Mischief

6.

THING SIL LIKED TO DO BEST was work by the window. Sit by the window, look down at the street, watch the people going by, write his words about the people. He still lived in Diamondback, better apartment than he used to live in with his mother and three sisters when he was just coming along. Close to the uptown edge of the park here. Look out the window, watch the people, write about the people. Difference between a rock group, no matter how lofty they played, and a rap crew was that the rapper was a social commentator, the rapper was writing about the people, telling the people what it was like to be black . You got some of your white rappers, they tried , man, they got the beat right and they got the words almost right, but the protest was plastic, man, they didn’t know what it was like .

If you weren’t black, you didn’t know what it was like to be black, you couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like. So whatever you wrote sympathetic about being black, why this was suspect, man, because without the pain thing you just didn’t grab the main thing. Being black was all about pain. Striving to rise above the daily pain. Or giving in to the pain, letting it take over, letting it lead you to ways that were unpro ductive, man, the choice was always there. This was what he tried to write in his songs, how the people had inside them the power to rise above the pain,be something. So when he wrote something like…

Dig the pig, man…

Dig the big pig, man…

See how he strut, man…

Kickin yo butt, man.

Wanna be a pig, man?

Wanna join the force, man?

Wanna take thelifeforce outta yo ownforce?

Wanna kick some butt, man, wanna kiss some butt, man?

Go put on theblue,man, cover up the black,man fo’ get that you a black man, juss go be a pig,man…

When he wrote something like that, he wasn’t saying the police were no good, he was only saying that for a black man to join the police was for the black man to become a traitor to his own people because it was the police holding down the people, it was the police looking the other way while the dealers did their thing on every street corner in every black hood in this city, looking the other way while the kids got poisoned and the fat fuckin wops in Sicily and the fat fuckin spics in Colombia got richer and fatter doing their thing.

Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer in the world didn’t know how this thing worked. More cocaine in America now than there was vanilla ice cream, the nation’s favorite flavor…

You dig vanilla?

Now ain’t that a killer!

You say you hate chocolate?

I say you juss thoughtless.

Cause chocolate is the color

Of the Lord’s first children

Juss go ask the diggers…

The men who find the bones

Go ask them ’bout chocolate…

Go ask them ’bout niggers…

That was another one of his songs. Got up to seventeen on the charts, never went higher because they didn’t understand the archeo logical shit in it, the proof that the first man on earth was a black man, standing tall and proud a hundred light years from a gorilla. You got your kids dropping out of school in the seventh grade, the fuck they knew about scientists digging up the bones of the first man and he’s a black African like you and me.

No pain back then.

Just went around doing your thing, hunted, fished, picked berries from the bushes and plants from the ground, moved with your group from place to place, living off the land, no drug dealer standing on a street corner offering you goodies cheap, this was before pain was invented. Wasn’t a law-enforcement officer alive who didn’t know how the triangle worked. America was saturated with cocaine now, there was hardly room for anybody else to snort even another tiny little speck of cocaine up his nose or inhale another puff of crack, which was base cocaine, as if you didn’t know, man. Everybody wanting to do coke was already doing coke, just ask your kid sister. That’s why you could get a six-bit hit now, try to get new customers that way. He sometimes thought the entire country was one big fuckin crack house spreading from New York to L.A. and every place in between. Which is where the triangle came in. The Colombians needed new markets for their goods, so what better place to go than Europe? Spit Shine played a gig in London at the Palladium last fall, Sil asked one of the other musicians—a brother who lived in Bloomsbury, wherever that was—asked him if there was any crack in London, the brother said the police here had heard of it but they’d never actually seen it. The brother was on hashish. Heroin, man. Hoss was still the big thing in Europe.

So that was the arrangement, that was the triangle. The Mafia was bringing in opium from the East and turning it into heroin, and the Colombian cartel was growing the coca plant and turning it into cocaine. So down the line all these ships arrive in Sicily and they offload cocaine and onload heroin. In Europe, the cocaine is turned into crack—look what we got, kiddies, a whole new thing for you to try along with democracy! And in the United States, a bag of H is sold for five slim ones, reviving a market that had begun to die when crack became all the rage. In no time at all, brothers and sisters would be begging for it all over again. Unless someone like Sil explained in his words that the only thing the wops and the spics had to offer the black man was contempt. The same contempt the Jew had for anyone who wasn’t lily-white vanilla. Sil wouldn’t be surprised if when they got to the bottom of the triangulation, it turned out a Jew was running the whole show. Try to tell any white man about a black man’s pain. Try even explaining it to somebody black as you were, but with a name like Gomez or Sanchez, which took the curse off it, made it sound like you were descended from Spanish nobility instead of somebody carried here in chains on a slave ship. The pain. Try to explain it. Write about it.

He wrote on a lined yellow pad, looking out his window. It was another sunny day like yesterday. Saturday morning, lots of people out there enjoying the sun, heading out to do their chores…

Dealer standing there on the corner of Ainsley where it joined the park…

People jogging or cycling in the park…

Not too many whites ventured this far uptown in the park.

His pencil was poised over the pad.

He saw a black woman in jogging shorts and a tank top walk into the park and then begin running the moment she was inside the wall, almost as if a starter’s pistol had been fired.

He began writing:

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

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

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

THEY HAD BURIED peter Wilkins at ten-thirty this morning, and now the funeral party was back in the three-story brownstone on Albermarle Street, partaking of the coffee, sandwiches, and cakes that relatives and neighbors had set out on the long dining-room table. There were perhaps two dozen people gathered in the living room when Kling arrived at a little before noon. He located Debra Wilkins standing in a circle of several other people, one of whom he determined was the minister who’d delivered the graveside eulogy and who was now modestly accepting compliments on how wonderful it had been.

Debra’s green eyes were streaked with red, and her eyelids were swollen. She stood listening to the others, nodding, a pained, numbed look on her face. Kling caught her eye. Recognizing him, she came to him at once.

“Have you…has there been any…?” she started, and he told her immediately that there hadn’t been any significant developments in the case, and he knew this was a bad time, but there were some questions he would like to ask her, if that was all right with her. Otherwise, he could come back some other time. She said now would be fine, and asked him if he would like a cup of coffee, something to eat. He told her No, thanks, this would just take a few minutes. They sat on chairs that had been arranged against the wall at the far end of the room. Everywhere around them there was the hushed conversation peculiar to these ritual gatherings. The people in this room were here less to honor the dead than to pay tribute to the living. Life goes on, these tribal meetings said. That was their essence and their importance. But the voices here were not raised in celebration; they were simply lowered in recognition. Kling, too, lowered his voice.

“Mrs. Wilkins,” he said, “when I called you yesterday, you told me you’d never heard the name Timothy O’Laughlin, and you were positive he wasn’t anyone your husband had known. I’m beginning to think there is no link between the victims, they were simply chosen at random, which is why I’d like to know a little more about where your husband actually went the night he was killed.”

Debra nodded. This was still very difficult for her. He hated having to talk to her just now, but time was rushing by, and whoever had killed three people was still out there someplace.

“You said he was going to a movie…”

“Yes.”

“Told you he was going to a movie…”

“Yes.”

“I checked the schedule for the theater you gave us, and the show he would have caught—if he left here at eight-thirty—the next show would have been at nine, and it would’ve let out at eleven. Coroner’s Office has estimated the postmortem interval…they have ways of determining the time of death, you see, I don’t even know how they figure it myself, and I’ve been a cop for a long time now. I hate to be talking about this, Mrs. Wilkins, but I have to, I hope you understand that.”

“Yes, please don’t worry. I want to help in any way I can.”

“Well, thank you, I appreciate that. But they can’t be exact about how many hours elapse since the time of death, even though they usually come pretty close. So when they say the time of death was around midnight, it could just as easily have been eleven, when the movie let out. The thing that keeps bothering me is why he went all the way over to Harlow Street, over there near the parkway. I asked the coroner if the body might have been moved…yes, they can determine that, too, in some instances,” he said, “don’t ask me how. It has something to do with the position of the body, the way the blood gathers in certain parts of the body, which—if the body is then moved and placed in another position—the earlier lividity, I think they call it, wouldn’t jibe with the new position. I’m not a doctor, I’m sorry, I just take for granted whatever they tell me on the autopsy report.”

“I understand.”

“But in this case, they weren’t able to tell whether the murder had taken place where your husband was found or whether he was transported there. There wasn’t much blood on the sidewalk, which there would’ve been if that was where he’d been shot, but it was raining all night, and it could’ve got washed away. In any case, they don’t know if that was the murder scene or not. The coroner couldn’t tell from just the autopsy, and the techs didn’t find anything at the scene that would have indicated the body was moved. So we’ve got to assume that’s where the murder was committed, which brings me back to why he went all the way over there to Harlow Street from Stemmler Avenue—in the pouring rain, no less.”

“I can’t understand it,” she said.

“He wasn’t carrying any paint when he left the apartment, was he?”

“Honestly, I didn’t notice. I was in the bathtub when he left.”

“Ah,” Kling said.

“He poked his head in, said he’d be back a little after eleven, and I said okay, see you later, something like that, and he was gone. I was getting ready for bed, you see. I usually take a bath around eight-thirty, nine o’clock, and then get in bed and read till the news comes on at ten. I’m usually asleep by eleven.”

“But not that night.”

“Pardon?”

“You told us you called the police at midnight….”

“Yes, when Peter hadn’t come home.”

“Were you waiting up for him?”

“Yes. That is, I was in bed, but I knew he’d be coming home, so I wasn’t sleeping , if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, I meant awake. I didn’t mean sitting up in the living room or anything.”

“I was awake, yes,” she said. “But in bed.”

“And when he didn’t come home, you called the police.”

“Yes.”

“At around midnight, you said.”

“I think it was exactly midnight. The clock was bonging. The one in the living room.”

“Did you ever see those cans of paint in his closet? I mean, before we found them the other day.”

“Never.”

“Do you have your own closet?”

“Yes.’’

“Never hung anything in his closet? Put anything in his closet?”

“Never.”

“So those cans were as much a surprise to you as they were to us.”

“A total surprise.”

“He wasn’t working on any art project of any kind, was he?”

“No. He didn’t have any inclinations along those lines.”

“Or a woodworking project. Something he might have planned to paint later on.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“I’ll tell you,” Kling said, “it’s hard to believe your husband was one of these writers…these graffiti writers…but I can’t think of anything else that would have taken him over to Harlow Street. You don’t have any friends on Harlow Street, do you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. That stretch near the highway approach isn’t a particularly nice area.” He thought for a moment, looked at her, and said, “Mrs. Wilkins, I know my partner was a little clumsy about this the other day, but it’s something I have to ask you now. Do you have any reason to believe your husband might have been involved with another woman?”

“A woman who lives on Harlow Street?” she asked, beginning to bristle.

“A woman who lives anywhere,” Kling said levelly.

“I have no reason to believe that,” Debra said.

“Do you have any idea at all as to why he would have gone over to that wall on Harlow Street?”

“None.”

“a graffiti -covered wall.”

“I don’t know why he went there.”

“In the rain.”

“In the rain,” she repeated. “He told me he’d be coming home straight after the movie. He told me he’d be home a little after eleven. I don’t know how he ended up dead…in the rain…on that street. I just don’t know,” she said, and began crying.

Kling waited.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I know how difficult…”

“Debra?”

The voice was soft, polite, seemingly unwilling to intrude. Kling turned. He saw a slender man some five feet eleven inches tall, wearing a brown suit and brown shoes, a white button-down shirt, and a striped gold-and-brown tie. Some thirty-five years old, Kling guessed. Unhandsome, his plain, craggy face somehow conveying a sense of dependability. He had a mustache, and he was wearing eyeglasses. Behind the glasses, his eyes were the color of the dark suit. It looked as if he, too, might have been crying. The look in his eyes certainly gave that impression. There was ineffable sadness there, unbearable grief. When he spoke again, it was in that same soft voice, as if he were whispering in church.

“I have to go now, Debra,” he said.

He extended both hands to her. Took her hands in his.

“You know how sorry I am,” he said.

She nodded.

They embraced.

She was crying again.

“I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” he said, and clutched her to him. She nodded into his shoulder, the tears flowing freely down her face. “Call me if you need anything,” he said, holding her at arm’s length now, looking down into her tearful face. “All right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Jeff.”

“Call me,” he said again, and patted her hand, and then nodded to Kling in farewell, and worked his way through the crowd of mourners to the front door.

“My husband’s partner,” she said. “Jeff Colbert. I don’t know what I’d have done without him. He’s been marvelous.”

“Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, “I’ll say the same thing he said. Call me. If you think of anything, however unimportant it may seem, call me.” He took out his wallet, found a card, handed it to her. “Any time of the day or night,” he said. “The message will get to me.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Either my partner or I will stay in touch,” he said, and wondered where the hell Parker was.

TEDDY HADN’T SEEN eileen Burke since she’d begun therapy, and the change in her now was virtually miraculous. Where earlier there had been a troubled police detective who couldn’t seem to reconcile her professional life with her personal life, there was now a woman who seemed in complete control of both. Wearing blue jeans and a green blazer that matched the color of her eyes, Eileen sat opposite her in the Chinese restaurant they’d chosen, her hands flashing across the table. She had learned to sign a little.

For you, she signed.Because we’re friends .

The signing was shaky, but well intentioned. Moreover, like many people learning a foreign language—which, in a sense, signing was—Eileen could understand it better than she could speak it. Teddy was grateful for that; she had a lot to tell her.

The two women would have attracted attention even if they hadn’t been signing. Neither of them would ever have thought this of herself, but each was startlingly beautiful in her own Irish way, Eileen with her fair complexion and fiery red hair, Teddy with her dark eyes and black hair. But the fact that they were signing to each other across the table, their fingers excitedly flying—well, Eileen’s weren’t quite soaring, but she was trying—captured the interest of the largely Chinese clientele lunching here.

Teddy was telling her what had happened outside the clinic yesterday. Eileen watched her fingers. She was signing more slowly than she might have with her husband or her children, but the fire in her eyes conveyed the excitement she felt in recalling the incident. Teddy was saying that the people planning the clinic defense had briefed them against engaging in any physical or verbal dialogue, or any other conduct that would escalate the potential for violence. She signed the words now:Verbal dialogue .

The irony had not been lost on her, nor was it lost on Eileen now. Teddy could not have answered the taunts hurled at her even if she’d chosen to.

I stood there with the blood running down my face,she signed…

…running down her neck and her shoulders and into the crew neck of the T-shirt, her eyes locked with the priest’s eyes for he was the one leading the verbal assault, he was the one directing the chanting as though conducting a church choir, seeing the hurtful words on his lips, the contorted faces of the others, the sheer volume of the attack lost on her, but this they did not know. Their words were literally falling on deaf ears.

She would neither yield nor bend.

The men and women who had come here today to defend the clinic stood shoulder to shoulder with her, and turned their smoldering eyes onto the nine whose frenzy seemed to rise in direct proportion to the silence Teddy would have kept in any event, but which she was incapable of breaking then or any other time. Her gaze fixed, her mouth set, she stared directly into the face of the priest who’d thrown the blood. Behind him, the sky was bluer than any there’d been so far this spring—“Murderers, give the children life! Murderers , give the children…”

“The sons of bitches,” Eileen said, and tried to sign it, but Teddy had already read her lips.

Her own fingers were moving again.

For twenty minutes they…

…tried to provoke a response from her, nine of them in a tight semicircle, raping her with their taunting shouts while the blood caked around her eyes and in the curves and ridges of her unhearing ears and at the corners of her mouth. The PRO-CHOICE shirt was sticky with blood, its blue turned purple from the infusion of red.

She kept staring into the priest’s dark eyes.

It was such a beautiful spring day, she signed now.

Eileen looked at her. Green eyes wide in expectation.

So?she signed.

This she knew how to sign.

Simple word.

So?

Teddy opened her eyes as wide as Eileen’s, and raised her eyebrows and her shoulders in remembered surprise.

They simplyleft! she signed.

“Good,” Eileen whispered, and nodded. She clumsily signed You did it, girl , and reached across the table to take Teddy’s hands in her own.

Teddy smiled.

Yep, the smile said.

She didn’t even have to sign it.

THE WOMAN who opened the door of the white clapboard house on Merriwether Lane was in her seventies, Budd guessed. White-haired and stooped, wearing absurdly large eyeglasses whose frames glittered with what appeared to be sequins, she peered at his detective shield and I.D. card, and then said, “Yes, sir, how can I help you?”

“This is my partner,” he said, “Detective Dellarosa.”

“Yes?”

Somewhat impatiently. Seventy fuckin years old, Budd thought, in a big hurry to go someplace.

“May we come in, please?” he asked.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“Does a man named Rubin Shanks live here?”

“He does.”

“We’d like to ask him a few questions, please.”

“My husband isn’t fit to answer any questions,” she said.

“Can you tell me your name, ma’am?”

“Margaret Shanks.”

“Mrs. Shanks, we’ve been talking to the man runs the Shell station downtown on Laker? He says he gave your husband a lift back here two days ago….”

“Yes?”

“Did he?”

“What’s this about?” she said again.

“It’s about your husband leaving a blue 1987 Acura Legend coupe at that Shell station yesterday.”

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

“Man there says the car was pushed in cause your husband couldn’t get it started. He left it there with his keys and the man drove him home. Is that right, ma’am?”

“We don’t own a blue car.”

“What kind of car do you own, ma’am?”

“A black one.”

“What year and make, ma’am?”

“I don’t know what this is all about.”

“What year and make, ma’am?”

“A 1987 Acura.”

“Would it be a Legend, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“A coupe?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me where that car is now?”

“Right here in the garage.”

“Ma’am, we’d really like to talk to your husband, if that’s okay with you.”

“I told you, my husband isn’t…”

“Who’s that, Meg?”

The detectives looked past her to where a white-haired, balding man appeared behind her left shoulder. He, too, was wearing eyeglasses. He seemed older than the woman, closer to eighty, Budd guessed.

“It’s no one,” she said. “Go back to your television.”

“Well, who is it?” he insisted.

Tall, brawny man, must’ve been a bruiser when he was young. Looking out at them now from behind the thick-lensed glasses, puzzled look on his face.

“Fox Hill Police,” Dellarosa said. “Okay to come in, sir?”

“I told you he…”

“Sure, come on in. Something happen? Was there an accident?”

“He really can’t…”

“Come on in, have some coffee,” he said, and the cops stepped past Mrs. Shanks and into the house. Absent the invitation, they’d have needed a warrant. Now they were legal.

The house was simply furnished. Little development house that must’ve cost them twenty thousand dollars when they’d bought it forty, fifty years ago, worth a hundred grand or more now. The television set was going. One of the soap operas. Big heads talking sexual innuendo. America in the daytime.

“Are you Rubin Shanks?” Budd asked.

The man blinked. His eyes behind the glasses looked totally bewildered.

“Meg?” he said.

“You’re Rubin Shanks,” she told him.

He didn’t seem convinced. Blinked again behind his eyeglasses, looked to her for confirmation. She nodded Yes , patiently but irritably.

“Mr. Shanks,” Budd said, “do you know the Shell station downtown on Laker Street?”

“I certainly do,” Shanks said. “Meg, would you bring these fellers some coffee? How do you take your coffee, fellers?”

“There isn’t any coffee,” she said.

“Why don’t you make some coffee for them, hon? Take a few minutes, fellers, if you don’t mind wai…”

“Thank you, but that’s okay, Mr. Shanks, we just want to ask you a few questions,” Budd said.

“What about?”

“Did you push a car into that service station yesterday afternoon?”

“What service station?”

“The one on Laker.”

“Laker?”

“Laker Street. Downtown.”

“Oh. Oh. Yesterday. Was I downtown yesterday, Meg?”

“You were downtown,” she said.

“Right, right,” he said, “it was two young fellers who pushed me. Right. I couldn’t get it started. They helped me get it to the service station.”

“Car wouldn’t start for you, is that it?” Budd asked.

“Keywouldn’t turn,” Shanks said, and shrugged. “Couldn’t get it to turn at the station, neither, they figured there was something wrong with where you put the key in. What do you call that, Meg? Where you put the key in?”

“The ignition,” she said.

“Figured it was frozen or something.”

“Uh-huh,” Budd said, and looked at his partner.

“What were you doing in town?” Dellarosa asked.

“Went to see my buddies down the Parade.”

“The Parade Bar? Down there on Laker?”

“Yessir. Stopped in to say hello to some of my old navy buddies.”

“Were you drinking, Mr. Shanks?”

“Nossir, I was not. Just drove downtown to say hello to some of my buddies, is all.”

“He drive that car all the time, ma’am?” Budd asked.

“I tell him not to,” she said. “He won’t listen.”

“Been driving since I was sixteen,” Shanks said.

“When you went to that bar, sir, do you remember where you parked your car?”

“What bar?”

“The Parade, sir. Where you said you went yesterday.”

“Is that where I went, Meg?”

“That’s what you told them, Rubin.”

“So where’d I park the car?”

“That’s what they want to know.”

“Must’ve been right where I found it later. Front of the Grand Union. But it wouldn’t start. Key wouldn’t turn in the…what’d you call it, Meg?”

“The ignition.”

“How’d your car get back here, sir?”

Shanks looked at his wife. The same bewildered, lost look again.

“Meg?” he said. “How’d it get back here?”

“I drove it back,” she said.

“Where’d you find it, ma’am?”

“Is he going to get in trouble?”

“Where’d you find it, can you tell us?”

“Near the movie theater.”

“No, Meg,” Shanks said, “it was in front of the Grand Union. Right where I left it.”

“Rubin,” she said, “you forgot where you left it.”

“No, I didn’t. It was right there where I left it. I got in, put the key in the ig…”

“Rubin, you got in the wrong car.”

“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t, Meg.”

“Rubin, that wasn’t our car. That was somebody else’s car.”

“It was?” he said, and looked at the detectives. “How could it have been somebody else’s car?” he said. “I know my own car, don’t I?”

“Mr. Shanks,” Budd said, “a man named Herman Friedlich was on the jitney going to the city this morning when he looked out the window and saw his car sitting there at that Shell station. He got off the bus, ran over there, put his key in the ignition, and was starting the car when the owner ran out and told him to get out of his customer’s car. Mr. Friedlich told him it was his car, and that it’d been stolen yesterday.”

“Stolen?” Shanks said, and looked at his wife.

“Yes, sir, it was reported stolen at five-forty-fiveP .M. yesterday. When Mr. Friedlich called us, he said he’d left the car unlocked…”

“He did?” Shanks said.

“Yes, sir, because he was just going in the Grand Union for a bottle of milk. When he came out, the car was gone.”

“Should’ve locked it,” Shanks said. “Nowadays.”

“Yes, sir, he should’ve.”

“But what’s that got to do with me ?”

“You got in the wrong car , Rubin,” his wife said impatiently, and then turned to Budd. “I’m sorry,” she said, “he forgets.”

“Ma’am…didn’t the garage call last night to tell you your husband had left the wrong key?”

“Yes, they did.”

“And didn’t you go down there with your son…your son lives here in Fox Hill, too, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t he drive you to the garage, and didn’t you tell the owner—a man named Jake Sutton—didn’t you ask him to give you the keys he had and you’d look for the other ones when you got home?”

“Yes. Because…”

“Because when you saw that blue car sitting there, you knew right off it wasn’t yours, didn’t you? You knew your husband had taken another man’s car and…”

“I was afraid he’d get in trouble.”

“So they gave you back the keys to your car…”

“Yes.”

“And then your son must’ve driven you around town…”

“Yes, looking for the car.”

“And when you found it, you drove it back here to your garage.”

“I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”

“Even though you must’ve realized he’d got in another man’s car, had the thing pushed all the way to the Shell station…”

“Young fellers saw I was having trouble,” Shanks said, “asked if I wanted a push.”

“You’re a goddamn fool ,” his wife said.

“Margaret,” he said, “I behaved in the proper manner. The key wouldn’t turn, so I took the car in to have it looked at. Who are these people? Are they saying I stole somebody’s car?”

His wife sighed heavily.

“What now?” she asked. “Are you going to arrest him?”

“Arrest me?” Shanks said. “What for? What’d I do?”

“How long has he been this way?” Dellarosa asked.

“Too long,” Margaret said, and sighed again.

THE STENCILED black lettering read:

This was not the name of a synagogue.

The DSS stood for Department of Social Services. The Temple stood for Temple Street Armory. Yesterday afternoon, Meyer had gone back to the Old Chancery for yet another visit, this time to check the stenciling on the blanket that had been wrapped around Jane Doe when she was dropped off at the railroad station. The stenciling was, in fact, identical to what he’d seen lettered in one corner of Charlie’s blanket. But while he was there, Dr. Elman had informed him of something more important.

During the night, Jane Doe had died of cardiac arrest. It was Dr. Elman’s theory that the woman may have had a history of ventricular arrhythmia. If she’d been taking medication for the ailment, something like Quinidine three times a day in 320 mg doses, and then was suddenly deprived of the drug, abandoned without the drug and unable to tell anyone she’d been on the drug…well, the results were inevitable. Was what Dr. Elman had theorized. Which was why Meyer was here at the Temple Street Shelter today. Or maybe he’d have been here, anyway. Maybe tracking down whoever had dumped those two old people was terribly important to him. Maybe he thought too often of the little old lady who’d drowned in her own bathtub after putting her wig on a stand across the room.

He had called the shelter the moment Elman gave him the news, and was told that the supervisor had left for the day and wouldn’t be in again till sometime after noon Saturday, nice hours supervisors kept. So here was Meyer now—on his day off, no less—talking to a man named Harold Laughton, who immediately told him that the reason he’d left so early yesterday was that he’d had to go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled and his dentist had warned him beforehand that there might be some pain the morning after, in which case he might want to take it a bit easy, which was why he’d left word that he might not be in till after noon sometime. So here he was, too, even though his mouth was killing him. So what did Meyer want, anyway?

Meyer wanted to know if Mr. Laughton recognized either of these blankets.

Mr. Laughton certainly did.

“Those blankets belong to my shelter,” he said.

They were talking in Laughton’s jerry-built office at the rear of the old brick building on Temple Street. There was a wooden desk in the office and a wooden coatrack and two wooden chairs. One wall of the office had a plate-glass panel that started at about waist high and overlooked the armory’s drill floor, furnished now with hundreds of cots crammed head to toe from brick wall to brick wall. At the foot of each cot was a khaki-colored blanket identical to the ones Meyer had placed on Laughton’s desk.

“Where’d you get these?” Laughton asked.

Meyer told him where he’d got them.

“If one of them was wrapped around a woman, she’s not one of my people,” Laughton said. “My shelter’s exclusively for men. Nine hundred and twenty cots out there, all for men.”

With nine hundred and twenty blankets on them, Meyer thought.

“I run one of the best shelters in this city,” Laughton said. “Other shelters, you have rats running across the floor all night long, keeping the men awake, biting them. Not here at Temple. I run a good shelter.”

“I’m sure you do,” Meyer said.

“Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here, not in my shelter. The guards I have here make certain that nothing like that happens to the men here. I have a top-notch notch psychiatrist assigned here. The social workers I have here are among the best in the city. This is more than just three hots and a cot here, this is a shelter with a heart. I’m very proud of my shelter here.”

“Any idea how these blankets got on those two people?” Meyer asked.

Laughton looked at him as if he’d just made a disparaging remark about this shelter he was very proud of here. He was a man in his late forties, Meyer guessed, virtually as bald as Meyer himself, but with a ferocious-looking handlebar mustache compensating for the lack of hair anywhere else on his head. Some five feet eight inches tall, give or take. His jaw swollen where the tooth had been pulled. Fierce blue eyes studying Meyer now, trying to decide whether the police were here to make some kind of trouble for him.

“We do have occasional thefts,” he said. “The men here aren’t the cream of society, you know. They come and go. Some of them—manyof them—have criminal records. Things occasionally stick to their fingers. Anything that isn’t nailed down, in fact. Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such—as I told you, the guards here are very good—but occasionally things will disappear.”

“Blankets?”

“Blankets, yes. Occasionally. In fact,some homeless people come in here just to steal blankets. And bedding. Especially during the wintertime. And spring’s been so late coming this year.”

“Yes.”

“So, yes, we’ve had blankets stolen. Occasionally.”

“Assuming these blankets were stolen…”

“Well, how else would they have left the premises?”

“Assuming that to be the case then…”

“Yes?”

Impatiently.

Meyer was taking up too much of his time, and besides he had a goddamn toothache.

Patiently, Meyer said, “Is there any way you can tell when these blankets might have been stolen?”

“No.”

“Nothing about them that would distinguish…”

“Nothing.”

“Have you had any blanket thefts recently ?”

“I wouldn’t know. We take inventory at the beginning of each month. We won’t be taking inventory again until the first of April.”

“What did your inventory show at the beginning of March?”

“We’d lost something like fourteen blankets the month before.”

“Fourteen blankets were stolen…”

“Or lost…”

“During February alone?”

“Yes.New blankets, too.”

“Are these blankets…?”

“That figure is low, by the way, when you compare it with other shelters in the city. But excuse me, Detective Meyer, why are you…?”

“Excuse me , but are these blankets new?”

“Yes, I would expect so.”

“You can tell they’re new?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What do you mean by new?”

“We received an allotment at the beginning of the year.”

“Then there is a way of determining when they were stolen. Or lost.”

“Well, yes, I suppose…”

“When in January did you receive your allotment?”

“Around the fifteenth.”

“How many blankets?”

“Fifty. To replace what had been stolen in the past quarter.”

“Fifty blankets had been stolen in the previous three months?”

“Roughly that many. I put in for fifty in replacement. That was a round number.”

“So you’d lost…what would you say…approximately sixteen, seventeen blankets a month.”

“About that many, yes.”

“And the city sent you fifty new blankets to replace them.”

“Yes.”

“How many of those blankets do you have left now?”

“I told you. We don’t take inventory till the first of each month.”

“How many blankets were stolen…or lost…in January, would you remember?”

“Twelve.”

“And fourteen in February, you said.”

“Fourteen, yes.”

“Twenty-six altogether.”

“Yes.”

“A little less than it was in the last quarter.”

“I suppose it is, actually.”

“Well, it’s only thirteen a month so far…”

“That’s right, actually, yes.”

“So there’s been a drop from the previous quarter.”

“Yes, it would seem so.”

“Even though spring’s been a long time coming.”

“We can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know,” Laughton said. “There are nine hundred and twenty cots in this shelter, and our security is second to none. But our main concern, security-wise, is keeping the shelter drug-free, and protecting the men who come to us for help. But…excuse me, Mr. Meyer. Surely the theft of a few blankets isn’t worth all this time, is it? And these two people who were abandoned…well, surely this is an everyday occurrence.”

“Not if one of them dies,” Meyer said.

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at four o’clock the next morning, Eileen was dead asleep. She fumbled for the phone in the darkness, lifted the receiver, turned on the bedside light, and saw snow falling outside her window.Snow again?

“Burke?”

“Yes, sir.”

Deputy Inspector Brady on the other end.

“Meet me at three-ten South Cumberland,” he said.

“Hit the hammer.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He knew she didn’t have a siren in her personal car, he was merely expressing the urgency of the situation, hit the hammer. There was no traffic, anyway, at this hour on a Sunday morning, she made it to the scene in ten minutes flat. A crowd of police personnel was standing in the falling snow near the emergency service truck and the dozen or more motor patrol cars angled in against the curb. Inspector Brady was nowhere in sight. She spotted Tony Pellegrino among the mass of black rain slickers and hoods, short and wiry and wearing jeans and a blue windbreaker with the wordPOLICE lettered across its back in white. She walked over to him and asked him what the situation was.

She was dressed much as Pellegrino was, jeans and the blue uniform windbreaker with the identifying word across the back, no hat, red hair glowing in the light of the overhead street lamp. You weren’t supposed to try kidding a hostage taker into believing you were anything but a cop. The wordPOLICE across the back of the jacket let the taker know exactly where he stood; this wasn’t a game here, this was all about people who were being held captive, there were lives at stake here.

The situation here involved two lives, if you counted the taker’s. The team’s motto was Nobody Gets Hurt; the taker’s life was as important to them as was the life of any hostage. Pellegrino told Eileen that what had happened here, the taker was this guy who lived with his brother and the brother’s wife…the sister-in-law…and slept in the room next door to theirs, just down the hall. What happened was he woke up in the middle of the night to go take a pee, and all at once he went bananas and pulled a gun and threatened to kill both his brother and the wife…the sister-in-law…if the brother didn’t leave the apartment right that minute.

“The brother went out of there like a shot,” Pellegrino said. “Called nine-one-one from the phone booth on the corner. The Boss is in the building already, working the door. He said you should go up the minute you got here.”

The Boss was Inspector Brady.

“What apartment?” she asked.

“Four-oh-nine. You can’t miss it. There’s a hundred cops in the hallway.”

“Thanks, Tony,” she said, and walked away from him through the lightly falling snow. She found Brady on the fourth floor, just coming away from the door as she moved through the knot of uniformed emergency service cops. Brady had turned fifty-four last month, a tall trim man with bright blue eyes, a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head. His nose was a bit too prominent for his otherwise small features; it gave his face a cleaving appearance. Like a ship under sail, parting the wave of blue uniforms in his path, he came toward Eileen and said at once, “A bad one.”

“Tony filled me in,” she said, nodding.

“Guy’s got the hots for his sister-in-law, plain and simple,” Brady said. “He heard them making love during the night and that set him off. Now the brother’s out of the apartment, he’ll either rape her or shoot her or both.”

“Older brother, younger, what? The taker.”

“Older. He’s thirty-two, the brother’s twenty.”

“How old’s the woman?”

“If you can call her that,” Brady said. “She’s only seventeen.”

Eileen nodded.

“Want to try the door?” he asked. “Be very careful. He may be on something, it’s hard to tell.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jimmy.”

“How far’d you get with him?”

“Nowhere,” Brady said.

This was a big admission for him. In the eight months since she’d begun working for Brady, nothing had changed her opinion of him as an egotistical sexist who used women on the door only when he felt a situation absolutely demanded it. For all his bullshit about hoping to expand the team so that it would one day include more than the two women now on it, he kept replacing burned-out male negotiators with new male negotiators, and when Martha Halsted flunked out the first time she had a real shot at the door, he began training not another woman but a man. The way Eileen saw it, Brady felt nobody did the job as well as he did, male or female. But he normally put a woman on the door only when the taker inside was another woman. It was rare that he trusted a woman to negotiate with a male taker. So why Eileen today? Was it because there was a potential rape victim in the apartment? Or was it because Jimmy had a hard-on and Brady was tossing him a juicy redhead? Some things in the police department never changed. She’d started the job as a decoy with Special Forces, and sometimes she felt like a decoy all over again. Nowadays, the guys on the job didn’t piss in a female cop’s locker anymore, but—

“Hello,” she said, “I’m Detective Eileen Burke, I’m a police-department negotiator.”