Mischief

5.

HER ALARM CLOCK had a two-position switch. The first position caused the bedside lamp to flash when the alarm went off. The second position flashed the lamp and simultaneously turned on a vibrator under her pillow. Normally, the flashing lamp was enough to awaken her, but this morning she was taking no chances; the switch was set to the second position. The combination of flashing lamp and vibrating pillow woke her up in five seconds flat. She hit the OFF button before all that shaking and blinking woke up Carella, who grunted, muttered something unintelligible, and rolled away from the light an instant before it quit.

The LED display on the clock read 3:01A .M.

It was still dark an hour later, when she left the house and began walking to the elevated subway station four blocks away. She was thinking that this section of Riverhead was still relatively safe, but she wasn’t used to being abroad alone—or even a broad alone, she thought, and smiled—at this hour of the night. She walked as fast as she could, somehow comforted by the lights burning in the surrounding apartment buildings, even at this ungodly hour. People were awake. People were preparing to start the day. I’m not alone, she thought, even though she hadn’t been out of the house at this hour since her high school prom, which she’d attended with the former Salvatore Di Napoli.

She expected the platform to be empty, but there were several other men and women standing on it waiting for the next train to come in, some of them wearing what she had been advised to wear, blue jeans and sneakers, and—at least in the case of one woman whose coat was hanging open—a blue T-shirt like the one the clinic had given Teddy yesterday, and which she was also wearing today. Lettered onto the front of the shirt were the words:PRO -CHOICE. She unbuttoned her coat now, revealing the shirt, and smiled at the woman in greeting. The woman smiled back. Both of them looked up the track for any sign of an incoming train. Nothing yet. Teddy figured the ride downtown would take about forty-five minutes, most of it on elevated tracks before the train plunged underground at the Grady Street station in lower Riverhead. She was due at the clinic at five sharp.

There was a scene in the movie Viva Zapata! that Teddy never tired of seeing, even though the musical accompaniment that was an integral part of it was lost on her. It was the long passage where Zapata and his brother are marching to the capital, or wherever they’re going, this was Marlon Brando when he was young and handsome and Anthony Quinn when he was young and possibly even more handsome. And as they march along with a straggling little band of followers, both of them looking fiercely determined, peasants keep coming out of the hills to join them, and all of the peasants are wearing white trousers and shirts and big sombreros, and they keep pouring down out of the hills with machetes in their hands, joining this straggling little band of maybe ten, twenty people until finally there’s an army of ten thousand behind them, all of them in those identifying white trousers and shirts.

It was like that on the subway this morning.

As the train rattled its way through the dark on the overhead tracks, the cars began filling with people on their way to work, yes, but they also began filling with people wearing the clinic’s blue shirt with thePRO-CHOICE lettering on its front. Men and women alike, all of them wearing the shirt, until the little band of stragglers who had boarded the train at Teddy’s stop became an army in uniform by the time the train reached the College Street station on Isola’s Upper South Side. Well, not an army the size of Zapata’s , not that overwhelming mass of white flowing down out of the hills to join him, no, nothing quite that grand or impressive, but impressive enough to Teddy’s eyes; at least a hundred people came up out of the College Street kiosk that morning, emerging from the dimness of the underground tunnel into the pale promising light of morngloam.

Sunrise was still an hour away as they gathered at the clinic to await the onslaught of the most fanatic faction of the anti-abortion movement, a self-styled “rescue” group funded by reactionaries and led by a pair of Catholic priests who in the past several years had been jailed far more often than they’d offered the host. Their tactics had been explained to Teddy yesterday at the last of the training and orientation meetings. As she assembled with the others, she felt totally prepared for anything that might come today.

She was wrong.

“DID YOUR SON know anyone named Timothy O’Laughlin?” Parker asked.

That was the name of the dead writer the blues had found at three o’clock this morning, just about when Teddy’s alarm was starting to blink and shake her awake. It was now a little past eight, and Catalina Herrera was trying to get back to her typewriter. Her son had been buried yesterday, and it was time now to begin attacking the pile of manuscripts and correspondence that had accumulated on the small desk she’d set up near the kitchen window. Barefoot and wearing a black skirt and a white blouse recklessly unbuttoned some four buttons down from the top to expose the slopes of her generous breasts, she stood silhouetted in the window that now streamed early morning sunlight. It looked as if spring might actually have arrived at last. It was time to get on with her work. Time to try to get on with living her life again.

“No, I don’ know thees name,” she said.

“Timmo?” he said. “Does that ring a bell?”

“No, I don’t know thees, too,” she said.

The charming Spanish accent. Parker loved it. Listening to her voice, he smiled—though a third victim was certainly nothing to smile about.

He and Kling had been called at home at twenty minutes past three this morning because the guy lying on the sidewalk near the graffiti-covered wall of what used to be the Municipal Fish Market in the northeast corner of the precinct had been shot twice in the head and once through the hand and then spray-painted afterward. The bullet through the hand was probably the result of his having thrown it up in self-defense, thinking perhaps he was Superman and could stop speeding bullets. Whether or not three shots had been fired or merely two —with the same bullet going through the hand and then the upper lip—was a matter of conjecture. As had been the case with the previous two victims, there hadn’t been any spent cartridges or bullets recovered at the scene, so nobody knew what kind of gun had been used except that it definitely wasn’t an automatic, which would have spewed cartridge cases like cherry pits. Each of the victims had been shot at close range. The bullets had gone right on through, so either the techs weren’t doing their jobs right or else the shooter had picked up after himself, like a conscientious citizen scooping up dog doo. Gathering bullets and cartridge cases if the gun had been an auto, bullets alone if it had been a revolver. A hunter and gatherer was the Graffiti Killer, as the tabloids had begun calling him.

“Mrs. Herrera,” Parker said, “we now have…do you mind if I call you Catalina?” he said, pronouncing it “Cat-uh-leen-uh” and not the way she herself would have pronounced it, “Cah-tah-leen-ah.”

“Cathy,” she said, surprising Kling.

Parker blinked.

“My friends call me Cathy,” she said.

“Cathy, good,” Parker said, and nodded. “What I was saying, Cathy, is that we now have three victims of this person, including your son, which by the way I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral yesterday.”

“De nada,”she said.

So damn cute, the way they talked, he thought. The women.

“But we were busy trying to get a line on the second one,” he said, “who doesn’t seem to fit the picture, although we found cans of spray paint in his house. I never heard of a closet graffiti writer, did you, Bert?” Parker asked, pulling him into it, showing with a grin what a jovial and well-meaning fellow he was, unlike other police detectives Cathy may have known. Kling did not enjoy being an accomplice. Parker wanted to hit on the woman, let him do it on his own time.

“We found the paint in his closet , you see,” Parker explained, though Kling guessed little Cathy here didn’t know what a closet anything was, no less a closet graffiti writer. Still, Parker had explained his little joke, which showed his heart was in the right place. “But the guy’s a lawyer, the second one,was a lawyer, thirty-eight years old, it turned out, with a wife thirty-five. You don’t expect a person like that to be writing graffiti, do you?”

“Of cours’ nah,” Cathy said.

Holmes to Watson, Kling thought. Watson agreeing with the master sleuth’s theory. In an accent you could slice with a machete.

“Your son never mentioned his name, did he happen to?”

“Wha’wass hees name?”

God, Parker loved the way she talked.

“Peter Wilkins,” he said.

“No. I never heard this name before.”

He was beginning to get bilingual, understanding every word she spoke. He wondered what she spoke in bed. He hoped she spoke Spanish. He wanted her to tell him all sorts of things in Spanish. Like how much she loved his cock in her Spanish mouth.

“So your son never mentioned either of them, is that right? What we’re looking for, Catalina,Cathy, is some kind of connection between the three of them, someplace we can hang our hats, is what we call it in police work,” he said, and smiled again.

Jee-sus! Kling thought.

“I don’t know anything to help,” she said.

It seemed clear to Kling that the woman had nothing further to contribute along these lines. The possibility was less than remote that her son had known either of the other two victims, one of them a lawyer, the other a veteran writer with a Criminal Mischief record. That’s what writing graffiti was called in the law books—Criminal Mischief. Three degrees of it.

Crim Mis One was defined as:With intent to do so and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that one has such right, damaging property of another: 1. In an amount exceeding $1,500; OR 2. by means of an explosive. This was a Class-D felony punishable by sentences ranging from a one-year minimum in prison to a seven-year max, unless you happened to be a sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-old toddler, in which case you could be sent to a reformatory instead.

The other two degrees of Criminal Mischief were determined by the value of the property damaged, more than $250 in the case of Crim Mis Two , a Class-E felony, and less than $250 in the case of Crim Mis Three , a mere Class-A misdemeanor. A Class-E felony was punishable by a min of one and a max of four with the same reformatory provision for so-called minors. A Class-A misdemeanor was punishable by no more than a year in prison or a thousand-dollar fine.

Kling was thinking that signs advising graffiti writers of the prison sentences they faced should be posted all over town.

Parker was saying, “What I’d like you to do, Cathy—when you finish your work here, I don’t want to interfere with your work, I see you have a lot of work to do—I want you to make a list for me of all of your son’s friends, so I can look them up and see whether there’s a possibility here of one of them being the person responsible.”

Kling was thinking that this was a dead end here. The Herrera kid seemed to be at the bottom of the pecking order, a simple “toy” in the hierarchy of graffiti writers. Timmo, on the other hand, had been a well-known writer back in the days when subway cars were being decorated top to bottom. God alone knew where the lawyer fit into the scheme of things. Was he some kind of nut who filed briefs during the daytime and then put on a Batman costume and went around spraying buildings at night? Either way, Kling figured the killer for some vigilante type choosing his victims at random.

“I’m working today and tomorrow, but I’ve got all day Sunday off,” Parker said, and smiled into Cathy’s open blouse. “We can spend the whole day together, if you like, going over the list. Do you think you’d like to do that? Cathy?”

And to Kling’s everlasting surprise, she said, “Yes, I think that would be very nice, thank you, what time should I expect you?”

CHARLIE’S CLOTHES told the same story.

Or rather, they didn’t tell any story at all.

Dr. Mookherji at St. Sebastian’s Hospital had told Meyer that all the labels had been cut out of the old man’s clothes, and Meyer had accepted the observation at face value. But Mookherji wasn’t a cop, and Meyer was still looking for a place to hang his hat—as Parker might have put it—which was what took him back to St. Sab’s that Friday.

True to Mookherji’s word, the labels had been cut out of everything, including Charlie’s bathrobe, his pajamas, and his bedroom slippers. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make certain that neither of these two old people would be identified. Meyer had no real reason to believe that the dumpings were related, of course, except for the fact that he’d got an immediate response from the old woman when he’d described the man who’d dropped Charlie—“Buddy,” she’d said at once. Not to mention the remarkably similar M.O.’s, guy drives off with each of them, dumps them in the middle of the night….

“The slippers, too,” he told the woman behind the counter, and sighed heavily. “Which wasn’t easy, getting the labels out.”

The woman nodded. She was thinking she’d have to refold all these clothes when he got through with them. Put them back in their proper bin.

“Well, thanks a lot,” Meyer said, and gave the countertop a little farewell pat. “I appreciate your help.”

“Did you want to see his blanket, too?” the woman asked.

THEY HAD TOLD HER the “rescue” workers would try to chain the doors of the clinic shut, looping a Kryptonite chain through the door handles, if that’s the way the doors were constructed, and then fastening the links with a Kryptonite lock. If the doors were fashioned differently—say a simple flush metal door with a dead-bolt keyway in it, or possibly a metal door with a wire-embedded glass panel in the upper half—they would try other ways to bar access to the clinic. They would chain themselves together, for example, and lie down in the walk leading to the entrance door so that if the police tried to remove them, they would be struggling with lifting or dragging twelve bodies chained together instead of a single body.

The idea was to make certain no one got in or out. Not the doctors who were murdering babies inside there, and not the girls or women who were carrying unwanted babies and who were seeking medical assistance to terminate their pregnancies—as was their right under the law of the land. The rescue group gathered outside the clinic this morning had deliberately chosen this location only three blocks from the Claremore College for Girls. Their strategy was to bring home the fact that many of the so-called women seeking abortions weren’t women at all but were, in fact, merely uninformed girls. These girls had to be taught that they were not exercising a right concerning their own bodies but were instead usurping a fundamental right of another human being—the fetus in the womb—trampling upon that right in the most fundamental way, terminating the life of that human being,murdering that human being. Once this was made clear to the young girls in this country, why, then and only then could the slaughter of the unborn innocent be stopped.

None of these rescuers seemed to realize that abortion was legal, that they were attempting to stop people from doing something that was entirely legal. In their interference and harassment, they had been supported by a president who—though sworn to uphold the laws of the land—had given succor to them by telephoning whenever they were disrupting a clinic and telling them how much he admired their position. To Teddy’s way of thinking, this was akin to the Commissioner of Police calling a bank robber while he was inside a bank holding hostages and telling him how much he respected the courageous stand he was taking.

They usually hit the clinics before dawn.

Chained the doors shut, nailed them shut, anything to prevent access, anything to make it more difficult for someone in desperate need of help. Sometimes they got inside the clinics and chained themselves to radiators or heavy pieces of furniture, the better to disrupt the entirely legal activities within. Mischief was the name of the game. Do their mischief, create their havoc, make it so difficult to pursue a legal right that eventually the right would erode and the small minority of people hoping to destroy it would have triumphed.

Frequently, their mischief was illegal.

Targeting a doctor who performed abortions, telephoning him and screaming the word “Murderer!” into his ear was considered a crime in most states of the union. In this state, it was called Aggravated Harassment, and it was a Class-A misdemeanor, punishable by the same year in prison and/or thousand-dollar fine a graffiti writer could get for vandalizing a building. Calling that same doctor, reeling off the names of his children, and asking how they were feeling today, was the sort of veiled threat many states considered the crime of Coercion—which in this state was a Class-D felony, three to seven in the slammer, correct. Printing posters with an innocent doctor’s name and picture and the wordsWANTED FOR MURDER on them was in most states called “libel,” which, while not a crime, was a tort for which a person could seek punitive damages in court.

That morning at twenty minutes past ten, a man demonstrating outside the abortion clinic committed two crimes in rapid succession—threeif you counted the fact that he had ignored the court order prohibiting him from coming any closer than fifteen feet of the police barricade.

The first crime was called simple Harassment, as opposed to the aggravated kind. This was a mere violation, for which all the perpetrator could expect was fifteen days in jail. This was defined as “engaging in a course of conduct or repeatedly committing acts which alarm or seriously annoy another person and which serve no legitimate purpose.” The specific action in which the man was engaged happened to be repeatedly shouting the word “Murderer!” into a woman’s face from six inches away.

The second crime was more serious.

It consisted of hurling a bag of blood into that same woman’s face from six inches away.

The woman was Teddy Carella.

The man was wearing a black suit, and a black shirt, and a white collar.

He called himself a priest.

Tossing the blood still might have been simple harassment had it not damaged property. As it was, the blood drenched not only Teddy’s face and her hair and her neck but it also soaked the front of thePRO-CHOICE T-shirt—$6.99 including the lettering when purchased in bulk, but property nonetheless—and this escalated the crime into a Crim Mis Three and the penalty to a possible year behind bars. The priest who threw the open plastic bag of blood at Teddy may not have known this, or might not have cared. He simply shouted, “Suffer the blood of the children!” and tossed the blood into her face. Teddy was totally unprepared for the sudden splash of foul-smelling stuff and for a moment thought this was actually human blood, and then correctly deducted that it couldn’t possibly be human blood, it had to be some kind of animal blood that had been allowed to sit unrefrigerated in order to achieve its present odious stench, dripping from her hair and down her face, and tasting vile where it touched her lips.

She had removed her coat and left it inside the clinic because the day had turned sunny and bright and mild, spring was truly here at last, though no one might have guessed from the anger roiling outside this place. ThePRO -CHOICET-shirt was short-sleeved, so there was nothing she could immediately use to wipe the blood from her face. As she fumbled for a possible tissue in the back pocket of her jeans, the priest put his face close to hers again and began screaming what sounded like a litany, flecks of spittle flying from his lips to mingle with the blood on her face.

“Taste the blood of the children!” he shouted. “Taste the blood of the innocent children,murderer who would slaughter them! Taste the blood of the unborn innocent,murderer who would pluck them from their mothers’ sacred wombs! Taste the blood of the defenseless progeny, slain by the murderers who would deny them birth! Drink the blood of the blessed unborn, fruit of the mother whose holy vessel the murderers would violate! Taste of the blood, drink of the blood, drown the murderers’ evil quest in the innocent blood of the issue torn from the sanctity and purity of all womankind!Murderers, give the children life !Murderers, give the children life !Murderers, give the children life !”

And now a handful of anti-abortion protesters formed behind their frocked leader in a tight semicircle, the focal point of which was Teddy, for she was the one streaming blood, she was the one they’d singled out to drench in blood, to target as the symbolic murderer of innocent children, she was the focus of their chanting now, eight of them standing shoulder to shoulder, pointing fingers in accusation and shouting in unison, “Murderers,give the children life! Murderers, give the children life! Murderers, give the children life! Murderers, give the children life !”

She could find no tissue in her pocket.

The blood kept streaming down her face.

SONNY SANSON was what he’d told Carter his name was, but Carter didn’t believe it for a minute. Big tall guy, blond, with a hearing aid in his ear, he’d make a good leading man if only he wasn’t deaf—hearing-impaired, excuse me, everything had to be so politically correct these days. It sometimes drove Carter crazy, trying to remember what was acceptable and what wasn’t; fuckin broads , it was all their fault. When he was in the slammer, a deaf man was a deaf man, period.

“The trouble with these uniforms you rent from costume supply houses,” the deaf man was saying, “is they all look fake.”

Carter tended to agree with him.

Carter didn’t like the idea to begin with—going in as a garbage man, which is what he gathered this was going to be—but he tended to agree that the stuff you rented always looked like it was for a summer-stock production of My Sister Eileen or Arsenic and Old Lace or The Price or Guys and Dolls or West Side Story, none of which had garbage men in them. Carter knew. Before he’d got caught dealing dope—on a very minor level, by the way—he used to be an actor. In fact, he’d played Officer Krupke in West Side Story and Officer Brophy in Arsenic and Old Lace, and he’d been up for the role of the cop brother in the Miller play, he couldn’t recall the name of the character, for a production they were doing at the Provincetown Playhouse, if he remembered correctly. It just went to show, you could play a hundred cops on the stage, it didn’t make a fuckin difference if they decided to bust you.

This deaf man here—Sanson, whatever his name was—knew that Carter had done time—for such a lowball operation, too, selling dope to the kids in Sound of Music —and he also knew that Carter had done some acting, which is what Carter supposed had caught his attention in the first place, the fact that he’d had acting experience—well, singing, too, for that matter. From what Carter could gather, the deaf man’s scheme had something to do with impersonating garbage men. Which was why he needed the uniforms. And this probably involved eyeball-to-eyeball contact, like theater in the round, which was why the uniforms couldn’t look fake. Carter was waiting to hear more about it, saying nothing for the moment, just listening. He had learned that the best actors in the world were also the best listeners.

“Which is why we’ll have to steal them,” the deaf man said. “The uniforms.”

“You plan to steal sanitation-department uniforms,” Carter said.

Deadpan delivery, like a take in itself, he’d learned that a long time ago. You just blankly repeated a man’s words, it made them sound preposterous.

“Yes,” Sonny said. “Or rather, I was hoping you’d steal them for me.”

“You want me to steal sanitation-department uniforms,” Carter said.

No emphasis on any of the words, just repeating the man’s statement flat out, deadpanned and deadeyed, you want me to steal sanitation-department uniforms, like a double take this time.

“Yes,” the deaf man said.

“From off the backs of garbage men?” Carter asked, and smiled, making a little joke, heh-heh.

“If that’s what it requires, yes.”

“Must be some other way to get them,” Carter said.

“I’m not too sure about that.”

“Without stealing them.”

“Stealing is sometimes the easiest way.”

“Stealing could also fuck up a job from minute one. You do something stupid like stealing garbage man uniforms, it could make the whole thing explode in your face. Which I don’t suppose you want to happen.”

“No.”

“So how many uniforms will you need?”

“Four of us will be going in.”

“Who are these four people? Cause I’ll need sizes, you realize.”

“Of course.”

“So who are they?”

“You, me, a man named Florry Paradise…”

“Florry Paradise.”

Same deadpan delivery.

“Yes, and another man yet to be selected.”

“How risky is this thing going to be?” Carter asked and gave him The Look. He had cultivated The Look when he was playing a small-time drug dealer in an episode of Miami Vice; this was before he himself became a real-life small-time drug dealer and got sent away on a five-and-dime, reduced to two-and-a-half for good behavior and an Academy Award performance before the parole board during which he convinced them that acting was a legitimate form of making a worthwhile contribution to society. Actually, he hadn’t acted a lick since he’d got out six years ago. Actually, he’d drifted into burglary was what he’d done, the things a man can learn in prison if only he pays attention. The Look said I am a reasonable man, so don’t fuck with me.

“Because,”he said, still wearing The Look, “the riskier this is, the more money I want for the part, the uh participation.”

“That’s understandable,” the deaf man said. “So suppose I tell you up front exactly what I’ll need from you, and then you can tell me whether or not you feel the risk is worth whatever it is I’m willing to pay for your participation, isn’t that the word you used?”

“Yes,” Carter said.

He had the feeling he was being put on, the fuckin hearing-impaired jackass.

“So tell me what you need,” he said.

“First the uniforms. Four in all. I don’t care if you buy them or steal them or find them under a rock. You know your own size, I’ll give you mine and Florry’s, and I’ll have the other one for you by the end of the week.”

“What are you thinking here? A wheel man and three to go in?”

“Something like that.”

“Cause I know a good wheel man, if you need one. Guy I met in the joint. Very good. Hands like a brain surgeon. He can drive you in and out of a pay toilet without putting in a quarter.”

“Can he drive a garbage truck?”

“A what?”

“A garbage truck.”

“What kind of heist is this, anyway?”

“A very big one.”

“With just four men involved?”

“That’s all it’ll take.”

“What kind of security are we talking about?”

“Virtually none.”

“Like what? What does virtually none mean?”

“A handful of policemen at most.”

“Does this involve taking out cops? Cause I have to tell you, I draw the line at doing cops. Except on the English-speaking stage, if you follow me.”

“I don’t plan on injuring any policemen.”

“But does the possibility exist?”

“Yes, it does. If things go very very wrong. But I don’t…”

“That’s what I…”

“…expect anything…”

“…meant. Taking out a cop…”

“…to go wrong.

“Well, you never know. And what I’m trying to say, you box a cop, you never get the bastards off your back. They’ll hound you till you’re old and gray, those bastards. They stick up for their own, it’s like a fuckin tribe they’ve got.”

“I recognize the risks.”

“I’m glad you do. I don’t mean the uniforms. For all I know you can walk in some store and buy them right off the rack. It’s not like a police uniform, where it could mean trouble if the wrong person got hold of it. Who the hell would want to wear a garbage man’s uniform except a garbage man?”

“Me,” the deaf man said, and smiled.

“And me, apparently. And two other guys.”

“Correct.”

“One on the wheel…”

“Yes, and another on the front seat beside him.”

“And the other two?”

“Hanging off the truck. The way garbage men do.”

“We’re going to ride a garbage truck to a bank stickup, right?”

“No, we’re not going to stick up a bank. This is so much simpler. But yes, we’ll be using a garbage truck.”

“Where are we going to get this garbage truck?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to steal one.”

“Here we go with the risk element again,” Carter said. “The uniforms, I’m not too worried about. A garbage truck is another thing again. You can’t just walk off with a fuckin garbage truck. That’s taking a very big risk, ripping off something as big as a garbage truck. In size , I mean.”

“But I heard you’re very good.”

“Sure, breaking into an apartment, opening a wall safe, like that. But the biggest thing I ever stole—I’m talking about size now, physical size, not value—the biggest thing was a bronze lamp supposed to come from some Egyptian museum, it turned out it was as queer as a turnip, it brought me twenty bucks from my fence. This big bronze thing like an elephant. Twenty bucks, can you believe it? I nearly got a hernia carrying it out. But a garbage truck? I never stole a garbage truck in my life.”

“Maybe you can just borrow one.”

Another smile. Big fuckin joke here, stealing a garbage truck.

“Big risk, a garbage truck,” Carter said, and gave him The Look again.

“Yes. That’s why I’m willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars for this part of the job alone.”

Carter swallowed.

“What does the rest of the job entail?” he asked.

FOX HILL was a town in Elsinore County on Sands Spit, some sixty-odd miles outside the city. The town had originally been named Vauxhall by the British, after the district of that name in the borough of Lambeth in London, but over the years the name had become Americanized—some might say bastardized—to its present form. The county had also been named by a British colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman. Nobody knew who had named Sands Spit.

Fox Hill had been a sleepy little fishing village until as recently as forty years ago, when an enterprising gentleman from Los Angeles came east to open what was then called the Fox Hill Inn, a huge rambling waterfront hotel that had since fallen into different hands and been renamed the Fox Hill Arms. The building of the hotel had also been responsible for the building of a town around it, rather the way a frontier fort in the dear, dead days eventually led to a settlement around it. Fox Hill was now a community of some forty thousand people, thirty thousand of them year-round residents, ten thousand known alternately as “the summer people” or, less affectionately, “the Sea Gulls.”

Herman Friedlich was a year-round resident.

At five forty-fiveP .M. on that Friday, the twenty-seventh day of March, Friedlich called the Fox Hill Police Department to say that he’d left his 1987 smoky-blue Acura Legend coupe outside the Grand Union supermarket while he went inside for a bottle of milk, and when he came out the car was gone.

The police officer to whom he’d reported this was Detective Sergeant Andrew Budd.

“Was the car locked?” Budd asked.

“No, I was just going in for a minute,” Friedlich said. “I got caught on the damn checkout line.”

You jackass, Budd thought.