Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

“No, this isn’t Phil.”

“I thought you were coming here at ten o’clock,” the widow Callahan said.

“Well, you see, this isn’t Phil.”

“I got all ready for you,” she said, petulantly he thought.

“Would you remember the name of the stonecutter, ma’am?” he asked. “It’s really very important.”

“Are you sure this isn’t Phil?”

“Oh, I’m positive. Positive, ma’am. Andrew Mullaney, M-U-L–L...”

“Oh,” the woman said. She paused. “The stonecutter’s name is Roger McReady, and he’s of McReady’s Monument Works in Queens,” she said, and hung up.

“Thank you,” Mullaney said in retrospect, and hung up. Since he was very hungry, he spent his last dime on a Hershey bar, which he consumed in three bites. Then he went out into the street and began walking crosstown toward the Queensboro Bridge. He had no plan in mind. Vaguely, he assumed it would be best to keep on the move, but he figured he had at least a little time before Merilee found her way back to Kruger’s apartment on East Sixty-first. So he walked at a normal pace, ambling along and looking at the Lexington Avenue chippies and the Third Avenue fags and the Second Avenue winos, then cutting uptown and thinking all the while what a nice city New York was if only a person had some money to spend in it. Irene had never been a one to worry about money, couldn’t matter less to her whether he’d earned ten thousand a year (which he hadn’t) or twenty thousand (which he most certainly hadn’t). “The best things in life are free,” she was fond of chirping around the house while he wrote out checks for the mountain of bills that seemed to accumulate each month, “all the world loves a lover, and boy do I love you!” or words to that effect, all of it sounding to him like the jabberwocky of a happy schizophrenic. He would gnaw his pencils down to a nub and mutter to himself about freedom and realization, thinking of the several times he had been out to the racetrack and won, or thinking of the few five-and-ten-cent poker games he had busted, or thinking of the impromptu crap game in which he had won thirty-two dollars from his startled friends — break out, he had muttered to himself, break out, cut loose, be a gambler!

So here he was, big gambler, just having lost half a million dollars, but hot on the trail of it again. Or at least hot on the trail of the stonecutter who might or might not have a clue as to how all that newspaper had happened to get inside the jacket. The problem now was one of transportation. He paused at the approach to the bridge, saw a sign reading FOOTWALK TO WELFARE ISLAND, and remembered that it was possible to walk to the island, and then across it, and then onto another bridge that led to Queens. The idea of such a long walk did not appeal to him, but the only other choice he could think of was walking all the way up to 125th Street and then across the Triboro Bridge, which seemed even longer to him. So he went down the cobbled path below the arching roadway overhead, and paused at the steps leading to the walkway. There were several signs affixed to the stone wall there. One of them, in white letters on a red enameled field, read:

A sign alongside it, in black letters on a white field, read:

He was standing there reading the second sign when a police car pulled up behind him. There were two patrolmen in the car. The one sitting alongside the driver rolled down his window and said, “Can’t you read that sign?”

“What sign, officer?” Mullaney said.

“That sign right behind you there,” the patrolman behind the wheel said, pointing. “I guess he can’t read the sign, Freddie.”

Mullaney turned and read the sign again. He was neither a baby carriage, a bicycle, a dog, or a skater, so he couldn’t understand why the policemen had stopped, or why they were now questioning him.

“Well, I can read the sign,” he said, “but I don’t see...”

“The other sign,” Freddie said.

“Oh, I see,” Mullaney said, and turned to look at it again. “It says No Standing Any Time.”

“Oh, he sees,” the patrolman behind the wheel said, “it says No Standing Any Time.”

“Yeah, Lou, he sees,” Freddie said, both of them beginning to sound very much the way Henry and George had sounded, though these two didn’t look at all alike. “What are you doing here?”

“It was just...”

“Are you standing here?”

“Yes, but..”

“Does the sign say No Standing Any Time?”

“Yes, but that applies to auto—”

“Then what arc you doing standing here?” Lou asked.

“I have to get to the cemetery,” Mullaney said, which was the truth so far. He decided to embroider upon the truth a little because both Freddie and Lou looked as if they just might pull him in for standing or loitering or hitchhiking or skating across the bridge without skates or raping somebody, it being Friday night, and there not being enough trouble to occupy them anywhere else in the city. “A very good friend of mine passed away just last month,” Mullaney said, “name of Martin Callahan. I was just talking to his widow a few minutes ago, and she seemed all broken up because the stone is ready, but she can’t bear to go out and look at it, being grief-stricken. So she asked me if I’d go out to take a look at it, see that they spelled his name right and all that, and I promised I would and then like a fool left my wallet in my jacket. At the gym. In my gym locker.”

“At the gym?” Lou asked.

“Yes, I go there to work out with the medicine ball. I’ve got a desk job, you see, keep the old bod in shape with a medicine ball.”

“What gym?”

“You know. Over on Fifty-third,” he said, wondering if there was a gym someplace on Fifty-third.

“Oh yeah, that one,” Freddie said. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I sell encyclopedias,” Mullaney said.

“Yeah, huh?”

“Yeah. So here I promised her I’d go out tonight and take a look at the stone for her, and I didn’t want to go all the way back to the gym, so I thought I’d walk across the bridge.”

“That’s a very interesting story,” Lou said.

“How did he die?” Freddie asked.

“Who?”

“Hoolihan. Your friend.”

“Callahan, you mean.”

“Yeah, Callahan, him.”

“Well...” Mullaney said, and paused, unable to remember how Callahan had died, but remembering very clearly how Feinstein had died, and figuring he might as well give them that story since they had thought his first story so interesting. “Actually,” he said, “it was very comical the way he...”

“Never mind,” Lou said, “I don’t like to hear about how guys died. Get in the car, and we’ll drop you off at the cemetery.”

“Thank you,” Mullaney said, and got into the squad car. “Where I’m going, actually, is to the stonecutters just outside the cemetery. McReady’s Monument Works.”

“I know where that is,” Freddie said.

“He thinks this is a taxi,” Lou said.

“Yeah,” Freddie said, “he thinks this is a taxi.”

But, being New Yorks Finest, they nonetheless drove him over the bridge and into Queens, where they dropped him off on the sidewalk just outside McReady’s Monument Works.

A cold wind blew in off the cemetery, keening relentlessly over gravestone and urn, eddying against the black iron fence, rising to a vivid scream that dropped again in moaning obbligato, a tortured cry of unknown horror and graveside lament.