Ed McBain - Hark!

'Eileen,' he said, 'I don't want you to take what I'm about to say the wrong way.' Uh-oh, she thought. 'This isn't just because you're a woman.' Am I being transferred? she wondered. To a precinct where a woman — Fat Chance Department — commands the detective squadroom? She waited.

'I want you to go over to the Stanford apartment. Now that Mobile's cleared it, I want you to go through her things, her personal items, everything she left behind. Bring a fresh eye to it. Bring a woman's eye to it. See if you can spot anything a man might have missed.' 'Yes, sir,' she said.

'It's not just because you're a woman,' he said. Then what is it? she wondered. 'I understand, sir,' she said. 'Pete.' In my experience,' he said, 'aside from crimes of passion, which this might have been Yes, sir.'

'. . . the man coming back to take revenge on the woman who done him wrong, that sort of thing . . .'

'Yes, sir.'

'But if this wasn't simply that, if instead the man wanted something from her, which in my experience is the motive for many murders, hasn't that been your experience, too? A person wants something very badly, he gets it, and then, to protect his identity or whatever, he kills the person he took it from. Like an arsonisr setting a fire to cover some other crime. Hasn't that been your experience, Eileen?'

'Well, I haven't investigated that many homicides, Pete. Sir,' she said. 'Or arsons, either, for that matter.'

'So what did the Deaf Man want from her?' Byrnes asked rhetorically. 'He masterminded a multimillion-dollar narcotics theft, you know ..."

'Yes, sir, I know.'

'. . . so was he coming back after that stash? If so, where is it? Where's the dope? Or the dope money? I don't think he's the sort of man who'd kill someone merely for revenge, do you? So why else might he have killed her? That's what I want you to bring your woman's eye to.'

'I understand, sir. It's like what the Walt Disney studio did a few years back.'

'The what?'

'The movie company.'

Yes?'

'They hired a nineteen-year-old girl to bring a teenager's sensibility to a script a man had written for them.'

'Oh,' Byrnes said.

'Turned out she was in her thirties. The female writer they hired.'

'Oh,' Byrnes said again.

'But they figured a man couldn't possibly know what a woman was thinking or feeling.'

'That's right,' he said. 'Even if he was a writer.' 'I can understand that.'

'So that's why you want me to shake down Gloria's apartment. Find out what she might have been thinking

or feeling.'

'Find out why he killed her,' Byrnes said, nodding

grimly.

MELISSA SUMMERS DIDN'T know quite what she was

feeling.

Never in her entire life had she ever met anyone like Adam Fen, or whatever his name was. Never anyone like him in all the guys she'd fucked for free when she was still just a girl and an amateur, never anyone like him in all the guys she'd fucked since turning pro at the age of sixteen in Los Angeles, California. Well, sort of dabbled at being a pro. She didn't really become a pro till she came to this city, thank you for that, Ambrose Carter. But never had she met anyone like Adam Fen. Never.

A deaf guy, no less! If he was, in fact, deaf. Actually, she didn't know what he was. One minute, he was kind and gentle with her, stroking her like a kitten, the next he was fierce as a tiger, slapping her around, making her do things even none of the freaks in LaLaLand had asked her to do, some of them movie stars even, would you believe it? Well, TV actors, anyway. Some of them. One of them, actually. Well, a walk-on part in a weekly sitcom, actually. Tipped her five hundred bucks. Told her to catch the show on NBC next Friday night. And there he was! Actually on the show!

Walked into this executive's office, said, 'Someone to see you, sir,' and walked right out again. Looked innocent as an angel, the things he'd asked her to do.

Adam Fen was worse. Or better, depending how you looked at it. If that was his real name. Which she sincerely doubted. But Melissa Summers wasn't her real name, either, so what difference did it make? He'd told her Adam Fen was an anagram for Deaf Man, which was certainly true, the anagram part, but whether or not he was really deaf was another matter. Not that she cared. What she was worried about was getting involved with him. She had the feeling that getting involved with him could be dangerous. Well, getting involved with any man, getting really involved with any man, was a dangerous thing to do.

Take the money and run, that was her motto.

Even when she was still giving it away (boy, talk about naive!) she'd realized that getting involved with a man — though back then they were all still boys, kids, you know, fifteen, sixteen, a bit older than she was, she'd started when she was fourteen, with a cousin of hers from New Jersey — getting involved meant letting them have the upper hand, and that was putting yourself in a vulnerable position.

He had a gun.

She'd seen the gun.

He'd showed her the gun.

Actually cocked the trigger and used it on her like a cock. The gun. Inserted the barrel inside her. Got her so scared, she almost peed on it. Turned out there were no bullets in it.

But she was afraid if she got involved with this guy, really involved with him — he might one day actually use the gun on her.

That was her fear.

He seemed unpredictable.

Exciting but dangerous.

So why was she running this errand at the bank for

him today?

THERE WAS SOMETHING eerily frightening about the murder scene. Maybe it was the yellow tape on the bedroom carpet, the outline of where Gloria Stanford's body had lain. Maybe it was the silence. Eileen guessed it was

the silence.

A stillness so complete that it seemed to exclude the sounds one normally associated with big-city living, the ambulances and police sirens outside, the occasional toilet being flushed somewhere in the building, the low whine of an elevator, the rumble of television voices. All seemed subordinate to the utter silence.

She stood in the entrance door to the dead woman's bedroom, looking in at the yellow tape on the floor. The stillness was oppressive. It seemed to be challenging her to enter the bedroom. She hesitated on the door sill. At last, she took a step into the room, walked gingerly around the taped outline on the floor, and directly to a drop-leaf desk that must have cost her yearly salary. As a detective/third, Eileen currently earned $55,936 a year; her own one-bedroom flat was furnished with stuff she'd bought at IKEA, across the River Harb.

She lowered the drop-leaf front and sat in a chair upholstered with a satin seat and back.

In one of the desk's warren of cubbyholes, she found a box of checkbook inserts. Blank checks for FirstBank's Salisbury Street branch right here in the city. Top sheaf of checks numbered from 151 through 180. Sheaves

below it numbered to follow. Lettering across the top of each check was:

Gloria Stanford

1113 Silvermine Oval

Isola, 30576

In another of the cubbies, she found FirstBank's most recent statement. Gloria's checking account balance at the end of March had been $1,674.18. On the third of April, she'd made a cash deposit of $9,800. Another cash deposit on April 12, this time for $7,200. Yet another on April 23, for $8,100. Total cash deposits for the month: $25,100. Total amount of checks written: $24,202.17; her closing balance on April 30 was $2,573.01.

By law, all banks were required to report to the Internal Revenue Service any cash deposits in excess of $10,000. Was it mere coincidence that Gloria's cash deposits had been for amounts somewhat less than the ten grand? She looked for a savings account passbook and could find none.

So where had those cash deposits come from?