The Frumious Bandersnatch

by Ed McBain

  “Well, he got out of Miramar just before Thanksgiving, that’s a state lockup even worse than Castleview…well, you know that. And he started coming here like clockwork once a week. He was living in a decent furnished room, and he had a job washing dishes in a deli over on Carpenter. I’ll tell you the truth, I figured he was a prime candidate for early discharge, which would’ve been three years instead of his maximum five. Then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t show up the week after Christmas, which I figured the holidays and all, am I right? But then he misses the first two weeks in January, and I figure shit the man’s absconded. Which is what it turned out to be. Failure to report here, changing address without permission, for all I know even leaving the fuckin state. A classic case of absconding. I issued a warrant for his arrest. If we catch him again, he’ll be doing his maximum-five behind bars. Some guys never learn.”

  “Can we have that last known?” Hawes asked.

  “Sure, but it won’t do you any good. He’s gone, man. And it’s a big bad city out there.”

  Strauss got up nonetheless, and carried the file on Wilkins over to the copying machine. Seeing the open bathroom door, he closed it as if sight of a toilet bowl might be offensive to his visitors from across the river. “Why do you want him?” he asked.

  “He may be involved in a kidnapping.”

  “Graduation Day, huh? Some guys never learn,” he said again.

  “How bad is that limp, by the way?” Hawes asked.

  “Well, he’s not a cripple or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. He just sort of drags the right foot a little, you know?”

  “Can you show me what you mean?” Carella asked.

  “Charlie, show him how Wilkins walks, will you?” Strauss said.

  Latham got up from behind his desk.

  Like an actor preparing before he went onstage, he hesitated a moment, thinking, and then he started walking across the room. The limp he affected was a slight one. His impersonation captured perfectly the walk of the masked man the detectives had seen on Honey Blair’s tape.

  “How’s that?” Latham asked.

  “Perfect,” Strauss said. “Maybe we ought to send you up there to Miramar, finish out his term.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Latham said, but he seemed pleased he’d been such a big hit.

  Strauss carried a sheaf of papers over from the copier. Stapling them together, he said, “You might as well have all the vitals,” and handed the pages to Carella. “If you find him, let me know,” he said. “I really thought he was a candidate for early, the jackass. Goes to show, don’t it?”

  He actually looked sad.

  CALVIN ROBERT WILKINS was still wearing the Saddam Hussein mask.

  He had the rifle in his left hand.

  Nothing in his right hand.

  No key, no nothing.

  He closed the door behind him.

  Came limping across the room to her.

  “He wouldn’t give me the key,” he said.

  She could swear he was grinning behind the mask.

  Standing not a foot away from her, he unzipped his fly.

  THIS, NOW, was what it was really like.

  There was no vorpal blade this time.

  There was no slow strip tease, no musical accompaniment, no claws catching at her garments to tear them tantalizingly to shreds. This was her top being violently ripped from her breasts, this was rough hands reaching under her already tattered skirt to tear her panties open over her crotch. There were no biting jaws, he did not bite her, he simply slapped her again and again, kept slapping her as she tried to pull her manacled hand free of the radiator, slapped her until her face was aching and bruised, her free hand flapping on the floor where he had rested the rifle, trying to find the rifle with blind seeking fingers while he kept slapping her till she felt dizzy and weak, murmuring “No, please don’t, please don’t, please don’t.”

  But still he had not raped her.

  Still he seemed to derive pleasure from the incessant slapping, his hand rhythmically hitting her, the back of his hand, the palm of his hand, the back of his hand again until she collapsed against the radiator, murmuring soundlessly no please don’t, no please please don’t.

  This time, there was no vorpal blade to save her.

  This was merely rape.

  Viciously, he spread her legs and forcibly entered her, tearing tissue as he plunged inside her. She screamed at the forced penetration, screamed again when he slapped her again and told her to shut up, and then slapped her again and again and again. And then his hands were on her breasts, squeezing her nipples hard, thrusting his over-powering rigidity into her below, grunting, his hands seeming not to know where to hurt her next, her face, her breasts, her buttocks, squeezing, slapping, punching her now, pinching her, punching her breasts, punching her face, blood suddenly bursting from her nose, until at last she screamed in agony, “Please stop!” and he ejaculated in that instant, and the door flew open and Yasir Arafat came into the room and shouted, “You stupid fuck!” and she lost consciousness.

  12

  THE SQUAD was somewhat perturbed. One might even say they were quite blaxitomed! Special Agent in Charge Stanley Marshall Endicott had just learned from his superior at Division Headquarters that the Police Commissioner had ordered the 87th Squad to stay on the Valparaiso kidnapping case!

  “A shitty little squad uptown,” he complained, visibly hummered.

  The agents and detectives in the big conference room at Bison Records all shook their heads in solemn agreement. All except Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran, who was pacing the floor, quite red in the face, even for an Irishman.

  “Dismissed my complaint,” he muttered, all visibly perscathed. “Said Carella wasn’t under my command and therefore could not have been insubordinate.”

  “What do we do now?” Feingold asked. “Whose case is it, anyway? Do we dismantle here, or what?”

  “It’s ours and theirs,” Endicott said.

  “A horse race, you mean,” Feingold said sourly.

  “I mean a horse race we’d better win!”

  “Suppose a motorcycle cop on the fuckin street insulted me?” Corcoran asked the air, still fuming, still all dejebbeled. “Would that be insubordination?”

  “Damn right,” Jones agreed, kissing a little ass, not for nothing had he learned to make his way in the white man’s police department.

  “Son of a bitch said he’d call again at three,” Endicott said.

  “The Commissioner?” Lonigan asked. He was none too bright, even though he’d been credited with smashing a big heroin ring in Majesta. But that was ten years ago.

  “The perp, the perp,” Endicott said, getting more and more perplexed himself. “This time we zero in,” he said, visibly afumitaxed. “If Loomis can’t keep him on the phone, I’ll personally cut off his balls.”

  “The perp’s?” Lonigan asked.

  Endicott merely looked at him.

  THE TELEPHONE CALL came at precisely three P.M. The kidnapper was nothing if not punctual. Though she recognized the voice at once, Gloria Klein asked who was calling. When the kidnapper said, “This is personal,” she asked him to hold one second, please, and then buzzed Loomis’ inner office.

  “Hello?” Loomis said.

  “He’s back,” she said.

  “It’s him,” Loomis told Endicott. He was already walking toward his isolation booth.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Endicott said, putting on the ear phones. “Keep him talking.”

  Sitting in the booth, Loomis picked up the extension phone.

  “Loomis,” he said.

  “Have you got the money?”

  “I’ll have it by six tonight. I’ve had to sell…”

  “Seven-fifty in new hundreds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Put Carella on.”

  “He’s not here.”

  There was a silence on the line.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I
didn’t realize you’d need him again.”

  “I don’t.”

  “First tower’s on him,” Jones said.

  “Is there another detective there?”

  Corcoran nodded.

  “Yes,” Loomis said.

  “Is he listening to this?”

  Corcoran shook his head.

  “No,” Loomis said.

  “You’re lying. Put him on.”

  “Second tower’s got him. He’s in a moving vehicle,” Feingold said.

  Corcoran picked up his extension.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Detective-Lieutenant Charles Corcoran.”

  “May I call you Charles?”

  “Is the girl still alive?”

  “I’ll ask the fucking questions, Charles!”

  Corcoran’s mouth tightened. Endicott was scowling.

  “Go down to the limo at seven P.M. sharp,” the caller said. “You, Mr. Loomis, and the money. Get on the River Dix Drive and head east. Rush hour should be over by then. I’ll call again at seven-fifteen. Any tricks and the girl dies. This phone is stolen, too,” he said, and laughed.

  There was a click on the line.

  “Son of a goddamn rotten son of a bitch bastard mother-fucking cocksucker!” Jones yelled. “He always gets off a second before we triangulate.”

  “You want this printout?” Feingold asked.

  “You heard him, it’s stolen,” Endicott said.

  “Will you have the money by then?” Corcoran asked Loomis.

  “It should be here by six,” Loomis said.

  “This time we play it our way,” Corcoran said.

  THEY’D BEEN WAITING outside the building since a quarter past one, but the landlady didn’t show up until almost three-thirty. She was dressed for Marrakech.

  No burkah covered her from head to toe, but instead she wore a modest black abayah that billowed out like the sail on a Sumerian galley, covering everything but her face and her slender hands. She had extraordinary brown eyes, almost as black as the abayah. With all that protective clothing, neither of the detectives could tell her exact age, but they guessed she was somewhere in her mid-forties. They also guessed the eyes were a bit flirtatious.

  The apartment building was in a Calm’s Point neighborhood with a large Arab population, mostly Egyptians, Moroccans, and other immigrants from North Africa. The streets here were lined with Turkish coffee houses, shops selling hummus and baklava, katayif and kibbi, mjddara and tabbouleh. And although there were only twelve mosques in the entire city, one of them was located two blocks from the furnished room Calvin Robert Wilkins supposedly rented at the end of last year.

  “We’re looking for the man who was renting a furnished room here from just before Thanksgiving to shortly after Christmas,” Carella told the landlady.

  The landlady nodded.

  “Know who we mean?” Hawes asked.

  “Yes, I know,” she said.

  They followed her up to the third floor.

  “Rent was coming due on January one,” she told them. “Guess he was in a big hurry to leave, eh?”

  Kirby Strauss the parole officer was right: The room Wilkins had been renting before he’d absconded was “perfectly decent.” Small, neat, tidy, inexpensively appointed with thrift-shop furniture.

  “When he rented it, did he say he’d be leaving in January?” Carella asked.

  “No. Said he wanted it on a month-to-month basis,” the woman said. “Which was okey-dokey with me.”

  Showing off her American slang. Brown eyes flashing. Left hand on her hip. Big silver ring on the thumb of that hand. Some kind of bright green stone set in it. Not jade, something else. Not emerald either, not in a silver setting.

  “When did he first tell you he’d be leaving?”

  “Just after Christmas.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Sure. Jamaica.”

  “No kidding? Jamaica, huh?”

  “Sure. You know Jamaica? I asked was he going with his friends, he said no, just himself.”

  “What friends?” Hawes asked at once.

  “The two who came here all the time. Man and a woman.”

  “When you say all the time…?”

  The woman shrugged under her voluminous garment. Ripples flowed down to her toes. He noticed she was barefoot. Ring on the big toe of her right foot, too. Red stone on this one.

  “Three, four times. He had the room only a month, you know. Little more than a month.”

  “Would you know their names? These friends of his?”

  “I don’t ask visitors’ names. There’s no trouble, I don’t ask visitors’ names.”

  “What’d they look like?” Carella asked.

  “The man was something like your height. Brown eyes like yours, curly black hair, very nice build,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “The girl was a redhead. Not like your red,” she said, turning to Hawes, “more brown in color, yes? With green eyes and…what do you call them? When there are spots on the face?”

  “Freckles?” Hawes suggested.

  “English,” she said, shaking her head. “Freckles, yes. I don’t think they were married, those two, but I think they were close, eh?” she said, and winked.

  “You mean, like engaged,” Hawes said, nodding.

  “No, I mean like sleeping together,” she said, and winked again.

  “So he was leaving for Jamaica, but he wasn’t taking his friends with him, is that it?” Carella said.

  “Well, not right that moment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wasn’t going to Jamaica that very moment when he left the room here.”

  “Then when was he going to Jamaica?”

  “He said in the spring.”

  “When in the spring?”

  “He only said the spring. ‘In the spring, I’ll be on a beach in Jamaica.’ Was what he said.”

  “So he might be in Jamaica right this minute, is that what you’re saying?”

  “This is the spring, yes,” she said. “So he could be there now, yes. Who knows? I don’t even know where Jamaica is. Do you know where Jamaica is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been to Jamaica?”

  “No, but I know where it is.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the Caribbean.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s that, the Caribbean?”

  “It’s where Mr. Wilkins might be right this minute,” Hawes said.

  “Mr. Who?” she asked.

  “Wilkins. Calvin Wilkins.”

  “That’s not the name he gave me,” she said.

  Hawes looked at her.

  “He told me something else, not that.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “I have to look,” she said.

  They followed her downstairs to her apartment. There were beaded curtains and a double bed, and a calendar with Arabic lettering on it. She opened the top drawer of a small painted chest and took from it a ledger of some sort. She opened the book, trailed her forefinger down the page. Her fingernails were painted a green the color of the stone in the ring.

  “Here,” she said, and tapped one of the names.

  They looked at the page.

  The name written there in a delicate feminine hand was:

  Richard Martin

  “Ricky, that’s right,” the landlady said.

  “Ricky Martin,” Hawes said.

  “Yes. That’s who his friends asked for, first time they came here.”

  “Ricky Martin,” Hawes said again.

  “Yes.”

  “Ricky Martin is a singer.”

  “This man was a singer?”

  “No, this man was a thief. Ricky Martin is the singer.”

  “He lived here more than a month, I never heard him sing,” the woman said, and shrugged again under the black garment.

  �
��Did he say where he might be going? When he left here?”

  “I told you. Jamaica.”

  “I mean in January. When he moved out. Right then. Where was he going? Did he tell you?”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  “Where?”

  “To stay with his friends. I think perhaps they had in mind a ménage à trois, eh? Perhaps that’s why he was in such a big hurry.”

  Hawes had once known a woman named Jeanette, or was it Annette, who’d called it a “ménage de trois.” For the longest time, he himself had called it that.

  “Are you fellows in such a big hurry, too?” the landlady asked. “Or shall I brew the three of us some nice jasmine tea?”

  Laurette, Hawes guessed it was.

  “Thanks,” he said, “you’ve been very helpful.”

  “You think it’s because of the record store?” she asked.

  Neither of the detectives knew what she meant.

  “That he picked a singer’s name?”

  They still didn’t know what she meant.

  “Because he worked in a record store?” she said.

  “Which one?” Carella asked at once.

  “Laura something,” she said. “In the city. Someplace downtown.”

  SOMEPLACE downtown could have been anywhere.

  In this city, when you crossed any of the bridges from the outlying sectors, you were heading into “The City.” And once you got into the city, you invariably headed “downtown” because that’s where all the action was.

  They started with the yellow pages for Isola, a literal translation of the Italian word “isola,” for “island.” They looked first under RECORDS, TAPES & COMPACT DISCS, and found a sub-heading that read See Compact Discs, Tapes & Records—Retail. They turned back to the Cs, and found a listing for exactly one hundred and twelve record shops. None of them were named Laura Something or Laura Anything. Under the L listings, they found seventeen. They called Wilkins’ former landlady at once.

  “Do any of these names ring a bell?” they asked, and started reeling them off. “L&M Records, Lane Books Music & Café…”