Hark!

by Ed McBain

  A copy of the second was on Meyer’s lap.

  A WET CORPUS?

  CORN, ETC?

  “Same thing. He’s telling us to pay attention here. I killed this woman, her nice white blouse is all covered with blood…”

  “Where does it say that?”

  “Metaphorically. A wet corpus. A bloody body. Is what he’s saying. Do your usual corny thing, he’s saying.”

  “And the third note?”

  Carella glanced at the copy:

  BRASS HUNT?

  CELLAR?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I mean, she was killed in her own bedroom. What’s he talking about, a cellar?”

  “I don’t know. The techs didn’t find any spent cartridge casings, so he can’t mean brass in that way.”

  “You’re thinking, like, a hunt for brass shell casings?”

  “Yes, but we already…”

  “Like he’s telling us we won’t find any shell casings cause the murder gun was an automatic?”

  “But we already know that. Ballistics already told us it was a forty-five.”

  “So he’s telling us again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he thinks he’s smarter than we are. He’s telling us we’re still in the cellar on this thing. No spent cartridge cases, we don’t know what kind of gun, we don’t know who the body is, we’re totally lost, we’re in the cellar. He’s giving us all these hints, but we’re just plain stupid. Is what he’s saying.”

  “Maybe,” Carella said.

  “It’s the next driveway,” Meyer said. “Where it says ‘Main Entrance.’ ”

  “You think he may have tossed the weapon in the basement?” Carella asked. “On his way out of the building?”

  “I don’t think so,” Meyer said. “But we can ask Mobile to check again.”

  “If not, why’s he pointing us to the cellar?” Carella asked, and shook his head, and pulled the police sedan into Boniface’s parking lot.

  DETECTIVE/SECOND GRADE Cotton Hawes was enormously pissed off. Sitting up in bed, wearing a blue-striped hospital gown, a shaft of sunlight streaming through the bedside window to highlight the white streak in his otherwise red hair, he fumed and snorted about having been cold-cocked by a rooftop sniper, and having to spend the day here…

  “For observation!” he shouted. “What do they have to observe? They’ve already cleaned and dressed the wound, what the hell do they have to observe?”

  “You got shot, Cotton,” Carella observed.

  “In broad daylight!” Hawes said. “Can you imagine someone shooting a cop in broad daylight?”

  Meyer could imagine it.

  “What was he thinking?” Hawes said. “A cop? Broad daylight? A good thing Sharyn yanked me out of Fluke’s. They wanted to amputate the foot!”

  “You didn’t happen to see the shooter, did you?” Carella asked.

  “I was too busy ducking. He was on one of the rooftops across the way.”

  “The Eight-Six is already up there looking around,” Meyer said.

  “Silk Stocking precinct.”

  “Who’s on it, do you know?”

  “Kling didn’t say.”

  “Not often the Eight-Six gets a sniper.”

  “Tell them one of the slugs is in the wall to the left of the entrance doors.”

  “Guy’s probably in China by now.”

  “Maybe not,” Hawes said, and looked suddenly concerned. “This guy was serious. I got the distinct impression he wanted me dead.”

  Carella looked at him.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said, and nodded. “And also, I have to wear like this open kind of boot for the next little while.”

  THE NEXT NOTE arrived ten minutes after Meyer and Carella got back to the squadroom. Yet another courier service. Same phony Adam Fen return name, same non-existent Abernathy Station P.O. Box 4884. The note read:

  PORN DIET?

  HELL, A TIT ON MOM!

  “Party’s getting rough,” Meyer said.

  Carella merely nodded.

  “I think he’s beginning to lose it,” Meyer said. “I mean, this is pure bullshit, is what this is here.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “No, what do you think?” Meyer asked. He sounded angry. Not as angry as Hawes had sounded half an hour ago, but angry enough for a man who hadn’t been shot in the foot.

  “I think it’s coffee and donuts time.”

  THE THURSDAY MORNING MEETING wasn’t supposed to take place till tomorrow, this still being Wednesday and all, but when Carella laid out the five notes for Lieutenant Byrnes to study, he agreed that the changing of the guard this afternoon might be a good time to summon together the great minds of the 87th Squad. Coffee and donuts were de rigueur, paid for from the squad’s slush fund, and arranged on top of the long bookcase on one wall of the lieutenant’s corner office.

  The team being relieved was Meyer, Kling, and Carella; Hawes would have been there, too, but he was in the hospital, still fuming. The relieving team was Willis, Parker, Genero, and Brown. Andy Parker, relieving five minutes late, was nonetheless the first to pour himself a cup of coffee and heap three donuts onto his paper plate.

  “So what’ve we got here?” Byrnes asked. “A nut?”

  He sounded annoyed. White-haired and blue-eyed, the map of Ireland all over his craggy phizz, he sat behind his desk in his corner-windowed office, glaring out at his men as though challenging them to tell him this nut was as sane as any of them.

  “Beginning to ramble a bit, right,” Meyer agreed, and rolled his eyes.

  “Whose mom is he referring to?” Parker asked.

  Naturally, his interest would have been drawn to mention of a porn diet and a tit, any tit. He had not shaved this morning. Upon awakening, he’d told himself he would shave this afternoon, before coming in. But it was now a little past four P.M., and he still hadn’t shaved, and he wouldn’t be relieved until midnight, so he probably wouldn’t shave at all today. But such were the vagaries of police work; one never knew when he might be called upon to impersonate some kind of shabby street person.

  “Who cares whose mom?” Meyer said. “Mom’s tit is where he starts to lose it.”

  “And us,” Carella added.

  “When were you not lost?” Byrnes wanted to know.

  “Well, at first we thought he was referring to the homicide we caught yesterday morning. In his first note…”

  “Let me see that again,” Byrnes said, and extended his hand across his desk. Carella gave him the note in its plastic shield:

  WHO’S IT, ETC?

  A DARN SOFT GIRL?

  O, THERE’S A HOT HINT!

  “And this arrived when?” Byrnes asked.

  “Around this time yesterday afternoon.”

  “So you figured the ‘darn soft girl’ was…what was the vic’s name again?”

  “Gloria Stanford. Yes.”

  “And that was the perp’s hot hint, is that what you figured? That Gloria Stanford was the darn soft girl?”

  “Yes. Well…yes.”

  “Some hint,” Parker remarked.

  “He spelled oh wrong,” Genero said, sure of it now. He’d looked it up in the dictionary last night. At five feet nine inches tall, Genero thought he was very tall. From his father, he had inherited beautiful curly black hair, a strong Neapolitan nose, a sensuous mouth, and soulful brown eyes. From his mother, he had inherited the tall Milanese carriage of all his male cousins and uncles—except for his Uncle Dominick, who was only five-six.

  “Tell me something,” Byrnes said. “Doesn’t the perp realize we know this girl’s name? I mean, he left her in her own apartment, he didn’t dump her in the park someplace without any ID on her, he’s got to realize we already know who she is. Isn’t that so?”

  “It would appear to be so, yes, sir,” Carella said.

  Byrnes looked at him. He was not used to being sirred by his detectives.

  “So why is he asking us who
she is? And why is he telling us there’s a hint in his note? Where’s the hint? Do any of you see a hint? Hot or otherwise?”

  “Am I the only one eating here?” Parker asked.

  “I can use some coffee,” Brown said.

  He appeared to be scowling, but that was merely his normal expression. A big man…well, a huge man…with eyes and skin the color of his name, Arthur Brown was the sort of detective who reveled in playing Bad Cop because it fulfilled the stereotypical expectations of so many white people. He particularly enjoyed being partnered with Bert Kling, whose blond hair and healthy cornfed looks made him the perfect Good Cop honkie foil. Going to the bookcase feast now, eating a donut in three bites before he poured himself a cup of coffee and put two more donuts on a paper plate, Brown said, “Could we see that second note, please?”

  Carella passed it around:

  A WET CORPUS?

  CORN, ETC?

  “He’s telling us we’ve got a bleeding corpse here,” Brown said.

  “Just what I thought,” Meyer said.

  “Then why the question marks?” Genero asked.

  “He’s saying ‘Get it?’ ” Kling said. “Wake up here! I’m spelling it all out for you, dummies.”

  “Pay attention here!”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Hark!”

  They all turned to look at Willis.

  “Is actually what he’s saying,” Willis said, and shrugged. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, he was the shortest man on the squad, but he was a black belt in karate, and he was ready to knock any one of his colleagues flat on his ass in ten seconds flat if they questioned his use of a perfectly legitimate synonym for “listen carefully.”

  “The third note is where he begins to lose it,” Meyer said. “In my opinion, anyway.”

  “Could we see it again?” Kling asked.

  Carella placed it on Byrnes’s desk. They crowded around it, munching donuts.

  BRASS HUNT?

  CELLAR?

  “Was there any top brass at the scene?” Byrnes asked.

  “Not a big enough case to draw their attention,” Carella said.

  “So what’s this about a ‘brass hunt?’ ”

  “I figured he might be referring to spent cartridge cases.”

  “Did Mobile find any?”

  “No, but…”

  “What’d Ballistics say the weapon was?”

  “A forty-five automatic.”

  “So there wouldn’t have been any.”

  “So what does ‘brass hunt’ mean?”

  “And why’s he sending us to the cellar?”

  “Which, by the way,” Meyer said, “Mobile went down there this afternoon and found zilch.”

  “Down where?” Genero asked.

  “The basement of the building,” Carella said. “Where the girl was killed.”

  “She was killed in the basement?”

  “No, in her bedroom. I meant the building where she was killed.”

  Genero looked bewildered.

  “The last note is where he loses it entirely,” Meyer said. “In my opinion, anyway.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Byrnes said.

  PORN DIET?

  HELL, A TIT ON MOM!

  “Maybe he’s referring to the girl again,” Genero said.

  “Did he shoot her in the breast?”

  “Not according to the ME’s report. She was shot twice. Both slugs took her in the heart. Just below the left breast.”

  “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s this ‘porn diet’ shit?” Parker asked.

  “What’s any of it?” Genero asked.

  “Who’s this Adam Fen?” Byrnes asked.

  “I checked the phone books yesterday,” Willis said. “Fen is a Chinese name…”

  “Told you,” Genero said.

  “…but I didn’t get an Adam anyplace in the city.”

  “Was there an Eve?” Parker asked. “Adam and Eve? Porn diet?”

  Byrnes glared at him.

  “Just a thought,” Parker said, and picked up another donut.

  “What about this P.O. box number?” Byrnes asked.

  “Nonexistent,” Willis said.

  “Why’d he pick 4884?”

  “Why’d he pick us?” Genero asked.

  “He’s crazy is why,” Meyer said.

  “Like a fox,” Carella said.

  “Let’s go over it again,” Byrnes said.

  IN A PENTHOUSE APARTMENT not a mile from where the detectives mulled over the various missives he’d sent them, the Deaf Man was trying to explain the meaning of the word anagram to the girl who sat beside him on his living room couch.

  The girl was blond, and perhaps twenty-three years old, certainly no older than that. He had helped her to remove her white blouse not three minutes ago, so she was at the moment wearing only a black miniskirt, black panties and bra, and black, high-heeled, strapped sandals. Altogether a dangerous look.

  “Think of it this way,” he said. “Suppose I told you your breasts are as ripe as berries.”

  “Well, you don’t know that yet, do you?” the girl said.

  “I can speculate,” the Deaf Man said.

  “I suppose we can all speculate,” she said.

  “As ripe as berries,” he repeated, and lifted a clean white pad from the coffee table, and with a marking pen wrote on it:

  AS BERRIES

  “Is that for emphasis?” the girl asked.

  Her name was Melissa, Lissie for short. She’d told him this at the bar in the cocktail lounge of the Olympia Hotel, where he’d picked her up. He knew she was a hooker. A hooker was what he needed. But he had never in his life paid anyone for sex, and he did not intend to pay for it now.

  “Now if we rearrange those letters,” he said, “placing them in a different order, we get the word…”

  And here he wrote on the pad again:

  BRASSIERE

  …and reached behind her back to unclasp it, freeing her breasts.

  “As ripe as berries,” he said, and tried to kiss her nipples, but she crossed her arms over her breasts, and crossed her legs, too, and began jiggling one black-sandaled foot.

  “And what’d you call that?” she asked. “Rearranging the letters that way?”

  “An anagram,” he said.

  “That’s a neat trick,” she said. “Can you do an anagram for Melissa?”

  “Aimless,” he said at once. “But how about this one?” he asked, and on the pad he wrote:

  A PET SIN

  …and reached under her skirt to lower them over her thighs, before writing on the pad:

  PANTIES

  “Neat,” she said, and uncrossed her legs and her arms, and lifted herself slightly so he could lower the panties to her ankles. She kicked them free. They sailed halfway across the room, hitting the sliding glass doors that opened onto the seventeenth-floor terrace and a spectacular view of the city.

  “Let’s hope no one can spy us,” he said, and wrote the last two words on the pad:

  SPY US

  “Can you rearrange those?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, and took the marker from his hand, and wrote:

  PUSSY

  “Neat,” he said.

  “But,” she said, and wrote:

  MORE’S NIFTY

  “I’ll bet it is,” he said.

  “Oh, you bet your ass it is,” she said. “But it’s your game, Adam.”

  “Which game do you mean?” he asked.

  His hand was between her legs, but her thighs were closed tight on it, refusing entrance.

  “This one,” she said, and wrote on the pad:

  SNAG A RAM

  “Anagrams, do you mean?”

  “Bingo,” she said.

  “You want an anagram for ‘more’s nifty.’ Is that it?”

  “Try it,” she said, and handed him the marker.

  He thought for merely an instant, and then wrote:<
br />
  MONEY FIRST

  “How clever of you,” she said, and spread her legs wide, and held her hand out to him, palm upwards.

  “I think not,” he said, and slapped her so hard he almost knocked her off the couch.

  LATER, WHILE MELISSA was still tied to the bed, he asked if she knew that “Adam Fen” was an anagram for “Deaf Man.”

  Aching everywhere, she said she guessed she did.

  He wrote both words on the pad for her, one under the other:

  ADAM FEN

  DEAF MAN

  “Gee, yeah,” she said.

  Along about then, a courier was delivering the final note in what the Deaf Man thought of as the first movement of his ongoing little symphony.

  THE NOTE IN THE inside envelope read:

  We wondred that thou went’st so soon

  From the world’s stage, to the grave’s tiring room.

  We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth,

  Tells thy spectators that thou went’st but forth

  To enter with applause.

  An Actor’s Art,

  Can die, and live, to act a second part.

  I’M A FATHEAD, MEN!

  There was also a line drawing in the envelope:

  “Who the hell is that supposed to be?” Parker asked.

  “Looks like a rag picker,” Byrnes said. “You have rag pickers in your neighborhood?”

  “We called him the Rags Man,” Brown said, nodding.

  “Why would he be sending us a picture of a rag picker?” Meyer asked.

  “No, Artie’s got it,” Carella said. “It’s a rags man. Oh, Jesus, it’s a rags man!”

  They all looked at him.

  He seemed about to have a heart attack.

  “It’s an anagram!” he said.

  “Huh?” Genero said.

  “An anagram, an anagram, a rags man! That’s an anagram for anagrams!”

  “Huh?” Genero said again.

  All at once the letters under the note’s poetry seemed to spring from the page, I’M A FATHEAD, MEN, leaping into the air before Carella’s very eyes, rolling and tumbling in random order, I A F M H A T D E A N M E, until at last they fell into place in precisely the order Adam Fen had intended.

  I AM THE DEAF MAN!

  “Shit,” Carella said, “he’s back.”

  AND NOW, of course, all of it made sense.