by Ed McBain
“I’ll look for them,” she said.
“Mort says this is his favorite restaurant in all the city,” Sil said, and hesitated, and then said, “Romantic, too. Mort said.”
“Itis romantic,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s romantic?”
“Oh yes, I do, yes,” he said. “All these flags. Would you care for some more wine?”
“Please,” she said.
He signaled to the waiter. The waiter poured.
“And whenever you’re ready, sir,” he said, “I’ll be happy to take your order.”
“In just a bit,” Sil said.
He lifted his glass, looked over it into her eyes.
“Chloe,” he said, “please say you’ll come Saturday.”
“Yes, I think I will,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and grinned.
She returned the smile.
She was thinking he was very cute. She was hoping hewould turn out to be the future.
They clinked glasses.
They drank.
“I can’t wait to see your face,” he said.
“When you do George’s song, you mean?”
“Well, that, too,” he said mysteriously.
“Well, whatdo you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
“No, tell me.”
“You’ll see,” he said.
Looking like the cat that swallowed the canary.
So damn cute she could eat him alive.
“I’m starving to death,” he said. “Let’s order.”
IN MAJESTAthat Wednesday night…
Majesta had without question been named by the British; the cognomen rang with all the authority, grandeur, greatness, and dignity of sovereignty, its roots being in the Middle English wordmaieste , from the Old Frenchmajesté , from the Latinmãjestãs. Even the section called Port Royal had long ago been British, though by the early nineteen-hundreds it had already become an exclusively Italian community. In the forties, the Puerto Ricans started coming in. Now there were Dominicans and Chinese as well.
In Majesta that Wednesday night, in Port Royal, at seven minutes past seven, with the sun already gone for almost an hour, a fifteen-year-old girl who called herself “Italian” even though her parents and grandparents had been born in this country, sat on the front stoop of her apartment building, enjoying the sweet fresh smell of the city now that the rain had stopped. The night was mild, it seemed to Carol Girasole that spring was honestly here at last.
At eight minutes past seven, eighteen-year-old Ramón Guzman walked up to Carol where she sat on the front stoop, bowed from the waist, said, “Haw do you do, miss?” in faintly accented English, stood up, grinned, punched her in the eye, shouted “April Fool!” and ran off.
Carol started yelling blue murder. Nothing like this had ever happened to her in her life! The nerve! A spic coming up to her and punching her for no good reason! Running off into the night, Ramón thought that what he’d just done was very comical, perhaps because he’d had a little too much to drink. He was still laughing to himself when he reached his own street and went upstairs to the apartment he lived in with his mother and three sisters. Five minutes later, he heard a great commotion downstairs and went to the window to look out.
The girl he had punched was standing outside the building with five grown men who’d formed a sort of circle around Geraldo Jiminez, it looked like, and they were yelling “You the April Fool kid? You the one hit this girl?” Geraldo, who was sixteen years old, and skinny as a needle, had just got here from Santo Domingo two months ago, and he didn’t speak enough English to know what “April Fool” meant, so he just kept shaking his head and saying no, not understanding what these men were so upset about, but figuring if he just shook his head and kept saying no over and over again, they’d realize there was some kind of mistake here. But the men kept yelling, “Wha’d you do, April Fool? You hit the girl here, huh?” and Geraldo said,“No hablo inglés,” and one of the men yelled, “Don’t lie!” and someone else hit him, and then they were all hitting him and Carol said, very softly, “I don’t think that’s him,” but they kept hitting him with their fists, yelling, “You lying spic bastard!” and “Hit a girl, huh?” and “April Fool, huh?” all the while hitting him. And then one of the men broke a bottle on his head, and when Geraldo fell to the sidewalk, they began kicking him. They kicked him everywhere, his head, his chest, his stomach, his groin, everywhere. Carol said, more softly this time, “I don’t think he’s the one,” but they kept kicking him till he lay still and silent and bleeding on the sidewalk.
Ramón watched all this from his window.
Then he took off his clothes and went to sleep in his undershorts in the room he shared with his three sisters.
IN ISOLAat nine o’clock that night, Sharyn Cooke and three other surgeons stood around Georgia Mowbry’s bed in the recovery room at Buenavista Hospital, talking quietly about their next move. This was now almost forty-eight hours since she’d been wheeled out of the operating room and she was neither responding to verbal stimuli nor voluntarily moving any of her extremities. At the same time, her fever stubbornly refused to drop and her white blood-cell count continued rising. Most alarming, though, was a significant increase in intracranial pressure, which almost certainly indicated free bleeding and the consequent danger of a blood clot. The surgeons could see no course except to go in again and find whatever was causing the problem. Dr. Adderley ordered Georgia prepped at once for emergency craniotomy.
At twenty minutes to ten, they opened her skull again.
An expanding blood clot killed her three minutes later.
PARKER FIGUREDthat the way to seduce a girl was to tell her how brave you were. Let her know you’d been in some very dangerous situations where you’d behaved courageously and fearlessly and with good humor, and she would then equate this with the size of your cock. So he told her first that he had flown an airplane in the war, but he didn’t bother to mention which war because he’d never flown an airplane in his life and he didn’t want her to start asking technical questions about this or that.
Then he told her he’d joined the police force after his honorable discharge and had made detective six months later—which was another lie since it had taken him three years to get the gold shield even though he’d had a rabbi in the Chief of Detectives’ Office putting in the good word. He told her he loved detective work because it gave him an opportunity to help the poor and oppressed by righting wrongs and by making certain the victimizers of this world got put behind bars where they belonged. He halfway believed this. About the victimizers, not the poor and oppressed bullshit. Far as Parker was concerned, nobody was poor and oppressed unless hechose to be poor and oppressed. He was saving the best part for last. The best part was the only true part.
They were sitting in the living room of her apartment on Chelsea Street, this was now almost eleven o’clock. He’d left Kling at five-thirty, later than he normally cared to work, he normally liked to quit for the day at three-forty-five on the button. But there’d been a lot of paper work to file on the new jackass got himself killed on Hall Avenue—scratchinga window, no less. Only good thing about the new murder was it gave him an excuse to call Cathy again, ask her a few more questions on the phone and then ask her if, by the way, she’d like to grab a quick bite, nothing fancy, maybe a pizza or something—brunch on Sunday had cost him seventy-five bucks for the two of them, with nothing but a stroll in the park and a handshake after—and then catch a movie later. Cathy told him she was just finishing typing a screenplay, what a coincidence, would six o’clock be okay? The movie had let out at ten, and she’d asked him to come back here for coffee, which he figured was a very good sign. So now he was laying the groundwork.
The porcupine story was always a good one because it was true and also because it showed him in a brave and also humorously sympathetic light. The way the porcupine story went—he had told it to so many different women on so many different occasions th
at he knew it by heart and never varied the details of it, listen, if something wasn’t broke, why fix it? The way it went, he was in the squadroom all alone one day when this lunatic…
“This was before I got transferred to the Eight-Seven. I was working out of the Six-Four in Calm’s Point, a very tough precinct. I was on the graveyard shift, this was maybe three, four o’clock in the morning, still as death up there, this guy walks in with a porcupine on a leash.”
He waited for her amused expression, women always thought a porcupine on a leash was something cute. Unless the thing’s owner had a gun in his hand. Which this guy had in his hand. The first thing Parker wondered was how he’d got past the desk sergeant. This was before bomb threats were common in this city; there weren’t patrolmen posted outside the front doors of station houses back then. But anyone walking in still had to stop at the muster desk, state his business, big sign advising them to do so. Especially a guy with a fuckinporcupine on a leash!
He risked the wordfuckin with her.
Waited for her reaction.
Nothing.
He considered that a good sign.
Anyway, the guy had to’ve told the desk sergeant what his business was, and the sergeant had probably sent him upstairs, maybe the porcupine had rabies or something, whatever these things got. But the guy certainly hadn’t told the sergeant he had a gun in his pocket, which he took out the minute he walked into the squadroom.
“So you got this picture, Cath?”
He risked using the diminutive, which sounded like a pet name. They were sitting on the couch and he had his arm around her. Her blouse unbuttoned low, which he realized was a habit with her, the better to see the boobs, my dear.
“Here’s this guy with a big gun in his right hand and his left hand is holding a leash at the end of which is this porcupine looks like an attack dog with quills.”
He laughed.
Cathy laughed, too.
He sort of hugged her when she laughed. Arm around her shoulders. Pulled her a little closer.
“It turns out he wants me to shoot the porcupine,” Parker said. “He’s nuttier than a Hershey bar, you understand…”
…keeps waving the gun in Parker’s face, it’s a thirty-eight, and telling him that the porcupine here is his wife’s pet who shit all over the house, and he wants Parker to shoot it for him. That’s why he brought the gun up here, he’s got a carry license for it, he works in the diamond center, it’s the only humane thing to do, shoot the fuckin porcupine. Meanwhile, the guy’s eyes are getting crazier and crazier and the gun is making bigger and bigger circles on the air and Parker’s afraid he’s going to get shot justtalking to this maniac. This is the police department’s obligation, the guy insists, mercifully putting a wild animal to sleep who has no right running around the apartment relieving himself at will while the guy is trying to sort diamonds. Meanwhile, the porcupine at the end of the leash is relieving himself all over the squadroom while Parker is trying to sort out this little dilemma he has here, whether he should put the thing to sleep with a legal handgun or risk getting shot himself as they debate the entire matter.
At this point in his recitation, Parker slid his hand down off Cathy’s shoulder and into her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe she was too fascinated by his delightful porcupine story to notice.
“I didn’t want to kill that poor animal,” he said, hoping his eyes were brimming with tears, “but neither did I wish to get shot myself,” undoing the buttons lower on her blouse, exposing the cones of a white bra, Cathy took a deep breath. “Besides, how did I know this was alegal pistol? There are many ramifications to police work, you know. So what I finally did,” he said, and reached behind her to undo the bra clasp, releasing her breasts into his hands, she took another deep breath, “what I did was I said to him ‘How about I take the little fella for a walk?’ and I got up and held out my hand for the leash, and he put the leash in my hand, and I said, ‘The gun, too, so I can do what has to be done outside,’” lowering his face to her breasts, nuzzling them with his cheeks, one against each cheek, it was a good thing he’d shaved before coming over here. His hands up under her skirt now, he said, “So I took the gun and the porcupine downstairs, and I called the ASPCA to take the thing away, and I gave the gun to the desk sergeant for him to run a make on, and it turned out the guy really did work in the diamond center and he did have a carry permit for the piece, so nobody got hurt, do you think you’d like to go in the bedroom now?” he asked as he lowered her panties.
Sometime during the next hour, while it was still April Fools’ Day and after Parker had brought Cathy to orgasm several times, she told him that her dream was to become a writer. He thought she meant a graffiti writer at first, like her dumb fuckin son. But she meant a movie writer. She told him she typed movie scripts all the time and it seemed like a very easy thing to do. She also told him that her other dream was to marry a decent hardworking man one day, perhaps a man like Parker, move out of the city into a little house with a low fence around it, cook barbecue in the backyard at the end of the day when she finished writing for the day, maybe in a suburb of Los Angeles, that’s where all the movie writers were. That was her dream. To marry a decent hardworking man…
“Like you,” she whispered.
…and write screenplays in the L.A. area and cook barbecue in the backyard.
His hand buried between her legs again, Parker thought Dream on, fool.
10.
AT TWO O’CLOCKon the morning of April second, the concert site was deserted except for a lone security guard. The people working in the production trailer had turned off the lights and locked up behind themselves some twenty minutes ago. Got into the two private cars parked outside, drove off on the access road that went out of the Cow Pasture and past the big lake they called The Swan, Carter wondered why. The guard—a big fat man wearing a blue uniform with a yellow stripe on the trouser legs—had waved off the two cars and then had got into his own black-and-white car with the gold shield of the company on the side. Carter figured he would radio the home office, tell them everybody’d just left, twoA .M. and all’s well. Then he’d take a little nap. Carterhoped .
The Cow Pasture was this huge lawn, some ten-plus acres of newly cropped grass that this weekend would be covered with God alone knew how many people, all of them screaming at the stage. The stage hadn’t been put up yet, nothing had been put up yet, there was only the empty lawn with the trailer sitting there all alone under the stars and the guard’s car parked across the entrance drive that led in from the access road. Since there was nothing to steal out here in the open except what was inside the trailer, the car was parked with its nosefacing the trailer. But Carter figured the guard knew there was nothing much of value in that trailer; this wasn’t like sitting outside Fort Knox waiting for a big caper to happen. This was a single guard sitting here in the middle of the night and never for a minute suspecting that anyone would want to get in that trailer. But the guard was armed and Carter didn’t want to get spotted fiddling with the Mickey Mouse lock on the door to the trailer; they had parked the trailer so that its back was to the lake, its entrance door clearly visible from where the guard sat behind the wheel of the car.
Carter’s instructions were to get in and get out without anyone knowing he’d been there. Steal one—andonly one—of theALL ACCESS laminates. Didn’t want anyone to know anything was missing. Just take one of the laminates and get out fast. There’d be laminates in there for specific areas, and different performing groups, but Florry had told him to look for the ones that saidALL ACCESS , that was the kind he needed. When Sanson introduced them, he said Florry knew about such things, he’d worked on the sound at Woodstock. Carter didn’t know what Grover Park had to do with whatthey’d be doing come Saturday, but Sanson said not to worry about it, just get the laminate, without the laminate we might not be doinganything come Saturday.
The uniforms had been the easiest part so far.
For all I k
now you can walk in some store and buy them right off the rack, he’d told Sanson. Which turned out to be exactly the case. Well, not justany store. What he’d done, he’d called the Department of Sanitation and told them these guys on his bowling team were sanitation employees and they’d just won a tournament…
“I’m captain of the team,” he said.
“Hey.”
…and he wanted to buy them some uniform stuff as a victory gift.
“What’d you have in mind?” the guy on the other end of the line asked. Heavy Calm’s Point accent. Carter visualized a fire hydrant with a cigar in its mouth.
“You know,” he said, “the uniforms they wear on the garbage trucks.”
“You mean the spruce-green uniforms?” the guy said.
“Yeah,” Carter said, “what they wear on the truck.”
“Yeah, we got those here,” the guy said, “the long-sleeve shirts, the pants, the jackets and hats, whatever you need, the T-shirts. We even got sweatshirts here, you want to get some of those. Those might be nice to bowl in.”
“Where are you?” Carter asked.
“Public Affairs Office. There’s like a little shop here. Room 831. Just come on down, you’ll find whatever you need. 335 Gold. You know where Gold Street is? Down on the Lower Platform? We’re next to where the old outdoor market used to be. Room 831. Just come up, we’ll take care of you. The shirts are eleven dollars, the long-sleeve shirts, and the pants are fifteen. If you want the sweatshirt…”
“Do you have any patches there?”
“Patches?”
“Sleeve patches, you know?”
“No, I don’t. But they can get those through their supervisors.”
“You can’t get any for me, huh? So I can sew them on, make it like a real surprise?”
“Let me see what I can do, okay? How many you need?”
“Just four.”
“When are you coming in?”
“I thought tomorrow.”
“I’m off tomorrow.”
