by Ed McBain
“Not even your mama?”
“Everyone calls me Richard.”
“ ‘Darts envenomed’ are poisoned darts, Richard.”
“Thanks for the information.”
“ ‘Welcome to the ears,’ ” Carella said, typing the words into the computer.
“Joking about his own infirmity,” Hawes said.
“You think so?”
“Signing the note, in effect. I am the Deaf Man, remember?”
“Julius Caesar, Act Five, Scene Three,” Carella said, reading from the screen.
“How many is that so far?”
“How many is what?”
“The plays he’s quoted from.”
“Nine?” Kling said.
“No, ten, I think.”
“No, wait…”
“Plus one from the sonnets. The one about the darling buds of May,” Eileen said, and glanced at Willis.
“And we still don’t know where the first one came from,” Carella said.
“Which one?”
“About ‘an actor’s art,’ all that.”
“ ‘An actor’s art can die, and live, to act a second part,’ ” Kling quoted.
“So how many is that?”
“Nine plays for sure. Or ten. Plus the sonnet.”
“Out of how many?” Genero asked.
They all looked at him.
“How many did he write?”
“Thousands,” Parker said.
“Must be a place we can find out,” Genero said. “Isn’t there a collection or something?”
“What difference does it make how many he wrote, Richard?”
“I thought if there was a collection someplace…”
“Yes, Richard?”
“We could figure out how many he wrote.”
“And then what?”
“One thing could lead to another,” Genero said, and shrugged.
THE DEAF MAN was thinking that almost anywhere in America, almost anyone could walk in with a bomb and blow the place to smithereens. Walk into any restaurant, any theater, any sporting event, any prayer meeting with a bomb strapped around your waist, and the rest was late-night news. When death was preferable to life, when death promised a heaven where there’d be seven, or seventeen, or seventy waiting virgins, however many there were supposed to be—he personally didn’t think there were any virgins left in the entire world—then what was to stop any lunatic from walking in with his ticket to paradise strapped around his waist?
Security?
Impossible to maintain in a free society.
Right this minute, he was walking into the biggest library in the city, stopping at a checkpoint where uniformed guards examined his briefcase, peering into it like the trained watchdogs they were, but never asking him to open his jacket or take off his shoes because so far no one in America had marched in loaded. Once that happened, things would change. Before long, you’d be strip-searched before you were permitted to watch the latest hit movie. But for now…
“Thank you, sir. If you’ll check the bag, please.”
He walked across the echoing, vaulted marble lobby to a cloakroom behind and to the right of the security guards. He handed the briefcase across the counter, received a claim check for it, and followed the signs to FOLGER FIRST FOLIO.
THERE USED TO BE a time when Ollie frequented girls like the ones employed or previously employed by Ambrose Carter. Not that he’d been personally intimate with anyone in the man’s stable. But he was certainly familiar with the species. There was a time, too, when Ollie might have called a prostitute of the Hispanic persuasion a “spic slut,” but that was before he’d met Patricia Gomez, who was Puerto Rican and a police officer besides and who was…well…not his girlfriend, quite, but someone he was…well…sort of seeing. And nowadays, he would break anyone’s head who called Patricia a spic.
The first hooker he talked to was, in fact, a spic slut named Paquita Flores, a very dark-skinned voluptuous cutie dressed somewhat scantily for so early in June, not even summer yet here in the city, sitting on the front stoop of her own building, skirt up to her ass, long legs flashing, licking a lollipop, as if she needed further advertisement.
“Yo, hombre,” she said, looking up, licking. “Long time no see.”
He tried to remember those days back then when he frequently traded police lenience for sexual favors. Paquita had been sixteen or thereabouts. She was now, what, twenty, twenty-one? He sat down beside her. Her skimpy frilled skirt flapped about her knees in a mild breeze. She kept licking the lollipop.
“Que pasa, maricon?” she said.
“What’s the word on Carter?” he asked.
“Oh, man, he’s like dead, you dinn know?” she said, and grinned around the lollipop.
“The street guessing why?”
“Maybe he ratted out a whore.”
“Which one?”
“Don’t know, man.”
“Who would know?”
“Carter wasn’ my abadesa,” Paquita said. “You axin the wrong person.”
“Who should I ask?”
“Go the Three Flies. His girls hang there.”
THE BOOK WAS in a thick glass case surrounded on all four sides by uniformed guards. The Deaf Man knew that the case was alarmed and that if anyone so much as touched the glass, the alarms would sound not only here on the second floor of the library, but also at the offices of Security Plus, who would immediately alert the Midtown South Squad, four blocks from the library.
A red velvet rope hanging on stanchions kept visitors back some four feet from the exhibit. The book in its glass case was opened to its title page:
A notice behind a plexiglas shield was fastened to one wall of the library’s Elizabethan Room, advising visitors that the book on display was on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., home to the largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works. Included in the Folger’s collections were more than 310,000 books and manuscripts, 250,000 playbills, 27,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, and prints, and musical instruments, costumes, and films.
The notice further advised that the rare book on exhibit was one of only four copies of the earliest complete editions of plays written by William Shakespeare. Whereas only eighteen of his plays had appeared in print during his lifetime, the First Folio collection contained thirty-six of his plays, together with a list of the names of the principal actors in the company, as well as comments and eulogies from them. The book had been printed in London in 1623, at an estimated cost of a bit more than six shillings per copy, marked up to a London retail price of fifteen shillings for the unbound edition, and an even one pound for the edition bound in plain calf.
It was now worth 6.2 million dollars.
THE THREE FLIES was a bar in what used to be a notorious red-light section of the Eight-Eight once upon a time before an off-duty cop got shot in the neighborhood by a pimp who didn’t like one of his girls having sex with the cop a few dozen times. The girl’s developing bad habit led to all the other neighborhood pimps calling the pimp in question—to his face, no less—un ahuevado. Which subsequently led to the hapless cop getting shot, and incidentally killed. So the other cops of the Eight-Eight took offense and went marching in there like it was Iraq. The area was now relatively clean, but the Three Flies was still a hangout for hookers and college boys who wandered over from Beasley U across the park, looking for sex or dope or both.
When Ollie got there at three that afternoon, the place was still comparatively empty; the schoolboys were still at their studies, and most of the hookers were still sleeping off last night’s revelries. The jukebox was playing some kind of bullfight music, and two girls were sitting in a booth bullshitting in time to it. Ollie walked over to them. He didn’t know either one of them, so he flashed the buzzer to let them know this was the Law here, and sat down opposite them, and grinned across the table at them. The girls didn’t look scared in the slightest; cops were some of their best customers.
One of the girls stared at him. She was a black girl with blond hair. The other one was white, also blond. Both of them in their twenties, Ollie guessed. Both of them smoking and drinking beer straight from the same bottle, passing it back and forth between them. Ollie wondered if they worked as a team, passing similarly shaped things back and forth between them.
“What about him?” the black blonde asked.
“Who’d he rat out? And why?”
The two blondes looked at each other.
Dead-panned, they turned back to Ollie.
“So?” he said.
“What’s in it for us?” the white blonde asked.
“Look, almeja,” Ollie said, which meant “cunt” in Spanish, but which the white blonde didn’t understand because she happened to be of Scotch-Irish descent, “I don’t have time to waste here, okay?”
The black blonde didn’t know what almeja meant, either, her great-great grandparents having come from the Ivory Coast. But she knew what the look on this fat hump’s face meant.
So she said, “Carmela Sammarone.”
Which was what led him to the Eighty-seventh Precinct.
OLLIE ARRIVED JUST a few minutes after the third note that day was delivered.
“She’s got the city’s whole damn powder crowd marching in here with her damn messages,” Byrnes told his assembled detectives.
“Your needle freaks and sleepwalkers, too,” Parker said.
This after they realized the third messenger was a heroin addict.
The third note read:
And that you not delay the present, but,
Filling the air with swords advanced and darts,
We prove this very hour.
“Swords again,” Meyer said.
“Spears to arrows to swords.”
“Or darts,” Carella said. “Maybe that’s where he’s leading us. Darts.”
“Like you throw at a board,” Genero said, nodding. “Like in a pub.”
“What do you know about pubs, Richard?”
“They’re like these bars they have over there.”
“Over where, Richard?”
“In England. Where Shakespeare came from,” Genero said, and hesitated. “Didn’t he?”
“Smaller and smaller,” Eileen said. “The weapons.”
Willis looked at her. So did Kling.
“They’re getting smaller and smaller.”
“A sword ain’t smaller than an arrow,” Parker said.
“A dart is,” Hawes said.
“He’s gonna shoot somebody with a poisoned dart!” Genero announced triumphantly.
“Who is?” Ollie Weeks asked.
He had just pushed his way through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. Now, sauntering in as if he owned the place, he walked over to where the detectives were gathered around the note on Carella’s desk, peeked at it, shrugged, and said, “Who’s Carmela Sammarone?”
“Why?” Eileen asked.
“Hey, Cutie, how you like it up here?” Ollie said, referring to her recent transfer, and grinning like a shark.
“I like it fine, thanks,” she said, almost adding “Fatso,” but she felt he might be sensitive. “Why do you want to know about Carmela Sammarone?”
“Because I caught a dead pimp, and from what I understand, he gave up one of his girls to you. Is that correct?”
“One of his former girls, yes.”
“So mayhaps his ratting her out pissed her off,” Ollie said. “And mayhaps, as a consequence, she pumped a pair of nines into him.”
“You speak Shakespeare, too?” Genero asked.
“Huh?” Ollie said.
“Mayhaps, I mean.”
“Huh?” Ollie said again.
“We’re getting notes from Shakespeare.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Shakespeare’s dead.”
“Quotes from him,” Genero explained.
“So what?” Ollie said.
“Sammarone is delivering them,” Willis said.
“Paying people to deliver them.”
“That’s what Carter spilled.”
Ollie thought this over for a moment.
“That doesn’t sound like a reason to kill him,” he said.
“Maybe it does,” Parker said. “We think she’s working for the guy who stiffed a broad last week.”
“Puts a different slant on it, I will admit,” Ollie said. “So why don’t we just go bust her and the guy both?”
“Where?”
“Last address we have for her is L.A.”
“I could go on the earie again,” Ollie suggested. “See if any of the other girls know where she’s at.”
“You could do that,” Willis agreed.
“It’s from Coriolanus,” Carella said at the computer.
“That makes an even ten plays. Or eleven maybe.”
“I’d still like to know how many he wrote,” Genero said.
“So go to the lib’ery, Richard.”
“You know that one about Bush?” Ollie asked.
“What one?”
“When they asked him how he liked Liberia, he said ‘I love it. Well, you know, my wife used to be a lib’erian.’ ”
“I don’t get it,” Parker said.
“What do you make of this last line?” Carella asked.
They all looked at it. Even Ollie looked at it.
We prove this very hour.
They all looked at the clock on the wall.
It was 3:45.
“Maybe he’s about to tell us when he’s going to do it,” Eileen said.
“Do what?” Ollie asked.
“Whatever he’s planning. The time he’s going to do it. The ‘very hour.’ ”
“Who?”
“The Deaf Man.”
“Do I know him?” Ollie said.
“Nobody knows him,” Genero said.
“This is getting too deep for me,” Ollie said. “I’m sorry I came up here. See you,” he said, and started out.
“Wait up,” Parker said.
The two men strolled out into the corridor together. Parker took Ollie’s elbow, leaned in close.
“So you still dating her?” he asked.
“Who you mean?”
“The little spic twist.”
“If you’re referring to Officer Gomez, yes, we are still seeing each other.”
“You get in yet?” Parker asked subtly.
“I got work to do,” Ollie said, and shook his elbow free.
“Still tryin’a find that masterpiece of yours?”
“So long, Andy,” Ollie said.
“Still tryin’a find the little spic faggot who stole your precious book?”
But Ollie was already going down the iron-runged steps that led downstairs.
THE TOPIC OF DISCUSSION at Channel Four’s afternoon meeting was what everyone was already calling “The Note.”
DEAR HONEY:
PLEASE FORGIVE ME AS I DID NOT KNOW YOU WERE IN THAT AUTOMOBILE
Present at the meeting were Honey Blair, of course; Danny Di Lorenzo, the show’s Program Director; Avery Knowles, its News Director and Head Anchor; his co-anchor, Millie Anderson; Jim Garrison, the Weekday Sports Anchor; and Jessica Hardy, the show’s Weather Person, or—as she preferred being called—its Meteorologist.
“I think we should suppress the Note,” Di Lorenzo said.
As news director, Avery Knowles felt the Note was indisputably newsworthy. But he wasn’t the program director, so he listened.
“The Note specifically says Honey wasn’t the target…”
“Thank God,” Jessica said.
She was a very religious person. She almost crossed herself.
“…which is nice for Honey, but not so good for us,” Di Lorenzo said.
“Who was in that car with you, anyway?” Millie asked.
“A friend of mine,” Honey said.
“What
friend?” Di Lorenzo asked.
“A detective I know.”
“A police detective?”
“Yes.”
“That makes it even worse.”
“How so?” Avery asked.
“If he’s a detective, he’ll be trying to find out who did the shooting.”
“So?”
“So that’s our job. That’s the job of Channel Four News. Find the demented individual who decided Honey Blair was a prime target for…”
“But I’m…”
“…extermination.”
“…not! He says as much in his note. He didn’t even know I was in the car. Cotton was the target.”
“Cotton?”
“Cotton Hawes. The detective who was with me.”
“Is that his name? Cotton?”
“Yes. Cotton Hawes.”
She said this somewhat defensively. She didn’t want to get into a brawl with Di Lorenzo because he was, after all, the program director, whereas she was but a mere roving reporter, though not quite so mere anymore, not after Friday’s shooting had granted her America’s seemingly obligatory fifteen minutes of fame. But shouldn’t they go on the air to tell their viewers that she hadn’t been the intended target at all, her fame had been ill-earned, the true focus of the attack was…
“Cotton Hawes,” Di Lorenzo said, shaking his head in disbelief. “An insignificant little nobody.”
Honey wanted to say that at six feet two inches, Cotton wasn’t what anyone might consider “little.” Not anywhere, as a matter of fact. Nor was he exactly a “nobody”; he was, in fact, the Detective / Second Grade who’d recently helped crack the Tamar Valparaiso kidnapping case. Nor was he “insignificant,” either. He was, in fact, well on the way to becoming what Honey considered the “significant other” in her life. But she didn’t mention any of this to Di Lorenzo because she was beginning to catch his drift and beginning to understand what his approach could mean to her career.
“What we’ve got here,” Di Lorenzo said, “is someone shooting at one of our star reporters…”
“But he wasn’t,” Millie said. “His note…”
“Nobody’s seen the Note but us,” Di Lorenzo said.
“I’d have to show it to Cotton,” Honey said.
“Why?”