Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

  ‘What else did you tell him?’ he asked again.

  ‘Well ... nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well ... I told him what you looked like and what you were wearing ... he was asking me questions, you see.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he was. How did he react to all this information?’

  ‘He seemed interested.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘He told me to keep in touch.’

  ‘And have you kept in touch?’

  ‘Well...’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Look, don’t you think you should tell me who you really are?’ she said.

  ‘I want to know whether you and Steve Carella have kept in touch.’

  ‘He said you’re a dangerous criminal is what he actually said. Are you a criminal?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me whether you’ve stayed in touch.’

  ‘What kind of criminal are you?’

  ‘A very good one.’

  ‘I mean ... like a burglar ... or a robber ... or ...’ She arched her eyebrows, the way her magazines had taught her. ‘A rapist?’

  ‘When did he tell you I was a criminal?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, when I saw him, I guess. At his house.’

  ‘Oh, you went to his house, did you?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘On Thanksgiving Day.’

  ‘And that was when he told you I was a criminal?’

  ‘Yes. And again today. A dangerous criminal is what he...’

  ‘Today?’ the Deaf Man said. ‘You spoke to him today?’

  ‘Well, yes, I did.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right after you called.’

  * * * *

  Four patrol cars were already angled into the curb when Carella and Brown got to the scene. At least a dozen patrolmen with drawn guns were crouched behind the cover of the cars, and more patrolmen were approaching on foot, at a run, their guns magically appearing in their hands the moment they saw what the situation was. Again neither Carella nor Brown discussed anything. They immediately drew their guns and stepped out of the car.

  A sergeant told them a cop was inside there. ‘Inside there’ was a doctor’s office. The cop and his partner had responded to a simple radioed 10-10—INVESTIGATE SUSPICIOUS PERSON—and had walked into the waiting room to find a man holding a .357 Magnum in his hand. The man opened fire immediately, missing both cops, but knocking a big chunk of plaster out of the waiting room wall and scaring the patients half to death. The point-cop had thrown himself flat on the floor. The backup-cop had managed to get out the door and radio the 10-13. The sergeant figured the man inside there was a junkie looking for dope. Doctors’ offices were prime targets for junkies. Carella asked the sergeant if he thought he needed them there. The sergeant said, ‘No, what I think I need here is the hostage team.’

  Carella and Brown holstered their guns and went back to the car.

  * * * *

  The Deaf Man was putting on his clothes. Naomi watched him from the bed.

  ‘I didn’t tell him you were coming here, if that’s what’s bothering you,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing’s bothering me,’ he said.

  But he was tucking the flaps of his shirt into his trousers. He sat again, put on his socks and shoes, and then went to the dresser for his cuff links. He put on the cuff links and then picked up the gun in its holster. He slipped into the harness and then came back to the chair for his jacket.

  She kept watching him, afraid to say anything more. A man like this one, you could lose him if you said too much. Instead, she opened her legs a little wider, give him a better look at her, he was only human, wasn’t he? He went to the closet, took his coat from a hanger, and shrugged into it.

  He walked back to the bed.

  He smiled and reached under his coat, and under his jacket, and pulled the gun from its holster.

  Naomi returned his smile and spread her legs a little wider.

  ‘Another game with the gun?’ she asked.

  * * * *

  It took Carella and Brown five minutes to clear the immediate area around the doctor’s office. The police had cordoned off the scene, so they had to slop at the barricade to identify themselves. It took them another ten minutes to get uptown to Naomi’s apartment.

  They were twelve minutes too late.

  The door to Naomi’s apartment was wide open.

  Naomi was lying on the bed with a bullet hole between her eyes.

  The pillow under her head was very red.

  Well, now they had a bullet.

  The bullet had entered Naomi Schneider’s skull just above the bridge of her manicured nose, and angled up slightly and exited at the back of her head, and had gone through the down pillow under her head to lodge in the mattress, where the lab technicians dug it out.

  The bullet told them that the murder weapon was a Colt Detective Special—similar to any one of the eleven on the picture the Deaf Man had sent I hem

  But that was all they had.

  And until they were in possession of an actual weapon they could test-fire for comparison purposes, the bullet was virtually useless to them.

  * * * *

  On Monday morning, December 12, another message from the Deaf Man arrived in the mail:

  They were looking at seven wanted flyers.

  ‘Beautiful people, each and every one of them,’ Meyer said.

  ‘Maybe he’s telling us who the gang is,’ Brown said.

  ‘He wouldn’t be that crazy, would he?’ Carella said. ‘To name them for us?’

  ‘Why not?’ Brown said. ‘If these guys are still loose, their pictures are in every precinct in town.’

  Which was just the problem.

  Even before they tacked the latest message to the bulletin board, the pictures were already there. All seven of them. Plus a dozen more like them. The detectives looked at all the Deaf Man’s messages now, marching across the bulletin board in a single, inscrutable horizontal line:

  Two nightsticks. Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Seven wanted flyers. Eight black horses, Eleven Colt Detective Specials.

  ‘What’s missing?’ Carella asked.

  ‘Everything’s missing,’ Brown said.

  ‘I mean ... there’s no one, right? Nothing for the number one. And nothing for nine or ten either.’

  ‘Assuming he plans to stop at eleven,’ Meyer said. ‘Suppose he plans to go to twenty? Or a hundred and twenty? Suppose he plans to keep sending these damn things forever?’

  * * * *

  ‘Fun is fun,’ Lieutenant Byrnes said, ‘but we happen to have two dead bodies.’

  He was sitting behind a desk in his corner office, the blinds open to the parking lot behind the police station. Inside the cyclone fence with its barbed wire frosting, pale December sunlight glanced off the white roofs of the patrol cars parked below. Carella thought the lieutenant looked tired. His hair seemed a bit grayer, his blue eyes a bit more faded. Am I going to look that way in a few years? he wondered. Is that what the job does to you? Burns you out, grinds you down to graying cinders?

  ‘Technically,’ Carella said, ‘the Schneider murder...’

  ‘It’s linked, it’s ours,’ Byrnes said flatly. ‘Wherever the hell it actually...’

  ‘The Four-One,’ Carella said.

  ‘So? Are they working it?’

  ‘No, Pete. They were happy to turn it over.’

  ‘Sure. Christmas coming up...’

  He let the sentence trail. He was thinking, Carella knew, that there’d be enough headaches ahead in the next two weeks. All the bad guys doing their Christmas shopping. The bad guys didn’t need cash or credit cards or charge accounts. The bad guys only needed nimble fingers. He wondered if the bad guys ever got to look as gray and as pale as Byrnes did. Send them to jail, they complained that the swimming pool wasn’t properly fi
ltered. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. They laughed at the old police adage and did their time standing on their heads, laughing. Came out looking healthier than when they went in, all that weight lifting in the prison gym. Came out ready to victimize again. Laughing all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride...

  ‘So what’ve you got?’ Byrnes asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Carella said.

  ‘Don’t tell me nothing, Byrnes said, ‘I’m starting to get heat on this. The cops in New York, they get a dead Harvard graduate, they wrap it in forty-eight hours. We got two dead girls, and you tell me nothing’

  ‘Well, we know it’s the Deaf Man, but...’

  ‘Then find him.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, Pete. We...’

  ‘What’s all this crap he keeps sending us? What’s any of it got to do with the victims?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘According to this ...’ He picked up the D.D. report on his desk. ‘According to this, the second girl knew him, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But only as Steve Carella. That’s the name he gave her.’

  ‘Used your name.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why’d she let him in that apartment? You told her he was dangerous, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So why’d she let him in? Was she crazy or something? Man like that, she lets him in her apartment?’ He shook his head. ‘What about the first victim? Did this ... what’s her name?’ He began leafing through the other D.D. reports.

  ‘Elizabeth Turner, sir.’

  ‘Did she know him, too?’

  ‘We don’t know, Pete. We’re assuming she did.’

  ‘Still don’t know where she worked, huh?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But you’re assuming it was a bank.’

  ‘That’s the line we’re taking, yes.’

  ‘Which would tie in. His M.O., I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe planning an inside job, is that what you figure?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Use the girl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t know which bank.’

  ‘We’ve checked them all, Pete.’

  ‘If he planned to use her, why’d he kill her?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Same gun?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘This picture of the guns ... the one he sent. All Colt Detective Specials, huh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And the Schneider girl was killed with a Colt Detective Special, huh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Eleven of them, huh? In the picture.’

  ‘Eleven, yes, sir.’

  ‘You think he plans to kill eleven girls?’

  ‘We don’t know, sir.’

  ‘What the hell do you know?’ Byrnes said, and then immediately said, ‘I’m sorry, Steve,’ and washed his open hand over his face and sighed heavily. ‘I got a call from Inspector Cassidy this morning,’ he said. ‘The girl’s father—the Schneider girl—her father’s a big wheel at some temple in Calm’s Point, he’s yelling like it’s the Holocaust all over again. You think there’s an anti-Semitic angle here?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘The other girl wasn’t Jewish, was she?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Yeah, well... also the Schneider girl worked for CBS, which the newspapers figure to be a glamour job...’

  ‘She was a receptionist there, Pete.’

  ‘You think he’s planning a heist at CBS?’

  ‘Well ... I’ll tell you the truth, that never occurred to us.’

  ‘I don’t know, do they have cash laying around there?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Anyway, you get a girl working for a television network, the media automatically makes a big deal of it. Well, you’ve seen the papers, you’ve seen television.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What I’m saying is we’re getting a lot of heat on this, Steve. From departmental rank and the media. I’d like to be able to tell somebody something. And soon.’

  ‘We’re doing our best, Pete.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. It’s just ... with Christmas coming...’

  He let the sentence trail again.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Christmas was indeed coming.

  And as far as Detective Lloyd Andrew Parker was concerned, it was coming too damn soon. In fact, it started coming sooner and sooner each year. This year the stores were already decorated for Christmas a few days before Thanksgiving. You woke up one morning, it wasn’t even turkey time yet, and there was Santa Claus in the store windows.

  Parker hated Christmas.

  He also hated his first name. He doubted that anyone on the squad knew his first name was Lloyd. Maybe no one in the entire world knew his first name was Lloyd. He himself had almost forgotten that his first name was Lloyd. Well, maybe Miscolo in the clerical office knew because he was the one who made out the pay chits every two weeks. Lloyd was a piss-ant name. Andrew was better because Andrew was one of the twelve apostles, and anybody with a twelve-apostle name was a good guy. If you were reading a book—which Parker rarely did—and you ran across a guy named Luke, Matthew, Thomas, Peter, Paul, James, like that, you knew right off he was supposed to be a good guy. That was in books. In real life you sometimes got the scum of the earth named for apostles, criminals who’d slit your throat for a nickel.

  Parker hated criminals.

  He also hated being called Andy. Made him sound like fuckin’ Andy Hardy or something. Little piss-ant twerp having heart-to-heart chats with his Judge Hardy father. Parker hated judges. It was judges who let criminals go free. He would have preferred being called Andrew, which was his true and honorable middle name. Andrew had some respect attached to it. Andy sounded like a good old boy you patted on the back: Hey, Andy, how’s it goin’, Andy? Parker hated his mother for having named him, first of all, Lloyd, and then having reduced his middle name, which he’d got when he was confirmed, to Andy. Parker hated his father for not having stood up to his mother when she decided to name him first Lloyd and then Andrew. Parker was glad both his mother and his father were dead.

  Parker wished Santa Claus was dead, too.

  Parker wished Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would get shot some starry Christmas Eve and be served as venison steak on Christmas Day. Or, better yet, venison stew. If he heard that dumb song on the radio one more time, he would take out his pistol and shoot the fuckin’ radio. The person Parker liked most at Christmastime was Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge would’ve made a good cop. Parker thought of himself as a good cop, but he knew most of the guys on the squad thought he was a lousy cop. He also knew they didn’t like him much. Fuck ‘em, he wasn’t running in any fuckin’ popularity contest.

  The Christmas songs had started on the radio a couple of days ago, as if all the disc jockeys just couldn’t wait to start playing them. Same old songs every year. This was only the fifteenth of December, and already he’d heard all the Christmas songs a hundred times over. ‘Silent Night’ and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’—he wished the little drummer boy would get shot together with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—and ‘The First Noel’ and ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘White Christmas’ and ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ and ‘Deck the Halls’ and ‘Jingle Bells’ and the worst fuckin’ Christmas song ever written in the history of the world: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.’ If Parker ever met the guy who wrote that song, he’d give him his two front teeth all right, on a platter after he knocked them out of his mouth.

  Parker hated Christmas songs.

  He hated everything about this city at Christmastime.

  He hated the city all the time, but he hated it most at Christmastime.

  All those phony Santa Clauses standing on street corners ringing bells and ask
ing for donations. All the Salvation Army piss-ants blowing trumpets and shaking tambourines. All the fake fuckin’ beggars who crowded the sidewalks, guys with signs saying they were blind or deaf and dumb like Carella’s wife, or guys on little trolleys with signs saying they lost their legs, all of them phonies like the phony Santa Clauses. Fuckin’ phony blind man went home at night, all of a sudden he could see when he was counting the money in his tin cup. Parker hated the street musicians and the break dancers. He hated the guys selling merchandise on the sidewalks outside department stores. If he had his way, he’d lock up even the ones who had vendor’s licenses, cluttering up the sidewalks that way, most of them selling stolen merchandise. Parker hated the out-of-towners who flocked to this city before Christmas. Gee, looka the big buildings, Mama. Fuckin’ greenhorns, each and every one of them, cameras clicking, oohing and ahhing, prime targets for pickpockets, caused more trouble than they were worth. Suckers for all the guys driving horse-drawn carriages around Grover Park. He hated the way those guys decorated their carriages for the holidays, garlands of pine hanging all over them, wreaths, banners saying seasons greetings, all the phony trappings of Christmas, when all they were after was the buck, the long green. Hated horses, too. All they did was shit all over the streets, make the job harder for the sanitmen. Hated the idea that there were still some horse-mounted cops in this city, more horses to shit on the city streets, had their stable right up here in the Eight-Seven, the old armory on the corner of First and Saint Sab’s, saw them heading downtown each and every morning, a fuckin’ parade of horses in different colors, cops sitting on them like they were a fuckin’ Roman legion. Hated horses and hated mounted cops and hated tourists who should have stayed home in Elephant Shit, Iowa.