Hark!

by Ed McBain

  “Thanks, Colton,” he told Hawes on the phone. “We’ll keep that in mind, if, when.”

  “Thanks,” Hawes said. “And it’s Cotton, by the way. Cotton Hawes.”

  “Really?” Hollister said, and hung up.

  Asshole, Hawes thought, and made his next call to the Eight-Six, where there was no question that he himself, Cotton (sometimes known as Colton) Hawes, had been the intended victim. The detective who’d caught the squeal there was a First named Barney Olson, and he told Hawes he was still working the case, but they’d had a rash of crib burglaries this past week, and he was sorry to admit he hadn’t given the sniper case his undivided attention.

  He sounded a bit distracted, but also somewhat sarcastic, landing a mite too heavily on the words “undivided attention,” hmm? Crib burglaries were not the theft of infants’ beds, but merely burglaries committed in dwellings rather than offices, and doubtless of vast importance in a Silk Stocking precinct like the 8-6. But, shit, man, a person—Hawes himself!—had been shot at from a rooftop, and it was very likely, in fact virtually indisputable that the Wednesday morning attempt on his life was linked to the subsequent Friday morning shooting outside his orthopedist’s office on Jefferson Avenue. He still wondered what you had to do to get the “undivided attention” of a cop around here.

  He did not yet know that a personal note of apology had been delivered yesterday to Channel Four’s seventh-floor offices on Moody Street.

  Neither did Honey.

  Her weekend off had started yesterday. This was still Sunday. This afternoon, in fact, they planned to go downtown to hear the visiting Cleveland Symphony Orchestra perform an all-Stravinsky program in Clarendon Hall’s popular “Three at Three” series. Meanwhile, Hawes had finished making his calls, and Honey was taking a luxuriant bubble bath.

  He wondered if he should go in there and offer to scrub her back.

  CARELLA’S MIND WAS on the Deaf Man.

  Watching his wife’s moving fingers, translating for his mother and sister, his mind was nonetheless on where the Deaf Man might be, and what he might be planning on this Sunday, the sixth day of June.

  Carella had checked with the desk sergeant at the 8-7 early this morning, as soon as he’d got up, but as of eight-thirty A.M, no message from Mr. Adam Fen had been delivered. He had checked again at twelve-thirty, just about when his mother, and Angela, and Angela’s two daughters were arriving for lunch, but again, there had been nothing from the man who’d barraged them with missives the week before.

  Now, reading and translating, Carella’s mind wandered.

  While Teddy explained that they had thought a Northern Italian menu might be appropriate, in honor of Luigi and his children and the dozen or more friends who were coming over from Milan for the wedding, Carella was thinking. Two days of anagrams, starting with WHO’S IT, ETC? on Tuesday afternoon and ending the next day with I’M A FATHEAD, MEN! All five notes designed to remind them of his previous mischief and to tell them he was the one who’d killed Gloria Stanford.

  And, as Teddy’s fingers signaled savory but difficult to sign pass-around starters like bruschetta and crostata di funghi and tartine di baccala, Carella simultaneously spoke the words aloud in his halting Italian while silently pondering the fusillade of Shakespearean quotes that had started on Thursday with three shakes and a spear…

  Rough winds do SHAKE…

  SHAKE off slumber…

  SHAKE me up…

  And finally…

  …footing of a SPEAR.

  Announcing without question that whatever might come next, it would most certainly come from Shakespeare. And indeed it had. On Friday morning…

  “Steve? Are you listening to her?”

  His sister’s voice. Yanking him forward some five centuries in time.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Teddy was starting on the main course.

  There’ll be two choices, she signed.

  “There’ll be two choices,” Carella said, reading her hands. “Either the roast lamb loin encrusted with mixed Italian herbs…”

  “Yummy,” Angela said.

  “Or the Tuscan-style veal tenderloin.”

  “I think I prefer the veal,” his mother said.

  “Well, there’ll be a choice, Mom.”

  “I know, honey. I’m just saying I love veal.”

  I thought no fish, Teddy signed. Fish can be tricky.

  Which was even trickier to sign.

  She went on to explain the entrées would be accompanied by fresh sweet peas and pearl onions…

  “And new potatoes,” Carella said, reading.

  And a spinach salad…

  “With goat cheese, walnuts, and a warm pancetta dressing,” Carella said.

  And, of course, there’ll be a choice of desserts, Teddy signed.

  “It sounds delicious,” Angela said.

  “Steve?” his mother said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Can’t wait,” he said, nodding, but his mind had begun to wander again.

  So while the women lingered over coffee and cannoli, and the children ran around the house giggling and playing whatever game they’d invented this week, he went to the computer in Mark’s room, and again called up the sources of the three “spear” notes they’d received on Friday.

  Tickle our noses with spear-grass—from Henry IV.

  Where is your boar-spear, man?—from Richard III.

  And the last note that day—Slander’s venom’d spear—from Richard II.

  Was there any significance to the choice of plays, or the order in which the notes were delivered?

  If so, what about yesterday’s notes?

  No more spears this time around. Now the Deaf Man was into arrows:

  Her waspish-headed son has broke his arrows

  Swears he will shoot no more but play with sparrows

  Act Four of The Tempest.

  The slings and arrows…

  Act Three of Hamlet.

  And lastly:

  As stand in narrow lanes

  Act Five of King Richard II.

  One historical drama this time around. Plus a straight play and a tragedy. Carella could see nothing significant in their choice.

  Or in the sequence of their delivery, either.

  He was left with solely spears and arrows, some of them buried, and he still didn’t know what the hell was about to happen.

  HAWES MENTIONED DURING the intermission that he was getting sort of a brush-off from the upper-crust dicks at the Eight-Six and the overworked ones in Mid South. Honey seemed surprised.

  “Even after the show I did Friday night?” she asked.

  “Oh, they’re aware of you, all right. But they don’t seem interested in finding a link to whoever took those potshots at me. Outside your building, I mean.”

  “You think the two shootings are linked?”

  “Well…don’t you?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know.”

  “You don’t? Honey, it seems obvious that I’m the one they’re after.”

  “You? Why on earth would anyone…?”

  “Maybe because I’ve put away one or two bad guys in my time. And some of those guys are out on the street again. And maybe they still don’t like the idea of…”

  “Excuse me, Miss Blair?”

  Hawes turned. A tall thin man with a silly grin on his face was virtually leaning in over Hawes’s aisle seat to extend his program to Honey in the seat next to his.

  “Could you sign it ‘To Ben,’ please?” he asked, and handed her the program and a marking pen.

  Hawes shifted his weight, giving Honey the arm rest and more room to write. Feigning indifference, he busied himself with his own program.

  It appeared that next week’s “Three at Three” series would kick off on Saturday afternoon with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, his only full concerto for violin. Konstantinos Sallas, the guest violinist, would…

  “There you go, Ben,” Honey said,
and handed the program and the pen across Hawes to the man, who was standing expectantly in the aisle, still grinning like a schoolboy.

  “Thank you, Miss Blair,” he said.

  Honey smiled, and then squeezed Hawes’s hand.

  The house lights were beginning to dim.

  AT A LITTLE PAST FOUR that afternoon, just as Eileen was searching through her refrigerator and discovering there was nothing but yogurt to eat for dinner tonight, her telephone rang. For some reason, she looked at her watch, and then went into the living room to pick up the receiver.

  “Burke,” she said.

  “Eileen, hi. It’s Hal.”

  “Hey, hi,” she said.

  “Got a minute?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got some ideas about our Deaf Man.”

  “I’m all ears,” she said.

  Willis laughed.

  “Wanna meet for a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Sure,” she said, and for some reason looked at her watch again.

  “Horton’s on Max?”

  “Give me ten.”

  “See you.”

  There was a click on the line.

  She looked at the receiver.

  Gave a little puzzled shrug.

  Shrugged aside the shrug.

  Put the receiver back on its cradle, went into the bedroom to see what she looked like in the mirror there, decided she looked good enough for coffee at Horton’s, looked at her watch again, and left the apartment.

  HORTON’S ON MAX was one of a chain of coffee joints that took their separate names from the streets or avenues of their locations. Hence there was a Horton’s on Howes and a Horton’s on Rae and a Horton’s on Granger and a Horton’s on Mapes and so forth. The Horton’s on Max took its name from its corner location on Maximilian Street, which had been named after Ferdinand Maximilian, the deposed emperor of Mexico, who—at dawn on the nineteenth of June, 1867—was executed by firing squad on El Cerro de las Campanas…

  “That means ‘The Hill of the Bells’ in English,” Willis told her.

  Maximilian Street was not located on or near any hill, nor was there a church close by that might have sounded bells every hour on the hour and therefore provided a modicum of credibility to naming the street after a long-forgotten and scarcely mourned Mexican emperor. But the street had been named during a heatedly fought mayoral election, when a brief influx of Mexican immigrants to this part of the city seemed to presage (wrongly as it turned out) a full-scale invasion of wetbacks. Ever mindful of the power of the ballot box, the city’s incumbent mayor dug into his history books and—seemingly ignorant of the fact that Maximilian had been imported from Austria and was largely despised—changed the name of the erstwhile “Thimble Street” (but that was another story) to the more acceptable to Mexicans (he thought) “Maximilian Street.”

  The theme of “independence” being a favorite one in any American election…

  “The other one being ‘patriotism,’ ” Willis said.

  …perhaps the incumbent mayor was thinking of Maximilian’s last words before the bullets thudded home: “I forgive everyone, and I ask everyone to forgive me. May my blood which is about to be shed, be for the good of the country. Viva Mexico, viva la independencia!”

  “But I digress,” Willis said.

  “How come you know so much about Mexico?” Eileen asked.

  Willis hesitated. Then he said, “Well, Marilyn spent a lot of time in Mexico, you know.”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Yes,” he said, and fell silent.

  They were sipping cappuccino in a corner window, sitting in armchairs opposite each other.

  “You okay with that now?” she asked.

  She was talking about Marilyn Hollis getting shot to death by a pair of Argentinian hit men.

  “Are you ever okay with something like that?” he asked, and suddenly reached across the table to touch her cheek. “Are you okay with this?” he asked.

  He was talking about the faint scar on her cheek where she’d been cut by the son of a bitch who’d later raped her.

  “As okay as I’ll ever be,” she said.

  “So,” he said, and pulled back his hand, and nodded. He hesitated for what seemed a long time. Then he asked, “Is there still anything between you and Bert?”

  “No,” she said. “No. Why?”

  “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t…”

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head.

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “You know.”

  She looked at him, nodded. There was another long silence.

  “Remember that time in the sleeping bag?” she asked.

  “Oh, God, yes!”

  Their first encounter with the Deaf Man. The stakeout in Grover Park. Eileen and Willis sharing a sleeping bag as pretend lovers. A decoy lunch pail on one of the benches, cut scraps of newspaper inside it, instead of the fifty thousand bucks the Deaf Man had demanded.

  The “passionate couple” assignment had been the choice one; Hawes and Willis had drawn straws for it, and Willis had won. He’d worked with Eileen only once before then, on a mugging case. Now they were lying side by side, in somewhat close proximity, in a sleeping bag.

  “We’re supposed to be kissing,” he told Eileen.

  “My lips are getting chapped,” she said.

  “Your lips are very nice,” he said.

  “We’re supposed to be here on business.”

  “Mmmm,” he answered.

  “Get your hand off my behind.”

  “Oh, is that your behind?”

  “Listen,” she said.

  “I hear it,” he said. “Somebody’s coming. You’d better kiss me.”

  She kissed him.

  “What’s that?” Willis asked suddenly.

  “Do not be afraid, guapa, it is only my pistol,” Eileen said, and laughed.

  Remembering now, sipping their coffees, they looked at each other across the round table between them. Eileen licked foam from her lips.

  “I didn’t know what guapa meant,” Willis said.

  “Rabbit,” Eileen said.

  “I know that now.”

  “The line was from For Whom the Bell Tolls. The sleeping bag scene between Robert and what’s her name.”

  “Ingrid Bergman.”

  “I meant in the book.”

  “I forget.”

  “Ah, how soon we forget,” she said.

  They looked at each other again.

  “What are these ideas you’ve got about the Deaf Man?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any ideas about the Deaf Man,” he said. “None at all. Not a clue.”

  “Then…”

  “I lied.”

  “You didn’t have to,” she said, and reached across the table and took his hand. “But promise me something, Hal.”

  “Yes?”

  “Never lie to me again.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I want to make love to you.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “Eileen? I want to make love to you,” he said.

  “I heard you,” she said.

  “Eileen?”

  “Yes, Hal, yes. I heard you.”

  “So…do you think…do you think you might…?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I think so,” and reached across the table, and took his other hand in hers. “Yes, Hal,” she said softly. “Yes.”

  MELISSA KNEW WHERE to find him because she’d worked for the bastard. Knew all his haunts, all his hangouts, all the places he slept and didn’t sleep. He was a busy little man, Ambrose Carter was. When she located him at seven o’clock that Sunday night, it was just beginning to grow dark.

  She spotted him through the front plate glass window, sitting at the bar, nursing what was probably a Blackjack, his favorite drink. She knew better than to go inside there, confront him where there’d be all his homies to help him out. Drag her out of there, do her fo
re and aft to teach her a lesson, a dozen of them, two dozen of them, however many it took to teach the little whore a lesson once and for all.

  Well, she was here tonight to teach him a lesson.

  Teach Mr. Ambrose Carter a lesson.

  Teach him you don’t go taking money from a person, even if she was a whore, and then not deliver on your promise. You just don’t do that.

  Not to Melissa Summers, anyway.

  She waited till he finished his drink, waited till he paid for it and came out of the bar, walking a bit unsteadily, watched him from across the street, and then caught up with him just as he was unlocking the door to his car.

  “Ame?” she said.

  He turned.

  He was looking at a small gun in her hand. Seemed like some kind of toy gun made out of plastic.

  “Well, look who the fuck’s here,” he said.

  “I’ll need my money back, Ame,” she said.

  “Get lost, ho,” he said, and went back to unlocking his car door, turning his back on her.

  It was calling her a whore that did it, she supposed. He shouldn’t have called her a whore. Shouldn’t have turned his back on her, either. Shouldn’t have dissed her that way. She thought maybe that was why she shot him twice in the back, once while he was still standing, and another time after he’d crumpled to the sidewalk.

  Or maybe it was because she’d sucked too many cocks for the son of a bitch in the five years she’d worked for him.

  Maybe that was it.

  SHE CAME OUT of the bathroom wearing only a white garter belt and red high-heeled pumps. The garter belt, white, made her look somewhat virginal. The pumps matched her lipstick, a red much brighter than her hair, too bright to be worn by anyone but a whore. She had pulled the hair back into a ponytail that again made her appear girlish, a teenager surprised, echoing the pristine white of the garter belt. The garter belt exposed the wild red tangle of her pubic hair, enforcing the whore image again. She was a study in contrasts tonight, Eileen Burke.