Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 7. Whole No. 454, June 17, 1981

M as in Mayhem by Lawrence Treat

© 1981 by Lawrence Treat

A brisk, breezy procedural about one of our favorite cop characters, Mitch Taylor of Homicide, assigned to protect a frightened concert pianist... “A lot of times you don’t really figure things out, you just go ahead and do something, and then later on it adds up and you find out why you did if”...

The way Mitch Taylor, Homicide, got it, it seemed that this Vladimir Borsky was supposed to give a concert tomorrow night and he’d asked for police protection on account his wife had threatened to chop off his hands or something. When the lieutenant handed out the assignment to Mitch, he figured about all he had to do was go out to the new Hubert Humphrey airport, pick the guy up, and then deliver him to his hotel and again to the concert hall the next day. After that somebody else could worry.

With a name like Borsky the guy ought to be easy to spot, even if he didn’t carry his piano around with him. Only he wasn’t, because when he showed up at the information counter after he got paged, he looked like he was ready to get down and hide under a piano instead of sitting in front of it. He was kind of a tall skinny guy with a nose that kept sniffing around, like he was going to sneeze only he couldn’t get started, and he looked pooped.

After Mitch introduced himself and showed his identification, he asked Borsky about this wife of his and what she had against him.

“Dough,” Borsky said. “She wants the shirt off my back and just about everything else I got.”

“What does she look like?” Mitch asked.

Borsky let loose like he’d been saving up his answer and here was his big chance.

“Mary O’Shaughnessy,” he said, “has a build like Marilyn M., she’s got a temper like a Hottentot, and she packs a wallop like Ali. Only she does it with a hammer.”

Mitch gagged on that one. “Mary O’Shaughnessy? Who’s she?”

“My wife,” Borsky said. “I’m Bill O’Shaughnessy. In this racket you gotta have a name that can pull them in. Borsky. Short and sweet. People remember it.”

Mitch didn’t exactly follow. Still, this guy made a living out of it and he had a right to call himself Attila the Hun if he felt like it, so Mitch got back to the point, which was how to get hold of the O’Shaughnessy dame and pull her in before she went out on her private massacre.

“About this wife of yours that wants to chop you up,” Mitch said. “She around anywheres?”

Borsky gave the place a quick look that couldn’t have spotted an elephant. “Not here,” he said, “unless she hired somebody to do her dirty work.”

“Could be,” Mitch said. “Now if I’m going to take care of you, you better give me your schedule. And make sure you stick to it, too.”

“Well, I’m booked at the Hotel Fremont, they got me a reservation for a couple of days. Tonight I’ll eat up in my room and go to bed early. A trip like this — airplanes upset me — so I got to take it easy. Then tomorrow I’ll go over to the concert hall and check the piano and maybe put in some practise for the evening.”

“What for?” Mitch said. “You’ll get all wore out.”

“Look,” Borsky said. “If you were going to pitch, you’d loosen up for a while, wouldn’t you? And pitching a ball game is nothing compared to the workout I put in. First of all, I got to dress up like Paderewski, and I sweat. I lose five pounds every time I’m out there. And my fingers got to be in shape. Take a look at them.”

He held up a hand with broad heavy fingers that ended up in thick pads. “The beating they take on the piano, they could pile-drive an oil rig fifty feet down. Anybody that thinks this racket is fun ought to try it. A different hotel every night. Receptions, and you got to pretend you like them. And then the fancy food they serve you, my stomach’s backing up on me. And with dames all over you, they won’t let you alone, and most of them ought to go back home and get reconstructed.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “Now one other thing — this concert, I ought to be there, where I can be ready for most anything. So me and the wife — you’ll fix it up, huh?”

Borsky got the idea. “Sure. Where do you want to sit? First row? Or maybe an aisle seat a little further back. Depends on the acoustics, I guess.”

“Up front sounds pretty good to me,” Mitch said, “but you’re the judge.”

So everything looked okay, no trouble he could see. Mitch had his unmarked car outside, Number Four, which was the one he liked, and he took Borsky up to the Fremont and checked him in and practically tucked him in bed for the night, and then Mitch went home and told Amy how they had tickets for the concert tomorrow night, and that was big stuff for Amy.

Mitch felt pretty good about things, and after dinner he had himself a beer and watched TV for a while without learning much, except that cops love danger and want nothing better than to get shot at a couple of times a week. That was news to Mitch. Still, he took it in stride, got to bed early, and was sound asleep when the phone rang.

What with it being around two in the morning, he figured it had to be bad news and it was, because the voice said, “Mr. Taylor? This is Bill, and I need you.”

“Bill? Bill who?”

“O’Shaughnessy. Borsky. Vladimir Borsky.”

“Oh, sure. Borsky. What’s up?”

“My wife. I think she’s here. You know my room, 807, so come over quick.”

“Be right there,” Mitch said. He put the phone down, told Amy something had come up, he had to leave, and then called the precinct and asked for a car. Five minutes later he was on his way to the Fremont, with Danny Epstein at the wheel.

The clerk, who had a long neck, was snoozing when Mitch got there, so Mitch told Danny to hang around for a while, Mitch might need him, and Mitch went on up to Room 807.

He tried the door first, before knocking, and it opened. The room was dark, though, except for a crack of light showing at the bottom of the bathroom door, and when Mitch got near it he could hear groaning inside. First off, before he did anything else, he had to figure out the best way to cover himself in case Borsky’d got himself cheesed up. And that was pretty easy, on account all Mitch had to say was he’d told Borsky to lock himself in and not open up for anybody except Mitch, and so that was the way it was, and Mitch opened the bathroom door.

The guy was flopped over the edge of the bathtub and was soaking his hands and he was hurt, but it wasn’t Borsky. Mitch grabbed him and stood him up, and the guy groaned and said, “My hands! I didn’t do anything. He was there waiting — with a hammer! He—”

Mitch picked him up on that and interrupted. “He?” Mitch said.

“He hit me on the hand. With a hammer.”

Mitch could see that a couple of fingers were pretty well mashed up, and he could guess what must have happened. This guy had found the door open, same as Mitch, and he’d probably stepped in to see if there was any loose cash around. This hammer nut must have been waiting inside, and what with the dark and being all keyed up, he’d jumped this guy and cracked down on his fingers before finding out he’d ruined the wrong hands. After that he’d blown, and he wasn’t Mary O’Shaughnessy and never had been, which Mitch hadn’t believed in the first place. Because why would she chop up the fingers that earned the dough she lived off of?

The thing that bothered Mitch most, though, was that it seemed Borsky had set him up. What was supposed to happen was, Mitch would walk in and this hammer nut would take a crack at him and either make chop suey out of Mitch’s hands or else miss and get strung out himself, but either way Mitch would probably make the collar, which would get this character out of Borsky’s hair.

The guy here wasn’t particularly worth Mitch’s time, so Mitch frisked him and got his name, which happened to be Sanger. With that much done, Mitch went to the phone and asked for Danny to come up, Danny could handle it from here on in. While he was waiting, Mitch asked this Sanger a couple of questions, mostly about who’d done the hammer job on him.

“I never saw him,” Sanger said in a croaking voice. “I got here by mistake, I was looking for my room and—”

“Skip it,” Mitch said. “I don’t give a damn why you were here, you can try your story out on Danny. All I want to know is who creamed you and what they looked like.”

Sanger gave out with a couple of groans, maybe they helped him a little, and this was certainly a night he was going to remember. “I never saw him,” Sanger said again, and sort of caught his breath. “I didn’t know anybody was here and I never even saw him until he jumped me. With a hammer.” Sanger took time out for another groan. “It hurts,” he said.

Around then Danny came in, and he knew Sanger right off. “We had him in the slammer a couple of times,” Danny said. “Just a grifter that sneaks into hotels and then goes around trying doors. Any time he finds one that isn’t double-locked or chained, he floats in and lets his fingers scratch around.”

“Well, he caught it this time,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “Looks like he’ll be out of circulation for a while.”

The three of them took the elevator down together. Danny went through with his formal arrest, while Sanger kept sniveling and wanting nothing except a hospital. As for Mitch, he was busy batting a bunch of ideas around in his head, and chiefly where was Borsky.

The clerk, whose name was Vince something, was about as awake as he was ever going to be, and that was halfway back to last Tuesday. He swore he’d been on the job every minute and that nobody had come into the hotel during the last hour or so.

Mitch shut him up fast. “I did,” Mitch said.

So it was pretty clear that anybody could have come in and out of the hotel any time after midnight. The question was whether Borsky had, and why he’d left his door unlocked.

Mitch couldn’t see Borsky leaving the hotel and walking around town for the fun of it, particularly if he needed protection, so he was either hiding out in the hotel somewhere, or else he was gone, and for good. But either way, somebody was loose with a hammer and wasn’t using it to drive in any nails.

A lot of times you don’t really figure things out, you just go ahead and do something, and then later on it adds up and you find out why you did it. That was how it was now when Mitch asked for a list of all the single dames who were registered in the hotel. While he was waiting, Mitch called home and told Amy that everything was okay but he probably wouldn’t be back until some time tomorrow, tomorrow being today, if she knew what he meant. After that Mitch began making his calls to the list Vince handed him, and Mitch came out with the same question each time, until it got kind of monotonous. “Is Bill there?” he kept asking.

On account nobody likes the phone to wake them up around three or four in the morning, everybody didn’t exactly cooperate. A couple of females, they just cursed him out. A few of them said, “Bill? Bill who?” Two of them got real mad and said, “There’s no Bill here, never was, and never will be,” and then slammed down the receiver. One dame, she just kind of whistled and then cut him off, but in the end Mitch had six names checked off. He looked at them for a while and then for no reason he knew of he crossed out two of them. After that he went upstairs to 807.

Borsky must have emptied his pockets and gone to bed last night, and then for some reason got up later on and dressed. Mitch could tell all that from the rumpled bed and from checking on Borsky’s clothes and from the pile of stuff he’d stuck in the night table, like his wallet and a little book of addresses and some bills and other stuff. There were some professional cards with the name Vladimir Borsky engraved on them, and then there was another card that said, “In case of accident please notify.” The name to be notified was Mary O’Shaughnessy, along with her address and phone number, so Mitch went and called her.

She started off in a voice, while it was maybe a little sleepy, it made you want to get over there and see what she was like. Mitch could kind of see her singing some good old Irish songs while Bill played the piano, and that was how they must have got started. But after Mitch explained who he was and what he was after, her voice sharpened up like a chain saw and he had to hold the receiver back from his ear on account he was afraid he’d break an eardrum.

“Calling me up three o’clock in the morning!” she yelled. “You’re a no-good cop and you use the phone to ask dumb questions on taxpayers’ money, and they ought to dock your salary, which you’re probably not earning in the first place. And where Bill O’Shaughnessy is, with his high-sounding Russian name and they ought to send him there and he’d find out he’d ought to kept the name he was born with, and it’s a good Irish name and what’s better? And who the hell are you and what did you say your name was?”

“Taylor.”

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself, waking me up in the middle of the night. Is that all you got to do? Getting respectable people out of bed at three in the morning and bothering them with all those dumb questions about my husband, and he ought to be tied up on the back porch and fed bread and water. Where did you say he was?”

“I’m trying to find out.”

“If you know Bill O’Shaughnessy and got half the brains you were born with, you’ll go down to the nearest brothel and you’ll find him trying to get them at half price, or maybe on sale at two for one, and you’d better stop bothering me or I’ll get you fired. Who did you say you were?”

Mitch hung up. Borsky had his problems all right, but they had nothing to do with Mitch. He’d found out what he wanted to know, so he put the door on chain and lay down on the bed and went to sleep.

Borsky showed up around nine the next morning. His right-hand thumb had a bandage on and he looked kind of tired, but then he always did. Except for the thumb and he hadn’t shaved, everything seemed okay.

Mitch gave him the silent treatment, and Borsky frowned, cleared his throat, and looked in the closet and then in the night table, and you could tell he was unsure of himself and trying to make up his mind what this was all about. He finally hit on what to say.

“Anything happen?” he asked.

“Not much.”

That stopped him. He cleared his throat again and finally decided to come out with his end of last night’s business.

“I got scared after I called you,” he said. “I figured I was a sitting duck. I was alone here, anybody could come in, and I didn’t know how long it would take you to get here. I heard noises out in the hallway and I thought I’d better beat it and let you handle things.”

Mitch didn’t say anything.

“You see, things have been piling up on me. My wife, these threats, my concert coming up tonight — I had to be alone. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Mitch didn’t answer.

“I found an empty room down the hall, so I went inside and locked the door and went to sleep. I just woke up. Anything happen here?”

“Who is she?” Mitch asked.

“She? What do you mean?”

Mitch picked up the list of names he’d weeded out and tried the first one. It was the Eberly female, and he read off the name. “Adele Eberly. She the one you slept with?”

That did it. Borsky kind of sucked in his breath and acted like he’d been caught snitching a can of beans in a supermarket. “How’d you know?” he asked.

“I got ways,” Mitch said, using his standard answer.

“Adele wants to marry me, if she can get a divorce. She saved me last night.”

“She leave home for you?” Mitch asked. “Her husband — is he the guy that’s after you with a hammer?”

“That’s right.” Borsky held up his hand as if he remembered it for the first time. “I hurt my thumb,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight. I can’t play like this. Maybe my thumb’s broken.”

“Get hold of a doc,” Mitch said, thinking of how Amy would feel if the concert got canceled. “He’ll fix you up.”

“I don’t know. Not with a thumb like this.”

Mitch grabbed the guy by the shoulders and shook him. “Look,” Mitch said. “You’re going to play tonight. I don’t give a damn if that thumb kills you or if you never play again, but you’re going on tonight and you’re going to be good, and if you try to welch, you’ll get the kind of cop-beating you hear about. I never done it, but it would be a pleasure to try, so you and me are going to see a doc.”

“I’ll just stay here and rest up,” Borsky said.

“The hell you will. You got to do something for that thumb, and I know the guy who can do it.”

He called the dispatcher and got hold of Doc Sapaniel, who was the police surgeon, and Mitch explained the situation and asked who the best man in town was, and Sapaniel said it was Benjamin Farmer, he knew all about thumbs, he handled fighters at ringside, you could bust a thumb or a whole hand, and in the time between rounds he had you fixed up and back in there punching.

Mitch thought he had it all settled, until Borsky tried to pull a prima donna and say that no damn fight doctor was going to fiddle around with his thumb. He was a musician, and not some kind of a pugilist.

“You got a different kind of bones in you?” Mitch asked.

“Adele knows somebody,” Borsky said. “She’ll be here pretty soon. She’ll handle things.”

That gave Mitch the signal that something wasn’t legit. Here Borsky didn’t want his thumb to get fixed and Mitch didn’t know what was wrong with it, if anything, so he said, “Let’s see it.”

Borsky backed off. “You a doctor?”

“Just let me see it,” Mitch said again, and Borsky squirmed away like a kid that was afraid of a flu shot. So right now it was kind of a tie score between them, except Mitch wasn’t going to leave it that way much longer.

“This girl friend of yours,” he said. “Tell me about her.”

“Nothing to tell,” Borsky said.

“You and her got something cooked up,” Mitch said. “What’s the angle?”

Borsky didn’t answer, and Mitch told himself the guy was trying to play five-handed solitaire all by himself. He had something going with this girl and he had a concert on tonight and a guy named Eberly was after him with a hammer on account Borsky was seeing the guy’s wife on the sly and so Eberly wanted to ruin him, and here was Mitch homing in on whatever Borsky had dreamed up.

The knock on the door came about three minutes later. Borsky called out, “Who’s there?” And a woman’s voice answered, “It’s me. Adele.”

Borsky yelled out, “No — not now!” Only Mitch was way ahead of him and opened the door while Borsky was still calling out. So this female dynamo — all Mitch saw at first was a face with a lot of chin and with blonde hair falling all over it — was charging past Mitch and right behind her was this character with murder in his eye and a hammer in his hand and he looked like King Kong. Mitch got pushed back and almost fell, what with the two of them ramming him like they were hitting the line and hellbent for a touchdown.

Mitch hit the wall and sort of bounced back, and he grabbed a chair and slung it at King Kong, which knocked the big guy off-balance and gave Mitch time to come barreling in. That would have ended the whole business, except that the dame got in the way and slapped out at Mitch, not hard, but enough to keep him from grabbing the hammer.

You get in a mess like that, and you can’t sort stuff out until later on. All Mitch was after was to stop the hammerer and save Borsky’s hand, which Mitch managed to do by taking a poke at the hammerer and then knocking Borsky back on the bed, which got Mitch between the concert pianist and the hammerer. But in doing it, Mitch lost his balance, so him and Borsky ended up lying there on the bed while King Kong and the dame went racing out of the room, slamming the door behind them.

Mitch got on the phone to tell them downstairs to stop the pair and call the police, only Borsky knocked it out of Mitch’s hand. By the time Mitch picked up the phone it was still buzzing and nobody was at the other end. He figured the girl at the switchboard had maybe gone out for a cup of coffee or else she was fixing her hair, but in any case it was too late to stop the pair, so Mitch gave up. Still, he now had a handle on the whole business and had most of the facts wrapped up.

“That was the Eberly dame,” he said, “and the guy with her, that was her husband. Right? And there’s nothing wrong with that thumb of yours, but there would have been if I hadn’t stopped the guy. And you just stood there and waited to get creamed. What for?”

“I was scared,” Borsky said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“The hell you say,” Mitch said, and wondered why Borsky didn’t want that concert tonight and why he was practically willing to have his hand busted. If this had been the fight game, Mitch would have had the answer, but who bets on a pianist? And what could you bet on?

Dough. Dough was involved. It always was and always would be, and so it had to be this time, too, which was more or less how Mitch happened to latch on to this theory.

“A guy like you,” he said to Borsky, “you got pretty valuable hands. What do you make? A hundred grand a year?”

“Sort of.”

“So if you’re out of action, you make nothing. Right?”

Borsky agreed. “That’s right.”

“Then you got insurance on your hands,” Mitch said. “How much?”

“You’re crazy!”

“Easy to find out,” Mitch said. “It must be plenty, to make you pull a fast one like this. And you’re in trouble, my friend. You fixed it up for me to get conked, and that’s conspiracy to commit assault and attempt to commit assault and maybe criminal solicitation besides, and just now that was interference with a police officer in the performance of his duty. That adds up to two misdemeanors and two felonies, so think it over and what it’s going to mean.”

Borsky didn’t have to think it over. “It’s all her fault,” he said. “It was her idea. She’s been following me around, she’s driving me nuts, and last night she made this proposition. She had it all arranged with this doctor she knew, he’s her cousin. He’d put me under an anesthetic and break my finger. It wouldn’t hurt, and we’d say her husband had done it and I could collect all that insurance, which was enough so I could retire. With her.”

“Think you’d get away with it?” Mitch said. “The insurance dicks would ask a lot of questions and one of the guys they’d ask would be me, and you know what I’d tell them.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Not yet you haven’t, but you better take off that bandage and start getting ready for tonight. Because it looks like this dame of yours switched sides and went back to her husband. He was going to commit mayhem and she threw a block on me when I tried to stop him, so where do you stand now?”

“Just keep Eberly away from me, because he’s liable to kill me, him and his hammer. You saw what he tried to do, didn’t you?”

“I thought you wanted him to, for the insurance.”

“I don’t know. She’s trouble and I was crazy to listen to her and—” Borsky stared at his hands. “These are all I got, and she’ll ruin me, she and that husband others. She’s mad.”

“Look,” Mitch said. “I’ll take care of him, you take care of yourself and them hands of yours.” Then, patting his gun, he added, “And this says nobody’s going to bother you, not till you get done with your piece tonight.”

So Mitch had everything tied up real good. Eberly might make another stab at Borsky, and if he did, Mitch would be ready for him. With Eberly collared and Borsky safe, Mitch would be in pretty good shape, the story would hit the front page, the Commissioner would congratulate him, and Mitch was pretty sure they’d give him a day off, so what more could you want?

That was when the phone rang. It was Tony Spino, from the Fifth, and he was downstairs.

“Taylor?” he said. “We got a guy here by the name of Eberly. Somebody saw him running around loose with a hammer in his hand, so they called us and we got him down here. He was on his way out and he’s making a lot of noise about some piano player. Know anything about it?”

“He was up here trying to commit mayhem on a guy who’s been playing around with his wife.”

“And you let him go?” Spino said, acting like he was surprised, which told Mitch what the official story was going to be and that Spino was due to get credit for the arrest.

Still, Eberly was on ice and the concert was safe, no trouble there. Mitch and Amy had about the best seats in the house, and afterwards they’d go back stage where there’d be a kind of reception, just for the VIP’s. So all in all, things weren’t too bad. They could have been worse, much worse.