Mischief

by Ed McBain

  “We didn’t say that, Mr. Ackerman,” Brown said. “We asked you what precautions you’ve taken in theevent of a fire.”

  “Which means you’reexpecting a fire, am I right? What I’m saying is, if there’s a fire and it rains, we got nothing to worry about, am I right? The rain’ll putout the fire.”

  Both detectives had seen roaring blazes that the most torrential downpours and a multitude of ladder companies had been unable to extinguish. Neither of them believed there was much opportunity for a gigantic fire in a ten-acre meadow in the middle of a huge park, but the Deaf Man had written “Burn this!”—and when the Deaf Man wrote, they listened.

  “So what precautionshave you taken?” Carella asked. “Aside from praying for rain?”

  “That’s very comical,” Ackerman said, and took his cigar from his mouth and pointed it at Carella in recognition. “The truth is, the fire department comes around to check every time there’s one of these events, indoors or out, and we always get a clean bill of health and a fare-thee-well,” he said, waving his cigar in the air like a magic wand and leaving behind it a trail of smoke like glitter dust. “They don’t come around till everything’s set up, though, because what’s the sense of inspecting an empty meadow in a park where there’s hardly what you’d call a severe threat of fire on any given day of the week, am I right? So,” he said, waving his magic-wand cigar again, “why don’t you come back tomorrow, and that should calm your nerves about whether or not we’re gonna have a holocaust in the middle of the city this weekend. How does that sound to you?”

  “Why tomorrow?” Brown asked.

  “Because the crews’ll be finished setting up tonight, and the fire department’ll do their inspection early tomorrow morning to make sure none of the wires or the portable toilets are fire hazards, and they’ll give me a certificate I can show you.That’s why tomorrow,” Ackerman said.

  “What time tomorrow?” Carella asked.

  “You guys are really worried about this, aren’t you?” Ackerman said.

  He didn’t know the Deaf Man.

  JEFF COLBERTseemed surprised to see them.

  “You made good time,” he said.

  “Huh?” Parker said.

  Colbert was standing in front of the big window in his office, the city’s spectacular downtown skyline behind him.

  “I called your office twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Left a message with a detective named Genero?”

  “We’ve been in the field,” Kling said.

  “We didn’t get your message,” Parker said.

  “I was just calling to say Mrs. Wilkins filed Peter’s will early this morning. You can have a look at it anytime you’d like.”

  “We already know what’s in it,” Kling said. “We spoke to Mrs. Wilkins yesterday.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” Colbert said.

  “I’ll bet you weren’t,” Parker said.

  Colbert looked at him.

  “Mr. Colbert,” Kling said, “do you remember where you happened to be at around twelve, twelve-thirty on the afternoon of March twenty-fifth?”

  “No, I don’t, offhand,” Colbert said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Would you happen to have an appointment calendar, anything like that, could maybetell you where you were?” Parker said.

  “Yes, I’m sure I can check my…”

  “Because wherewe think you were,” he said, “is in the SavMor Hardware store on River and Marsh, is wherewe think you were at that time.”

  “Buying twenty-two cans of spray paint,” Kling said.

  “What makes you think that?” Colbert asked, and smiled.

  “A girl who can identify you,” Kling said.

  “Want to meet her?” Parker asked.

  HE COULDremember a time when the chief of detectives would run a lineup downtown at headquarters every Monday through Thursday of the week. This was not for identification purposes, the way the lineup today was. Back then, two detectives from every precinct in the city would pull lineup duty on one of those four days, and they’d trot dutifully downtown to sit on folding wooden chairs in the big gymnasium while felony offenders arrested the day before were trotted onto the stage and questioned by the chief.

  The chief stood behind a microphone on a podium at the back of the gym, and he reeled off the charges against the person standing on the stage, and gave the circumstances of the arrest and then kept him or her up there for five, ten minutes, however much time he thought the offender was worth. This allowed his rotating detectives the opportunity tosee everyone who’d committed a felony in this fair city, the theory being that if somebody seriously broke the law once he’d seriously break it again, andnext time the cops would be able to recognize a troublemaker on sight. This was when law enforcement was a personal sort of thing. Some detectives actually looked forward to pulling lineup duty every other week. It gave them a day away from the squadroom and it made them feel noble, seeing all those scumbags up there on the stage.

  Nowadays, you didn’t have these formal lineups anymore. The only lineups you had were like the ones they were holding today for the benefit of Miriam Hartman, the black girl who’d been working SavMor’s counter number six when Jeffry Colbert presumably checked out twenty-two cans of spray paint on a rainy Wednesday in March.

  The lineup room at the Eight-Seven—or the showup room as it was sometimes called—wasn’t half so elaborate as the ones in some of the newer, flashier precincts. Relocated in the basement of the building, where there’d been space to build a larger stage and to install seating for twelve behind the large sheet of oneway plate glass, the room lacked an efficient airconditioning system and was sometimes suffocatingly hot during the summer months. But this was still the beginning of April, and Miriam Hartman seemed comfortable enough as she sat looking at the lighted stage beyond the glass, waiting for the action to begin. If she wasn’t, then fuck her, Parker thought.

  For the lineup today, they had rounded up three other men with mustaches, two of them offenders they’d brought up from the holding cells, and one of them a patrolman they’d asked to change back into his street clothes. In addition, they had three menwithout mustaches, one of them from the clerical office, the other two street patrolmen, all of them wearing civvies. Including Colbert, this made seven men, four of them with mustaches, three without. Moreover, two of the men wearing mustaches were about the same height as Colbert—five-eleven, in there. All of the men were white. There would be no later opportunity for some slippery shyster to come in and say the identification process had been loaded against Colbert. This wasn’t a case of him being the only tall white guy with a mustache. Miriam Hartman had her choice ofthree of them.

  The seven men walked out onto the stage. With the possible exception of Colbert, all of them had been through this drill before. The two offenders they’d drafted from the holding cell came out first, followed by three policemen, and then Colbert, and then the other policeman. There were height markers on the wall behind them. The stage was well lighted, but the illumination was not blinding. None of the men had to squint into the darkened room beyond.

  Parker pulled the microphone to him.

  One by one, he ordered each of the men to take a step forward, to smile, and to say “Some weather, huh?” which Miriam Hartman had said were the words spoken to her by the man who’d purchased the paint. One by one, they stepped forward, smiled—somewhat ghoulishly in the case of one of the offenders—and said, “Some weather, huh?”

  “Thank you, step back, please,” Parker said after each man had done his little turn.

  He figured later that Miriam Hartman had picked out Colbert the moment he stepped onto the stage. He was not at all surprised when she said, “That’s him.”

  “Second from the left?” Parker asked, confirming it.

  “Second from the left,” she said, and nodded emphatically.

  IN THEinterrogation room upstairs, Meyer and Hawes were talking to William Harris Hamilton, which—according
to his driver’s license—was the shelter guard’s full name.

  This was going to be a tough one, and they knew it.

  All they had so far was Margaret Shanks’s word that she’d hired Hamilton to pick up her husband and drop him off somewhere, preferably out of her life forever. They hadn’t yet been able to identify either the man known only as Charlie, or the woman who’d died of cardiac arrest after someone had left her as helpess as an infant, alone and untended in a deserted railroad station. If Hamilton was the person who’d dumped her there, they felt they could reasonably charge him with Murder in the Second Degree, a Class-A felony defined in §125.5 with the words “A person is guilty of murder in the second degree when, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.” Failing this, they were positive a charge of Manslaughter Two—a mere Class-C—would stick. Manslaughter in the Second Degree was defined in §125.15 as “Recklessly causing the death of another person.”

  Hamilton told them he’d never heard of anyone named Margaret Shanks.

  He told them he’d never heard of her husband Rubin Shanks, either.

  “She just picked your name out of a hat, huh?” Hawes asked.

  “I don’t know what she did. All I know is I never heard of her,” Hamilton said.

  He seemed supremely confident that whatever they were after, they weren’t going to get it from him. And even if they did get it, it wouldn’t do them any good. They had advised him of his rights and asked him if he wanted a lawyer present while they questioned him. He’d waived his right to counsel, and now sat smoking a cigarette at the long table in the room, glancing every now and again at the one-way mirror on the wall, as if to tell them heknew what the thing was, and didn’t give a damn if anybody was behind it watching him. At the moment, nobody was behind it. They planned to call in Margaret Shanks later, bring her face-to-face with the man she’d paid to get rid of her husband. They also planned to confront Hamilton with Rubin himself, see if the old man would recognize him as the person who’d driven him from Fox Hill to the Silver Harb playground. All in good time. Meanwhile, they went about it the way they always did.

  You ask a man the same questions enough times, he’ll finally run out of the pat answers he’s prepared and start telling you things he didn’t plan to tell you.

  “Have you always done security work?” Meyer asked.

  “Depends what you mean by security work.”

  Hawes wanted to smack him right in the mouth.

  “Square-shield work,” he said. “Youknow what security work is.”

  “I was also a prison guard. Is that security work?” Hamilton said.

  Which explained why he thought he could beat the system here. Having once been in the criminal justice business himself, more or less. Having rubbed elbows, so to speak, with all sorts of slimy bastards like himself, who’d got caught and locked up only because they were dumb. He was smarter than any of the cons he’d known, smarter too than these two jerks questioning him here, or so he thought, and which he was now trying to prove. Mr. Cool here. Grinning and smoking his cigarette. Hawes wanted to ram the cigarette down his throat.

  “Which prison?” he asked.

  “Castleview. Upstate.”

  “How long have you been working at the shelter?”

  “Year and a half now.”

  “Hear about the blankets being stolen there?”

  “No. Were some blankets stolen?”

  “Lots of blankets,” Meyer said. “Twenty-six so far this year.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Some of those blankets have been popping up around town.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, either.”

  “One of them in the Whitcomb Avenue railroad station.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “Harb Valley line,” Hawes said.

  “Still don’t know it.”

  “Runs all the way upstate to Castleview. You said you worked there, didn’t you?”

  “Yep.

  “But you never heard of the Harb Valley line?”

  “Sure, I have. I just don’t know the Whitcomb Avenue station.”

  “Then you couldn’t have driven this little old lady there, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Picked her up, wherever, wrapped her in a blanket stolen from the shelter…”

  “I don’t know anything about her or about the stolen blankets, either.”

  “How about someone named Charlie?”

  “I know a lot of people named Charlie.”

  “This particular Charlie gave us a pretty good description of someone who looks exactly like you.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Really,” Meyer said. “Forty, forty-five years old, five-ten, brown eyes and dark hair. Sounds a lot like you, doesn’t it?”

  “Charliewho , would this be?”

  “You tell us.”

  “I told you. I know dozens of Charlies.”

  “Said you were wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket. Same as you’re wearing now,” Hawes said.

  “Must be thousands of men in this city wearing the same thing right this minute.”

  “What are your hours at the shelter?” Hawes asked.

  “They vary.”

  “How?”

  “We work rotating shifts.”

  “Eight-hour shifts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three shifts a day?”

  “Eight to four, four to midnight, midnight to eight,” Hamilton said, and nodded.

  “Just like us,” Meyer said.

  “Gee,” Hamilton said.

  Hawes wanted to kick him in the balls.

  “Five on, two off?” he asked.

  “Five on, two off, yes.”

  “Which days are you off?”

  “Thursdays and Fridays.”

  “So you’re off today.”

  “I’m off today. Which is why you found me playing the horses.”

  “Were you working the midnight shift on the night of March thirty-first?”

  He knew Hamilton had been working that night because that was the night he’d spent there.

  “I don’t remember,” Hamilton said.

  “You don’tremember ? That was only threenights ago.”

  “Then I guess I was working the midnight shift, yeah.”

  “How about March twenty-fourth? You weren’t working the midnight shiftthat night, were you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, if you were working graveyard thispast week, then the weekbefore it would’ve been the four to midnight, isn’t that right?”

  “If you say so,” Hamilton said.

  “Well, let’s look at it,” Meyer said, and opened his notebook to the calendar page, and took the cap off his ballpoint pen “You were off yesterday and you’re off today…that’s the second and third of April.”

  Hamilton said nothing.

  “And you were working the midnight shift the five previous days, so that would’ve been from March twenty-eighth to April first.”

  “If you say so,” Hamilton said again.

  “Yes, I say so,” Meyer said. “Then you had two days off before that—the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, a Thursday and Friday…”

  Hamilton stifled a yawn.

  “And you’d have worked the four-to-midnight on the five days beforethat .”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Bored to tears.

  “The twenty-second to the twenty-sixth,” Meyer said.

  Hamilton sighed.

  “So youcouldn’t have been working the midnight shift on the twenty-fourth, could you?”

  “No.”

  “You’d have gotoff work at midnight, in fact, and then you’d have been free to roam the night, hmm?” Meyer said, and smiled pleasantly.

  Hamilton looked at hi
m.

  “So do you remember where you went after work on the morning of March twenty-fourth?” he asked.

  “Home to bed, I’m sure.”

  “You were relieved at midnight and you went straight home to bed, is that it?”

  “That’s what I usually do.”

  “But is it what you did that particular morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Positive.”

  “You didn’t by chance drive to the Whitcomb Avenue station, did you?”

  “I told you. I’m not familiar with…”

  “Cause that’s where the woman turned up,” Meyer said. “Early on the morning of March twenty-fourth.”

  “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

  “And Charlie turned up two days later, on the twenty-sixth,” Hawes said. “AThursday morning. Your day off.”

  “Charlie who? I told you, I know hundreds of Charlies.”

  “Would you like to meet this particular Charlie?” Meyer asked.

  “Nope.”

  “How about Rubin Shanks?”

  “Told you. I don’t know him.”

  “Maybe they’ll know you,” Hawes said.

  BECAUSE THEinterrogation room was busy, they talked to Jeffry Colbert in the relative quiet of the clerical office, the squadroom at the moment being occupied by an assortment of teenagers who’d had the bad manners and worse timing to shoot one of their classmates just as school was letting out and just as David Two was cruising past the schoolyard. They were variously screaming for their mamas or their lawyers while claiming it was really the two police officers in the David car who had shot the kid in the schoolyard, not to mention the head. Their cries of innocence floated down the second-floor corridor and almost but not quite managed to batter down the door to the clerical office, where Parker and Kling now confronted Colbert with evidence even a lawyer might understand.

  The moment Miriam Hartman positively identified him, they had probable cause to charge him with four counts of Murder Two, officially place him in custody, and send his fingerprints downtown. Now, at a quarter to four, they had in their possession a report from the fingerprint section, which had compared Colbert’s prints against the ones the lab had lifted from the various cans delivered yesterday, after the reluctant handyman at the Wilkins building had finally turned them over to Parker and Kling when they’d threatened him with court orders and such. They asked Colbert now if he would like an attorney present while they asked him some questions, and he told them hewas an attorney, in case they’d forgotten it. They hadn’t forgotten it; they were, in fact, banking on it. But because Colbert was being such a smart-ass attorney, and because they were both such smart-ass detectives, they asked him for a waiver in writing, which Colbert—supremely confident of his own lawyerly prowess—was happy to sign.