Hark! (30 page)

“Sure as hell
looks
like Shakespeare,” Parker insisted.

“But why's he taking us back to 4884?” Carella said.

“Could it be a street address?” Eileen said.

“Must be thousands of 4884's in this city.”

“Let me see that new one again,” Willis said.

They all looked at it:

Look, sire, paper is kool!

“Well, this is off the wall, I know…”

“Let's hear it,” Hawes said.

“In this first quote. The third line…”

We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth

“The last three words…”

thy printed worth

“What I'm thinking, Willis said, “is…well…I know this is far out…but if you
print
something, you've got to have…”

“Paper!”
Eileen said, and felt like kissing him, he was so smart.

Look, sire, paper is kool!

“Hey, kool!” Genero said. “He's telling us to look at the newspapers, see what's playing around town.”

“Find the concert.”

“
If
it's a concert.”

“We've already done that,” Parker said sourly.

 

P
OLLY
V
ANDERMEER WAS
a cute little twenty-two-year-old blonde wearing a pleated plaid skirt and a white long-sleeved blouse with a tie that matched the skirt. Looking more like a preppie freshman than a senior in Communications at Ramsey University, she greeted Hawes with a wide smile and a warm handshake. Miss Blair, as she called her, had already told her that a detective investigating the shooting wanted to talk to her. She did not seem at all intimidated; she'd already spoken to two detectives from the Eight-Six Squad.

“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.

R
UDY
M
ANCUSO 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.”

 

Y
OU'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.

 

T
HE 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.

 

W
HEN 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.