Mischief

10.

AT TWO O’CLOCK on the morning of April second, the concert site was deserted except for a lone security guard. The people working in the production trailer had turned off the lights and locked up behind themselves some twenty minutes ago. Got into the two private cars parked outside, drove off on the access road that went out of the Cow Pasture and past the big lake they called The Swan, Carter wondered why. The guard—a big fat man wearing a blue uniform with a yellow stripe on the trouser legs—had waved off the two cars and then had got into his own black-and-white car with the gold shield of the company on the side. Carter figured he would radio the home office, tell them everybody’d just left, twoA .M. and all’s well. Then he’d take a little nap. Carter hoped .

The Cow Pasture was this huge lawn, some ten-plus acres of newly cropped grass that this weekend would be covered with God alone knew how many people, all of them screaming at the stage. The stage hadn’t been put up yet, nothing had been put up yet, there was only the empty lawn with the trailer sitting there all alone under the stars and the guard’s car parked across the entrance drive that led in from the access road. Since there was nothing to steal out here in the open except what was inside the trailer, the car was parked with its nose facing the trailer. But Carter figured the guard knew there was nothing much of value in that trailer; this wasn’t like sitting outside Fort Knox waiting for a big caper to happen. This was a single guard sitting here in the middle of the night and never for a minute suspecting that anyone would want to get in that trailer. But the guard was armed and Carter didn’t want to get spotted fiddling with the Mickey Mouse lock on the door to the trailer; they had parked the trailer so that its back was to the lake, its entrance door clearly visible from where the guard sat behind the wheel of the car.

Carter’s instructions were to get in and get out without anyone knowing he’d been there. Steal one—and only one—of theALL ACCESS laminates. Didn’t want anyone to know anything was missing. Just take one of the laminates and get out fast. There’d be laminates in there for specific areas, and different performing groups, but Florry had told him to look for the ones that saidALL ACCESS , that was the kind he needed. When Sanson introduced them, he said Florry knew about such things, he’d worked on the sound at Woodstock. Carter didn’t know what Grover Park had to do with what they’d be doing come Saturday, but Sanson said not to worry about it, just get the laminate, without the laminate we might not be doing anything come Saturday.

The uniforms had been the easiest part so far.

For all I know you can walk in some store and buy them right off the rack, he’d told Sanson. Which turned out to be exactly the case. Well, not just any store. What he’d done, he’d called the Department of Sanitation and told them these guys on his bowling team were sanitation employees and they’d just won a tournament…

“I’m captain of the team,” he said.

“Hey.”

…and he wanted to buy them some uniform stuff as a victory gift.

“What’d you have in mind?” the guy on the other end of the line asked. Heavy Calm’s Point accent. Carter visualized a fire hydrant with a cigar in its mouth.

“You know,” he said, “the uniforms they wear on the garbage trucks.”

“You mean the spruce-green uniforms?” the guy said.

“Yeah,” Carter said, “what they wear on the truck.”

“Yeah, we got those here,” the guy said, “the long-sleeve shirts, the pants, the jackets and hats, whatever you need, the T-shirts. We even got sweatshirts here, you want to get some of those. Those might be nice to bowl in.”

“Where are you?” Carter asked.

“Public Affairs Office. There’s like a little shop here. Room 831. Just come on down, you’ll find whatever you need. 335 Gold. You know where Gold Street is? Down on the Lower Platform? We’re next to where the old outdoor market used to be. Room 831. Just come up, we’ll take care of you. The shirts are eleven dollars, the long-sleeve shirts, and the pants are fifteen. If you want the sweatshirt…”

“Do you have any patches there?”

“Patches?”

“Sleeve patches, you know?”

“No, I don’t. But they can get those through their supervisors.”

“You can’t get any for me, huh? So I can sew them on, make it like a real surprise?”

“Let me see what I can do, okay? How many you need?”

“Just four.”

“When are you coming in?”

“I thought tomorrow.”

“I’m off tomorrow.”

“Can you leave them for me?”

“The shirts? They’re right here. All you have to…”

“The patches.”

“Oh. Sure, if I can get ’em for you. What’s your name?”

“Ray Gardner.”

“Okay, Ray, let me see what I can do.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Hey, come on.”

As easy as that.

The garbage truck would be a bit more difficult.

Sanson wanted him to steal the truck on the day of the job, take it at noon, drive straight over to the river with it. Carter had argued against this. First, it would mean a daylight heist, which increased the risk. And next, the trucks were in use during the day, they weren’t just sitting around in empty lots all over the city the way they were at night. Cyclone fences around the lots, razor wire on top of the fences, be hard enough getting in at night , never mind the daytime. Sanson had listened hard—he always listened hard, the deaf fuck—and then he’d said Okay, but it has to be as late as possible the night before, I don’t want some sanitation slob to discover the missing truck and alert the entire department. It was agreed that Carter would steal a truck from the Blatty Street garage in Riverhead sometime during the empty hours of the night before the concert.

For now, he had to get that laminate.

He could see movement in the car, Fat Boy was never going to sleep. One thing Carter hated was conscientious public servants. He looked over toward the trailer, wondering whether the area near the door was dark enough for him to risk it even with the guard awake. He decided it wasn’t. All he needed was half a minute to pick that lock, couldn’t the guy sneak forty winks for him? He waited another ten minutes, decided Fat Boy would be awake all night, and went into the woods bordering the lake. Hoping he wouldn’t step on any lovers’ asses in there, he circled around toward the access road, picked up a rock the size of a cantaloupe, came up behind the car, and hurled the rock at the rear window. He was back in the woods again even before Fat Boy came out of the car yelling. Took Carter three minutes to run back to the trailer. Another minute to pick the lock and open the door. Over to the left, he could hear Fat Boy chasing shadows on the access road. Still out of breath, he pulled the door shut behind him and locked the door from the inside.

Taking a Mag-Lite from his pocket, he shielded it before he snapped it on, allowing only a pinpoint of illumination to escape his cupped hands as he began searching the trailer. Nothing was locked in here, nothing to steal but the laminates, and there was a guard outside making sure that wouldn’t happen. He found boxes and boxes of them inside a metal cabinet at the far end of the trailer. All of the laminates were marked in the left-hand corner with the slightly-ajar-window logo of Windows Entertainment. They were color-coded in four different colors: yellow, pink, pastel blue, and orange. There were laminates with the names of the various groups on them, and laminates with big numbers on them1, 2, 3, 4 and then he found the box he needed, the ones with the laminates markedALL ACCESS. He didn’t know which of the colors were for which days, so he took one in each color, and grabbed a handful of lanyards from the shelf. He doused the light and was about to step out of the trailer again when he heard the guard’s footsteps outside.

He waited in the dark.

Fat Boy shook the knob.

Standard procedure.

Shake it, see if it’s locked.

Which was why Carter had locked it from the inside.

He kept waiting.

Heard footsteps moving off.

Heard the car door opening and then closing again. Fat Boy on the horn to the home office, Hey, somebody smashed my fuckin window !

Carter stayed inside the trailer for another ten minutes. Then he eased open the door a few inches, looked toward the car, opened the door wider, stepped down onto the grass, and slipped silently into the night.

THE DEAF MAN’S next letter was delivered to the squadroom early that Thursday morning, the second day of April. As usual, there was a short note attached to a larger sheet of paper. The note read:

The paragraph photocopied from Rivera’s book read:

S iSHONA’S BLOND HAIRglistened in the light of the four moons. Everywhere around them, the naked bodies twisted and the voices roared to the night. “The multitude will destroy itself,” she told Tikona. “It will turn upon itself and see in itself the olden enemy. Its fury will blind its eyes. It will know only the enmities of the Ancients.”

“The river runs fast after the Rites of Spring,” Tikona said.

“But the fury rises before,” Sishona answered.

“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” Carella said.

“Rivera or the Deaf Man?” Brown asked.

“The Deaf Man,” Carella said. “What’s the goddamn jackass trying to tell us?”

“A jackass he’s not,” Meyer said. “In fact, maybe he’s a genius.”

“That’s what he’d like us to believe, anyway.”

“Let’s go over it from the start, okay?” Meyer said. “First he tells us there’s this multitude that’s going to explode.”

“Let me see that damn thing again,” Carella said. He was beginning to get irritated. The Deaf Man always irritated him. More so because he was deaf. Or pretending to be deaf. The person Carella loved most in his life was a woman who was really deaf.This son of a bitch…

“Here,” Hawes said.

Yesterday, the dentist had removed the stain from his teeth. He looked normal again. Or almost normal. The dentist had used a fine abrasive stone to clean off the sealant and stain, and then had polished the teeth with fine sandpaper. He told Hawes that the enamel would never come back—something they hadn’t told him before he’d given his all for the job—but that the calcium in the teeth would remineralize them, whatever the hell that meant. Hawes was annoyed. As much by the Deaf Man as by the dentist.

They all looked at the first message yet another time:

I fEAR ANexplosion,” Tikona said. “I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.”

“I, too, share this terrible fear, my son,” Okino said. “But The Plain is vast, and though the multitude multiplies, it can know no boundaries here, it cannot be restrained by walls. Such was the reason The Plain was chosen by the elders for these yearly rites of spring.”

“A multitude on a vast plain,” Kling said.

“A multitude that’s multiplying ,” Brown said.

“More and more people.”

“Jostling.”

“Ready to explode.”

“Let’s see the next one,” Carella said.

They all looked at the next message:

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 !”

“a milling crowd,” Hawes said.

“a killing crowd.”

“A crowd moving toward its victim.”

“Its common enemy.”

“Chanting, stamping, shouting.”

“All flailing arms and thrashing legs.”

“Kill, kill,kill !”

“i hate this son of a bitch,” Carella said.

“Let’s look at the one we got today,” Kling said.

They put it on the desk beside the other two:

S iSHONA’S BLONDhair glistened in the light of the four moons. Everywhere around them, the naked bodies twisted and the voices roared to the night. “The multitude will destroy itself,” she told Tikona. “It will turn upon itself and see in itself the olden enemy. Its fury will blind its eyes. It will know only the enmities of the Ancients.”

“The river runs fast after the Rites of Spring,” Tikona said.

“But the fury rises before,” Sishona answered.

“Where does he get these crazy names?” Kling said. “Sishona.”

“Never mind Sishona,” Brown said. “What’s he trying to tell us here?”

“Sounds like a goddamn orgy,” Hawes said irritably.

“The multitude will destroy itself,” Meyer said.

“Turn upon itself.”

“See in itself the olden enemy.”

“The enmities of the Ancients,” Kling said.

They all looked at each other.

“What we have to do,” Carella said, “is find this goddamn crowd.”

TODAY WAS PINK.

Florry had laminates in four different delightful colors, but the men walking past the security guards were all wearing pink, so he took out his pinkALL ACCESS pass from his pocket, hung it on the lanyard Sanson had provided with the laminate, and then looped the lanyard over his head. He had learned over the years that if you behaved as if you belonged someplace, nobody ever questioned you. The laminate helped. All pink and official-looking, the card passed him through the checkpoint without even a sideward glance from the two security guards.

The concert site was bustling with activity at nine that morning. The technicians and the work crews had begun arriving at sixA .M., before it was light, picking up their laminates at the production trailer, buying early morning breakfasts from the catering tent, and then beginning to load in as morngloam tinted the sky to the east. The concert was a one-off show, which meant that everything erected here today and tomorrow would be torn down next Monday. Florry had deliberately chosen to arrive late, when the men would already be at work. Union people tended to know one another, and there were hordes of them here today. The same held true for sound technicians. All he wanted to do was blend in with the crowd. Move from space to space as if he belonged. Ask no questions. Move around, look around, get the lay of the land.

TheUnion, of course, was IATSE, which curt acronym stood for the very long-winded International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the U.S. and Canada. But it was the Teamsters who had unloaded the trucks and it was the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who were snaking cables all over the place, and men from the Carpenters Local who were sawing and hammering away at the foundation of what would eventually become a huge stage.

The ground was still wet after all the rain this week, and the trucks and milling men had turned it into a quagmire. The sun was shining now, though, and the people from Windows Entertainment were hopeful that the ground would dry out before the crowds came in. Meanwhile, things were progressing on schedule, and there was no doubt that everything would be ready when the first of the groups was scheduled to perform.

Florry enjoyed all this activity.

There must’ve been close to a hundred people working here, all of them experts at what they were doing, all of them with a deadline to meet: By one o’clock this Saturday the stage and the roof over it, and the lighting hanging from it, and the speakers and amps in the sound towers on either side of it, and the delay towers with more speakers and amps, and the control tower for the house mix had to be up and ready to go, rain or shine.

Woodstock, you didn’t have any delay towers, they were too unreliable back then. Now you could calibrate your delays so that the sound coming from the stage stacks was exactly in synch with what was coming from the speakers out in the audience. Back then, all you had on the stage was two giant speakers whereas nowadays it wasn’t unusual to have a half-dozen stacks of speakers going at once. Back then, whenever you sent out a high signal, you distorted the mixer, and had to compensate for it by padding your mike line to reduce the signal. Today, you could correct the distortion right at the console, using your pre-amp gain control.

Still there was nothing today that could match Woodstock for excitement. Well, how could it? You did a Paul Simon concert right here in this same park, you got a crowd of 750,000 people—but that was expected. Woodstock, they were anticipating 200,000 and they got somewhere between half a million and 600,000! This weekend, nobody knew how many would show up. You got rain again, you could fold your tent and go home, even if the concert was free. Still, there were a couple of headliners scheduled to appear, so if the weather was good, you could draw a tremendous crowd. Free, that was the key word. You walked in, you sat on your blanket, and you listened. Big open crowd here in the outdoors. Listening.

It was Florry’s job to make sure they heard the right thing at the right time.

The right time was 1:20P .M.

The right thing was Sanson’s message.

Already burned into the chip and ready to go.

All Florry had to do was get into the console.

But the console wasn’t even up yet, wouldn’t be up till sometime tomorrow most likely.

For now, Florry had seen all he had to see.

He walked toward where a busy crew was erecting a cyclone fence around the backstage area. A pair of security guards were watching the fence go up. Neither of them even glanced at him as he left the construction site.

DEBRA WILKINS seemed to have gained control of herself. This was now a week and a day since her husband was slain by the person the newspapers were currently calling the Sprayer Slayer. In America, everything needed a title because everything was a miniseries concocted for the enjoyment of the populace. This new miniseries was titled The Sprayer Slayer and Part I was subtitled “The Hunt.” If they ever caught him, Part II would be subtitled “The Trial.” But if they wanted to keep their audience, they had better catch him soon. In America, nothing bored people more than something that went on for longer than a week or so. Americans had very short attention spans. Maybe this accounted for the fact that whereas Parker had taken Catalina Herrera to bed only the night before, he was this morning giving the widow Wilkins the eye. If they made a miniseries based on Parker’s romantic adventures, it would probably be titled Cop Lover .

“As you know,” he told Debra, “we now have four victims of this person, and whereas until now there didn’t seem to be any definite link between the four…”

“Haveyou found a link?” Debra asked.

“The killer left a note at the scene of the last murder,” Parker said gravely. You had to play different women different ways. You had to impress certain blonde and glacial types with your sincerity. He was hoping Debra Wilkins would see him as a dedicated professional for whom she would happily take off her panties. “If it isn’t too much trouble, Mrs. Wilkins, I wonder if you’d take a look at the note and tell us if you recognize the handwriting. Bert?” he said, as if prompting his presenter-partner at the Academy Awards to hand him the envelope, please.

Kling produced the photocopy of the note Midtown South had given him. He handed it to Parker who in turn handed it to Debra. She studied it carefully.

“It doesn’t look at all familiar,” she said.

“It was written on a scrap of paper he probably picked up at the scene,” Parker said. “One of these throwaway flyers advertising a neighborhood deli. We figure the note was a spur-of-the-moment idea.”

“We figure he wants to get caught,” Kling said.

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

“What my partner’s trying to say,” Parker said, “is that if we can match this handwriting, then we’ve got him on all four murders. Because it was found at the scene of one murder, and he confesses in the note to the other three .”

“I see. But why would he do such a stupid thing?” Debra asked.

“Like my partner says, he may want to get caught.”

“Either that,” she said, “or he’s a copycat who committed only the one murder and wants to take credit for the previous ones as well.”

“Now that is very good investigative thinking, Mrs. Wilkins,” Parker said, and shook his head in appreciative wonder. “Have you ever done police work?”

“Never,” she said.

Kling suddenly wondered if she was employed. The Wilkinses didn’t have any children, and homemaking for a childless couple didn’t seem like much of a fulltime occupation. Before he could ask her, though, Debra said, “I was once a legal secretary. For a firm that mostly handled criminal cases. That’s how I met Peter. He’d negotiated the divorce settlement for a woman whose husband later held up a bank. We were defending the husband in the criminal suit, and we called the former wife in for a deposition. I think he was claiming her as an alibi on the day of the robbery, I forget the exact circumstances. In any case, Peter and his partner…”

She turned to Kling.

“Jeffry Colbert,” she said. “You met him here last Saturday.”

“Yes, I remember,” Kling said. “We talked to him yesterday.”

“Oh?” Debra said.

So the son of a bitch didn’t call her like he said he would, Parker thought.

Kling was wondering if this would be a good time to bring up the will. He decided it wasn’t. But he felt further explanation about why they’d gone to see Colbert…or was it necessary?

“Few questions we wanted to ask him,” he said, and then, immediately, “You were telling us how you’d met your husband.”

“Yes, he and Jeffry accompanied this woman to the deposition. I started dating Peter and…well…eventually we got married.”

“How long ago was that?” Kling asked.

“Three years,” she said.

Her lip was beginning to quiver again. Maybe she wasn’t quite as much in control as Kling had earlier thought. Partly to move her away from memories of what had been a happier time, partly because the logistics were still bugging him, he said, “I’ve been trying to figure how your husband could have got all those paint cans into the apartment without your noticing. I gather you’re not working now…”

“No, I’m not.”

“Are you gone a lot? Out of the apartment, I mean.”

“I walk a lot,” she said. “I’m still learning the city, you see. I came here from Pittsburgh four years ago, but I was just beginning to know it when Peter…when the…when he…he got killed.”

“I wonder if we can take another look at those paint cans,” Kling said.

“I threw them out,” she said.

“Why?” he said, surprised.

“They…reminded me that Peter had a secret life, something I knew nothing about. I couldn’t stand looking at them any longer.”

“When did you throw them out?”

“Yesterday.”

“Where?”

“I left them in the basement. We have a man…”

She caught herself. She could no longer use the word “we” when discussing her family. Her husband was dead. Now it was the singular. I. She avoided that, too.

“A handyman comes in three times a week. We leave…”

It could no longer be avoided.

“I leave things down there for him to get rid of.”

“To get rid of how?”

“Some things he puts out with the garbage. The rest he carts off himself.”

“Where is he now? Your handyman?”

“I saw him outside just a little while ago. Working in the yard.”

“I don’t see what’s so important about those cans,” Parker said, “you should be bothering Mrs. Wilkins about them.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know you’d need them.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Parker said. “Mrs. Wilkins, I’m going to leave you my card. If you remember anything you think we should know…if, for example, anything about the handwriting rings a bell…we’ll be leaving this with you, by the way, it’s just a copy…you call me, okay? I’ll be here in a minute,” he said, and grinned like a shark.

“Thank you,” Debra said, and accepted the card.

“There’s just one more thing,” Kling said.

She looked up from the card.

“When we saw Mr. Colbert yesterday, he mentioned that your husband had left a will….”

“Yes?”

“You know about the will, do you?”

“Yes?”

“I know it hasn’t been probated yet….”

“Now that…the…the funeral is over and I…”

The lip quivering again, the eyes beginning to well with tears.

“I plan to do that tomorrow,” she said.

“Then…if the will’s going to be made public, anyway,” Kling said, “can you tell us who the beneficiaries are?”

“There’s only one beneficiary,” she said. “I’m the sole beneficiary.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“You have my card,” Parker said, and winked at her.

In the hallway outside, Kling said, “Let’s go talk to that handyman.”

“Why?” Parker said.

“She cries too much.”

“For Christ’s sake, her husband got whacked last week!”

“And she’s his sole goddamn beneficiary .”

Parker looked at him.

“How come she never saw those cans in his closet?” Kling asked.

“She told you. She didn’t go in his closet.”

“Didn’t see him carrying them into the house, either, huh?”

“You heard her, she’s out a lot. What are you saying, Bert? You saying she whacked him?”

“I’m saying opportunity .”

“What the fuck does that mean, opportunity?”

“Do you buy Wilkins as a writer?”

“Why not? Lots of guys lead peculiar lives.”

“A lawyer? Writing on walls ?”

“Lawyers especially are very peculiar,” Parker said.

“You don’t think it’s amazing she never noticed twenty-two cans of paint in her husband’s closet, huh?”

Parker let this sink in.

“You’re saying exactly what I said about the brother, right? She hears about this nut who killed…”

“Right, and opportunity knocks,” Kling said. “She whacks the husband and then makes him look like one of the victims.”

“You’re forgetting she’s the one who just now suggested a copycat, aren’t you?”

“Which, if she killed him, was very smart of her.”

Parker looked at him again.

“Okay,” he said at last, “let’s go find them fuckin cans.”

The handyman hadn’t thrown the paint cans into the garbage waiting for disposal because they looked brand-new and he figured that would be a tragic waste. At first he was reluctant to show the cans to the detectives because he was afraid they might take them away from him. Kling convinced him they only wanted to have a look at them.

On the bottom of each can, there was a little sticker that read:

They now knew where the paint had been purchased.

Trouble was, there were eight SavMor Hardware stores in Isola alone, and another twelve scattered all over the city.

AT THREE O’CLOCK that afternoon, Eileen went downtown to talk to Karin Lefkowitz. Karin was her shrink. She went to see her because she was feeling guilty about Georgia Mowbry. She told Karin that she was the one who’d been working the door and yet it was Georgia who’d been shot and killed. It didn’t seem fair, she said.

People kept telling Karin that she looked a lot like Barbra Streisand playing Lowenstein in Prince of Tides . Karin resented this because she didn’t know a single analyst who would have behaved as outrageously as that one had; in the picture, anyway; she hadn’t read the book. Besides, she didn’t think she looked or behaved at all like Barbra Streisand. Her nose was a trifle long, true, but she didn’t have long fingernails and she didn’t wear high heels to work and she didn’t hire any of her patients to give her son football lessons. As a matter of fact, she didn’t have any children, perhaps because she wasn’t married. And what she wore to work was tailored suits and Reeboks. Anyway,she’d been here first.

“Would you rather have been the one who got shot and killed?” she asked Eileen.

“Well, no. Of course not.”

“Then why do you feel guilty?”

Eileen told her all over again how Georgia had come to the door…

“Yes.”

…to see if she needed anything or wanted to use the ladies’ room…

“Yes.”

“And just that minute the goddamn door opened and he shot her.”

“So?”

“So I think he was firing at me . I think he opened that door and let loose thinking he’d be shooting me . Killing me . Because he’d already killed the girl in the apartment and I’d been the one talking to him, so maybe he figured I was the one responsible for what he’d done, who the hell knows what he was thinking, he was nuts.”

“That’s right, you have no way of…”

“But I was the target, I’m sure of that, not Georgia. He fired blind, he didn’t even know there were two of us out there when he opened that door. He was going for me , Karin. And Georgia got it instead. And now Georgia’s dead.”

“Eileen,” Karin said, “let me tell you something, okay?”

“Sure.”

“This one isn’t your freight.”

“He wanted to kill…”

“You don’t know what he wanted to do!”

“He couldn’t have known Georgia was…”

“Eileen, I won’t let you get away with this. Damn it, i won’t . You can blame yourself for getting raped…”

“i don’t blame myself for…”

“Not anymore you don’t! And you can blame yourself for shooting a man who was coming at you with a knife…”

“i don’t !”

“Well, good, maybe we’re making some progress, after all,” Karin said dryly. “But if you think I’m going to let you spend another century in here blaming yourself for this one, you’re wrong. I won’t do it. You can walk right out that door if you like, but i won’t do it.”

Eileen looked at her.

“Right,” Karin said, and nodded.

“I thought you were supposed to help me deal with guilt,” Eileen said.

“Only if it’s yours,” Karin said.

THE LIBRARY closest to the station house was on the corner of Liberty and Mason in an area that used to be called Whore Street but that now sported coffee-houses and boutiques and little shops that sold designer jewelry and antiques. The restoration attracted tourists to the Eight-Seven, and tourists attracted pickpockets and muggers. Carella and Brown liked it better when the short street was lined with houses of prostitution.

The librarian in the reference room told them that the way it worked with back newspapers, it usually took three weeks to a month to get them on microfilm. So if they wanted anything from February , for example, it would already be on microfilm, but if they were interested in March’s papers, chances are they’d still be in the reference room.

Sitting at a long table overhung with green shaded lamps, both men began poring over the newspapers for the past month, trying to zero in on any announced outdoor event that might qualify for whatever mischief the Deaf Man had in mind. This was still only April, and not many producers of alfresco extravaganzas were foolish enough to bank on the weather at this time of year, but…

The circus had arrived on March twenty-first for a two-week run that would end this Saturday. Did a crowd in a tent qualify as a crowd without boundaries? Concerning such a crowd, Rivera had written, “it cannot be restrained by walls .” Well, a tent didn’t have walls, did it? Was it possible that the circus was the Deaf Man’s target? If so, his proposed happening would take place all the way downtown in the Old City, where the huge tent had been pitched close to the battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago.Le Cirque Magnifique was the name of the troupe. Direct From Paris, the advertisement read. Carella was copying the information in his notebook when Brown said, “How about this one?”

Carella looked.

The ad was headlined:

There was a picture of Tony grinning out of the full-page ad, and beneath that the words:

FRI.& SAT.,APR.3 & 4 • 8PM

The location of the event was given as the Holly Hills Arena in Majesta.

“Is an arena an open space?” Brown asked.

“Well, it has no ceiling,” Carella said. “And there’ll be a hell of a crowd there, that’s for sure.”

“But will it be an outdoor crowd?”

“Actually, I don’t think so. He says no boundaries , no walls . An arena…”

“The Deaf Man?”

“No, Rivera. I’m sure a crowd in an arena wouldn’t be the kind of crowd he means.”

They kept searching the entertainment pages.

Liza Minnelli was scheduled to perform in the Coca-Cola Concert Series this coming Sunday night, the fifth of April. But that was at Isopera, the city’s opera house, very definitely a walled space and therefore specifically excluded by Rivera’s—and presumably the Deaf Man’s—definition.

Peggy Lee was in town and so was Mel Tormé, each of them performing at separate clubs, again excluded by definition.

“Does it have to be in town?” Brown asked.

“Why?”

“Here’s a couple over the bridge.”

“I don’t think he’d be alerting us if…”

“Yeah,” Brown said.

“I mean, it has to be something in the city, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Here’s something on a cruise ship,” Carella said.

“What kind of cruise?”

“Around Isola. Big-name band cruise.”

“Well, a ship doesn’t have walls ,” Brown said. “But doesn’t the size of the crowd mean something? He calls it a multitude , doesn’t he? Rivera? a multiplying multitude. That doesn’t sound like a crowd on a ship to me. That sounds more like…”

“Hey,” Carella said.

He was looking at a full-page ad in today’s morning newspaper. The headline on the ad read:

The location of the event was the Cow Pasture in Grover Park. The concert would start at one o’clock this Saturday and end at midnight on Sunday. At the bottom of the ad was a single line that read:

Produced by Windows Entertainment, INC

THE WAY MEYER and Hawes figured this, the shifts at the Temple Street shelter were the same as those in the police department. They tried to time the stake-out, or the plant—or even the sit as it was called in some cities—so that they’d catch part of the four-to-midnight and also part of the graveyard shift. Their reasoning was that if people were walking out of the armory with armloads of goods paid for by the city, then they wouldn’t be doing so in broad daylight, nor would they be doing it when there was a lot of activity on the street. The armory wasn’t located in what you’d call a high-traffic area, but there were some scattered shops and restaurants in the surrounding streets, and at least some kind of activity till around ten, ten-thirty, when it started getting quiet. They pulled up across the street at ten-fifteen that Thursday night, doused the headlights, and sat back to watch the passing parade.

Hawes kept bitching about what they’d done to his teeth. He told Meyer he was afraid to call Annie Rawles because she’d notice right off his teeth didn’t have their usual sparkle. Meyer said he had to look at the bright side, making a pun Hawes didn’t get.

“I don’t see any bright side to this,” he said. “I let them talk me into removing the enamel from my teeth, and now they tell me it’ll never come back. What kind of bright side is that?”

Meyer had his eye on the big brick building across the street. He was thinking this would make the third night they’d be sitting the place and if something didn’t come down soon, he was ready to call it quits. He frankly had his doubts about the reliability of Hawes’s informer, the crazy Frankie with the wild eyes and the watch cap.

“How’d he know all this, anyway?” he asked.

“The dentist? He said he’d done it for the Feebs once. What I should’ve said is I don’t want you to do anything to me you did for them jackasses, is what i should’ve said. Now the enamel won’t grow back.”

“I meant your informer,” Meyer said. “Frankie.”

“He said he saw them walking out with the stuff.”

“When?”

“All the time, he said.”

“At night, during the day?When , Cotton?”

“What the hell are you so cranky about? It’s my goddamn teeth.”

“I’m thinking we’re wasting our time here, is why I’m getting a little impatient , let’s say, not cranky.”

“Meyer, it stands to reason if they’re stealing the whole damn store, they’re doing it at night.”

“They haven’t done it so far the past two nights,” Meyer said.

“Thursday’s a good night for stealing,” Hawes said mysteriously.

Meyer looked at him.

“He said they’re all in on it, all the square shields, they take turns divvying up the loot,” Hawes said. “They walk out with it a little at a time….”

“Like what? A bar of soap every six months?”

“No, like half a dozen blankets, a carton of toothpaste, like that. Spaced out. So the stuff won’t be missed.”

“Is Laughton in on this?”

“The supervisor? My guy didn’t say.”

“Your guy,” Meyer said.

“Yeah.”

“A guy you meet inside there in the dead of night, he’s crazy as a bedbug, he’s all at once your guy , as if he’s a respected informer ,” Meyer said, not realizing he’d just uttered an oxymoron.

“Let’s say he seemed reliable,” Hawes said.

“Why is Thursday such a good night for stealing?” Meyer asked.

“Is that a riddle?” Hawes said.

“You said Thursday…”

“I give up,” Hawes said. “Why is Thursday such a good night for stealing?”

Someone was coming out of the shelter.

A man wearing a brown jacket and dark trousers, hatless, carrying a big cardboard carton in his arms.

“What do you think?” Meyer asked.

“I don’t think he’s one of the guards.”

“You only saw the ones on the graveyard.”

“Want to take him?”

“That box looks heavy, doesn’t it?”

“Let’s wait till he clears the shelter. Otherwise we blow the plant.”

They waited. The man was struggling with the weight of the carton, staggering up the street with it. They kept watching him till he turned the corner, and then they got out on either side of the car, and ran to the corner. He was halfway up the block now, walking in the middle of the sidewalk, still bent with his load. They came up behind him, one on each side, flanking him.

“Police,” Meyer said softly.

The guy dropped the box. Hawes wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d simultaneously wet his pants. The box clattered to the sidewalk as if it contained a load of scrap iron. Meyer pulled open the flaps and looked inside.

“Where’d you get these?” Meyer asked.

He was looking at half a dozen used pots and pans.

“They’re mine,” the man said.

He was unshaven and unshowered and he smelled like a four-day-old flounder. The brown jacket was stiff and crusted with grime. He was wearing high-top black sneakers worn through at the big toe on each foot. His trousers were too large for him, soiled at the cuffs, baggy in the seat, torn at each knee.

At first glance, the carton seemed to contain only the cooking implements, which they guessed he’d stolen from the shelter’s kitchen. But this was only the top layer. As they dug deeper into the box, they discovered a stainless-steel fork, knife, and teaspoon, a coffee mug, a quart thermos bottle, a tiny reading lamp, three or four frayed paperback mystery novels, an umbrella, a plaid lap robe, an inflatable pillow, a folding aluminium chair with green plastic back and seat, a tattered pair of fur-lined gloves, a black leather aviator’s helmet with glass goggles, a stack of paper plates, a packet of paper napkins, an alarm clock with a broken dial, a desk calendar, a red plastic egg crate, a corded stack of newspapers, three pairs of socks, one pair of Jockey shorts, a comb, a hairbrush, a bottle of Tylenol, a deodorant spray can, a…

They both realized in the same instant that they were looking into the man’s home.

“Sorry to bother you,” Meyer mumbled.

“It’s a mistake,” Hawes said.

“Sorry,” Meyer said.

The man closed the flaps on the carton, picked it up again, and began walking up the street, struggling with its weight.

They almost felt like helping him.

“I WANTED YOU to hear this without any background noise,” Silver said.

Chloe figured this was like being invited up to some guy’s apartment to see his etchings. He’d called her twenty minutes ago, asked if she could stop by on her way to rehearsal. He still thought she worked with some kind of dance group, she’d been pretty vague about what kind of dance. It was now ten-forty, she was due at the club at eleven. She hoped he hadn’t picked tonight to make his move, hoped he really did want her to hear this song he’d written. She’d pretty much decided she’d go to bed with him sooner or later, but there were things she had to sort out first.

Like, for example, why she hadn’t yet quit the job.

Why hadn’t she just marched in, said So long, Tony, it was nice getting groped all these months, and thanks for the use of the hall, but I’ve got twenty grand in the bank now, and what I’m going to do is open a beauty parlor.

Simple thing to do, right?

So why hadn’t she done it?

Something scary about it, she guessed. Going out on her own. Easier to suffer the hands on her. Easier to…

“Nice thing about rap, I can accompany myself,” he said, and grinned.

His apartment was on a stretch of turf that used to be called Honey Lane when Diamondback was in its heyday. Lots of rich and respectable black people used to live right here on this street. The brownstones lining Honey Lane were as fancy as any you could find on the Upper South Side of Isola. Stained-glass panels set in mahogany entrance doors. Polished brass door-knobs and knockers. Sweeping carpeted stairways. This was back when Mr. Charlie came uptown to listen to jazz and watch the high-yeller chicks strutting in their little beaded dresses. Diamondback was the place to go back then.

Dope hit Diamondback long before it hit the rest of America, right after the War—the real war, not the miniseries in the Gulf. There were many blacks—and Chloe Chadderton was one of them—who believed that dope was the white man’s way of keeping the nigger in his place. Spread dope in all the black hoods, the way the British used to do when they were running China, and you subjugated the people, you made sure they never got any power. The fat black cats in Diamondback ran for the hills when dope came in, sold out and left for the suburbs, same as whites did whenever blacks moved in, it was kind of funny. Now Diamondback was a war zone. Half a century of indifference and you had teenagers clocking for big-time dealers and doing crack themselves.

Which was maybe why Chloe was scared of going out there on her own. In a white man’s bar, on a white man’s table top, with a white man’s hands all over her, she sometimes felt…safe. Cared for. Protected. This was what they’d done to her. In the long run, she was still a slave, still afraid to take that leap into freedom.

“It’s called ‘Black Woman,’” Sil said.

“Takeoff on ‘Sister Woman’?” she asked, and was immediately sorry.

His face fell.

“Well…no,” he said. “‘Sister Woman’ is somethin else, Chloe. ‘Sister Woman’ was your husband’s bleat , his way of protestin before rap was even a dream in anybody’s head. You want to know what rap is, it’s calypso without melody, straight out of the West Indies, never mind Africa. That’s why ‘Sister Woman’ fits in so good with what we do. Spit Shine is pure rhythm , and your husband’s lyrics got the beat of the drums in them, right up front, hell, he coulda been writin his words specially for us. But ‘Black Woman’…”

“I didn’t mean you ripped it off,” she said. “I’m sorry if you…”

“No, no, all I’m tryin’a splain is how the two raps are different. ‘Sister Woman’ is a rap we got from calypso , but ‘Black Woman’ is somethin I pulled out of rhythm and blues. Well you’ll see what I mean when you hear it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“On Saturday, we start the act with your husband’s song, new rap for the group, they sit up and take notice the minute we open our mouths. Then we do ‘Hate,’ which was a hit they all know, and which is just what it says it is, man, it’s about hate , pure and simple. And then we do ‘Black Woman.’ Which is about love. R and B is always about love. And lovers,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she said again.

“Would you like to hear it?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I told you, Sil, I have to be at the…the rehearsal starts at…”

“That’s cool, don’t worry,” he said, and grinned, and sat at the table and began beating out a rhythm with the palms of his hands, the gut rhythm of rap, an intricate clickety rhythm that made her want to move her feet in response, a rhythm as immediate as a bulletin from the front. Over the beat of his hands on the tabletop, he began the rap he’d written last Saturday:

“Black woman, black woman, oh yo eyes so black,

“Tho yo skin wants some color, why is that , tell me that.

“Why is that , black woman, don’t confuse me tonight,

“You confusin me, woman, you confusin me quite,

“Cause you look so white

“When i know you black.”

“Black woman, black woman, is you white or black?

“Is you quite black, woman, don’t confuse me tonight,

“You confusin me, woman, I’m a’taken aback

“Cause you look so white

“When i know you black.”

“Now you know where I stand, cause you know how I look, you been hearin my rap, you been readin my book.

“You can see in my hand all the cards I can play, you can read in my eyes all the things I can say.

“Do you spec me to lose all them centuries past,

“Do you spec me to worship at yo lily-white ass?

“Do you spec me to love all that’s white that’s within you?

“Do you spec me to love all the white man that’s in you?

“Well, I will.”

“Black woman, white woman, gonna love you so,

“Be you black, be you white, even so, that is so,

“That is that , white woman, no confusion tonight,

“No confusion, black woman, I’m forgettin the white,

“In the night, in the night,

“All is black, all is white

“Love the black, love the white,

“Love the woman tonight.”

His hands stopped their erratic rhythm on the tabletop. He looked at her very solemnly.

“That’s…lovely,” she said.

“I wrote it for you,” he said.

She had thought so.

“I love you,” he said.

She had thought that, too.

She went into his arms. They kissed. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest. In a little while, she would call the club to tell Tony Eden she was quitting. There was no hurry.

AT SEVEN-THIRTY on the morning of April third, just as Chloe and Sil were sitting down to breakfast at the small kitchen table in his apartment facing Grover Park, a British nanny was wheeling a baby carriage into the playground near Silvermine Oval, close to the River Harb, on the northernmost edge of the 87th Precinct.

An old man was sitting on one of the benches.

He was wearing pajamas and a robe, and he was wrapped in a khaki-colored blanket.

His hair was white. It danced about his balding head in the early morning breeze. He sat staring past the playground equipment and out over the water. He was wearing thick-lensed eye glasses. His eyes were moist with tears behind them.

The nanny went over to him, and in her polite British way asked, “Sir, are you all right?”

The old man nodded.

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.