Fiddlers

by Ed McBain

  ‘Where is he now, this Father Joseph?’

  ‘He lives in the community center on Stanley Street.’

  Ollie looked at his watch.

  It was ten past midnight.

  He wondered what time priests went to bed. Well, retired priests. He wondered who paid for a priest’s retirement. He wondered who’d shot Father Michael here.

  ‘Who’s got these other Glock murders?’ he asked Monroe.

  ‘The Eight-Seven,’ Monroe said.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Ollie said.

  * * * *

  In the middle of the night, he woke up screaming.

  She sat up, yelled, ‘Chaz! What is it?’

  ‘A nightmare,’ he said.

  But he was doubled over in bed, clutching his abdomen.

  He lay beside her, trembling. He felt cold to the touch. She held him close. In a little while, he got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She heard the water in the sink running. He was in there for five minutes before he came back to bed.

  ‘Tell me the dream,’ she said.

  He hesitated, thinking. Then he said, ‘It was in Nam.’

  He was still holding his belly. The chills seemed to be gone, though.

  ‘This woman and her baby are sitting on the hood of a Jeep. We’re supposed to transport them back to where an interpreter is waiting to question the woman. Well, the girl, actually; she’s no more than nineteen. The sergeant thinks the girl is a spy for the Vietcong, I don’t know what gave him that idea.

  ‘The sergeant is driving the Jeep. He likes to drive. I’m riding shotgun. M-1 in my lap. The girl is sitting on the hood of the vehicle. Baby in one arm, holding the baby tight. Other arm extended, stiff, hand clutching this like sort of handle on the hood, so she won’t fall off with her baby. The road is rutted and bumpy, these mud roads they had over there, between the rice paddies…”

  He began trembling again.

  ‘I don’t remember the rest of it,’ he said.

  When she got up to pee later, he was sound asleep.

  She kept thinking about his dream. After she’d washed her hands, she opened the door to the medicine chest over the sink.

  There were five bottles of prescription pain relievers in there.

  She wondered if he’d had a nightmare at all.

  * * * *

  It certainly had been very nice to fall into two gratuitous drug busts while investigating a pair of homicides. But these windfalls hadn’t brought them any closer to learning who had killed the blind violinist, or the cosmetics sales rep, or even the university professor. Nor did it much endear them to Connors and Brancusi, the two Narcotics cops who now had Internal Affairs to deal with because some punk nightclub manager was making noises about having greased them for protection. The things a desperate ex-con would say to avoid taking another fall!

  And now, to make matters worse, a dead priest had turned up last night in the Eight-Eight.

  And guess who’d caught the case?

  ‘Now the usual thing that would happen here,’ Ollie explained to the assembled detectives of the Eight-Seven that Friday morning, ‘would be if a person caught a body that he later learned had been shot with the same pistol used in three previous murders another squad had been investigating - fruitlessly, I might add - since the sixteenth of the month

  This was now the twenty-fifth day of June. The clock on the squadroom wall read 9:10 A.M.

  ‘The usual thing that would happen would be for the responding detective to cite FMU, and then run the paper over posthaste to the squad that originally caught the squeal, in this case yours precisely, the Famous Eighty-seventh.’

  He paused to have his droll sarcasm appreciated.

  ‘But it so happens that my plate at the moment is both literally and figuratively empty

  He did not expect any of the cops here in this room to understand or appreciate such literary terms, but the fact was that there’d been a dearth of murders in his own precinct and besides he was on a diet, hence the empty plates all around…

  ‘… and so I’ve decided to join forces with you, so to speak, and take upon myself the investigation of the priest’s murder, whose name happens to be Father Michael Hopwell, should this be of any interest to you. And also to lend whatever assistance I may deem myself capable of, ah yes, in the ongoing investigations of the Geezer Murders you are already pursuing.’

  The Eight-Seven detectives did not know whether this was a blessing or a curse.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ollie said, ‘don’t bother standing, no applause necessary,’ and executed a slight but difficult bow with one hand on his still quite ample middle, empty plate or not.

  Ollie’s idle comment notwithstanding, the tabloids spread on Carella’s desktop that Thursday morning were still calling the string of homicides ‘the Glock Murders.’ Now that Ollie was on the scene, would the murders be remembered from this day to the ending of the world as ‘the Geezer Murders’? Carella hoped not.

  But look at the facts.

  Four murders thus far, all committed with the same automatic pistol. Two of the vics in their fifties. One in her sixties. And now one in his seventies. These were not youngsters, Maude. These were people getting on in life, you might say. Given your average life span of what -seventy, seventy-five, eighty tops? - this put middle age somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Yes, kiddies, face it. You were rounding the bend at thirty, and middle-aged at thirty-five, imagine that. Fifty was fast approaching old age. Sixty was, in fact, old. Seventy was decrepit. Eighty was ready for the box. None of these victims had been skipping off to kindergarten with a lunch pail in one hand and a box of crayons in the other. In all truth, the ages of the victims made the case sort of boring. Like watching Woody Allen kissing a beautiful blonde in one of his movies. If someone’s about to die soon, anyway, what was the sense of going to all the trouble of killing him? Or her?

  Well, you couldn’t say the two fifty-something-year-olds were exactly at death’s door. In fact, Alicia Hendricks had been a damn good-looking woman, in excellent health - and sexually active when she was younger, don’t forget. And whereas the wandering violinist had been blind, he was otherwise in pretty good shape and certainly not rushing out to buy himself a burial plot. But aside from those two, the others seemed unlikely candidates for termination. Ho hum, let nature take its course was what most citizens of this city were thinking as they turned the pages of their newspapers to sexier stuff like the killing and torture of Iraqi prisoners of war.

  Not that the tabloids weren’t doing their best to make the murders sound as sexy as possible. The first thing they did was suggest that the Glock Murders were in fact serial murders, and then they quoted various FBI profile statistics common to most serial murders.

  Never mind that until the murder of the priest last night, there had been only three killings…

  (A serial killer is someone who usually kills more than five people.)

  Never mind that the now-four murders had been committed in the relatively short space of six days…

  (A serial killer usually slays over a longer period of time, sometimes even months or years, allowing a so-called cooling-off period between each murder.)

  Never mind that the victims here were a mixed bag: a blind musician, a cosmetics saleswoman cum dope dealer, a university professor, and now a priest.

  (A serial killer’s victims are usually of the same type - prostitutes, hitchhikers, postal employees, what have you, but always easily categorized.)

  Never mind that all the victims here were shot in the face at close range with an automatic pistol.

  (Most serial murders are committed by strangulation, suffocation, or stabbing.)

  One of the tabloids suggested that the serial killer here was trying to obliterate his victims’ faces, a supposition with which a PD profiler actually agreed. All of the tabloids agreed that the primary motive of a serial killer was sexual, whether or not any sex had actually taken place before or after the murder. T
hey also agreed that most serial killers were white males between the ages of twenty and thirty, which description fit half the stockbrokers downtown.

  The detectives looking at all these statistics saw only two converging characteristics that might have marked their man as a serial killer: his victim’s ages and their race: they were all getting on in years, and they were all white.

  It was Fat Ollie Weeks who came up with the notion that three of the murders might be simple smoke-screen murders.

  ‘Maybe he was only after one of them,’ he said. ‘Let’s say the priest last night, for example. Maybe the rest were just to throw us off the track. No connection at all between them.’

  ‘Among them,’ Willis corrected, though he had to admit Ollie might have a point here. Aware that Eileen Burke was watching him, waiting for his further response, he merely said, ‘In which case, which one?’

  ‘Was he really after, you mean?’

  ‘You kill four people, you’re really after each and every one of them,’ Parker said.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree,’ Byrnes said, surprising Parker. ‘A smoke screen isn’t usually this prolonged. Too much danger here of us closing in.’

  ‘I don’t see the danger yet,’ Eileen said. ‘We haven’t found any connection, so maybe Ollie’s right.’

  ‘In which case, which one was he really after?’ Willis insisted. ‘Who was the real victim?’

  ‘Far as I’m concerned,’ Byrnes said, ‘they’re all real victims, and he was after each and every one of them. Stay on all of them,’ he advised. Or warned. ‘And bring me something!’

  * * * *

  Parker caught up with Ollie on his way out of the squadroom, and asked how things were going with his little Latina dish.

  ‘Or do you plan on marrying her?’ he said. ‘Is that it, Ollie?’

  ‘Well, no. I mean, the subject hasn’t come up. We’ve only seen each other a few times, whattya mean marry her?’

  ‘Is exactly what I’m saying. But if there are no wedding bells on the horizon, then when do you plan to make your move?’

  ‘I don’t know what move you mean.’

  ‘Ho-ho, he don’t know what move I mean,’ Parker said to the air. ‘I mean getting in her pants, sir, is what I mean. When do you plan to attempt this?’

  ‘I didn’t make any plans for that,’ Ollie said.

  ‘Then start now,’ Parker said. ‘When are you seeing her again?’

  ‘Saturday night.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’

  ‘No, next Saturday night.’

  ‘No,’ Parker said.

  ‘Whattya mean no? That’s when I’m seeing her. July third, next Saturday night.’

  ‘Wrong,’ Parker said. ‘Saturday night is wrong, July third, July whenever. She’ll know what you’re planning, she’ll…’

  ‘I ain’t planning nothing.’

  ‘She’ll think you’re planning something. Saturday night? Of course you’re planning something! She’ll be on High Alert, she’ll put up a Panty Block.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘These Latinas, they call themselves, they know all kinds of ways to cut off a man’s dick and sell it to a cuchi frito joint. It’s called a Panty Block. If she suspects for a single minute what you’re planning…”

  ‘But I’m not…”

  ‘… she’ll throw up a Panty Block like you never saw in your life. Here’s what you gotta do,’ Parker said. ‘If you wanna get in this girl’s pants, you first gotta create an ambulance.’

  ‘A what?’ Ollie said.

  ‘An ambulance. In French, that means like a setting.’

  ‘I always thought an ambulance

  ‘Yeah, I know, but the French are peculiar. To them, ambulance means lighting, music, mood, the whole setting. Ambulance, is what they call it. They know about such things, the French. Saturday night is out. Any Saturday night. What’d you plan to do that Saturday night?’

  ‘I told her to come over around seven. I told her I’d cook dinner for her.’

  ‘Oh boy! High Alert at once! Panty Block, Panty Block!’ Parker said, and threw up his hands in alarm. ‘You want my advice?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Call her, tell her you want to change it to brunch. Tell her to come over for a nice Sunday brunch. Eleven o’clock Sunday.’

  ‘That’s the Fourth of July.’

  ‘Good, that’s a good American holiday, these Latina girls like to think they’re American. Tell her you’ll make pancakes. Pancakes are very American, very innocent. Tell her to dress casual. Blue jeans, if she likes. Most of these Latina girls don’t wear pants under their jeans, you’re already halfway home.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I want to trick her that way…”

  ‘What trick? You’re creating a safe ambulance is all. Nice Sunday morning brunch, the Fourth of July, who could suspect Wee Willie is lurking in the bushes?’

  ‘It ain’t so wee.’

  ‘That’s just an expression. No one’s disparaging your package.’

  ‘Just so you know.’

  ‘Call her. Change it to brunch.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Am I talking to the wall here?’ Parker said. ‘Call her!’

  * * * *

  Dr. Angelo Babbio was the head of the Visual Impairment Services Team at the Veterans Administration Medical Center. He told them that before the Iraq War began, a survey here at VAMC estimated that the number of legally blind veterans in America would increase by 37 percent, from 108,122 in 1995 to 147,864 in 2010.

  ‘That was before we started getting the figures from Iraq,’ he said.

  ‘Do your records go back to the Vietnam War?’ Carella asked.

  ‘They go back to World War I,’ Babbio said. ‘What’s your interest in the visually impaired?’

  ‘We’re investigating the murder of a blinded vet.’

  ‘And you think he may have been treated here?’

  ‘According to his brother, yes.’

  ‘When do you think this might have been?’

  ‘Late sixties, early seventies.’

  ‘Long time ago,’ Babbio said.

  He led them through corridors lined with silent men sitting in wheelchairs. Elderly men on oxygen. Young soldiers recently returned from the desert. A bird colonel still proudly wearing his uniform, sitting motionless in his chair, his head bandaged. Facing a window beyond which was a green lawn and a blue sky he could not see.

  Max Sobolov’s records were already on microfilm. He’d indeed been treated here for rehab. Nothing they could do about his eyes, he’d lost both those to a mortar explosion. But they could teach him about spatial layouts, and environmental constants, and features of walls and floors, and how to use echolocation. They could teach him how to carry out complex tasks, travel intricate routes, locate difficult objectives. They could teach him the use of the long cane. They could teach him independence.

  ‘We have him discharged after five years,’ Babbio said. ‘According to this…’ He tapped the file folder. ‘… he was a difficult patient.’

  ‘In what way?’ Meyer asked.

  ‘Bitter, uncooperative. Lots of them come back that way, you know. They go off all gung-ho, and suddenly they’re home, and they’re still young, but they’ve lost an arm or a leg, or half a face, or they’re paralyzed, or blind - as was the case with Sobolov here - and it gives them an entirely different perspective. Sobolov was in a lot of pain. We had to medicate him quite heavily.’

  ‘Did he become drug dependent?’ Carella asked.

  ‘Well… who can say? We gave him a lot of morphine, let’s put it that way.’

  ‘Was he an addict when he left here?’ Carella insisted.

  ‘There is nothing in his record to indicate he was morphine-addicted when he left VAMC,’ Babbio said.

  The detectives did not appear convinced.

  ‘Look,’ Babbio said, ‘we’re lucky we were able to release him as a functioning member of society. Most of them never get
back to what they once were.’

  Carella wondered how many wars it would take.

  * * * *

  They tried to imagine what this Riverhead neighborhood must have looked like forty years ago.

  The elevated-train stops on the Dover Plains Avenue line would have been the same. Cannon Hill Road, and then the stations named after the numbered streets, spaced some nine blocks apart. The end of the line would have signaled an expanse of vacant lots, and then the beginning of the first small town beyond the city itself. Today, those once-empty lots were crowded with low-rise apartment buildings and shops where city melted imperceptibly into suburb.

  No longer were there trolley tracks under the elevated tracks, and the traffic was heavier now. Today, Dover Plains Avenue was lined with bodegas where once there had been Italian groceries or Jewish delis. What had earlier been an ice-cream parlor was now a cuchi frito joint. The pizzeria and the bowling alley were perhaps there long ago, but the language spoken in them now was Spanish.

  Times had changed, and so had the neighborhood where Alicia Hendricks and her brother, Karl, had once lived. But still anchoring the hood, like pegs at the corners of a triangular tent, were Our Lady of Grace Church, the Roger Mercer Junior High School, and Warren G. Harding High.

  Alicia and her brother had each attended both schools. Karl had gone on from Harding High to prison. Alicia had begun work at a restaurant named Rocco’s. They did not expect the restaurant to be there today. But there it was, sitting on the corner of Laurelwood and Trent, a green and white awning spread over the sidewalk, tables outdoors a little early in the season, waiters in long white aprons bustling in and out of the place. ROCCO’s, the sign above the awning read.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Parker said.

  The present owner was a man named Geoffrey Lucantonio. His father, now deceased, was the Rocco who’d owned the place when Alicia worked here all those years ago. Geoffrey was seventeen when Alicia took the job. He remembered her well.

  ‘Sure. I used to fuck her,’ he said discreetly. ‘Then again, so did everyone else.’

  Apparently, Alicia’s reputation had preceded her from Mercer Junior High. Well-developed at the age of twelve, she had first gained a following as the ‘vacuum cleaner’ of the seventh grade, a sobriquet deriving from her ability to perform excellent oral sex, a trend that was catching on among pubescent girls as a means of avoiding vaginal penetration and therefore unwanted pregnancies. By the time she reached the ninth grade, she’d tipped to the fact that blowjobs were a form of male exploitation, and she moved on to sex that brought satisfaction to herself as well. It wasn’t long before her phone number was scrawled in telephone booths and on men’s room walls with the advisory ‘For a wild ride, call Alicia.’