Ed McBain - Eight Black Horses

Brown looked up at the sky.

Not a cloud in it.

He took in a deep breath of fresh air.

‘Morning gentlemen,’ a voice said, and they turned to look up the path where a man in his late fifties, wearing dark blue slacks, a seersucker jacket, a pink shirt, and a blue polka dot tie, was approaching. He was carrying a black satchel in his right hand. ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This the body?’

‘No, the body’s up in the trees there,’ Monroe said.

‘It’s an Indian body,’ Monoghan said. ‘They put them up in the trees.’

The assistant medical examiner looked up into the tree-tops. Leaves fell everywhere around them, twisting on the air.

‘We’ve had three naked bodies this week,’ the M.E. said to no one and then knelt over the dead woman.

‘Where’d you hear that?’ Monroe asked Monoghan.

‘Where’d I hear what?’

‘That Indians put dead bodies up in the trees.’

‘It’s a fact,’ Monoghan said.

‘Does Muhammad Gandhi know that?’

‘I’m talkin’ about American Indians,’ Monoghan said. ‘Somebody dies, they put the body up in the trees.’

‘What for?’

‘Who the hell knows?’

The M.E. had rolled the body over. He was holding a stethoscope to the dead woman’s chest.

‘Whattya think, Doc?’ Monroe asked. ‘She dead enough for you?’

‘Quiet, please,’ the M.E. said.

‘He thinks he’s gonna get a heartbeat,’ Monoghan said.

The men fell silent. There was only the sound of the flutter of leaves on the sunlit air. The dead woman’s eyes were opened wide. They were as blue as the sky above. Her hair was as golden as the leaves beneath her. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, a not unattractive woman except for the gaping exit wound in the hollow of her throat. Carella wondered if she’d ever been out in the sun, she was so white.

‘She’s dead, all right,’ the M.E. said, rising and putting his stethoscope back into his satchel. ‘You can put it down as a gunshot wound.’

‘While you’re here,’ Monroe said, ‘I been having trouble with my throat. You wanna take a look at it?’

* * * *

The next letter—well, it wasn’t really a letter.

The next message—it wasn’t that, either, not unless it meant something.

The next piece of folded paper with, well, pictures on it was waiting for them when they got back to the station house. It had arrived, Sergeant Murchison told them, in a plain white envelope with no return address on it. The postmark over the stamp indicated that the letter had been mailed here in the city on the twenty-fourth, yesterday. That spoke well for the Post Office Department; in this city it sometimes took four days for a letter to travel three blocks crosstown.

They did not know if this one was also from the Deaf Man.

That’s because there was no ear on it.

They’d been fairly certain that the first letter—message, piece of folded paper, whatever the hell—had come from the Deaf Man. That was because they were all expert sleuths, and when their eyes fell upon a deaf ear, they recognized it at once.

The first—communication, they guessed it was—had arrived on Saturday, October 22. It had been addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella at the 87th Precinct, and it looked like this:

Well, everybody on the squad knew that those things prancing across the top of the page were horses. They also knew that there were eight of them, and they were black, and if you put all of that together, you got eight black horses. Which meant nothing, of course. Which, of course, if the Deaf Man had sent this thing to them, meant something. Because the Deaf Man often sent communications that looked as if they meant nothing until you figured them out and then they meant something. One thing they had learned about the Deaf Man over the years was that he always played the game fair. They didn’t know why he played the game fair, but then again they rarely understood the workings of the criminal mind, especially the master criminal mind. In their minds the Deaf Man was a master criminal. That was why he played the game fair and sent communications that looked as if they meant nothing when actually they meant something.

They figured it was the Deaf Man because of the ear with the bar across it.

Most people do not have bars across their ears.

In international sign language, if you saw a cigarette with a bar across it, it meant no smoking. If you saw the capital letter P with a bar across it, it meant no parking. An ear with a bar across it could have meant no ear, but they suspected instead that it meant no hearing, which further meant deaf, and since the ear wasn’t a delicately shaped shell-like thing but instead a very masculine-looking ear (unless it was the ear of a female wrestler), they concluded that the picture of the ear with the bar across it meant DEAF MAN.

This conclusion was unsettling.

They did not want to believe that the Deaf Man was back in their midst.

They had posted the Deaf Man’s message on the bulletin board and hoped it would go away. But this was Tuesday morning, October 25, and it had not gone away. Instead, there was a second envelope addressed personally to Carella. When he opened it, there was another single white sheet of folded paper in it. He unfolded the paper. He looked at it. This time there was no ear with a bar across it. Instead, there was—or were, as the case actually was:

Meyer Meyer was looking over Carella’s shoulder.

He was wearing lightweight slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt with a crocodile over where the pocket would have been if there’d been a pocket on the shirt. Most polo shirts did not have pockets these days. Meyer didn’t mind that, now that he’d given up smoking. The shirt was a shade darker than his blue eyes. The trousers were a sort of cream-colored polyester, as pale as his bald pate. His wife, Sarah, had told him this morning that he looked tacky wearing summer clothes to work when it was already the end of October. He’d commented, wittily he thought, that maybe in his head it was October, but in the rest of him it was still June. Sarah suspected he was making a sexual remark.

‘Is it him again?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Carella said.

‘So what are those supposed to be, anyway?’ Meyer said.

‘Radios, I guess,’ Carella said.

‘Walkie-talkies, looks more like,’ Brown said.

‘Five walkie-talkies,’ Carella said.

‘No ear, though.’

‘No ear.’

‘Maybe it isn’t him,’ Carella said.

‘From your lips to God’s ear,’ Meyer said.

‘Five walkie-talkies,’ Brown said, and shook his head.

‘He’s giving us arithmetic lessons,’ Meyer said. ‘Eight, five...’

‘He’s jerkin’ us off,’ Brown said. ‘Eight black horses, five walkie-talkies, those things don’t have anything at all to do with each other.’

* * * *

The trouble with naked dead bodies is that they are not wearing clothes.

Clothing is an aid to identification.

Clothing is also helpful in determining who the perpetrator or perpetrators may have been. Hair clings to clothing. Stains cling to clothing. Bread crumbs, iron filings, sawdust, face powder, flea powder, gunpowder, all sorts of juicy informational tidbits cling to clothing, making a laboratory technician’s life a bit easier. Nothing much clings to a dead body. Unless it was raped, in which case there are often wild pubic hairs tangled in the victim’s crotch or traces of semen to be found in the vagina.