Hark! (13 page)

“Yes.”

“What is it you're going to do?”

“You don't have to know that.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?”

“Because
you'll
be delivering the notes.”

“Oh no.
Me
walk into a police station? Not on your life!”

“Not you personally,” he explained patiently. “You'll have to
find
people who'll deliver the notes for you.”

“It'll
still
come right back to me. There's no way I would
ever
do anything like that. Why would I want to do anything like that?”

“Because I'm going to give you thirty-five thousand dollars to do it.”

“You are?”

“I am. Five thousand dollars a day for tomorrow, and the six days next week.”

“Gee,” she said.

“That should be enough to buy you the people you need, don't you think?”

“Well, I guess so, yes.”

“With quite a bit left over for your trouble, I would expect.”

“I would expect.”

“You could buy yourself some nice lingerie.”

“I certainly could.”

“Or something.”

“Or something, yes.”

“And there's a lot more coming, Lissie. We're talking seven figures in the coffers here.”

She was remembering that she'd taken a million-eight out of that safe-deposit box for him. Was he talking about seven figures in
addition
to that? Should she ask? Why not?

“In
addition
to the other money, you mean?” she said. “The money from the bank?”

“In addition, yes.”

“Seven figures has to be at least another million, right?”

“At least,” he said.

“And what's my share of that?” she asked.

“Mustn't be greedy, girl,” he said.

Why not? she thought. And don't call me girl, she thought. But did not say.

“How does a vacation in Tortola sound?” he asked. “After this is all over?”

“A vacation in Tortola might be very nice,” she said, “but…”

“I've already booked the flight,” he said. “We leave at nine-thirty Sunday morning, the thirteenth of June. Doesn't that sound nice?”

“Not as nice as a piece of seven figures.”

He chuckled. Actually chuckled. Still chuckling, he said, “Well, I suppose one can never be too rich or too thin.”

“I'll say.”

“Do you know who said that, Lissie?”

“No, who?”

“The Duchess of Windsor.”

“Who's that?”

“A king gave up an empire for her.”

“She must have been very beautiful.”

“Not half as beautiful as you.”

Melissa wondered if he was telling her he'd give up an empire for her. Maybe cut her in on that seven figures he'd just mentioned? She didn't ask. Play the cards you're dealt, she thought. So far, she was a hundred thousand K richer than she'd been before she picked him up in that hotel bar. Or vice versa. Not to mention the sable coat and the mink stole.

“Do you think you can get those notes delivered when they're supposed to be delivered?”

“I think so, yes,” she said. “But…uh…these people I hire to deliver them?”

“Yes?”

“They'll be able to describe me, won't they? They'll tell the police exactly what I look like.”

“That's where the wigs come in,” he said.

M
ELISSA FIGURED THIS WAS
what she usually did, anyway, except in reverse. Haggle over a price, that is. What usually happened, the john said, “Two hundred for the night,” and then you said “Five hundred.” He said “Three,” you said “Four.” You settled for three and a half and everybody was happy—especially you, if he fell asleep after the first go-round.

This was Saturday morning, the fifth day of June. Very
early
Saturday morning.

Before she left the apartment, Adam had given her five thousand bucks in hundreds. Five thousand dollars! Which didn't seem like very much when you broke it down to a mere fifty $100 bills, oh well.

“That's your outside limit for the day,” he'd told her. “You get your people for less than that, whatever's left over is yours, you can buy yourself that lingerie we were talking about.”

She had a better idea of what to buy with what was left over, but first she had to buy what she needed to make this work at all.

She figured, correctly as it turned out, that not too many people would be eager to take a letter into a police station. Not with the anthrax scare still a very much alive issue. Would've been different if any of the brilliant masterminds in Washington—some of them should meet Adam Fen, they wanted mastermind—knew what to do about it except stick their thumbs up their asses. As it was, the first three men she approached said flat out, “What are you, crazy?” This after she'd offered two hundred bucks just to carry a friggin letter inside a police station and hand it to the desk sergeant!

The next person she approached was in a coffee shop on Jefferson. Six in the morning, the girl sitting there drinking coffee was a working girl like herself, Melissa could spot them a hundred miles away. Black girl with hair bright as brass, nail polish a purple shade of Oklahoma Waitress. She'd had a hard night, too, judging from the bedraggled look of her. Melissa started low, no sense spoiling her, and the hell with sisterhood. Turned out the girl was nursing a horrendous hangover, figured Melissa was looking for a little early-morning girlie-girlie sex, told her any muff-diving would cost her two bills.

Melissa tried to explain that no, what she wanted was a letter delivered to a police station. She showed her the letter. It was addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Melissa told the girl this was her boyfriend. She told the girl they'd had an argument last night. She told the girl she was desperate to make up with him. The girl said, “Honey, you a hooker same as me. If yo boyfrien's a
po
-lice, I'm the queen of England.”

It sort of insulted Melissa that she'd been spotted for a hooker straight off like that.

After three more tries and three more turndowns, she remembered something her mother had told her as a child: Desperate people do desperate things. So what she needed here was somebody desperate to carry that letter in. For a minute, in fact, since she herself was starting to get a little desperate here—it was already seven
A.M.
—she thought she might carry it in personally. Tell the cops some guy wearing a hearing aid had given her nine hundred bucks to deliver it, show them nine bills, tell them she was just a hard-working girl worked nights at a Burger King and had met this guy over the counter, asked her to deliver the letter. She didn't know nothing at all about who he was or what was inside the letter. So please let me go, sirs, as my mother will be wondering why I'm not home yet, my shift ending at eight in the morning and all.

Decided against it.

If that girl in the coffee shop had spotted her for a whore, the cops would make her in a minute.

Was it really that easy to see what she was?

Maybe she'd buy a new dress with whatever the residuals turned out to be today.

At seven-fifteen that morning, she taxied down to a skid row area of flophouses, homeless shelters, bars, and electrical supply houses. First crack out of the box, she found a doorway wino who said he'd deliver the letter for fifty bucks. She taxied uptown again, the wino sitting beside her on the back seat, stinking of piss and belching alcohol fumes. At five past eight, she dropped him off three blocks from the stationhouse, the letter in one pocket of his tattered jacket, and pointed him in the right direction. Told him she'd be watching him so he'd better make sure he kept his end of the bargain. Guy swore on his sainted mother.

Melissa figured he'd be stopped the minute he set foot on the bottom tread of the stationhouse steps, and he was.

Which was why she'd bought the wigs, right?

That's what the first note read.

“Is that correct English?” Genero asked. “ ‘Has
broke
his arrows'?”

Nobody answered him.

“ ‘Shoot no more,' ” Meyer said. “He's telling us he's not going to shoot anybody else. Gloria Stanford was the last one.”

“Unless he plans to use
arrows
,” Willis said.

“Or spears,” Kling suggested.

“No, he's finished with the spears,” Carella said. “Now he's onto arrows.”

“ ‘Swears he will shoot no more.' ”

“Gonna ‘play with sparrows' instead.”

“Little birdies,” Parker said sourly.

“Did you see that movie Hitchcock wrote?” Genero asked.

“Hitchcock didn't write it,” Kling said.

“Then who did?”

“Daphne somebody.”

“
Twice
,” Willis said.

“She wrote
The Birds
twice?” Genero asked, puzzled now.

“No,
arrows.
He uses arrows twice this time.”

Carella was at the computer again, looking for his rhyme zone. Parker glanced down at the Deaf Man's note.

“I only see
arrows
once,” he said.

“The second one is buried in another word,” Willis said. “
Arrows
in
sparrows.
”

“So what's the significance of
that
?” Parker asked, sounding angry.

“
The Tempest
,” Carella announced. “Act Four, Scene One.”

 

C
APTAIN
J
OHN
M
ARSHALL
F
RICK
should have retired ten years ago, but he liked to tell himself the 87th Precinct couldn't get along without him. Byrnes thought of him as an old fart. There were men who were Frick's age—sixty, sixty-five, in there, whatever he was—who still thought like much younger men, carried themselves like much younger men, sounded like much younger men, actually
looked
far younger than they were. John Marshall Frick was not one of them.

Frick belonged to that other category of older men who thought of themselves as “senior citizens,” men who had nothing to do anymore except send each other old fart jokes via e-mail every day. Men who'd retired from life and living too damn early—although Frick was old when he was fifty and should have retired then.

“Tell us your name,” he told the wino.

“Freddie.”

“Freddie
what
, Freddie?”

“Freddie Apostolo. That means Freddie the Apostle.”

“You been drinking a little today, Freddie?”

“A little. I drink a little every day.”

“Why'd you write that note, Freddie?”

“I didn't.”

Byrnes looked at his boss. Did the Captain really think this old wino had pulled up a Shakespeare quote from the internet and delivered it in person to the precinct? Did he really think this slovenly old bum stinking of body odor and urine and sweet wine was the notorious Deaf Man who'd slain Gloria Stanford and who so far had delivered all these tantalizing notes designed to infuriate and…well…intoxicate? He wasn't even wearing a hearing aid!

“Then who wrote it, Freddie?”

“I got no idea.”

“Then where'd you get it?”

“This girl gave it to me.”

“What girl?”

“Pretty girl with black hair and bangs.”

Byrnes almost said She does?

“What's her name?”

“Don't know.”

“Just gave you this note, is that…”

“No.”

“…right? Just handed you…”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Gave me fifty bucks to deliver it. Said I should hand it to the desk sergeant, that's all. Which I tried to do but you guys stopped me at the front door. I used to play piano, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“That's how I started drinking. There's always a drink on a piano, did you ever notice? A drink and a cigarette. I'm lucky I didn't get throat cancer. You play piano, you drink and you smoke, that's it. I guess I drank a little too much, huh?”

“I guess so. Where'd you conduct this transaction with your mysterious black-haired lady?”

“She wasn't mysterious at all. It was down near the Temple Street Shelter. She came over to me and asked would I like to make fifty bucks. So I said yes.”

“Who wouldn't?” Frick said.

“Sure. So what did I do wrong, can you please tell me?”

“Did she tell you her name?”

“No. I didn't tell her mine, either.”

“How'd you get uptown here, all the way from Temple?”

“We took a taxi. She dropped me off on Fourth, said she'd be watching. I believed her.”

“Why's that?”

“She looked like I'd better do what she said.”

“How's that?”

“Her eyes. There was a look in her eyes.”

“What color?” Frick asked. “The eyes.”

“Brown,” Freddie said.

“How tall?”

“Five-seven, five-eight?”

“White?”

“Sure.” Freddie paused. “Her eyes said she'd kill me if she had to.”

Byrnes looked at the captain again.

“Okay, go home,” Frick told Freddie.

“Home?” Freddie said.

 

S
HE HAD WATCHED FROM
the park across the street, and had seen the uniformed cop on the front steps first challenge and next detain the wino she'd enlisted. But that was okay because she knew the letter would now be delivered one way or another, and she didn't much care if they later locked the bum up, or hanged him by his thumbs from a lamppost, or whatever.

She now knew that whoever she might recruit to deliver all the remaining letters would also be stopped, but this didn't bother her, either. The letters would get inside the precinct, they would be read, the messengers would protest, “Hey, I'm only the messenger!”, and that would be that. In this city, there had to be two million girls with shoulder-length black hair and bangs. Or feather-cut red hair, for that matter. Well, maybe a million, the redheads.

The problem was rounding up two more guys today, and however many more she'd need for every day next week, Monday through Saturday, the twelfth of June, which was the date Adam had announced for whatever it was, she didn't know. His caper? His escapade? His prank, his practical joke, his
whatever
it was that would add seven figures to the coffers, whatever
they
might be, coffers. She sometimes wished she was smarter than she was.

But she was smart enough to know that she couldn't keep running back and forth between all the way downtown and up here to secure new messengers all the time. That would be both exhausting and time-consuming. So whereas she didn't like to cut anyone else in on the thirty-five grand Adam had allotted for the project, she knew that she needed a middleman here. And the only middleman she could think of was the first pimp she'd had, or vice versa, when she arrived in this rotten city five years ago.

 

A
MBROSE
C
ARTER WAS
a black man who still ran a stable of eleven whores, four of them white, and he was very happy to see little Mela Sammarone again because he thought she might be coming back to work for him again. As it turned out, she wanted
him
to work for
her.

“Now juss lemme get this straight,” he said, putting on a baffled black man look. In truth, nothing ever baffled him. He was too damn smart to ever be baffled.

They were sitting in a bar in what was called the Overlook section of Diamondback, appropriately named in that a lot of drug and prostitution shit was conveniently overlooked by the police here. Ambrose was nursing a Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola. Melissa was drinking a Coke without the bourbon. The two wigs she'd purchased were in her tote bag. Sitting there
au naturelle
, more or less, as it were, she looked as blond and as pert and as pretty as a young Meg Ryan. Ambrose really regretted not representing her any longer. He thought of himself as not a pimp but a representative.