Ed Mcbain - Fuzz

Polly shrugged.

“Not a nice fellow?” Hawes asked.

“Let’s say not my type,” Polly said.

“Mm-huh.”

“Let’s say a son of a bitch,” Polly said.

“What happened?”

“He came in here last night.”

“When? What time?”

“Musta been about nine, nine-thirty.”

“After the symphony started,” Hawes said.

“Huh?”

“Nothing, I was just thinking out loud. Go on.”

“He said he had something nice for me. He said if I came into his room, he would give me something nice.”

“Did you go?”

“First I asked him what it was. He said it was something I wanted more than anything else in the world.”

“But did you go into his room?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

“Like what?”

“Like a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“All right, what was this ‘something nice’ he promised you?”

“Hoss.”

“He had heroin for you?”

“And that’s why he asked you to come into his room? For the heroin?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what he said.”

“He didn’t attempt to sell it to you, did he?”

“No. But …”

“Yes?”

“He made me beg for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He showed it to me, and he let me taste it to prove that it was real stuff, and then he refused to give it to me unless I … begged for it.”

“I see.”

“He … teased me for … I guess for … for almost two hours. He kept looking at his watch and making me … do things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Stupid things. He asked me to sing for him. He made me sing ‘White Christmas,’ that was supposed to be a big joke, you see, because the shit is white and he knew how bad I needed a fix, so he made me sing ‘White Christmas’ over and over again, I musta sung it for him six or seven times. And all the while he kept looking at his watch.”

“Go ahead.”

“Then he … he asked me to strip, but … I mean, not just take off my clothes, but … you know, do a strip for him. And I did it. And he began … he began making fun of me, of the way I looked, of my body. I … he made me stand naked in front of him, and he just went on and on about how stupid and pathetic I looked, and he kept asking me if I really wanted the heroin, and then looked at his watch again, it was about eleven o’clock by then, I kept saying Yes, I want it, please let me have it, so he asked me to dance for him, he asked me to do the waltz, and then he asked me to do the shag, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I never even heard of the shag, have you ever heard of the shag?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Hawes said.

“So I did all that for him, I would have done anything for him, and finally he told me to get on my knees and explain to him why I felt I really needed the bag of heroin. He said he expected me to talk for five minutes on the subject of the addict’s need for narcotics, and he looked at his watch and began timing me, and I talked. I was shaking by this time, I had the chills, I needed a shot more than …” Polly closed her eyes. “I began crying. I talked and I cried, and at last he looked at his watch and said, ‘Your five minutes are up. Here’s your poison, now get the hell out of here.’ And he threw the bag to me.”

“What time was this?”

“It musta been about ten minutes after eleven. I don’t have a watch, I hocked it long ago, but you can see the big electric numbers on top of the Mutual Building from my room, and when I was shooting up later it was 11:15, so this musta been about ten after or thereabouts.”

“And he kept looking at his watch all through this, huh?”

“Yes. As if he had a date or something.”

“He did,” Hawes said.

“Huh?”

“He had a date to shoot a man from his window. He was just amusing himself until the concert broke. A nice fellow, Mr. Orecchio.”

“I got to say one thing for him,” Polly said.

“What’s that?”

“It was good stuff.” A wistful look came onto her face and into her eyes. “It was some of the best stuff I’ve had in years. I wouldn’t have heard a cannon if it went off next door.”

Hawes made a routine check of all the city’s telephone directories, found no listing for an Orecchio — Mort, Morton, or Mortimer — and then called the Bureau of Criminal Identification at four o’clock that afternoon. The B.C.I., fully automated, called back within ten minutes to report that they had nothing on the suspect. Hawes then sent a teletype to the F.B.I. in Washington, asking them to check their voluminous files for any known criminal named Orecchio, Mort or Mortimer or Morton. He was sitting at his desk in the paint-smelling squadroom when Patrolman Richard Genero came up to ask whether he had to go to court with Kling on the collar they had made jointly and together the week before. Genero had been walking his beat all afternoon, and he was very cold, so he hung around long after Hawes had answered his question, hoping he would be offered a cup of coffee. His eye happened to fall on the name Hawes had scribbled onto his desk pad when calling the B.C.I., so Genero decided to make a quip.

“Another Italian suspect, I see,” he said.

“How do you know?” Hawes asked.

“Anything ending in O is Italian,” Genero said.

“How about Munro?” Hawes asked.

“What are you, a wise guy?” Genero said, and grinned.

He looked at the scribbled name again, and then said, “I got to admit this guy has a very funny name for an Italian.”

“Funny how?” Hawes asked.

“Ear,” Genero said.

“What?”

“Ear. That’s what Orecchio means in Italian. Ear.”

Which when coupled with Mort, of course, could mean nothing more or less than Dead Ear.

Hawes tore the page from the pad, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the wastebasket, missing.

“I said something?” Genero asked, knowing he’d never get his cup of coffee now.

The boy who delivered the note was eight years old, and he had instructions to give it to the desk sergeant. He stood in the squadroom now surrounded by cops who looked seven feet tall, all of them standing around him in a circle while he looked up with saucer-wide blue eyes and wished he was dead.

“Who gave you this note?” one of the cops asked.

“A man in the park.”

“Did he pay you to bring it here?”

“Yeah. Yes. Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had yellow hair.”

“Was he tall?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Was he wearing a hearing aid?”

“Yeah. A what ?”

“A thing in his ear.”

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.

Everybody tiptoed around the note very carefully, as though it might explode at any moment. Everybody handled the note with tweezers or white cotton gloves. Everybody agreed it should be sent at once to the police lab. Everybody read it at least twice. Everybody studied it and examined it. Even some patrolmen from downstairs came up to have a look at it. It was a very important document. It demanded at least an hour of valuable police time before it was finally encased in a celluloid folder and sent downtown in a manila envelope.

Everybody decided that what this note meant was that the deaf man (who they now reluctantly admitted was once again in their midst) wanted fifty thousand dollars in lieu of killing the deputy mayor exactly as he had killed the parks commissioner. Since fifty thousand dollars was considerably more than the previous demand for five thousand dollars, the cops of the 87th were quite rightfully incensed by the demand. Moreover, the audacity of this criminal somewhere out there was something beyond the ken of their experience. For all its resemblance to a kidnaping, with its subsequent demand for ransom, this case was not a kidnaping. No one had been abducted, there was nothing to ransom. No, this was very definitely extortion, and yet the extortion cases they’d dealt with over the years had been textbook cases involving “a wrongful use of force or fear” in an attempt to obtain “property from another.” The key word was “another.” “Another” was invariably the person against whom mayhem had been threatened. In this case, though, their extortionist didn’t seem to care who paid the money so long as someone did.