by Ed McBain
However…
The director would personally phone the Eight-Four Precinct, to alert them to possible danger at tomorrow’s three o’clock concert, and to ask for bulkier police protection. “Bulkier” was the exact word he’d used. Carella told him he planned to do that himself, but it never hurt to get a request straight from the horse’s mouth.
So now there was nothing else the Eight-Seven could do. It was no longer their baby; they could even throw away the bath water. If the Deaf Man was after the Folger First Folio, Mid South would be there at the library to stop him. If he was after the Greek violinist, the Eight-Four would nab him at the concert hall.
Either way, the end of a brilliant career.
Confident that he’d done all he could do for now, Carella left the squadroom at six that Friday night.
As Fat Ollie himself might have said, tomorrow was indeed another day.
Ah yes.
14.
PREDICTING A BUSY night tonight—because in this city Saturday night was when all the loonies came out to howl—Byrnes assigned only a skeleton crew to the day shift. Arriving at 7:45 A.M. to start their eight-hour stint were Detectives Meyer, Parker, and Genero. Meyer might have wished for slicker partners, but Carella had a wedding to attend, and Hawes was off chasing whoever had tried to kill him twice, and Kling had called in sick, so he was stuck with these two.
The first message came fifteen minutes after they’d signed in. It was delivered by a Caucasian drug addict, aged eighteen, nineteen, in there. The sealed envelope was addressed to Carella.
“I thought we were through with this guy,” Parker said.
“Apparently not,” Meyer said, and called Carella at home. Carella was already up and having breakfast. The wedding was scheduled for noon.
“Want me to open it?” Meyer asked.
“Be my guest,” Carella said.
There was a single note in the envelope. It read:
GO TO A PRECINT’S SHIT!
“He spelled precinct wrong,” Genero said. “Didn’t he?”
Meyer read the note to Carella, misspelling and all.
“He doesn’t make spelling mistakes,” Carella said.
“Unless he’s quoting Shakespeare.”
“This isn’t Shakespeare.”
“What do you think?”
“An anagram,” Carella said. “He’s starting all over again.”
“Or is he just telling us it’s going to happen right here,” Meyer said. “In the Eight-Seven Precinct.”
“Maybe that, too. Let me talk to my son.”
“Huh?” Meyer said.
THE NAME IN THE mailbox was Edward Cudahy.
Hawes had not got the address until eight this morning when finally he’d reached Rudy Mancuso, who’d told him Saturday was Eddie’s day off, and wanted to know why Hawes wanted to talk to him again. Hawes told him he needed to confirm some information he’d got from Cudahy’s partner, Franklin Hopper. A total fabrication, but Mancuso gave him the address.
The apartment number was 3B.
There was no lock on the glass-paneled inner lobby door. Hawes opened it and found himself facing a steep flight of stairs. A narrow corridor to the right of the steps led to an apartment at the end of the ground-floor level. He began climbing. It was now eight-thirty in the morning, and the building was heavy with sleep. On the third floor, he took his gun from its shoulder holster.
There was no sound from behind the door to apartment 3B. He listened a moment longer, and then tapped at the door. Waited. A voice called, “Yes?”
“Federal Express,” he said.
“Fed…?”
A puzzled silence.
He waited.
The door came open some four inches, held by a night chain. Eddie Cudahy’s face appeared in the narrow opening. His eyes widened the moment he recognized Hawes. The door was already starting to close again. In that single instant, Hawes had to decide whether or not to kick it in. He was not armed with a No-Knock warrant, but the guy in there might have fired a rifle at him on two separate occasions. Possibly blow the later court case, or lose the perp now? Which? Choose!
His flat-footed kick snapped the chain and sent the door flying inward. He followed it into the room, saw Cudahy running for the window and the fire escape beyond, saw too in those next immediate sudden seconds that the walls of the single room were covered with photographs of Honey Blair.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” he shouted, and was grateful when Cudahy stopped and put his hands up over his head.
IT’S EASY TO FIND things when you’re a kid.
It’s even easy to find 1,253 anagrams for the words GO TO A PRECINT’S SHIT! because that’s exactly how many there were on the internet site Young Sherlock Holmes called up for his big detective father. Scattered among those that made no sense at all were some actual phrases or sentences that seemed to mean something:
GO STOP A CRETIN!
“He’s calling himself a cretin,” Mark said.
“That, he ain’t,” Carella said.
A NICE GROT STOP!
“What’s a grot?” Carella asked.
“British slang,” Mark said. “Brit kid in my class says that all the time. ‘I feel a bit grot today.’ ”
“So what’s a ‘grot stop’?”
“A break when you’re not feeling too good?”
“I’m not feeling too good right this minute,” Carella said, and rolled his eyes.
GRITS TO A PONCE!
“What’s grits?” Mark asked.
“Some kind of Southern dish,” Carella said. “Made out of corn, I think. What’s a ponce?”
“That’s British, too,” Mark said. “It’s somebody who’s gay.” He turned from the computer. “Is this guy gay? The one who’s sending you these notes?”
“I don’t think so.”
A NEGRO COP TITS!
“Well, hello,” Mark said, and grinned.
But the anagram the Deaf Man seemed to be indicating, the words that seemed best to fit GO TO A PRECINT’S SHIT!, was all the way down near the end of the list:
PROGNOSTICATE THIS!
He was asking them to predict.
He was asking them to forecast exactly what precinct shit would go down in which precinct on the twelfth day of June.
Today.
And she goes down at twelve.
GO TO A PRECINT’S SHIT!
PROGNOSTICATE THIS!
But when on the twelfth?
And where?
If not the library or the concert hall, then where in their very own precinct?
HAWES MARCHED HIS prisoner into the stationhouse moments after the second note that day was delivered. The clock over the muster desk read 9:10 A.M.
“You want to take this upstairs?” Murchison asked him, and handed the envelope across the desk. He was not wearing gloves. They had given up wearing gloves when handling these envelopes because they knew there’d be no prints on them except those left by the delivering junkies.
On the second floor, Hawes dropped the envelope on Meyer’s desk, and then said, “This way, Eddie.”
“Who’s that?” Meyer asked.
“Guy tried to kill me,” Hawes said.
“He’s dreaming,” Cudahy told Meyer, but he accompanied Hawes down the hall toward the Interrogation Room.
Meyer shrugged and opened the envelope.
One, two, three: time, time!
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Parker asked.
“It means three o’clock,” Meyer said, “what do you think it means? One, two, three, bingo! He’s giving us the exact time, the time! It’s either the folio or the violinist.”
“Or something else at one, is a possibility,” Parker said. “Or even something at two.”
“I thought it was supposed to be precinct shit now,” Genero said.
He had gone outside to look at the word lettered across the top of the entrance doors, and sure enough the Deaf Man had spelled it wrong.
&
nbsp; “Maybe it is something in the precinct,” Parker said. “At one or two o’clock.”
Actually, he didn’t care where it was or when it was. All he knew was that at four o’clock he’d go home.
Meyer was already on the phone with Carella, reading him the note.
“What happened to the anagrams?” Carella asked.
“This is what we got,” Meyer said.
“Call me if anything else comes in,” Carella told him. “I’ll be here till eleven.”
“I SAW YOU THE FIRST time you came up to the station,” Cudahy told Hawes. He had decided that maybe it was best to cooperate here. Maybe if he explained his side of it, Hawes would understand. On television, there were sympathetic cops who understood a person’s side of it.
“This was after she taped the Valparaiso kidnapping last month,” Cudahy said. “I spotted you going into the screening room together to watch the tape. The screening room is right down the hall from Transportation. I saw you when you went in, and I saw you when you came out together. I knew something was going on right then. Knew it right off. Figured I had to stop it.”
“Why?” Hawes asked.
“Why? Because I have an investment in her.”
“Oh, you do, huh? What kind of investment, if you don’t mind?”
“An emotional investment. I watched her from the very beginning, from when she first came to the station from Iowa, when they had her doing these remotes from godforsaken places all over the city, in weather you could freeze yourself, those little skirts she wears, in rainstorms, snowstorms, even places that were dangerous, drug dealers, hookers, they sent her everywhere! And I was watching her. So I wasn’t about to let somebody step in and take my place, not after all those years of her paying her dues.”
“Take your place, huh?”
“Yes! My rightful place!”
“Did she even know you existed? Does she know you exist now?”
Hawes was trying to keep this from getting too personal here. But this little son of a bitch had tried to kill him, twice, no less.
“Oh, she knows I exist, all right. You think she doesn’t stop in Transportation every now and then, thank us for the good service we provide, the cars we send her? You think she doesn’t know I’m taking good care of her? She gave me a signed picture last Christmas. Autographed personally to me. ‘To Eddie, With Warmest Wishes, Honey.’ Warmest wishes. You think that means nothing, warmest wishes?”
“So you decided to kill me.”
“Only when you started sleeping over. Until then…listen, she’s entitled to friends, that’s okay with me. I didn’t mind you taking her to restaurants, to movies, that was okay. But…”
“What’d you do, follow us?”
“Just to make sure you didn’t harm her.”
“Followed us all over the city, is that it?”
“To protect her! But when you started staying at her place nights…no. That wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right. No.”
He was shaking his head now, convincing himself that this wasn’t right, trying to convince Hawes as well that this simply wasn’t right.
“Did you know I was a cop?”
“Not at first.”
“How about later?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t think I could protect her, huh? A police officer? Couldn’t protect her, huh?”
“You’re the one I was trying to protect her from!”
“So you tried to kill me.”
“Tried to keep you away from her.”
“And almost killed her in the bargain!”
“I didn’t know she was in the car. I thought the driver had dropped her off at Four, and then gone to pick you up. I was waiting for you on Jefferson Avenue, but I didn’t know she was with you.”
“Waiting to kill me,” Hawes said.
“To warn you.”
“But killing me would’ve been all right, too, huh?”
“You should have kept away from her. It was your fault I almost hurt her. I apologized for that.”
“Oh, you did, huh?”
“In the note I wrote.”
“What note?”
“I sent her an apology. Told her I was sorry, I didn’t know she was in the limo.”
“When was this?”
“Right after what happened on Jefferson Avenue. The incident there.”
“Incident! Attempted murder, you mean!”
And then, suddenly, what Cudahy had just said sunk in. If he’d really written Honey a note of apology, then she’d known all along that she hadn’t been his intended victim. All that stuff on television…
“Go ask her, you don’t believe me,” Cudahy said.
Hawes guessed he’d have to.
MEYER AND HIS TWO brilliant sleuths were still pondering the first two notes when the third one arrived at twelve minutes to ten.
It read:
Why, sir, is this such a piece of study?
Now here is three studied, ere ye’ll thrice wink:
Meyer called Carella at once.
“He’s zeroing in on three,” he told him.
“Going backwards, too,” Carella said. “Halving the numbers each time. First twelve, then six, now three.”
“Backwards and smaller.”
“Right. Spears, arrows, darts, remember?”
“If he’s saying three o’clock,” Meyer said, “then it’s still either Clarendon Hall or the library.”
“Neither of which is in our precinct.”
“So what was all that about ‘a precinct’s shit’?”
“Might’ve had nothing to do with anything. Just an anagram for ‘prognosticate this.’ Just him telling us to predict.”
“Or…” Meyer said.
“Yeah?”
“Did you notice he said ‘a precinct’s shit’? Not ‘the precinct’s shit.’ What he said was ‘Go to a precinct’s shit.’ ”
“So?”
“So…if it’s three o’clock, then it’s Clarendon Hall or the library. It’s either the Eight-Four’s shit, or Mid South’s. Not ours.”
“Yeah, I get what you’re saying.”
“Although…”
“Yeah?”
“He says, ‘Go to a precinct’s shit.’ Go to it. Maybe he’s telling us to send some of our own people to both venues.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“It’s a thought, isn’t it?” Meyer said.
Carella could almost see him smiling.
“It’s a good thought,” he said. “Let’s see what he sends next.”
“You put on your tuxedo yet?”
“Just about to.”
THE NEXT NOTE came at 10:27 A.M.
My lord, I was born about three
of the clock in the afternoon
“Three o’clock for sure,” Meyer told Carella on the phone. “That still makes it either Sallas and the Eight-Four, or the folio and Mid South.”
“We’re covered either way,” Carella said.
“Right.”
Both men fell silent.
“The thing is…”
“I know.”
“If it’s either Mid South or the Eight-Four, why’s he breaking our balls?”
“Maybe we’re reading this all wrong,” Meyer said.
“You think?”
“No, I think we’ve got it right.”
“But, you know…”
“Yeah.”
“All that tight security.”
“Right.”
“He can’t really be telling us it’s three o’clock, can he?”
Both men were silent again.
“So how do you want to work this?”
“I’ve got a wedding to go to.”
“You know what I think?”
“Say.”
“We have nothing to worry about. The Eight-Four is sending its people over, and so is Mid South.”
“Right. So we’re okay.”
“I think so.”
“Me, t
oo.”
“Don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just…with this guy…”
“I know.”
“He may be planning to blow up the Calm’s Point Bridge, who the hell knows? All the rest of it may be bullshit, just like Parker says.”
“Yeah, well, Parker,” Meyer said, lowering his voice.
Carella looked at the clock again.
“I gotta get out of here,” he said.
“Good luck,” Meyer said.
NOSTRADAMUS!
It was writ large. And the slanted exclamation point lent urgency to the word, demanding attention.
“Another anagram, right?” Genero said.
“Wrong,” Parker said. “Nostra Damus is a college in the Midwest.”
Meyer was thinking about the anagram they’d received first thing this morning:
GO TO A PRECINT’S SHIT!
Which they’d rearranged as:
PROGNOSTICATE THIS!
He’d been taught by his grandfather that Nostradamus was a sixteenth-century French physician who’d become famous during his lifetime and afterward because of his talent for prophesying the future. Prophecies. Prognostications. Prognosticate this, amigo! And now Nostradamus, who had fascinated Meyer’s grandfather only because he’d been born of Jewish parents.
“Nostradamus was…” Meyer started to explain, but Genero said, “There’s ‘SUM’ again.”
“Where?” Parker asked.
“Backwards,” Genero said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?” Parker asked impatiently.
“All those notes we got. Where are those copies, Meyer?”
Meyer found the copied notes, spread them on his desktop.
“Here you go,” Genero said. “Here’s the one I mean.”
But she would spell him backward
“So?” Parker said.
“And this one,” Genero said.
MUST SELL AT TALLEST SUM
