Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

  Elizabeth Turner had worked for a bank in Los Angeles. She had worked for a bank here in this city, and she had also worked for a bank in Washington, D.C. Honest citizens, like criminals, will most often seek the same line of work when they move from one state to another. Wasn’t it likely, in fact almost mandatory, that Elizabeth would have sought a job in yet another bank upon her return here?

  The detectives knew that in this state all employers had to fill out a so-called WRS-2 form, which was a quarterly report of wages that had to be filed with the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance on April 30, July 31, October 31, and January 31. The WRS-2 form listed the name and social security number of each employee, together with the gross wages earned in that quarter. The detectives were in possession of Elizabeth Turner’s social security number. They knew she had left the job in Washington on May 1. They further knew that she had been found dead in Grover Park on October 25. Wasn’t it a likelihood that at least one and perhaps two WRS-2 forms had been filed for her since her return to the city? Carella made a call upstate and spoke to a man named Culpepper there. Culpepper said he would check the WRS-2 forms filed on July 31 and October 31 and get back to him.

  He did not get back to him until November 11, a dismally gray, wet, and cold Friday, by which time the case was already seventeen days old. He told Carella that none of the forms filed on July 31 reported wages for an Elizabeth Turner in that quarter.

  ‘How about the October thirty-first forms?’ Carella asked.

  ‘Those haven’t been processed yet.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a computer up there?’

  ‘Not for these quarterly forms,’ Culpepper said.

  ‘Well, when do you think they will be processed?’

  ‘When we get to them.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘When we get to them,’ Culpepper said again. ‘Sometime before the next quarter’s filing is due.’

  ‘You mean in January? Next year?’

  ‘The WRS-2’s are due on January thirty-first, that’s right.’

  ‘This is a homicide here,’ Carella said. ‘I’m trying to find out where this girl worked. Can’t you do something to expedite this?’

  ‘It’d be different if the forms were filed under an employee’s name,’ Culpepper said. ‘Or even his or her social security number. But they’re not. They’re filed under the employer’s name. You don’t know how long it took us to check all those July forms, looking for this Elizabeth Turner. And those forms had already been processed.’

  Carella knew exactly how long it had taken. He had made his request six days ago. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s very important for us to find out where...’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Culpepper said. ‘I’ll have the October thirty-first forms checked once they’ve been processed, but I can’t do better than that.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ Carella said, and hung up.

  He sat staring at his typewriter for a moment, anti then he rolled a D.D. Supplementary Report form into it. He had typed almost a full page when Alf Miscolo came from the clerical office down the hall. There was a plain white envelope in his hand. This one was postmarked November 10. As with the four that had preceded it, the letter was addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella, the name neatly typewritten on the face of the envelope.

  ‘I thought maybe he’d forgotten us,’ Miscolo said.

  ‘No such luck,’ Carella said and tore open the flap of the envelope.

  The same single white sheet of paper inside.

  And pasted to it:

  ‘That looks to me like four police hats,’ Miscolo said.

  ‘Yes,’ Carella said.

  ‘You think he’s a cop?’ Miscolo asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then why’s he sending us pictures of all this police shit? Walkie-talkies, shields, handcuffs? Police hats?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t like the idea of somebody sending us pictures of police paraphernalia,’ he said. ‘It’s spooky.’

  He was not a handsome man, Miscolo. His nose was massive and his eyebrows were bushy, and I here was a thickness about his neck that created the impression of head sitting directly on shoulders. But normally there was an animation to his face and a sparkle to his dark eyes—never more evident than when he was defending the truly abominable coffee he brewed in his office—and this was totally lacking now as he stared disconsolately at the sheet of paper in Carella’s hand.

  A police station was sacrosanct to men like Miscolo and Carella. Whatever happened out there on the streets, it did not come into the station house except in handcuffs. Although once—as they both remembered well—a woman with a gun and a bottle of nitroglycerin had held this very room hostage for more hours than either of them cared to count. For the most part, though, the precinct was as much a castle to these men as was a shabby row house to a British miner. It was enormously troubling to Miscolo that someone was using police equipment to make whatever the hell point he was trying to make. He felt as if he’d wandered into a filthy subway toilet and found his wife’s monogrammed towels on one of the sinks.

  He knew what the other four messages had—well, advertised, if that was the correct word. They were all posted side by side on the squadroom bulletin board in the order in which they’d been received:

  Eight black horses.

  Five walkie-talkies.

  Three pairs of handcuffs.

  Six police shields.

  And now this.

  Four police hats.

  Except for the horses, it was as if somebody was putting together a policeman piece by piece.

  ‘They all got to do with cops., you realize that?’ he said. ‘Except the horses.’

  ‘Cops still ride horses in this city,’ Carella said.

  ‘Them shields on the hats got no numbers on them, you realize that? He prolly cut out a picture of a hat someplace and then Xeroxed it.’

  ‘There’s a number on this picture of the shields, though.’

  ‘You suppose that’s a real shield?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  “Cause you can Xerox anything nowadays,’ Miscolo said. ‘You lay something on the glass there, you close the cover, you press the button, you get a pretty good picture of it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Carella said.

  ‘If it is a real one ... where’d he get it?’ Miscolo asked.

  ‘Maybe I oughta check it out,’ Carella said. ‘Trouble is...’

  ‘Yeah, I know. You’d feel like a jerk.’

  ‘I mean, we’re getting these dumb letters...’

  ‘I know...’

  ‘I make a call to Personnel, ask if a cop lost a potsie with the number seventy-nine on it...’

  ‘You’d feel like a jerk.’

  ‘Which is how we’re supposed to feel,’ Carella said.

  ‘I don’t like this guy, I really don’t like him,’ Miscolo said, and looked at the picture of the four police hats again. ‘What’s he trying to tell us anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carella said, and sighed heavily.

  ‘You want some coffee?’ Miscolo asked.

  ‘Thanks, not right now,’ Carella said.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Miscolo said, and shrugged and left the squadroom.

  The rain lashed the windows.

  Carella wondered if he should call Personnel to run a check on shield number seventy-nine.

  He looked at the D.D. form in his typewriter. Years ago you had to use carbon paper to make duplicate, triplicate, even quadruplicate copies. Now you just ran down the hall and asked Miscolo to run off Xerox copies for you. The way the Deaf Man—it had to be the Deaf Man—had Xeroxed the pictures he’d been sending them. The form—just as he’d typed it, errors, overscoring, and all—read:

  That was as far as he’d got.

  He was about to throw the Elizabeth Turner case into the Open File. Open. A euphemism for dead end. A case waiting for a miracle to happen. Open. In that years from now, by some impossible stro
ke of luck, they might arrest a man dropping another dead woman in yet another park, and he would confess to the first murder and perhaps a dozen murders before that one.

  He looked at the form again.

  He looked at the Deaf Man’s most recent message.

  Four police hats.

  No faces under them.

  Anonymous hats.

  The form in Carella’s typewriter was about to be thrown into the vast anonymity of the Open File, another piece of paper in a maze of information that confirmed the ineffectiveness of the police in a city where far too many murders were committed. The Open File was a gaping maw that swallowed victims. And in the process swallowed victimizers as well.

  The proximity of the Deaf Man’s anonymous hats and the imminently anonymous form in the typewriter made him suddenly angry. It was entirely possible that there was no connection whatever between Elizabeth Turner and the Deaf Man. Seeking such a connection would most certainly be time-consuming and, in the long run, perhaps foolish. But she had been found dead in the park across the street. And there had been five letters from the Deaf Man to date, and if he wasn’t sticking his finger in their collective eye, then it certainly seemed that way. Throw Elizabeth Turner’s corpse into the Open File, and he’d be throwing the Deaf Man into it as well.

  He ripped the D.D. report from his typewriter.

  He carried the Deaf Man’s most recent greeting to the bulletin board and was about to tack it up with the others there, when it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps they were meant to be read in numerical rather than chronological order.

  He began shifting them around, retacking them to the board in a single horizontal line.

  Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Eight black horses.

  So what? he thought.

  They still meant nothing.

  Not realizing how close he’d come to at least a beginning, he walked back to his desk, checked his book of police department phone listings, and then dialed Personnel downtown on High Street.

  ‘Personnel, Sergeant Mullaney,’ a voice answered.

  ‘Detective Carella at the Eight-Seven,’ he said. ‘I need a name and address for a possible police officer.’

  ‘A possible officer?’ Mullaney said.

  ‘Yes. All I’ve got is a shield number.’

  ‘What’s the number?’ Mullaney asked

  ‘Seventy-nine.’

  ‘You gotta be kidding,’ Mullaney said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Seventy-nine? You know what number we’re up to now? Don’t even ask. You know how many cops been through this system since the police department was started? Don’t ask.’

  ‘Check it anyway, okay?’

  ‘This guy’s got to be kidding,’ Mullaney said to no one. ‘Where’d you get this number?’

  ‘On a picture of a shield.’

  ‘A picture of a shield?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it says seventy-nine on it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s your number, Coppola?’

  ‘Seven-one-four, five-six, three-two. And it’s Carella.’

  ‘That’ll give you some idea where we are now with the shield numbers. So you want me to check a shield some guy was a kid when the fuckin’ Dutch were still here?’

  ‘Just do me the favor, okay? This is a homicide we’re working.’

  ‘I ain’t surprised. A guy with shield number seventy-nine, he’s been dead for at least three centuries. Hold on, okay?’

  Carella held on.

  Mullaney came back onto the line some five minutes later.

  ‘No active shield number seventy-nine,’ he said. ‘Just like I figured.’

  ‘How about past records?’

  ‘We don’t go back to Henry Hudson,’ Mullaney said.

  ‘Check your past records,’ Carella said impatiently. ‘This is a goddamn homicide here.’

  ‘Don’t get your ass in an uproar, Coppola,’ Mullaney said, and left the phone again.

  Carella waited.

  When Mullaney came back, he said, ‘I got a badge number seventy-nine from 1858. There were eight-hundred thousand people in this city then, and we had a police force of fourteen hundred men. You’ll be interested in learning, no doubt, that in those days the police department was also charged with cleaning the streets.’

  ‘So what’s changed?’ Carella said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mullaney said. ‘You want this guy’s name?’

  ‘Please,’ Carella said.

  ‘Angus McPherson,’ Mullaney said. ‘He died in 1872. You’ll be interested in learning, no doubt, that by then we had a population of a million-four and a police force of eighteen hundred men. Also, by then, there was a street cleaning department. Cops didn’t have to shovel horse manure anymore. All they had to worry about was getting shot. Which was what happened to this guy McPherson. Where’d you get a picture of his shield? In an antiques shop?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Carella said. ‘Thanks a lot, Maloney.’

  * * * *

  He had told Charlie Henkins that his name was Dennis Dove, and had asked him to make it ‘Den’ for short. Charlie didn’t realize it, but the words den dove were Swedish. In Swedish the word den meant ‘the,’ but dove was not a white bird of peace. The word wasn’t even pronounced the way it was in English. In Swedish dove meant ‘deaf man.’ Den Hove, then, was the Deaf Man.

  ‘The thing I still don’t understand,’ Charlie said, ‘is why you want to do it on Christmas Eve. I mean, the situation is exactly the same on any night. The money’ll be there in the vault any night we pick.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s when I want to do it,’ the Deaf Man said.

  Charlie scratched his head. He was not a particularly bright human being, but then again most armed robbers weren’t. The Deaf Man had chosen him because he knew how to use a gun and was not afraid to use it. Charlie had, in fact, served a great deal of time at Castleview Prison upstate precisely because he’d used a gun while holding up a liquor store. The owner of the store was now confined to a wheelchair for life, a minor detail that disturbed Charlie not in the least. The way Charlie figured it, he’d had to burn the owner of the store because the man was reaching for his own gun under the counter. Charlie hadn’t considered the fact that two cops in a cruising police car up the street would hear the shots and would, within the next three minutes, have Charlie in handcuffs. Those were the breaks. He who hesitates is lost, dog eat dog, and easy come, easy go. Charlie knew all the proverbs and tricks of the trade, and he had learned a few more of them while serving his time upstate. Everybody learned a few tricks in the slammer. The Deaf Man figured Charlie was perfect for the job he’d planned. Charlie had twinkling blue eyes and a little round pot belly.

  ‘What I usually like to do on Christmas Eve,’ Charlie said, ‘is I like to watch television. They do a lot of specials on Christmas Eve. Last Christmas Eve I watched Perry Como on television. He used to be a barber, you know? My cousin Andy used to be a barber, too, before he got into doing burglaries. Not that Perry Como does burglaries.’

  ‘You’ll be home by seven-thirty,’ the Deaf Man said. ‘You can watch television all night long, if you like.’

  ‘I go in at a quarter to seven, huh?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Into the vault at a quarter to seven,’ the Deaf Man said.

  ‘Yeah, sure, that’s what I meant.’ He scratched his head again. ‘You sure Lizzie gave you the right numbers?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘The combinations, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean. The numbers are absolutely correct.’

  ‘And there’s this little push-button pad on the outer door, right?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yes. Set in a panel to the right of the door.’

  ‘Steel door, huh?’