Mischief

11.

THIS TIME, they’d made a mistake.

They’d cut all the labels out of his underwear, his pajamas, his robe, and his slippers, and they’d wrapped him in the same presumably stolen DSS TEMPLE blanket, but there was one label they could not remove, and that one was tattooed on the biceps of his left arm:

Hawes looked through his directory, found the private police number for the U.S. Navy’s Discharged Personnel Center, and placed the call. The woman he spoke to was a chief petty officer named Helen Dibbs. Hawes identified himself, told her what he was looking for, and asked how long it would take her to get back.

“Is that all you’ve got on him?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

“Try to make it difficult, will you? Just the name of a ship with a woman’s name under it?”

“A war, too, don’t forget. Haven’t you got World War II on your computers?”

“Sure, we do. But gimme a break, huh?”

“Just run the Hanson through from 1941 to 1945. See if anyone in the crew listed Meg as a next of kin.”

“Sure.”

“Easy, right?”

“Sure.”

“When can you get back?”

“When I get back,” Dibbs said, and hung up.

She got back two hours later.

“Here’s the poop,” she said. “The Hanson was a radar picket ship, named for Robert Murray Hanson, a marine hero who got shot down in the Pacific. She was commissioned in May of 1945, which made my job a little easier since I didn’t have to track her all the way back to Pearl Harbor. It still wasn’t a piece of cake, though; there were three hundred and fifty men and twenty officers aboard her when she sailed for the Pacific. As for Meg…”

Hawes held his breath.

“It’s a good thing it wasn’t Mary. Only five men listed Margarets or Marjories as their next of kin, and one of them was later killed in the Korean War, on a minesweep in…”

“I don’t think Meg’s a form of Marjorie,” Hawes said.

“Then that leaves three. You got a pencil?”

A first-class gunner’s mate named Angelo Peretti had listed his mother, Margaret, as next of kin. At the time of his discharge, Peretti’s mother was living in Boston, Massachussetts.

A lieutenant j.g. named Ogden Pierce had listed his wife, Margaret, as next of kin. He’d lived with her in Baltimore, Maryland.

A seaman first class, radar striker, named Rubin Shanks had listed his wife, Margaret, as next of kin. They were living at the time of his discharge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

None of them had lived in this city.

But Meyer and Hawes hit the phone books for all five administrative units of the city, anyway, and for good measure they went through the directories for all the surrounding suburbs; both of the previous victims had been driven to where they’d been dumped. There was a Victor Peretti in Calm’s Point; he did not know anyone named Angelo Peretti. There was a Robert Pierce in Isola; he did not know any Ogden Pierces.

In the Elsinore County directory, they found a listing forSHANKS ,RUBIN on Merriwether Lane. When they called the number, a woman named Margaret Shanks said, “What did he do now?”

They asked if they could come out there to talk to her.

She said they could.

At that very moment, another letter from the Deaf Man was being delivered to the muster desk downstairs.

A nD NOW THErhythm reached a frantic pitch, and from where he stood on the tower built of rock, Ankara saw the swell and rise of the multitude and he knew that the fear had turned at last to fury and that the sowing would be good and the reaping plentiful. Listening to the rhythmic stamping of the feet, hearing the voices raised in joyous fury, he smiled up at the four moons and made the sign of the planting.

“Well, that’s it for sure,” Brown said. “He’s planning something at that rock concert.”

“Then why does he tell us to burn this one?” Carella asked.

“Maybe he’s gonna start a fire there.”

“You notice there’s no ‘P.S.’ this time? Nothing about more coming later.”

“So this is the last one.”

“So it’s got to be tomorrow.”

“And it’s got to be the concert.”

“Where’s that ad?” Carella said.

They looked at the ad again.

“The Cow Pasture,” Brown said.

“Starts at one tomorrow.”

“Ends at midnight Sunday.”

“What else starts tomorrow?” Carella asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you don’t think he’s really telling us, do you?”

“Maybe not. But even so, we’d better see what kind of security they’ve got at this concert.”

“Windows Entertainment,” Carella said, and pulled the phone directory to him.

MARGARET SHANKS was wearing eyeglasses that looked like the ones that British guy on television wore, whatever his name was, the guy who performed in drag. It was almost impossible to focus on anything but the glasses. Tiny woman with white hair and these big oversized glasses, asking the detectives if they’d like some coffee. This was now close to twelve noon. Sunlight was streaming through the windows in the small living room of the development house. They declined her offer, and then showed her a Polaroid picture they’d taken of the man who’d been dumped in the Silver Harb playground early that morning.

“Is that your husband?” Hawes asked.

“Yes, it is. Where is he?”

“At the moment, ma’am, he’s at Morehouse General Hospital in Isola.”

“Was he in an accident?”

“No, ma’am,” Meyer said. “He was left in the playground early this morning. The blues who picked him up took him directly to the hospital.”

“Is he all right then?”

“Yes, ma’am, he’s fine.”

“I worry so about him,” she said, and lowered her eyes behind the outlandish glasses.

“Yes, ma’am,” Meyer said. “Ma’am, do you have any idea how he might have got to that playground?”

“None at all. Last week, he drove himself into town and then forgot…”

“Into the city, do you mean?”

“No, right here. Fox Hill.”

“And what happened?”

“He forgot where he’d parked the car. Got into another man’s car by mistake, had it pushed to a service station…it was a terrible mess. The police came here, I had to straighten it all out, thank God nobody pressed criminal charges. But the man whose car it was said Rubin had damaged it, which he hadn’t, and now he’s suing us, it’s terrible. I haven’t let Rubin drive since, I don’t know how he got into the city.”

“When was this?” Hawes asked. “When he got into another man’s car?”

“It was exactly a week ago.”

“That would’ve made it…”

“The twenty-seventh,” Meyer said, looking at the calendar in his notebook. “Last Friday.”

“And you say he hasn’t been driving since?” Hawes said.

“I hide the keys.”

“Because you see,” Meyer said, “he was in a robe and pajamas. So he couldn’t have taken the train in, could he? Not dressed like that.”

“I don’t know how he got in,” Margaret said.

“When’s the last time you saw him?” Hawes asked.

Margaret hesitated.

“Last night,” she said.

The hesitation had been enough for both detectives. By instinct, they closed in. Old lady or not, they closed in.

“When last night?” Meyer asked.

“When…he was getting ready for bed.”

“Putting on his pajamas?” Hawes asked.

“Yes”

“What time was this?”

“Around ten o’clock.”

“Getting ready for bed, you said.”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?” Meyer asked.

Working in tandem. They had done this a thousand times before, they would do it a thousand times again. There was something here. They wanted to know what it was.

“I was…helping him wash and…and brush his teeth. He can’t do those…things too well for himself anymore.”

“Could he do those things a week ago? When he drove the car into town.”

“I wouldn’t have let him go if I’d seen him getting in it. It’s difficult to keep track, you know. He…you can’t just keep your eye on someone day and night.”

“Did you have your eye on him last night?” Hawes asked.

“Yes, I…try to take care of him the best I can.”

“But last night he got out of the house somehow, didn’t he?”

“Well, I…I guess he did. If he’s in the city now, then I guess…I guess he must’ve…must’ve got out somehow.”

“Youdidn’t drive him to the city, did you?” Meyer asked.

“No.”

“You’re sure about that, are you?”

“Positive.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“Your husband went to bed at that time, too?”

“Yes.”

“Do you sleep in the same room?”

“No. He snores.”

“Anybody else have a key to this house?”

“No.”

“When did you learn he was missing?”

“What?”

“When did you learn he was missing, ma’am? We called you at a little past ten this morning, and you asked what he’d done this time. Did you know he was missing before we called?”

“Yes, I…did.”

“When did you find out he was missing, ma’am?”

“When I…woke up this morning.”

“What time was that?”

“Around seven.”

“How’d you learn he was gone?”

“He wasn’t in his bed.”

“What’d you do then?”

“I…”

Her eyes were beginning to mist behind the ridiculous eyeglasses.

“What’d you do, ma’am?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“You didn’t call the police to report him missing?”

“I didn’t want any more trouble with the police.”

“So you didn’t call them?”

“No.”

“Your husband wasn’t in his bed, he wasn’t in the house, but you didn’t…”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Both men fell silent.

“Day and night, living with a ghost, you don’t know what it’s like. He talks to me, but he doesn’t make sense, it’s like being alone. Last week, when the thing with the car happened, at least he still knew my name. Now he doesn’t even know my name. Day by day, he forgets a little more, a little more. Last week, he could drive the car, now he can’t even tie his own shoelaces ! He gets worse and worse all the time. All the time. I think he may have had a small stroke, I don’t know, I just don’t know. I have to take him to the bathroom, I have to wipe him, you don’t know what it’s like ! No, i didn’t call the police. I didn’t want to call the police. I didn’t want them to find him! Why did you have to find him? Why did you have to find me ? Why can’t you leave me in peace , damn you!”

“Ma’am…”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”

“Ma’am,” Meyer said, “do you know how your husband got into the city?”

She hesitated a long time before answering.

Her eyes behind the absurd eyeglasses were wet with tears now. She stared vacantly past the detectives into somewhere beyond, perhaps to a time when a young sailor had his wife’s pet name tattooed onto his arm, a name he could no longer remember. Perhaps she was thinking how rotten it was to get old.

“Yes,” she said at last, “I know how he got into the city.”

THE FOUR OF THEM were in the car the Deaf Man had rented that morning. Gloria was sitting with him on the front seat, behind the wheel and fifteen pounds heavier than when he’d interviewed her last Sunday. Carter and Florry were on the back seat. The car was parked on Silvermine Drive, overlooking the River Highway and the Department of Sanitation facility on the water’s edge.

“The burn is set for one tomorrow,” he said. “We go in at twelve-thirty, secure the facility, wait for the fuzz to arrive. We should be out of there by one-twenty latest. We’ll have clear sailing all the way downtown.”

“Where do we make the transfer?” Gloria asked.

“Just off the parkway, a mile below the facility. In the boat-basin parking lot.”

“We using this same car tomorrow?” Carter asked.

“No, I’ve reserved four other cars.”

“Be safer that way, don’t you think?”

“Yes, of course. That’s why I…”

“I mean, in case anybody makes us today,” Carter said, still flogging a dead horse.

“Yes, I understand,” the Deaf Man said.

“That way, we’ve got four cars, they’ll go crazy tracking us down,” Carter insisted.

“When do we collect what’s coming to us?” Florry asked, which the Deaf Man considered premature since Florry hadn’t yet done anything but construct what he called his “little black box,” for which the Deaf Man had already paid him ten thousand as an advance against the hundred thou he’d promised. All Gloria had done so far was cut her hair and gain fifteen pounds, for which she, too, had already received ten thousand bucks. For the same amount of money, Carter had purchased the uniforms they’d be wearing, stolen the laminates, and located the garbage truck he’d be stealing early tomorrow morning. Thirty thousand bucks had been advanced thus far, against the three hundred the Deaf Man would be paying in total for their participation tomorrow. Meanwhile, the park wasn’t wired, and they didn’t have the garbage truck, and Gloria looked even more womanly than she had before she’d gained the weight and got her hair cut like a boy’s.

“You’ll all be paid the balance of your fees when we’re safely across the bridge and at the motel,” he said. “Then we all go our separate ways.”

Except Gloria, he thought. He was planning on celebrating with her after the job tomorrow. Pay them all, send the other two on their merry way, and then ask Gloria to share a bottle of champagne with him in the motel room. Toot a few lines, get down to male-female basics.

He could not get over the transformation in her.

Her hair was even shorter than his now, trimmed close at the sideburns and the back of her head, a single blonde tuft combed straight back off her forehead. Last night, after they’d tried on the garbage men’s uniforms, he’d sent down for pizza, and they’d all made themselves comfortable around the kitchen table. Her uniform jacket slung over the back of her chair, sitting in just the baggy green trousers and snug T-shirt, Gloria must have felt his steady gaze upon her. She turned suddenly away. He did not know whether she was embarrassed by his scrutiny, or whether she’d turned away merely to protect her job; the fact of the matter was that she’d gained weight in precisely the wrong places, transforming herself into the most voluptuous garbage man in the universe.

“You reserved a room yet?” Carter asked.

“Yes,” the Deaf Man said.

“Cause otherwise, we’re liable’a get there and find they’re full up,” he said, flogging yet another dead horse.

“The room’s already been reserved,” the Deaf Man said.

“Cause those motels over the bridge,” Carter said, “they’re riding academies, most of them, you get guys taking their bimbos there in the afternoon. We pull up with the van full of stuff, there won’t be a room for us.”

The Deaf Man looked at him.

“But you already reserved one,” Carter said, and shrugged.

“Yes.”

“Let’s hope they hold it.”

“For Christ’s sake, go phone your mother, will you?” Gloria said testily. “Ask her if we’ve got a different car for tomorrow, if the room is reserved, if you can blow your nose or go take a pee , for Christ’s sake!”

“It pays to be careful,” Carter said solemnly. “When I was on the stage, even though I’d been doing the same part for weeks and of course knew my lines by heart, I always had the stage manager cue me on them every night before I went on. I never went up in all the years I was acting.”

“Fine, you never went up,” Gloria said, tapping her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.

“Did I see you in anything?” Florry asked.

“You’re getting on my nerves,” Gloria said, “all these superfluous questions. We’re here to run it through, I don’t know what all these other questions have to do with anything.”

“She’s right,” the Deaf Man said. “Let’s run it.”

Gloria nodded curtly and started the car.

THE MAN they’d spoken to at SavMor’s regional headquarters was a vice president named Arthur Presson. He’d told them yesterday afternoon that he would check the code numbers following the SavMor name on the pricing label and get back to them as soon as he could. He did not get back until two o’clock that Friday, almost twenty-four hours after they’d made their “urgent” request; corporate chiefs do not know from homicide investigations.

Kling took the call.

“On that pricing label,” Presson said.

He sounded Yale out of Choate.

“Yes, sir,” Kling said, intimidated.

“You understand that we have four hundred and thirty SavMor stores nationwide…”

“Yes, sir.”

“…and whereas all we sell is hardware , as opposed to a supermarket, say, which color-codes for frozen food, produce, dairy products, meats, and so on…”

“Yes, sir.”

“…we do need a code on our labels so that our computers can zero in immediately on the state, the specific city in that state, and the particular store in that city. The number thirty-seven, for example, would indicate…we have stores in each of the fifty states, you see…”

“I see.”

“Thirty-seven would be Georgia.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the number four following it would mean Atlanta, as opposed to five for Macon or six for Gainesville.”

“I see.”

“And then…well, we have nine stores in Atlanta, so the last number in the code could be for any one of those nine stores. The coded labels are supplied to the various stores. The pricing changes for each locality. Prices are set at national headquarters. In Dallas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The code number you read to me on the phone was 19-06-07.”

“That’s the exact number,” Kling said.

“The nineteen is for this state, and the oh-six is for this city. We have twenty stores here. The oh-seven store is in Isola. It’s located on River and Marsh…are you familiar with the Hopscotch area? All the way downtown?”

“I am.”

“Well, that’s where it is,” Presson said.

Which was a long way from where Peter Wilkins had lived with his wife on Albermarle Way, all the way uptown .

“Thank you, sir,” Kling said, “I appreciate your time.”

“De nada,”Presson said, for no good reason Kling could fathom, and then hung up.

Parker was sitting at his desk, reading the morning paper and picking his teeth. Kling told him what he had. He listened, tossed the toothpick into the metal wastebasket under his desk, folded the newspaper, put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, rose, farted, and said, “Let’s go.”

RIVER STREET started on the waterfront in the oldest section of town, an area of narrow lanes and gabled houses dating back to when the Dutch were still governing. For quite some distance, it ran parallel to Goedkoop Avenue, which lay cheek by jowl with the courthouses and municipal buildings in the Chinatown Precinct, and then it crossed Marsh at the virtual hub of an area bristling with restaurants, art galleries, boutiques, bookstores, shops selling drug paraphernalia, sandals, jewelry, unpainted furniture, leather goods, lighting fixtures, herbal lotions and shampoos, Tarot cards, teas, art-deco reproductions and handcrafted items ranging from wooden whistles to whittled nudes. Here and there in the lofts along these narrow streets, a multitude of artists and photographers had taken up residence, spilling over from the Quarter into Hopscotch, so-called because the first gallery to open here was on Hopper Street, overlooking the Scotch Meadows Park.

The manager of the SavMor Hardware store on the corner of River and Marsh looked at the can of paint Kling had handed him, turned it over to glance at the pricing label stuck to its bottom, said, “That’s our store, all right,” and then said, “How can I help you?”

“We found twenty-two cans of this stuff in a dead man’s closet,” Parker said, getting directly to the point. “Every color you’d care to name, twenty-two of them. Is there anything on that pricing label that’d tell you when the purchase was made?”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Anything at your checkouts that might help us?” Kling asked. “Mr. Presson mentioned you’re computerized. Would your…?”

“Yes, we are. Mr.who ?”

“Presson. At regional headquarters. Would your computers show a sale of twenty-two cans of…?”

“I thought you meant someone in the store here,” the manager said. “When was this purchase made?”

“Sometime after the twenty-fourth of last month,” Parker said. “That’s when he got killed.”

He was thinking like Kling now. If Debra had killed him, then she’d bought the paint after he was safely out of the way.

“Wouldyour computers be able to help us?” Kling asked.

“Well, let’s take a look,” the manager said. “Twenty-two cans of spray paint is an unusual purchase.”

It was indeed.

But on the twenty-fifth day of March—the very day Peter Wilkins was found dead on Harlow Street, the day before Parker and Kling discovered the treasure trove of cans in the Wilkins apartment—someone had in fact purchased twenty-two cans of the paint at $2.49 a can, which came to a total of $54.78 plus tax.

The girl at checkout counter number six remembered the day well.

“It was still raining,” she said. “There was a lot of rain that day. This must’ve been around twelve, one o’clock in the afternoon, the lunch hour. We get lots of people in here during the lunch hour. He had his cart full of…”

“He?”Parker said. “It wasn’t a woman?”

“Not unless she had a mustache,” the girl said.

THE OFF-TRACK betting parlor at a little past two that afternoon was thronged with men and women waiting for the start of the fourth at Aqueduct. Meyer and Hawes had chosen this particular location because Margaret Shanks had described a man who sounded remarkably like the security guard who’d been touting Pants on Fire the night Hawes spent at the Temple Street shelter. She’d told them the man’s name was Bill Hamilton. Whether he’d show here this afternoon at the parlor on Rollins and South Fifth was anybody’s guess. A call to Laughton, the shelter’s supervisor, had informed them that this was Hamilton’s day off. A visit to the home address Laughton had supplied proved fruitless. So here they were now in the betting parlor Hamilton had called “the really ritzy one,” rubbing elbows with a white, black, and Latino crowd both detectives might charitably have described as seedy.

There was a television monitor in each corner of the room on the wall that faced the street, the screens now showing the odds for the fourth race, which was scheduled to go off at twenty past two. The favorite, the 6F horse, was paying seven to two. The long shot, the 2B horse, was paying thirty to one. On both side walls, racing forms were posted behind glass panels, and there were posters advising the prospective gambler on how to bet in five easy steps, and other posters listing the track codes for some sixteen or seventeen tracks, AQU for Aqueduct, BEL for Belmont, SAR for Saratoga, LAU for Laurel, and so on, and yet other posters detailing the bet codes, W for Win, P for Place, S for Show, WP for Win/Place Combination, and so on.

There was a pay phone on one of the walls, with a small green sign over it askingGAMBLING PROBLEM ? and then suggesting that anyone with such a problem should dial the 800 number listed below. The sign did little to dissuade the three dozen men and two women who were milling about the room, glancing up at the changing odds on the two monitors and noisily debating, in English and in Spanish, which horses to bet. Some of the gamblers were already placing their bets at any of the seven windows on the rear wall, where hanging plaques announcedCASHING /SELLINGand a handwritten sign cautionedNO VERBAL BETS .

The horses were being led onto the track now, the man doing the live calls from the main office downtown on Stemmler Avenue announcing each horse and rider as they came onto the screen, “The number three horse is Trumpet Vine, the rider is Fryer,” or “Number six, Josie’s Nose, the jockey is Mendez,” or “Number nine, Golden Noose, Abbott in the saddle,” and so on.

Meyer and Hawes kept watching the front door.

Some five minutes later, the man downtown announced that betting on the fourth race would close in less than four minutes, and this caused a flurry of activity at the betting windows, people glancing over their shoulders for a last fast look at the changing odds, writing out their betting tickets with the pencils provided, paying their money, and then beginning a drift toward the television monitors as the man downtown told them betting would close on the fourth race in less than two minutes.

Hamilton came in just as the horses broke from the gate. The moment Hawes spotted him, he nudged Meyer. Hamilton wasn’t wearing his security guard uniform this time around, sporting instead a brown leather jacket over blue jeans and tasseled loafers, and carrying a racing form in his right hand. He greeted someone he knew, shook hands with someone else, and was looking up at the monitor in the left-hand corner of the room when Meyer and Hawes came up to him.

“Mr. Hamilton?” Meyer said.

“Bill Hamilton?” Hawes said.

“Yeah?”

“Police,” Meyer said, and flashed the tin.

On the television screens, the horses were thundering around the track, the announcer’s excited voice calling the race, “Coming up on the outside, number four…”

“What?” Hamilton said.

“Police,” Hawes said.

“Keep going!” one of the gamblers shouted.

“Pushing through on the rail, it’s number nine…”

“Police? What is this, a joke?”

“No joke,” Hawes said.

“Into the stretch, it’s one and four and nine and…”

Not a man or woman in that place turned away from the screens as the horses galloped into the home stretch. There was a real-life drama going on behind them right here in their friendly neighborhood betting parlor, two cops in plainclothes throwing around badges and bracing a good old gambling buddy, but not a soul in the joint gave a damn. They were watching the horses. The horses were all.

“Whip him, whip him!”

“Heading for home, it’s one, and nine, and three…”

“Is it all at once against the law to bet the ponies?” Hamilton asked, and grinned broadly, playing to the oblivious crowd.

“No, it’s all at once against the law to kill little old ladies,” Meyer said.

MORT ACKERMAN was a portly man wearing a brown suit and smoking a huge brown cigar. He looked more like a banker than a promoter, but the sign on his office door readWINDOWS ENTERTAINMENT ,INC ., and the posters all over his walls attested to his successful promotion of more performers than Carella or Brown knew existed.

Sitting in a black leather swivel chair, he blew out a ring of smoke and said, “I’ll tell you something. An outfit crazy enough to do a show outdoors in April , it deserves somebody setting fire to the stage. If that’s what you think’s gonna happen. FirstBank has no business doing this thing, in this city, in April , no business at all. It isn’t as if they come from Florida, these people, they don’t know what the climate here is like. These are people who know this city, this is the only place they have their banks, is in this city. Look at the weather we’ve had the past few weeks. If it doesn’t rain this weekend, it’ll be a miracle. But if what you say is true, there’s gonna be a fire…”

“We didn’t say that, Mr. Ackerman,” Brown said. “We asked you what precautions you’ve taken in the event of a fire.”

“Which means you’re expecting a fire, am I right? What I’m saying is, if there’s a fire and it rains, we got nothing to worry about, am I right? The rain’ll put out the fire.”

Both detectives had seen roaring blazes that the most torrential downpours and a multitude of ladder companies had been unable to extinguish. Neither of them believed there was much opportunity for a gigantic fire in a ten-acre meadow in the middle of a huge park, but the Deaf Man had written “Burn this!”—and when the Deaf Man wrote, they listened.

“So what precautions have you taken?” Carella asked. “Aside from praying for rain?”

“That’s very comical,” Ackerman said, and took his cigar from his mouth and pointed it at Carella in recognition. “The truth is, the fire department comes around to check every time there’s one of these events, indoors or out, and we always get a clean bill of health and a fare-thee-well,” he said, waving his cigar in the air like a magic wand and leaving behind it a trail of smoke like glitter dust. “They don’t come around till everything’s set up, though, because what’s the sense of inspecting an empty meadow in a park where there’s hardly what you’d call a severe threat of fire on any given day of the week, am I right? So,” he said, waving his magic-wand cigar again, “why don’t you come back tomorrow, and that should calm your nerves about whether or not we’re gonna have a holocaust in the middle of the city this weekend. How does that sound to you?”

“Why tomorrow?” Brown asked.

“Because the crews’ll be finished setting up tonight, and the fire department’ll do their inspection early tomorrow morning to make sure none of the wires or the portable toilets are fire hazards, and they’ll give me a certificate I can show you.That’s why tomorrow,” Ackerman said.

“What time tomorrow?” Carella asked.

“You guys are really worried about this, aren’t you?” Ackerman said.

He didn’t know the Deaf Man.

JEFF COLBERT seemed surprised to see them.

“You made good time,” he said.

“Huh?” Parker said.

Colbert was standing in front of the big window in his office, the city’s spectacular downtown skyline behind him.

“I called your office twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Left a message with a detective named Genero?”

“We’ve been in the field,” Kling said.

“We didn’t get your message,” Parker said.

“I was just calling to say Mrs. Wilkins filed Peter’s will early this morning. You can have a look at it anytime you’d like.”

“We already know what’s in it,” Kling said. “We spoke to Mrs. Wilkins yesterday.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Colbert said.

“I’ll bet you weren’t,” Parker said.

Colbert looked at him.

“Mr. Colbert,” Kling said, “do you remember where you happened to be at around twelve, twelve-thirty on the afternoon of March twenty-fifth?”

“No, I don’t, offhand,” Colbert said. “Why do you ask?”

“Would you happen to have an appointment calendar, anything like that, could maybe tell you where you were?” Parker said.

“Yes, I’m sure I can check my…”

“Because where we think you were,” he said, “is in the SavMor Hardware store on River and Marsh, is where we think you were at that time.”

“Buying twenty-two cans of spray paint,” Kling said.

“What makes you think that?” Colbert asked, and smiled.

“A girl who can identify you,” Kling said.

“Want to meet her?” Parker asked.

HE COULD remember a time when the chief of detectives would run a lineup downtown at headquarters every Monday through Thursday of the week. This was not for identification purposes, the way the lineup today was. Back then, two detectives from every precinct in the city would pull lineup duty on one of those four days, and they’d trot dutifully downtown to sit on folding wooden chairs in the big gymnasium while felony offenders arrested the day before were trotted onto the stage and questioned by the chief.

The chief stood behind a microphone on a podium at the back of the gym, and he reeled off the charges against the person standing on the stage, and gave the circumstances of the arrest and then kept him or her up there for five, ten minutes, however much time he thought the offender was worth. This allowed his rotating detectives the opportunity to see everyone who’d committed a felony in this fair city, the theory being that if somebody seriously broke the law once he’d seriously break it again, and next time the cops would be able to recognize a troublemaker on sight. This was when law enforcement was a personal sort of thing. Some detectives actually looked forward to pulling lineup duty every other week. It gave them a day away from the squadroom and it made them feel noble, seeing all those scumbags up there on the stage.

Nowadays, you didn’t have these formal lineups anymore. The only lineups you had were like the ones they were holding today for the benefit of Miriam Hartman, the black girl who’d been working SavMor’s counter number six when Jeffry Colbert presumably checked out twenty-two cans of spray paint on a rainy Wednesday in March.

The lineup room at the Eight-Seven—or the showup room as it was sometimes called—wasn’t half so elaborate as the ones in some of the newer, flashier precincts. Relocated in the basement of the building, where there’d been space to build a larger stage and to install seating for twelve behind the large sheet of oneway plate glass, the room lacked an efficient airconditioning system and was sometimes suffocatingly hot during the summer months. But this was still the beginning of April, and Miriam Hartman seemed comfortable enough as she sat looking at the lighted stage beyond the glass, waiting for the action to begin. If she wasn’t, then fuck her, Parker thought.

For the lineup today, they had rounded up three other men with mustaches, two of them offenders they’d brought up from the holding cells, and one of them a patrolman they’d asked to change back into his street clothes. In addition, they had three men without mustaches, one of them from the clerical office, the other two street patrolmen, all of them wearing civvies. Including Colbert, this made seven men, four of them with mustaches, three without. Moreover, two of the men wearing mustaches were about the same height as Colbert—five-eleven, in there. All of the men were white. There would be no later opportunity for some slippery shyster to come in and say the identification process had been loaded against Colbert. This wasn’t a case of him being the only tall white guy with a mustache. Miriam Hartman had her choice of three of them.

The seven men walked out onto the stage. With the possible exception of Colbert, all of them had been through this drill before. The two offenders they’d drafted from the holding cell came out first, followed by three policemen, and then Colbert, and then the other policeman. There were height markers on the wall behind them. The stage was well lighted, but the illumination was not blinding. None of the men had to squint into the darkened room beyond.

Parker pulled the microphone to him.

One by one, he ordered each of the men to take a step forward, to smile, and to say “Some weather, huh?” which Miriam Hartman had said were the words spoken to her by the man who’d purchased the paint. One by one, they stepped forward, smiled—somewhat ghoulishly in the case of one of the offenders—and said, “Some weather, huh?”

“Thank you, step back, please,” Parker said after each man had done his little turn.

He figured later that Miriam Hartman had picked out Colbert the moment he stepped onto the stage. He was not at all surprised when she said, “That’s him.”

“Second from the left?” Parker asked, confirming it.

“Second from the left,” she said, and nodded emphatically.

IN THE interrogation room upstairs, Meyer and Hawes were talking to William Harris Hamilton, which—according to his driver’s license—was the shelter guard’s full name.

This was going to be a tough one, and they knew it.

All they had so far was Margaret Shanks’s word that she’d hired Hamilton to pick up her husband and drop him off somewhere, preferably out of her life forever. They hadn’t yet been able to identify either the man known only as Charlie, or the woman who’d died of cardiac arrest after someone had left her as helpess as an infant, alone and untended in a deserted railroad station. If Hamilton was the person who’d dumped her there, they felt they could reasonably charge him with Murder in the Second Degree, a Class-A felony defined in §125.5 with the words “A person is guilty of murder in the second degree when, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.” Failing this, they were positive a charge of Manslaughter Two—a mere Class-C—would stick. Manslaughter in the Second Degree was defined in §125.15 as “Recklessly causing the death of another person.”

Hamilton told them he’d never heard of anyone named Margaret Shanks.

He told them he’d never heard of her husband Rubin Shanks, either.

“She just picked your name out of a hat, huh?” Hawes asked.

“I don’t know what she did. All I know is I never heard of her,” Hamilton said.

He seemed supremely confident that whatever they were after, they weren’t going to get it from him. And even if they did get it, it wouldn’t do them any good. They had advised him of his rights and asked him if he wanted a lawyer present while they questioned him. He’d waived his right to counsel, and now sat smoking a cigarette at the long table in the room, glancing every now and again at the one-way mirror on the wall, as if to tell them he knew what the thing was, and didn’t give a damn if anybody was behind it watching him. At the moment, nobody was behind it. They planned to call in Margaret Shanks later, bring her face-to-face with the man she’d paid to get rid of her husband. They also planned to confront Hamilton with Rubin himself, see if the old man would recognize him as the person who’d driven him from Fox Hill to the Silver Harb playground. All in good time. Meanwhile, they went about it the way they always did.

You ask a man the same questions enough times, he’ll finally run out of the pat answers he’s prepared and start telling you things he didn’t plan to tell you.

“Have you always done security work?” Meyer asked.

“Depends what you mean by security work.”

Hawes wanted to smack him right in the mouth.

“Square-shield work,” he said. “You know what security work is.”

“I was also a prison guard. Is that security work?” Hamilton said.

Which explained why he thought he could beat the system here. Having once been in the criminal justice business himself, more or less. Having rubbed elbows, so to speak, with all sorts of slimy bastards like himself, who’d got caught and locked up only because they were dumb. He was smarter than any of the cons he’d known, smarter too than these two jerks questioning him here, or so he thought, and which he was now trying to prove. Mr. Cool here. Grinning and smoking his cigarette. Hawes wanted to ram the cigarette down his throat.

“Which prison?” he asked.

“Castleview. Upstate.”

“How long have you been working at the shelter?”

“Year and a half now.”

“Hear about the blankets being stolen there?”

“No. Were some blankets stolen?”

“Lots of blankets,” Meyer said. “Twenty-six so far this year.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Some of those blankets have been popping up around town.”

“I don’t know anything about that, either.”

“One of them in the Whitcomb Avenue railroad station.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“Harb Valley line,” Hawes said.

“Still don’t know it.”

“Runs all the way upstate to Castleview. You said you worked there, didn’t you?”

“Yep.

“But you never heard of the Harb Valley line?”

“Sure, I have. I just don’t know the Whitcomb Avenue station.”

“Then you couldn’t have driven this little old lady there, right?”

“Right.”

“Picked her up, wherever, wrapped her in a blanket stolen from the shelter…”

“I don’t know anything about her or about the stolen blankets, either.”

“How about someone named Charlie?”

“I know a lot of people named Charlie.”

“This particular Charlie gave us a pretty good description of someone who looks exactly like you.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Really,” Meyer said. “Forty, forty-five years old, five-ten, brown eyes and dark hair. Sounds a lot like you, doesn’t it?”

“Charlie who , would this be?”

“You tell us.”

“I told you. I know dozens of Charlies.”

“Said you were wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket. Same as you’re wearing now,” Hawes said.

“Must be thousands of men in this city wearing the same thing right this minute.”

“What are your hours at the shelter?” Hawes asked.

“They vary.”

“How?”

“We work rotating shifts.”

“Eight-hour shifts?”

“Yes.”

“Three shifts a day?”

“Eight to four, four to midnight, midnight to eight,” Hamilton said, and nodded.

“Just like us,” Meyer said.

“Gee,” Hamilton said.

Hawes wanted to kick him in the balls.

“Five on, two off?” he asked.

“Five on, two off, yes.”

“Which days are you off?”

“Thursdays and Fridays.”

“So you’re off today.”

“I’m off today. Which is why you found me playing the horses.”

“Were you working the midnight shift on the night of March thirty-first?”

He knew Hamilton had been working that night because that was the night he’d spent there.

“I don’t remember,” Hamilton said.

“You don’t remember ? That was only three nights ago.”

“Then I guess I was working the midnight shift, yeah.”

“How about March twenty-fourth? You weren’t working the midnight shift that night, were you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, if you were working graveyard this past week, then the week before it would’ve been the four to midnight, isn’t that right?”

“If you say so,” Hamilton said.

“Well, let’s look at it,” Meyer said, and opened his notebook to the calendar page, and took the cap off his ballpoint pen “You were off yesterday and you’re off today…that’s the second and third of April.”

Hamilton said nothing.

“And you were working the midnight shift the five previous days, so that would’ve been from March twenty-eighth to April first.”

“If you say so,” Hamilton said again.

“Yes, I say so,” Meyer said. “Then you had two days off before that—the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, a Thursday and Friday…”

Hamilton stifled a yawn.

“And you’d have worked the four-to-midnight on the five days before that .”

“Uh-huh.”

Bored to tears.

“The twenty-second to the twenty-sixth,” Meyer said.

Hamilton sighed.

“So you couldn’t have been working the midnight shift on the twenty-fourth, could you?”

“No.”

“You’d have got off work at midnight, in fact, and then you’d have been free to roam the night, hmm?” Meyer said, and smiled pleasantly.

Hamilton looked at him.

“So do you remember where you went after work on the morning of March twenty-fourth?” he asked.

“Home to bed, I’m sure.”

“You were relieved at midnight and you went straight home to bed, is that it?”

“That’s what I usually do.”

“But is it what you did that particular morning?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Positive.”

“You didn’t by chance drive to the Whitcomb Avenue station, did you?”

“I told you. I’m not familiar with…”

“Cause that’s where the woman turned up,” Meyer said. “Early on the morning of March twenty-fourth.”

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

“And Charlie turned up two days later, on the twenty-sixth,” Hawes said. “a Thursday morning. Your day off.”

“Charlie who? I told you, I know hundreds of Charlies.”

“Would you like to meet this particular Charlie?” Meyer asked.

“Nope.”

“How about Rubin Shanks?”

“Told you. I don’t know him.”

“Maybe they’ll know you,” Hawes said.

BECAUSE THE interrogation room was busy, they talked to Jeffry Colbert in the relative quiet of the clerical office, the squadroom at the moment being occupied by an assortment of teenagers who’d had the bad manners and worse timing to shoot one of their classmates just as school was letting out and just as David Two was cruising past the schoolyard. They were variously screaming for their mamas or their lawyers while claiming it was really the two police officers in the David car who had shot the kid in the schoolyard, not to mention the head. Their cries of innocence floated down the second-floor corridor and almost but not quite managed to batter down the door to the clerical office, where Parker and Kling now confronted Colbert with evidence even a lawyer might understand.

The moment Miriam Hartman positively identified him, they had probable cause to charge him with four counts of Murder Two, officially place him in custody, and send his fingerprints downtown. Now, at a quarter to four, they had in their possession a report from the fingerprint section, which had compared Colbert’s prints against the ones the lab had lifted from the various cans delivered yesterday, after the reluctant handyman at the Wilkins building had finally turned them over to Parker and Kling when they’d threatened him with court orders and such. They asked Colbert now if he would like an attorney present while they asked him some questions, and he told them he was an attorney, in case they’d forgotten it. They hadn’t forgotten it; they were, in fact, banking on it. But because Colbert was being such a smart-ass attorney, and because they were both such smart-ass detectives, they asked him for a waiver in writing, which Colbert—supremely confident of his own lawyerly prowess—was happy to sign.

That out of the way, Kling said, “Mr. Colbert, there are a few things we’d like to show you, and then we’d like to ask you to do something for us, and then we’re going to call the District Attorney’s Office, and get them to send someone here to do a Q and A. First, we want to show you this report that was just faxed to us from the fingerprint section, which positively identifies your fingerprints with the ones we lifted from the paint cans we recovered in your partner’s closet, would you like to read this, please?”

Colbert read the fax.

Silently, he handed it back.

“Next, we would like you to read this signed statement from a girl, a woman, named Miriam Hartman, positively identifying you as the man who purchased those cans of paint on the afternoon of March twenty-fifth, would you care to look at this, too, please, sir?”

Colbert looked at the signed statement.

He handed it back.

“Next, sir, what we’d like you to do for us, if you will…”

“What we want you to do ,” Parker said impatiently, “is write something on a piece of paper for us, the identical words we’re going to give you, that’s what we’d like you to do.Sir ,” he added, and shot a glance at Kling.

“I don’t want to answer any further questions,” Colbert said.

“Well, we haven’t really asked you any questions yet, sir,” Kling said, “even though you waived your rights to an attorney other than yourself and said you’d be happy to answer whatever questions we may have. But this isn’t a question , sir, this is a request. It’s the same as if we asked you to put on your hat or touch your finger to your nose or appear in a lineup or let us take your fingerprints…”

“Which we already did , by the way,” Parker said.

Without a fuckin peep from you, he thought.

“It’s what you might call the difference between testimonial and non testimonial responses,” Kling said helpfully.

“What do you want me to write?” Colbert asked.

“Five words,” Kling said, and eased a piece of paper and a pen across the desk to him.

Colbert picked up the pen.

“What are the words?” he asked.

“‘I killed the…’”

“No, I won’t…”

“‘…three up…’”

“…write that,” Colbert said, and put down the pen as if it had caught fire.

“I guess you know that we can get a court order forcing you to write those words for us,” Kling said.

“Then get it,” Colbert said.

“You want to play hardball, huh?” Parker said.

“I don’t like being charged with murder. Does that surprise you?”

“Who does?” Parker agreed. “You want us to ask for a court order or not? I get on the phone, I make an oral application, a judge’ll…”

“No judge in his right mind’ll grant…”

“Wanna bet?”

“You can’t force me to write a confession.”

“Come on, Mr. Colbert,” Kling said. “You know this isn’t a confession. We’re looking for a…”

“No? You want me to put in writing that I killed three…”

“All we’re looking for is a handwriting sample, and you know it.”

“Oh, that’s all , huh?”

“We’re wasting time here,” Kling said. “Do we make application, or don’t we? Five’ll get you ten a judge signs the order in three seconds flat.”

“While we’re at it,” Parker said, “let’s ask for a warrant to toss his apartment. Find the fuckin murder weapon.”

“Let’s not press our luck,” Kling said. “How about it, Mr. Colbert? Do we apply for a court order? Or do you write what we’re asking you to write, without all the fuss and bother?”

“Get your court order,” Colbert said.

Kling sighed.