by Ed McBain
They still didn’t know what any of it meant.
Did he plan to stop at eleven?
Or would he go beyond that?
If he stopped at eleven, then the number one was still missing in the sequence.
The hell with it, they thought.
Christmas was only five days away.
* * * *
Bert Kling was looking through his mail when Eileen Burke let herself in with the key he had given her.
It was close to four-thirty in the afternoon, and the lights on the Calm’s Point Bridge—festooned for the holiday season and visible through his windows—were blinking red and green against the purple dusk. He sat under a floor lamp near the windows in an easy chair he’d bought in a thrift shop after his divorce. He had never discussed his divorce with Andy Parker. He had never discussed anything but police work with Parker, and even that rarely. He did not know Parker was himself divorced. He did not know that the two men might have shared common thoughts on the subject, did not know that Parker, like himself, thought of divorce as a kind of killing.
The holidays, even now and even with Eileen, were the most difficult time for Kling. Augusta would pop into his mind whenever he shopped the stores, even when he was shopping for Eileen. Well, the physical similarities, he supposed. In trying to settle on a color, he’d tell a store clerk that his girlfriend was a green-eyed redhead—describing Eileen, of course—and immediately Augusta would come to mind. Or in trying to remember what size Eileen wore, he’d say she was five feet nine inches tall, and immediately the image of Augusta would come again, unbidden, ghostlike, Augusta as he’d first seen her when he was investigating a burglary in her apartment...
Long red hair and green eyes and a deep suntan. Dark green sweater, short brown skirt, brown boots. High cheekbones, eyes slanting up from them, fiercely green against the tan, tilted nose gently drawing the upper lip away from partially exposed, even white teeth. Sweater swelling over breasts firm without a bra, the wool cinched tightly at her waist with a brown brass-studded belt, hip softly carving an arc against the nubby sofa back, skirt revealing a secret thigh as she turned more fully toward him…
Augusta.
‘Hi,’ Eileen said, and came to where he was sitting.
She kissed him on top of the head. Red and green lights from the bridge blinked into the red and green of her hair and her eyes.
‘You look like Christmas,’ he said.
‘I do, huh?’ she said. ‘I feel like Halloween. When did you get in? I called a little while ago.’
‘A little after four,’ he said. ‘I was doing some shopping. What’d the doctor say?’
‘He said time heals all wounds.’
She took off her coat, tossed it familiarly onto the bed, sat on the edge of the bed, eased off her high-heeled shoes, and reached down to massage one foot. Long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved and tapering to slender ankles. Eileen. Augusta. The knifing would have destroyed Augusta. She was a model, her face was her fortune. Eileen was only a cop. But she was a woman. And a beautiful woman. And she’d been cut on her face. The knifing had occured on October 21, two months ago. At the hospital they’d taken twelve stitches. The scar was still livid on her left cheek.
‘He said I might not need plastic surgery at all,’ Eileen said. ‘Told me the hospital emergency room did a very good job. He said the scar may look awful now...’
‘It doesn’t really look bad at all,’ Kling said.
‘Yeah, bullshit,’ Eileen said. ‘But it’ll heal as a thin white line, he said, if I can live with that. He said it all depends on my “acceptance level.” How do you like that for a euphemism?’
‘When do you have to see him again?’ Kling asked.
‘Next month. He says I shouldn’t even be thinking about plastic surgery just yet. He said the cut should be entirely healed within six months to a year, and I should wait till then to see how I feel. That’s what he means by acceptance level, I guess. How much vanity I have. How ugly I’d care to look for the rest of my life.’
‘You don’t look ugly,’ Kling said. ‘You couldn’t possibly look...’
‘I’m not winning any beauty contests these days, that’s for sure,’ Eileen said. ‘You think there are any rapists out there who dig scars? Think they’d go for a decoy with a slashed left cheek?’
‘I kind of like the look it gives you,’ he said, trying to joke her out of her dark mood. ‘Makes you look sort of dangerous.’
‘Yeah, dangerous,’ she said.
‘Devil-may-care. Like a lady pirate.’
‘Like a three-hundred-pound armed robber,’ Eileen said. ‘All I need is a tattoo on my arm. Mom in a heart.’
‘You feel like Chinese tonight?’ he asked.
‘I feel like curling up in bed and sleeping for a month. Going to see him is exhausting. He’s always so fucking consoling, do you know what I mean? It isn’t his fucking face, so he thinks...’
‘Hey,’ Kling said softly.
She looked up at him.
‘Come on,’ he said, and went to her. He kissed the top of her head. He cupped his hand under her chin and kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose. He kissed the scar. Gently, tenderly.
‘Kissing it won’t make it go away, Bert,’ she said, and paused. ‘I hope you didn’t buy me anything too feminine for Christmas.’
‘What?’
I don’t feel pretty,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want any gifts that...’
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘And feminine. And sexy. And...’
‘Sweet talker,’ she said.
‘So where do you want to eat?’ he said. ‘McDonald’s?’
‘Big spender, too,’ she said, pausing again. ‘And what?’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘Beautiful and feminine and sexy and what?’
‘And I love you,’ he said.
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
‘With all the umpteen million other women in this city... ?’
‘You’re the only woman in this city,’ he said.
She looked at him. She nodded.
‘Thank you,’ she said softly and rose from the bed. ‘Let me shower and change,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ she said again and kissed him on the mouth and then went into the bathroom.
He heard the shower when she turned it on.
He picked up the stack of mail again. He opened several Christmas cards and then picked up a red envelope and tore open the flap. The card inside read:
Scrawled on the flap on the card in the same handwriting was the message:
The door to the bathroom opened. Eileen poked her head around the jamb. ‘Wanna come shower with me?’ she asked.
* * * *
Christmas Day would fall on a Sunday this year.
This was good for the department stores. Normally sales fell off a bit on Christmas Eve. You had your last-minute shoppers, sure, and the stores all stayed open till six o’clock to accommodate even the tardiest, but the volume was nowhere as great as it was at any other time during that last hectic week before the big event. Unless Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday. Then, miraculously, sales perked up. This may have had something to do with the fact that working people were used to shopping on Saturdays. Maybe they felt this was just another Saturday, same as all the rest in the year, time to get out there and spend Friday’s paycheck. Or maybe the Christmas bonuses had something to do with it, get that big fat extra wad of money on Friday, good time to spend it was Saturday, right? It was funny the way a Saturday Christmas Eve brought out the customers in droves. Statistics showed that it didn’t work that way if Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday. Not as many shoppers. Even God rested on Sunday. This year, with prosperity lingering for yet a little while and with Christmas Eve coming on a Saturday, storekeepers, all over the city were anticipating a banner day.
On Thursday, December 22, the detectives of I he 87th Squad received what they surmised was almost the last of the Deaf Man’s communic
ations.
It was Arthur Brown, in fact, who guessed this one was the penultimate one. The single white sheet of paper in the now-familiar typewritten envelope showed:
‘Number twelve,’ Brown said.
‘Twelve roast pigs,’ Carella said.
‘Only one more to go,’ Brown said.
‘How do you figure that?’
‘It’s the twelve days of Christmas, don’t you get it?’ Brown said. ‘Two nightsticks, three pairs of handcuffs, four police hats ... the twelve days of Christmas.’
‘He’s just wishing us a Merry Christmas, huh?’ Carella said.
‘Fat chance,’ Brown said. ‘But all that’s missing now is the first day. It’s the twelve days of Christmas, Steve. I’ll bet next month’s salary on it.’
‘So what’ll the first day be?’
‘Take a guess,’ Brown said, grinning.
* * * *
Brown did not like putting up Christmas trees.
He also did not like what Christmas trees cost nowadays. When he was a kid, you could get a huge tree for five bucks. The seven-foot tree he’d bought this year had cost him thirty-five dollars. Highway robbery. He would not have bought a tree at all if it weren’t for Connie, his eight-year-old daughter. Connie still believed in Santa Claus. There was no fireplace and hence no chimney in the Brown apartment, but Connie always left a glass of milk and a platter of chocolate-chip cookies under the tree for Santa. Every Christmas Brown had to drink the goddamn glass of milk before he went to bed. He also had to eat some of the chocolate-chip cookies.
The first thing he did not like about putting up a Christmas tree was the lights. It seemed to Brown that if the United States could put a man on the moon, then some brilliant scientist someplace could also figure out a way to make Christmas tree lights that didn’t have wires. Brown was no brilliant scientist, but he himself had figured out a very simple way to do this, and if some starving inventor out there wanted to cash in on a bonanza, he was willing to divulge it for a hefty piece of the action. He knew just how it would work in principle, but he didn’t have the electrical engineering know-how to put it on paper. He had never discussed his idea out loud with anyone because he didn’t want it stolen from him. There were a lot of crooks in this world, as he well knew, and it seemed likely to him that his multimillion-dollar idea would be stolen the moment he talked to anyone about it. He already had a name for the product: No Strings. If he and somebody went partners on it, they could sell billions and billions of Christmas tree lights every year. No strings. No wires to loop around branches. Each Christmas tree light an individual entity that could be hung anyplace on the tree. All anybody had to do was contact him, write to him care of the 87th Precinct, make him an offer. He was willing to listen.
Meanwhile, he struggled with the damn lights.
Nobody helped him.
That was the second thing he disliked about putting up the tree.
His wife, Caroline, was in the kitchen baking the chocolate-chip cookies Connie would put under the tree on Christmas Eve, some of which Brown would later have to eat while he drank the goddamn glass of milk. Connie herself was in the den watching television. All alone in the living room Brown struggled first with the lights and then with the Christmas balls, which was the third thing he disliked about putting up a tree. Not the Christmas balls themselves—except when one fell off the tree and crashed to the floor, leaving all those silvery splinters that were impossible to pick up—but the little hooks that held the balls to the tree. Why was it that no matter how carefully you packed all the ornaments away after Christmas, there were always more balls than there were hooks? Brown suspected there was an international ring of ornament-hook thieves.
The smell of baking cookies filled the apartment.
The sound of animated cartoon characters filled the apartment.
Brown worked on the tree.
Only two more days to go, he thought.
His daughter, Connie, suddenly appeared in the doorway.
‘How come there’s no black Santa Clauses?’ she asked.
Brown sighed.
* * * *
The twelve days of Christmas.
Twelfth Night.
The eve of Epiphany.
The first day of Christmas was Christmas Day itself. On Christmas Day the detectives of the 87th Squad would no doubt be celebrating, opening their own meager gifts, and not for a moment expecting the first of his gifts. But receive it they would and perhaps recognize at last what all his advance publicity had been about. They would not, however—if his notes had been inaccessible enough—realize what lay in store for them on January 5, Twelfth Night, Epiphany Eve.
In lower case the word ‘epiphany’ meant the sudden revelation of an underlying truth about a person or a situation. The English word was from the Greek epiphaneia, of course, the gods revealing themselves to mortal eyes, but the Irish novelist James Joyce—one of the Deaf Man’s favorites—first popularized the word in modern literature by calling his early experimental prose passages ‘epiphanies.’ A sudden flash of recognition. Would the men of the 87th recognize al last? Before the sudden flash? During it? There would be no time for recognition afterward.
He smiled again.
Epiphany Day. January 6. In honor of the first time Jesus Christ manifested himself to the Gentiles. On Epiphany Eve, Twelfth Night as it was called—oh what fun Shakespeare’d had with that one—the Deaf Man would reveal himself in spirit to the detectives, making it clear to them for the first, last, and only time that he would brook no further interference with his chosen profession. On three previous occasions he had given them every opportunity to thwart his plans, virtually laying them all out in advance—but never once realizing his plans actually would meet with disaster. Oh, not through any brilliant deduction on their part, no, that would be giving them far too much credit for intelligence. But rather through clumsy accidents. Accidents. The bane of the Deaf Man’s existence.
Accidents.
The first time it had been a cop wanting to buy ice cream from the Deaf Man’s stolen getaway truck. Wanted an ice cream pop. One of the specials with the chopped walnuts. Never once suspected the refrigerator compartment was stuffed with money stolen from the Mercantile Trust. But blew the job anyway—by accident.
The next time it had been two small-time hoods committing a holdup in a tailor shop on the very same night the Deaf Man had planned a little fillip-surprise to his big extortion scheme. There were two detectives in the back of the store, waiting for the hoods. The Deaf Man and his accomplices came in the front door at the very same moment. Fuzz! A stakeout for the two punks, and the Deaf Man had accidentally walked into it. Carella had shot him on that occasion; he would never forget Carella’s shooting him, would never forgive him for it.
The last time—well, he supposed he could credit Carella with having doped that one out in advance, though he’d certainly given him enough help with it. That had been his mistake. Laid it all out too clearly, too fairly. Virtually told Carella he was planning to rob the same bank twice in the same morning, setting up an A-team for a fall and then going in with his B-team—to find Carella there and waiting.
Carella was smarter than the Deaf Man thought he was.
He was maybe even smarter than he himself thought he was.
Accidents, not mistakes.
But now—no more Mr. Nice Guy.
There was nothing in the book that said he had to play the game fairly.
They were lucky he was playing it at all.
On the night before Christmas the Deaf Man Would steal half a million dollars, perhaps more.
And get away with it this time, because this time he had not warned the police in advance. Well, yes, he had not been able to resist dropping Elizabeth’s body in the park opposite the station house. Naked, though, and therefore unidentifiable. And that had been the only clue, if it could be considered one, to the job planned for Christmas Eve.
On Epiphany Eve, Twelfth Night,
he would destroy the detectives—most of them anyway— who worked out of the old building facing Grover Park.
And get away with that, too.
Because, although he’d warned them, he had not warned them fairly.
They would die.
Horribly.
He smiled at the thought.
Tonight was December 23.
Tonight there was still some work to be done.