by Ed McBain
“I think I look beautiful,” she said, sounding amazed by the discovery.
“You are beautiful,” Willis said, and held out his hand to her.
She came to the bed and sat on the edge of it. He kissed first her hand, and then the faint scar on her left cheek. He kissed the hollow of her throat and her nipples. He kissed her below, where the red hair curled recklessly beneath and around the garter belt, and then he found her lips and kissed her longingly and tenderly, murmuring “Eileen, Eileen, Eileen” against her mouth, and her hair and her ears and her shoulders and her neck, making her feel beautiful, genuinely beautiful and clean for the first time since she was raped and stabbed.
He took her in his arms and lowered her onto the bed.
Discovering her, marveling at her presence beside him, he repeated over and over again, “Eileen, Eileen, Eileen, Eileen, Eileen.”
Her name.
No one else’s name.
Hers alone.
8.
WELL, WELL, WELL, now what have we here?” Detective Oliver Wendell Weeks asked.
He was talking to the uniformed cops who’d called in what appeared to be a homicide at eight-fifteen this bright Monday morning, June 7, which was when Police Officers Mary Hannigan and Roger Bradley found what appeared to be a dead body on the sidewalk alongside what appeared to be a BMW sedan.
Long before the two officers happened across the stiff on their first circuit of Adam Sector during the first half-hour of the day shift, a great many other people had noticed it lying there on the sidewalk in a huge puddle of blood. All through the livelong night and early morning, these passersby glanced down at the body and hurried on along because, this neighborhood being what it was, nobody thought it prudent to report what sure as hell looked like a murder. Especially those good citizens who recognized the corpse as being the remains of one Ambrose Carter, an influential, what you might call, pimp.
Ollie recognized Carter the moment the ME rolled him over.
“Ambrose Carter, Pimp,” he announced, spreading his hands on the air and raising his voice to the world at large, but especially to the two Homicide cops who’d been sent over to lend authority to the vile goings-on up here in the Eight-Eight.
“I know all the girls in his stable,” Weeks said.
“Biblically, no doubt,” the ME commented drily.
“You think one of them might’ve aced him?” Muldoon asked.
“It’s been heard of,” Mulready said.
The two Homicide dicks were wearing black suits, black socks and shoes, black ties, white shirts, black snap-brimmed fedoras. They looked like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, except that they were both white. They had already decided there was nothing important for them up here. A dead pimp? Who cared?
“Shell casings there,” Muldoon said, indicating them with a nod of his head.
“I saw them,” Weeks said.
“By the way, you ever find the guy who stole your book?”
“Not yet,” Ollie said. “But I will.”
“What book?” Mulready asked.
“Detective Weeks here wrote a book,” Muldoon said.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Tell him, Ollie.”
“I wrote a book, yes,” Ollie said. “What’s so strange about that?”
“Nothing at all,” Muldoon said. “Every detective I know has written a book.”
“Not me,” Mulready said.
“Not me, neither,” Muldoon said. “But we’re exceptions to the rule, right, Ollie?”
“I don’t need this,” Ollie said.
“Can I buy this book on Amazon?” Mulready asked.
“It ain’t been published yet,” Muldoon said. “That’s what’s so fascinating about it. The manuscript was stolen from the back seat of Detective Weeks’s car by some transvestite hooker.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Mulready said.
“Who you ain’t caught yet, am I right, Ollie?”
“Shove it up your ass,” Ollie explained.
The Mobile Crime boys were just arriving.
MELISSA HAD BEGUN looking for her next three messengers immediately after she ran from what she supposed the cops would now be calling the “crime scene.” Hadn’t thought to clean up after herself, pick up those little brass thingies from the sidewalk, whatever you called them, she’d thought of that only later; they could identify a weapon from stuff like that, couldn’t they? She just wanted to get the hell out of there fast. Before last night, she’d never shot a person in her life, no less killed one, and she was just plain scared.
But that was last night and now was now.
Sitting in the Starbucks on Rafer and Eleventh, her hand shaking only slightly as she lifted a cup of espresso macchiato to her lips, she read both morning newspapers and could not find a single article about the death of a pimp named Ambrose Carter. Not a single paragraph. Not a single word. As her mother was fond of saying: Good riddance to bad rubbish.
She was feeling exceptionally fine this morning.
’Tis pity she’s a whore and all that, but it wasn’t every day you got to kill the pimp who’d turned you out.
Smiling secretly, she sipped serenely.
Along about now, the first of the three envelopes should be arriving at the Eight-Seven. She had arranged to meet later with her next two chosen messengers, exchange cash for envelopes. One, two, three, and finished for the day.
The way she’d found all three delivery boys was by remembering once again what her mother had taught her at her knee: Desperate people do desperate things.
Only this time, she’d looked for the most desperate people she could find.
Simple.
She took another satisfying sip of espresso.
Maybe she’d even buy herself one more cup.
Maybe a double this time.
And a chocolate chip cookie.
What the hell.
You know his nature,
That he’s revengeful, and I know his sword
Hath a sharp edge: it’s long and, ’t may be said,
It reaches far, and where. ’twill not extend,
Thither he darts it. Bosom up my counsel,
You’ll find it wholesome.
“A sword now?” Meyer asked.
“From spears to arrows to a sword,” Carella said.
He was already at the computer.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Has a sharp edge’?” Genero asked.
“Hath is what they said back in those days,” Parker explained.
“Sounds like a lisp,” Genero said.
“Maybe he’s gay,” Parker suggested. “This guy whose sword hath a sharp edge.”
“Don’t forget it’s long, too,” Eileen said, looking all wide-eyed and innocent.
“And reaches far,” Willis added.
Kling darted a look at both of them.
“Party’s getting rough again,” Hawes said.
“ ‘Bosom,’ yeah,” Genero said, grinning.
“It’s from King Henry VIII,” Carella said. “Act One, Scene One.”
“Which tells us nothing at all,” Kling said.
“It tells us we know him,” Brown said, “and we know he’s out for revenge.”
“That’s for sure.”
“You think he’s really gonna use a sword?” Hawes asked. “For whatever he’s planning?”
“Well, he said no more arrows, didn’t he? Where’s that other note?”
Carella went searching through the notes they’d received the week before. He found the one he was looking for, put it on the desk for the others to look at again:
Her waspish-headed son has broke his arrows,
Swears he will shoot no more but play with sparrows
“Doesn’t say anything about swords,” Parker said. “Just says from now on he’s gonna play with sparrows.”
“Does he mean girls?” Genero asked. “Chicks?”
“They call ’em birds in England,” Willis said,
nodding.
“Sparrows,” Meyer said, and shrugged. “Could be. Who the hell knows?”
“The Shadow knows,” Genero said.
“Dee Shadow know,” Brown said, affecting a thick, down-home, watermelon-eating accent.
“Sparrows has arrows in it, you know,” Willis said.
“Hath,” Parker corrected.
“I mean, the word sparrows. It has the word arrows in it.”
“So you told us,” Hawes said.
“Just mentioning it. I mean, if we’re still on the spears-to-arrows-to-swords kick.”
“Don’t forget he hath a long sword,” Eileen said, looking innocent again.
“And that thither he will dart it,” Willis said.
“It doesn’t say that,” Kling said, sounding annoyed.
Carella looked at him.
“Well, more or less,” Willis said, and shrugged.
Eileen shrugged, too.
“Or maybe we’re missing the point,” Hawes said, and grinned.
“Is that another sword joke?” Genero asked.
KONSTANTINOS SALLAS seemed to be a creature of habit.
The Deaf Man had been trailing him for the past week now, and his routine never varied. The man was staying at the new Intercontinental Hotel on Grover Avenue, at the high-rent reaches of the 87th Precinct, facing Grover Park. Enter the park at Sakonuff Street, follow the footpath uptown, past the zoo, wander crosstown past the lake, under the arches, and you’d come out a few blocks from the 87th Precinct stationhouse, where just about now—he glanced at his watch—someone should be delivering the second of his notes that day.
Every day since he’d arrived from Athens, Sallas left his hotel at 8:30 A.M. and in the company of his bodyguard walked directly to Clarendon Hall, which took him precisely seventeen minutes. At 8:48, he entered the concert hall by the stage door, where a uniformed guard challenged him on only the first day.
It was no different today.
It was now 8:48:17 by the Deaf Man’s digital watch, and Sallas was just entering the hall, the bodyguard trailing dutifully behind him.
Later, the Deaf Man thought.
THE DEAF MAN was not the only cheap thief working the Eight-Seven and environs that Monday morning.
At a quarter past nine, Parker and Genero went to investigate the apparent strangulation of a seven-month-old baby in her crib. The father, a letter carrier, had left for work at five this morning. The mother was in hysterics when she let the detectives into the apartment. There were purple bruises on the infant’s throat. Her tongue bulged out of her mouth. A window alongside the baby’s bed was open to the fresh breezes of early June. The mother told them she was sleeping soundly when her husband left for work. She didn’t know the baby was dead till she woke up around a quarter to nine. She’d called the police at once.
In the hallway outside, Genero said, “The father did it.”
“Wrong, Richard,” Parker said. “The mother.”
Twenty minutes later, Willis and Eileen went out together to investigate a burglary in a lingerie shop the night before. The owner of the shop, a woman who spoke English with a French accent, told them she’d opened the shop at ten o’clock this morning to find everything “t’rown all over zee place like you see it now, eh?” Waving her hands on the air. Indeed, there were panties and slips, bras and garter belts, kimonos and teddies, tangas and boyshorts, merry widows and bustiers strewn all over the shop. The cash register drawer was open, but the lady told them she’d taken its contents home with her when she left last night at seven. Which might have accounted for why the intruder had gone berserk inside there.
“In England, they call these ‘suspenders,’ ” Willis told Eileen, lifting from the floor a garter belt trimmed in black lace.
“Do you have this in white?” Eileen asked the lady.
Cost her sixty bucks.
She winked at Willis when they left the shop.
At ten-thirty that morning, Carella and Hawes went out to investigate an apparent suicide on Silvermine Oval, in a building not too far from where Gloria Stanford had been shot to death a week ago today. The woman in the tub was naked. The ME pronounced her dead, and suggested she’d electrocuted herself by dropping a hair dryer into the water.
“Nice tits, though,” Monoghan said.
“Great jugs, you mean,” Monroe corrected.
Carella wondered if someone other than the dead woman had dropped that dryer into the tub. The super of the building told them the woman’s husband was a stockbroker downtown, left for work very early every morning. At a little before eleven, they headed down to the financial district to ask him a few questions.
Kling and Brown, the Good Cop / Bad Cop team, caught a squeal closer to home at five past eleven. Drive-by shooting. Gang stuff. Dead boy on the sidewalk. Nobody saw or heard anything. They were back in the squadroom by twelve-fifteen. Everyone else drifted in by the half-hour.
IT WAS NOW TWELVE-THIRTY, and here came Konstantinos!
Striding out of the stage door, saying hello to the armed guard there, and then marching off up the avenue toward his favorite little deli.
Dutifully, the Deaf Man followed.
Every day so far, Sallas left the concert hall at twelve-thirty, walked to the Greek delicatessen—surprise!—on Sakonuff, had lunch there, and then walked back to the hall to resume rehearsal at 1:00 P.M. At 4:00 P.M. every day, he exited through the stage door, bodyguard beside him, violin case swinging from his right hand, took a brief brisk stroll up Grover Avenue, past the museum and the 87th Precinct stationhouse, and then turned back toward the hotel again.
Later, the Deaf Man thought.
IT WAS ONLY AFTER THE second messenger arrived that the police detected a pattern here: Carmela Sammarone was drafting junkies to do her legwork. At least today, anyway. At least in the selection of her delivery boys.
It wasn’t too difficult to find a junkie on any street corner in this city. Lay some shit on him, or just the cash to buy the shit, and he’d go out to kill his own mother for you. It wasn’t difficult to recognize a junkie, either. There were always the red watery eyes, the pupils either too large or too small. There was the puffy face, or the cold, sweaty palms, or the shaking hands, or the pale skin. Sometimes there was the smell of this week’s substance of choice—cocaine or heroin or ecstasy or meth or OxyContin—on the breath or the body or the clothes.
But more than any of these, there was the blank desperate stare of the addict. And behind those dead eyes, the knowledge that he or she was married to a tyrannical slaveholder. And the further knowledge that not a single soul on earth—sister, mother, brother, father, spouse, significant other, social worker, doctor, or cop—looked upon you with anything but pity or contempt because they felt you had no one but yourself to blame for your predicament.
“Where’d you get this letter, Joseph?” they asked the first messenger.
At the time, they suspected he might be a junkie, but they didn’t yet realize a pattern was about to emerge.
“Girl give it to me Langley Park.”
“What girl?”
“Doan know who she was.”
“She give you a name?”
“Nossir. Lay a C-note on me, say she be watchin me deliver the en’lope.”
“Where was this, Joseph?”
“Tole you. Langley Park.”
“How old was she?”
“Ain’ no good with ages. Young.”
“How young? Young like you?”
“Older.”
“How old are you, Joseph?”
“Seventeen.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Short red hair, brown eyes.”
The second messenger was a girl with bleached blond hair and green eyes. Her hair was matted and stringy and greasy. Her eyes had lost all their luster, and she was as thin as a rail, and her clothes were bedraggled and stained and smelled of vomit and Christ knew what else. She was probably somewhere in her mid-twenties, but
she could easily have been mistaken for a woman in her thirties. Maybe even older. A tired woman in her thirties.
Speaking with a Calm’s Point accent—the Irish, not the black or Italian variety—she told them she’d been an addict since she was seventeen, a hooker since she was eighteen. Started with crack, which was all the rage then, moved on to gremmies and sherms and even did some fry before starting to shoot hop directly into the vein, welcome to the club, sweetheart! She told them this girl with long black hair had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, two bills to deliver this envelope here, told her she didn’t know who the girl was, didn’t know her name, had never seen her before this morning, wouldn’t recognize her again if she tripped over her in church.
She was stoned out of her mind when she delivered the envelope, and she couldn’t remember where, or even when, she’d met the girl with the long black hair.
“I’m a natural redhead, wanna see?” she said, and lifted her skirt.
She spelled her name Aine Duggan, but she pronounced it Anya Doogan.
They figured her for a lost cause.
But now they knew for sure that Carmela Sammarone was finding her messengers in the city’s pool of drug addicts.
And the pool was bottomless.
I may say, thrusting it;
For piercing steel and darts envenomed
Shall be as welcome to the ears
“He’s sticking it to us,” Parker said.
“That’s what he means by ‘thrusting it,’ ” Genero agreed.
“Sticking it right in our eye.”
“ ‘Thrusting it.’ ”
“ ‘I may say,’ ” Meyer said, quoting from the note. “He sounds like Rumsfeld. Next thing you know, he’ll be saying ‘Golly!’ and ‘Gee whiz!’ ”
“There’s that sword again,” Eileen said.
“Where?” Willis asked.
“ ‘Piercing steel.’ ”
“Poisoned darts, too,” Kling said.
“I don’t see any poisoned darts,” Genero said.
“ ‘Darts envenomed.’ That’s poisoned darts, Dickie-boy.”
“No one calls me ‘Dickie,’ ” Genero told Parker.
