by Ed McBain
“Did you know Orecchio?” Hawes asked.
“Will you keep me clean?”
“Unless you had something to do with it.”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve got my word.”
“A cop?” she asked, and smiled wanly.
“You’ve got my word, if you want it.”
“I need it, it looks like.”
“You need it, honey.”
“I knew him.”
“How?”
“I met him the night he moved in.”
“When was that?”
“Two, three nights ago.”
“Where’d you meet?”
“I was hung up real bad, I needed a fix. I just got out of Caramoor, that sweet hole, a week ago. I haven’t had time to get really connected yet.”
“What were you in for?”
“Oh, hooking.”
“How old are you, Polly?”
“Nineteen. I look older, huh?”
“Yes, you look older.”
“I got married when I was sixteen. To another junkie like myself. Some prize.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“Time at Castleview.”
“For what?”
Polly shrugged. “He started pushing.”
“Okay, what about Orecchio next door?”
“I asked him for a loan.”
“When was this?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“Did he give it to you?”
“I didn’t actually ask him for a loan. I offered to turn a trick for him. He was right next door, you see, and I was pretty sick, I swear to God I don’t think I coulda made it to the street.”
“Did he accept?”
“He gave me ten bucks. He didn’t take nothing from me for it.”
“Sounds like a nice fellow.”
Polly shrugged.
“Not a nice fellow?” Hawes asked.
“Let’s say not my type,” Polly said.
“Mm-huh.”
“Let’s say a son of a bitch,” Polly said.
“What happened?”
“He came in here last night.”
“When? What time?”
“Musta been about nine, nine-thirty.”
“After the symphony started,” Hawes said.
“Huh?”
“Nothing, I was just thinking out loud. Go on.”
“He said he had something nice for me. He said if I came into his room, he would give me something nice.”
“Did you go?”
“First I asked him what it was. He said it was something I wanted more than anything else in the world.”
“But did you go into his room?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Like what?”
“Like a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“All right, what was this ‘something nice’ he promised you?”
“Hoss.”
“He had heroin for you?”
“And that’s why he asked you to come into his room? For the heroin?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what he said.”
“He didn’t attempt to sell it to you, did he?”
“No. But …”
“Yes?”
“He made me beg for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He showed it to me, and he let me taste it to prove that it was real stuff, and then he refused to give it to me unless I … begged for it.”
“I see.”
“He … teased me for … I guess for … for almost two hours. He kept looking at his watch and making me … do things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Stupid things. He asked me to sing for him. He made me sing ‘White Christmas,’ that was supposed to be a big joke, you see, because the shit is white and he knew how bad I needed a fix, so he made me sing ‘White Christmas’ over and over again, I musta sung it for him six or seven times. And all the while he kept looking at his watch.”
“Go ahead.”
“Then he … he asked me to strip, but … I mean, not just take off my clothes, but … you know, do a strip for him. And I did it. And he began … he began making fun of me, of the way I looked, of my body. I … he made me stand naked in front of him, and he just went on and on about how stupid and pathetic I looked, and he kept asking me if I really wanted the heroin, and then looked at his watch again, it was about eleven o’clock by then, I kept saying Yes, I want it, please let me have it, so he asked me to dance for him, he asked me to do the waltz, and then he asked me to do the shag, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I never even heard of the shag, have you ever heard of the shag?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Hawes said.
“So I did all that for him, I would have done anything for him, and finally he told me to get on my knees and explain to him why I felt I really needed the bag of heroin. He said he expected me to talk for five minutes on the subject of the addict’s need for narcotics, and he looked at his watch and began timing me, and I talked. I was shaking by this time, I had the chills, I needed a shot more than …” Polly closed her eyes. “I began crying. I talked and I cried, and at last he looked at his watch and said, ‘Your five minutes are up. Here’s your poison, now get the hell out of here.’ And he threw the bag to me.”
“What time was this?”
“It musta been about ten minutes after eleven. I don’t have a watch, I hocked it long ago, but you can see the big electric numbers on top of the Mutual Building from my room, and when I was shooting up later it was 11:15, so this musta been about ten after or thereabouts.”
“And he kept looking at his watch all through this, huh?”
“Yes. As if he had a date or something.”
“He did,” Hawes said.
“Huh?”
“He had a date to shoot a man from his window. He was just amusing himself until the concert broke. A nice fellow, Mr. Orecchio.”
“I got to say one thing for him,” Polly said.
“What’s that?”
“It was good stuff.” A wistful look came onto her face and into her eyes. “It was some of the best stuff I’ve had in years. I wouldn’t have heard a cannon if it went off next door.”
Hawes made a routine check of all the city’s telephone directories, found no listing for an Orecchio — Mort, Morton, or Mortimer — and then called the Bureau of Criminal Identification at four o’clock that afternoon. The B.C.I., fully automated, called back within ten minutes to report that they had nothing on the suspect. Hawes then sent a teletype to the F.B.I. in Washington, asking them to check their voluminous files for any known criminal named Orecchio, Mort or Mortimer or Morton. He was sitting at his desk in the paint-smelling squadroom when Patrolman Richard Genero came up to ask whether he had to go to court with Kling on the collar they had made jointly and together the week before. Genero had been walking his beat all afternoon, and he was very cold, so he hung around long after Hawes had answered his question, hoping he would be offered a cup of coffee. His eye happened to fall on the name Hawes had scribbled onto his desk pad when calling the B.C.I., so Genero decided to make a quip.
“Another Italian suspect, I see,” he said.
“How do you know?” Hawes asked.
“Anything ending in O is Italian,” Genero said.
“How about Munro?” Hawes asked.
“What are you, a wise guy?” Genero said, and grinned.
He looked at the scribbled name again, and then said, “I got to admit this guy has a very funny name for an Italian.”
“Funny how?” Hawes asked.
“Ear,” Genero said.
“What?”
“Ear. That’s what Orecchio means in Italian. Ear.”
Which when coupled with Mort, of course, could mean nothing more or less than Dead Ear.
Hawe
s tore the page from the pad, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the wastebasket, missing.
“I said something?” Genero asked, knowing he’d never get his cup of coffee now.
| Go to Contents |
* * *
Chapter 5
* * *
The boy who delivered the note was eight years old, and he had instructions to give it to the desk sergeant. He stood in the squadroom now surrounded by cops who looked seven feet tall, all of them standing around him in a circle while he looked up with saucer-wide blue eyes and wished he was dead.
“Who gave you this note?” one of the cops asked.
“A man in the park.”
“Did he pay you to bring it here?”
“Yeah. Yes. Yeah.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“What did he look like?”
“He had yellow hair.”
“Was he tall?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Was he wearing a hearing aid?”
“Yeah. A what?”
“A thing in his ear.”
“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.
Everybody tiptoed around the note very carefully, as though it might explode at any moment. Everybody handled the note with tweezers or white cotton gloves. Everybody agreed it should be sent at once to the police lab. Everybody read it at least twice. Everybody studied it and examined it. Even some patrolmen from downstairs came up to have a look at it. It was a very important document. It demanded at least an hour of valuable police time before it was finally encased in a celluloid folder and sent downtown in a manila envelope.
Everybody decided that what this note meant was that the deaf man (who they now reluctantly admitted was once again in their midst) wanted fifty thousand dollars in lieu of killing the deputy mayor exactly as he had killed the parks commissioner. Since fifty thousand dollars was considerably more than the previous demand for five thousand dollars, the cops of the 87th were quite rightfully incensed by the demand. Moreover, the audacity of this criminal somewhere out there was something beyond the ken of their experience. For all its resemblance to a kidnaping, with its subsequent demand for ransom, this case was not a kidnaping. No one had been abducted, there was nothing to ransom. No, this was very definitely extortion, and yet the extortion cases they’d dealt with over the years had been textbook cases involving “a wrongful use of force or fear” in an attempt to obtain “property from another.” The key word was “another.” “Another” was invariably the person against whom mayhem had been threatened. In this case, though, their extortionist didn’t seem to care who paid the money so long as someone did.
Anyone. Now how were you supposed to deal with a maniac like that?
“He’s a maniac,” Lieutenant Byrnes said. “Where the hell does he expect us to get fifty thousand dollars?”
Steve Carella, who had been released from the hospital that afternoon and who somewhat resembled a boxer about to put on gloves, what with assorted bandages taped around his hands, said, “Maybe he expects the deputy mayor to pay it.”
“Then why the hell didn’t he ask the deputy mayor?”
“We’re his intermediaries,” Carella said. “He assumes his demand will carry more weight if it comes from law enforcement officers.”
Byrnes looked at Carella.
“Sure,” Carella said. “Also, he’s getting even with us. He’s sore because we fouled up his bank-robbing scheme eight years ago. This is his way of getting back.”
“He’s a maniac,” Byrnes insisted.
“No, he’s a very smart cookie,” Carella said. “He knocked off Cowper after a measly demand for five thousand dollars. Now that we know he can do it, he’s asking ten times the price not to shoot the deputy mayor.”
“Where does it say ‘shoot’?” Hawes asked.
“Hmmm?”
“He didn’t say anything about shooting Scanlon. The note yesterday just said ‘Deputy Mayor Scanlon Goes Next.” ’
“That’s right,” Carella said. “He can poison him or bludgeon him or stab him or …”
“Please,” Byrnes said.
“Let’s call Scanlon,” Carella suggested. “Maybe he’s got fifty grand laying around he doesn’t know what to do with.”
They called Deputy Mayor Scanlon and advised him of the threat upon his life, but Deputy Mayor Scanlon did not have fifty grand laying around he didn’t know what to do with. Ten minutes later, the phone on Byrnes’ desk rang. It was the police commissioner.
“All right, Byrnes,” the commissioner said sweetly, “what’s this latest horseshit?”
“Sir,” Byrnes said, “we have had two notes from the man we suspect killed Parks Commissioner Cowper, and they constitute a threat upon the life of Deputy Mayor Scalon.”
“What are you doing about it?” the commissioner asked.
“Sir,” Byrnes said, “we have already sent both notes to the police laboratory for analysis. Also, sir, we have located the room from which the shots were fired last night, and we have reason to believe we are dealing with a criminal known to this precinct?”
“Who?”
“We don’t know.”
“I thought you said he was known …”
“Yes, sir, we’ve dealt with him before, but to our knowledge, sir, he is unknown.”
“How much money does he want this time?”
“Fifty thousand dollars, sir.”
“When is Scanlon supposed to be killed?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
“When does this man want his money?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
“Where are you supposed to deliver it?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
“What the hell do you know, Byrnes?”
“I know, sir, that we are doing our best to cope with an unprecedented situation, and that we are ready to put our entire squad at the deputy mayor’s disposal, if and when he asks for protection. Moreover, sir, I’m sure I can persuade Captain Frick who, as you may know, commands this entire precinct … “
“What do you mean, as I may know, Byrnes?”
“That is the way we do it in this city, sir.”
“That is the way they do it in most cities, Byrnes.”
“Yes, sir, of course. In any case, I’m sure I can persuade him to release some uniformed officers from their regular duties, or perhaps to call in some off-duty officers, if the commissioner feels that’s necessary.”
“I feel it’s necessary to protect the life of the deputy mayor.”
“Yes, of course, sir, we all feel that,” Byrnes said.
“What’s the matter, Byrnes, don’t you like me?” the commissioner asked.
“I try to keep personal feelings out of my work, sir,” Byrnes said. “This is a tough case. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never come up against anything like it before. I’ve got a good team here, and we’re doing our best. More than that, we can’t do.”
“Byrnes,” the commissioner said, “you may have to do more.”
“Sir …” Byrnes started, but the commissioner had hung up.
Arthur Brown sat in the basement of Junior High School 106, with a pair of earphones on his head and his right hand on the start button of a tape recorder. The telephone at the La Bresca house diagonally across the street from the school had just rung for the thirty-second time that day, and as he waited for Concetta La Bresca to lift the receiver (as she had done on thirty-one previous occasions) he activated the recorder and sighed in anticipation of what was to come.
It was very clever of the police to have planted a bug in the La Bresca apartment, that bug having been installed by a plainclothes cop from the lab who identified himself as a telephone repairman, did his dirty work in the La Bresca living room, and then strung his overhead wires from the roof of the La Bresca house to the telephone pole outside, and from there to the pole on the school sidewalk, and from there to the roof of the school building, and down the sid
e wall, and into a basement window, and across the basement floor to a tiny room containing stacked textbooks and the school’s old sixteen-millimeter sound projector, where he had set up Arthur Brown’s monitoring station.
It was also very clever of the police to have assigned Arthur Brown to this eavesdropping plant because Brown was an experienced cop who had conducted wiretaps before and who was capable of separating the salient from the specious in any given telephone conversation.
There was only one trouble.
Arthur Brown did not understand Italian, and Concetta La Bresca spoke to her friends exclusively in Italian. For all Brown knew, they might have plotted anything from abortion to safe cracking thirty-one times that day, and for all he knew were about to plot it yet another time. He had used up two full reels of tape because he hadn’t understood a word that was said, and he wanted each conversation recorded so that someone — probably Carella — could later translate them.
“Hello,” a voice said in English.
Brown almost fell off his stool. He sat erect, adjusted the headset, adjusted the volume control on the tape recorder, and began listening.
“Tony?” a second voice asked.
“Yeah, who’s this?” The first voice belonged to La Bresca. Apparently he had just returned home from work.
The second voice …
“This is Dom.”
“Who?”
“Dominick.”
“Oh, hi, Dom, how’s it going?”
“Great.”
“What’s up, Dom?”
“Oh, nothing,” Dom said. “I was just wondering how you was, that’s all.”
There was silence on the line. Brown tilted his head and brought his hand up to cover one of the earphones.