Mischief Page 5

  Two of these men were doctors.

  They had taken the Hippocratic oath.

  But what were they to do when someone requiring extensive testing and exhaustive personal care was dropped off on their doorstep with no one in sight to pay the bills?

  “Can you tell us anything at all about yourself?” Sloane asked.

  “I always wet the bed,” the woman said. “Polly doesn’t like it.”

  Haggerty sighed.

  “Let’s call Missing Persons,” he said. “Maybe she wandered over to that railroad station all by herself. Maybe somebody’s out there looking for her.”

  Sloane doubted it. Besides, wouldn’t the people at the Eight-Six have called Missing Personsbefore bringing her here? Actually, he doubted that, too. This was a pass-the-buck society.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” he said.

  But he was thinking they were stuck with her.

  THE FROZEN-YOGURT PLACEwas on Stemmler and North Fifth, not too distant from the Eight-Seven’s station house. This was now only nine in the morning. The teenage kid working the counter had just opened the place when the man walked in, and stood there for a while, looking at the chart, and finally told the kid that what he wanted was the no-fat chocolate on a cone. Then, so he’d have his hands free when the kid served him, he said, “How much will that be? So I can get the money out now.”

  The kid said, “Depends what size you want.”

  His wallet already in his hand now, the man said, “Whatare the different sizes?”

  “There’s the small and the large,” the kid said.

  “What’s the difference between them?”

  “The small is about this high,” the kid said, holding the palm of his hand some three inches above the top of the cone, “and the large is aboutthis high,” he said, raising his palm a few inches higher.

  “I’ll take the small,” the man said.

  “Okay,” the kid said, and pulled a lever and began swirling yogurt onto the cone.

  “So how much will that be?” the man asked, ready to take from his wallet the bill or the several bills or whatever it would cost to pay for the yogurt before he was unable to handle cone and wallet at the same time.

  “I have no idea,” the kid said. “I just started…”

  “Excuse me,” the man said, his wallet still in his hand, “but didn’t you just tell me the price depended on the size?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “So I ordered the small, you’re making me a small right there, so what’s this you got no idea what the price’ll be?”

  “What it is…”

  “You tryin’ a be a wise guy?” the man said.

  “No, sir, it’s just…”

  “You tryin’a make a fuckin fool outta me?”

  “Sir, today’s my first…”

  “You don’t know what the fuckinprice is, huh? You know whatthis is?” the man said and the kid found himself standing there with a no-fat chocolate on a cone looking into the barrel of a gun. The kid began shaking. The man said, “Never mind, I don’twant the fuckin thing no more,” and shot the kid in the chest.

  It was the city’s first shooting that day.

  Another one would take place fifteen hours later.

  3.

  “WE WERE BEGINNINGto 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 sometimesdid look dapper, though not as dapper as theythought , 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 werenot 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 lastmonth ?”

  “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 meanwe , 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 youthink he was spraying? The face, the chest, the hands, the guy’s clothes. He wentcrazy 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 beany 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 apriest or something.”

  “Aquest ,” Monoghan said. “Shooting all the fuckin writers in the city, is what I mean. Like aquest . Like the fuckin impossibledream , you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “A man on amission , amissionary murderer, he doesn’tneed an M.O., he just shoots and sprays, or sprays and shoots, there doesn’thave 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 SITTINGwith 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 neverdid 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 fuckingname , 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 oneother 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 inSilence 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 andespecially 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 matterhow 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. Flo
rry 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 werefour hundred thousand people there that time. What a thing that was! I got laideight times in two days!Eight different girls! What a thing!”

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

  “Oh, Iknow . 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 beeninstrumental , 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.