Hark!

by Ed McBain

  “It seems incredibly awesome,” she said, “that anyone would want to kill Miss Blair. I mean, she’s like so nice.”

  “She is indeed,” Hawes said.

  They were in a small room that served as a coffee-break area for members of the Channel Four staff. A coffee machine, a refrigerator, a four-burner stove top with a tea kettle on it, a soft-drinks machine. One other woman was in the room when they sat down, drinking coffee, absorbed in the morning paper. A white-faced clock on the wall, black hands, gave the time as 11:10.

  “Miss Vandermeer,” he said, “I wonder…”

  “Oh, please, Polly,” she said.

  “Polly, do you remember Miss Blair asking you to order a car for her last Friday morning?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Polly said, blue eyes wide now, face all serious and attentive.

  “Do you remember the exact request?”

  “Yes, sir, she asked for a pickup at her apartment and a drop-off here at the studio.”

  Hawes looked at her.

  “No interim stops?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “A stop at the 87th Precinct, for example? 711 Grover Avenue? And another one on Jefferson Avenue?”

  “No, sir, this was the same as every morning.”

  “When did she make this request?”

  “When she left for home Thursday evening.”

  “For the next morning, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. For Friday morning, the fourth of June.”

  “Didn’t mention my name, huh?”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Cotton Hawes, yes. Did she say she’d be picking up and dropping off Detective Cotton Hawes? On her way to the studio?”

  “No, sir, she certainly did not,” Polly said, sounding suddenly disapproving.

  “So when Miss Blair gave you this request, what did you do with it?”

  “Phoned it down to Transportation.”

  “On Thursday evening.”

  “Yes, for the next morning.”

  “Who took your call there?”

  “Rudy Mancuso.”

  “Is Transportation in this building?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where, Polly?”

  BORROW OR ROB?

  “Clearly, it’s another palindrome,” Willis said.

  “Front to back or vice versa,” Brown said.

  “Well, he’s certainly not about to borrow anything,” Meyer said.

  “Then why does he say so?” Genero asked.

  “He doesn’t say for sure,” Carella said. “He asks us to guess. Is he going to borrow or is he going to rob?”

  “Right,” Kling said. “He’s asking us to guess which.”

  “Teasing us again,” Meyer said.

  “But why a palindrome?” Willis asked.

  “Are we forgetting his first note today?” Eileen said.

  A rod not a bar, a baton, Dora.

  “Right,” Parker said. “A baton. He’s going to stick a baton up somebody’s ass.”

  “No, he’s going to rob the box office at a concert someplace.”

  “That’s rob,” Parker said. “You stick somebody up, you ain’t borrowing, you’re robbing.”

  “The only concerts are the ones we found in the paper,” Carella said. “And we’ve already alerted the local precincts.”

  “Good,” Parker said. “So let’s forget it.”

  “Remember when there used to be those big rock concerts at the Hippodrome?” Genero said, misting over.

  “Circus just left there,” Kling said.

  “I love circuses,” Eileen said, and glanced at Willis as if she expected him to buy her a balloon.

  “Anyway, a palindrome isn’t a hippodrome,” Kling said.

  “They used to have hippos in them big arenas, you know, back in Roman times,” Parker said. “That’s how they got the name hippodrome.”

  No one challenged him.

  RUDY MANCUSO WAS a squat burly man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, who sat in shirtsleeves behind a cluttered desk in an office where two other men sat at equally cluttered desks across the room. He was entirely sympathetic to Hawes’ quest for the shooter, but he seemed totally unaware that Hawes himself had been the target in the first rifle assault. In fact, he didn’t even know there’d been a previous shooting. He kept clucking his tongue over “poor Miss Blair,” becoming all business—“Transportation, Mancuso”—each time the ringing phone interrupted Hawes’ questioning. In a comparatively peaceful ten minutes, Hawes managed to get some answers.

  Mancuso corroborated essentially what Polly had already told him. The telephone request last Thursday evening was for a Friday morning pickup at ten, at Honey’s building, and a drop-off here at Channel Four. No interim stops. Same as every morning.

  “If there were interim stops…”

  “None were ordered, Detective.”

  “But if there were…”

  “Okay?”

  “Who would have known about them?”

  “You mean like if Miss Blair, after she’d been picked up, told the driver to stop someplace on the way here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the driver would have known…”

  “Who else?”

  “He might’ve called in to say he was stopping at such and such a place before…”

  “Who would’ve taken that call?”

  “Either Eddie or Frankie. Right there across the room.”

  YOU’D HAVE THOUGHT Eddie and Frankie were a ventriloquist and his dummy. Everything Eddie said, Frankie repeated. Eddie’s full name was Edward Cudahy. He watched while Hawes wrote it down in his little notebook. Frankie’s full name was Franklin Hopper. He watched, too. Eddie told Hawes he didn’t remember any driver calling in to say he’d be making any interim stops on Honey Blair’s way to the studio last Friday morning. Frankie said the same thing. Eddie said he didn’t remember which drivers were on call last Friday morning. Frankie said the same thing. Hawes thanked them both for their time. Both men said, “You’re welcome,” almost simultaneously.

  Hawes went back to Rudy Mancuso’s desk, and asked for the name of the driver who’d picked up Honey Blair last Friday morning, the fourth of June.

  Mancuso told him the driver was off today.

  “Then give me his home address,” Hawes said.

  “I don’t know if I should do that.”

  “Would a court order change your mind?” Hawes asked.

  THE LAST NOTE OF THE day arrived at a quarter to four. It was another palindrome. It read:

  MUST SELL AT TALLEST SUM

  “Now just what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Parker asked.

  No one knew what the hell that was supposed to mean.

  Besides, the night shift was just coming on, so they all went home.

  WHEN YOU’RE IN LOVE, the whole world’s Italian.

  Or so it seemed to Carella.

  Here they all were, ta-ra!, the prospective brides and grooms and their whole mishpocheh or meshpocheh or however “family” was spelled in Italy, all gathered in a restaurant called Horatio’s, in the city’s midtown area, not too distant from where Luigi Fontero had put up all his relatives. Carella wondered who had paid all those air fares to the U.S. and whether or not the visiting Italians all had to be fingerprinted before gaining entrance to these fiercely protected shores—thank you, Bulldog Tom Ridge, and the ever-alert Homeland Security team.

  Representing the Fontero family was a small army of relatives from Milan, Naples, Genoa, and/or Rome, kinfolk near, far, or even remote, but certainly numerous and clamorous. Representing the Carellas were Steve and Teddy (minus the children, or “i creatori,” as he and his sister used to be called when they themselves were small, ah so long ago); and Uncle Freddie who was a casino dealer in Vegas and who had flown east especially for the wedding this Saturday; and Carella’s Aunt Josie and his Uncle Mike, who’d come all the way up from Orlando, Florida, hadn’t seen them in years, but hey, this was a
big double wedding! Aunt Josie loved to play poker. Uncle Mike used to call Angela “The Homework Kid” when she was small because she always had her nose buried in a book, but now—hey, looka here!—all grown up and about to be married for the second time.

  Aunt Dorothy was here, too, summoned from wherever she was living in California with the third of her husbands, Carella’s beloved Uncle Salvie having died of cancer shortly after Carella joined the force. He missed Uncle Salvie, a cab driver who’d known the city better than any cop, used to tell stories abut the hundreds of passengers he carried to every remote neighborhood. Carella’s grandmother always kept telling him he should have become a writer. Carella guessed he’d’ve made a good one, too, some of the phony novelists around these days.

  Aunt Dorothy was the one who’d first tipped to the fact that young Carella was enjoying what to him at the time was a wildly erotic relationship with Margie Gannon, a little Irish girl who lived across the street from the Carella family in Riverhead. This steamy adolescent byplay amounted to nothing more than copping a feel every now and then, or sliding his hand under Margie’s skirt and onto her silken sexy panties, but oh, such ecstasy! Aunt Dorothy teased him relentlessly about her, referring to her as Sweet Rosie O’Grady, Carella never could figure why.

  Aunt Dorothy was telling a dirty joke now. She loved dirty jokes. Carella suspected the joke fell upon deaf ears as regarded most of the Fontero tribe. For that matter, Henry Lowell’s stiff Wasp relatives didn’t seem to be enjoying his aunt’s ribald sense of humor, either. His sister’s intended sat holding her hand and smiling tolerantly as the joke unfolded endlessly, something about the Pope, sure to be a winner among the Fonteros, the Pope being stopped by a prostitute outside the Vatican (Careful, Aunt Dotty!) and then running back inside to ask the Mother Superior “What’s a blowjob?” (Watch it!) and the Mother Superior telling him…

  Carella suddenly wondered if his mother and Luigi…

  No, he didn’t want to go there.

  All at once, everyone was laughing.

  Even the Fonteros, who, Carella now realized, understood more English than he’d earlier supposed.

  The laughter swelled everywhere around him.

  He wondered why he couldn’t find it in himself to share it.

  13.

  THE ELEVENTH DAY of June dawned all too soon.

  At six-thirty A.M. on what looked like the start of a sunny Friday morning, Melissa and the Deaf Man were sitting in the breakfast nook of his seventeenth-floor apartment, overlooking River Place South, Gleason Park, and the River Harb beyond.

  “Your job tomorrow,” he was telling her, “will be a very simple one.”

  She was thinking that her job today wouldn’t be a simple one at all. If she didn’t get out of here soon to start lining up her junkies…

  “The luxury sedan from Regal will be arriving here at half past noon tomorrow,” he said. “All you have to do is deliver the driver to the Knowlton.”

  So what else is new? she thought.

  “And what will you be doing?” she asked.

  Far as she could see, all he’d done so far was sit on his brilliant ass while she ran all over the city doing his errands. And he still hadn’t told her what her cut of the big seven-figure payoff would be, if there ever was a big payoff, which she was honestly beginning to doubt, now that he was into palindromes and all. If he was so intent on screwing up the 87th Precinct, why was he bothering with word games? Why didn’t he just lob a hand grenade through the front door? Good question, eh, Adam? What is this thing you have with them, anyway?

  “What is this thing you have with them, anyway?” she asked, venturing the question out loud, what the hell.

  “By this thing…?”

  “This messing around with their heads.”

  “Let’s just say our ongoing relationship has been a frustrating one,” he said.

  “Okay, but why…?”

  “I wouldn’t trouble my pretty little head over it,” he said, a line she had heard in many a bad movie, a line she had in fact heard from the late unlamented Ambrose Carter while he was still training her, so to speak, his exact words being, “I wouldn’t trouble my pretty little head over it, swee’heart, just suck the man’s cock.”

  “Yes, but I do trouble my pretty little head over it,” she said now, somewhat defiantly. “Because it seems to me you’re spending a lot of time and money telling these jerks exactly what you’re about to do…”

  “Exactly what I’m not about to do is more like it,” he said.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Why are you bothering, that’s the question? Why not just do the gig and get out of town?”

  “That’s precisely what I plan to do. Tortola, remember?”

  “Who’s Detective Stephen Louis Carella?” she asked, straight out.

  “A dumb flatfoot.”

  “Then why are you addressing these letters to him? If he’s so dumb…”

  “It’s personal. I shot him once.”

  “Why?”

  “He was getting on my nerves.”

  “Did he send you away, is that it?”

  “I’ve never done time in my life.”

  “Did he bust you? Did you beat the rap?”

  “Never. Neither Carella nor the Eight-Seven has ever laid a hand on me.”

  “Then…I don’t get it. Why bother with them?”

  “Diversion, my dear, it’s all diversion.”

  “I don’t know what that means, diversion.”

  “It means smoke and mirr…”

  “I know what it means, I just don’t see how it applies here.”

  “Try to look at it this way, my dear,” he said patiently. She did not like it when he got so tip-toey patient with her. It was more like condescension when he got so patient. “In these perilous times of High Alert, with a terrorist lurking under every bush—please pardon the pun—one can’t be too careful, can one? So, even with the assistance of policemen from other precincts, they’ll still be too late.”

  “Who’ll be too late?”

  “The stalwarts of the Eight-Seven.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “The foul deed that smells above the earth—to paraphrase Mr. Shakespeare in his brilliant Julius Caesar—shall already have been done. Too late, my love. Altogether too late.”

  “I still don’t get it,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, and sighed heavily, “I wouldn’t trouble my pretty little head over it.”

  Which pissed her off all over again.

  THE DRIVER WHO’D BEEN behind the wheel of the limo last Friday was named Kevin Connelly, and he did not appreciate being awakened at seven in the morning. Associating Hawes at once with the bullets that had come crashing into the car last week, he immediately looked into the hallway past him, as if expecting another fusillade. Satisfied that Hawes was alone, he stepped aside and let him into the apartment.

  He was still in his pajamas. He threw on a robe, led Hawes into the kitchen, and immediately set a pot of coffee to brew on the stove. Like two old buddies about to embark on a hunting trip, they sat drinking coffee at a small table adjacent to a small window.

  “I want to know about the Honey Blair call last Friday,” Hawes said. “What’d the dispatcher give you?”

  “Pickup and delivery for Miss Blair,” Connelly said. “Same as always.”

  “So how come you picked me up on the way?”

  “Miss Blair told me to stop by for you.”

  “Gave you 711 Grover?”

  “No, she didn’t know the address of the precinct. I had to look it up in my book. This little book I have.”

  “How about 574 Jefferson? Did she tell you we’d be dropping me off there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did you figure it’d take from her building to the precinct?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  “And from there to Jeff Av?”

  “Another twenty.”

  “Plenty of time
for someone to get there ahead of us.”

  “Well, sure. As it turned out.”

  “But you and Miss Blair were the only ones who knew where we were going.”

  “Until I called it in to Base.”

  “Base?”

  “The Transportation office. At Channel Four. I called in to give them the new itin.”

  “Who’d you speak to there?”

  “One of the guys.”

  “Which one?” Hawes asked.

  And after me, I know, the rout is coming.

  Such a mad marriage never was before:

  Hark, hark! I hear the minstrels play.

  “God, does he know about the wedding?” Carella asked out loud.

  “How could he?” Meyer asked.

  “He could,” Genero said knowingly. “He’s evil.”

  Carella was thinking, It is a mad marriage. Two mad marriages! Like never was or were before. He was already at the computer, searching for the source of the quote. It was eight-thirty in the morning. The other detectives all clustered around the first note that day as if it were a ticking time bomb. Which perhaps it was.

  “There’s hark,” Willis said. “I told you it meant listen, didn’t I?”

  “ ‘Hark, hark!’ ” Kling quoted. “He’s harking us to death.”

  “Hokking our chainiks,” Meyer said.

  “Which means?” Parker demanded, sounding insulted.

  “Which means ‘breaking our balls,’ excuse me, Eileen.”

  “It’s from The Taming of the Shrew,” Carella said. “Act Three, Scene Two.”

  “Think the Minstrels might be a rock group?” Brown asked.

  “Here, check it out,” Willis said.

  The June 11–18 issue of Here & Now magazine had appeared on the newsstands early this morning. Published every Friday, it covered the city’s cultural scene for the following week, alerting its readers to what was happening all around town. Handily divided into sections titled Art, Books, Clubs, Comedy, Dance, Film, Gay & Lesbian, Kids, Music, Sports, and Theater, the magazine offered a neat little guide to all that was going on that week.