
He couldn’t believe that the concert tomorrow was the Deaf Man’s real target. If he knew the man at all, and he thought he knew him pretty well, then the concert—whatever he’d planned for the concert, a fire, whatever—would only be the diversion. This was a free concert, there wasn’t any box office the Deaf Man hoped to rob, his true targethad to be somewhere else, the real thrusthad to be elsewhere.
But where?
Big city, this one.
The songs running through his head.
Time running through his head.
The clock ticking relentlessly toward one o’clock tomorrow when the concert would start.
What else was happening at one tomorrow?
And where?
The songs kept hissing from the old radio, saxophones and trumpets, snare drum and bass, piano and trombone.
What? he wondered.
Where?
13.
THE MORNING OF APRIL FOURTHdawned gray and uncertain, a lowering sky covering the city like a gunmetal lid. The crowds began gathering at eight in the morning, long before the concert site was open to the public. This was a free event, with unreserved seating, first come, first admitted. By ten o’clock, the overcast began burning off, and by a little before eleven the sun was shining brightly and the sky was as blue as a periwinkle’s bloom. A fresh breeze wafted in over the River Harb, adding a briskness to the day, but no one involved with the concert in the park was complaining. For April, they could not have wished for better weather.
It must have been like this in olden times, Chloe thought, when people from miles about came to local fairs. Sil had asked her to meet him at eleven sharp, at the main entrance to the site. As she approached now, she saw at once that a crowd had gathered around him, shouting his name, waving autograph books and programs for him to sign. The moment he spotted her, he broke away from the crowd, and came to her, and took her hand. She felt enormously privileged as he ushered her quickly through security and led her toward the cyclone fence that enclosed the backstage area.
“Better put this on,” he said, “let you go wherever you like. He slipped a lanyard over her head. The orange laminate hanging from it had the name of the group, Spit Shine, printed across the top, and then—in bolder lettering below it—the wordARTIST. They went past the beer tent and then through the guard gates, and he helped her up the wooden steps leading to the stage. People were busily coming and going everywhere. Still holding her hand, he led her to where Jeeb was testing his sound levels. Each of the artists had one or two, sometimes three, stage monitors at his feet, enabling him to hear any other performer onstage in whichever proportions he chose. As Sil approached, Jeeb was monitoring a sample chorus from the two girls in the crew, standing some six feet away from him on either side, and rapping out the lyrics to “Hate,” which would be the second song they’d be doing today.
“Jeeb,” Sil said, “I’d like you to meet Chloe Chadderton. Chloe, this’s Jeeb Beeson, leader of the group.”
“Hey, how you doin?” Jeeb said.
“Her husband wrote ‘Sister Woman,’” Sil said.
“We openin with that,” Jeeb said.
“I can’t wait to hear it,” Chloe said.
“Girls do the main rap, me an’ Silver do a kind of jungle chant behind ’em. Works real fine. Your husband wrote some fine words, Chloe.”
“Thank you,” she said, though George Chadderton seemed a long time ago, and Silver Cummings represented the present and, she hoped, the future as well. Six feet away, like bookends on either side of the little triangle Chloe formed with Sil and Jeeb, the girls kept rapping the lyrics to “Hate,” the words angling up out of the speaker at Jeeb’s feet:
“You got a date with hate…
“At the Devil’s gate…”
CARELLA AND BROWNfigured they’d get there by noon. Check with the security people, see if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious in the hours before the concert was scheduled to begin. But neither of them was convinced that the concert was the Deaf Man’s target, so they sat now at their separate desks, poring over newspapers and magazines, trying to pinpoint any event that would start at oneP .M. and that might or might not include fire as part of the performance.
Neither of them realized that the event they were looking for had been posted on the squadroom bulletin board all week long.
From: Jacques Duprès, Deputy Commissioner Police Department Public Information Division
On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00pm., narcotics seized in 6, 955 arrests by the Police Department will be destroyed at the Department of Sanitation Incinerator on River Harb Drive at Houghton Street.
Included in the contraband to be destroyed is 24lbs, 4 ounces and 113 grains of heroin, valued at $24, 251, 875.
Cocaine Valued at $3, 946, 406, crack cocaine valued at $583, 000, marijuna valued at $221, 689, and other drugs and equipment to administer drugs, including LSD, opium, and hashish will also be destroyed.
THE CROWD WASmostly black. The Deaf Man was counting on that. There were also whites in the crowd. The Deaf Man was counting on that as well. There were Hispanics in the crowd, and some Asians, but the Deaf Man considered them inessential to his plan. Most of the people in the crowd were young. This fit in perfectly with his scheme. Young males were quick to take offense and to seek reprisal; young girls were quick to urge mischief and to seek excitement. Fifty percent of the teenagers in this city carried guns. This was a well-publicized figure that had not escaped the Deaf Man’s attention. He knew that at an event as massive as the concert, a weapons check would be unlikely if not impossible. This was not a junior high school with a security guard at the door. This was a ten-acre meadow with a makeshift entrance marked by two pylons spaced some twenty feet apart and painted in alternating red, white, and blue stripes, with a security guard standing at each pylon, smiling benignly. But even if therewas a weapons check, even if every young male who entered the concert site was unarmed, there would be a riot anyway.