Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

  Most of all, Parker hated Alice Patricia Parker.

  None of the guys on the squad knew that Parker had once been married. Fuck ‘em, it was none of their business.

  Around Christmastime he always wondered where Alice Patricia was. He hated her, but he wondered where she was, what she was doing.

  Probably still hooking someplace.

  Probably L.A. She’d always talked about going out to California. Maybe San Francisco. Hooking someplace out there in California.

  On Thanksgiving Day he’d sat alone in his garden apartment in Majesta and watched the Gruber’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Watched it on one of the local channels. Not as big or as famous as the Macy’s parade in New York, but what the fuck, it was at least the city’s own parade. Ate a frozen turkey dinner he’d heated up in his microwave oven. And wondered where Alice Patricia was.

  And wondered what she was doing.

  Blond hair and blue eyes.

  A figure you could cry.

  Whenever a blond, blue-eyed homicide victim turned up—like the one Carella and Brown had caught in October—Parker wondered where Alice Patricia was, wondered if she was lying dead in an alley someplace, her throat slit by some California pimp.

  I’m only doing it as a sideline, she’d told him.

  Well, listen, they’d warned him. This was when he was still working out of the Three-One downtown, not a bad precinct, still in uniform down there, learning what it was like to be a fuckin’ cop in this fuckin’ city. Filth and garbage, that was what you dealt with. Went home with the slink of it on your hands and in your nostrils. He’d met her in a bar, she was dancing topless there, the guys all warned him. These topless dancers, they said, you know what they are. They’re either turning tricks already, or else they drift into doing massage parlors part-time, and before you knew it, they were full-fledged hookers. He told them to go fuck themselves. Alice Patricia was maybe dancing topless, but she had ambitions and ideals, wanted to dance someday in a legitimate show, make it here and then move on to Broadway and the big time. Took ballet lessons and voice lessons and acting lessons, wanted to make it big. She wasn’t what they thought. Parker knew she wasn’t. When he married her, he didn’t invite any of the guys from the Three-One to the wedding.

  It was going good, he thought it was going real good.

  Then one night—he had the four to midnight—he went over to the club she was working at, a place called Champagne Bubbles or some such shit, and one of the girls told him Alice Patricia had gone out for an hour or so, and he said, ‘What do you mean she went out for an hour or so?’ This was now twelve-thirty, one o’clock in the morning, the place was almost empty except for some sailors sitting at the bar watching a girl Alice Patricia called the Titless Wonder. ‘This time of night she went out for an hour or so?’ Parker said. He knew what this city turned into after midnight. A fuckin’ moonscape full of predators crawling the streets looking for victims. Filth and garbage, the stink of it. ‘Where’d she go?’ he asked.

  The girl looked at him.

  She was topless. She kept toying with a string of pearls around her neck.

  ‘Where’d she go?’ he asked again.

  ‘Leave it be, Andy,’ the girl said.

  He grabbed the string of pearls, ripped them from her neck. The pearls clattered to the floor, rolled on the floor. The sound of the pearls was louder than the sound of the taped music the girl onstage was dancing to.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  So, you know, he found her in a hot-bed hotel three blocks from the club. He was in civvies, he had changed in the locker room when his tour ended, the room clerk thought he was a detective when he showed his shield. This was a year before he’d made Detective/Third. He’d made Detective/Third after the divorce, when he had nothing to concentrate on but police work. The room clerk told him a blond, blue-eyed girl had come in with a black man about fifteen minutes ago. The room clerk told him they were in room 1301. Parker would remember the number of the room always. And the stink of Lysol in the hallway.

  He beat the black man to within an inch of his life. Kicked him down the stairs. Told him to get his black ass out of this city. He went back to the room. Alice Patricia was still on the bed, naked, smoking a cigarette.

  He said, ‘Why?’

  She said, ‘I’m only doing it as a sideline.’

  He said, ‘Why?’

  ‘For kicks,’ she said, and shrugged.

  ‘I loved you,’ he said.

  It was already past tense.

  Alice Patricia shrugged again.

  He should have killed her.

  He said, ‘This is it, you know.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, and stubbed out the cigarette.

  He walked out of the room and out of the hotel and into the city. He beat up two drunks who were singing at the tops of their lungs on Hastings Street. He threw an ash can through a plate glass window on Jefferson Avenue. He roamed the city. He was drunk himself when he got back to the apartment at four in the morning. He thought maybe he’d find Alice Patricia there. He thought if she was there, he would kill her. But she was already gone, took all of her clothes with her. Not even a note. Took his lawyer three months to find her. The divorce became final six months after that. And three months after that he made Detective/Third.

  He still wondered about her whenever the holidays came around.

  Hated her, but wondered about her.

  Hated the fuckin’ holidays.

  Hated the thought of snow maybe coming for Christmas.

  He hated snow. It started out white and pure and ended up filthy.

  He hated Christmas trees, too. All they did was make a garbage collection problem, even more work for the sanitmen, like the horseshit all over the streets. Right after Christmas you had a dead forest of fuckin’ Christmas trees, trailing tinsel, stacked up outside the buildings with the garbage. The garbage was bad enough in this city, he sometimes thought it was a city of uncollected black plastic bags. The leftover Christmas trees only made it worse. Saw them all over the city. Dead. Trailing tinsel. She used to dance with this little G-string that looked as if it was made of Christmas tree tinsel, all sparkly and bright, her hips rotating, dollar bills tucked into the waistband. I’m only doing it as a sideline. Could’ve been a big fuckin’ star. He’d have gone backstage, talked to the other people in the cast. Alice Patricia is my wife, he would’ve said. No kidding? Yeah, I’m a cop. No kidding?

  He hated being a cop.

  Hated the notes from this guy who had the squadroom in a fuckin’ tizzy. The Deaf Man. Who gave a shit about the Deaf Man? In Parker’s world they were all thieves, some of them smart thieves and some of them dumb ones. Maybe the Deaf Man was a smart one, but he was still a thief. So what was all this fuss about the notes he was sending? Smart-ass thief was all.

  Parker wondered what it was like to be young.

  Wondered what it would be like to be called Andrew again.

  Alice Patricia used to call him Andrew.

  He hated her.

  Oh, Christ, how he loved her!

  * * * *

  On Monday morning, December 19, another note from the Deaf Man arrived.

  They were beginning to get tired of him. In six days it would be Christmas. They had other things to do besides worrying about his foolishness. They did not know why he had killed Elizabeth Turner—if he’d killed her—and they did not know what his goddamn messages meant. They figured be had killed Naomi Schneider because he may have told her something she had not yet repeated to them, and this something would have been dangerous if revealed. The Deaf Man let them know only what he wanted them to know. Anything else was a risk, and he took no unpredictable risks. So good-bye, Naomi.

  But both cases were as dead as this year’s calendar would soon be, and the latest message from him was only an irritation. They merely glanced at it and then tacked it to the bulletin board with the others:

  * * * *

  Cotton Hawes was in trouble.<
br />
  He felt like calling in a 10-13.

  Instead, he said, ‘I do have a Gruber’s charge account.’

  He was embarrassed to begin with. He had just bought Annie Rawles two hundred dollars’ worth of sexy lingerie as a Christmas gift. Two hundred and thirteen dollars and twenty-five cents with tax. He hoped he would not have to explain to this lady on the sixth floor of Gruber’s new uptown store that he had bought the underwear for a Detective/First Grade. The store, not six blocks from the station house, was part of the mayor’s new Urban Renewal Program. The real Gruber’s was all the way downtown, on Messenger Square. Hawes should have gone downtown. He should have known better than to shop anywhere in the precinct, even though the new store was very nice and—according to the mayor’s office, at least—was doing a very good business and was serving as a model for redevelopment of shitty neighborhoods all over the city.

  ‘Not according to our records,’ the woman behind the counter said.

  Hawes wondered if she would be caught dead in the sort of sexy lingerie he had bought for Annie.

  ‘I’ve had a Gruber’s charge account for three years now,’ he said.

  ‘Let me see your card again, please,’ the woman said.

  He handed her the card.

  He was in the sixth-floor credit office. The woman downstairs on the first floor—where Lingerie was—had told him to go up to the sixth floor to the credit office because when she’d tried to run his card through the computer, she had come up with an INVALID. He had taken the escalator up to the sixth floor and had seen a bristling array of signs pointing in different directions: MANAGER’S OFFICE. CASHIER’S OFFICE. CREDIT OFFICE. RETURNS. PERSONNEL OFFICE. TOY DEPARTMENT. SANTA CLAUS. TELEPHONE OFFICE, REST ROOMS. He had almost got lost, fine detective that he was. But here he was in the credit office, handing his card across the counter to a woman who had a nose like a broomstick. And eyes like dirt. Her eyes were dirty. Not brown, not black—just dirty. She looked at his card with her dirty eyes. She almost sniffed it with her broomstick nose.

  ‘I have the new card,’ he said.

  ‘Where is the new card, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Home,’ he said. ‘I haven’t put it in my wallet yet.’

  He realized, as he said this, that claiming to have the card at home was akin to a pistol-carrying thief claiming he had left his permit in a desk drawer someplace.

  ‘If you planned to shop here,’ the woman said, ‘you should have put your card in your wallet.’

  Hawes opened his wallet. ‘This is where the new card should be,’ he said. ‘But I left it home.’

  He had really opened his wallet so she could see the gold and blue-enameled detective shield pinned to it. She looked at the shield with her dirty eyes.

  ‘You should have the new card with you at all times,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know I’d be shopping today,’ he said. ‘I have a lot of things to carry in my wallet,’ he said. ‘My police shield,’ he said. ‘My police ID card. I’m a detective,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to carry more things in my wallet than I absolutely have to.’

  ‘But you’re carrying the old card in your wallet,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I am. By mistake. The new one should be there.’

  ‘The old card went through our computer as invalid.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’m up here on the sixth floor. But if you run a check through your computer files up here, you’ll see that I received a new card in May. And forgot to put it in my wallet.’

  ‘No wonder people get away with murder in this city,’ she said, and left the counter.

  He waited.

  She came back ten minutes later.

  ‘Yes, you did indeed receive a new card,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘Thank you,’ he added.

  ‘You understand, sir,’ she said, ‘that the charging of two hundred dollars’ worth of lingerie could not go unquestioned when a card came up invalid.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that,’ he said.

  She knew it was for lingerie. She had called downstairs. He wondered if she knew what sort of lingerie.

  “There are a lot of crooks in this city, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that,’ he said.

  ‘If you’ll go downstairs again to Lingerie,’ she said, ‘the card will go through this time. I hope you are aware, sir, that panties are not returnable.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Especially our Open City line, which many women wear for special occasions only. I hope you have the right size.’

  ‘I have the right size, yes,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said, and sniffed the air as if smelling something rank, and gave him a last look with her dirty eyes, and left him standing at the counter.

  All the way home he thought about his encounter in Gruber’s. He wished Gruber’s would burn to the ground. He wished the mayor would take his Urban Renewal Program to Dallas, Texas. Or Vladivostok. All Gruber’s did was encourage more crime in an area already crime-ridden. More damn pickpocket and shoplifting arrests in that store since it opened last February than in all the oilier stores along the Stem. Okay, it was making a lot of money. And maybe attracting other businesses to the area. But did the mayor ever stop to think how much time the cops up here were putting into Gruber’s? On shitty little arrests? For which they had to travel all the way down to Headquarters to do the booking?

  He was still fuming when he reached his building downtown. He stepped into the small entry foyer, took his keys from his pocket, and unlocked his mailbox. There was a sheaf of letters, including a bill from Gruber’s. He did not look at the mail more closely until he was in his apartment. He was tempted to call Annie, tell her about the hassle uptown, but that would blow the surprise. Instead, he mixed himself a drink and then sat down and leafed through the envelopes. One of them seemed to be a Christmas card. He tore open the flap on the red envelope. It was not a Christmas card. It was an invitation. It read:

  Scrawled on the flap of the card in the same handwriting was the message:

  Harriet was Harriet Byrnes, the lieutenant’s wile. Why in hell was she throwing a party for him in the squadroom? Was it Pete’s birthday? An anniversary? Twenty years on the force? Thirty? A hundred?

  Hawes shrugged and wrote down the date and time in his appointment calendar.

  * * * *

  On Tuesday morning, December 20, the Deaf Man’s tenth message arrived.

  They knew by now that the number of items pasted to each blank sheet of paper had nothing whatever to do with the order in which the messages were received. The eight black horses, for example, were on the very first message. The six police shields were on the fourth message. The eleven Colt Detective Specials were on the seventh message. And so on. And now on the tenth message:

  The detectives tacked the sheet of paper to the bulletin board. There were now:

  Two nightsticks. Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Seven wanted flyers. Eight black horses. Nine patrol cars. Ten D.D. forms. And eleven Detective Specials.