Ed McBain - Hark!

This was what made her think he might want to be her mentor.

He did not tell her what he was up to, but she figured it had to be something grand. When a man already had eighteen million in the poke — less the hundred grand he'd laid on her, and the sable and the mink - he certainly didn't have to take risks on any penny-ante scheme. She knew this had something to do with misleading the police, though she didn't know exactly why he would want to do that. She also suspected that she would somehow figure into his plan later on, he wasn't just keeping her around because she gave great head, which by the way, she did, and that wasn't just her opinion.

She was curious to see how this thing might unfold. She was also wondering if he'd cut her into it for another big chunk later on.

So she figured she would stick around, why not, even

though the hundred K could take her around the world

three times over, like the mink stole took her shoulders.

'Do you know the story Frank Sinatra used to tell on

himself? Do you like Sinatra?'

'I don't know Sinatra all that well,' she said. The truth. With him, always the truth. 'When he was playing Vegas, he would put on his tux each night, and stand in front of the mirror tying his bow tie, can you visualize that?'

'Sort of,' she said. She found it hard to visualize Sinatra himself. She concentrated instead on some guy trying to tie a bow tie.

'He'd tweak the tie this way and that . . .' She loved him using words like 'tweak,' which most guys didn't.

"... until finally he said to his mirror-image, "Thar's good enough for jazz." Do you understand the meaning of that?'

'No, I'm afraid I don't.'

Never lie to this man, she thought again.

'He was going out there to sing jazz. This was not grand opera, this was merely jazz. And he wasn't going to fool around with that tie any longer, it was good enough for jazz. You have to remember, Lissie, that even in his later years, Sinatra could sing rings around any other singer, male or female. Any of them. Name one who could beat him. And he knew exactly how good he was. Never mind who hit the charts that particular week. He knew none of them could come anywhere near him. In fact, he knew how bad most of them really were, million-copy gold records or not. So he was just going out there to sing his splendid jazz in yet another barroom to yet another bunch of people who'd already heard all his tunes. The bow tie was good enough for jazz, do you see?'

'Gee,' she said.

'Well, I can always tie my tie so that it's good enough for jazz, I can do what I plan to do without all this folderol beforehand

Folderol. Another word she liked.

'But then where would all the fun be?' he asked, and looked deep into her eyes. 'Where would all the fun be, Lissie?'

5.

HE'S BACK TO spears again,' Genero said.

The Deaf Man's first note that Friday morning, the fourth day of June, read:

Come on, come on; where is your boar-spear,

man? Fear you the boar, and go so unprovided?

'Or is he telling us he's just a bore?' Parker asked.

'Which he spelled wrong, by the way.'

'Because, you want to know the truth, I think he is a bore. Him and his Shakespeare both.'

'Never give critics a good line,' Carella said.

Parker didn't know what he meant.

'Anyway, we don't know for sure that this one is Shakespeare,' Kling said.

'Well,' Eileen said, 'he told us it was going to be Shakespeare from now on, didn't he? That's what he told us yesterday, am I right? That's what the spear and all those shakes were about yesterday.'

She was inordinately proud of her deduction yesterday, and did not much like Kling shooting her down this way now. In her secret heart, she also felt he wouldn't be talking this way if they hadn't once shared a relationship. This was some kind of man-woman thing between them, she felt, and had nothing whatever to do with sound police work.

'Who else but Shakespeare would talk like that?' Carella asked.

'Right,' Genero said. 'Nobody but Shakespeare talks like that.'

'Well, Marlowe talked like that,' Willis said.

'Marlowe said "Where is your boar-spear, man?'"

'I don't know if Marlowe actually said that particular line. I'm just saying Marlowe talked a lot like Shakespeare.'

'Did Raymond Chandler know that?' Kling asked.

'Know what?' Brown asked.

'Who's Raymond Chandler?' Genero asked.

'The guy who wrote the books,' Meyer said.

'What books?'

'The Phillip Marlowe novels.'

'Did he know he sounded like Shakespeare?'

'I'm talking about Christopher Marlowe,' Willis said.

'What's a boar-spear, anyway, man?' Brown asked.

'They had these wild boars back in those days,' Parker said.

'The question is,' Eileen said, 'why's he going back to spears again?'

'Maybe he's gonna throw a spear at somebody,' Genero suggested.

'This city,' Parker said, 'I'd believe it.'

AS HAWES WAS leaving the squadroom for his eleven o'clock doctor's appointment, Genero sidled over to him.

'I know how it feels to get shot in the foot,' he said. 'I'm with you, guy.'

'Thanks,' Hawes said.

Actually, he didn't appreciate the comparison. The way he recalled it, Genero had shot himself in the foot. This was on the eighth day of March during a very cold winter many years ago, the second time the Deaf Man

had put in an appearance. What he'd done that time around was demand $50,000 in lieu of killing the deputy mayor, asking that the Eight-Seven leave the money in a lunch pail on a bench in Grover Park.

If Hawes remembered correctly, the fuzz staked out in the park that day had included a detective recruited from the Eight-Eight, who was posing as a pretzel salesman at the entrance to the Clinton Street footpath. Meyer and Kling, disguised as a pair of nuns, were sitting on a park bench saying their beads. Willis and Eileen were pretending (or not) to be a passionate couple necking in a sleeping bag on the grass behind another bench. Genero was sitting on yet another bench, wearing dark glasses and scattering bread crumbs to the pigeons as he patted a seeing-eye dog on the head.

Genero was still a patrolman at the time. He'd been pressed into undercover service only because there was a shortage of detectives in the squadroom that Saturday. Unaccustomed to the art of surveillance, he jumped up the moment he saw somebody picking up the lunch pail, yanked off his blind man's dark glasses, unbuttoned the third button of his overcoat the way he'd seen detectives do on television, reached in for his revolver, and promptly shot himself in the leg.

This was not the same thing as getting shot by a sniper from a rooftop across the way. Or maybe it was.

Grumbling to himself, Hawes threw open the front door of the stationhouse, nodded to the uniformed cop bravely protecting homeland security on the steps outside, and limped down to the sidewalk, where he planned to make a right turn that would take him to the subway kiosk up the street.

A black stretch limo was standing at the curb, its

engine running. Stenciled onto the rear door of the car was the Channel Four logo — a silhouette of the city's skyline with the huge numeral 4 superimposed on it. The tinted rear window on the street side slid down noiselessly. Honey Blair's grinning face appeared in the opening.

'Want a lift, gorgeous?' she asked.

Hawes walked over to the car. 'Hey!' he said. 'What're you doing here?'

'Thought I'd surprise you,' she said.

He climbed in beside her, pulled the door shut behind him. 'Nice wheels,' he said.

'One of the perks of being a media staaahj she said, rolling her eyes on the last word.

'Five seventy-four Jefferson,' Hawes told the driver.

'I've already got that, sir,' the driver said.