The Frumious Bandersnatch

by Ed McBain

  Carella took his hand.

  One of the FBI agents stepped away from the other blue suits. “I’m Stan Endicott,” he said. “Special Agent in Charge. Welcome aboard.”

  Carella had been taught by a sergeant at the Academy never to trust a smiling man with a gun in his hand. He wondered if that same sergeant had ever said anything about a roomful of smiling men in suits, all of whom were packing if the bulges under their jackets were any indication.

  “Meet the rest of the team,” Endicott said, and introduced first his lookalike in the blue suit, “Special Agent Brian Forbes,” and then another FBI agent whose name flew by like the Twentieth Century, and then the pair of city dicks, one of them a Detective/First, the other a Detective/Second. Carella thought he recognized one of the names as belonging to a man who’d made spectacular headlines breaking up either a dope ring or a racketeering scheme or something of the sort—but what had Endicott meant by “Welcome aboard?” Or Corcoran by “Welcome to The Squad?”

  Everyone was still smiling.

  “I brought that stuff you asked for,” Carella said, and walked over to the large conference table in the center of the room and put down his dispatch case. Through the huge windows facing South, he could see across the square to the new red brick Police Headquarters building, ablaze with light even at this hour. He snapped open the latches on the case, lifted the lid, and removed from it first a sheaf of his own and Hawes’ typed DD reports…

  “Our reports on the crime scene witnesses,” he said.

  …and then the reports Meyer and Kling had filed on their visits to the marina and their interview with the marina watchman…

  “These are about the boat and the stolen Explorer.”

  …and then the report Willis had typed up on his and Parker’s visit to Polly Olson.

  “Also,” he said, “the report from Mobile was waiting when I got there. I haven’t looked at it yet. I can leave it here with the other stuff, if you like.”

  “He still doesn’t get it,” Corcoran said, smiling.

  Carella wondered if his fly was open.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’ll be working with us,” Endicott said.

  Carella figured they must be shorthanded. Some detective out sick or on vacation. Supposed to be twelve men on the Joint Task Force, only six of them in the room here, still smiling like drunken sailors.

  “We thought Mr. Loomis should be working with someone he liked and trusted.”

  “Actually, I asked if that would be possible,” Loomis said, and nodded.

  “Will that be okay, Steve?” Endicott asked.

  “Well…sure,” Carella said.

  “Now you’re pissing with the big dogs,” Corcoran said, grinning, and clapped Carella on the back.

  Hard.

  FAT OLLIE WEEKS was watching a cable television channel whose slogan was “Equal and Equitable,” which they hoped conveyed the promise of commensurate and unbiased reportage on any subject their reporters tackled. Tonight’s burning question was “Gay or Fey?” and its subject matter was the Tamar Valparaiso video Bison Records had generously provided.

  The moderator was a man named Michael Owens, who was familiarly called “Curly” Owens by his colleagues because he happened to be bald. This reverse spin was something called “irony,” a favorite figure of speech practiced in English-speaking countries where it was thought clever to express a meaning directly contrary to that suggested by the words themselves. Curly was, in fact, the very opposite of hirsute, his condition exacerbated by daily shavings and waxings that gave his head the appearance of an overripe melon.

  His two guests tonight were at opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum in that one of them was a minister who represented a Christian Right activist organization that called itself the “Citizens for Values Coalition,” or the CVC, and the other was a homosexual who was speaking for a group that called itself “Priapus Perpetual,” or PP for short.

  Ollie didn’t choose to waste time watching a fag who called his prick a pee pee debating a priest who was probably a fag himself, but he happened to be eating at the kitchen table right then, and the clicker was on the coffee table in front of the TV set, and he didn’t feel like walking into the adjoining room to go switch channels. Besides, he had just watched the clip from the Valparaiso video, and he had to agree that the little lady was splendidly endowed, ah yes, so maybe these two jackasses would have something interesting to say about her obviously fey assets. Ollie supposed the word “fey” had something to do with female pulchritude, otherwise why had it been positioned opposite the word “gay”?

  “Well, you’ve seen the video,” Curly told his guests. “So which is it? Gay or Fey?”

  The minister’s name was Reverend Karl Brenner. He was a man with a long sallow face and snow white hair, wearing for tonight’s show Benjamin Franklin spectacles and a rumpled, dark gray suit with a white collar, the fuckin hypocrite, Ollie thought. Brenner himself thought the words “gay” and “fey” were synonymous; he had no idea what they were supposed to be debating here. If a man was fey, he was, ergo, gay. And the African-American man on the video was obviously both fey and gay.

  The representative of Priapus Perpetual was named Larry Graham. He knew that the widely accepted meaning of “fey” was “strange or unusual” but he himself had been considered strange or unusual long before he became gay. Dressed tonight in a purple turtleneck sweater over which he had thrown a beige cashmere jacket, he sat looking smug and self-satisfied, the little fag, Ollie thought. Actually, Graham was as bewildered as the reverend was, even though he realized the question wasn’t being asked about the black dancer who’d played the Bandersnatch, but rather about Tamar Valparaiso herself, whose father had warned “Beware the Jabberwock, my son,” mind you, and had later exulted, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy,” don’t forget.

  As Graham saw it, the question being asked was: Who or what is this person with the exuberant breasts in a torn and tattered costume? A girl or a boy? A daughter or a son? A male or a female? In short, gay or fey? A revealed homosexual or merely a female eccentric, a whimsical adolescent girl, or—dare one even suggest it—a visionary? A Joan of Arc, mayhaps, wielding an invisible vorpal sword?

  “What do you say, gentlemen?” Curly asked, and then immediately said, “Ooops, excuse me, Larry,” and then, compounding the felony, said, “But that’s what the debate tonight is all about, isn’t it? Is the person on that tape supposed to be homosexual, like Larry Graham here, who admits it freely? And if so…”

  “Of course he is,” Graham said.

  “Reverend?”

  “Are we talking about the African-American in the mask? If so, he is very definitely homosexual.”

  “And how do you know that?” Graham asked at once.

  “Well, the very way he moves,” Brenner said.

  “He moves like a dancer,” Graham said.

  “Fred Astaire didn’t move that way. Neither did Gene Kelly.”

  “Besides, we’re not talking about the dancer. The question does not refer to the dancer.”

  “It certainly doesn’t refer to the girl,” Brenner said.

  “That’s exactly the metaphor,” Graham said.

  The Reverend Brenner didn’t know what metaphor meant, either. He thought it meant simile. If so, was this little homosexual person here implying that the girl being assaulted was somehow a simile for a homosexual?

  “I do not see any connection,” he said. “The problem with organizations like yours, Mr. Graham, is that you presuppose everyone in the world is either already homosexual or else would like to become homosexual. That is the implicit threat to family values, and the entire reason for the existence of groups like CVC…”

  “I do believe, yes,” Larry said, “that ‘Bandersnatch’ is about a young boy coming out of the closet, yes. If we study the video carefully, we…”

  “Oh, please,” Brenner said, “that’s utter nonsense.”

&
nbsp; “Why don’t we take another look at it?” Curly said, and to someone off camera, “Can we roll it again, boys?”

  Ollie thought, Good, let’s watch the strip tease again.

  This was not the tape Honey Blair and her crew had shot on the night of the kidnapping. This was the studio-shot video with its animated footage and a skimpily but fully clothed Tamar larking under a yellow sky with pastel colored clouds and whimsical budding flowers and fanciful floating insects while the sound of a synthesizer…

  She looks like a shepherd boy, Ollie thought, and suddenly understood what Larry Graham had meant a moment ago.

  She did not look like a boy for very long.

  Within seconds after the black guy in his gray mask came whiffling out of the woods, he was clawing and biting at her and tearing her clothes to ribbons, exposing a ripe female form that Ollie was sure would promote perpetual Priapic emissions from teenage boys all over America, not to mention even more mature males in the population.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Graham’s voice said over the video. “The boy has to recognize himself as female before he can realize his full power.”

  Bullshit, Ollie thought, and the telephone rang.

  He hit the mute button and picked up the receiver.

  “Weeks,” he said.

  “Oll?”

  Patricia.

  He grinned.

  “Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

  “Fine, Oll,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Watching television. You familiar with this kidnapping the 8-7 caught?”

  “Yeah, this new singer.”

  “Some fag is saying she’s a boy.”

  “Get out,” Patricia said.

  “Did you see the video?”

  “Sure, it’s all over the place.”

  “That’s some boy, huh?”

  “I’d like to look like a boy like that,” Patricia said.

  “You look fine just the way you are,” Ollie said.

  “Thanks, Oll,” she said, and was silent for a moment. “I was calling to…uh…see if we’re still on for Tuesday night,” she said.

  “Why shouldn’t we still be on?”

  “I just wondered, that’s all. Also, there’s this old movie playing at the Atlantis—that’s like an art house, y’know—I thought I’d like to see again, if you’d like to see it. It’s with Al Pacino, it’s called Looking for Richard. That’s Richard the Third, the Shakespearean character, y’know. Well, it’s also a real king, but Shakespeare wrote the play.” Patricia hesitated again. “Do you think you might like to see it?”

  “Sure,” Ollie said. “Whatever you say, Patricia.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Good. You’ll like it, I promise. It’s not at all what you expect Shakespeare to be.”

  “Hey, I love Shakespeare,” he said.

  “Well, good. Then I made a good pick, huh?”

  “You certainly did.”

  He had never seen a Shakespeare play in his entire life.

  “Also, how should I dress?” she asked. “I told you, I’ll be working Tuesday…”

  “Me, too.”

  “So I won’t have time to go home and change…”

  “Me, neither. Just put on what’s in your locker. Whatever you wear to work that morning.”

  “It won’t be anything fancy,” Patricia said. “Just slacks and a sweater, probably.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “Okay then. You working tomorrow?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “See you up the precinct then.”

  “See you,” Ollie said.

  There was a click on the line.

  He sighed heavily and put the receiver back on its cradle.

  The fag and the priest were still going at it.

  He hit the mute button again.

  “…sending this message to adolescent boys all over America,” the Reverend Brenner was saying. “If you want to slay wild dragons…”

  “It isn’t a dragon,” Graham said.

  “…then you have to declare yourself to be homosexual! What kind of a message…?”

  “I’m sure that isn’t Tamar Valparaiso’s mess…”

  “You just said the boy in that video…”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

  “I’m sure her message is simply ‘Be what you wish to be. In choice, there is freedom.’ ”

  “Oh, are we going to get into the abortion issue now?”

  “Not on my time,” Ollie said out loud, and turned off the set, and wondered if any of that scrumptious apple pie his sister had baked was still in the refrigerator.

  WHAT WAS CALLED CSI in some cities was called MCU here in the big bad city, and never the twain shall meet. The Mobile Crime Unit had struck out twice last night, once on the Rinker and again on the Ford Explorer, but that didn’t mean they weren’t as sharp or as perceptive as their television counterparts. On the contrary, the package they had messengered over to Carella at seven-thirty this evening, and which he now presented to The Squad downtown, included one piece of very important information.

  As expected, there’d been no latent fingerprints on any of the railings or bulkheads the perps may have touched in boarding the River Princess and then descending into the ballroom where Tamar was performing. The intruders were wearing gloves. So much for that.

  But they were also wearing running shoes with identifiable soles. And whereas they hadn’t left any recoverable footprints on the rubber ladder-treads that ascended to the second level of the yacht, they had left behind some discernable prints on the mahogany steps and the parquet dance floor inside.

  Together, Carella and The Squad looked over the report prepared by an MCU Detective/First named Oswald Hooper.

  The report stated, unsurprisingly, that the recovered footprints had been left behind on stairway and dance floor by two separate males wearing running shoes later identified from laboratory comparison soles as Reeboks. That the persons wearing the shoes were both male was established by the size and type of the shoe and also by the angle of the foot, definitively different for male and female.

  What was revealing about the separate prints, however, was the separate walking pattern for each man. The pattern for the man whose prints were consistently recovered on the starboard side of the stairway and dance floor was remarkably different from the pattern for the man who’d been on the port side of all the action.

  “Starboard is right, port is left,” Corcoran told Endicott.

  Endicott gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that his father had taken him sailing on Chesapeake Bay when he was still a toddler. Corcoran missed the meaning of the look.

  “The guy on the right was the one who did all the hitting,” Carella said. “Have you seen the tape yet?”

  “Only on television,” Endicott said.

  Forbes, the other FBI agent, said, “It’s all over the place.”

  “I’ve requested a copy from Channel Four,” Corcoran said.

  “Are they giving you one?” Carella asked, surprised.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, when I seized it as evidence, they threatened to sue the city.”

  Corcoran raised his eyebrows and gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that this was the Joint Task Force here, kiddo, this was The Squad.

  “Well, good luck,” Carella said, and shrugged, but he felt he had been reprimanded. Or perhaps warned. And he realized all at once that Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran did not want him on this team. He almost walked out. Something kept him there. Maybe it was the fact that Barney Loomis had requested his presence as someone he liked and trusted.

  “What’s this about a walking pattern?” Endicott asked, and they all went back to reading Hooper’s report.

  Apparently, the man on the left possessed a normal walking pattern. That is to say, an imaginary line drawn in the direction of his walk had run through the inner edges
of his heel prints. The distance between the footprints of a man walking slowly would be about twenty-seven inches. The distance for a running man would be forty inches. A man walking fast would measure thirty-five inches between footprints. The guy on the left had been moving very fast. Thirty-three inches between footprints. But it was a normal walking pattern, and not a broken one.

  The guy on the right, however—the one who’d rifle-stocked the black dancer and slapped Tamar Valparaiso—had been moving more slowly, twenty-eight inches between footprints. And his walking line indicated that he was partially leaning on his left foot and slightly dragging the right foot.

  “Leaning?” Endicott said.

  “Dragging?” Corcoran said.

  Carella almost said “Shhhhh.”

  Absent any perfectly flat footprints for the right foot, Hooper’s report went on, and given the slower gait and broken walking line, it would be safe to conclude that the suspect sustained a past injury to the right leg that manifests itself now in an existent noticeable limp.

  “That’s what it was!” Carella told them.

  He was referring to what he’d noticed on the tape, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint until just this minute. None of the others knew what the hell he was talking about.

  “So what do we do?” Endicott asked. “Put out a medical alert?”

  “The report says ‘past injury,’ ” Corcoran said.

  “How far in the past? Could’ve been last week.”

  “A physician’s bulletin can’t hurt,” Carella said.

  “You want to take care of that?” Corcoran suggested.

  And all at once, Carella got it.

  He was going to be the errand boy.

  “What’s my role here going to be?” he asked. Flat out. Head to head.

  “What would you like it to be?” Corcoran asked right back. Straight on. Toe to toe.

  “I don’t want to be a gopher, that’s for sure.”

  “Who says that’s what we want?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I think it’s what I want that counts, isn’t it?” Loomis said, stepping in. “I’m the one those men will be contacting, I’m the one they’ll be expecting to pay the ransom, whatever that’s going to be. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I believe Detective Carella is as qualified as any man in this room to handle whatever may come up in the next few days. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assign him to running out for coffee and sandwiches.”