by Ed McBain
This was Saturday morning, the fifth day of June. Very early Saturday morning.
Before she left the apartment, Adam had given her five thousand bucks in hundreds. Five thousand dollars! Which didn’t seem like very much when you broke it down to a mere fifty $100 bills, oh well.
“That’s your outside limit for the day,” he’d told her. “You get your people for less than that, whatever’s left over is yours, you can buy yourself that lingerie we were talking about.”
She had a better idea of what to buy with what was left over, but first she had to buy what she needed to make this work at all.
She figured, correctly as it turned out, that not too many people would be eager to take a letter into a police station. Not with the anthrax scare still a very much alive issue. Would’ve been different if any of the brilliant masterminds in Washington—some of them should meet Adam Fen, they wanted mastermind—knew what to do about it except stick their thumbs up their asses. As it was, the first three men she approached said flat out, “What are you, crazy?” This after she’d offered two hundred bucks just to carry a friggin letter inside a police station and hand it to the desk sergeant!
The next person she approached was in a coffee shop on Jefferson. Six in the morning, the girl sitting there drinking coffee was a working girl like herself, Melissa could spot them a hundred miles away. Black girl with hair bright as brass, nail polish a purple shade of Oklahoma Waitress. She’d had a hard night, too, judging from the bedraggled look of her. Melissa started low, no sense spoiling her, and the hell with sisterhood. Turned out the girl was nursing a horrendous hangover, figured Melissa was looking for a little early-morning girlie-girlie sex, told her any muff-diving would cost her two bills.
Melissa tried to explain that no, what she wanted was a letter delivered to a police station. She showed her the letter. It was addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Melissa told the girl this was her boyfriend. She told the girl they’d had an argument last night. She told the girl she was desperate to make up with him. The girl said, “Honey, you a hooker same as me. If yo boyfrien’s a po-lice, I’m the queen of England.”
It sort of insulted Melissa that she’d been spotted for a hooker straight off like that.
After three more tries and three more turndowns, she remembered something her mother had told her as a child: Desperate people do desperate things. So what she needed here was somebody desperate to carry that letter in. For a minute, in fact, since she herself was starting to get a little desperate here—it was already seven A.M.—she thought she might carry it in personally. Tell the cops some guy wearing a hearing aid had given her nine hundred bucks to deliver it, show them nine bills, tell them she was just a hard-working girl worked nights at a Burger King and had met this guy over the counter, asked her to deliver the letter. She didn’t know nothing at all about who he was or what was inside the letter. So please let me go, sirs, as my mother will be wondering why I’m not home yet, my shift ending at eight in the morning and all.
Decided against it.
If that girl in the coffee shop had spotted her for a whore, the cops would make her in a minute.
Was it really that easy to see what she was?
Maybe she’d buy a new dress with whatever the residuals turned out to be today.
At seven-fifteen that morning, she taxied down to a skid row area of flophouses, homeless shelters, bars, and electrical supply houses. First crack out of the box, she found a doorway wino who said he’d deliver the letter for fifty bucks. She taxied uptown again, the wino sitting beside her on the back seat, stinking of piss and belching alcohol fumes. At five past eight, she dropped him off three blocks from the stationhouse, the letter in one pocket of his tattered jacket, and pointed him in the right direction. Told him she’d be watching him so he’d better make sure he kept his end of the bargain. Guy swore on his sainted mother.
Melissa figured he’d be stopped the minute he set foot on the bottom tread of the stationhouse steps, and he was.
Which was why she’d bought the wigs, right?
Her waspish-headed son has broke his arrows,
Swears he will shoot no more but play with sparrows
That’s what the first note read.
“Is that correct English?” Genero asked. “ ‘Has broke his arrows’?”
Nobody answered him.
“ ‘Shoot no more,’ ” Meyer said. “He’s telling us he’s not going to shoot anybody else. Gloria Stanford was the last one.”
“Unless he plans to use arrows,” Willis said.
“Or spears,” Kling suggested.
“No, he’s finished with the spears,” Carella said. “Now he’s onto arrows.”
“ ‘Swears he will shoot no more.’ ”
“Gonna ‘play with sparrows’ instead.”
“Little birdies,” Parker said sourly.
“Did you see that movie Hitchcock wrote?” Genero asked.
“Hitchcock didn’t write it,” Kling said.
“Then who did?”
“Daphne somebody.”
“Twice,” Willis said.
“She wrote The Birds twice?” Genero asked, puzzled now.
“No, arrows. He uses arrows twice this time.”
Carella was at the computer again, looking for his rhyme zone. Parker glanced down at the Deaf Man’s note.
“I only see arrows once,” he said.
“The second one is buried in another word,” Willis said. “Arrows in sparrows.”
“So what’s the significance of that?” Parker asked, sounding angry.
“The Tempest,” Carella announced. “Act Four, Scene One.”
CAPTAIN JOHN MARSHALL FRICK should have retired ten years ago, but he liked to tell himself the 87th Precinct couldn’t get along without him. Byrnes thought of him as an old fart. There were men who were Frick’s age—sixty, sixty-five, in there, whatever he was—who still thought like much younger men, carried themselves like much younger men, sounded like much younger men, actually looked far younger than they were. John Marshall Frick was not one of them.
Frick belonged to that other category of older men who thought of themselves as “senior citizens,” men who had nothing to do anymore except send each other old fart jokes via e-mail every day. Men who’d retired from life and living too damn early—although Frick was old when he was fifty and should have retired then.
“Tell us your name,” he told the wino.
“Freddie.”
“Freddie what, Freddie?”
“Freddie Apostolo. That means Freddie the Apostle.”
“You been drinking a little today, Freddie?”
“A little. I drink a little every day.”
“Why’d you write that note, Freddie?”
“I didn’t.”
Byrnes looked at his boss. Did the Captain really think this old wino had pulled up a Shakespeare quote from the internet and delivered it in person to the precinct? Did he really think this slovenly old bum stinking of body odor and urine and sweet wine was the notorious Deaf Man who’d slain Gloria Stanford and who so far had delivered all these tantalizing notes designed to infuriate and…well…intoxicate? He wasn’t even wearing a hearing aid!
“Then who wrote it, Freddie?”
“I got no idea.”
“Then where’d you get it?”
“This girl gave it to me.”
“What girl?”
“Pretty girl with black hair and bangs.”
Byrnes almost said She does?
“What’s her name?”
“Don’t know.”
“Just gave you this note, is that…”
“No.”
“…right? Just handed you…”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Gave me fifty bucks to deliver it. Said I should hand it to the desk sergeant, that’s all. Which I tried to do but you guys stopped me at the front door. I used to play piano, you know.”
“Is
that right?”
“That’s how I started drinking. There’s always a drink on a piano, did you ever notice? A drink and a cigarette. I’m lucky I didn’t get throat cancer. You play piano, you drink and you smoke, that’s it. I guess I drank a little too much, huh?”
“I guess so. Where’d you conduct this transaction with your mysterious black-haired lady?”
“She wasn’t mysterious at all. It was down near the Temple Street Shelter. She came over to me and asked would I like to make fifty bucks. So I said yes.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Frick said.
“Sure. So what did I do wrong, can you please tell me?”
“Did she tell you her name?”
“No. I didn’t tell her mine, either.”
“How’d you get uptown here, all the way from Temple?”
“We took a taxi. She dropped me off on Fourth, said she’d be watching. I believed her.”
“Why’s that?”
“She looked like I’d better do what she said.”
“How’s that?”
“Her eyes. There was a look in her eyes.”
“What color?” Frick asked. “The eyes.”
“Brown,” Freddie said.
“How tall?”
“Five-seven, five-eight?”
“White?”
“Sure.” Freddie paused. “Her eyes said she’d kill me if she had to.”
Byrnes looked at the captain again.
“Okay, go home,” Frick told Freddie.
“Home?” Freddie said.
SHE HAD WATCHED FROM the park across the street, and had seen the uniformed cop on the front steps first challenge and next detain the wino she’d enlisted. But that was okay because she knew the letter would now be delivered one way or another, and she didn’t much care if they later locked the bum up, or hanged him by his thumbs from a lamppost, or whatever.
She now knew that whoever she might recruit to deliver all the remaining letters would also be stopped, but this didn’t bother her, either. The letters would get inside the precinct, they would be read, the messengers would protest, “Hey, I’m only the messenger!”, and that would be that. In this city, there had to be two million girls with shoulder-length black hair and bangs. Or feather-cut red hair, for that matter. Well, maybe a million, the redheads.
The problem was rounding up two more guys today, and however many more she’d need for every day next week, Monday through Saturday, the twelfth of June, which was the date Adam had announced for whatever it was, she didn’t know. His caper? His escapade? His prank, his practical joke, his whatever it was that would add seven figures to the coffers, whatever they might be, coffers. She sometimes wished she was smarter than she was.
But she was smart enough to know that she couldn’t keep running back and forth between all the way downtown and up here to secure new messengers all the time. That would be both exhausting and time-consuming. So whereas she didn’t like to cut anyone else in on the thirty-five grand Adam had allotted for the project, she knew that she needed a middleman here. And the only middleman she could think of was the first pimp she’d had, or vice versa, when she arrived in this rotten city five years ago.
AMBROSE CARTER WAS a black man who still ran a stable of eleven whores, four of them white, and he was very happy to see little Mela Sammarone again because he thought she might be coming back to work for him again. As it turned out, she wanted him to work for her.
“Now juss lemme get this straight,” he said, putting on a baffled black man look. In truth, nothing ever baffled him. He was too damn smart to ever be baffled.
They were sitting in a bar in what was called the Overlook section of Diamondback, appropriately named in that a lot of drug and prostitution shit was conveniently overlooked by the police here. Ambrose was nursing a Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola. Melissa was drinking a Coke without the bourbon. The two wigs she’d purchased were in her tote bag. Sitting there au naturelle, more or less, as it were, she looked as blond and as pert and as pretty as a young Meg Ryan. Ambrose really regretted not representing her any longer. He thought of himself as not a pimp but a representative.
He still considered her the one who’d got away. Partially because he hadn’t been able to hook her on any kind of controlled substance, she’d been too smart for that, but primarily because she’d been socking away bit by bit, piece by piece, what came to a total of fifty-five grand over a period of five years, which she’d offered him in exchange for her freedom. Well, figure it out, man. He wasn’t holding her passport or no shit like that, and fifty-five in the here-and-now was worth grabbing on the spot, you never knew how fast these girls would age and become worthless. So he’d said So long, darlin, and kissed her off. But here she was, back again. And asking him to represent her again in a different sort of way.
“You want me to fine however many people it is you’ll need in the next however many days…”
“That’s right.”
“…screen them for you befo’hand so you’ll be sure they willin to march into a po-lice station…”
“Yes, Ame.”
“…and then senn ’em to way’ever you be waitin for ’em, so you can pay ’em a hunnerd bucks each to deliver an envelope, separate envelopes actually…”
“Separate envelopes, yes.”
“…into this po-lice station, whichever one it may be.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“And what’s in this for me, may I be so bold? What do I get for fine-in’ these people for you?”
“A thousand bucks today, and a grand a day starting Monday.”
“Till when?”
“Last one’ll be next Saturday.”
“That’s a total of seven large.”
“Seven, correct.”
Carter thought this over.
“How do I know this won’t come back on me?” he asked. “These people marchin up to a po-lice station, they sure to be stopped, Mel.”
“I know that. They tell the cops they got the money from me. You’re out of this completely. I’m the one pays them, I’m the one they describe.”
“You don’t mine bein’ made?”
“Not at all.”
Carter thought this over for another moment.
“Make it an even ten K,” he said.
“You’ve got it,” she said. “I’ll need two people today. I’ll tell you where they can meet me.”
“Male or female? Or do it matter?”
“As suits you,” Melissa said. “I wouldn’t send me one of your whores, though….”
“Now do I look stupid, Mel?” he asked.
“No one could ever say that about you, Ame,” she said, and grinned.
“How do I get paid?” he asked.
“Three now,” she said. “Two grand Monday morning, a grand every morning after that, straight through the twelfth.”
“You trust me that far, huh?”
“Got no reason not to, Ame.”
“That when it’s going down?” he asked. “The twelfth? Whatever this thing may be?”
“Now do I look stupid, Ame?” she asked.
THE SECOND NOTE that Saturday morning was addressed to Miss Honey Blair at Channel Four News. It read:
DEAR HONEY:
PLEASE FORGIVE ME AS I DID NOT KNOW YOU WERE IN THAT AUTOMOBILE.
It was unsigned.
THE DEAF MAN’S second note was delivered to the 87th Precinct at a little past noon that day by a man who admitted under intense questioning that a pretty redhead had paid him a hundred dollars to take it over here. Before he’d met her at a bar called the Lucky Diamond down on Lewis and Ninth, he’d never seen her in his life. Did this mean they would take the money from him?
“That’s Macbeth,” Genero said.
To be or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
> And by opposing, end them?
Even Parker knew this was definitely not Macbeth.
“It’s Romeo and Juliet,” he said.
Eileen did not think the quote on the lieutenant’s desk was from Romeo and Juliet. She knew that play virtually by heart, or at least she knew the Baz Luhrmann movie version, which she’d seen seven times when it was first released, falling in love with Leonardo di Caprio, who now seemed rather pudgy and middle-aged to her. But this was definitely not Romeo and Juliet.
Carella knew the quote was from Hamlet because back in his green and salad days, he’d played a bearded drama-club Claudius to a zaftig Sarah Gelb’s Gertrude. Sarah had thrown herself much too seriously into the Oedipal theory of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother, French-kissing twenty-year-old Aaron Epstein during the famous “Now, mother, what’s the matter?” scene in the Queen’s closet. “What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue in noise so rude against me?” young Sarah had demanded, her breasts heaving in the low-cut Elizabethan gown she wore, a crown tilted saucily on her reddish curls.
After the opening night party, Sarah performed the same osculatory acrobatics with Carella, in the back seat of his father’s automobile, which led to a somewhat steamy interlude interrupted by two uniformed cops driving past in a radio motor patrol car. Tossing the beams of their torches through both open back windows, surprising the coupling young lovers—Sarah pulling up her panties, Carella zipping up his fly—those two diligent vigilantes caused him to hate all cops for a good long time. But he would never forget Hamlet, oh no, and this now was most definitely Hamlet.
Hal Willis was wondering why the Deaf Man—if indeed the Hamlet quotation had been sent by him—had chosen to bring up the second-act curtain on their dreary Saturday morning routine with perhaps the most famous soliloquy in all literature. Did he feel he had given them information enough about spears and such, and was now ready to move on to another topic? In which case, what might this new topic be, hmmm?
The note had undoubtedly been computer-generated, printed on the same white bond paper he’d used for his previous messages.
