Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (9 page)

“Another Italian suspect, I see,” he said.

“How do you know?” Hawes asked.

“Anything ending in O is Italian,” Genero said.

“How about Munro?” Hawes asked.

“What are you, a wise guy?” Genero said, and grinned. He looked at the scribbled name again, and then said, “I got to admit
this
guy has a very funny name for an Italian.”

“Funny how?” Hawes asked.

“Ear,” Genero said.

“What?”

“Ear. That’s what Orecchio means in Italian. Ear.”

Which when coupled with Mort, of course, could mean nothing more or less than Dead Ear.

Hawes tore the page from the pad, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the wastebasket, missing.

“I said something?” Genero asked, knowing he’d never get his cup of coffee now.

The boy who delivered the note was eight years old, and he had instructions to give it to the desk sergeant. He stood in the squadroom now surrounded by cops who looked seven feet tall, all of them standing around him in a circle while he looked up with saucer-wide blue eyes and wished he was dead.

“Who gave you this note?” one of the cops asked.

“A man in the park.”

“Did he pay you to bring it here?”

“Yeah. Yes. Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had yellow hair.”

“Was he tall?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Was he wearing a hearing aid?”

“Yeah. A
what?”

“A thing in his ear.”

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.

Everybody tiptoed around the note very carefully, as though it might explode at any moment. Everybody handled the note with tweezers or white cotton gloves. Everybody agreed it should be sent at once to the police lab. Everybody read it at least twice. Everybody studied it and examined it. Even some patrolmen from downstairs came up to have a look at it. It was a very important document. It demanded at least an hour of valuable police time before it was finally encased in a celluloid folder and sent downtown in a manila envelope.

Everybody decided that what this note meant was that the deaf man (who they now reluctantly admitted was once again in their midst) wanted fifty thousand dollars in
lieu of killing the deputy mayor exactly as he had killed the parks commissioner. Since fifty thousand dollars was considerably more than the previous demand for five thousand dollars, the cops of the 87th were quite rightfully incensed by the demand. Moreover, the audacity of this criminal somewhere out there was something beyond the ken of their experience. For all its resemblance to a kidnaping, with its subsequent demand for ransom, this case was
not
a kidnaping. No one had been abducted, there was nothing to ransom. No, this was very definitely extortion, and yet the extortion cases they’d dealt with over the years had been textbook cases involving “a wrongful use of force or fear” in an attempt to obtain “property from another.” The key word was “another.” “Another” was invariably the person against whom mayhem had been threatened. In this case, though, their extortionist didn’t seem to care
who
paid the money so long as someone did.

Anyone
. Now how were you supposed to deal with
a
maniac like that?

“He’s a maniac,” Lieutenant Byrnes said. “Where the hell does he expect us to get fifty thousand dollars?”

Steve Carella, who had been released from the hospital that afternoon and who somewhat resembled
a
boxer about to put on gloves, what with assorted bandages taped around his hands, said, “Maybe he expects the deputy mayor to pay it.”

“Then why the hell didn’t he
ask
the deputy mayor?”

“We’re his intermediaries,” Carella said. “He assumes his demand will carry more weight if it comes from law enforcement officers.”

Byrnes looked at Carella.

“Sure,” Carella said. “Also, he’s getting even with us. He’s sore because we fouled up his bank-robbing scheme eight years ago. This is his way of getting back.”

“He’s a maniac,” Byrnes insisted.

“No, he’s a very smart cookie,” Carella said. “He knocked off Cowper after a measly demand for five thousand dollars. Now that we know he can do it, he’s asking ten times the price not to shoot the deputy mayor.”

“Where does it say ‘shoot’?” Hawes asked.

“Hmmm?”

“He didn’t say anything about
shooting
Scanlon. The note yesterday just said ‘Deputy Mayor Scanlon Goes Next.’”

“That’s right,” Carella said. “He can poison him or bludgeon him or stab him or …”

“Please,” Byrnes said.

“Let’s call Scanlon,” Carella suggested. “Maybe he’s got fifty grand laying around he doesn’t know what to do with.”

They called Deputy Mayor Scanlon and advised him of the threat upon his life, but Deputy Mayor Scanlon did not have fifty grand laying around he didn’t know what to do with. Ten minutes later, the phone on Byrnes’ desk rang. It was the police commissioner.

“All right, Byrnes,” the commissioner said sweetly, “what’s this latest horseshit?”

“Sir,” Byrnes said, “we have had two notes from the man we suspect killed Parks Commissioner Cowper, and they constitute a threat upon the life of Deputy Mayor Scanlon.”

“What are you doing about it?” the commissioner asked.

“Sir,” Byrnes said, “we have already sent both notes to the police laboratory for analysis. Also, sir, we have located the room from which the shots were fired last night, and we have reason to believe we are dealing with a criminal known to this precinct?”

“Who?”

“We don’t know.”

“I thought you said he was known …”

“Yes, sir, we’ve dealt with him before, but to our knowledge, sir, he is unknown.”

“How much money does he want this time?”

“Fifty thousand dollars, sir.”

“When is Scanlon supposed to be killed?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“When does this man want his money?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“Where are you supposed to deliver it?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“What the hell
do
you know, Byrnes?”

“I know, sir, that we are doing our best to cope with an unprecedented situation, and that we are ready to put our entire squad at the deputy mayor’s disposal, if and when he asks for protection. Moreover, sir, I’m sure I can persuade Captain Frick who, as you may know, commands this entire precinct …”

“What do you mean,
as
I may know, Byrnes?”

“That is the way we do it in this city, sir.”

“That is the way they do it in
most
cities, Byrnes.”

“Yes, sir, of course. In any case, I’m sure I can persuade him to release some uniformed officers from their regular duties, or perhaps to call in some off-duty officers, if the commissioner feels that’s necessary.”

“I feel it’s necessary to protect the life of the deputy mayor.”

“Yes, of course, sir, we all feel that,” Byrnes said.

“What’s the matter, Byrnes, don’t you like me?” the commissioner asked.

“I try to keep personal feelings out of my work, sir,” Byrnes said. “This is a tough case. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never come up against anything like it before. I’ve got a good team here, and we’re doing our best. More than that, we can’t do.”

“Byrnes,” the commissioner said, “you may
have
to do more.”

“Sir …” Byrnes started, but the commissioner had hung up.

Arthur Brown sat in the basement of Junior High School 106, with a pair of earphones on his head and his right hand on the start button of a tape recorder. The telephone at the La Bresca house diagonally across the street from the school had just rung for the thirty-second time that day, and as he waited for Concetta La Bresca to lift the receiver (as she had done on thirty-one previous occasions) he activated the recorder and sighed in anticipation of what was to come.

It was very clever of the police to have planted a bug in the La Bresca apartment, that bug having been installed by a plainclothes cop from the lab who identified himself as a telephone repairman, did his dirty work in the La Bresca living room, and then strung his overhead wires from the roof of the La Bresca house to the telephone pole outside, and from there to the pole on the school sidewalk, and from there to the roof of the school building, and down the side wall, and into a basement window, and across the basement floor to a tiny room containing stacked textbooks and the school’s old sixteen-millimeter sound projector, where he had set up Arthur Brown’s monitoring station.

It was also very clever of the police to have assigned Arthur Brown to this eavesdropping plant because Brown was an experienced cop who had conducted wiretaps before and who was capable of separating the salient from the specious in any given telephone conversation.

There was only one trouble.

Arthur Brown did not understand Italian, and Concetta La Bresca spoke to her friends exclusively in Italian. For all Brown knew, they might have plotted anything from abortion to safe cracking thirty-one times that day, and for all he knew were about to plot it yet another time. He had used up two full reels of tape because he hadn’t understood a word that was said, and he wanted each conversation recorded so that someone—probably Carella—could later translate them.

“Hello,” a voice said in English.

Brown almost fell off his stool. He sat erect, adjusted the headset, adjusted the volume control on the tape recorder, and began listening.

“Tony?” a second voice asked.

“Yeah, who’s this?” The first voice belonged to La Bresca. Apparently he had just returned home from work. The second voice …

“This is Dom.”

“Who?”

“Dominick.”

“Oh, hi, Dom, how’s it going?”

“Great.”

“What’s up, Dom?”

“Oh, nothing,” Dom said. “I was just wondering how you was, that’s all.”

There was silence on the line. Brown tilted his head and brought his hand up to cover one of the earphones.

“I’m fine,” La Bresca said at last.

“Good, good,” Dom said.

Again, there was silence.

“Well, if that was all you wanted,” La Bresca said, “I guess …”

“Actually, Tony, I was wondering …”

“Yeah?”

“I was wondering if you could lend me a couple of bills till I get myself organized here.”

“Organized doing what?” La Bresca asked.

“Well, I took a big loss on that fight two weeks ago, you know, and I still ain’t organized.”

“You never been organized in your life,” La Bresca said.

“That ain’t true, Tony.”

“Okay, it ain’t true. What
is
true is I ain’t got a couple of bills to lend you.”

“Well, I heard different,” Dom said.

“Yeah? What’d you hear?”

“The rumble is you’re coming into some very big loot real soon.”

“Yeah? Where’d you hear
that
shit?”

“Oh, I listen around here and there, I’m always on the earie.”

“Well, this time the rumble is wrong.”

“I was thinking maybe just a few C-notes to tide me over for the next week or so. Till I get organized.”

“Dom, I ain’t seen a C-note since Hector was a pup.”

“Tony …”

There was a slight hesitation, only long enough to carry the unmistakable weight of warning. Brown caught the suddenly ominous note and listened expectantly for Dom’s next words.

“I
know,”
Dom said.

There was another silence on the line. Brown waited. He could hear one of the men breathing heavily.

“What
do you know?” La Bresca asked.

“About the caper.”
“What
caper?”

“Tony, don’t let me say it on the phone, huh? You never know who’s listening these days.”

“What the hell are you trying to do?” La Bresca asked. “Shake me down?”

“No, I’m trying to borrow a couple of hundred is all. Until I get organized. I’d hate like hell to see all your planning go down the drain, Tony. I’d really hate to see that happen.”

“You blow the whistle, pal, and we’ll know just who done it.”

“Tony, if I found out about the caper, there’s lots of other guys also know about it. It’s all over the street. You’re lucky the fuzz aren’t onto you already.”

“The cops don’t even know I exist,” La Bresca said. “I never took a fall for nothing in my life.”

“What you took a fall for and what you done are two different things, right, Tony?”

“Don’t bug me, Dom. You screw this up …”

“I ain’t screwing nothing up. I’m asking for a loan of two hundred bucks, now yes or no, Tony, I’m getting impatient here in this goddamn phone booth. Yes or no?”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” La Bresca said.

“Does that mean yes?”

“Where do we meet?” La Bresca asked.

Lying in the alleyway that night with his bandaged hands encased in woolen gloves, Carella thought less often of the two punks who had burned him, and also burned him up, than he did about the deaf man.

As he lay in his tattered rags and mildewed shoes, he was the very model of a modem major derelict, hair matted, face streaked, breath stinking of cheap wine. But beneath that torn and threadbare coat, Carella’s gloved right hand held a .38 Detective’s Special. The right index finger of the glove had been cut away to the knuckle, allowing Carella to squeeze the finger itself inside the trigger guard. He was ready to shoot, and this time he would not allow himself to be cold-cocked. Or even pan-broiled.