Hark!

by Ed McBain

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Last call was half an hour ago.”

  “How come?” Ollie asked.

  He was surprised. In this city you could legally serve alcoholic beverages till four in the morning.

  “We discovered traffic slows down after two, is all,” the bartender said. “Sorry.”

  Ollie flashed the tin.

  “Few questions,” he said.

  “Can’t this wait?” the bartender asked.

  “Afraid it can’t,” Ollie said, and pulled out one of the bar stools, and sat.

  The bartender sighed, dried his hands on a dish towel.

  “Wednesday night last week,” Ollie said. “Were you working?”

  “I was.”

  “Two hookers,” Ollie said. “One blond…”

  “We don’t allow hookers here at the Olympia,” the bartender said.

  “Yes, I’m sure you don’t. But you probably didn’t recognize them as hookers. One was blond, short hair, what they call a feather cut, brown eyes. The other one had hair down to her shoulders, brown, with blue eyes. Good-looking girls, both of them. Probably well-dressed.”

  “We get lots of women in here could answer that description,” the bartender said.

  “This particular woman, the one with the brown hair, told me her and her friend were in here about ten o’clock last Wednesday night and that her friend, the blonde with the short hair, picked up some guy here and left the bar with him around eleven. Would you happen to remember that occurrence?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Big handsome guy, blond like the girl. Hearing aid in his right ear, would you recall now?”

  “We get lots of…”

  “Yes, I’m sure you get ten thousand blond guys wearing hearing aids every night of the week,” Ollie said. “But on this specific night last Wednesday, this particular blond guy with the hearing aid paid for the bar tab with a credit card. According to my source, anyway, who I feel is a reliable one.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “His name.”

  “All that stuff went to the cashier that same night.”

  “All what stuff?”

  “The credit card slips.”

  “Do you remember the man I’m talking about?”

  “I seem to recall someone with a hearing aid, yes.”

  “Tall blond guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the hookers, too?”

  “I didn’t know they were hookers.”

  “Of course not. Did you look at his credit card?”

  “I must’ve checked the signature on the back, yes. When he signed for the tab.”

  “Would you recall the name on that card?”

  “Come on, willya? How do you expect me to remember…?”

  “Or what kind of card it was?”

  “We honor all the major credit cards here. How do you expect me to…?”

  “Is the cashier’s office open now?” Ollie asked.

  “The credit card slips from last Wednesday are long gone, if that’s what you’re think…”

  “Gone where?” Ollie asked.

  THAT NAZI BASTARD Deaf Man had kept him awake most of the night, so Meyer had come to work early this morning, arriving at the tail end of the Graveyard Shift, with only Fujiwara and O’Brien here in the squadroom, the rest of the 8-7’s courageous team out preventing crime in these mean streets.

  Now, in the comparative 6:30 A.M. stillness, no phones ringing, no keyboards clattering and clacking, he tried to make some sense of what they’d got so far. Copies of all the delivered notes were spread across his desktop. A copy of the list of plays plundered by Mr. Adam Fen was close at hand. All he had to do was piece it all together, ha!

  Compared to all this Shakespearean lore, the earlier anagrams seemed elementary. Well, perhaps not. On their simplest level, the quotes were telling them:

  1) This is going to be Shakespeare 101, kiddies.

  2) I am going to dribble out the information bit by bit, piece by piece.

  3) I am going to use darts as my weapon.

  Perfectly clear.

  But on the Deaf Man’s turf, nothing was ever what it seemed. All was illusion and deception, a showoff smirking at them, telling them how goddamn smart he was while they were so goddamn stupid.

  So what else was he trying to tell them?

  Was there something here other than the obvious “Shakespeare, boys! Patience, girls! Darts, anyone?”

  He set aside the anagrams, looked at the Shakespearean quotes again. Arranged them in order on his desktop. Okay. If the Deaf Man had chosen to start with shakes and then spear, he was without question telling them “Shakespeare.” Step to the head of the class. Shakespeare. We’re finished with all the anagrammatic fun and games, kiddies, and now we’re moving on to more scholarly matters. Graduate school, kiddies.

  Okay.

  So what next?

  More spear quotes.

  Spear-grass, boar-spear, and venom’d spear.

  All right, separate the non-spear words, maybe there’s something there.

  Grass, boar, venom’d.

  Anything?

  Not that he could see.

  Well, grass was pot, and a boar was a pig, and venom was poison.

  Pot, pig, poison.

  Still nothing.

  He looked more closely at the arrows notes.

  Broke his arrows.

  Slings and arrows.

  Narrow lanes.

  The arrow buried in the narrow of the last note.

  The unrelated words were broke, slings, and lanes.

  Nothing there, either.

  How about the darts?

  Thither he darts it.

  Darts envenomed

  Advanced and darts.

  Thither, envenomed, and advanced.

  Mean anything to you, Meyer, old boy?

  No? Then how about the three kings he’d chosen?

  Beats three jacks any day of the week.

  Raise you a dollar.

  Henry the Fourth, Richard the Third, Richard the Second.

  Fourth, third, second.

  Four, three, two.

  Hold it…

  The numbers were getting smaller.

  Four, three, two.

  Well, maybe that was an accident.

  No, with the Deaf Man, nothing was accidental.

  He was giving them information in reverse order!

  Four, three, two. Spears, arrows, darts.

  Moving from larger to smaller, in effect heading backwards. Zeroing in on the weapon he would use.

  Their reasoning yesterday had been right on the mark.

  The Deaf Man’s weapon would be darts.

  No question about it.

  They had broken the code.

  IN AMERICA, it is not a crime to be a drug addict.

  This means that you can walk into any police station and announce, “I am a drug addict,” and they will tell you to run along, sonny. Unless you’re in possession of drugs. That’s another matter.

  In this city, the subsections of Article 220 of the Penal Law define the various degrees of criminal offense for possessing any of the so-called controlled substances listed in Section 3306. There are a lot of them. More than a hundred and thirty of them. Some of them you never heard of. Unless you’re addicted to them. Like, for example, Furethidine. Or Alfentanil.

  In the eyes of the law, you can be a drug addict, but you cannot possess any of the narcotics that make you an addict. If this sounds somewhat bass-ackwards, consider the law that makes it a crime to solicit a prostitute. The pertinent section of the Penal Law’s “solicitation” articles reads:

  “A person is guilty of patronizing a prostitute when he patronizes a prostitute.”

  Swear to God.

  This means you cannot go into a police station to confess that you’re either a prostitute or have just patronized a prostitute because then you’re guilty of two separate crimes, whereas if
you say you’re a drug addict you’re not guilty of anything but being a damn fool.

  That’s why the girl who delivered the first note that morning at 8:30 A.M. freely admitted that she was a drug addict who’d been approached in Harrison Park in Riverhead by a girl with long black hair who’d paid her a hundred and fifty dollars to deliver this here letter here, but she did not mention that she was also a prostitute who’d been working the park all night long the night before.

  This was her prerogative here in the land of the free.

  “AH-HA!” MEYER SAID. “This time we’re ahead of you, wise guy!”

  The first note that Tuesday morning read:

  “Yea,” quoth he, “dost thou fall upon thy face?

  Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit

  “Romeo and Juliet,” Willis said from the computer. “Act One, Scene Three.”

  “Didn’t he use that play before?” Parker asked. “ ‘To be or not to be?’ Didn’t he?”

  “He’s simply telling us he’s doing it backwards. But we already know that, big shot!” Meyer said, and jabbed his extended forefinger at the air like a pistol.

  “Now he’s saying hast, “the friggin faggot,” Parker said, modifying his language in deference to the presence of a lady.

  “He’s telling us we’re witless,” Eileen said.

  “Telling us when we smarten up, we’ll fall over backwards.”

  “Is he gonna blow some poisoned darts at somebody’s back?” Genero asked.

  LUIGI FONTERO HAD boarded Alitalia’s flight 0413 at Milan’s Linate airport at 4:05 P.M. yesterday. He’d spent two hours and fifteen minutes on the ground in Frankfurt and was scheduled to arrive here at 9:00 A.M. It was now twenty minutes to ten, and he still wasn’t here. Carella, waiting in the area just outside Customs with his mother and what appeared to be ten thousand other people, was beginning to get itchy. He’d told the lieutenant he’d be in by eleven o’clock latest. Now he was beginning to wonder.

  “Do you think we should ask again?” his mother said.

  “Mom, they said a half-hour late.”

  “That was forty minutes ago.”

  “He’ll be here, don’t worry.”

  For the occasion, his mother was wearing a simple pale blue suit and French-heeled shoes. She would not have her hair done until the day before the wedding; she was wearing it now in a youngish bob under a cloche hat Carella’s grandmother had probably worn as a Twenties flapper, blue velvet with blue satin trim. Her brown eyes sparkled. She kept looking at the clock across the hall.

  “You don’t think anything’s…?”

  “No, Mom, they’d’ve told us.”

  “Sometimes they don’t,” she said.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “These days,” she said, and let the sentence trail.

  It had occurred to him, too.

  He, too, looked at the clock.

  HONEY BLAIR HAD NOT told Hawes about the shooter’s note, and she felt absolutely rotten about keeping such vital—well, probably not—information from him. But she justified this by telling herself the Note wouldn’t be of much value, anyway, fingerprint-wise, since it had been passed from hand to hand at yesterday afternoon’s meeting. Besides, the overnights had shown that during her second defiant challenge to the shooter at a quarter past six yesterday, ratings had soared.

  So, naturally, whereas she wanted Cotton to catch the guy who was trying to kill him, at the same time she hoped he wouldn’t catch him too soon, not while she was enjoying the kind of celebrity she’d only dreamed about before now. It was one thing to have some guy ask you to sign his program at a concert; it was quite another to be stopped on the street, six seven times in a single morning, people telling her “Go get him, Honey!” or “We’re with you, Honey!”

  Celebrity was a funny thing.

  People could turn on you in a minute—witness the whole Michael Jackson circus—or they could suddenly make you their darling. She enjoyed being their darling. But of course she didn’t want anyone hurting her own precious darling, who at that very moment was on his way to the orthopedist’s office building downtown, not because his foot was hurting him but because Jefferson Avenue wasn’t the Eight-Seven where nobody never saw nothing nohow.

  Actually, Honey wished him luck.

  LUIGI FONTERO CAME STRIDING out of Customs wearing a brown silk suit with a matching brown-and-yellow striped tie over a beige shirt, a brown homburg tilted rakishly over one eye. He looked like Rossano Brazzi about to seduce Katherine Hepburn, all grins, hopeful expectation in his eyes.

  When he spotted Carella’s mother, he rushed to her at once. They fell into each others’ arms like young lovers who’d been parted by war or famine. Luigi kissed her. Kissed Carella’s mother. Not on the cheek, or even both cheeks the way Europeans did, but full on the lips, Carella’s mother, a real smackeroo, right there in front of her own son.

  “You are so beautiful,” Luigi told her.

  Carella wanted to retch.

  “How are you, Steve,” Luigi said at last, and offered his hand.

  Carella accompanied them to the baggage claim area, listening invisibly to his mother’s questions about the flight and the food on the flight, and the weather when Luigi left Milan, and when his relatives and friends would be arriving, listened to Luigi’s answers, hearing him call Carella’s mother “Luisa,” his eyes never leaving her face, calling her “cara mia” and “tesora bella,” kissing her again and again, not on the lips, on the nose instead and the forehead and the chin, not offering to help when Carella yanked first one heavy suitcase, and then another, off the carousel, Luigi’s arm around Carella’s mother’s waist, Luisa’s waist, cara mia’s waist, tesora bella’s waist, her head on his shoulder, the big furniture-maker from Milan, Luigi Fontero.

  Carella wheeled their luggage cart out to the curb for them, and hailed a taxi for them. He watched as the taxi pulled away. They both waved back at him through the rear window, beaming. It occurred to him that his mother really could have come out here by herself.

  Alone, he walked back to the parking lot where he’d left the car.

  574 JEFFERSON AVENUE was a monolithic polished black granite structure flanked by a fur emporium on one side and a huge bookstore on the other.

  When Hawes came walking up from the subway kiosk four blocks away, a full-scale demonstration was going on outside the fur place. The manager of the bookstore was out on the sidewalk, telling a police sergeant that these fur freaks were keeping customers away from his store. The sergeant was telling him this was a free country.

  “Then you should be free to wear furs if you like,” the manager said. He himself owned a raccoon hat that had cost him a hundred and eighty dollars, though not in the fur emporium next door.

  Hawes walked through the line of chanting pickets and into the fur shop. A smartly dressed saleswoman in her fifties, he guessed, came over to him, the smile on her face belying the obvious concern in her eyes. Neatly coiffed hair. Blue eyes in a porcelain face. Eyes darting toward the plate glass windows fronting the store, afraid a brick would come crashing through at any moment. Store dummies wearing mink, sable, red fox, silver fox, raccoon, muskrat, coyote, and a veritable zoo of other animal furs stared eyeless at the protesters outside.

  “Yes, sir, may I help you?” the woman asked.

  Faint accent there? Nordic? He wondered if they protested the wearing of furs in Sweden or Denmark. He showed her his shield.

  “Detective Hawes,” he said. “I’m investigating the shooting outside last Friday.”

  “Why don’t you do something about the shouting outside right this minute?” the woman said.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, “but I’m not here about that. May I speak to the manager, please?”

  “I am the manager,” she said.

  “I’d like to talk to whoever may have been working here last Friday morning at eleven o’clock,” he said. “Whoever may have seen or heard anything at all.
”

  “Do you realize what’s happening here?” the woman said.

  “Yes, ma’am, I have some idea. But someone tried to kill two people last Friday…”

  “Someone’s trying to kill us right now!”

  “I’m sure the sergeant outside will keep it under control.”

  “I’m not talking about physical violence. They’re too smart for that. I’m talking about ruining our pre-season business.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hawes said.

  It occurred to him that not too many good citizens were eager to help a cop investigating a crime, whether it was uptown in the asshole of creation or here in a fancy fur palace on the city’s luxury shopping avenue. He was thinking he should have become a dentist, as his mother had suggested.

  “Could I talk to your people, please?” he said softly.

  She stared at him a moment longer, incredulously, and then said, “I’ll see who was here,” and walked off toward the back of the store.

  Hawes stood there among all the dead animals, waiting.

  THE SECOND NOTE arrived at twenty minutes to one.

  Hawes was just telling them he’d struck out at the fur salon, where everyone had either been deaf or blind last Friday, where nobody working in the place had heard any shots or seen anyone pumping a dozen or so slugs into the limo. The manager of the bookstore was so incensed about the marchers next door that he could hardly concentrate on anything Hawes was asking. In any case, there were thirty-eight employees in the shop and they serviced thousands of customers every day, so how did he expect them to have heard or seen a mere murder attempt right outside? Why don’t you go get those freakin fur freaks off the sidewalk? he’d wanted to know.

  Which was when a uniform brought in an envelope that had been delivered downstairs not five minutes ago, interrupting Hawes’ doctoral dissertation on the indifference of the citizenry. At that very moment, Murchison was questioning the indisputable hophead who’d delivered it. The addict interrogations had moved from Captain to mere Sergeant in the space of a mere three days. Sic transit gloria mundi, even though it was Tuesday.

  The note read: