Mischief

9.

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY came in with a spectacular sunrise over the city’s rooftops, but by eight o’clock on that first day of the month, the sky was already gray and menacing, and by nine it was raining again. Some people maintained that the choice of this particular date for the playing of pranks had something to do with the vernal equinox, when Old Mother Nature impishly played weather tricks on mere mortals. Whatever the origin, All Fools’ Day, as it was alternately called, had been celebrated for centuries all over the world—and today it was raining. Again.

And today, again, another of the Deaf Man’s letters was delivered by hand to the muster desk downstairs. The messenger was a sixteen-year-old kid cutting high school classes. He told Sergeant Murchison that a tall blond guy with a hearing aid had given him ten bucks to take the envelope in here and hand it to the fat guy behind the desk. Murchison told him to get the hell out of here, and then he sent one of his patrolmen upstairs with the envelope.

Meyer and Hawes had begun a hastily conceived surveillance of the shelter the night before, some fifteen hours after the guy with the crazy eyes had told Hawes about all the nefarious goings-on there. But despite Frankie’s grave warnings, they’d observed nothing out-of-the-way. No square shields leaving the building carrying heaps of blankets or cartons of soap. They planned to continue sitting the place tonight, despite the rain. There was not a cop alive who liked surveillance, especially when it was raining.

Meyer was telling a joke when the patrolman walked in.

“This guy is giving a lecture on supernatural phenomena,” he said, his blue eyes already twinkling in anticipation. “And when he finishes the lecture he asks the crowd if any of them have ever been in the presence of a ghost. The hands go up, and he counts them, and he says, ‘That’s about right, I usually get a response of about fifty percent to that question. Now how many of you who just raised your hands have ever been touched by a ghost?’ The hands go up again, and he counts them, and says, ‘That’s about right, too, sixteen, seventeen percent is what I usually get. Now how many of you have ever had intercourse with a ghost?’ Well, this old guy in his nineties raises his hand, and the lecturer asks him to please come up to the stage, and the guy dodders to the front of the auditorium, and climbs the steps, and the lecturer says, ‘Sir, this is really astonishing. I give these lectures all over the world, and this is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who’s actually had intercourse with a ghost.’ The old man says, ‘What? Would you say that again, please?’ And the lecturer yells, ‘THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’VE EVER MET ANYONE WHO’S ACTUALLY HAd INTERCOURSE WITH A GHOST!’ and the old guy says, ‘Oh, excuse me, I thought you said intercourse with a goat !’”

“That’s a Deaf Man joke for sure,” Brown said, laughing.

Which was exactly when the patrolman walked in with the letter.

No one bothered worrying about fingerprints anymore; they’d gone that route with the Deaf Man in the past, and it was a fruitless one. The patrolman handed the envelope to Carella, to whom it was addressed, and then hung around to see what this lunatic was up to this time; word was spreading around the precinct that the Deaf Man was back. Carella tore open the flap, took out a note stapled to another sheet of paper, and read the note first:

The larger sheet of paper had obviously been photocopied from Rivera’s book. It read:

F rOM WHERE ANKARAstood on the rock tower erected to the gods at the far end of the vast plain, he could see the milling throng moving toward the straw figure symbolizing the failure of the crop, the frightening twisted arid thing the multitude had to destroy if it were to strangle its own fear. The crowd moved forward relentlessly, chanting, stamping, shouting, a massive beast that seemed all flailing arms and thrashing legs, eager to destroy the victim it had chosen, the common enemy, a roar rising as if from a single throat, “Kill, kill,kill!”

“He’s gonna kill somebody,” Brown said.

“Somebody in a crowd ,” Meyer said.

“On a vast plain ,” Carella said.

“Either that or he’s trying to fool us again,” Hawes said.

“Try not to be fooled this time,” Carella quoted.

“You know what they call him in France, don’t you?” Meyer asked.

“Who? The Deaf Man?”

“No. The person who gets fooled. On April Fools’ Day. They call him poisson d’ avril .”

“I thought you didn’t speak French,” Brown said, remembering his Haitian.

“My wife does,” Meyer said, and shrugged.

“What’s that mean, anyway?” Hawes asked.

“April fish.”

“You think something big’s gonna happen outside today?” Brown asked. “Something with a huge crowd ready to explode?”

“A crowd ready to kill, ” Hawes said.

“Let’s check the newspaper,” Carella said.

“Go brush your teeth,” Meyer told Hawes.

They checked the paper.

There were no advertisements for any big outdoor event happening that day.

Good thing, too.

It would have been washed out.

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY.

Raining to beat the band.

The Romans used to celebrate something called the Festival of Hilaria, which somewhat resembled it. But that was on the twenty-fifth of March. In India, too, there was a festival called Holi, during which similar high jinks occurred before its conclusion on the thirty-first of March. Here in America, here in this city, the jokes started early.

The city for which these men worked was divided into five separate geographical sections. The center of the city, Isola, was an island, hence its name: “isola”means “ island” in Italian. In actual practice, however, the entire city was casually referred to as Isola, even though the other four sections were separately and more imaginatively named.

In Isola that morning, a seventy-six-year-old priest named the Reverend Albert J. Courter of the St. Mary of Our Sorrows Church on Harrington and Morse was wearing clerical garb and waiting for the J train on the Morse Street platform when he was suddenly attacked by two men who stole his wallet, his rosary, and a medal identifying him as a member of the Order of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers.

The first of the men said, “Good morning, Father,” as the priest came up the steps to the platform. The next thing the priest knew, another man grabbed him in a choke hold from behind, causing him to lose consciousness for several moments. While he was lying on the platform, they began ripping his pockets. He regained consciousness just as they were running off.

Father Courter was taken to the nearest hospital, on Harrington and Cole, where he was treated for cuts and bruises on his face before he was released. He told Lieutenant George Kagouris of the Transit Authority Police that he’d been heading downtown to visit with friends and fellow priests in the neighborhood where he’d grown up. He told the lieutenant that there’d been only twenty dollars in the wallet. He told the lieutenant that the medal and rosary beads had no real monetary value. He told the lieutenant that before his attackers ran off, the one who’d first greeted him turned with a grin and shouted, “April Fool, Father!”

THE WOMAN’S NAME was Rebecca Bright, and she told Kling immediately that her younger brother had been a little odd even when he was a kid, and she wasn’t surprised that he’d been doing graffiti or that he’d got himself killed for it.

The detectives at Midtown South—where Henry Bright’s body had been found on the sidewalk outside the bookshop, the shards of the shattered plate-glass window all around him—had called Kling early this morning with an FMU request. Operations Division had informed them that detectives Parker and Kling were currently investigating the uptown murders of the three previous graffiti writers, and since this seemed obviously related, it was a clear case of First Man Up, and should be turned over to the Eight-Seven, not that Midtown South was trying to shirk its responsibilities.

Kling wanted to know why they considered this a clear case of FMU, not that he was trying to shirk his responsibilities, but copycatting was not an unknown phenomenon in this city. For example, had they recovered any bullets at the scene? This was a trick question. There’d been no bullets or cartridge cases recovered at the scenes of any of the three previous murders. But to Kling’s great surprise, the detective calling from M.S. said, “Yeah, we did, matter of fact, but that’s not why we’re turning this over to you. We know you didn’t find nothing previous.”

“What’d you find?”

“Three bullets inside the front window. Guy must’ve missed the victim first few times he fired. Anyway, the slugs went through the plate glass, and we recovered them.”

“That still doesn’t add up to…”

“We also got a note.”

“a what ?”

“Thistime he pinned a note to the body.”

“a note ?”

“Got it right here in my hand. Nice handwritten note. What it says is, ‘I killed the three uptown.’ Now does that sound like FMU, or does it?”

Kling was thinking the guy wanted to get caught, leaving a handwritten note. Only the ones who wanted to get caught left notes. Except the Deaf Man.He left notes because he didn’t want to get caught.

Rebecca Bright was a singularly plain woman, some thirty years old, Kling guessed, sitting in a small office at the travel agency for which she worked. Posters of Italy and Spain covered the walls behind her. Kling wondered what it was like in Italy or Spain.

“Did you know your brother was writing graffiti?”

“No,” she said. “But, as I told you, I’m not surprised.”

“Scratchinggraffiti, actually,” Kling said. “A section of the broken window had his initials on it. Scratched into the glass. An H , anyway, and part of a B . He was killed before he could finish the tag.”

“The what?”

“The tag. The marker. That’s what these writers call them. The graffiti writers.”

“I see.”

“Did you know any of your brother’s friends?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t know if any of them were writers then?”

“No. You mean graffiti writers, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Far as I knew, Henry worked in the produce department of a supermarket. I had no idea what he was doing at night. Scratching his name on windows, you now tell me. Or his friends, either.”

“Never met any of them, is that right?”

“Never. Henry and I didn’t see much of each other. Henry was a pain in the ass, if you’ll pardon my French. I didn’t like him when he was a kid, and I liked him less when he grew up.If you can call a twenty-two-year-old who scratches his name on windows a grown-up. ”

“But you didn’t know he was doing that.”

“That’s right. I would have liked him even less if I’d known.”

“Would you recognize the handwriting on this note?” Kling asked, and showed her a photocopy of the note M.S. had turned over to him.

Rebecca studied it.

“No,” she said. “Is that who killed my brother? The one I’ve been reading about in the papers?”

“It’s a possibility,” Kling said.

“He’s got to be crazy, don’t you think? Though, I’ll tell you the truth…”

Kling waited.

“Sometimes I feel like killing them myself.”

NO ONE KNEW why brawling, boisterous Calm’s Point was called that. Perhaps at one time, when the British were still there, it had indeed been a peaceful pastoral place. Nowadays, the name carried with it a touch of irony bordering on sarcasm: Calm’s Point was the noisiest section of the sprawling city, and the spin its residents put on the English language was the cause of derision, amusement, and gross imitation everywhere else in the United States. Ask a native of Calm’s Point where he came from, and be would proudly and unerringly tell you “Carm’s Pernt.”

The officers who answered the radio call had been told only to investigate a complaint of “loud music” coming from apartment 42 at 2116 Nightingale Avenue in a largely Colombian section of Calm’s Point. They could hear the music blasting the moment they entered the building. They were experienced cops; it was with a sense of foreboding that they climbed the steps to the fourth floor. They knocked. They knocked again, using their batons this time. They yelled “Police!” over the blare of the Spanish music coming from inside the apartment. They banged on the door again. Then they kicked it in.

A man later identified as Escamilio Riomonte was lying on the floor with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

A woman later identified as Anita Riomonte, his wife, was found lying beside him, a bullet hole in the back of her head.

A four-month-old baby later identified as their daughter, Jewel, was found alive in her crib.

Neighbors told the responding officers that the couple sold heroin from the apartment and that the motive was probably robbery. It was later established that each of the victims had been shot once in the back of the head with a .25 caliber semiautomatic handgun. Sergeant Charles Culligan of the Six-Three Precinct remarked, “Whoever did it, looks like they done it before.”

The child was removed to the Riverhead Municipal Hospital Center where it was concluded that she’d spent at least twenty-four hours in that crib before the officers discovered her. Her temperature upon admission to the hospital was recorded as a hundred and five degrees. The moment she began hyperventilating, she was moved to an intensive-care unit. Although the shooting had taken place the day before, Jewel died at 12:34P .M. that April Fools’ Day.

THE NEWSPAPER ADS last weekend had listed the name of the promoter as Windows Entertainment. It had also listed the names of the groups that would be performing in Grover Park this coming weekend. The Deaf Man chose one of the lesser-known groups—he guessed it was lesser known because its name was in smaller type than some of the others—and then placed his call to Windows.

“Hello,” he said to the woman who answered the phone, “this is Sonny Sanson, I’m handling the arrangements for Spit Shine? For the gig this weekend?”

“Yes, Mr. Samson, how…?”

“Sanson,” he said. “S-A-N-S.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sanson, how can I help you?”

“My people are worried about the laminates.”

“Worried?”

“When and where do we pick them up?”

“Oh. Just a moment, please, I’ll put you through to our security division.”

The Deaf Man waited. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to anyone in the security division. In the corporate world, it was always best to deal with lower-level twerps because twerps always wanted to make themselves seem important even if they had to give away the store to create the impression. Someone in Security might…

“Hello?” a voice said.

“This is Sonny Sanson,” the Deaf Man said. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

“Ronnie Hemmler.”

“Mr. Hemmler, I’m handling the arrangements here in the city for Spit Shine? For the weekend gig? My people are wondering about the laminates. Would you know what the plans are?”

“Plans for what?” Hemmler asked.

Note of suspicion in his voice, not for nothing was he a Security person.

“For picking them up. My people are getting nervous.”

“What people?”

“Spit Shine?” the Deaf Man said patiently. “The group?”

“Yeah?”

“We want to pick up our laminates.”

“Didn’t you get anything in the mail on this?”

“Not yet.”

“Something went out on this last week.”

“From you?”

“No, no, it would’ve come from Artco.”

“Artco? Is that another company?”

“No, it’s a department here. Artists Coordination. They’re in charge of things like that.”

“Who do I talk to there?”

“Just a second,” Hemmler said.

The Deaf Man waited.

When Hemmler came back on, he said, “Sonny?”

He hated it when people who didn’t know him called him by his first name—even if it wasn’t his real name.

“Yes?” he said, not having to feign irritation this time.

“You can try Larry Palmer up there, I’ll give you his extension number.”

“Can’t you just switch me?”

“I’ll try, but it doesn’t always work. Let me give you the extension in case you get cut off.”

“Thank you,” the Deaf Man said.

Hemmler gave him the extension number and said, “Now hang on.”

The Deaf Man listened while Hemmler told the operator to transfer the call to three-nine-four, and then he waited again, certain he would be disconnected and surprised when a woman’s voice said, “Artco.”

“Larry Palmer, please,” he said.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Sonny Sanson. Ronnie Hemmler in Security asked me to call.”

“Just one moment, please.”

He waited again.

“Larry Palmer.”

The Deaf Man went through the whole drill yet another time. Palmer listened patiently.

“So what is it you want to know?” he asked.

“We haven’t got our laminates yet. My people…”

“You’ll get those at the site. You managing Spit Shine?”

“No, I’m just smoothing the way for them while they’re here.”

“Well, when they get to the park…they’ll want to do a sound check, I guess, make sure everything’s the way they want it…”

“Oh, sure.”

“So just have your road manager stop in the trailer, let them know who he wants around the act. In the stage area, you know? How many people he wants there. They’ll give him the laminates he needs.”

“What trailer would that be?” the Deaf Man asked.

“The production trailer,” Palmer said, sounding somewhat surprised. “On the site. Windows’ll have a stage manager in there.”

“Who do we talk to if the stage manager’s out to lunch?” he asked, smiling, keeping his tone light.

“Well, there’ll be a secretary in the trailer, two or three assistants, you know how these things work.”

“Sure. What’s a good time to stop by?”

“Once they start setting up, they’ll be going day and night.”

“When will that be?”

“Listen, don’t you know all this?”

“There was a foul-up,” the Deaf Man said.

“What kind of foul-up?”

“Long story,” he said. “i still don’t know when we’ll be setting up, or when we can do our sound checks, or…”

“Well, the unions’ll be loading in at six tomorrow morning, but you won’t want to pick up your laminates then, there’ll be a mob scene at the trailer. You won’t need them till your act gets there, anyway, so what’s the hurry?”

“No hurry at all,” the Deaf Man said. “Thanks a lot.”

“No sweat, Sonny,” Palmer said, and hung up.

IN RIVERHEAD early that afternoon…

The name Riverhead came from the Dutch, though not directly. The land up there had once been owned by a patroon named Ryerhurt, and it had been called Ryerhurt’s Farms, which eventually became abbreviated and bastardized to Riverhead. Over the years, this section of the city had been inhabited sequentially by Jews, Italians, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and—most recently—Koreans, Colombians, and Dominicans. If ever there was a melting pot, Riverhead was it. The only trouble was that the melting pot had never come to a boil.

In Riverhead early that afternoon, two young men crouched behind the stairs in the ground floor hallway of the parole office on Edgerley Avenue, whispering in their native tongue about April Fools’ Day. In Colombia, April Fools’ Day was called el día de engañabobos , and whoever was made a fool of on this day was called un inocente. Today, the two young men planned to make a fool of a parole officer named Allen Maguire. The way they planned to do this was to kill him.

In this city, killing someone wasn’t such a big deal. In the first quarter of the year, for example, five hundred and forty-six murders were committed, which might have sounded like a lot when you compared it to the mere fifty blankets stolen from DSS TEMPLE in three months last year, but all it really came to was a scant nine murders a day, not bad when you considered all the guns out there. Sixty-one percent of all the murders in this city were committed by firearms, but that was no reason to take guns away from people, was it? After all, in eight percent of this city’s murders, feet or fists were the weapons, but did anybody suggest amputation as a means of control? Of course not.

The two men planning to kill the parole officer did not plan to use their fists or their feet. They were both armed with Intratec nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols capable of laying down a barrage of fire at the rate of five or six rounds a second. The Intratecs were part of the April Fools’ Day joke. The two Colombians had been hired by a Riverhead drug dealer named Flavio (Fat Boy) Garcia, who’d been convicted two months ago for a parole violation, namely for having in his possession a firearm, namely an Intratec nine. Maguire was the person who’d brought the parole violation charges after Garcia’s arrest, and now Fat Boy was languishing upstate in a delightful little cell at Castle-view Penitentiary, from which he’d ordered the two Colombians to “seriously injure” the parole officer. They took this to mean kill him.

They had not been instructed to kill him on April Fools’ Day, however, nor had they been instructed to use Intratecs on him, but they both felt that since an Intratec had been the instrument of Garcia’s embarrassment, it should now be the instrument of his revenge. They were quite looking forward to doing the parole officer, not the least because Garcia had promised to give both of them promotions if they succeeded in carrying out his instructions. At the moment, they were both clockers, who were low-level people who sold cocaine on street corners. A clocker in the drug world was somewhat higher in status than a toy in the world of graffiti writers. Manuel and Marco planned to change their status within the next twenty minutes.

It only took fifteen.

At precisely seven minutes past two that afternoon, Allen Maguire came back from lunch and stepped into the building on Edgerley, only to see two young men step from behind the staircase with pistols in their hands. He turned to run, but he was too late. One of them yelled,“Inocente! Inocente!” and then both of them opened fire. Maguire was dead twenty times over when they stepped over his bleeding body, giggling, and ran out of the building into the rain.

THE MAN WHO STOPPED at the 87th Precinct’s muster desk at two-thirty that afternoon said he wanted to talk to the detectives investigating the Wilkins case. Sergeant Murchison took his name, called upstairs, told Kling who was here, and then asked the man to go up to the detective division on the second floor, he’d see the signs.

The man introduced himself as David Wilkins.

“Peter was my brother,” he said.

Thirty-four, thirty-five years old, Kling guessed. Brown eyes, reddish hair, reddish mustache. Slender and fit-looking; Kling supposed he exercised regularly. He was sporting a tan, in fact. Had he just come back from a vacation in the sun someplace?

“The reason I’m here,” Wilkins said, “is I went to Surrogate’s Court this morning to see what it said in my brother’s will, and they told me a will hadn’t been filed.”

“Yes?” Kling said.

“I feel certain there’s a will.”

“Yes?”

“So why hasn’t it been filed yet?”

“Well, it sometimes takes a while to get papers to court,” Kling said. “Two, three months sometimes. It’s still early to be…”

“I think I’m in that will,” Wilkins said. “I think that’s why it hasn’t been filed yet.”

“What makes you think you’re in it?”

“Little things my brother said. Hints. We were very close.”

Kling wanted to ask him if he’d known his brother was a closet graffiti writer. Those twenty-two cans of paint in the closet still bothered him. Debra Wilkins as surprised to see them as the detectives were. No idea her husband was hoarding paint for his nocturnal forays.

“I think Debra knows I’m in the will, and is trying to hide it from me,” Wilkins said.

“Have you asked her if you’re in it?”

“We don’t speak to each other.”

“Oh.”

Kling was suddenly interested. Detectives liked nothing better than family disputes. Family disputes provided motives. But an unfiled will? a hidden will? That was the stuff of paperback mysteries. In police work there were no mysteries. There were only crimes and the motives for those crimes.

“Haven’t spoken to each other since the wedding,” Wilkins said. “That was three years ago. She threw a glass of champagne in my face.”

“Why’d she do that, Mr. Wilkins?”

Seeming only mildly interested, but this was a family dispute and he was listening intently.

“I called her a whore.”

Kling all ears now. This was turning into a Southern Gothic.

“Why’d you do that, Mr. Wilkins?”

“Because she is one,” he said, and shrugged.

“You don’t mean that literally,” Kling said, prodding.

“No, but you know what I mean.”

“No, what do you mean?”

“A cock tease,” Wilkins said.

Good thing you didn’t call her that , Kling thought. She’d have broken the whole bottle of champagne over your head.

“Ever mention this to your brother?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Wilkins said. “I figured he made his bed, let him lie in it.”

But now he’s dead, Kling thought.

“And you think she’s hiding the will from you, is that it?”

“I’m sure she’s hiding it. What I want is for you to go in her house with a search warrant…”

“Well, we can’t do that, Mr. Wilkins.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think a judge would grant one. Not to go in and search for a will. Not without some reason to believe it would constitute evidence in a crime.”

“If she’s keeping money from me, it is a crime.”

“Well, we don’t know if there is a will, you see, or if you’re in it, if there is one. And if there is, how do you know it’s in her house? Have you ever seen this will?”

“No, but…”

“So how can I ask for a court order to search for a will that may not exist? The judge would throw me out.”

“So she just gets away with it, huh? Hiding the will from me?”

“Well…what you can do…I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t want to advise you. But if you went to see a lawyer…”

“Lawyers!”Wilkins said.

“…I’m sure he could write a letter to your sister-in-law…”

“Thatbitch!”

“…asking her if there is a will, and if so, when does she plan to petition the court for probate. Then if she doesn’t answer in a reasonable amount of time, he can take it from there.”

“Take it where from there?”

“Go to court for you, I guess.”

“What you’re saying is it’s going to cost me money to get whatever money my brother left me.”

Ifhe left you any, Kling thought.

“What I’m saying,” Kling said, “is that this isn’t a police matter.”

But maybe it was.

THIS WAS THE old City.

The ocean-battered seawall still stood where the Dutch had built it centuries ago, the massive cannons atop it seeming even now to control the approach from the Atlantic though their barrels had long ago been filled with cement. If you looked out over the wall at the very tip of the island, you could watch the Dix and the Harb churning with crosscurrents where the two rivers met. The wind howled in fiercely here, ripping through streets that had once accommodated horse-drawn carts but that were now too narrow to allow the passage of more than a single automobile. Where once there had been two-story wooden taverns, a precious few of which still survived, there were now concrete buildings soaring high into the sky, infested redundantly with lawyers and financiers. The firm of Osborne, Wilkins, Promontori and Colbert was in one of those buildings.

“I love the view from up here,” Parker said. “This part of the city.”

They were strolling down the hallway toward a huge floor-to-ceiling window through which they could see towering skyscrapers succumbing to dusk. It was close to five o’clock. They hadn’t called ahead, and Kling was wondering now if they should have. But Parker had told him he liked to surprise people. Parker thought he was full of surprises. Maybe he was. His surprise for today was that he hadn’t shaved. Kling wondered if it was wise to go into a fancy lawyer’s office without either an appointment or a shave.

The receptionist asked them who they were.

Parker flashed the tin and told her they wanted to talk to Mr. Colbert, please, if he could spare them a minute. Neither of them particularly liked lawyers. Aside from district attorneys, their entire experience with lawyers was with defense lawyers, many of whom had once been D.A.’s, all of whom were determined to impeach them as witnesses and cast them as brutes, racists, and perjurers. But Peter Wilkins had been a lawyer, and he was dead. And this morning his brother had raised the question of a will that might or might not exist, in which he might or might not have been named as a beneficiary. So they were here to talk to yet another lawyer, who happened to have been Peter Wilkins’s partner, and who now came out of his office to greet them personally.

Kling recognized the man he’d met at the wake. Thirty-five years old or thereabouts, plain, craggy face, dark eyes, mustache, eyeglasses. Wearing the same brown suit he’d been wearing when they’d met the first time. Button-down collar, striped tie. Tall and angular. Hand extended in greeting.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “come in, please, have you learned anything?”

“No, not yet,” Kling said.

“Few questions we’d like to ask you, though,” Parker said, “if that’s all right with you.”

“Yes, please,” he said, ushering them into his private office and closing the door behind them. They were facing a window wall that offered a breathtaking view of the skyline. Big wooden desk covered with papers in blue binders. Bookshelves sagging with heavy legal tomes. Framed university degrees on the walls. Colbert sat behind his desk, the window wall behind him.

“So,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“I got a visit this morning from a man named David Wilkins,” Kling said. “Do you know him?”

“Peter’s brother. Yes. I know him.”

“I understand he and Mrs. Wilkins don’t get along.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Colbert said, and smiled.

“Threw champagne in his face, that right?” Parker asked.

“He shouted obscenities at her. At her own wedding reception, mind you. I’ve never seen her so angry.”

“You were there?”

“Oh, yes. The three of us have been friends…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I still can’t get used to the idea of Peter being gone.” He sighed, shook his head again, and said, “Yes, I was there. I was Peter’s best man, in fact.”

“Wilkins seems to think his brother left a will,” Kling said.

Colbert said nothing.

“And that he’s in it,” Parker said.

Colbert still said nothing.

“Would you know if there’s such a will?” Kling asked.

“Why do you want to know this?” Colbert said.

“Well…there’s been a murder committed,” Kling said, “and we like to cover all the…”

“What my partner’s trying to say,” Parker said, “is that it has been known in the annals of crime for people to kill other people in order to inherit money. Is what I think he’s trying to say.”

“I see. So you think…”

“We don’t think anything yet,” Kling said. “We’re trying…”

“What we think ,” Parker said, “is that Wilkins sounds like a flake goes around insulting the bride at her own wedding and now thinks he’s named in his brother’s will, is what we think. Which could have some bearing on the case.”

“So is there such a will?” Kling asked.

“By such a will, do you mean a will in which David Wilkins is named as a beneficiary? Or merely a will Peter Wilkins left?”

“Take your choice,” Parker said.

“Peter Wilkins left a will, yes,” Colbert said. “Hasn’t Debra told you this?”

“We didn’t ask her,” Parker said. “Do you have a copy of that will, Mr. Colbert?”

“I have the original,” Colbert said.

“May we see that will, please?” Kling asked.

“Why?” Colbert said.

“As my partner explained, it might have some bearing if Wilkins was named as…”

“Yes, I understand. But the will hasn’t yet been probated, hasn’t been made a public document. If I showed it to you, I’d be violating the privacy…”

“Mr. Colbert,” Parker said, “your partner was killed. We’re trying to find out who did it.”

“I recognize that. But I don’t think I can show you his will.”

Parker looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” Colbert said.

“Can you tell us if David Wilkins is a beneficiary in the will?” Kling asked.

“Suppose I say he is? Will you then want to know what the conditions of the will are, what the terms of the will are, what…”

“Can’t you just give us a simple yes or no?” Parker said.

“Can’t you wait till the will is probated? The man was buried only last week, I would think…”

“Let me put it to you this way, Mr. Colbert,” Parker said. “Suppose this nutty brother of his who loses his head at weddings discovers he’s going to inherit a million bucks when his brother dies. And suppose he sees in the newspaper that a person was killed spraying a wall, and suppose he decides it would be a good idea to kill his brother and make it look like the same person did it so he can collect his mil and run off to the South Pacific, do you think then you could understand why we might want to know if this guy’s really going to inherit?”

“Yes, but…”

“So give us a break, willya?” Parker said.

Colbert smiled.

“I suppose I can disclose a negative,” he said. “No, David Wilkins is not named as a beneficiary in his brother’s will.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “Can you tell us who is named?”

“That would be a positive,” Colbert said, and smiled again. “I’m sorry, really, but I couldn’t reveal that without first asking Debra Wilkins’s permission.”

“It’ll be a matter of public record the minute she files for probate,” Kling said.

“Yes, but it’s not a matter of public record yet.”

“Do you know when she plans to file?”

“I have no idea.”

“Hasn’t said anything to you about…”

“She’s given me no instructions. Her husband was just killed, Mr. Kling. I’m sure the last thing on her mind is filing his will.”

Kling nodded.

Parker nodded, too.

“Well, thanks a lot,” he said, “we appreciate your time.”

“Happy to be of help,” Colbert said, and came from behind his desk to show them to the door. “If you like,” he said, “I’ll give Debra a call, ask if it’s okay to supply the information you’re looking for.”

“Yeah, we’d appreciate that,” Parker said, and handed him his card.

“Thanks again,” Kling said.

In the hallway outside, as they walked toward the elevators, Parker said, “Did you see those diplomas on his wall? The guy went to Harvard !”

“Why’d he wait till we were on our way out?” Kling asked.

“Wait for what ?” Parker said. “Sometimes you’ve very fucking mysterious, you know that?”

“Wait to make his offer. About calling the wife.”

“Let me tell you what that’s called, okay? It’s called lawyer-client confidentiality, and it means you don’t call your client while somebody is with you who can hear the conversation. Got it?”

“I’m gonna ask her about that will,” Kling said. “I don’t see what the big secret is about a will that’s gonna be probated anyway.”

“It’ll wait till tomorrow,” Parker said. “You bucking for commissioner or what?”

Kling looked at his watch.

“It’ll wait till tomorrow,” Parker said again.

Kling nodded. “Wanna grab a burger?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Parker said, and grinned. “But not with you.”

CHLOE THOUGHT it was an April Fools’ Day joke at first, Sil handing her the check over the table. He’d told her on the phone this morning that it might take a few days yet for the group’s business manager to cut the check, but here he was handing it to her, nice pretty yellow check, his fingers to her fingers over the table. The first thing she saw was the six zeros, four of them in front of the decimal point and another two after it. Then she saw the two, and sure enough, she was looking at a check for twenty thousand dollars.

“I should have asked for it in singles,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

“How about quarters?” Sil said. “Wheelbarrow full of quarters.”

“This won’t bounce, will it?” she asked.

“Better not,” he said, and raised his wineglass.

She put the check in her handbag and snapped the bag shut before she lifted her glass.

“Here’s to the first Spit Shine performance of ‘Sister Woman’ this Saturday,” he said.

“Here’s to it,” she said, and they both drank.

“Will you come hear us?” he asked. “I’ll get you a laminate, you can sit right on the stage with us.”

“What’s a laminate?”

“A pass. Get you through security.”

“What time Saturday?” she asked.

“We’re opening the whole thing,” he said. “Only better spot would be the closing one. Usually, your headliner’s the last act on stage. But Grass thinks next to closing would be better for a Sunday. The thing’s running two full days, you know. Starts at one o’clock Saturday, ends midnight Sunday.”

“Who’s Grass?” Chloe asked.

“Girl in the crew.”

The way he said it, so offhandedly like that, she figured there was something going on between them. Looked away, too, something going on there for sure.

“There’ll be ten groups altogether, five on Saturday, another five on Sunday. Figure an hour onstage for each of us, maybe even an hour and a half, depending on how it’s going. Then, when you figure in your dead time…”

“Dead time?”

“Yeah, the next act placing they instruments and setting up they own mikes and amps, that all takes time. Sometimes your dead time can be an hour between each act, depending how fussy the group wants t’be. What I’m saying is it’ll be a full day, if you want to go the whole route. I’d be happy t’stay with you, you want to stick around after we’re through performing. Or we can go someplace else, if you like, spend the day together. If you like,” he said.

“I haven’t yet said I was coming,” she said.

“Well,if you come. I thought you might like to hear us do ‘Sister Woman,’ is all. We’ve been rehearsing it, I think it’ll go down real fine.”

“It’s a good song.”

“Oh yeah.”

“When will you be doing it? I mean, where in the act?”

“We’re opening with it. Usually, you open with something familiar, give ’em time to settle down while they listen to one of your hits. This time, we’re jumpin right in with both feet, givin ’em a new one.Then we’ll do one of our hits…you familiar with ‘Hate’?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“You got a date with hate, at the Devil’s gate,” he rapped, beating out the rhythm on the tabletop, “you gotta hate the ofay…you don’t know it, huh? Big hit. Anyway, we do that after ‘Sister Woman’ and then we’ve got a big surprise planned for later on, I was hoping you’d stay for it. Something unusual for us. Chloe, I’d…be very disappointed if you didn’t come Saturday. I was looking forward to your coming. It’d be very special for me if you was to come.”

She had promised Tony she’d work all day Saturday—which was supposed to be her day off—to make up for tonight. Now that she had the check, she could tell Tony things had changed. Tell him she didn’t need the job anymore. Though she knew people who’d won more than twenty on the lottery, blew it all in a month. She couldn’t let that happen. Maybe she should hang on to the job till she figured what to do next. Put the money in the bank, keep dancing at Eden’s till she explored the opportunities open to her. Go in this Saturday, like she said she would. Still, she did want to hear them do “Sister Woman.” Then again, that tune was the past, man, that tune was George Chadderton, long dead and gone and scarcely missed at all. The future was Chloe Chadderton. But maybe the future was Sil, too.

“One o’clock, you say?”

“Get you a laminate the minute you say the word. All access, you can roam around wherever you like before the concert starts. I’ll set you up on the stage where you can hear and see everything we do. Take you around later, introduce you to the other groups.” He lowered his eyes again. “That’d make me very proud,” he said.

“I’ll see,” she said.

She wasn’t playing it cute, she wasn’t that kind of woman, never had been. She was still thinking it might be better to hang on to the job, go in Saturday like she’d promised Tony. Maybe Sil was the future, though she wasn’t too sure about that, either. Men were men, and too damn many of them were alike. But future or not, the job at the Eden was the present. She didn’t want to start living on that twenty. That twenty was her stake.

“Well, you think it over,” he said, and took another sip of the wine. “I don’t know too much about Italian food,” he said, “except pizza on the road. There’s some great pizza joints in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But I asked Mort…Mort Ackerman…what he thought the best…”

“Who’s Mort Ackerman?”

“Promoter doing the concert. Windows Entertainment, you ever hear of them?”

“No.”

“They’re gigantic. Mort’s the CEO. We were yellin at him about the ads, and he called today to say there’d be full-page ads in all the papers tomorrow, and Spit Shine’s featured real prominent, big as any other headliner.”

“I’ll look for them,” she said.

“Mort says this is his favorite restaurant in all the city,” Sil said, and hesitated, and then said, “Romantic, too. Mort said.”

“It is romantic,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s romantic?”

“Oh yes, I do, yes,” he said. “All these flags. Would you care for some more wine?”

“Please,” she said.

He signaled to the waiter. The waiter poured.

“And whenever you’re ready, sir,” he said, “I’ll be happy to take your order.”

“In just a bit,” Sil said.

He lifted his glass, looked over it into her eyes.

“Chloe,” he said, “please say you’ll come Saturday.”

“Yes, I think I will,” she said.

“Good,” he said, and grinned.

She returned the smile.

She was thinking he was very cute. She was hoping he would turn out to be the future.

They clinked glasses.

They drank.

“I can’t wait to see your face,” he said.

“When you do George’s song, you mean?”

“Well, that, too,” he said mysteriously.

“Well, what do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”

“No, tell me.”

“You’ll see,” he said.

Looking like the cat that swallowed the canary.

So damn cute she could eat him alive.

“I’m starving to death,” he said. “Let’s order.”

IN MAJESTA that Wednesday night…

Majesta had without question been named by the British; the cognomen rang with all the authority, grandeur, greatness, and dignity of sovereignty, its roots being in the Middle English word maieste , from the Old French majesté , from the Latin mãjestãs. Even the section called Port Royal had long ago been British, though by the early nineteen-hundreds it had already become an exclusively Italian community. In the forties, the Puerto Ricans started coming in. Now there were Dominicans and Chinese as well.

In Majesta that Wednesday night, in Port Royal, at seven minutes past seven, with the sun already gone for almost an hour, a fifteen-year-old girl who called herself “Italian” even though her parents and grandparents had been born in this country, sat on the front stoop of her apartment building, enjoying the sweet fresh smell of the city now that the rain had stopped. The night was mild, it seemed to Carol Girasole that spring was honestly here at last.

At eight minutes past seven, eighteen-year-old Ramón Guzman walked up to Carol where she sat on the front stoop, bowed from the waist, said, “Haw do you do, miss?” in faintly accented English, stood up, grinned, punched her in the eye, shouted “April Fool!” and ran off.

Carol started yelling blue murder. Nothing like this had ever happened to her in her life! The nerve! A spic coming up to her and punching her for no good reason! Running off into the night, Ramón thought that what he’d just done was very comical, perhaps because he’d had a little too much to drink. He was still laughing to himself when he reached his own street and went upstairs to the apartment he lived in with his mother and three sisters. Five minutes later, he heard a great commotion downstairs and went to the window to look out.

The girl he had punched was standing outside the building with five grown men who’d formed a sort of circle around Geraldo Jiminez, it looked like, and they were yelling “You the April Fool kid? You the one hit this girl?” Geraldo, who was sixteen years old, and skinny as a needle, had just got here from Santo Domingo two months ago, and he didn’t speak enough English to know what “April Fool” meant, so he just kept shaking his head and saying no, not understanding what these men were so upset about, but figuring if he just shook his head and kept saying no over and over again, they’d realize there was some kind of mistake here. But the men kept yelling, “Wha’d you do, April Fool? You hit the girl here, huh?” and Geraldo said,“No hablo inglés,” and one of the men yelled, “Don’t lie!” and someone else hit him, and then they were all hitting him and Carol said, very softly, “I don’t think that’s him,” but they kept hitting him with their fists, yelling, “You lying spic bastard!” and “Hit a girl, huh?” and “April Fool, huh?” all the while hitting him. And then one of the men broke a bottle on his head, and when Geraldo fell to the sidewalk, they began kicking him. They kicked him everywhere, his head, his chest, his stomach, his groin, everywhere. Carol said, more softly this time, “I don’t think he’s the one,” but they kept kicking him till he lay still and silent and bleeding on the sidewalk.

Ramón watched all this from his window.

Then he took off his clothes and went to sleep in his undershorts in the room he shared with his three sisters.

IN ISOLA at nine o’clock that night, Sharyn Cooke and three other surgeons stood around Georgia Mowbry’s bed in the recovery room at Buenavista Hospital, talking quietly about their next move. This was now almost forty-eight hours since she’d been wheeled out of the operating room and she was neither responding to verbal stimuli nor voluntarily moving any of her extremities. At the same time, her fever stubbornly refused to drop and her white blood-cell count continued rising. Most alarming, though, was a significant increase in intracranial pressure, which almost certainly indicated free bleeding and the consequent danger of a blood clot. The surgeons could see no course except to go in again and find whatever was causing the problem. Dr. Adderley ordered Georgia prepped at once for emergency craniotomy.

At twenty minutes to ten, they opened her skull again.

An expanding blood clot killed her three minutes later.

PARKER FIGURED that the way to seduce a girl was to tell her how brave you were. Let her know you’d been in some very dangerous situations where you’d behaved courageously and fearlessly and with good humor, and she would then equate this with the size of your cock. So he told her first that he had flown an airplane in the war, but he didn’t bother to mention which war because he’d never flown an airplane in his life and he didn’t want her to start asking technical questions about this or that.

Then he told her he’d joined the police force after his honorable discharge and had made detective six months later—which was another lie since it had taken him three years to get the gold shield even though he’d had a rabbi in the Chief of Detectives’ Office putting in the good word. He told her he loved detective work because it gave him an opportunity to help the poor and oppressed by righting wrongs and by making certain the victimizers of this world got put behind bars where they belonged. He halfway believed this. About the victimizers, not the poor and oppressed bullshit. Far as Parker was concerned, nobody was poor and oppressed unless he chose to be poor and oppressed. He was saving the best part for last. The best part was the only true part.

They were sitting in the living room of her apartment on Chelsea Street, this was now almost eleven o’clock. He’d left Kling at five-thirty, later than he normally cared to work, he normally liked to quit for the day at three-forty-five on the button. But there’d been a lot of paper work to file on the new jackass got himself killed on Hall Avenue—scratchinga window, no less. Only good thing about the new murder was it gave him an excuse to call Cathy again, ask her a few more questions on the phone and then ask her if, by the way, she’d like to grab a quick bite, nothing fancy, maybe a pizza or something—brunch on Sunday had cost him seventy-five bucks for the two of them, with nothing but a stroll in the park and a handshake after—and then catch a movie later. Cathy told him she was just finishing typing a screenplay, what a coincidence, would six o’clock be okay? The movie had let out at ten, and she’d asked him to come back here for coffee, which he figured was a very good sign. So now he was laying the groundwork.

The porcupine story was always a good one because it was true and also because it showed him in a brave and also humorously sympathetic light. The way the porcupine story went—he had told it to so many different women on so many different occasions that he knew it by heart and never varied the details of it, listen, if something wasn’t broke, why fix it? The way it went, he was in the squadroom all alone one day when this lunatic…

“This was before I got transferred to the Eight-Seven. I was working out of the Six-Four in Calm’s Point, a very tough precinct. I was on the graveyard shift, this was maybe three, four o’clock in the morning, still as death up there, this guy walks in with a porcupine on a leash.”

He waited for her amused expression, women always thought a porcupine on a leash was something cute. Unless the thing’s owner had a gun in his hand. Which this guy had in his hand. The first thing Parker wondered was how he’d got past the desk sergeant. This was before bomb threats were common in this city; there weren’t patrolmen posted outside the front doors of station houses back then. But anyone walking in still had to stop at the muster desk, state his business, big sign advising them to do so. Especially a guy with a fuckin porcupine on a leash!

He risked the word fuckin with her.

Waited for her reaction.

Nothing.

He considered that a good sign.

Anyway, the guy had to’ve told the desk sergeant what his business was, and the sergeant had probably sent him upstairs, maybe the porcupine had rabies or something, whatever these things got. But the guy certainly hadn’t told the sergeant he had a gun in his pocket, which he took out the minute he walked into the squadroom.

“So you got this picture, Cath?”

He risked using the diminutive, which sounded like a pet name. They were sitting on the couch and he had his arm around her. Her blouse unbuttoned low, which he realized was a habit with her, the better to see the boobs, my dear.

“Here’s this guy with a big gun in his right hand and his left hand is holding a leash at the end of which is this porcupine looks like an attack dog with quills.”

He laughed.

Cathy laughed, too.

He sort of hugged her when she laughed. Arm around her shoulders. Pulled her a little closer.

“It turns out he wants me to shoot the porcupine,” Parker said. “He’s nuttier than a Hershey bar, you understand…”

…keeps waving the gun in Parker’s face, it’s a thirty-eight, and telling him that the porcupine here is his wife’s pet who shit all over the house, and he wants Parker to shoot it for him. That’s why he brought the gun up here, he’s got a carry license for it, he works in the diamond center, it’s the only humane thing to do, shoot the fuckin porcupine. Meanwhile, the guy’s eyes are getting crazier and crazier and the gun is making bigger and bigger circles on the air and Parker’s afraid he’s going to get shot just talking to this maniac. This is the police department’s obligation, the guy insists, mercifully putting a wild animal to sleep who has no right running around the apartment relieving himself at will while the guy is trying to sort diamonds. Meanwhile, the porcupine at the end of the leash is relieving himself all over the squadroom while Parker is trying to sort out this little dilemma he has here, whether he should put the thing to sleep with a legal handgun or risk getting shot himself as they debate the entire matter.

At this point in his recitation, Parker slid his hand down off Cathy’s shoulder and into her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe she was too fascinated by his delightful porcupine story to notice.

“I didn’t want to kill that poor animal,” he said, hoping his eyes were brimming with tears, “but neither did I wish to get shot myself,” undoing the buttons lower on her blouse, exposing the cones of a white bra, Cathy took a deep breath. “Besides, how did I know this was a legal pistol? There are many ramifications to police work, you know. So what I finally did,” he said, and reached behind her to undo the bra clasp, releasing her breasts into his hands, she took another deep breath, “what I did was I said to him ‘How about I take the little fella for a walk?’ and I got up and held out my hand for the leash, and he put the leash in my hand, and I said, ‘The gun, too, so I can do what has to be done outside,’” lowering his face to her breasts, nuzzling them with his cheeks, one against each cheek, it was a good thing he’d shaved before coming over here. His hands up under her skirt now, he said, “So I took the gun and the porcupine downstairs, and I called the ASPCA to take the thing away, and I gave the gun to the desk sergeant for him to run a make on, and it turned out the guy really did work in the diamond center and he did have a carry permit for the piece, so nobody got hurt, do you think you’d like to go in the bedroom now?” he asked as he lowered her panties.

Sometime during the next hour, while it was still April Fools’ Day and after Parker had brought Cathy to orgasm several times, she told him that her dream was to become a writer. He thought she meant a graffiti writer at first, like her dumb fuckin son. But she meant a movie writer. She told him she typed movie scripts all the time and it seemed like a very easy thing to do. She also told him that her other dream was to marry a decent hardworking man one day, perhaps a man like Parker, move out of the city into a little house with a low fence around it, cook barbecue in the backyard at the end of the day when she finished writing for the day, maybe in a suburb of Los Angeles, that’s where all the movie writers were. That was her dream. To marry a decent hardworking man…

“Like you,” she whispered.

…and write screenplays in the L.A. area and cook barbecue in the backyard.

His hand buried between her legs again, Parker thought Dream on, fool.