Ed Mcbain - Mischief

“We’d use it in the concert first—we’re doin a concert on the fourth, though you’d never know it.”

“The Fourth of July?” she said. Eyes opening wide. Gorgeous sloe eyes the color of coal. Narrow oval face. Good firm breasts in the fitted brown dress. Medallion hanging in the hollow of her throat. Long, graceful neck, he wanted to kiss her behind each ear.

“No, no,” he said. “Next month. The fourth.”

“So there’s some kind of urgency,” she said.

“Well, we’d have to put it together, rehearse it…”

“Put it together how?”

“As rap,” he said. “Give it the rhythms rap needs. This isn’t just a matter of talkin the lyrics, you know, they got to be paced, they got to be skittered.”

“Where’s this going to be?” she asked. “The concert.”

“In the park here. Grover Park.”

“Be a lot of people?”

“It’s a free concert,” he said, figuring he’d cut her off at the pass before she got any grandiose ideas.

“You want the song free then?” she asked. “Because it’s a free concert ?”

“No, we’d pay you for the use.”

“How much?”

He figured he was dealing small time here. The lady needed money, that was the long and the short of it. He didn’t know she was in fact dead broke and considering a life not dissimilar to the one Sister Woman lived in the song.

The music company aside—it was virtually defunct, anyway—Chloe was still doing what she’d been doing at the time of her husband’s murder, dancing almost naked on bartops, men tucking dollar bills into her G-string, sometimes five, rarely more than that unless you went in the back room with them. In the back, you danced naked for them, you let them touch your breasts, kiss your nipples, slide their hands up your legs to your garters, all this was a simple step above performing forty-dollar hand jobs behind the plastic greenery, which she had never done because she knew that once you crossed the Rubicon into performing an actual sex act, the progression after that—and the justification for it—was easy. Massage parlor work, escort work, outright prostitution. She had girlfriends who’d gone that route, girls who used to dance alongside her on the bar. They told her she was dumb not doing it herself. She had considered it. She was still considering it. But here was a man interested in her dead husband’s work….

“What about the other songs on the album?” she said.

“Not interested in anything but the hooker song,” he said, and shook his head. “I’d like to put it in the group’s li’berry.”

“Say it was yours?”

“No, no.”

“Say you wrote it?”

“No, I wouldn’t rip it. We’d give your husband credit.”

“Fuck my husband,” she said, startling him. “All I’m interested in is what’ll bring the most money. You want to buy the copyright, fine, say the song is yours, that’s fine, too, the lyrics are yours, whatever you want , but that’ll cost you. You want to perform it one time, that’s another matter. Then you’d have to come back to me next time you want to do it. I’ll level with you, Mr. Cummings….”

“Silver,” he corrected.

“Sounds like the Lone Ranger’s horse,” she said.

He flared for a moment. And then burst out laughing. She watched him. Even white teeth, strong jaw, he really was quite attractive.

“Make it Sil then,” he said, still laughing. “That’s what all my friends call me.”

“Sil,” she said, “I need some real cash. I want to keep this apartment I’m in, but the lease runs out the end of April and I know they plan to raise the rent, and the truth is I’m still doing the kind of work I was doing when my husband got killed, but I don’t much…”

“What kind of work do you do?” he asked.

She looked him dead in the eye.

“I’m a dancer,” she said.

But didn’t tell him she danced naked for men who touched her breasts and her legs, and even kissed her nipples….

“But I’m not enjoying it…”

Which was the truth.

“…so I’d like to start my own business, open a beauty salon in Diamondback, there’s always room for another beauty salon.”

“I would guess you know a great deal about beauty,” he said, intending a compliment and hoping she took it as such, relieved when she said, “Why, thank you, Sil,” sounding enormously surprised.

“A great deal,” he repeated, like a politician emphasizing key words in his speech.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I need cash if I’m going to go out on my own, do you understand what I mean?”

She did not say that some of her girlfriends were pulling down five, six hundred dollars a day, five days a week, twenty-five hundred to three thousand a week, something like a hundred and fifty thousand a year, she did not tell him that. Nor did she tell him how tempted she was lately, or how trapped she was beginning to feel. She did not want to become a whore. She did not.

Outside the windows, night had already claimed the city.

“How much are you looking for?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand,” she said.

Which was outrageous.

“You’ve got it,” he said.

THE TWO POLICE OFFICERSin Adam One were taking another quick run at the sector before they parked awhile to fool around a little. Necking on the job, not to mention reciprocal masturbation, was specifically forbidden by police-department regulations, but boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and the police officers in Adam One were respectively named Adam O’Hare, no relation to the car, and Josie Ruggiero, and they had been playing around on the job and running around on their respective spouses for the past month and a half now. Their burgeoning affair had started with a little hand-holding on the front seat, the walkie-talkie squawking between them, and had rapidly progressed to a little kissy-facey and then a little touchy-feely, and it would be merely a matter of time now before they found themselves a deserted stretch of turf on the graveyard shift and went “all the way,” as such mischief was known in the trade.

It was now a quarter past five on this rainy morning. It would be dark until sixA .M., and they were not due back at the Eight-Seven till a quarter of eight, at which time they would turn in the car and be relieved by the next shift. Relief of quite another sort was what they had in mind at the moment, however. As soon as they completed this routine pass at the sector, they would drive over to the posted Quiet Zone surrounding St. Sebastian’s Hospital. Considering what their present separate but identical states of mind were urgently demanding, the dark, tree-lined streets there would perfectly serve their needs. Rarely if ever, and certainly not at this hour of the morning, was the area frequented by through traffic; the posted speed limit was ten miles per hour and there were traffic lights on every corner, blinking to the deserted streets. Park in the empty visitors’ parking lot, douse the headlights, anyone saw a patrol car sitting there in the rain, they’d think it was a radar speed trap instead of two horny cops unzipping each other’s flies.

O’Hare wished they’d let Josie wear a skirt to work, make life so much simpler. Josie wished her husband never found out what Adam and she had been doing every night on the job since the middle of February. Her husband was a sergeant who worked out of Narcotics and he was six feet two inches tall and he weighed two hundred and ten pounds and he had been known to bust a few heads in his lifetime. Adam, on the other hand, was five feet eight inches tall, and he weighed a hundred and fifty-four pounds, although when it came to size he was adequately compensated elsewhere.