Hark!

by Ed McBain

  They turned back to the door behind them.

  Someone had worked long and hard on the knob in order to get to the lock. Removed the knob, approached the lock from inside the door.

  “No alarm on this door?” Willis said.

  “No,” the super said.

  “You ought to look into that,” Willis said.

  Why? Eileen wondered. Horse is already out of the barn.

  The super was thinking the same thing.

  “Can we go down to her apartment again?” Eileen asked.

  THIS TIME THEY CONCENTRATED on the door and the lock. And this time, now that they were looking for them, they found the discreet marks a burglar’s jimmy had left. So now they knew how he’d got in. Jumped onto the roof from the building next door, forced the lock on the roof door, did the same thing to the lock on Gloria Stanford’s apartment. Was waiting for her when she got home that day. He’d used a gun with a silencer, Ballistics had confirmed that. So no one had heard any shots, no one had raised an alarm. Had he left the building the same way he’d got in? Probably. Easy come, easy go.

  They thanked the super for his time, and left 1113 Silvermine Oval.

  “Want to do a canvass next door?” Willis asked.

  “I doubt if anyone spotted him going in or out,” she said. “But if you want to knock on doors, I’m with you.”

  “For the sake of closure,” he said.

  “I hate that word,” she said. “Closure.”

  “So do I.”

  “It’s a lawyer’s word.”

  “I also hate lawyers,” Willis said.

  “Me, too.”

  They were out on the street now. It was almost three-thirty. Their shift was almost over.

  “So what do you say?”

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “Keep the Loot happy.”

  THE DEAF MAN’S third and final note that day cleared up any lingering doubt that he was trying to spear the word spear, so to speak:

  Yea, and to tickle our noses with spear-grass to make them bleed, and then to beslubber our garments with it and swear it was the blood of true men.

  “What the hell is spear-grass?” Parker asked.

  “Some kind of grass they have over there in England,” Genero said.

  “How do you happen to know that?”

  “Common sense. If it’s Shakespeare, it has to be England.”

  “This doesn’t even look like Shakespeare,” Hawes said.

  “That’s right. It’s not even poetry.”

  “Shakespeare also wrote prose,” Carella said.

  “And this time, there is a message,” Kling said, “prose or whatever.”

  “What’s prose?” Genero asked.

  “What’s the message?” Hawes asked.

  “That it’s all fake. He’s misleading us. It’s slander, the venom’d spear. It’s a lie again.”

  “Same as always.”

  “Tickle your noses to make them bleed…”

  “Must be some kind of sharp grass, don’t you think? That spear-grass?”

  “…and then beslubber your garments…”

  “I love that word.”

  “Sounds like beslobber,” Brown said. “Beslobber the Johnson…”

  “Beslubber the garments…”

  “The clothes…”

  “…with the blood from the nose, make it look like battle wounds. That’s what he’s saying. It’s all fake. He’s leading us to spear, but he’s going someplace else.”

  “Then why’s he leading us to spear?”

  “Cause he’s a rotten son of a bitch,” Carella said.

  THE BUILDING NEXT DOOR to 1113 Silvermine Oval was a seventeen-story edifice with six apartments on each floor. By five-thirty that night, Willis and Eileen had knocked on the doors to a hundred and two apartments, and spoken to eighty-nine tenants who were home and who answered their knocking. The first time they’d ever dealt with the Deaf Man, they’d got a description of him from a doorman named Joey. This was a long time ago, after he’d fired a shotgun blast into Carella’s shoulder and slammed the stock of the shotgun into his head again and again and again. One could understand why Carella considered any encounter with the Deaf Man a highly personal matter.

  He’s around my height, Joey had told Lieutenant Byrnes. Maybe six-one, six-two, and I guess he weighs around a hun’ eighty, a hun’ ninety pounds. He’s got blond hair and blue eyes, and he wears this hearing aid in his right ear.

  This was the description they gave the tenants now. Had anyone seen a white male fitting that description, in or around the building, at anytime on Memorial Day?

  No one had seen anyone fitting that description.

  Not on Memorial Day or any other day.

  Outside the building again, Willis said, “Wanna catch a bite to eat?”

  Eileen looked at him.

  “Maybe go see a movie afterward?” he said.

  She hesitated a moment longer.

  Then she said, “Sure. Why not?”

  THAT EVENING, CHANNEL FOUR’S Six O’Clock News had a big story to tell.

  Someone had tried to kill their star investigative reporter, Honey Blair.

  Avery Knowles, the show’s co-anchor, first announced it on the air at five minutes past six, following the breaking news about a big fire in Calm’s Point, where two children left alone had been playing with a kerosene burner while their mother was out scratching numbers off a lottery ticket at the corner grocery store.

  “Earlier today,” Avery said, “an armed assailant tried to murder someone with whom all of our viewers are familiar. You can only see the story now, here on Channel Four, in Honey Blair’s own words.”

  Only a handful of literate viewers knew that if they could only see the story now, right here on Channel Four, then they could not also hear the story. However, these were probably not Avery Knowles’s own words, but instead the words of some network employee who didn’t realize that the correct language should have been “You can see the story now, only here on Channel Four.”

  Standing before the camera in her trademark legs-slightly-apart pose, wearing a mini that was also something of a trademark, Honey said (not in her own words, either, even though they were coming from her own mouth), “This morning at approximately five minutes to eleven, in front of five-seventy-four Jefferson Avenue, a gunman fired some dozen or more shots into a Channel Four vehicle that was driving me here to the studio. I have no idea why I was the target, but if any of our listeners have any information whatsoever regarding the shooting, please call either the police hotline number at the bottom of the screen or our own hotline number listed just below it. Meanwhile, hear this loud and clear, Mr. Shooter! I don’t know what might have ticked you off, but I’m going to keep doing my job, rain or shine, bullets or not! Just keep that in mind, mister!”

  The camera cut back to the co-anchors. Millie Anderson, the woman on the team, said, “We’re with you, Honey. Folks, if you have any information at all, please call one of those hotlines, won’t you?”

  She glanced at Avery and said, “A terrible thing, Ave.” Avery nodded in solemn agreement. Millie looked back into the camera again. “At the Federal Courthouse downtown this afternoon,” she said, “two women accused of…”

  Cotton Hawes snapped off his television set.

  He was wondering why Honey hadn’t mentioned he’d been in the car with her. Or that someone had tried to kill him as he’d come out of her building Wednesday morning. He was merely a cop, but it seemed to him that in all probability he himself, and not Honey Blair, had been the intended target.

  But he guessed that was show biz.

  EILEEN DIDN’T THINK she should ask him anything about Marilyn Hollis.

  Willis didn’t think he should ask her anything about Bert Kling.

  So over dinner, they talked mostly about the case. The two cases actually. One past, one future. The murder of Gloria Stanford and whatever monkeyshines the Deaf Man might be cooking up for the days ahead. They
had worked together for a good long while now—from way back to when Eileen was still with Special Forces—but they’d socialized only once before, dinner with the four of them, Willis and Marilyn, Eileen and Kling. So to make dinner tonight a bit less awkward, they tried to figure out why the Deaf Man had anagramatically confessed to the murder of Gloria Stanford, and why he was now taunting them with Shakespearean quotes that might or might not indicate some crime he was planning for the future.

  “Why us?” Willis wondered aloud.

  “I think it’s something personal,” Eileen said. “I think he has something personal against Steve.”

  “Or maybe each and every one of us.”

  “Maybe. But why? What’d we ever do to him?”

  “He’s annoyed because we always mess him up.”

  “Wellll,” Eileen said, “I’m not sure I’d say exactly that, Hal. We’ve never been the ones who actually foiled his plans.”

  “Foiled,” Willis said. “I love that word. Foiled.”

  “So do I.”

  “You think we’ll foil his plans this time?”

  Smiling. Stressing the word. He had a nice smile, Eileen noticed.

  “How can we foil his plans if we don’t even know what they are?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’ll tell us, never fear.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “I really do.”

  “Dream on,” Eileen said.

  WHEN MELISSA GOT BACK to the apartment that evening, the first thing he did was ask her to model the wigs.

  Her natural hair color—well, as natural as Miss Clairol could make it—was what they called “Spring Honey,” a sort of soft blondish hue that she felt suited her chocolate-brown eyes. In a wig shop on Sakonsett Street—which name she supposed derived from the American Indians who had once inhabited this island—she’d found a wig shop named Hair Today that was having what it called its “Late Spring” sale. There were sales going on all over this city, and nobody could tell her this had nothing to do with the shitty economy. She’d bought two wigs—well, gee, these prices!—a red one in a sort of feather cut like the one she wore her own hair in, and a black one, shoulder length with bangs across the forehead. Looked s-o-oo natural with her brown eyes. Cost a bit less than a hundred each, including tax.

  “Nice,” he said. “You don’t look at all like yourself.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” she asked.

  She’d gone to bed with guys who’d asked her to wear wigs, and then complained that the drapes didn’t match the carpet, any excuse to bat her around, some of these creeps you met.

  She sure hoped this wasn’t going to be the case here tonight.

  The wigs and all.

  “WELL, I HAVE TO TELL YOU,” Willis said, “this only confirms my theory that you should never go see a movie anybody both wrote and directed.”

  They had just come out of the theater and were strolling up the avenue, most of the shops already closed, the evening still somewhat balmy.

  “I kind of liked it,” Eileen said.

  “You did? Even though it withheld facts we needed to know? I mean, to solve the crime?”

  “Well, you’re a cop. You’d naturally be looking for something like that.”

  “You’re a cop, too. Don’t you think he should have given us, like…some clues?”

  “I was more interested in the personal story. I think women look more for that.”

  “Witholding evidence doesn’t bother you?”

  “Only if the Deaf Man does it.”

  “This was worse than what the Deaf Man’s doing. At least he’s playing fair. He gives us everything we need to know…”

  “We hope.”

  “…and if we’re too dumb to figure it out, that’s our own hard luck.”

  “Wanna go for some coffee or something?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Willis said, but he was just gathering steam.

  As they walked up the avenue toward a coffee shop on the corner, and while they ordered, and even after they’d been served, he went on to say that a lot of the movies he saw nowadays claimed to be mysteries in one way or another, and being a cop whose profession was investigating crime, he felt like shooting the damn auteur directors who made these films.

  “Uh-huh,” Eileen said. “Like which movies do you mean?”

  “Any movie that says ‘written and directed by.’ ”

  “You’ve got a real thing about that, huh?”

  “No, it’s just that…well, figure it out for yourself. Most writers can’t direct, am I right? And most directors can’t write. So when you get a movie that’s both written and directed by the same person, run for the hills!”

  “You really think so, huh?”

  “I really think so. Male or female, if it’s written and directed by, that’s exactly like ‘Conspiracy to Commit,’ or ‘Criminal Facilitation,’ or ‘Hindering Prosecution,’ all of them pretty damn serious crimes.”

  “My, such passion!” Eileen said.

  “Well, it just isn’t fair,” he said, and ducked his head and smiled sheepishly, as though he’d revealed something about himself that might better have stayed concealed. Again, she felt like reaching across the table and taking his hand.

  Outside the coffee shop, they went their separate ways. After all, this hadn’t been a real date. This had just been two cops having dinner together, and seeing a movie afterward, sharing coffee, sharing a bit of movie criticism.

  She hadn’t asked him anything abut Marilyn Hollis.

  And he hadn’t asked her anything about Bert Kling.

  And tomorrow was another working day.

  “STARTING TOMORROW MORNING,” the Deaf Man was saying, “there’ll be notes delivered to the 87th Precinct every day but Sunday.”

  “Why not Sunday?” Melissa asked.

  “Because even God rested on Sunday.”

  “Oh, I see. And what will these notes say?”

  “You don’t have to know that.”

  “Starting tomorrow, you say?”

  “Yes. And continuing through Saturday.”

  “That means…what’s today?”

  “The fourth.” He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s almost midnight, almost the fifth.”

  “That means the last notes will be delivered on June twelfth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that when you’re going to do this thing, whatever it is? On June twelfth?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it you’re going to do?”

  “You don’t have to know that.”

  “Then why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you’ll be delivering the notes.”

  “Oh no. Me walk into a police station? Not on your life!”

  “Not you personally,” he explained patiently. “You’ll have to find people who’ll deliver the notes for you.”

  “It’ll still come right back to me. There’s no way I would ever do anything like that. Why would I want to do anything like that?”

  “Because I’m going to give you thirty-five thousand dollars to do it.”

  “You are?”

  “I am. Five thousand dollars a day for tomorrow, and the six days next week.”

  “Gee,” she said.

  “That should be enough to buy you the people you need, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I guess so, yes.”

  “With quite a bit left over for your trouble, I would expect.”

  “I would expect.”

  “You could buy yourself some nice lingerie.”

  “I certainly could.”

  “Or something.”

  “Or something, yes.”

  “And there’s a lot more coming, Lissie. We’re talking seven figures in the coffers here.”

  She was remembering that she’d taken a million-eight out of that safe-deposit box for him. Was he talking about seven figures in addition to that? Should she ask? Why not?

  “In addition to the other m
oney, you mean?” she said. “The money from the bank?”

  “In addition, yes.”

  “Seven figures has to be at least another million, right?”

  “At least,” he said.

  “And what’s my share of that?” she asked.

  “Mustn’t be greedy, girl,” he said.

  Why not? she thought. And don’t call me girl, she thought. But did not say.

  “How does a vacation in Tortola sound?” he asked. “After this is all over?”

  “A vacation in Tortola might be very nice,” she said, “but…”

  “I’ve already booked the flight,” he said. “We leave at nine-thirty Sunday morning, the thirteenth of June. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

  “Not as nice as a piece of seven figures.”

  He chuckled. Actually chuckled. Still chuckling, he said, “Well, I suppose one can never be too rich or too thin.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Do you know who said that, Lissie?”

  “No, who?”

  “The Duchess of Windsor.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A king gave up an empire for her.”

  “She must have been very beautiful.”

  “Not half as beautiful as you.”

  Melissa wondered if he was telling her he’d give up an empire for her. Maybe cut her in on that seven figures he’d just mentioned? She didn’t ask. Play the cards you’re dealt, she thought. So far, she was a hundred thousand K richer than she’d been before she picked him up in that hotel bar. Or vice versa. Not to mention the sable coat and the mink stole.

  “Do you think you can get those notes delivered when they’re supposed to be delivered?”

  “I think so, yes,” she said. “But…uh…these people I hire to deliver them?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’ll be able to describe me, won’t they? They’ll tell the police exactly what I look like.”

  “That’s where the wigs come in,” he said.

  6.

  MELISSA FIGURED THIS WAS what she usually did, anyway, except in reverse. Haggle over a price, that is. What usually happened, the john said, “Two hundred for the night,” and then you said “Five hundred.” He said “Three,” you said “Four.” You settled for three and a half and everybody was happy—especially you, if he fell asleep after the first go-round.