Mischief

3.

“WE WERE BEGINNING to wonder when you’d put in an appearance,” Parker said.

“Sure, sure,” Monoghan said.

“Sure,” Monroe said.

“This is now getting to be worthy of Homicide’s close attention, am I right?” Parker said. “A serial sprayer?”

“Sure, sure,” Monoghan said.

“Which is why we’re graced with your company, am I right?” Parker said, and winked at Kling.

“Yeah, bullshit,” Monroe said.

He and his partner were dressed identically, and they now waved away Parker’s wise-ass remarks in unison. As the forecasters had promised, it had begun raining a few hours ago. Now, at seven in the morning, the four men were standing—or trying to stand—under an overhang that might have accommodated only two of them if neither was as wide of girth as the two Homicide cops. Monoghan and Monroe were wearing belted black trench coats, in keeping with an unwritten rule they had formulated for themselves, which dictated that they dress in basic black since they considered the color, or lack of it, fashionable. In truth, they sometimes did look dapper, though not as dapper as they thought , and certainly not today, standing under the dripping overhang in wet and rumpled raincoats. They looked, in fact, like some dark stout seabirds that had just swum ashore in a foul climate somewhere. Both of them kept trying to shoulder Parker and Kling out from under the slim protection of the overhang and onto the sidewalk where the dead man lay all covered with paint and blood.

The rain was relentless.

It washed away the blood, but not the paint.

The dead man had been painted in two metallic tones, gold and silver all over his face and his hands and the front of his T-shirt and barn jacket. He looked like a robot whose wires had been pulled, lying there on the sidewalk all limp and gilded in front of the graffiti-sprayed wall.

“Those are designer jeans he’s wearing,” Monoghan said.

He himself wasn’t feeling quite as sartorially elegant as he preferred looking. That was because he hadn’t wanted to get his black bowler all wet in the rain and had left it home in his closet. Whenever he wore his bowler, Monoghan felt very British. Whenever he and Monroe were out together in their identical bowlers, they called each other “Inspector.” Wot say you, Inspector Monroe?Cheer -ee-oh, Inspector Monoghan. And so on. Actually, they were not inspectors, but mere detectives/first grade—as distinguished from first-grade detectives. No one in the police department—or in his right mind, for that matter—would have called either of them a first-grade detective. In fact, their roles were merely supervisory at best, intrusive at worst.

Monoghan and Monroe frequently showed up at homicide crime scenes even though they never actively investigated a case; that was the job of whichever precinct detectives happened to catch the squeal. Later on, you sent Homicide the paperwork and they’d make a few calls to see how you were doing, but most of the time they stayed out of your way unless you were taking forever to come up with a lead on a case that was making newspaper and television headlines. The murder of the first graffiti artist had captured the attention of the television newscasters because it had been a very pictorial crime, what with all the red letters scribbled on the wall behind the Herrera kid. Also, everybody in this city hated graffiti writers, and was silently cheering on the killer, hoping he would wipe out every fucking one of them. So Monoghan and Monroe had decided to drop in this morning, see how things were coming along now that they had a second victim painted all silver and gold and bleeding from three holes in his forehead.

“How old you think he is?” Monroe asked.

“Thirty-five, forty,” Monoghan said.

“I didn’t think they came that old, these writers,” Monroe said.

“They come in all ages,” Parker said. “The one the other night was only eighteen.”

“This one looks a lot older than that,” Monroe said.

“You know how old Paul McCartney is?” Monoghan asked.

“What’s that got to do with graffiti writers?” Monroe said.

“I’m saying graffiti writers came along around the same time the Beatles did. So you get some of these veteran writers, they could be the same age as McCartney.”

“What’s McCartney? Forty, in there?”

“He’s got to be forty-five, forty-six years old, you could have graffiti writers that old, too,” Monoghan said. “Is what I’m saying.”

“Fifty,” Kling said.

“Fifty? Who?”

“At least.”

“McCartney? Come on. Then how old is Ringo?”

“Even older,” Kling said.

“Come on, willya?” Monoghan said.

“Anyway, this guy don’t look no fifty,” Monroe said.

“What I’m saying, he could be McCartney’s age, though McCartney’s no fifty, that’s for sure,” Monoghan said, and glared at Kling.

“Thirty-five, forty is what this guy looks,” Monroe said, also shooting Kling a dirty look. “Which, you ask me, is old for one of these punks.”

The assistant medical examiner arrived some five minutes later. He was smoking a cigarette when he got out of his car. He coughed, spit up some phlegm, shook his head, ground out the cigarette under the sole of his shoe, and went over to where the men were trying to keep out of the rain, standing against the graffiti-covered wall under the overhang.

“Anybody touch him?” the M.E. asked.

“Yeah, we had our hands all over him,” Monroe said.

“Don’t laugh,” the M.E. said. “I had one last month, the blues went through his pockets before anybody else got there.”

“You had another writer last month ?”

“No, just this person got stabbed.”

“This one got shot,” Monoghan said.

“Who’s the doctor here?” the M.E. said testily, and lighted another cigarette. Coughing, he knelt beside the painted body on the sidewalk and began his examination.

The rain kept falling.

“Rain makes some people cranky,” Monroe observed.

The M.E. didn’t even look up.

“You think this guy’s gonna go through every writer in the city?” Monoghan asked.

“We don’t catch him, he will,” Monroe said.

“What you mean we , Kimosabe?” Parker said, and Monroe looked at him blankly.

Kling was staring at the falling rain.

“Did a nice job on his face, didn’t he?” Monroe said.

“You mean the holes in it, or the artwork?”

“Both. He blended the artwork nice around the holes, you notice? Made like gold and silver circles coming out from the holes. Like ripples? In a river? When you throw in a stone? That’s hard to do with a spray can.”

“The Stones are even older,” Monoghan said, reminded again. “Mick Jagger must be sixty, sixty-five.”

“What was he spraying?” Kling asked suddenly.

“What do you think he was spraying? The face, the chest, the hands, the guy’s clothes. He went crazy with the two spray cans.”

“I mean the writer.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t see any gold or silver paint on the wall here.”

They all looked at the wall.

The graffiti artists had been busy here forever. Markers and tags fought for space with your color-blended burners, and your two-tone and even 3-D pieces. But Kling was right. There wasn’t any gold or silver paint on the wall. Nor did there seem to be any fresh paint at all.

“Musta caught him before he got started,” Monroe said.

“The Herrera kid was writing when the killer done him,” Parker said, picking up on Kling’s thought.

“Don’t mean anything,” Monoghan assured him. “You get these guys doing missionary murders, they don’t necessarily follow any set M.O.”

“Missionarymurders?” Monroe said.

“Yeah, these guys on a mission.”

“I thought you meant the fuckin stiff was a priest or something.”

“a quest ,” Monoghan said. “Shooting all the fuckin writers in the city, is what I mean. Like a quest . Like the fuckin impossible dream , you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“A man on a mission , a missionary murderer, he doesn’t need an M.O., he just shoots and sprays, or sprays and shoots, there doesn’t have to be a pattern.”

“Even so, Parker said, and shrugged. “The Herrera kid was doing his fuckin masterpiece when the killer done him.”

“Don’t mean a thing,” Monoghan said.

“Cause of death is gunshot wounds to the head,” the M.E. said, and lighted another cigarette.

THE PERSON SITTING with the Deaf Man was called Florry Paradise. This was the name he’d used when he was the lead guitarist in a rock group called the Meteors, not too prophetic in that it never did achieve any measure of fame, its streak across the stratosphere being confined to the single gig it played in the local high school gymnasium. The rest of the time, the group spent rehearsing in their parents’ garages. This was when Florry was eighteen years old and there was a rock group rehearsing in every garage in America.

Florry’s legacy from those days was threefold.

He had always hated the name Fiorello Paradiso, which he felt had been foisted upon him at birth rather than offered to him as a matter of choice. Everything in America these days was either pro-choice or no-choice and it seemed to him that a person should at least have the right to choose his own fucking name , which he’d done when he was eighteen and which, at the age of forty-two, he still had: Florry Paradise. That was the first thing he’d inherited from those joyous days with the unmeteoric Meteors.

The second thing was a little bit of deafness primarily due to keeping the volume controls up so loud when the group was practicing and due secondarily to listening to rock stations on the radio with the volume turned up to the same decibels. Florry shared this same slight loss of hearing with anyone who back then had learned three guitar chords and talked their parents into buying them twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of amplifiers and speakers for which they needed only one other cord (his father was fond of saying) to plug into an electric outlet, har, har, har, Dad.

But all this fiddling around with expensive and very heavy-to-carry paraphernalia had inadvertently provided the former Fiorello Paradiso with a vast knowledge of electronics that years later enabled him to open and operate a shop specializing in sound systems and equipment. The name of Florry’s business, of which he was the president and sole stockholder, was Meteor Sound Systems, Inc., a nod in the direction of the old group, which was also responsible for him having met his wife, though back then she wore granny gowns and beads and no bra and flowers in her hair. Maggie Paradise used to be the band’s female vocalist, her name back then being Margaret Riley, Irish to the core and fair as a summer morn. He did not, however, think of her as another Meteor legacy; three of those were quite enough, and besides she was now fat and forty and Florry was screwing the firm’s bookkeeper, whose name was Clarice like the woman in Silence of the Lambs , the movie, only with bigger tits, usually after hours while the speakers in his shop blared the Stones’ “Lady Jane.” Florry was fascinated by anything that transported or amplified or modified or enhanced sound, the Deaf Man’s hearing aid included. He was thinking of getting one for himself, though he would never in the world admit to anyone—not even his wife and especially not Clarice—that he sometimes couldn’t hear exactly everything a person was saying.

He heard everything the Deaf Man was saying now; he guessed the acoustics in this apartment were exceptionally fine. The apartment itself was on Grover Avenue, overlooking Grover Park, which was where the concert would be taking place. The Deaf Man had given Florry a map of the park, and he referred to that now as he listened to what would be needed from him, looking up at the Deaf Man’s lips every now and then because no matter how good the acoustics were, you could sometimes miss a word or two, hmm?

“Do you see the largest patch of blue on the map?” the Deaf Man asked.

“Yes, I do,” Florry said.

“It’s called the Swan. It’s an artificial lake.”

“I see that,” he said, and looked at the map again.

“Just below that is an area tinted green. That’s called the Cow Pasture. It’s the largest grassy area in the park.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s where the concert will be held.”

“That’s where they do all the outdoor theater stuff, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s a beautiful spot. The lake in the background to the east, the buildings lining Grover Avenue to the north—well, you can see it from here,” he said, and walked to the wide expanse of windows lining the southern wall of the apartment. Florry went to stand beside him. Both men looked down the twelve stories to the park across the street.

There was the faintest hint of green on trees moving into timid leaf, but nothing was flowering yet, neither forsythia nor cornelian cherry shrub added touches of yellow or pink to the panorama below. Yet even in the rain, at three in the afternoon, there was a simple beauty to the starkness of naked trees against a gray and solemn sky. The lawn itself looked patchy and brown from above, but if the intermittent rains persisted, it would be green enough in time for the concert. And, of course, the lake beyond looked magnificent from this viewpoint, a dark patch of blue spreading amoebalike between the Cow Pasture to the west and the tennis courts to the east. Both men looked down appreciatively. There were still some things that could be enjoyed in this city—if only from a distance.

“They’re estimating a crowd of some two hundred thousand people,” the Deaf Man said.

“Be quite a bash,” Florry said. “Did you go to Woodstock that time?”

“No,” the Deaf Man said.

“August of 1969? You didn’t go that time? Man, you really missed something. There were four hundred thousand people there that time. What a thing that was! I got laid eight times in two days!Eight different girls! What a thing!”

“This won’t be like that,” the Deaf Man said.

“Oh, i know . Nothing could be like Woodstock. Ever again. Nothing.”

The Deaf Man suddenly wondered if he’d chosen the wrong man for the job. Would an anachronistic hippie be capable of shouldering such a huge responsibility? And yet, he had come highly recommended, a man who possessed not only the skills the Deaf Man required but who, in addition, held the quaint precepts of the law in rightful contempt. According to what the Deaf Man had learned, Florry—on thirteen separate occasions and for compensation far more generous than what Meteor Sound Systems, Inc. could ever provide—had been instrumental , one might say, in circumventing some rather elaborate alarm systems, thereby enabling easy access to the people who’d hired him. Since all of these burglaries—a round baker’s dozen, so to speak—had been committed in dwellings during the nighttime, this made Florry an accomplice to precisely thirteen committed Burg Ones, for which he could have been sentenced to a good long time in a state penitentiary if ever he were caught and convicted.

The Deaf Man’s source had worked with Florry on four break-ins over the past six months, and he’d told the Deaf Man that Florry knew everything there was to know about sound systems, that he worked well under pressure, and could also recite the names of all the hit songs and albums of every rock group there’d been for the past thirty years. The Deaf Man had been impressed—but he hadn’t realized then that Florry Paradise would still be wearing beads and a ponytail and a fringed deerskin vest while he reminisced about the good old days at Woodstock.

“I need an enormously sophisticated system,” he said.

“What are we talking about?” Florry asked. “Rap or real music?”

“Voice,” the Deaf Man said.

“You mean rap? This is for amplifying rap music?”

“No. It’s for amplifying a voice .”

“Well, that’s what rap is , am I right? Voices and drums, am I right? Like in the jungle.”

“Yes, but this won’t be rap. This will be a recorded voice . I’d need you to make the recording….”

“On tape? Or do we burn an EPROM?”

“I don’t know what that is,” the Deaf Man admitted. Nor did he know how you burned one.

“It’s an electronic chip. We’d digitally store the voice on it.”

“Well, whatever you think best.”

“But this won’t be rap, huh?”

The Deaf Man was ready to strangle him.

“Because this is a rap concert, am I right?” Florry said. “The one coming up in the park?”

“Rap and rock.”

“How big is that lawn?”

“A bit over ten acres.”

“They’ll be using stuff’ll blow away everything in sight. Woodstock, they didn’t even have any delay towers. You weren’t there, you really missed something. I got laid eight times in two days, did I tell you? The sound system there was primitive compared to what we got today. The stuff they’ll be using in the park’ll carry sound all over those ten acres and then some. You want this voice to go out over the speakers, is that it?”

“I want to drown out anything else that’s going on at the time. When we start the tape, or the chip, or whatever…”

“Will this be a delayed start, or what?”

“Yes, that’s what I’d like. I don’t want to be anywhere near the lawn when the tape starts.”

“That’s easy enough, I can rig that for you. You know…well, it depends, of course.”

“What were you about to say?”

“If you really want to do this right, let’s just knock out their signal and substitute yours for it.”

“That would be perfect.”

“But this would have to be after all their equipment is in place, you understand.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll probably be placing the stage, two, three days before the event. Do their equipment check the day before. What kind of fuzz will I have to worry about?”

“There shouldn’t be any additional police presence in the days preceding the concert. There’ll be a larger presence on the day itself…”

“Naturally.”

“…but the only thing we’ll have to worry about then is getting the tape started on cue….”

“That’ll be automatic.”

“Good.”

“So how many cops while I’m in there messing around?”

“I have no idea. My guess is you’ll have to worry more about private security guards. But I don’t think anyone will bother you. It’s been my experience that if a workman simply goes about his business, no one will bother him.”

“Mine, too. But these various groups, their own people might like challenge me, you know? Who’re you, man? What’re you doing here, man?”

“Tell them you’re with the parks department, setting up some noise-monitoring equipment for the parks commissioner. Tell them anything you like, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, truly.”

“Just so they don’t go running to the cops, hey, there’s this honkie settin up shit here, he don’t belong to none of our groups.”

“That won’t happen.”

“Cause then, all of a sudden, I got fuzz wanting to know who I am and what I’m doing and I’m standin there with like my finger up my ass.”

“Would you like me to arrange some false identification for you?”

“A laminate would be terrific.”

“What’s a laminate?”

“Like a card covered with plastic, you wear it around your neck at these events, nobody bothers you.”

“Where would I get such a thing?”

“The promoter’s usually in charge of handing them out, they’re valuable as gold. Anybody asts you anything, you flash the laminate, they say Pass, friend, I go about my work. That’s if anybody asts me anything. Otherwise, I mind my own business, like you said, I don’t look for no trouble, I don’t get none.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“A laminate should be easy.”

“Maybe,” the Deaf Man said. He wasn’t at all sure it would be that easy. “Is there anything else you’ll need?”

“Yeah,” Florry said. “Money. We haven’t discussed money yet.”

“For wiring the job, fifty thousand.”

“That sounds low. In fact, that sounds very low, all the risks.”

“I don’t see any risks. If I can get the laminate for you…”

“Even with the laminate, I still see there could be risks. I’m in there working into these other guys’ shit, I can see risks.”

“You understand that the fifty is just for the wiring. On the day of the concert…”

“It’s still low for the wiring. Cause frankly, that’s the most exposure, when I’m out there placing the stuff. The day of the concert, I’m with you and the others, we’re like mutual protection. But when I’m placing the stuff and there’re cops wandering around looking over the progress of the work and whatnot, this is when there’s exposure, and exposure is risk. So I don’t know how much you had in mind for the day of the concert…”

“I had thirty in mind.”

He really had fifty in mind.

“Thirty’s fine for what has to be done that day,” Florry said, “if it’s as simple as you say it’s gonna be, but for the rigging beforehand I’d need at least another eighty.”

“Sixty is as high as I can go,” the Deaf Man said.

“Seventy-five’s my bottom line.”

“Let’s compromise at seventy and we’ve got a deal.”

“Seventy for the rigging plus thirty for later on.”

“A hundred altogether, yes.”

“Okay, we’ve got a deal at a hundred.”

Which was what the Deaf Man had planned to pay all along.

“When do you want to burn the EPROM?”

“The sooner the better.”

“Then let’s get it out of the way tomorrow sometime, okay? Can you stop by the shop like around eleven?”

“Eleven sounds fine.”

“Bring me ten K in cash,” Florry said, “the rest payable right after the gig. I should actually charge you more up front, cause that’s where the biggest risk is, when I’m in there fuckin up their work. But I’m being a good guy cause I think I’m gonna enjoy the challenge.”

“Thanks,” the Deaf Man said.

Dryly.

AT SIX P.M. on that rainy evening of March twenty-fifth, Sylvester Cummings, otherwise and preferably known as Silver Cummings, met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

Her name was Chloe Chadderton.

They sat in a bar atop one of the city’s more elegant midtown hotels, Silver’s agent having made the reservation, thereby paving the way for his appearance. Otherwise, the headwaiter might not have admitted a young black man wearing dreadlocks and what looked like carpenter’s overalls over a red T-shirt, not to mention footwear that had the appearance of used combat boots.

Chloe was more appropriately attired, wearing a simple brown woolen dress—this was springtime, yes, but the weather outside warranted clothing more suited to Scotland in the month of January—high-heeled brown pumps to match, a heavy gold bracelet on her right wrist, and a dangling gold medallion that nestled in the hollow of her throat. If Silver had been pressed to say what color she was, he would have said “Uptown ripe,” what the slave owners down South used to call “high yeller,” which exact words he had used in one of his songs to pillory modern-day bigots wherever they lived. Silver’s own color was a rich chocolate brown, which he hoped Chloe found attractive because thirty seconds after they’d met he was madly in love.

The one thing a rapper could never be accused of was being tongue-tied. He was close to that now.

“It was really nice of me to…of you to come meet me,” he said.

Chloe thought he was sort of cute, stammering and lowering his head that way, like a schoolboy. She figured him for twenty-three, twenty-four years old, some four or five years younger than she was—but since George’s death, she’d dated men who were even younger than that. On the phone Silver had sounded very businesslike. Introduced himself as the writer for Spit Shine, which group she’d heard of, told her he was interested in acquiring the rights to one of George Chadderton’s songs, who should he talk to up there at Chloe Productions, Inc.? She’d told him she was George Chadderton’s widow, and she was the person he should talk to, and he suggested that they meet for a drink, he’d tell her what he had in mind.

Reason he had asked her to have a drink with him instead of going up there to her office was he didn’t know how she’d take to the idea of a rap crew doing only her late husband’s lyrics and throwing his music in the garbage can. He still didn’t know how she’d react. But the lyrics were all he wanted, never mind that calypso shit.

Rain snakes slithered down the long window beside their table. Sunset wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes yet, but the city already looked dark and forbidding and there were lights on in all the office and apartment buildings. Chloe was drinking a Johnny Walker Black on the rocks, Silver was drinking a Perrier and lime. Needed to keep his head clear. He really wanted that song, wanted to get it in rehearsal for the concert coming up.

“The song I’m interested in,” he said, “is ‘Sister Woman.’”

“Good song,” she said. “George wrote it just before he got killed. Well, the lyrics, anyway.”

He could’ve jumped on this at once, this business about the lyrics, but instead he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know there’d been that kind of trouble.”

“Well, it’s a long story,” she said. “Some crazy woman was keeping his brother prisoner…it was really too weird. Anyway, he left this notebook full of lyrics, and I thought something could he done with them. So I hired this person to put some calypso music to them….”

“There’s no composer listed on the…”

“I paid him outright. A thousand bucks.”

Smart lady, he thought.

“Copyrighted it all under the name of Chloe Productions. Wrapped an album deal that netted me three.”

Well,not so smart, he thought.

“Not enough to retire on, but it got me through a long cold winter. How much did you plan to pay for using the song?”

Straight to the point. Had it been another long cold winter? Even so, spring was here. Wasn’t it?

“We’d only want to use the lyrics,” he said. “Spit Shine. We’re a rap group….”

“Yes, I know.”

“We don’t do calypso stuff.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“So all we’d want would be the lyrics. Cause they make the kind of point we’re int’rested in makin.”

“Um-huh. So how much would these lyrics be worth to you? Did you plan to record this, or just perform it live?”

“We’d use it in the concert first—we’re doin a concert on the fourth, though you’d never know it.”

“The Fourth of July?” she said. Eyes opening wide. Gorgeous sloe eyes the color of coal. Narrow oval face. Good firm breasts in the fitted brown dress. Medallion hanging in the hollow of her throat. Long, graceful neck, he wanted to kiss her behind each ear.

“No, no,” he said. “Next month. The fourth.”

“So there’s some kind of urgency,” she said.

“Well, we’d have to put it together, rehearse it…”

“Put it together how?”

“As rap,” he said. “Give it the rhythms rap needs. This isn’t just a matter of talkin the lyrics, you know, they got to be paced, they got to be skittered.”

“Where’s this going to be?” she asked. “The concert.”

“In the park here. Grover Park.”

“Be a lot of people?”

“It’s a free concert,” he said, figuring he’d cut her off at the pass before she got any grandiose ideas.

“You want the song free then?” she asked. “Because it’s a free concert ?”

“No, we’d pay you for the use.”

“How much?”

He figured he was dealing small time here. The lady needed money, that was the long and the short of it. He didn’t know she was in fact dead broke and considering a life not dissimilar to the one Sister Woman lived in the song.

The music company aside—it was virtually defunct, anyway—Chloe was still doing what she’d been doing at the time of her husband’s murder, dancing almost naked on bartops, men tucking dollar bills into her G-string, sometimes five, rarely more than that unless you went in the back room with them. In the back, you danced naked for them, you let them touch your breasts, kiss your nipples, slide their hands up your legs to your garters, all this was a simple step above performing forty-dollar hand jobs behind the plastic greenery, which she had never done because she knew that once you crossed the Rubicon into performing an actual sex act, the progression after that—and the justification for it—was easy. Massage parlor work, escort work, outright prostitution. She had girlfriends who’d gone that route, girls who used to dance alongside her on the bar. They told her she was dumb not doing it herself. She had considered it. She was still considering it. But here was a man interested in her dead husband’s work….

“What about the other songs on the album?” she said.

“Not interested in anything but the hooker song,” he said, and shook his head. “I’d like to put it in the group’s li’berry.”

“Say it was yours?”

“No, no.”

“Say you wrote it?”

“No, I wouldn’t rip it. We’d give your husband credit.”

“Fuck my husband,” she said, startling him. “All I’m interested in is what’ll bring the most money. You want to buy the copyright, fine, say the song is yours, that’s fine, too, the lyrics are yours, whatever you want , but that’ll cost you. You want to perform it one time, that’s another matter. Then you’d have to come back to me next time you want to do it. I’ll level with you, Mr. Cummings….”

“Silver,” he corrected.

“Sounds like the Lone Ranger’s horse,” she said.

He flared for a moment. And then burst out laughing. She watched him. Even white teeth, strong jaw, he really was quite attractive.

“Make it Sil then,” he said, still laughing. “That’s what all my friends call me.”

“Sil,” she said, “I need some real cash. I want to keep this apartment I’m in, but the lease runs out the end of April and I know they plan to raise the rent, and the truth is I’m still doing the kind of work I was doing when my husband got killed, but I don’t much…”

“What kind of work do you do?” he asked.

She looked him dead in the eye.

“I’m a dancer,” she said.

But didn’t tell him she danced naked for men who touched her breasts and her legs, and even kissed her nipples….

“But I’m not enjoying it…”

Which was the truth.

“…so I’d like to start my own business, open a beauty salon in Diamondback, there’s always room for another beauty salon.”

“I would guess you know a great deal about beauty,” he said, intending a compliment and hoping she took it as such, relieved when she said, “Why, thank you, Sil,” sounding enormously surprised.

“A great deal,” he repeated, like a politician emphasizing key words in his speech.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I need cash if I’m going to go out on my own, do you understand what I mean?”

She did not say that some of her girlfriends were pulling down five, six hundred dollars a day, five days a week, twenty-five hundred to three thousand a week, something like a hundred and fifty thousand a year, she did not tell him that. Nor did she tell him how tempted she was lately, or how trapped she was beginning to feel. She did not want to become a whore. She did not.

Outside the windows, night had already claimed the city.

“How much are you looking for?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand,” she said.

Which was outrageous.

“You’ve got it,” he said.

THE TWO POLICE OFFICERS in Adam One were taking another quick run at the sector before they parked awhile to fool around a little. Necking on the job, not to mention reciprocal masturbation, was specifically forbidden by police-department regulations, but boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and the police officers in Adam One were respectively named Adam O’Hare, no relation to the car, and Josie Ruggiero, and they had been playing around on the job and running around on their respective spouses for the past month and a half now. Their burgeoning affair had started with a little hand-holding on the front seat, the walkie-talkie squawking between them, and had rapidly progressed to a little kissy-facey and then a little touchy-feely, and it would be merely a matter of time now before they found themselves a deserted stretch of turf on the graveyard shift and went “all the way,” as such mischief was known in the trade.

It was now a quarter past five on this rainy morning. It would be dark until sixA .M., and they were not due back at the Eight-Seven till a quarter of eight, at which time they would turn in the car and be relieved by the next shift. Relief of quite another sort was what they had in mind at the moment, however. As soon as they completed this routine pass at the sector, they would drive over to the posted Quiet Zone surrounding St. Sebastian’s Hospital. Considering what their present separate but identical states of mind were urgently demanding, the dark, tree-lined streets there would perfectly serve their needs. Rarely if ever, and certainly not at this hour of the morning, was the area frequented by through traffic; the posted speed limit was ten miles per hour and there were traffic lights on every corner, blinking to the deserted streets. Park in the empty visitors’ parking lot, douse the headlights, anyone saw a patrol car sitting there in the rain, they’d think it was a radar speed trap instead of two horny cops unzipping each other’s flies.

O’Hare wished they’d let Josie wear a skirt to work, make life so much simpler. Josie wished her husband never found out what Adam and she had been doing every night on the job since the middle of February. Her husband was a sergeant who worked out of Narcotics and he was six feet two inches tall and he weighed two hundred and ten pounds and he had been known to bust a few heads in his lifetime. Adam, on the other hand, was five feet eight inches tall, and he weighed a hundred and fifty-four pounds, although when it came to size he was adequately compensated elsewhere.

“Wanna park awhile?” he asked now.

“Mmm, yeah,” she said.

Adam nodded. He was already outrageously erect inside his blue uniform trousers, and he couldn’t wait to have her hands on him again. Adam’s wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant and there wasn’t much activity at home for him these days. Susan—like every other cop’s wife in this city—didn’t like the idea of him being partnered with a woman, no less a darkhaired beauty like Josie Ruggiero,Italian in the bargain, whom she’d met at the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Ball this past Christmas, before anything had started between her husband and his new partner. His old partner had been killed on the job. Susan told Adam that if he ever so much as looked cockeyed at Josie, his new partner would be killed also, though not necessarily on the job. Adam, too. There would be a double homicide there in the old Eight-Seven, and no judge in his right mind would ever blame Susan.

Adam rationalized his actions by telling himself a stiff cock had no conscience.

Josie rationalized hers by telling herself she was gloriously in love.

Either way, they were consenting adults who knew exactly what they were doing and who looked forward to ever-escalating ecstasy night after night after night.

What they weren’t looking forward to on this early morning of March twenty-sixth, the very last thing they wanted this morning as they drove into the Quiet Zone, each one separately entertaining high hopes and great expectations of secret steamy congress in the snugness of their blue-and-white cocoon, the surprise they definitely had not anticipated and did not now expect to find in the middle of the parking lot was a little old man sitting in a wheelchair in the rain.

THE INTERN in the emergency room at St. Sebastian’s Hospital was telling Meyer Meyer that someone had dumped an old man in the hospital’s parking lot sometime early this morning, and he was wondering now if the police had any missing-persons reports that might describe the man, his name was Charlie. That was all they were able to get from him, Charlie. This was now a little after eight o’clock in the morning. The day shift had relieved some twenty minutes ago, and Meyer was now having his breakfast—a cup of coffee and a toasted English muffin—at his desk.

“Charlie what?” he asked.

“I just told you,” the intern said. “Charlie is all we got from him.”

“That isn’t much to go on,” Meyer said, “just Charlie.”

“I can give you a description,” the intern said. “He’s got to be at least seventy-five years old….”

“Is that a guess, or did he tell you?”

“No. All he knows is his first name.”

“Then you’re just guessing he’s seventy-five.”

“Educated guess.”

“Seventy-five, right. Color of his eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Hair?”

“Fringe of white around the ears. Otherwise, he’s bald.”

Like me, Meyer thought.

“I’ll check Missing Persons,” he said, “see if they have anything.”

THERE WERE CURRENTLY two hospitals within the confines of the 87th Precinct’s geographical boundaries, both of them lousy. Morehouse General was considered one of the worst hospitals in the city, but St. Sab’s—as it was familiarly known—ran a close second. Cops knew where all the good hospitals were; whenever a cop got shot, a radio car raced him to the nearest good hospital, siren screaming. The Old Chancery in the Eight-Six was another wonderful hospital to be avoided at all costs. Buenavista was a good one, and there were several others to which you could quickly transport a wounded cop if you were hitting the hammer and riding hell-bent for leather.

Meyer and Hawes went over to St. Sab’s at a little past nine that morning. They made an interesting-looking pair of cops, Meyer standing some two inches shorter than Hawes, both men burly and tall, but Meyer completely bald whereas Hawes had flaming red hair with a white streak over the left temple. Meyer wondered what the politically correct term for “bald” was. Depilated? Non-hirsute? He also wondered why you didn’t see as many bald women as you saw bald men. He had, in fact, seen only one bald woman in his entire lifetime, and she had drowned in a bathtub full of soapy water, a lady almost ninety years old and too weak to get herself out of the tub, drowned while she was probably calling weakly for help all day long. There was a blonde wig on a stand in the bathroom, alongside the sink. Meyer wondered what that old lady had looked like when she was young and had her own blonde hair. Bald and emaciated, she had looked like a concentration-camp survivor.

Meyer thought about that little old bald lady for months after they’d found her in her apartment in that soapy bathtub. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about her. About how she’d looked Jewish to him. Because it was one thing to be a Jew who thought of Israel as a foreign country and it was another thing to be a Jew who put up a Christmas tree every year and who hadn’t been inside a synagogue since the time he was investigating the murder of a dead rabbi, years and years ago, but it was quite another thing to know that what had happened to the Jews in Germany had happened only because they were Jews like himself. The little old lady with her blonde wig on a bathroom stand caused Meyer to weep for every Jew in the world—even though it turned out she wasn’t Jewish at all; her name in fact was Kelly.

He guessed he was thinking about her now because the man named Charlie looked a lot older than the seventy-five years the intern had estimated. Sitting up in bed, he seemed totally out of it, a frail old man peering out of a face with skin as transparent as parchment, his eyes as blue as chicory blooms.

“How you doing, sir?” Hawes asked.

The old man nodded.

Charlie.

Charlie is all we got from him.

Labels cut out of all his clothes. Wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a wheelchair in the rain.

“We’ve run some tests,” the intern said now. “He’s diabetic and anemic, he’s got high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, and cataracts on both eyes. The memory loss could be Alzheimer’s, but who can tell?”

“Does he know how he got here?” Hawes asked.

“Do you know how you got here, sir?” Meyer asked.

“In a car,” Charlie said.

“Who was driving the car, do you know?”

“A man,” Charlie said.

“Do you know who he was?”

“No.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No.”

His voice was shaky. So were his hands. Meyer wondered if he also had Parkinson’s. The intern hadn’t mentioned anything about Parkinson’s. The intern’s name—his last name, anyway, and an initial for his first name—was lettered onto a little plastic tag pinned to his tunic.DR .J .MOOKHERJI . Indian, Meyer guessed. There were more Indian doctors training in this city than there were Indian snake charmers in all Calcutta. If you were admitted to an emergency room in this city, chances were the doctor treating you had a mother in Delhi.

“How’d you get in his car?” Hawes asked.

“Carried me out to it. Put me on the front seat with him.”

“When was this?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“From the house.”

“Where would that be, sir?”

“The house,” he said again, and shrugged.

“He doesn’t know where he lives,” Mookherji said. “I’ve already asked.”

“What time was this, sir?” Hawes asked. “When the man carried you out to the…?”

“If he ever knew how to tell time, he doesn’t anymore,” Mookherji said.

“What did the man look like?” Meyer asked.

He wasn’t hoping for much. Some of these people, they could remember something had happened to them when they were four years old, but they couldn’t recall where they’d put their hat three minutes ago.

“He was forty, forty-five years old,” Charlie said, “about five feet ten inches tall, with brown eyes and dark hair. Wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket with a yellow shirt under it, no hat.”

Meyer was impressed. So was Hawes.

“Was he white or black?” Meyer asked.

“White.”

“Anything else you can remember about him?”

“He was nice to me,” Charlie said.

“Did you contact Missing Persons?” Mookherji asked.

“No one answering his description,” Meyer said. He did not mention that the detective he’d spoken to had asked, “What is this, a fuckin epi demic?”

“Did he drive you straight here from the house?” Hawes asked.

“Don’t know,” Charlie said.

“My guess is he was bedridden,” Mookherji said. “He’s got bedsores all over him. We’d really like to locate his people, whoever they are, whoever dumped him here.” Hospital personnel had picked up the media expression. Hardly anyone in a hospital called it abandonment. It was dumping, plain and simple. Like dumping your garbage. Only these were human beings.

“How long were you in the car, do you know?” Hawes asked.

“He has no concept of time,” Mookherji said.

“Twenty months,” Charlie said.

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He knew my name.”

“Knew you were Charlie?”

“Called me Charlie, knew my name.”

“Charlie what?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did he say anything to you when he left you here?”

“Said I’d be all right.”

“Anything else?”

“Said there were people who loved me,” Charlie said, and looked into Meyer’s face, and said, “Do you love me?” and began weeping.