by Ed McBain
“Because someone’s trying to kill him, for Christ’s sake!”
This time, Jessica actually did cross herself.
“You said he’s a detective, didn’t you?” Di Lorenzo asked.
“Yes, but…”
“So I’m assuming he knows how to take care of himself. The point is, for reasons as yet unknown to any of us, someone shot at your limo this past Friday morning. It’s not our job to find this person, whoever he…”
“You said it was,” Avery reminded him. “Our job.”
“No. Our job is to keep this story alive. The longer we keep it alive, the longer the Great Unwashed will tune in to Channel Four at six and eleven every night. I don’t care if we never find him. The point is, somewhere out there…”
Where did I hear that line before? Honey wondered.
“Somewhere out there,” Di Lorenzo repeated, pointing to the seventh-floor windows and the magnificent view of the skyline beyond, “there’s a killer intent on slaying our own Honey Blair. Let’s not let anyone forget that.”
He’d already forgotten the Note that said Honey wasn’t the target at all.
THE LAST TIME he’d followed a woman he loved was when he was still married to Augusta. Top fashion model, should have known better than to marry her, a mere cop, should have known it would turn out the way it finally did. He hadn’t felt good about following her, and he didn’t feel good following Sharyn now.
He had been waiting across the street from her office on Ainsley Avenue since a quarter to five. Her usual routine was to subway over to Rankin Plaza and the Deputy Chief Surgeon’s office there, where she’d stay till noon, break for lunch in Majesta, and then bus back to the city and uptown to her private practice. Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Cooke in the morning, Dr. Sharyn Cooke, internist, in the afternoon. He knew he was living with a Deputy Inspector whereas he was a mere Detective/Third. This didn’t matter; he loved her. He was white and she was black. This didn’t matter, either; he loved her.
What mattered…
He’d found Augusta in bed with another man.
Almost killed the son of a bitch.
His eyes had met Augusta’s.
Their eyes had said everything there was to say, and all there was to say was nothing.
Across the street, Sharyn was coming out of her office.
He turned away, still watching her in the reflecting plate glass window of a pharmacy, a trained cop. When she started away from the building, stepping out with that quick, proud stride of hers, he turned and began trailing her, still on the other side of the street, a hat hiding his telltale blond hair. Black and blond. A doctor and a cop. Should he have known better this time, too?
She swung into a Starbucks up the street, came out five minutes later, carrying a cardboard container. Sipping at the coffee, she strolled along almost jauntily, enjoying the mild weather, walking right past the bus stop where she could have caught a bus that would have taken her crosstown to his apartment. Tonight was his place again; tomorrow night would be hers. They alternated haphazardly; they were in love. Or so he devoutly wished.
The neighborhood in which Sharyn maintained her office had been gentrified ten years ago and was already sliding inexorably back into the morass of a full-time ghetto and slum. What had once been a pool parlor and was later transmogrified to a fitness center was now a seedy cuchifrito joint catering to the area’s small Hispanic population, a minority here among the predominant blacks. A similar transformation-retransformation process had taken place when condemned tenements became sleek brick apartment buildings that were already crumbling into decrepitude. Drugs—flourishing when crack was all the rage, virtually vanquished when the Reverend Gabriel Foster launched his famously popular No Shit Now! campaign—were back on the street with a vengeance, the preferred controlled substance now being heroin, seems like old times, don’t it, Gert?
In this stretch of all too sadly familiar black turf, blond Bert Kling followed the gorgeous black woman he adored, and hoped against hope that she was not hurrying to meet Dr. James Melvin Hudson.
But she was.
THE NAME OF THE café was the Edge.
It was called this because it was on the very edge of Diamondback, in a sort of no-man’s-land that separated the hood from the rest of the city. Jumping the season somewhat, the Edge had put tables out on the sidewalk, and as Sharyn approached, half a dozen patrons were sitting there in the quickly fading light, sipping coffees or teas, munching on cookies or cakes. One of them got to his feet, and walked toward her, hand outstretched.
Dr. James Melvin Hudson.
Kling hung back.
Ducked into a doorway.
She took his hand, Dr. James Melvin Hudson’s hand, reached up, kissed him on the cheek, which Kling thought an odd greeting for a pair of physicians; cops never even shook hands with other cops. She sat opposite him, and he signaled to a waiter. She’d just had a coffee…
Kling could imagine her explaining this to him…
So if he didn’t mind, she’d just sit here…
Turning away the waiter’s proffered menu…
And then leaning into him over the table, Dr. James Melvin Hudson, her elbows on the table, heads close together, talking seriously and intimately as on the sidewalk passersby hurried on along, unknowing, uncaring, this was the big bad city.
Kling watched them for the next half-hour, hidden in his secret doorway, a cop, shoulders hunched as if it were the dead of winter and not the seventh day of June, hat pulled down low on his forehead, hiding his blond hair. The blond guy and the black girl. Had it been a mistake from the start? Was it now a mistake? Would black and white ever be right in America?
He looked at his watch, Dr. James Melvin Hudson did, and signaled to the waiter. Sharyn watched him as he paid the bill, rose when he did, kissed him on the cheek again when he went off, and then sat again at the table, alone now, seemingly deep in thought as the shadows lengthened and evengloam claimed the distant sky.
GENERO HADN’T BEEN INSIDE a public library since he was twelve years old and checked out John Jakes’ Love and War with his new Adult Section card. His current reading ran to the Harry Potter books, but he actually bought those because he felt people should support starving writers who wrote on paper napkins in coffee shops.
The library he went to that Monday night was in his Calm’s Point neighborhood and stayed open till ten P.M. He got there around eight, after having dinner with his mother and father in their little one-story house nearby. His mother made penne alla puttanesca, which she told him meant “whore style,” in front of his father, too. When he asked the librarian if she had a book that had everything Shakespeare ever wrote in it, she looked at him funny for a minute, and then came back with a heavy-looking tome that he took to the reading room, which was as quiet as a funeral parlor.
He didn’t plan to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote; he simply planned to count all the stuff he’d written. The numbers he came up with were thirty-seven plays, five long poems, and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, which up to now he’d thought were also poems, but since they were in a separate section of the book labeled SONNETS, he now guessed otherwise. He also guessed this was a very large body of work. In fact, he could hardly think of anyone else who’d written so many wonderful things, he supposed, in his or her lifetime.
He didn’t know to what use he could put this newfound knowledge, but he considered it very sound detective work. And besides, when he returned the book, the librarian looked at him with renewed respect, he also supposed.
LYING IN BED, waiting for her to come to him, Kling told her they’d probably figured out what weapon—or weapons, actually—the Deaf Man planned to use, but not whom he planned to kill, or even if he planned to kill anyone at all.
“It’s darts,” he said. “Plural. D-A-R-T-S. Probably poisoned. We figured out it’s, like, the law of diminishing returns. In his notes, he went from spears to arrows to darts, in descending order. Like backward.
So we’re pretty sure it’s darts, but we don’t know who or how—or even when, for that matter.”
“Mmm,” Sharyn said.
She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She seemed preoccupied, but she often got that way while getting ready for bed. Lots of things a woman had to do before bedtime. Even so…
“Thing is, that’s not his usual style,” Kling said. “Announcing a murder, I mean.”
Sharyn spit into the sink.
“We think he killed this woman last week, but that may have been getting even for her betraying him or something. Mayhem is more his style. Subterfuge. Leading us in one direction and then moving in another.”
“He sounds like a real pain in the ass,” Sharyn said, and came back into the bedroom. She was wearing a baby-doll nightgown, no panties, fuzzy pink slippers.
“A supreme pain in the ass,” Kling said. “But dead serious.”
“Are you cold in here?” Sharyn asked. “Or is it just me?”
“It is a little chilly,” he said. “Such a nice day, too.”
“Lovely.”
The room was silent for a moment.
“How’d your day go?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
He hesitated. Took the plunge.
“What’d you do?”
“The usual,” she said. “Parade of the halt and lame at Rankin, lunch at a Chinese restaurant, march of the poor and oppressed up in Diamondback. Same old, same old.”
She took off her slippers, climbed into bed beside him.
“And afterward?” he asked.
“After what?”
“After work?”
“Bought a coffee at Starbucks, and caught a bus home. Come warm my feet,” she said, cuddling close to him.
9.
IT WAS ALREADY one o’clock on Tuesday morning, the eighth day of June. Despite the light drizzle wetting the streets and dampening the libido, the stroll in Ho Alley had been underway since eleven or so last night.
There was a time when Ollie might have found these nocturnal adventures exciting…well, actually had found them exciting, never mind the “might have.” Half the girls out here looked like they were parading in their underwear. The other half were wearing skirts cut high on their thighs, some of them slit up the side to expose even more flesh, barelegged, with strapped stiletto-heel sandals or boots of the dominatrix variety, leather laces up the side. If you were a red-blooded American male, how could you not get excited?
Especially when these girls reeked of everything forbidden. He didn’t mean just the casual blowjob; junior high school girls were giving those away free nowadays. He meant the very concept of Anything Goes. In a society becoming more and more restrictive, here on this five-block stretch of turf, everything was permitted. Anything imagined by the Great Whores of Babylon had been refined to perfection over the centuries and was now for sale in this outdoor bazaar where girls talked freely and seemingly without fear of arrest about such delicacies as the Moroccan Sip, and the Acapulco Ass Dip, and the Singapore Slide.
There ought to be a law, Ollie thought.
There was, in fact, a law, but you couldn’t guess it existed on this street at this hour of the night. As short a time ago as only last month, Ollie would have found all these flashing legs and winking nipples and glossy wet lips…well…arousing. Even now, he felt a faint stirring in his groin, but he suspected that was a conditioned response and not anything generated by true desire. Or maybe it was because one of the girls had just grabbed his genitals and asked, “What you got here, Big Boy?”
“Nothing for you, honey,” he said.
“Sure about that? I’m a virgin from Venezuela.”
“And I’m a bullfighter from Peru,” he said.
“Less see what you got there, torero.”
“Unzip him, Nina.”
“Want me to suck your espada?”
“Come on, torero, less see that acero you got there.”
“Or maybe juss a puntilla, eh?”
“Feels like a nice big package here, Anita.”
“Wha’ you say, matador?”
“We have our’sess a real fiesta brava, eh?”
“Some other time, girls,” he said, and walked away.
“You’ll beeee sorrr-eeeee!” they chanted in unison behind him.
Ollie wondered if he might be coming down with something.
For the past half-hour, he’d been looking for a girl named Wanda Lipinsky. From all accounts, Wanda was not Jewish. She had chosen the surname only because of its echoing proximity to the name Lewinsky, which slant rhyme seemed to promise all sorts of oral delights. Toward that end (and no pun intended) Wanda could be recognized, he’d been informed, by the thong panties she affected in imitation—if ever anyone got past her mouth to explore the hidden treasures under her skirt. But these were not the good old days, and these promised delectations, ah yes, were not what interested Ollie about Ms. Lipinsky, whose real name, he was further told, was Margaret O’Neill.
Little Margie, it seemed, was a freelance like the Carmela Sammarone who had possibly aced the pimp who’d given her up to the Boys of Grover Park. Little Margie, it further seemed, had gone on the town with Little Mela this past Wednesday night, cruising the hotels midtown, where Mela had scored, but not, alas, the thong-wearing Lewinsky sound-alike. Or so the grapevine maintained, and Ollie had no reason to doubt a story now corroborated by three skimpily dressed hookers freezing their asses off in what had turned into a somewhat chilling rain.
In the old days, there might have been something exciting about these girls—white, black, Latina, Asian, there was pure democracy in Ho Alley—shivering in their underwear and openly peddling their wares. But now, on this early morning in early June…
Surely he was coming down with something.
…they seemed only poor damn creatures who needed to be helped and comforted. Or perhaps even pitied.
Frowning, puzzled, he hunched his shoulders and moved on through the falling drizzle.
HE DID NOT FIND Wanda Lipinsky until two that morning. She was backing her way out of a blue Chevy Impala where she’d undoubtedly just blown the little spic behind the wheel, her skirt halfway up her ass, exposing her buttocks and the red silk ribbon of a pair of thong panties buried in her crack.
He waited till she was clear of the car, waited until she turned, tugging at the short skirt, and began walking off.
“Wanda?” he asked.
She stopped dead on the sidewalk.
Turned toward him with a hooker’s welcoming smile on her face. She was not an unattractive girl—woman, he guessed—in her mid- or late twenties, with long brownish hair and what he perceived in the near-dark to be blue eyes. Short tight skirt, the line of the thong panties clearly visible. Low-cut, swoop-necked blouse, uplift bra thrusting her breasts in his face. Eyebrows raising slightly. Do I know you?
“Police,” he said, and showed the tin. “Few questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Sure,” she said wearily.
Another night in the cooler, she was thinking.
HE WANTED TO KNOW about last Wednesday night.
“Were you with Carmela Sammarone last Wednesday night?” he asked.
“Carmela…?”
“Sammarone. You know who she is, Wanda. Were you with her?”
They were sitting in an all-night joint on Carson and McIntyre. Wanda was nursing a beer; she still had a long night ahead of her. She hoped. Ollie was sipping a club soda with a slice of lime in it; he was officially off duty, but he wanted to keep his wits about him. He had a feeling that Little Margie O’Neill here could turn out to be a slippery little customer.
“Carmela Sammarone,” he said again.
Wanda said nothing.
“You do know her, don’t you?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Were you with her last Wednesday night?”
“Wednesday night, Wednesday night,” Wanda said, rolling her eyes, thinking.
“Yes or no, Wanda?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Wanda,” he said, “don’t fuck with me.”
“Language,” she scolded.
“I need to find her. I understand you went downtown cruising…”
“I told you I don’t remember.”
“Think. The hotels downtown. Think, Wanda.”
“Oh. You mean…?”
“Yes? What do I mean?”
“Melissa? You talking about Melissa?”
“Is that what she calls herself? Melissa?”
“Melissa Summers, yes.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“No, I don’t. I’m not her fucking mother.”
“Language,” Ollie scolded.
“What’d she do?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask her.”
“I don’t rat out friends.”
“Then you do know where she is.”
“I told you I don’t.”
“Where’d the two of you go last Wednesday night?”
“Who said we went anywhere?”
“Three girls so far. You want their names?”
“What’d Lissie do?”
“Tell me where she scored last Wednesday.”
“Why? She rip off the guy, or something?”
“There was a guy, right?”
“You got me,” she said, shrugging. “Was there?”
“How’d you like getting mugged and printed again tonight?”
Wanda said nothing.
“Wanna spend the night in a holding cell, Margie?”
Still nothing.
“You want some dyke forcing you to lick her pussy?”
“Been there, done that,” she said.
“Okay then, we’re through talking,” he said, and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Go where? Nobody solicited you.”
“Gee, didn’t somebody? I could swear you said you’d blow me for a C-note.”
She looked up at him.
“Sit down,” she said.
He kept standing.
“Sit down,” she said again.
THE BARTENDER AT THE Olympia Hotel was washing glasses when Ollie got there at a little before three that morning.