Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “It might be a trade-off,” she said. “You do five or six of them, you run the risk of them zeroing in, anyway. But…”

  “You don’t know how scary it is out there,” he said. “Middle of the night.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said. “But you also let them know this is a real mission, you’re not just somebody fooling around out there.”

  “Not a dilettante,” he said.

  “A dilettante, right. You let them know this is a serious thing with you.”

  “Do you see what the papers are calling me?”

  “I like that,” she said, and grinned and moved her knee a little, the knee on the bent leg, just moved it slightly to the left.

  He got excited just thinking about her. He was excited now, thinking about last night, about her in the short purple nightgown and the way she just sort of carelessly moved her knee back and forth so that the gown sort of fell away from her, exposing her, the grin on her face saying You want some of this, baby? Come take it, sweetheart.

  Got excited all over again just thinking about it.

  She wanted him to do five of these fucking vandals, he’d do five. Six, he’d do six. A dozen? Name it. Doing them was her idea to begin with. If he had to do ahundred of them, he’d do a hundred. If he couldfind them.

  One o’clock in the morning, the streets were deserted.

  It was trying to second-guess them that was difficult. Figuring out where they’d hit next. What he did was drive the car around till he found an area with a lot of graffiti on the walls, figuring this was a happy hunting ground with good buffalo, they’d be back for more, right? Tried to find a pristine wall in a neighborhood flowering with graffiti. Figured the wall would attract them.

  Tonight he was midtown.

  Not much graffiti down here, but he’d read in today’s paper about a gang scratching their names onto a plate-glass window down here, and he thought Hmm,this is something new, maybe there’s opportunity here.

  That was after they’d made love all night long. That purple gown, Jesus. He’d left her early this morning, bought a newspaper in the corner candy store and read it on the taxi ride back to his own place. The newspaper was full of stories about the graffiti killer. One of the accompanying stories was about the jewelry-store hit this past Saturday night, though, big initials scratched into the plate-glass window fronting Hall Avenue, the letters PPWA in the lower right-hand corner, whateverthat stood for, the police weren’t speculating. The story said this was a new wrinkle, defacing glass or plastic surfaces.

  He’d thought about that in the shower, thought about it while he was putting on fresh clothes, thought about it in the deli around the corner from his apartment, where he had breakfast, thought about it on the subway ride downtown.

  Wouldn’t the graffiti killer be attracted to this new development? he wondered.

  Nip it in the bud, so to speak?

  Show the world he was afteranyone vandalizing this city in a serious way?

  Show them he was serious?

  So he’d driven uptown tonight and circled the blocks looking for anyone who seemed suspicious in any way, hoping to catchanyone writing on a store window, stop him dead in his tracks, blow him away while he was committing the act.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  He’d been too successful, scared off all the punks.

  Didn’t want to get out of the car and walk around, this was Silk Stocking territory here, a cruising cop spotted a man alone they’d thinkhe was about to carve up a goddamn shop window. So he just kept cruising. No pattern to the way he drove, drifting down Hall for a few blocks, then turning North toward Detavoner and then driving uptown and turning south again, all the way to Jefferson, watching all the while for someone standing in front of a window doing his thing.

  He spotted a man on Jefferson, standing against a window, all right, but he was just taking a leak.

  Nature calls, he thought, and smiled in the darkness of the automobile.

  Police car up ahead. MS letters on its side. Midtown South.

  He made a right turn on the next corner, heading up to Hall again, and then continued across the avenue and on to Detavoner again, MidtownNorth territory, wouldn’t do to have the same police car spotting him twice in the rearview mirror, now would it?

  Uptown again for six block hung a right came down to Hall again, hung a louie, and was approaching the big intersection where the jewelry store had been hit, when across the street he saw a kid with hair like a picket fence standing in front of the window of the bookstore there.

  He slowed the car to a crawl.

  Slid down the electric window on the passenger side, purred up the street to where the kid was busily scratching away at the plate glass.

  The kid turned when he heard the car stopping. Too late.

  “Here, kid!” he said, and fired two shots into his head and another into his chest and then he fired a few into the window, too, just for good measure.

  WHEN A MANtells you, quote…

  “I run one of the best shelters in this city.”

  Unquote.

  And he also tells you, quote…

  “I run a good shelter.”

  Unquote.

  And goes on to say, “Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here in my shelter….”

  Well, one could possibly forgive an experienced cop for wondering if perhaps the gentleman didth protest too much. Especially when he went on to give you, in fits and starts, other little quotable tidbits like “Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such” and then goes on to say that fifty blankets were stolen during the last quarter of the preceding year and twenty-six stolen so far in the first two months ofthis year, but “we can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know….”

  Wellllll…

  Meyer was certain that Harold Laughton would forgive him for marching straight over to the Sixteenth Precinct last Saturday after his visit to the shelter. And then, since he was already there, where he felt comfortable in surroundings very much like those at the old Eight-Seven, and so it shouldn’t be a total waste of time, Meyer asked the desk sergeant to check the activities log for the past several months, just on the off-chance thatmaybe —listen, who could tell, stranger things had happened—justpossibly everything wasn’t quite so kosher at DSS TEMPLE as the protesting Mr. Laughton had claimed.

  And lo and behold!

  It seemed that in the month of January, which was as far back as the good sergeant wished to go, the precinct had dispatched Charlie Two to the shelter a total of eight times, three of those times to investigate reported assaults, five of them to investigate emergencies that subsequently required hospitalization for rat bites and/or drug overdoses.

  The activities log showed an increase in Charlie Two responses for the month of February, with a total of twelve visits to the shelter, most often in the dead of night, for causes similar if not identical to those reported in January.

  For the month of March, Charlie Two—which of course was the radio car patrolling the sector in which the shelter was located—had been there only seven times, but one of those calls had been occasioned by a homicide that took place in the shelter’s men’s room.

  In short, DSS TEMPLE was no different from any of the city’s other shelters, and Harold Laughton was full of shit, so Meyer called Cotton Hawes at once and told him not to shave over the weekend. Now, at one-thirty that Tuesday morning, a tall red-headed man wearing a tattered brown sports jacket and threadbare blue jeans, his face sporting a three-day beard stubble, his hands encrusted with grime, walked into the shelter and approached the registration desk. He was carrying a duffel bag presumably containing all of his worldly belongings, and he stank so badly of booze that the admissions clerk virtually reeled when the man told him his name was Jerry Hudson and he needed a place to stay for the night.

  Hawes signed the register under that name, was handed
first the key to a locker and next an index card with the number 104 written on it…

  “Lucky number,” Hawes said boozily and grinned at the clerk, showing greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth.

  …was told that 104 was the number on his cot—he’d find a cardboard thing with the number on it, hanging from the foot of the cot and was directed to a room across the drill hall floor, where he picked up a pillow, a blanket, and a toilet kit. Contributed by Halligan Food Stores, it said on the kit’s flimsy blue plastic case. Walking with the uncertain step of a drunk, the blanket and pillow clutched to his chest, the duffel hanging halfway down his back, the toilet kit dangling by its cord from his right wrist, he made his way slowly across the huge room to the battered green lockers lining one entire wall. The place echoed with the snores and groans and nocturnal mumblings of hundreds of sleeping men, resonated as well with the voices of men who were wide awake at this hour of the morning and talking loudly to themselves or to others, the drone counterpointed by the mutterings and murmurs of yet more mentrying to sleep. He located the locker corresponding to the number on his key, unlocked the door, tossed in his duffel, locked the door again, and pulled the key’s elasticized loop over his right wrist. Five minutes later, he found the cot marked 104, put the blanket at the foot of it and the pillow at the head of it, and sat down heavily on its edge. He was just about to lie down when a voice said, “Up, Mac.”

  Hawes turned.

  A man shorter than he was, but brimming with more muscles than should have been allowable by law, was standing at the foot of the cot, scowling. He was wearing khaki undershorts and a khaki tank-top undershirt that Hawes guessed was regulation military gear. He was tattooed all over his muscles and in some places where there weren’t any muscles, including the top of his bald head.

  “I saidup, ” he said. “Offthe cot.”

  The last thing Hawes wanted in this place was an argument. He was here to get a line on whoever had stolen a blanket subsequently wrapped around an old lady now deceased. But people had been hurt here, some of them badly, one of them so badly that they’d had to bury him afterward. Hawes wondered if it would appear convincing for a drunk to sober up in ten seconds flat. He decided it would.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  Cold sober.

  Alert to any danger.

  Was the impression he hoped to create.

  As an afterthought, he hiccuped.

  The man with all the muscles and tattoos smiled.

  “My cot,” he said reasonably.

  “One-oh-four,” Hawes said, equally reasonably, and showed the index card and his greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth in a smile that would have made the lab exceedingly proud.

  The repulsive coloration had been created by a dentist the lab had called in. The dentist had first cleaned Hawes’s normally pristine teeth with polishing cups, using dental toothpaste, and asking him to rinse afterward. The dentist had then dried off the teeth and painted them with a weak solution of acid to take off the shine. He had let the acid stand for some fifteen to thirty seconds, had washed it off, and had then painted on the Taub stains normally used to match dentures to the natural teeth in the mouth. Discolored teeth were usually green around the gum, brown in the middle, and yellow near the tip. He painted Hawes’s teeth accordingly, coated them with clear plastic, light-fused them, and promised him the process could be reversed whenever Hawes decided to give up his new profession. Hawes hoped so. But he had to admit he looked disgusting.

  “One-oh-four isalways my cot,” the man said.

  Still reasonably. Smiling in return.

  “My ticket,” Hawes said, and again showed him the index card with the handwritten number 104 on it.

  “A mistake. They must’ve meant one-oh-five.”

  Hawes looked over at the cot on his left.

  Someone was sound asleep in it.

  “Man in it,” he said reasonably.

  “One-oh-threethen,” the man said.

  Hawes looked at the cot on his right. Someone was sleeping in that one, too. This was getting to beGoldilocks .

  “Up,” the man said again, and jerked his thumb over his tattooed shoulder. Hawes saw the head of a dragon glaring at him in reds, blues, and greens. He wondered if the man was a former marine.

  “Fuck off, sonny,” he said.

  The man blinked.

  “What?”

  “Or you’re dead fuckin meat,” Hawes said, and lay down again, and closed his eyes in dismissal.

  He could hear the man’s sputtering astonishment at the foot of the cot. He kept his eyes closed, tensing for an attack he hoped would not come. In a little while, he pretended to be instantly asleep and snoring.

  “Fuckin asshole,” the man muttered at last, and Hawes heard his bare feet padding away from the cot.

  He’d slept all that day in preparation for tonight. Now, after he was sure Mr. Muscles was gone for good, he gathered up his things and went into the men’s room, where the voices seemed to be loudest. Carried the blanket and the pillow with him, too, so they wouldn’t be stolen.

  There were half a dozen grizzled men gathered near the sinks, talking to a pair of square shields in blue uniforms. Either one of the guards could have been the man Charlie had described as driving him. One a bit shorter than the other, but each in the five-nine to five-eleven range, each in his mid-forties, with brown eyes and dark hair. The conversation stopped for just an instant when Hawes came in, and then picked up again as he went over to one of the urinals. There were no doors on any of the stalls in here, the better to keep the place as drug-free as Harold Laughton had told Meyer it was.

  One of the guards was saying that some off-track betting parlors were ritzier than others. That was the exact word he used, ritzier. Hawes had never seen an OTB parlor that could be called ritzy. But the guard went on to say that the parlor he preferred overall the others, thereally ritzy one, was the one on Rollins and South Fifth.

  “That’s where I go all the time,” he said. “It attracts a much better crowd.”

  The half-dozen grizzled men clustered around him agreed that the parlor on Rollins and South Fifth attracted a much better crowd.

  “Very ritzy,” one of them said.

  “Who do you like in the third tomorrow?” the other security guard asked.

  “Pants on Fire,” the first one said.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Good horse,” the first guard said.

  “He runs like he’s got aload in his pants, never mind a fire.”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” one of the men chanted, and everyone laughed.

  One of the other men asked the guards about something supposed to’ve happened here at Temple only the week before. Man named Rudy Price had gone apeshit, tried to drown himself in the toilet bowl. Stuck his head in one of the toilet bowls, tried to drown himself. The guy was asking the guards if it was true. Everybody seemed to think it was comical, man trying to drown himself in a toilet bowl. The guard who liked Pants on Fire said Yeah, it was true, they caught him just in time. One of the men said they shoulda let him do it, he was a no-good fuck, Price.

  Hawes zipped up his fly, and shuffled over to the group.

  “What time’s breakfast?” he asked the guard.

  “First time here?” one of the men asked him.

  Big burly black guy with a beard like Brillo. Wearing jeans and combat boots and a beaded vest and a scarf. The vest looked as if he’d got it in India someplace.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said. Briefly.

  “Breakfast starts at six-thirty,” the guard told him.

  “Yuppie commuters in here got to catch they trains,” the black man said, and grinned at his own little joke. His teeth were a lot whiter than the ones the lab had given Hawes. He was tempted to smile back. He didn’t.

  A man wearing a blue watch cap pulled low on his forehead, coal-black eyes burning in his skull, said, “Lots of crazies here tonight.”

  Hawes tho
ught he looked crazy himself.

  “Keep you awake all fuckin night, their screamin,” he said.

  “Whyn’t you guys try to get some sleep?”

  This from the guard who thought Pants on Fire was a dog.

  Hawes had the feeling the guards wanted these guys out of the men’s room here, where they could get in trouble shooting dope, or fighting, or whatever. Didn’t want to have to divide their time between here and the drill floor outside. This was a shelter with a heart, Laughton had told Meyer, but things happened here. Hawes didn’t know how many square shields there were on the job—he’d seen four or five of them outside when he was collecting the blanket and stuff—but there were more than nine hundred cots out there, and it seemed just possible that more guards were needed on the floor than here in the head. Hence the eagerness to get all their chickens in one coop.

  “Quieter in here than out there,” the man with the crazy eyes said.

  “Well, let’s turn in, anyway, huh?” the guard said, gently but pointedly.

  The men began moving out. The two guards walked out behind them, like shepherds nudging their sheep to pasture. The big black guy fell in beside Hawes. On the drill floor just outside the men’s room, a naked man was pacing back and forth, yelling, “This is a case for the Supreme Court! I cite Wagner v. Wagner, 238 Alabama, 627, 184, South Dakota, wherein it was ruled and upheld on appeal…”

  “More of them on the streets than there is in the hospitals,” the black man said.

  Hawes said nothing.

  “I’m Gleason,” the man said.

  “Hudson,” Hawes said.

  The guard drifted off, walking to where two other guards were standing near the registration desk. There was still a hum in the room. Lights turned low, the room humming with the sound of hundreds of men asleep or awake.

  “You dealin?” Gleason asked.

  Hawes looked at him.

  “Get guys in here lookin like they been through all kinds of shit, they really dealin.”