Ed McBain - Hark!

'Right,' Kling said. 'He's asking us to guess which.'

'Teasing us again,' Meyer said.

'But why a palindrome?' Willis asked.

'Are we forgetting his first note today?' Eileen said.

A rod not a bar, a baton, Dora.

'Right,' Parker said. 'A baton. He's going to stick a baton up somebody's ass.'

'No, he's going to rob the box office at a concert someplace.'

'That's rob,' Parker said. 'You stick somebody up, you ain't borrowing, you're robbing.'

'The only concerts are the ones we found in the paper,' Carella said. 'And we've already alerted the local precincts.'

'Good,' Parker said. 'So let's forget it.'

'Remember when there used to be those big rock concerts at the Hippodrome?' Genero said, misting over.

'Circus just left there,' Kling said.

'I love circuses,' Eileen said, and glanced at Willis as if she expected him to buy her a balloon.

'Anyway, a palindrome isn't a hippodrome,' Kling said.

'They used to have hippos in them big arenas, you know, back in Roman times,' Parker said. 'That's how they got the name hippodrome.'

No one challenged him.

RUDY MANCUSO WAS a squat burly man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, who sat in shirtsleeves behind a cluttered desk in an office where two other men sat at equally cluttered desks across the room. He was entirely sympathetic to Hawes' quest for the shooter, but he seemed totally unaware that Hawes himself had been the target in the

first rifle assault. In fact, he didn't even know there'd been a previous shooting. He kept clucking his tongue over 'poor Miss Blair,' becoming all business - 'Transportation, Mancuso' - each time the ringing phone interrupted Hawes' questioning. In a comparatively peaceful ten minutes, Hawes managed to get some answers.

Mancuso corroborated essentially what Polly had already told him. The telephone request last Thursday evening was for a Friday morning pickup at ten, at Honey's building, and a drop-off here at Channel Four. No interim stops. Same as every morning.

'If there were interim stops . . .'

'None were ordered, Detective.'

'But if there were

'Okay?'

'Who would have known about them?'

'You mean like if Miss Blair, after she'd been picked up, told the driver to stop someplace on the way here?'

'Yes.'

'Well, the driver would have known

'Who else?'

'He might've called in to say he was stopping at such and such a place before

'Who would've taken that call?'

'Either Eddie or Frankie. Right there across the room.'

YOU'D HAVE THOUGHT Eddie and Frankie were a ventriloquist and his dummy. Everything Eddie said, Frankie repeated. Eddie's full name was Edward Cudahy. He watched while Hawes wrote it down in his little notebook. Frankie's full name was Franklin Hopper. He watched, too. Eddie told Hawes he didn't remember any driver calling in to say he'd be making any interim stops

on Honey Blair's way to the studio last Friday morning. Frankie said the same thing. Eddie said he didn't remember which drivers were on call last Friday morning. Frankie said the same thing. Hawes thanked them both for their time. Both men said, 'You're welcome,' almost simultaneously.

Hawes went back to Rudy Mancuso's desk, and asked for the name of the driver who'd picked up Honey Blair last Friday morning, the fourth of June.

Mancuso told him the driver was off today.

'Then give me his home address,' Hawes said.

'I don't know if I should do that.'

'Would a court order change your mind?' Hawes asked.

THE LAST NOTE of the day arrived at a quarter to four. It was another palindrome. It read:

MUST SELL AT TALLEST SUM

'Now just what the hell is that supposed to mean?' Parker asked.

No one knew what the hell that was supposed to mean.

Besides, the night shift was just coming on, so they all went home.

WHEN YOU'RE IN love, the whole world's Italian.

Or so it seemed to Carella.

Here they all were, ta-ra!, the prospective brides and grooms and their whole mishpocheb or meshpocheh or however 'family' was spelled in Italy, all gathered in a restaurant called Horatio's, in the city's midtown area, not too distant from where Luigi Fontero had put up all

his relatives. Carella wondered who had paid all those air fares to the U.S. and whether or not the visiting Italians all had to be fingerprinted before gaining entrance to these fiercely protected shores — thank you, Bulldog Tom Ridge, and the ever-alert Homeland Security team.

Representing the Fontero family was a small army of relatives from Milan, Naples, Genoa, and/or Rome, kinfolk near, far, or even remote, but certainly numerous and clamorous. Representing the Carellas were Steve and Teddy (minus the children, or 'i creatori,' as he and his sister used to be called when they themselves were small, ah so long ago); and Uncle Freddie who was a casino dealer in Vegas and who had flown east especially for the wedding this Saturday; and Carella's Aunt Josie and his Uncle Mike, who'd come all the way up from Orlando, Florida, hadn't seen them in years, but hey, this was a big double wedding! Aunt Josie loved to play poker. Uncle Mike used to call Angela 'The Homework Kid' when she was small because she always had her nose buried in a book, but now - hey, looka here! - all grown up and about to be married for the second time.

Aunt Dorothy was here, too, summoned from wherever she was living in California with the third of her husbands, Carella's beloved Uncle Salvie having died of cancer shortly after Carella joined the force. He missed Uncle Salvie, a cab driver who'd known the city better than any cop, used to tell stories abut the hundreds of passengers he carried to every remote neighborhood. Carella's grandmother always kept telling him he should have become a writer. Carella guessed he'd've made a good one, too, some of the phony novelists around these days.

Aunt Dorothy was the one who'd first tipped to the

fact that young Carella was enjoying what to him at the time was a wildly erotic relationship with Margie Gannon, a little Irish girl who lived across the street from the Carella family in Riverhead. This steamy adolescent byplay amounted to nothing more than copping a feel every now and then, or sliding his hand under Margie's skirt and onto her silken sexy panties, but oh, such ecstasy! Aunt Dorothy teased him relentlessly about her, referring to her as Sweet Rosie O'Grady, Carella never could figure why.

Aunt Dorothy was telling a dirty joke now. She loved dirty jokes. Carella suspected the joke fell upon deaf ears as regarded most of the Fontero tribe. For that matter, Henry Lowell's stiff Wasp relatives didn't seem to be enjoying his aunt's ribald sense of humor, either. His sister's intended sat holding her hand and smiling tolerantly as the joke unfolded endlessly, something about the Pope, sure to be a winner among the Fonteros, the Pope being stopped by a prostitute outside the Vatican (Careful, Aunt Dotty!) and then running back inside to ask the Mother Superior 'What's a blowjob?' (Watch it!) and the Mother Superior telling him . . .

Carella suddenly wondered if his mother and Luigi . . .

No, he didn't want to go there.

All at once, everyone was laughing.

Even the Fonteros, who, Carella now realized, understood more English than he'd earlier supposed.

The laughter swelled everywhere around him.

He wondered why he couldn't find it in himself to share it.

13.

THE ELEVENTH DAY of June dawned all too soon.

At six-thirty A.M. on what looked like the start of a sunny Friday morning, Melissa and the Deaf Man were sitting in the breakfast nook of his seventeenth-floor apartment, overlooking River Place South, Gleason Park, and the River Harb beyond.

'Your job tomorrow,' he was telling her, 'will be a very simple one.'