Ed Mcbain - Mischief

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 last month ?”

“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 mean we , 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 you think he was spraying? The face, the chest, the hands, the guy’s clothes. He went crazy 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 be any 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.”

“ Missionary murders?” Monroe said.

“Yeah, these guys on a mission.”

“I thought you meant the fuckin stiff was a priest or something.”

“a quest ,” Monoghan said. “Shooting all the fuckin writers in the city, is what I mean. Like a quest . Like the fuckin impossible dream , you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“A man on a mission , a missionary murderer, he doesn’t need an M.O., he just shoots and sprays, or sprays and shoots, there doesn’t have 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 never did 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 fucking name , 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 one other 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 in Silence 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 and especially not Clarice—that he sometimes couldn’t hear exactly everything a person was saying.