Hark! (10 page)

He turned the CD pamphlet over, looked at the picture on the back of it.

“You think any of these guys are handsome?” he asked.

She hesitated.

A tick of an instant too long, he thought.

Then she said, “No.”

She took the pamphlet from his hand, thumbed through it till she found the lyrics for another of the songs, something called “Black Woman.”

“I like these last few couplets, don't you?” she said.

“Couplets,” he said. “Now
that's
Shakespeare for you.”

She began reading them aloud.

She looked up into his face.

Batted her eyelashes like an ingenue.

“So what do you say, big boy?” she asked.

 

“D
O YOU KNOW HOW
much money was in that box?” the Deaf Man asked her.

Melissa debated lying. But she figured it might not be such a good idea to lie to this man.

“Yes,” she said.

He looked surprised. She did not think he was the sort of man a person could ever surprise, but he sure looked surprised now.

“How do you know?”

“I counted it,” she said.

“Why?”

She again debated lying. No, she thought. Always tell this man the truth. Or one day he'll kill you.

“I counted it so I'd know how much I should ask. For what I did. For walking that money out of the bank for you.”

“I see. You felt you were entitled to some sort of reward, is that it?”

“Well…a million-eight,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. “Don't
you
think that's worth a tip?”

Stop thinking like a hooker, she warned herself.

“How big a tip, would you say?”

She knew better than to fall into this trap.

“I'll leave that entirely to your judgment,” she said.

“Does a hundred thousand sound okay?” he asked, and smiled.

She smiled back.

“A bit low,” she said, “but hey, you're the boss.”

S
HE FIGURED HE THOUGHT
of himself as some kind of mentor.

The last time she had a mentor was right here in the big bad city, the minute she got off the bus from L.A. Enter Ambrose Carter in his shiny pimp threads, Hey, li'l girlfriend, welcome to town. Got a place to stay? Introduced her to twelve of his homies that very night, cheaper by the dozen, right? Twelve of them who took her under their collective wing, a sort of pimp conglomerate that proceeded to fuck her day and night in a tiny room off the Stem, everywhere, anyplace she had an opening, day and night, twelve of them coming into the room one after the other to let her know she belonged to them, day and night. “Turned her out,” as the expression went in the trade. Taught her she was nothing but a cheap two-bit hooker now, even though in L.A. she'd been getting a hundred bucks a throw for a mere blowjob.

Well, boys, you should see me now, she thought.

Adam wasn't kidding when he'd said a hundred K.

That's what he'd given her, cold cash, and he'd also taken her to a fur salon on Hall Avenue, where they were having what they called their Fall Preview Sale, when it wasn't even summer yet, and he bought her a sable coat that came right down to her ankles, and a mink stole she could wrap around her three times.

He also told her she could now leave anytime she wanted, but that if she stayed she might learn a thing or two.

This was what made her think he might want to be her mentor.

He did not tell her what he was up to, but she figured it had to be something grand. When a man already had a million-eight in the poke—less the hundred grand he'd laid on her, and the sable and the mink—he certainly didn't have to take risks on any penny-ante scheme. She knew this had something to do with misleading the police, though she didn't know exactly why he would want to do that. She also suspected that she would somehow figure into his plan later on, he wasn't just keeping her around because she gave great head, which by the way, she did, and that wasn't just her opinion.

She was curious to see how this thing might unfold.

She was also wondering if he'd cut her into it for another big chunk later on.

So she figured she
would
stick around, why not, even though the hundred K could take her around the world three times over, like the mink stole took her shoulders.

“Do you know the story Frank Sinatra used to tell on himself? Do you like Sinatra?”

“I don't know Sinatra all that well,” she said.

The truth. With him, always the truth.

“When he was playing Vegas, he would put on his tux each night, and stand in front of the mirror tying his bow tie, can you visualize that?”

“Sort of,” she said. She found it hard to visualize Sinatra himself. She concentrated instead on some guy trying to tie a bow tie.

“He'd tweak the tie this way and that…”

She loved him using words like “tweak,” which most guys didn't.

“…until finally he said to his mirror-image, ‘That's good enough for jazz.' Do you understand the meaning of that?”

“No, I'm afraid I don't.”

Never lie to this man, she thought again.

“He was going out there to sing jazz. This was not grand opera, this was merely jazz. And he wasn't going to fool around with that tie any longer, it was good enough for jazz. You have to remember, Lissie, that even in his later years, Sinatra could sing rings around any other singer, male or female. Any of them. Name one who could beat him. And he knew exactly how good he was. Never mind who hit the charts that particular week. He knew none of them could come anywhere near him. In fact, he knew how
bad
most of them really were, million-copy gold records or not. So he was just going out there to sing his splendid jazz in yet another barroom to yet another bunch of people who'd already heard all his tunes. The bow tie was good enough for jazz, do you see?”

“Gee,” she said.

“Well, I can always tie my tie so that it's good enough for jazz, I can do what I plan to do without all this folderol beforehand…”

Folderol. Another word she liked.

“But then where would all the fun be?” he asked, and looked deep into her eyes. “Where would all the fun be, Lissie?”

H
E'S BACK TO
spears again,” Genero said.

The Deaf Man's first note that Friday morning, the fourth day of June, read:

“Or is he telling us he's just a bore?” Parker asked.

“Which he spelled wrong, by the way.”

“Because, you want to know the truth, I think he
is
a bore. Him and his Shakespeare both.”

“Never give critics a good line,” Carella said.

Parker didn't know what he meant.

“Anyway, we don't know for sure that this one
is
Shakespeare,” Kling said.

“Well,” Eileen said, “he
told
us it was going to be Shakespeare from now on, didn't he? That's what he told us yesterday, am I right? That's what the
spear
and all those
shakes
were about yesterday.”

She was inordinately proud of her deduction yesterday, and did not much like Kling shooting her down this way now. In her secret heart, she also felt he wouldn't be talking this way if they hadn't once shared a relationship. This was some kind of man-woman thing between them, she felt, and had nothing whatever to do with sound police work.

“Who else but Shakespeare would talk like that?” Carella asked.

“Right,” Genero said. “Nobody but Shakespeare talks like that.”

“Well,
Marlowe
talked like that,” Willis said.

“Marlowe said ‘Where is your boar-spear, man?' ”

“I don't know if Marlowe actually said that particular line. I'm just saying Marlowe talked a lot like Shakespeare.”

“Did Raymond Chandler know that?” Kling asked.

“Know what?” Brown asked.

“Who's Raymond Chandler?” Genero asked.

“The guy who wrote the books,” Meyer said.

“What books?”

“The Phillip Marlowe novels.”

“Did he
know
he sounded like Shakespeare?”

“I'm talking about
Christopher
Marlowe,” Willis said.

“What's a boar-spear, anyway, man?” Brown asked.

“They had these wild boars back in those days,” Parker said.

“The question is,” Eileen said, “why's he going back to
spears
again?”

“Maybe he's gonna throw a spear at somebody,” Genero suggested.

“This city,” Parker said, “I'd believe it.”

 

A
S
H
AWES WAS LEAVING
the squadroom for his eleven o'clock doctor's appointment, Genero sidled over to him.

“I know how it feels to get shot in the foot,” he said. “I'm with you, guy.”

“Thanks,” Hawes said.

Actually, he didn't appreciate the comparison. The way he recalled it, Genero had shot
himself
in the foot. This was on the eighth day of March during a very cold winter many years ago, the second time the Deaf Man had put in an appearance. What he'd done
that
time around was demand $50,000 in lieu of killing the deputy mayor, asking that the Eight-Seven leave the money in a lunch pail on a bench in Grover Park.

If Hawes remembered correctly, the fuzz staked out in the park that day had included a detective recruited from the Eight-Eight, who was posing as a pretzel salesman at the entrance to the Clinton Street footpath. Meyer and Kling, disguised as a pair of nuns, were sitting on a park bench saying their beads. Willis and Eileen were pretending (or not) to be a passionate couple necking in a sleeping bag on the grass behind another bench. Genero was sitting on yet another bench, wearing dark glasses and scattering bread crumbs to the pigeons as he patted a seeing-eye dog on the head.

Genero was still a patrolman at the time. He'd been pressed into undercover service only because there was a shortage of detectives in the squadroom that Saturday. Unaccustomed to the art of surveillance, he jumped up the moment he saw somebody picking up the lunch pail, yanked off his blind man's dark glasses, unbuttoned the third button of his overcoat the way he'd seen detectives do on television, reached in for his revolver, and promptly shot himself in the leg.

This was not the same thing as getting shot by a sniper from a rooftop across the way.

Or maybe it was.

Grumbling to himself, Hawes threw open the front door of the stationhouse, nodded to the uniformed cop bravely protecting homeland security on the steps outside, and limped down to the sidewalk, where he planned to make a right turn that would take him to the subway kiosk up the street.

A black stretch limo was standing at the curb, its engine running. Stenciled onto the rear door of the car was the Channel Four logo—a silhouette of the city's skyline with the huge numeral 4 superimposed on it. The tinted rear window on the street side slid down noiselessly. Honey Blair's grinning face appeared in the opening.

“Want a lift, gorgeous?” she asked.

Hawes walked over to the car. “Hey!” he said. “What're
you
doing here?”

“Thought I'd surprise you,” she said.

He climbed in beside her, pulled the door shut behind him. “Nice wheels,” he said.

“One of the perks of being a media
staaah
,” she said, rolling her eyes on the last word.

“Five seventy-four Jefferson,” Hawes told the driver.

“I've already got that, sir,” the driver said.

Honey tapped a button. The tinted glass partition between the driver's seat and rear compartment slid up, closing them off, sealing them in a soundless, moving cocoon.

“Here's another perk,” she said, and unzipped his fly.

“Uh-oh,” Hawes said.

“You know why Clinton got impeached, don't you?” she asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“It was because right-wing conservatives didn't know what the word ‘blowjob' meant.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh-huh. They thought ‘blowjob' was the code word for two villains running around the White House.”

“Now where'd they get
that
idea?”

“From James Bond.”

“I see. Two villains from James Bond, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Which ones?”

“Blofeld and Oddjob,” she said.

She didn't say anything else after that.

Or if she did, he didn't hear her.

 

D
R
. S
TEPHEN
H
ANNIGAN
was one of the orthopedists approved by the PD for the treatment of police personnel injured in the line of duty. Whether getting shot as you left your girlfriend's house in the early morning qualified as “injured in the line of duty” was a matter for the Police Benevolent Association to sort out later. Meanwhile, a civil servant who earned $62,587 a year as a Detective/Second Grade pulled up in a stretch limo in front of 574 Jefferson Avenue at the corner of Jefferson and Meade. Hawes kissed Honey goodbye, and was just stepping out on the curb side of the car, when—

He hurled himself and Honey to the floor of the car the instant he heard the first shot. He wasn't counting, but enough shots were fired in the next thirty seconds to shatter the tinted glass window of the limo, rip through the Channel Four logo on the rear door, tear up the interior upholstery, smash the whiskey and brandy decanters in both side door panels, and narrowly miss killing Honey and Hawes both.

Picking himself up off the floor of the car, Hawes yelled “I wasn't angry until right
now
!” never realizing how close he'd come to echoing Shakespeare's “I was not angry since I came to France” line in
King Henry V
, Act IV, Scene vii.

 

T
HE SECOND NOTE
that day read:

“That first line is intended for us,” Meyer said. “He's telling us by now we should be feeling disgraced, impeach'd…”

“Which he
also
spelled wrong,” Genero said.

“…and baffled here. That's what he's saying.”

“No, I don't think any personal message is intended here,” Eileen said. “I think he's simply calling our attention to the last word in the couplet.
Spear.
It's
spear
again.”

“I quite agree,” Genero said, sounding somewhat Shakespearean himself. “But what's a couplet?”

“And
why
?” Kling asked.

“Why what?” Parker said.

“Why's he pointing us to
spear
again?”

“A
poisoned
spear.”

“Where does it say that?”

“Venom'd. That means poisoned.”

“Shakespeare keeps dropping his e's, you notice that?”

“What's slander?” Genero asked.

“A lie,” Carella said.

 

“M
EANWHILE WE'VE GOT
a dead girl here,” Lieutenant Byrnes said.

He had asked Willis and Eileen to step into his office, and now they were sitting in chairs opposite his desk, listening attentively. Eileen figured the Loot was old enough to call a thirtysomething dead woman a “girl” and get away with it, so she forgave him. “Let's forget what this hard-of-hearing shmuck plans to do
next
,” Byrnes said, “and concentrate instead on what he's
already
done. He's committed murder, is what he's done. He can quote Shakespeare from here to Christmas, and that won't change the fact that he
killed
that girl!”

“Yes, sir,” Eileen said.

Byrnes glared at her.

“Pete,” she corrected.

“What'd the FBI report tell us, Hal?”

“Nothing,” Willis said. “No matching prints anywhere. Means she doesn't have a record, was never in the armed forces, and never worked for any governmental agency.”

“Which is not surprising,” Byrnes said. “How many people do you know who have their fingerprints on file?”

Willis thought this over. Except for the hundreds of assorted thieves he met in this line of work, he couldn't think of a single soul.

“I want both of you to go back to the girl's building,” Byrnes said. “He got into that apartment somehow. How'd he get past the doorman? Did anybody see him going in or coming out? He's not invisible, how'd he manage it? Talk to everybody and anybody. Get a description, get
something.
”

As they started out of his office, he added,
“Anything.”

 

T
HE CATERER WAS
as gay as a bowl of fresh daisies.

His name was Buddy Mears, and he was wearing a fawn-colored suit with a lavender shirt open at the throat. He had blond hair and blue eyes. A nose Caesar would have died for. High cheekbones. Taut skin. Teddy Carella wondered if he'd had a face lift. They were sitting in his office on Henley and Rhynes, in Riverhead, not far from the hall in which the reception would take place on June twelveth. Carella had driven here on his lunch hour. Teddy had taken a bus over. Sample menus were open on Buddy's desk. Several framed culinary awards were hanging on his walls. Plaques, too. Early June sunshine streamed through the windows and splashed onto the open menus.

“How many guests are we expecting?” he asked.

“About a hundred,” Carella said.

Teddy signed to him.

Buddy looked politely puzzled.

“A hundred and
twelve
,” Carella corrected.

Buddy already knew that Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute, speech-and-hearing impaired as they were calling it these days, but nonetheless a woman with devastating black hair and luscious dark brown eyes to match, absolutely gorgeous even when her fingers were flashing on the air, as they were now.

Carella watched her flying fingers.

“The numbers keep changing every day,” he translated for her. And then added, “Either my mother or my sister keep inviting new people all the time.”