by Ed McBain
She was inordinately proud of her deduction yesterday, and did not much like Kling shooting her down this way now. In her secret heart, she also felt he wouldn’t be talking this way if they hadn’t once shared a relationship. This was some kind of man-woman thing between them, she felt, and had nothing whatever to do with sound police work.
“Who else but Shakespeare would talk like that?” Carella asked.
“Right,” Genero said. “Nobody but Shakespeare talks like that.”
“Well, Marlowe talked like that,” Willis said.
“Marlowe said ‘Where is your boar-spear, man?’ ”
“I don’t know if Marlowe actually said that particular line. I’m just saying Marlowe talked a lot like Shakespeare.”
“Did Raymond Chandler know that?” Kling asked.
“Know what?” Brown asked.
“Who’s Raymond Chandler?” Genero asked.
“The guy who wrote the books,” Meyer said.
“What books?”
“The Phillip Marlowe novels.”
“Did he know he sounded like Shakespeare?”
“I’m talking about Christopher Marlowe,” Willis said.
“What’s a boar-spear, anyway, man?” Brown asked.
“They had these wild boars back in those days,” Parker said.
“The question is,” Eileen said, “why’s he going back to spears again?”
“Maybe he’s gonna throw a spear at somebody,” Genero suggested.
“This city,” Parker said, “I’d believe it.”
AS HAWES WAS LEAVING the squadroom for his eleven o’clock doctor’s appointment, Genero sidled over to him.
“I know how it feels to get shot in the foot,” he said. “I’m with you, guy.”
“Thanks,” Hawes said.
Actually, he didn’t appreciate the comparison. The way he recalled it, Genero had shot himself in the foot. This was on the eighth day of March during a very cold winter many years ago, the second time the Deaf Man had put in an appearance. What he’d done that time around was demand $50,000 in lieu of killing the deputy mayor, asking that the Eight-Seven leave the money in a lunch pail on a bench in Grover Park.
If Hawes remembered correctly, the fuzz staked out in the park that day had included a detective recruited from the Eight-Eight, who was posing as a pretzel salesman at the entrance to the Clinton Street footpath. Meyer and Kling, disguised as a pair of nuns, were sitting on a park bench saying their beads. Willis and Eileen were pretending (or not) to be a passionate couple necking in a sleeping bag on the grass behind another bench. Genero was sitting on yet another bench, wearing dark glasses and scattering bread crumbs to the pigeons as he patted a seeing-eye dog on the head.
Genero was still a patrolman at the time. He’d been pressed into undercover service only because there was a shortage of detectives in the squadroom that Saturday. Unaccustomed to the art of surveillance, he jumped up the moment he saw somebody picking up the lunch pail, yanked off his blind man’s dark glasses, unbuttoned the third button of his overcoat the way he’d seen detectives do on television, reached in for his revolver, and promptly shot himself in the leg.
This was not the same thing as getting shot by a sniper from a rooftop across the way.
Or maybe it was.
Grumbling to himself, Hawes threw open the front door of the stationhouse, nodded to the uniformed cop bravely protecting homeland security on the steps outside, and limped down to the sidewalk, where he planned to make a right turn that would take him to the subway kiosk up the street.
A black stretch limo was standing at the curb, its engine running. Stenciled onto the rear door of the car was the Channel Four logo—a silhouette of the city’s skyline with the huge numeral 4 superimposed on it. The tinted rear window on the street side slid down noiselessly. Honey Blair’s grinning face appeared in the opening.
“Want a lift, gorgeous?” she asked.
Hawes walked over to the car. “Hey!” he said. “What’re you doing here?”
“Thought I’d surprise you,” she said.
He climbed in beside her, pulled the door shut behind him. “Nice wheels,” he said.
“One of the perks of being a media staaah,” she said, rolling her eyes on the last word.
“Five seventy-four Jefferson,” Hawes told the driver.
“I’ve already got that, sir,” the driver said.
Honey tapped a button. The tinted glass partition between the driver’s seat and rear compartment slid up, closing them off, sealing them in a soundless, moving cocoon.
“Here’s another perk,” she said, and unzipped his fly.
“Uh-oh,” Hawes said.
“You know why Clinton got impeached, don’t you?” she asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“It was because right-wing conservatives didn’t know what the word ‘blowjob’ meant.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh. They thought ‘blowjob’ was the code word for two villains running around the White House.”
“Now where’d they get that idea?”
“From James Bond.”
“I see. Two villains from James Bond, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Which ones?”
“Blofeld and Oddjob,” she said.
She didn’t say anything else after that.
Or if she did, he didn’t hear her.
DR. STEPHEN HANNIGAN was one of the orthopedists approved by the PD for the treatment of police personnel injured in the line of duty. Whether getting shot as you left your girlfriend’s house in the early morning qualified as “injured in the line of duty” was a matter for the Police Benevolent Association to sort out later. Meanwhile, a civil servant who earned $62,587 a year as a Detective/Second Grade pulled up in a stretch limo in front of 574 Jefferson Avenue at the corner of Jefferson and Meade. Hawes kissed Honey goodbye, and was just stepping out on the curb side of the car, when—
He hurled himself and Honey to the floor of the car the instant he heard the first shot. He wasn’t counting, but enough shots were fired in the next thirty seconds to shatter the tinted glass window of the limo, rip through the Channel Four logo on the rear door, tear up the interior upholstery, smash the whiskey and brandy decanters in both side door panels, and narrowly miss killing Honey and Hawes both.
Picking himself up off the floor of the car, Hawes yelled “I wasn’t angry until right now!” never realizing how close he’d come to echoing Shakespeare’s “I was not angry since I came to France” line in King Henry V, Act IV, Scene vii.
THE SECOND NOTE that day read:
I am disgraced, impeach’d and baffled here,
Pierced to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear
“That first line is intended for us,” Meyer said. “He’s telling us by now we should be feeling disgraced, impeach’d…”
“Which he also spelled wrong,” Genero said.
“…and baffled here. That’s what he’s saying.”
“No, I don’t think any personal message is intended here,” Eileen said. “I think he’s simply calling our attention to the last word in the couplet. Spear. It’s spear again.”
“I quite agree,” Genero said, sounding somewhat Shakespearean himself. “But what’s a couplet?”
“And why?” Kling asked.
“Why what?” Parker said.
“Why’s he pointing us to spear again?”
“A poisoned spear.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Venom’d. That means poisoned.”
“Shakespeare keeps dropping his e’s, you notice that?”
“What’s slander?” Genero asked.
“A lie,” Carella said.
“MEANWHILE WE’VE GOT a dead girl here,” Lieutenant Byrnes said.
He had asked Willis and Eileen to step into his office, and now they were sitting in chairs opposite his desk, listening attentively. Eileen figured the Loot was old enough to call a th
irtysomething dead woman a “girl” and get away with it, so she forgave him. “Let’s forget what this hard-of-hearing shmuck plans to do next,” Byrnes said, “and concentrate instead on what he’s already done. He’s committed murder, is what he’s done. He can quote Shakespeare from here to Christmas, and that won’t change the fact that he killed that girl!”
“Yes, sir,” Eileen said.
Byrnes glared at her.
“Pete,” she corrected.
“What’d the FBI report tell us, Hal?”
“Nothing,” Willis said. “No matching prints anywhere. Means she doesn’t have a record, was never in the armed forces, and never worked for any governmental agency.”
“Which is not surprising,” Byrnes said. “How many people do you know who have their fingerprints on file?”
Willis thought this over. Except for the hundreds of assorted thieves he met in this line of work, he couldn’t think of a single soul.
“I want both of you to go back to the girl’s building,” Byrnes said. “He got into that apartment somehow. How’d he get past the doorman? Did anybody see him going in or coming out? He’s not invisible, how’d he manage it? Talk to everybody and anybody. Get a description, get something.”
As they started out of his office, he added, “Anything.”
THE CATERER WAS as gay as a bowl of fresh daisies.
His name was Buddy Mears, and he was wearing a fawn-colored suit with a lavender shirt open at the throat. He had blond hair and blue eyes. A nose Caesar would have died for. High cheekbones. Taut skin. Teddy Carella wondered if he’d had a face lift. They were sitting in his office on Henley and Rhynes, in Riverhead, not far from the hall in which the reception would take place on June twelveth. Carella had driven here on his lunch hour. Teddy had taken a bus over. Sample menus were open on Buddy’s desk. Several framed culinary awards were hanging on his walls. Plaques, too. Early June sunshine streamed through the windows and splashed onto the open menus.
“How many guests are we expecting?” he asked.
“About a hundred,” Carella said.
Teddy signed to him.
Buddy looked politely puzzled.
“A hundred and twelve,” Carella corrected.
Buddy already knew that Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute, speech-and-hearing impaired as they were calling it these days, but nonetheless a woman with devastating black hair and luscious dark brown eyes to match, absolutely gorgeous even when her fingers were flashing on the air, as they were now.
Carella watched her flying fingers.
“The numbers keep changing every day,” he translated for her. And then added, “Either my mother or my sister keep inviting new people all the time.”
“This is so-o-oo cute, what they’re doing,” Buddy said. “The double wedding. Adorable. So let’s figure a hundred and ten people…”
Reading his lips, Teddy again signed, A hundred and twelve.
“Yes, I know, darling,” Buddy said, almost as if he could read her hands. “I’m approximating. But let’s say a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve. Will we be passing fingerlings around before dinner?”
“Fingerlings?” Carella said, and looked at Teddy.
Finger food, she signed.
“Fig with liver mousse,” Buddy said, nodding. “Seared tuna on toast tips…well, here,” he said, and moved one of the sample menus to where Carella and Teddy sat opposite him. “Potato pancakes with avocado salsa…salmon and cucumber bites…goat cheese tartlets…and so on. We’ve got fifty or more fingerlings we can pass around before dinner is served.”
“Do you think we’ll want fingerlings?” Carella asked.
I think they might be nice, Teddy signed. With the drinks. Beforehand.
“How many different kinds of fingerlings would you suggest?” he asked Buddy.
“Oh, four or five. Half a dozen. That should be enough. We don’t want to get too complicated. And we don’t want to spoil our appetites for dinner, do we?”
Reading his lips, Teddy signed, Maybe we should choose the dinner menu first.
Carella translated.
And come back to the hors d’oeuvres later.
Hors d’oeuvres was a difficult word to sign. Or to read. She saw the puzzled look on her husband’s face. She corrected it at once.
Finger food.
Carella told Buddy what she’d said.
“Well, yes, certainly, we can do it backwards if you prefer,” he said, sounding miffed.
For the appetizers, he suggested three dishes from which the guests could choose. Either the lobster salad with black truffle dressing, or the Hamachi tuna tartare with caviar crème fraiche and smoked salmon, or the jumbo shrimp cocktail. For the main course, again a choice of three dishes. Either the roasted branzino stuffed with seafood, button mushrooms, roasted artichokes, and fennel, or the chicken curry with pearl onions, red peppers, and madras rice, or the braised rabbit in Riesling with spaëtzle, fava beans, and wild mushrooms.
“All served with a baby-greens-and-tomato salad with lemon, extra virgin olive oil, and century-old balsamic vinegar dressing,” he said, grinning in anticipation.
Carella looked at Teddy.
She looked back at him.
“Isn’t there anything…simpler?” Carella asked.
“Simpler?” Buddy said.
“Well…it’s just…I don’t think many of the invited guests would appreciate such a…such an ambitious menu.”
“These are, believe me,” Buddy said, “some of our very simplest selections. Virtually basic, in fact.”
“Well,” Carella said, and shrugged and turned to Teddy. “Hon?” he said.
Some of the guests will be coming from Italy, she signed.
Carella told Buddy what her hands had just said.
“So what would you like to serve them?” Buddy said, somewhat snippily. “Spaghetti and meatballs?”
“No, but…” Carella started.
“Or maybe you should just take them over to McDonald’s,” Buddy snapped.
“Maybe so,” Carella said, and rose abruptly. “Let’s go, hon,” he told Teddy, who had stood up at almost the same moment.
“We also make a nice risotto,” Buddy offered as they went out the door.
“ANYBODY COMING IN the building has to talk to me first,” the doorman told them. “Has to state his business with me,” he said. “I clear all visitors with the tenant. That’s the rule here. No exceptions.”
“So if anyone had come here for Ms. Stanford…”
“That’s right.”
“…on Memorial Day…”
“Correct.”
“…he’d’ve had to talk to you.”
“Which is what I just told you,” the doorman said, “din’t I?”
“So how’d he get in her apartment?” Eileen asked.
“I got no idea,” the doorman said.
“Is there a service entrance?”
“Yes, there is a service entrance.”
“Where’s that?”
“Around the back of the building. On Eleventh. But the man taking deliveries there has to call up to the tenant, same as me. Before he lets anything or anyone go upstairs. So you can save yourselves a walk around there.”
“Is there a door to the roof?” Willis asked.
“Of course there’s a door to the roof.”
“Is it kept locked?”
“All the time.”
“Mind if we take a look up there?”
The doorman looked at them, and then wagged his head as if to say there was no accounting for people who wished to waste their time. “Let me get the super to take you up,” he said, and yanked a wall phone off its hook.
THE BUILDING SUPERINTENDENT seemed surprised.
“Looks like somebody smashed the lock,” he said, studying the door to the roof.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Willis said.
“Sure does.”
“When’s the last time you were up here?”
“Try,” Eileen said.
“Must’ve been last week sometime. Water tank was leaking. Had to bring a plumber up.”
“When last week would that have been?”
“Friday, must’ve been. Had a tough time getting a plumber cause the long weekend was coming up. Well, it’s always tough getting a plumber. Plumbers are the divas of the building trade, you know. Guys fixing toilets, can you imagine? Divas!”
Eileen had already taken out her pocket calendar.
“So this would’ve been Friday, May twenty-eighth, is that right?” she said. “When you last came up here?”
“If that’s what it says,” he said, and leaned over to look at the calendar in her hand.
“And the lock was okay at that time?” Willis said.
“Had to use my key to open the door,” the super said.
“Anybody been up here since?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Let’s see what’s on the other side,” Eileen said.
A doorknob was lying on the floor inside the door. The super poked a screwdriver into the hole the missing knob had left, angled it upward, and used it for leverage to pull open the door. They stepped out onto the roof.
There were times when this city took your breath away.
The day was sunny and bright, with wisps of white clouds scudding across an immaculate blue sky. At this time of day, the sun glinted on the gray-green waters of the River Harb below in the near distance, causing dancing sparkles of silver to glimmer on its surface. There was enough breeze to encourage the city’s sailors; at least a dozen boats skimmed along the river’s surface, bright sails billowing in the sunlight. Across the river in the next state, a non-competitive skyline seemed modestly secure in its own stark beauty. And to their right, the city’s rooftops stretched far and away to the distant River Dix.
“Is the building next door a doorman building?” Eileen asked.
“Don’t think so,” the super said.
“So he could’ve got onto this roof from the one next door,” Willis said.
“If he was of a mind to, yes,” the super said.
“Could’ve jumped right over.”
“If he was intent on doing mischief, yes.”