by Ed McBain
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll see.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet we will,” Honey whispered.
Hot and heavy.
Like that.
Not a worry in sight.
Little did they know.
THE BICYCLE COURIER was a Korean immigrant who not five minutes earlier had almost caused a serious accident when he ran a red light on Culver Avenue and almost smacked into a taxi driven by a Pakistani immigrant whose Dominican immigrant passenger began cursing in Spanish at the sudden brake-squealing stop that hurled her forward into the thick plastic partition separating her from the driver.
Now, safe and sound, and smiling at the desk sergeant, the courier asked in his singsong tongue if there was a Detective Stephen Carella here. Murchison took the slender cardboard envelope, signed for it, and sent it upstairs.
The packet was indeed addressed to Carella, the words DETECTIVE STEPHEN LOUIS CARELLA scrawled across the little insert slip, and below that the address of the precinct house on Grover Avenue. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, ripped open the tab along the top end of the stiff envelope, and found inside a white business-size envelope with his name handwritten across it again, DETECTIVE STEPHEN LOUIS CARELLA. He opened this smaller envelope, and pulled from it a plain white sheet of paper upon which were the typewritten words:
WHO’S IT, ETC?
A DARN SOFT GIRL?
O, THERE’S A HOT HINT!
“Who’s it from?” Meyer asked, walking over.
“Dunno,” Carella said, and turned the packet over in his hands. The return name on the delivery insert, in the same handwriting as Carella’s scribbled name, was ADAM FEN. The return address was for a post office box at the Abernathy Station downtown.
“Anybody you know?” Meyer asked.
“Nope,” Carella said, and looked at the note again.
WHO’S IT, ETC?
A DARN SOFT GIRL?
O, THERE’S A HOT HINT!
“He spelled oh wrong,” Genero said. “Didn’t he?” he asked, not certain anymore. He had walked into the squadroom as part of the relieving night-shift team, and was now at Carella’s desk, peering at the two envelopes and the note. “Isn’t oh supposed to be spelled with an h?”
“It’s sexier without the h,” Parker said.
He, too, had just walked in as part of the relieving team. All in all, there were now six detectives crowded around Carella’s desk, all of them looking at what he’d just received by same-day delivery. Cotton Hawes, all suffused with heat from his conversation with Honey Blair, had to agree that o was sexier than oh, even if he couldn’t say exactly why. Detective Richard Genero was still pondering the exact spelling of the word oh, when Hal Willis suggested that perhaps Adam Fen was an Irishman, a “fen” being an Irish bog or marsh…
“…or swamp or something like that, isn’t it?” he asked.
…and the Irish sometimes waxing a bit romantic, which might account for dropping the h in the word oh, confirming Genero’s lucky surmise.
Kling had already gone home, so he didn’t have any opinion at all. Eileen Burke was just coming through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. She hadn’t yet seen the stuff on Carella’s desk, so she didn’t have an opinion, either. As yet.
Meyer was remembering that Monoghan—or Monroe, or one or the other of them—had remarked earlier today that the dead woman on the bedroom floor of the Silvermine Oval apartment was “zaftig,” which in Yiddish meant “juicy” or “succulent,” but which in everyday English slang meant “having a full or shapely figure,” which Meyer supposed could be translated as “a darn soft girl.” He hesitated before mentioning this aloud because he knew in his heart of hearts that Detective Andy Parker was at best a closet anti-Semite and he didn’t want to introduce religious conflict into what seemed to be a mere note from a possible homicidal nut named Adam Fen. But the coincidence seemed too rare not to have specific meaning.
“You know,” he said, “the word zaftig…”
And Carella immediately nodded and said, “Gloria Stanford.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Some crazy trying to tell us he did it?”
“Did what?” Parker asked. “And what the hell is zaftig?”
“A darn soft girl,” Meyer said.
“Is that some kind of sexist remark?” Eileen asked.
Unlike the female detectives she saw on television, Eileen was not wearing a tight sweater. Instead, she had on an olive-green pants suit that complemented her red hair and green eyes. On every cop television show, at least one of the leading characters was a female detective. Sometimes, you had two or three female detectives in the same squadroom. Sometimes, even the lieutenant in command of the squad was a woman. In Eileen’s experience, this was total bullshit. Of the eighteen detectives on the 87th Squad, she was the only woman.
“We caught a shooting death this morning,” Meyer explained.
“Beautiful woman.”
“Gloria Stanford.”
“Two in the chest.”
“So is this a written confession?” Genero asked hopefully.
“Oh, there’s a hot hint!” Parker said, and rolled his eyes.
“Where’s the Abernathy Station?” Willis asked.
“Downtown near the Arena,” Hawes said.
“Should be easy to check that P.O. box.”
“You don’t think Mr. Fen here would give us a real address, do you?” Parker asked.
“What’s the name of that courier service?” Hawes asked.
Carella turned the envelope over again.
“Lightning Delivery.”
“Shy and unassuming,” Eileen said.
“Modest, too.” Willis agreed.
“Fen sounds Chinese to me,” Genero said. “Like Moo Goo Gai Fen.”
They all looked at him.
“No, Fen is American,” Parker said. “There was once an actor named Fen Parker, no relation. Played Daniel Boone on TV.”
“That was Fess Parker,” Hawes said.
Parker shrugged.
“Anyway,” Genero said, nodding in agreement with himself, “Adam Fen is most definitely Chinese. Adam is a popular name in Hong Kong.”
“How do you happen to know that?” Parker asked.
“It’s common knowledge,” Genero said.
Willis almost sighed. He turned to the three detectives who were now fifteen minutes late getting relieved.
“Go home,” he told them. “We’ll get on this shit.” He tapped the courier envelope. “Maybe we’ll learn something.”
“Mazeltov,” Meyer said.
“Which means what?” Parker asked, making it sound like a challenge.
“Which means ‘good luck,’ ” Carella said.
He had no expectation that either Lightning Delivery or the Abernathy Station would provide any clue to Adam Fen.
He was right.
3.
IT WOULD SEEM ODD that in this vast and bustling metropolis, in the mightiest nation on earth, a message from someone intent on mischief could enter a police station unchallenged. After the anthrax mailings—and what with Homeland Security and all—one might have thought that a barrier of screening machines would have been erected at the portals of every police station in the country. Nay.
In the good old days (ah, the good old days) whenever you were in trouble, you ran right into a police station, any police station, past the hanging green globes flanking the wooden entrance doors, and you rushed to the desk sergeant and yelled, “I’ve been raped!” “I’ve been robbed!” “I’ve been mugged!” and somebody would take care of you. Nowadays, there was a uniformed cop standing guard at the entrance, and he asked you to state your business and show some ID before he let you inside. This was still the big bad city and a great many choices were available to you. “I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been axed, I’ve been shot in the foot!” But he wouldn’t let you inside there unless he
felt you had legitimate business with the police.
Well, a same-day, courier-service messenger certainly has legitimate business with the police if he’s delivering a letter. Besides, what are you supposed to do? Examine each and every letter in his pouch? Impossible. In fact, what you do is you say, “How goes it today, Mac?” and you let him in. Same way you let in the courier from Lightning Delivery yesterday, whom you also called “Mac” even though you didn’t know him from Adam.
Adam Fen was the return name on the letter the messenger carried to the muster desk at six-thirty that Wednesday morning, the second day of June. The letter was once again addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Sergeant Murchison asked an officer to take the letter upstairs.
Upstairs in the squadroom, Bob O’Brien shouldn’t have opened it because it wasn’t addressed to him, but he thought if a person used a same-day delivery service, there might be some urgency involved. Besides, the graveyard shift still had an hour-fifteen to go, and things were pretty quiet. So he pulled on a pair of latex gloves, ripped open the MetroFlash envelope, and plucked from it a white business-size envelope. The note folded inside it read:
A WET CORPUS?
CORN, ETC?
O’Brien figured their trigger-happy lunatic from yesterday was still bragging about his dead broad.
EARLY STAGES OF a romance, when you go to the bathroom to pee, you make sure the door is locked, and you run water in the sink to cover the sound of your urination, lest it be your ruination. When Hawes came back into the bedroom, Honey was awake and sitting up in bed.
“I have to pee, too,” she said, and climbed over the side of the bed, long legs flashing beneath the hem of a white baby-doll nightgown. On her way to the bathroom, she tossed him a sassy moon, grinned over her shoulder, and then disappeared behind the closed door. He did not hear the lock clicking shut. Neither did he hear water running in the sink.
He wondered if he should call in sick. If the squad hadn’t caught a homicide yesterday, he might have given it serious thought. Was there time, anyway? He looked at his watch. Six forty-five. Figure half an hour to get uptown to the precinct. No way he could manage it.
Honey came out of the bathroom.
Reading his mind, she asked, “Do we have time?”
“I have to be in at a quarter to eight,” he said.
She looked at the bedside clock.
“Nuts,” she said, and went to him and kissed him anyway.
It was almost a goodbye kiss.
THE FIRST SHOT CRACKED on the early morning air the moment Hawes stepped out of the building. He was about to say “Good morning” to Honey’s doorman when he heard the shot and instinctively ducked. He had been a cop for a good long time now, and he knew the difference between a backfire and a rifle shot, and this was a rifle shot, and he knew that even before he heard the bullet whistling past his right ear, even before he saw brick dust exploding from the wall of the building where the first slug hit it.
Because he was an officer of the law, and because he was sworn to protect the citizenry of this fair city, the first thing he did was shove the doorman back into the building and out of harm’s way, and the second thing he did was drop to the sidewalk, which was when the second shot came, ripping air where Hawes’ head had been not ten seconds earlier. On his hands and knees, he scrabbled for cover behind a car parked at the curb to the left of the building’s canopy, reaching it too late to drag his right foot from the sniper’s line of fire.
He felt only searing pain at first, and then a wave of fleeting nausea, and then anger, and then immediate self-recrimination—how could he have let this happen to himself? His gun was already in his hand, too late. He was already scanning the rooftops across the way, too late. The doorman was starting out of the building…
“Stay back!” Hawes shouted, just as another shot splintered the suddenly surreal stillness. There were two more shots, and then a genuine stillness. He signaled to the doorman with his outstretched left hand, patting the air, wait, wait, his hand was saying. There were no further shots.
The doorman came rushing out of the building.
“Call an ambulance,” Hawes said.
A small puddle of blood was forming on the sidewalk.
SHARYN COOKE WAS ASLEEP in Bert Kling’s bed when the phone rang in his apartment near the Calm’s Point Bridge. He was not due in until seven forty-five, and this was now a quarter past seven and he was just heading out the door. He picked up the phone, said, “Kling,” listened, said, “Just a moment, please,” and then went to the bed and gently shook Sharyn awake. “For you,” he said.
Sharyn scowled at him, but she took the phone.
“Deputy Chief Cooke,” she said.
And listened.
“What?” she said.
And listened again.
“Where is he?”
She looked at Kling, shook her head. Her face was grim.
“I’ll get there right away,” she said. “Thanks, Jamie,” she said, and hung up.
“What?” Kling asked.
“Cotton Hawes got shot,” Sharyn said. And then immediately, seeing his face, “It’s not serious. Just his foot. But he’s at Satan’s Fluke, and I want him moved out of there fast.”
“I’ll come with you,” Kling said.
She was already in the bathroom.
“Who’s Jamie?” he asked.
But she’d just turned on the shower.
THE SECOND NOTE that day arrived at twenty minutes to eight. Sergeant Murchison handed Carella the envelope the moment he walked into the muster room.
“Arrived five minutes ago,” he said.
Carella nodded, said, “Thanks, Dave,” and studied the envelope as he climbed the steps to the second floor of the old building. Name of the courier service was Speed-O-Gram. The envelope was addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella. The return name on it was Adam Fen, the return address P.O. Box 4884, Abernathy Station. Willis had drawn a blank on each of those yesterday. There were only five Fens listed in all of the city’s telephone directories. None of them was an Adam. Willis had called each and every one of them, with no luck. He got Chinese accents each and every time, “So solly, no Adam Fen here”; for a change, Genero had been right. There were only 300 post office boxes at the Abernathy Station downtown. A box numbered 4884 simply did not exist.
“See you got another one,” O’Brien said.
Carella didn’t know what he was talking about.
O’Brien handed him the MetroFlash envelope and the note that had been inside it:
A WET CORPUS?
CORN, ETC?
“Meaning?” Carella asked.
“You’re the detective,” O’Brien said.
“He’s still trying to confess,” Carella said.
“You think?”
“Telling us there’s a dead body wet with her own blood.”
“Maybe so,” O’Brien admitted dubiously, not wishing to press his good fortune by venturing a true opinion. O’Brien was known far and wide as a hard-luck cop. Not only just here in the confines of the Eight-Seven. Everywhere in the city. Far and wide. Walk down the street with Detective Bob O’Brien, there’d be shooting. Just standing beside him here in the squadroom, Carella was wondering if a bullet would come smashing through one of the windows.
“But what does he mean by ‘corn, etc?’ ” O’Brien asked, stepping out boldly.
“He’s referring to the same old routine,” Carella said. “A body, an investigation, like that. He’s telling us this is all corny by now. We’ve seen it a thousand times on television.”
“You think?” O’Brien said again.
“I’m guessing. Same as you.”
“What’s the new one say?” O’Brien asked.
He knew his own hard-luck reputation. Shrugged it aside. He’d had to shoot only six, or maybe seven, people in his entire career, but who was counting? And, anyway, that wasn’t so much. Besides, if they couldn’t take a joke, fuck ’em.
BRASS HUNT?
CELLAR?
“So what’s that got to do with your wet corpse?” O’Brien asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Carella said.
Which was when the telephone rang.
It was Bert Kling telling him that Cotton Hawes had been shot and that Sharyn was having him moved from the notorious St. Luke’s to Boniface, one of the city’s better hospitals.
ON THE WAY to Boniface, Carella and Meyer tried to dope out what the three notes meant. The first one said:
WHO’S IT, ETC?
A DARN SOFT GIRL?
O, THERE’S A HOT HINT!
“Okay, the darn soft girl is the female stiff we caught. That’s obvious.”
“Then why’s he asking us who it is?” Carella asked.
He was driving. Meyer was riding shotgun.
“Cause he’s a madman,” Meyer said. “Lunatics don’t behave like normal people.”
“He asks us who it is, etcetera, etcetera, and so on, and then he tells us that’s a hot hint? Right after he’s already told us the vic is a darn soft girl who we already know is Gloria Stanford? I don’t get it, Meyer, I really don’t.”
“He’s confessing, is all. He wants us to catch him, is all. It’s like that nut years ago who wrote in lipstick on the mirror, whatever his name was.”
“Here? One of our cases?”
“No, Chicago. Catch me before I kill more. Whatever it was he wrote on the mirror.”
“That’s what he wrote.”
“He wanted them to stop him.”
“But this guy doesn’t want us to stop him. He doesn’t say ‘Stop me!’ ”
“ ‘Catch me’ was what he said. Heirens, that was his name. William Heirens. The guy in Chicago.”
“Our guy says I killed this girl and I’m giving you a hint who she is, that’s what he says in his note.”
“In his first note. What about the other two?”