Eight Black Horses

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 asking 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.

Most of all, Parker hated Alice Patricia Parker.

None of the guys on the squad knew that Parker had once been married. Fuck ‘em, it was none of their business.

Around Christmastime he always wondered where Alice Patricia was. He hated her, but he wondered where she was, what she was doing.

Probably still hooking someplace.

Probably L.A. She’d always talked about going out to California. Maybe San Francisco. Hooking someplace out there in California.

On Thanksgiving Day he’d sat alone in his garden apartment in Majesta and watched the Gruber’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Watched it on one of the local channels. Not as big or as famous as the Macy’s parade in New York, but what the fuck, it was at least the city’s own parade. Ate a frozen turkey dinner he’d heated up in his microwave oven. And wondered where Alice Patricia was.

And wondered what she was doing.

Blond hair and blue eyes.

A figure you could cry.

Whenever a blond, blue-eyed homicide victim turned up—like the one Carella and Brown had caught in October—Parker wondered where Alice Patricia was, wondered if she was lying dead in an alley someplace, her throat slit by some California pimp.

I’m only doing it as a sideline, she’d told him.

Well, listen, they’d warned him. This was when he was still working out of the Three-One downtown, not a bad precinct, still in uniform down there, learning what it was like to be a fuckin’ cop in this fuckin’ city. Filth and garbage, that was what you dealt with. Went home with the slink of it on your hands and in your nostrils. He’d met her in a bar, she was dancing topless there, the guys all warned him. These topless dancers, they said, you know what they are. They’re either turning tricks already, or else they drift into doing massage parlors part-time, and before you knew it, they were full-fledged hookers. He told them to go fuck themselves. Alice Patricia was maybe dancing topless, but she had ambitions and ideals, wanted to dance someday in a legitimate show, make it here and then move on to Broadway and the big time. Took ballet lessons and voice lessons and acting lessons, wanted to make it big. She wasn’t what they thought. Parker knew she wasn’t. When he married her, he didn’t invite any of the guys from the Three-One to the wedding.

It was going good, he thought it was going real good.

Then one night—he had the four to midnight—he went over to the club she was working at, a place called Champagne Bubbles or some such shit, and one of the girls told him Alice Patricia had gone out for an hour or so, and he said, ‘What do you mean she went out for an hour or so?’ This was now twelve-thirty, one o’clock in the morning, the place was almost empty except for some sailors sitting at the bar watching a girl Alice Patricia called the Titless Wonder. ‘This time of night she went out for an hour or so?’ Parker said. He knew what this city turned into after midnight. A fuckin’ moonscape full of predators crawling the streets looking for victims. Filth and garbage, the stink of it. ‘Where’d she go?’ he asked.

The girl looked at him.

She was topless. She kept toying with a string of pearls around her neck.

‘Where’d she go?’ he asked again.

‘Leave it be, Andy,’ the girl said.

He grabbed the string of pearls, ripped them from her neck. The pearls clattered to the floor, rolled on the floor. The sound of the pearls was louder than the sound of the taped music the girl onstage was dancing to.

‘Where?’ he said.

So, you know, he found her in a hot-bed hotel three blocks from the club. He was in civvies, he had changed in the locker room when his tour ended, the room clerk thought he was a detective when he showed his shield. This was a year before he’d made Detective/Third. He’d made Detective/Third after the divorce, when he had nothing to concentrate on but police work. The room clerk told him a blond, blue-eyed girl had come in with a black man about fifteen minutes ago. The room clerk told him they were in room 1301. Parker would remember the number of the room always. And the stink of Lysol in the hallway.

He beat the black man to within an inch of his life. Kicked him down the stairs. Told him to get his black ass out of this city. He went back to the room. Alice Patricia was still on the bed, naked, smoking a cigarette.

He said, ‘Why?’

She said, ‘I’m only doing it as a sideline.’

He said, ‘Why?’

‘For kicks,’ she said, and shrugged.

‘I loved you,’ he said.

It was already past tense.

Alice Patricia shrugged again.

He should have killed her.

He said, ‘This is it, you know.’

‘Sure,’ she said, and stubbed out the cigarette.

He walked out of the room and out of the hotel and into the city. He beat up two drunks who were singing at the tops of their lungs on Hastings Street. He threw an ash can through a plate glass window on Jefferson Avenue. He roamed the city. He was drunk himself when he got back to the apartment at four in the morning. He thought maybe he’d find Alice Patricia there. He thought if she was there, he would kill her. But she was already gone, took all of her clothes with her. Not even a note. Took his lawyer three months to find her. The divorce became final six months after that. And three months after that he made Detective/Third.

He still wondered about her whenever the holidays came around.

Hated her, but wondered about her.

Hated the fuckin’ holidays.

Hated the thought of snow maybe coming for Christmas.

He hated snow. It started out white and pure and ended up filthy.

He hated Christmas trees, too. All they did was make a garbage collection problem, even more work for the sanitmen, like the horseshit all over the streets. Right after Christmas you had a dead forest of fuckin’ Christmas trees, trailing tinsel, stacked up outside the buildings with the garbage. The garbage was bad enough in this city, he sometimes thought it was a city of uncollected black plastic bags. The leftover Christmas trees only made it worse. Saw them all over the city. Dead. Trailing tinsel. She used to dance with this little G-string that looked as if it was made of Christmas tree tinsel, all sparkly and bright, her hips rotating, dollar bills tucked into the waistband. I’m only doing it as a sideline. Could’ve been a big fuckin’ star. He’d have gone backstage, talked to the other people in the cast. Alice Patricia is my wife, he would’ve said. No kidding? Yeah, I’m a cop. No kidding?

He hated being a cop.

Hated the notes from this guy who had the squadroom in a fuckin’ tizzy. The Deaf Man. Who gave a shit about the Deaf Man? In Parker’s world they were all thieves, some of them smart thieves and some of them dumb ones. Maybe the Deaf Man was a smart one, but he was still a thief. So what was all this fuss about the notes he was sending? Smart-ass thief was all.

Parker wondered what it was like to be young.

Wondered what it would be like to be called Andrew again.

Alice Patricia used to call him Andrew.

He hated her.

Oh, Christ, how he loved her!

* * * *

On Monday morning, December 19, another note from the Deaf Man arrived.

They were beginning to get tired of him. In six days it would be Christmas. They had other things to do besides worrying about his foolishness. They did not know why he had killed Elizabeth Turner—if he’d killed her—and they did not know what his goddamn messages meant. They figured be had killed Naomi Schneider because he may have told her something she had not yet repeated to them, and this something would have been dangerous if revealed. The Deaf Man let them know only what he wanted them to know. Anything else was a risk, and he took no unpredictable risks. So good-bye, Naomi.

But both cases were as dead as this year’s calendar would soon be, and the latest message from him was only an irritation. They merely glanced at it and then tacked it to the bulletin board with the others:

* * * *

Cotton Hawes was in trouble.

He felt like calling in a 10-13.

Instead, he said, ‘I do have a Gruber’s charge account.’

He was embarrassed to begin with. He had just bought Annie Rawles two hundred dollars’ worth of sexy lingerie as a Christmas gift. Two hundred and thirteen dollars and twenty-five cents with tax. He hoped he would not have to explain to this lady on the sixth floor of Gruber’s new uptown store that he had bought the underwear for a Detective/First Grade. The store, not six blocks from the station house, was part of the mayor’s new Urban Renewal Program. The real Gruber’s was all the way downtown, on Messenger Square. Hawes should have gone downtown. He should have known better than to shop anywhere in the precinct, even though the new store was very nice and—according to the mayor’s office, at least—was doing a very good business and was serving as a model for redevelopment of shitty neighborhoods all over the city.

‘Not according to our records,’ the woman behind the counter said.

Hawes wondered if she would be caught dead in the sort of sexy lingerie he had bought for Annie.

‘I’ve had a Gruber’s charge account for three years now,’ he said.

‘Let me see your card again, please,’ the woman said.

He handed her the card.

He was in the sixth-floor credit office. The woman downstairs on the first floor—where Lingerie was—had told him to go up to the sixth floor to the credit office because when she’d tried to run his card through the computer, she had come up with an INVALID. He had taken the escalator up to the sixth floor and had seen a bristling array of signs pointing in different directions: MANAGER’S OFFICE. CASHIER’S OFFICE. CREDIT OFFICE. RETURNS. PERSONNEL OFFICE. TOY DEPARTMENT. SANTA CLAUS. TELEPHONE OFFICE, REST ROOMS. He had almost got lost, fine detective that he was. But here he was in the credit office, handing his card across the counter to a woman who had a nose like a broomstick. And eyes like dirt. Her eyes were dirty. Not brown, not black—just dirty. She looked at his card with her dirty eyes. She almost sniffed it with her broomstick nose.

‘I have the new card,’ he said.

‘Where is the new card, sir?’ she asked.

‘Home,’ he said. ‘I haven’t put it in my wallet yet.’

He realized, as he said this, that claiming to have the card at home was akin to a pistol-carrying thief claiming he had left his permit in a desk drawer someplace.

‘If you planned to shop here,’ the woman said, ‘you should have put your card in your wallet.’

Hawes opened his wallet. ‘This is where the new card should be,’ he said. ‘But I left it home.’

He had really opened his wallet so she could see the gold and blue-enameled detective shield pinned to it. She looked at the shield with her dirty eyes.

‘You should have the new card with you at all times,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know I’d be shopping today,’ he said. ‘I have a lot of things to carry in my wallet,’ he said. ‘My police shield,’ he said. ‘My police ID card. I’m a detective,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to carry more things in my wallet than I absolutely have to.’

‘But you’re carrying the old card in your wallet,’ she said.

‘Yes, I am. By mistake. The new one should be there.’

‘The old card went through our computer as invalid.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’m up here on the sixth floor. But if you run a check through your computer files up here, you’ll see that I received a new card in May. And forgot to put it in my wallet.’

‘No wonder people get away with murder in this city,’ she said, and left the counter.

He waited.

She came back ten minutes later.

‘Yes, you did indeed receive a new card,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘Thank you,’ he added.

‘You understand, sir,’ she said, ‘that the charging of two hundred dollars’ worth of lingerie could not go unquestioned when a card came up invalid.’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ he said.

She knew it was for lingerie. She had called downstairs. He wondered if she knew what sort of lingerie.

“There are a lot of crooks in this city, you know,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m aware of that,’ he said.

‘If you’ll go downstairs again to Lingerie,’ she said, ‘the card will go through this time. I hope you are aware, sir, that panties are not returnable.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

‘Yes. Especially our Open City line, which many women wear for special occasions only. I hope you have the right size.’

‘I have the right size, yes,’ he said.

‘Yes, well,’ she said, and sniffed the air as if smelling something rank, and gave him a last look with her dirty eyes, and left him standing at the counter.

All the way home he thought about his encounter in Gruber’s. He wished Gruber’s would burn to the ground. He wished the mayor would take his Urban Renewal Program to Dallas, Texas. Or Vladivostok. All Gruber’s did was encourage more crime in an area already crime-ridden. More damn pickpocket and shoplifting arrests in that store since it opened last February than in all the oilier stores along the Stem. Okay, it was making a lot of money. And maybe attracting other businesses to the area. But did the mayor ever stop to think how much time the cops up here were putting into Gruber’s? On shitty little arrests? For which they had to travel all the way down to Headquarters to do the booking?

He was still fuming when he reached his building downtown. He stepped into the small entry foyer, took his keys from his pocket, and unlocked his mailbox. There was a sheaf of letters, including a bill from Gruber’s. He did not look at the mail more closely until he was in his apartment. He was tempted to call Annie, tell her about the hassle uptown, but that would blow the surprise. Instead, he mixed himself a drink and then sat down and leafed through the envelopes. One of them seemed to be a Christmas card. He tore open the flap on the red envelope. It was not a Christmas card. It was an invitation. It read:

Scrawled on the flap of the card in the same handwriting was the message:

Harriet was Harriet Byrnes, the lieutenant’s wile. Why in hell was she throwing a party for him in the squadroom? Was it Pete’s birthday? An anniversary? Twenty years on the force? Thirty? A hundred?

Hawes shrugged and wrote down the date and time in his appointment calendar.

* * * *

On Tuesday morning, December 20, the Deaf Man’s tenth message arrived.

They knew by now that the number of items pasted to each blank sheet of paper had nothing whatever to do with the order in which the messages were received. The eight black horses, for example, were on the very first message. The six police shields were on the fourth message. The eleven Colt Detective Specials were on the seventh message. And so on. And now on the tenth message:

The detectives tacked the sheet of paper to the bulletin board. There were now:

Two nightsticks. Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Seven wanted flyers. Eight black horses. Nine patrol cars. Ten D.D. forms. And eleven Detective Specials.

They still didn’t know what any of it meant.

Did he plan to stop at eleven?

Or would he go beyond that?

If he stopped at eleven, then the number one was still missing in the sequence.

The hell with it, they thought.

Christmas was only five days away.

* * * *

Bert Kling was looking through his mail when Eileen Burke let herself in with the key he had given her.

It was close to four-thirty in the afternoon, and the lights on the Calm’s Point Bridge—festooned for the holiday season and visible through his windows—were blinking red and green against the purple dusk. He sat under a floor lamp near the windows in an easy chair he’d bought in a thrift shop after his divorce. He had never discussed his divorce with Andy Parker. He had never discussed anything but police work with Parker, and even that rarely. He did not know Parker was himself divorced. He did not know that the two men might have shared common thoughts on the subject, did not know that Parker, like himself, thought of divorce as a kind of killing.

The holidays, even now and even with Eileen, were the most difficult time for Kling. Augusta would pop into his mind whenever he shopped the stores, even when he was shopping for Eileen. Well, the physical similarities, he supposed. In trying to settle on a color, he’d tell a store clerk that his girlfriend was a green-eyed redhead—describing Eileen, of course—and immediately Augusta would come to mind. Or in trying to remember what size Eileen wore, he’d say she was five feet nine inches tall, and immediately the image of Augusta would come again, unbidden, ghostlike, Augusta as he’d first seen her when he was investigating a burglary in her apartment...

Long red hair and green eyes and a deep suntan. Dark green sweater, short brown skirt, brown boots. High cheekbones, eyes slanting up from them, fiercely green against the tan, tilted nose gently drawing the upper lip away from partially exposed, even white teeth. Sweater swelling over breasts firm without a bra, the wool cinched tightly at her waist with a brown brass-studded belt, hip softly carving an arc against the nubby sofa back, skirt revealing a secret thigh as she turned more fully toward him…

Augusta.

‘Hi,’ Eileen said, and came to where he was sitting.

She kissed him on top of the head. Red and green lights from the bridge blinked into the red and green of her hair and her eyes.

‘You look like Christmas,’ he said.

‘I do, huh?’ she said. ‘I feel like Halloween. When did you get in? I called a little while ago.’

‘A little after four,’ he said. ‘I was doing some shopping. What’d the doctor say?’

‘He said time heals all wounds.’

She took off her coat, tossed it familiarly onto the bed, sat on the edge of the bed, eased off her high-heeled shoes, and reached down to massage one foot. Long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved and tapering to slender ankles. Eileen. Augusta. The knifing would have destroyed Augusta. She was a model, her face was her fortune. Eileen was only a cop. But she was a woman. And a beautiful woman. And she’d been cut on her face. The knifing had occured on October 21, two months ago. At the hospital they’d taken twelve stitches. The scar was still livid on her left cheek.

‘He said I might not need plastic surgery at all,’ Eileen said. ‘Told me the hospital emergency room did a very good job. He said the scar may look awful now...’

‘It doesn’t really look bad at all,’ Kling said.

‘Yeah, bullshit,’ Eileen said. ‘But it’ll heal as a thin white line, he said, if I can live with that. He said it all depends on my “acceptance level.” How do you like that for a euphemism?’

‘When do you have to see him again?’ Kling asked.

‘Next month. He says I shouldn’t even be thinking about plastic surgery just yet. He said the cut should be entirely healed within six months to a year, and I should wait till then to see how I feel. That’s what he means by acceptance level, I guess. How much vanity I have. How ugly I’d care to look for the rest of my life.’

‘You don’t look ugly,’ Kling said. ‘You couldn’t possibly look...’

‘I’m not winning any beauty contests these days, that’s for sure,’ Eileen said. ‘You think there are any rapists out there who dig scars? Think they’d go for a decoy with a slashed left cheek?’

‘I kind of like the look it gives you,’ he said, trying to joke her out of her dark mood. ‘Makes you look sort of dangerous.’

‘Yeah, dangerous,’ she said.

‘Devil-may-care. Like a lady pirate.’

‘Like a three-hundred-pound armed robber,’ Eileen said. ‘All I need is a tattoo on my arm. Mom in a heart.’

‘You feel like Chinese tonight?’ he asked.

‘I feel like curling up in bed and sleeping for a month. Going to see him is exhausting. He’s always so fucking consoling, do you know what I mean? It isn’t his fucking face, so he thinks...’

‘Hey,’ Kling said softly.

She looked up at him.

‘Come on,’ he said, and went to her. He kissed the top of her head. He cupped his hand under her chin and kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose. He kissed the scar. Gently, tenderly.

‘Kissing it won’t make it go away, Bert,’ she said, and paused. ‘I hope you didn’t buy me anything too feminine for Christmas.’

‘What?’

I don’t feel pretty,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want any gifts that...’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘And feminine. And sexy. And...’

‘Sweet talker,’ she said.

‘So where do you want to eat?’ he said. ‘McDonald’s?’

‘Big spender, too,’ she said, pausing again. ‘And what?’ she said.

‘Huh?’

‘Beautiful and feminine and sexy and what?’

‘And I love you,’ he said.

‘Truly?’

‘Truly.’

‘With all the umpteen million other women in this city... ?’

‘You’re the only woman in this city,’ he said.

She looked at him. She nodded.

‘Thank you,’ she said softly and rose from the bed. ‘Let me shower and change,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ she said again and kissed him on the mouth and then went into the bathroom.

He heard the shower when she turned it on.

He picked up the stack of mail again. He opened several Christmas cards and then picked up a red envelope and tore open the flap. The card inside read:

Scrawled on the flap on the card in the same handwriting was the message:

The door to the bathroom opened. Eileen poked her head around the jamb. ‘Wanna come shower with me?’ she asked.

* * * *

Christmas Day would fall on a Sunday this year.

This was good for the department stores. Normally sales fell off a bit on Christmas Eve. You had your last-minute shoppers, sure, and the stores all stayed open till six o’clock to accommodate even the tardiest, but the volume was nowhere as great as it was at any other time during that last hectic week before the big event. Unless Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday. Then, miraculously, sales perked up. This may have had something to do with the fact that working people were used to shopping on Saturdays. Maybe they felt this was just another Saturday, same as all the rest in the year, time to get out there and spend Friday’s paycheck. Or maybe the Christmas bonuses had something to do with it, get that big fat extra wad of money on Friday, good time to spend it was Saturday, right? It was funny the way a Saturday Christmas Eve brought out the customers in droves. Statistics showed that it didn’t work that way if Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday. Not as many shoppers. Even God rested on Sunday. This year, with prosperity lingering for yet a little while and with Christmas Eve coming on a Saturday, storekeepers, all over the city were anticipating a banner day.

On Thursday, December 22, the detectives of I he 87th Squad received what they surmised was almost the last of the Deaf Man’s communications.

It was Arthur Brown, in fact, who guessed this one was the penultimate one. The single white sheet of paper in the now-familiar typewritten envelope showed:

‘Number twelve,’ Brown said.

‘Twelve roast pigs,’ Carella said.

‘Only one more to go,’ Brown said.

‘How do you figure that?’

‘It’s the twelve days of Christmas, don’t you get it?’ Brown said. ‘Two nightsticks, three pairs of handcuffs, four police hats ... the twelve days of Christmas.’

‘He’s just wishing us a Merry Christmas, huh?’ Carella said.

‘Fat chance,’ Brown said. ‘But all that’s missing now is the first day. It’s the twelve days of Christmas, Steve. I’ll bet next month’s salary on it.’

‘So what’ll the first day be?’

‘Take a guess,’ Brown said, grinning.

* * * *

Brown did not like putting up Christmas trees.

He also did not like what Christmas trees cost nowadays. When he was a kid, you could get a huge tree for five bucks. The seven-foot tree he’d bought this year had cost him thirty-five dollars. Highway robbery. He would not have bought a tree at all if it weren’t for Connie, his eight-year-old daughter. Connie still believed in Santa Claus. There was no fireplace and hence no chimney in the Brown apartment, but Connie always left a glass of milk and a platter of chocolate-chip cookies under the tree for Santa. Every Christmas Brown had to drink the goddamn glass of milk before he went to bed. He also had to eat some of the chocolate-chip cookies.

The first thing he did not like about putting up a Christmas tree was the lights. It seemed to Brown that if the United States could put a man on the moon, then some brilliant scientist someplace could also figure out a way to make Christmas tree lights that didn’t have wires. Brown was no brilliant scientist, but he himself had figured out a very simple way to do this, and if some starving inventor out there wanted to cash in on a bonanza, he was willing to divulge it for a hefty piece of the action. He knew just how it would work in principle, but he didn’t have the electrical engineering know-how to put it on paper. He had never discussed his idea out loud with anyone because he didn’t want it stolen from him. There were a lot of crooks in this world, as he well knew, and it seemed likely to him that his multimillion-dollar idea would be stolen the moment he talked to anyone about it. He already had a name for the product: No Strings. If he and somebody went partners on it, they could sell billions and billions of Christmas tree lights every year. No strings. No wires to loop around branches. Each Christmas tree light an individual entity that could be hung anyplace on the tree. All anybody had to do was contact him, write to him care of the 87th Precinct, make him an offer. He was willing to listen.

Meanwhile, he struggled with the damn lights.

Nobody helped him.

That was the second thing he disliked about putting up the tree.

His wife, Caroline, was in the kitchen baking the chocolate-chip cookies Connie would put under the tree on Christmas Eve, some of which Brown would later have to eat while he drank the goddamn glass of milk. Connie herself was in the den watching television. All alone in the living room Brown struggled first with the lights and then with the Christmas balls, which was the third thing he disliked about putting up a tree. Not the Christmas balls themselves—except when one fell off the tree and crashed to the floor, leaving all those silvery splinters that were impossible to pick up—but the little hooks that held the balls to the tree. Why was it that no matter how carefully you packed all the ornaments away after Christmas, there were always more balls than there were hooks? Brown suspected there was an international ring of ornament-hook thieves.

The smell of baking cookies filled the apartment.

The sound of animated cartoon characters filled the apartment.

Brown worked on the tree.

Only two more days to go, he thought.

His daughter, Connie, suddenly appeared in the doorway.

‘How come there’s no black Santa Clauses?’ she asked.

Brown sighed.

* * * *

The twelve days of Christmas.

Twelfth Night.

The eve of Epiphany.

The first day of Christmas was Christmas Day itself. On Christmas Day the detectives of the 87th Squad would no doubt be celebrating, opening their own meager gifts, and not for a moment expecting the first of his gifts. But receive it they would and perhaps recognize at last what all his advance publicity had been about. They would not, however—if his notes had been inaccessible enough—realize what lay in store for them on January 5, Twelfth Night, Epiphany Eve.

In lower case the word ‘epiphany’ meant the sudden revelation of an underlying truth about a person or a situation. The English word was from the Greek epiphaneia, of course, the gods revealing themselves to mortal eyes, but the Irish novelist James Joyce—one of the Deaf Man’s favorites—first popularized the word in modern literature by calling his early experimental prose passages ‘epiphanies.’ A sudden flash of recognition. Would the men of the 87th recognize al last? Before the sudden flash? During it? There would be no time for recognition afterward.

He smiled again.

Epiphany Day. January 6. In honor of the first time Jesus Christ manifested himself to the Gentiles. On Epiphany Eve, Twelfth Night as it was called—oh what fun Shakespeare’d had with that one—the Deaf Man would reveal himself in spirit to the detectives, making it clear to them for the first, last, and only time that he would brook no further interference with his chosen profession. On three previous occasions he had given them every opportunity to thwart his plans, virtually laying them all out in advance—but never once realizing his plans actually would meet with disaster. Oh, not through any brilliant deduction on their part, no, that would be giving them far too much credit for intelligence. But rather through clumsy accidents. Accidents. The bane of the Deaf Man’s existence.

Accidents.

The first time it had been a cop wanting to buy ice cream from the Deaf Man’s stolen getaway truck. Wanted an ice cream pop. One of the specials with the chopped walnuts. Never once suspected the refrigerator compartment was stuffed with money stolen from the Mercantile Trust. But blew the job anyway—by accident.

The next time it had been two small-time hoods committing a holdup in a tailor shop on the very same night the Deaf Man had planned a little fillip-surprise to his big extortion scheme. There were two detectives in the back of the store, waiting for the hoods. The Deaf Man and his accomplices came in the front door at the very same moment. Fuzz! A stakeout for the two punks, and the Deaf Man had accidentally walked into it. Carella had shot him on that occasion; he would never forget Carella’s shooting him, would never forgive him for it.

The last time—well, he supposed he could credit Carella with having doped that one out in advance, though he’d certainly given him enough help with it. That had been his mistake. Laid it all out too clearly, too fairly. Virtually told Carella he was planning to rob the same bank twice in the same morning, setting up an A-team for a fall and then going in with his B-team—to find Carella there and waiting.

Carella was smarter than the Deaf Man thought he was.

He was maybe even smarter than he himself thought he was.

Accidents, not mistakes.

But now—no more Mr. Nice Guy.

There was nothing in the book that said he had to play the game fairly.

They were lucky he was playing it at all.

On the night before Christmas the Deaf Man Would steal half a million dollars, perhaps more.

And get away with it this time, because this time he had not warned the police in advance. Well, yes, he had not been able to resist dropping Elizabeth’s body in the park opposite the station house. Naked, though, and therefore unidentifiable. And that had been the only clue, if it could be considered one, to the job planned for Christmas Eve.

On Epiphany Eve, Twelfth Night, he would destroy the detectives—most of them anyway— who worked out of the old building facing Grover Park.

And get away with that, too.

Because, although he’d warned them, he had not warned them fairly.

They would die.

Horribly.

He smiled at the thought.

Tonight was December 23.

Tonight there was still some work to be done.

* * * *

In this neighborhood you had to be careful, even with it being so close to Christmas. In fact, maybe even more careful this time of year; people did funny things around Christmastime. Lots of the street people around here, they could remember a time—well, this hadn’t been Christmastime, it was in March sometime, years ago—they could remember some young kids setting fire to bums sleeping in doorways. Winos. Doused them with gasoline and set fire to them. Doug Hennesy hadn’t lived in this city then, but he’d heard plenty about them long-ago roasts, and he knew you had to be more careful in this city than maybe in any city on earth. Not that Doug considered himself a bum. Or even a wino. Doug was a street person, is what he was.

He didn’t particularly enjoy the holiday season because the streets were always too crowded, everybody rushing around, everybody selfish and concerned only with his ownself, never mind dropping a coin in the hand of someone needy like Doug. He’d managed to get four dollars and twenty-two cents today—two days before Christmas, could you imagine it? Where was the spirit of giving?—but that had taken him from eight this morning till almost seven tonight. He kept wondering who had given him the two cents. Had it been that well-dressed guy in the raccoon coat and the beaver hat? Two cents. But the money Doug collected had been enough for three bottles of excellent wine at a dollar forty a bottle, including tax, with the two cents still left over. He’d already drunk one of the bottles and planned to savor the remaining two all through the night, huddled in the doorway here on Mason Avenue.

The hookers on Mason Avenue didn’t like the idea of street people sleeping in doorways. They felt it made the neighborhood look shoddy, as if anything could make it look shoddier than it actually was. Felt it was bad for business. Downtown Johns came up here looking for a little black or Puerto Rican ass, they didn’t want to see wino bums sprawled in the doorways. The hookers on Mason Avenue were thinking of getting a petition signed against the street people who made their turf look shoddy. Well, Doug guessed he couldn’t blame them much. They worked hard, those girls did. He tried to remember the last time he’d been to bed with a woman, hooker or otherwise. Couldn’t remember for the life of him. Back in Chicago, wasn’t it? Back when he used to be an accountant in Chicago? Another lifetime

Some of your street people, the men, they took advantage of women living on the streets same as themselves. Found a bag lady curled up in a doorway, threw her skirts up, had their way with her. Doug would never in a million years do anything like that, take advantage of someone unfortunate. He’d seen—this was yesterday morning, it almost broke his heart. He’d seen this young street person, she couldn’t have been older than twenty-eight or nine, wearing a pink sweater over a thin cotton dress, woolen gloves cut off at the fingers, Christ, she almost broke his heart. Standing in a doorway. Looking at herself in the plate glass window on the door. Hands clasped over her belly. Exploring her belly. Fingers widespread in the sawed-off woolen gloves. Touching her belly. Her belly as big as a watermelon. And on her face a look of total bewilderment. For an instant Doug visualized her standing in a bedroom someplace, the closet door open, a full-length mirror on the closet door, imagined her standing in a silken nightgown, her hands widespread over her pregnant belly, just the way they were widespread over her belly in that doorway, only with a different look on her face. A look of pride, of pleasure. A young pregnant woman awed by the wonder of it, her face glowing. Instead, a doorway on a cold winter day near Christmas—and a look of utter confusion.

Ah, God, the poor unfortunates of this world.

He unscrewed the top of the second bottle of wine.

It was going to be another cold night.

Maybe on Christmas Day he’d wander over to the Salvation Army soup kitchen.

Well, he’d see. No sense making plans in advance.

He had the bottle tilted to his mouth when the man appeared suddenly out of the darkness. The street light was behind the man; Doug couldn’t see his face too clearly. Only the blond hair whipping in the wind. And what looked like a hearing aid in his right ear.

‘Good evening,’ the man said pleasantly.

Doug figured he was a downtown John up here looking for a little poontang.

‘Good evening,’ he answered, and then—in the season’s spirit of generosity—he extended the bottle of wine and said, ‘Would you like some wine, sir?’

‘No, thank you,’ the man said. ‘I’d like your ear.’

At first Doug thought the man wanted to talk. Friends, Romans., countrymen, lend me your ears. But then, suddenly and chillingly, he saw a switchblade knife snap open in the man’s hand, the blade catching the reflection of the traffic light on the corner, the steel flashing red and then green as the light changed, little twinkly Christmas pin-points of light, and all at once the man’s left hand was at Doug’s throat, forcing him onto his back in the doorway. The wine bottle crashed to the sidewalk—a dollar and forty cents!—splintered into a thousand shards of green glass as the man rolled him over onto his left side, the knife flashing yellow and then red as the traffic light changed again.

Doug felt a searing line of fire just above his right ear.

And then the fire trailed downward, spreading, the pain so sharp that Doug screamed aloud and instantly cupped his hand to his right ear.

His right ear was gone.

His hand came away covered with blood.

He screamed again.

The blond man with the hearing aid disappeared as suddenly as he had materialized.

Doug kept screaming.

A hooker swishing by in red Christmas satin and fake fur, heading for the bar up the street, her stiletto heels clattering on the sidewalk, looked into the doorway and shook her head and clucked her tongue.

* * * *