Hark!

by Ed McBain

  “Why Hamlet?” Willis asked.

  “Why Macbeth?” Genero insisted.

  “Something in Grover Park again?” Brown suggested. “Like his mischief last time around? Some kind of event in the Cow Pasture?”

  “When does Shakespeare on the Green start?” Eileen asked.

  “Sometime later this month?”

  “Around the fifteenth?”

  “Later, I think.”

  “But even if it is Shakespeare on the Green…”

  “Right,” Eileen said.

  “Of course,” Meyer agreed.

  “…it’d be bullshit, anyway.”

  “He never tells us what he’s really up to.”

  “So toss the letter,” Parker suggested, and shrugged.

  “He’s got to be telling us something,” Carella said.

  “Even if it’s something misleading?”

  “Poetry,” Brown said, shaking his head.

  “Shakespearean poetry, no less.”

  “Macbeth, no less!” Genero said, agreeing.

  MELISSA CALCULATED THAT of the thirty-five large Adam was allotting for operating expenses, Carter was costing her ten, and the various messengers would cost her another, say, two, three thou, depending on how far upward any of them negotiated the basic hundred-dollar delivery fee. That would leave her with a cool profit of, say, twenty thousand.

  She had already given Carter three as the down payment for his work, and had paid the twelve o’clock delivery boy a hundred. Because the girl looked so neat and clean and innocent and all, Melissa had given two hundred to the four o’clock messenger Ame had sent; she wondered where the hell in Diamondback he’d found somebody who resembled a college girl. So out of the five K Adam had laid on her this morning, she now had something like sixteen hundred left, after cab fares and drinks and coffees and such while she’d waited for the messengers to show up first at the Lucky Diamond and then at the Hotel Majestic lounge, the separate venues (she liked that word) she’d chosen for their meeting places.

  Now what she could have done was take that sixteen hundred and buy herself some goodies with it, including the lingerie Adam had suggested, but she figured a more profitable investment would be a gift for Adam himself. She decided she’d look for a cashmere robe for him; a nice black cashmere robe would put him in a good mood, his blond hair and all.

  But then, because at the back of her mind she still had the feeling that one day he might shoot her dead if he became dissatisfied with one thing or another…

  …and since she was already uptown here where she knew most of the criminal element from the days when she was either on her back or her knees, working either day or night to fill the coffers, whatever they were, of her erstwhile representative, Ambrose Carter…

  …she decided to visit a man named Blake Fuller, who sold her a neat little Kahr PM 9, which at only 16.9 ounces empty and measuring only four by five-and-a-half inches overall, would fit nicely into her purse, just in case push came to shove later on down the line.

  Only cost her five bills, too, which Fuller advised her was a bargain.

  That left eleven hundred for the robe.

  Thinking she’d done a good day’s work so far, she grabbed a taxi and headed for the big department stores midtown.

  Along about then, the cute little college girl lookalike was delivering the Deaf Man’s third and final note of the day.

  THE NOTE read:

  Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes

  And beat our watch, and rob our passengers.

  “At least he spelled everything right this time,” Genero said. “Didn’t he?”

  Carella was already at his computer, looking for RhymeZone Shakespeare Search.

  “An arrow again,” Eileen said, just as Carella typed in “as stand in narrow lanes.” “Buried in the word narrow.”

  “First spears, now arrows,” Kling said.

  “Arrows all day long.”

  “King Richard II, Act Five, Scene Three,” Carella read from the screen.

  “First The Tempest, then Hamlet, and now Richard II,” Willis said.

  “Any importance to these plays he’s choosing?” Hawes asked. He was being very careful not to get his open-toed boot stepped on by any of the detectives milling around Carella’s desk.

  “He’s just choosing them at random,” Parker said. “It’s all total bullshit.”

  “I don’t think so,” Carella said. “First off, he’s telling us it’s going to happen on our watch. He’s going to ‘beat our watch.’ ”

  “That’s very clever,” Genero said.

  “Thanks,” Carella said.

  “I meant him. It’s very clever of him to have found that reference.”

  “He’s going to rob our passengers,” Eileen said.

  “We don’t have any passengers,” Parker said.

  “It’s something to do with passengers,” she insisted.

  “A train?”

  “An airplane?”

  “A boat?”

  “Oh, Jesus, not another boat.”

  “Not another rock star, please!”

  “Who stands in narrow lanes?” Hawes asked.

  “Hookers,” Parker said at once.

  This he knew for sure.

  PARKER SUGGESTED THAT he should be the one who interrogated the girl because he was older and therefore more avuncular than either Hawes, Willis, Genero, or Kling, and perhaps younger but more experienced than Carella, which he wasn’t; Carella had been a cop longer than Parker had, and Carella had just turned forty whereas Parker was forty-two.

  In any case, because the police department was at best a sexist organization and Lieutenant Byrnes was still clinging to the notion that Eileen Burke could bring a woman’s so-called intuition to this case, she was the one chosen to speak to Alison Kane that Saturday afternoon.

  “So where’d you get that letter, Alison?” she asked.

  Chummy sort of dormy school-girl approach.

  “In the lounge at the Hotel Majestic.”

  “Is it nice there? I’ve never been there.”

  “Very nice, yes,” Alison said.

  She was perhaps twenty-four, twenty-five years old, some five-six or -seven, slender and curvy but not too buxom. Wearing a not-too-short dark green skirt, with a paler green twin sweater set, crew neck and buttoned cardigan. String of pearls around her neck. Truly looked Ivy League. Eileen figured her for a hooker.

  “What were you doing at the Majestic?” she asked.

  “Just stopped by for a cup of tea.”

  Sounded Ivy League, too.

  “Happened to be strolling by the Majestic…”

  “I’d been doing some shopping.”

  “Went into the lounge…”

  “Yes. For a cup of tea.”

  “And happened to…well, how did that letter come into your hands, can you tell me?”

  “A woman gave it to me.”

  “Ah. What woman?”

  “A woman I met there. She said she’d had an argument with her boyfriend who was a detective up here, and she wanted someone to deliver this letter of apology to him.”

  “And you believed her.”

  “She seemed sincerely contrite.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Also, she offered me money to deliver the letter.”

  “Ah.”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “Ah.”

  “So I figured I’d help her out. Why not? Her boyfriend’s name was on the letter, some Italian name, so I figured her story was genuine. Otherwise, where would she have got the name?”

  “And her name? Did she tell you her name?”

  “Cookie.”

  “Cookie, uh-huh.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cookie what?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What did this Cookie look like?”

  “Red hair in a feather cut. Brown eyes. About my height, I would guess. Nice figure. About my age, maybe a li
ttle younger. Well-dressed.”

  “Like you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Was she wearing gloves?”

  “What?”

  “Gloves.”

  “No. Gloves?”

  “Gloves. I don’t suppose you were wearing gloves, either, were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t. Gloves? It’s June!”

  “Miss Kane, would you mind if we took your fingerprints before you left the precinct?”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I would mind. Why do you want my fingerprints?”

  “Because they’re most likely on that envelope you handled, and we’d like to eliminate them when we run our check.”

  “What check?”

  “To see what other prints may be on it.”

  “No,” Alison said. “No fingerprints.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eileen said, and looked her dead in the eye. “Ever been in trouble with the law, Miss Kane?”

  She did not answer.

  “Alison? Ever been…?”

  Which was when she gave up Ambrose Carter.

  “WHUT THIS IS,” Ambrose told Willis and Eileen, “is a tempest in a teapot.”

  He was thinking he’d like to put the redhead in his stable. What the hell could she be making as a cop?

  “Girl told us you’re her pimp,” Eileen said.

  “I been out of that trade a long time now,” Carter said.

  “We’re not looking at a Two-Thirty bust,” Willis said.

  Carter knew the man was referring to Section 230.25 of the Penal Law, which stated that a person was guilty of promoting prostitution when he knowingly advanced or profited from prostitution by managing, supervising, controlling, or owning either a house of prostitution or a prostitution business involving two or more prostitutes.

  Which Carter was, in fact, guilty of doing. Owning a prostitution business involving two or more prostitutes. Eleven of them, in fact. But he didn’t let on like he knew what Willis was talking about, because that would be the same thing as admitting he was a pimp, and not a mere agent of sorts.

  “Then whut is it you are looking at, Detective?” he asked Eileen, deferring to her rank and her beauty and her big tits. “And whut do it have to do with me?”

  “Alison Kane,” Eileen said again, which was exactly how she’d opened the conversation.

  “Said you sent her to meet some woman…”

  “I tole you I am no longer engaged in that form of occupation.”

  “This wasn’t a takee-outee call,” Eileen said. “This woman needed someone to deliver a letter.”

  “To us,” Willis said.

  “At the Eighty-seventh Precinct.”

  “Woman gave her two bills to do it.”

  “I still does not know whut this possibly has to do with me,” Carter said, spreading his hands wide in innocence.

  “We want the woman’s name.”

  “I do not know which woman you is talkin’ about.”

  “The woman who gave Alison Kane two hundred bucks to deliver a letter to us.”

  “I know of no such woman.”

  “Alison says you’re the one who sent her…”

  “I do not know anyone named Alison, either. Kane or otherwise.”

  “How about Gloria Stanford?” Willis said.

  “Her neither. Who are all these women?”

  “Gloria Stanford was murdered on Memorial Day,” Willis said.

  “And that ain’t such a tempest in a teapot,” Eileen suggested.

  Which was when Carter gave up Carmela Sammarone.

  THE FEDERAL SEARCH came up with a hit for a prostitution arrest in Los Angeles six Decembers ago. A set of partials they’d lifted from the envelope Alison Kane had delivered matched the prints on file for Sammarone, Carmela, NMI in the AFIS system.

  Before now, they’d had good reason to believe that the Deaf Man had killed Gloria Stanford. Problem was they didn’t know who he might be, or where they could find him.

  Now they also had good reason to believe he’d engaged a prostitute named Carmela Sammarone to recruit at least one other person to deliver his messages to the precinct.

  Problem here was they didn’t know where she might be, either.

  Or even that nowadays she was known as Melissa Summers.

  7.

  THE PHONE RANG at a little past nine that Sunday morning.

  They were sleeping in Sharyn’s apartment that night, and she always slept on the side of the bed closest to the phone because in this city you never knew when another cop would get shot, and the Deputy Chief Surgeon would have to respond.

  Sharyn picked up the receiver and said, “Cooke here,” and then listened, and said, “Where?” and listened again, and said, “I’m on the way,” and hung up and threw back the covers and ran for the bathroom.

  Kling was dressed before she was.

  “I’ll drive you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “I want to,” he said. “We’ll get breakfast when you’re finished there.”

  “My dollface,” she said, and went to him and kissed him.

  He drove them through a Mickey D’s for coffee, and they started the drive to Majesta with the windows down and fresh morning breezes blowing through. There was very little traffic so early on a Sunday morning, and they made it over the bridge in ten minutes flat and were at Mount Pleasant in another ten. Mount Pleasant was one of the city’s better hospitals. There’d be no need for Sharyn to arrange a transfer, but a cop had been badly cut trying to break up an early morning gang rumble outside St. Matthew’s Church on Camden Boulevard, and she had to be here to make sure he’d get the best possible treatment.

  That didn’t explain why Dr. James Melvin Hudson was standing outside the main entrance to the hospital.

  Kling suddenly remembered that this was where Dr. James Melvin Hudson worked. When he wasn’t working at the office of the Deputy Chief Surgeon in Rankin Plaza, four miles and another world away. Medland versus Copland.

  Dr. James Melvin Hudson was wearing his hospital togs this morning, looking all pristine and medical in a white tunic with a stethoscope hanging out of the right-hand pocket. Dr. James Melvin Hudson was tall and black and extremely handsome, and he’d been dating Sharyn when she and Kling first met, and here he was now. Standing outside Mount Pleasant Hospital. Where he was Head of the Oncology Department. Which was why he also worked at Rankin Plaza because cops didn’t only get shot or knifed or bludgeoned or axed; they sometimes got cancer.

  And then Kling remembered that it was someone named Jamie who’d called Sharyn to tell her Hawes had been shot.

  And he suddenly wondered if the colleague who’d suggested she give a listen to “Go Ask” was none other than Jamie Hudson himself.

  Sharyn got out of the car.

  “Hi, Jamie,” she said. “Where is he?”

  And went into the hospital without telling Kling where they’d be meeting for breakfast later.

  THERE WAS NOTHING he appreciated more than thoughtful solitude. Alone in the room he had set aside as his office, sitting behind his computer and contemplating the week ahead, he knew an intense satisfaction he felt lesser men could not possibly enjoy.

  For him, the planning was far more exciting than the execution. He had read somewhere that Alfred Hitchcock felt a movie was finished the moment he laid out his storyboard. In many respects, he felt the same way.

  The letters he would…

  Or rather Melissa would…

  Or rather Melissa’s minions would deliver next week had already been composed and printed and placed in their separate envelopes, each of them addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella at the 87th Precinct. Step by step, bit by bit, Monday through Friday, the delivered messages would gradually unfold his meticulous plan, leading the Keystone Kops down the garden path until Saturday, ta-ra! when at last all would be revealed—if
they were clever enough. But too late.

  Smiling, he hunched over the keyboard and opened first the folder he had titled SKED, and next the file he had titled CALENDAR:

  MON 6/7 DARTS

  TUE 6/8 BACK TO THE FUTURE

  WED 6/9 NUMBERS

  THU 6/10 PALS

  FRI 6/11 WHEN?

  SAT 6/12 NOW!

  He nodded in satisfaction.

  Bit by bit, he thought.

  Step by step.

  The actual gig next Saturday held little or no interest for him. Neither did the eventual payoff. It was the planning that thrilled him to the marrow—to coin a phrase. And this was a magnificent plan!

  He suddenly burst into jubilant song.

  WHEN MELISSA HEARD HIM singing at the top of his lungs, she thought perhaps he’d finally lost it. Sighing, she picked up the receiver and punched out Ambrose Carter’s number in Diamondback. He answered on the third ring.

  “Ame,” she said, “it’s me.”

  “Li’l early to be callin, ain’ it?”

  She looked at the clock on the desk. It was ten minutes past ten.

  “Sorry, Ame,” she said, “but I was wondering about tomorrow.”

  “Whut about tomorrow?”

  “Have you lined up your three people?”

  “Whut three people?” he said.

  She held the receiver away from her ear, looked at it the way a person might do on television when she’d just heard something she couldn’t quite understand or believe. Eyes squinching up. Brow furrowing.

  “For the letters,” she said.

  “Whut letters?” he said.

  “The letters you were going to find people…”

  “Whut letters?” he said again.

  “The letters I advanced you three fucking thousand dollars to…”

  “I don’t know whut you talkin bout, girl,” he said, and hung up.

  She looked at the phone again.

  Just like on television.

  HAWES COULDN’T QUITE imagine himself dating a so-called celebrity, but he guessed that’s what Honey Blair was. Which was why he didn’t have to prod the detectives of Midtown South to follow up diligently on the drive-by shooting that had taken place outside 574 Jefferson at a few minutes before eleven on Wednesday morning, June second, four days ago. The other person in that perforated limousine had been Hawes himself, by the way, but this didn’t seem of much interest to a detective named Brody Hollister, who was heading up the Mid South investigative team.