“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.
Chapter 5
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.
Anyone. Now how were you supposed to deal with a maniac like that?
“He’s a maniac,” Lieutenant Byrnes said. “Where the hell does he expect us to get fifty thousand dollars?”
Steve Carella, who had been released from the hospital that afternoon and who somewhat resembled a boxer about to put on gloves, what with assorted bandages taped around his hands, said, “Maybe he expects the deputy mayor to pay it.”
“Then why the hell didn’t he ask the deputy mayor?”
“We’re his intermediaries,” Carella said. “He assumes his demand will carry more weight if it comes from law enforcement officers.”
Byrnes looked at Carella.
“Sure,” Carella said. “Also, he’s getting even with us. He’s sore because we fouled up his bank-robbing scheme eight years ago. This is his way of getting back.”
“He’s a maniac,” Byrnes insisted.
“No, he’s a very smart cookie,” Carella said. “He knocked off Cowper after a measly demand for five thousand dollars. Now that we know he can do it, he’s asking ten times the price not to shoot the deputy mayor.”
“Where does it say ‘shoot’?” Hawes asked.
“Hmmm?”
“He didn’t say anything about shooting Scanlon. The note yesterday just said ‘Deputy Mayor Scanlon Goes Next.” ’
“That’s right,” Carella said. “He can poison him or bludgeon him or stab him or …”
“Please,” Byrnes said.
“Let’s call Scanlon,” Carella suggested. “Maybe he’s got fifty grand laying around he doesn’t know what to do with.”
They called Deputy Mayor Scanlon and advised him of the threat upon his life, but Deputy Mayor Scanlon did not have fifty grand laying around he didn’t know what to do with. Ten minutes later, the phone on Byrnes’ desk rang. It was the police commissioner.
“All right, Byrnes,” the commissioner said sweetly, “what’s this latest horseshit?”