Ed Mcbain: Mischief

This is for

Judy and Michel Cornier

The City in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

THE LUMINOUS DIALof his watch showed ten minutes past two in the morning. The rain had tapered off at about midnight. He would not have come out if it’d still been raining. These writers didn’t work in the rain. Didn’t want to get their spray cans all wet. Some writers. Scribblers was more like it. Each one scribbling right over the one before him. Kept on scribbling and scribbling till all there was left of a clean white wall was a barbed-wire tangle of words and names you couldn’t even read.

The wall he’d chosen tonight was a new one.

You could almost smell the fresh cement.

New walls attracted these writers the way honey did bears. Put up a new wall or a new fence, wouldn’t be ten minutes before they were out spraying it. Gave them some kind of thrill, he supposed. He’d once read something about burglars defecating in people’s shoes while they were in an apartment stealing things. Added insult to injury. Wasn’t enough they were in there taking a man’s possessions, they had to go and soil his belongings besides, let him know what contempt they had for him. This was the same thing. Person sprayed his paint scribbles on a wall or a fence, he was telling the citizens of this city he was shitting on them.

He hoped it wouldn’t start raining again.

There were lightning flashes in the distance, rumbles of thunder, but he didn’t think the rain was moving any closer to where he was standing here waiting for someone to show up.

This was a two-lane street here running under the highway. Your writers never sprayed where their work wouldn’t be seen, they always picked a street or a road with traffic on it, so every time you went by you could ooh and aah over the terrific mess they’d made of the wall. There weren’t any leaves on the trees yet, no protection that way, nothing to create any kind of shadow, just these naked branches reaching up toward the parkway where every now and again a car’s headlights drilled the blackness of the night. Spring was slow coming this year. This was the twenty-third of March, a dreary Monday morning. Even though spring had arrived officially three days earlier, it had been raining on and off ever since. Cold, too. Walking in the cold dank rain, he had worked out his plan.

Tonight would be the first of them.

If anybody showed.

If not, he’d do it tomorrow night.

No rush at all.

Get it done in time enough.

Three of them altogether, one plus one plus one.

He figured these writers had to do their dirty work at night, didn’t they, you never saw any of them doing it during the daytime. Probably scouted a new wall or fence during the day, came back at night to mess it up. If anybody showed tonight, he’d wait till they did some messing up before he did a little messing of his own. Catch ’em in the act, bam ! The gun in the pocket of his coat was a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.

Lightning way way off in the distance now.

Low growl of thunder far far away.

On the highway overhead, a car’s tires hissed on the still-wet roadway. There was a penetrating chill on the air, made a man wish he was home in his own bed, instead of out here waiting for some jackass who didn’t know what he was in for.

Well, come on , he thought. Can’t stand out here all night , can I? Catch pneumonia out here, night like this one. He never had much cared for the month of March, his own time of year was the fall. Something about the fall always reached him. Nothing uncertain about the fall, you knew where you stood. March, April, forget it. Third day of spring, you’d think it was still the dead of winter, chill out here working its way clear into a man’s bones. His gloved hand in the pocket of his coat felt warm around the walnut grip of the pistol.

One plus one plus one again.

Then retire.

Thing was, he was beginning to realize this might take longer than he’d figured. No way of telling when or even if anybody would show, he could be standing out here all night long and nobody’d come and he’d just have to do it all over again each time out, night after night. Wait in the dark till—

Hold it.

Coming up the street. Hands in his pockets. Kid of seventeen, eighteen, looking this way and that, had to be up to some kind of mischief. He moved deeper into the shadow cast by the highway overhead. Lightning again in the distance. Not even the sound of thunder this time, too far away. Another car sped by overhead, tires hissing, headlights casting fallout into the naked branches of the trees. He pulled still farther back into the shadows.

The kid was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. High-topped sneakers. Turned to look over his shoulder. Turned back again, looked left and right, looked dead ahead, then stopped under the highway, and took a flashlight from his pocket. Light splashed onto the new cement wall. His face cracked into a grin, as if he were looking at a beautiful naked woman. Stood there with the flashlight playing on the wall, moving the flashlight over the wall, inch by inch, raping the clean empty wall with his eyes and the beam of the light. Then he reached inside his jacket and took out a spray can of paint and stood back from the wall a moment, studying it, the flashlight in his left hand, the spray can in his right, deciding where he should start his masterpiece.

He was spraying red paint onto the wall, spraying an S , and then a P , and then an I , and then a D , when he heard movement behind him, and turned sharply and saw a man wearing a black wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, a dark coat with the collar pulled up high on his neck, a gun in his hand.

“Here,” the man said.

And shot him twice in the face.

The boy lay still and silent on the ground under the highway, his life’s blood oozing out of his face, the spray can lying beside him. He shot the boy one more time, in the chest this time, and then he reached down to pick up the can in his gloved hand, and pressed the button on top of the can, and squirted red paint all over the boy’s face oozing blood, his chest oozing blood, red paint and red blood mingling while overhead another car pierced the night with its headlights and sped off into the distance where now there was no lightning at all.

DURING THE EMPTY HOURSof the night, the rain had changed to snow; it was that kind of spring. At nine o’clock that morning, it was still snowing.

“I remember, Easter Sunday once, it was snowing,” Parker said. “This is nothing unusual.”

“March twenty-third, it’s unusual to be snowing,” Kling said.

“Not if it could snow on Easter,” Parker said.

“I remember once,” Meyer said, “Passover and Easter Sunday fell on the very same day.”

“That happens all the time,” Carella said.

“That’s because the Jews stole Passover from Easter,” Parker said, blithely unaware.

Meyer didn’t even bother.

The snow kept falling from the dull gray March sky. Beyond the grilled-mesh windows that protected the squad room from the brickbats of society, the day was blustery and bleak.

Andy Parker was looking over the report the graveyard shift had filed on the dead graffiti writer. The paper told him Baker One had found the kid early this morning, under the River Highway on North Eleventh. Kid’s name was Alfredo Herrera, street name Spider. That’s what he was probably trying to write on the wall,SPIDER , when somebody pumped two into his face and another in his chest and painted him red for good measure. Served him right, Parker thought, fuckin writer. But didn’t say. Meanwhile, the city had to spend time and money trying to find out who done it, when who gave a shit, really?