Hark!

They thanked the super for his time, and left 1113 Sil-vermine Oval.

'Want to do a canvass next door?' Willis asked.

'I doubt if anyone spotted him going in or out,' she said. 'But if you want to knock on doors, I'm with you.'

'For the sake of closure,' he said.

'I hate that word,' she said. 'Closure.'

'So do I.'

'It's a lawyer's word.'

'I also hate lawyers,' Willis said.

'Me, too.'

They were out on the street now. It was almost three-thirty. Their shift was almost over.

'So what do you say?'

'Let's do it,' she said. 'Keep the Loot happy.'

THE DEAF MAN'S third and final note that day cleared up any lingering doubt that he was trying to spear the word spear, so to speak:

Yea, and to tickle our noses with spear-grass to make them bleed, and then to beslubber our garments with it and swear it was the blood of true men.

'What the hell is spear-grass?' Parker asked. 'Some kind of grass they have over there in England,' Genero said.

'How do you happen to know that?'

'Common sense. If it's Shakespeare, it has to be England.'

'This doesn't even look like Shakespeare,' Hawes said.

'That's right. It's not even poetry'

'Shakespeare also wrote prose,' Carella said.

'And this time, there is a message,' Kling said, 'prose or whatever.'

"What's prose?' Genero asked.

'What's the message?' Hawes asked.

'That it's all fake. He's misleading us. It's slander, the venom'd spear. It's a lie again.'

'Same as always.'

'Tickle your noses to make them bleed

'Must be some kind of sharp grass, don't you think? That spear-grass?'

'. . . and then beslubber your garments

'I love that word.'

'Sounds like beslobber,' Brown said.  'Beslobber the

Johnson

'Beslubber the garments

'The clothes . . .'

'. . . with the blood from the nose, make it look like battle wounds. That's what he's saying. It's all fake. He's leading us to spear, but he's going someplace

else.'

'Then why's he leading us to spear?'

'Cause he's a rotten son of a bitch,' Carella said.

THE BUILDING NEXT door to 1113 Silvermine Oval was a seventeen-story edifice with six apartments on each floor. By five-thirty that night, Willis and Eileen had knocked on the doors to a hundred and two apartments, and spoken to eighty-nine tenants who were home and who answered their knocking. The first time they'd ever dealt with the Deaf Man, they'd got a description of him from a doorman named Joey. This was a long time ago, after he'd fired a shotgun blast into Carella's shoulder and slammed the stock of the shotgun into his head again and

again and again. One could understand why Carella considered any encounter with the Deaf Man a highly personal matter.

He's around my height, Joey had told Lieutenant Byrnes. Maybe six-one, six-two, and I guess he weighs around a hun' eighty, a hun' ninety pounds. He's got blond hair and blue eyes, and he wears this hearing aid in his right ear.

This was the description they gave the tenants now. Had anyone seen a white male fitting that description, in or around the building, at anytime on Memorial Day?

No one had seen anyone fitting that description.

Not on Memorial Day or any other day.

Outside the building again, Willis said, 'Wanna catch a bite to eat?'

Eileen looked at him.

'Maybe go see a movie afterward?' he said.

She hesitated a moment longer.

Then she said, 'Sure. Why not?'

THATEVENING, CHANNEL Four's Six O'Clock News had a big story to tell.

Someone had tried to kill their star investigative reporter, Honey Blair.

Avery Knowles, the show's co-anchor, first announced it on the air at five minutes past six, following the breaking news about a big fire in Calm's Point, where two children left alone had been playing with a kerosene burner while their mother was out scratching numbers off a lottery ticket at the corner grocery store.

'Earlier today,' Avery said, 'an armed assailant tried to murder someone with whom all of our viewers are familiar. You can only see the story now, here on Channel Four, in Honey Blair's own words.'

Only a handful of literate viewers knew that if they could only see the story now, right here on Channel Four, then they could not also hear the story. However, these were probably not Avery Knowles's own words, but instead the words of some network employee who didn't realize that the correct language should have been 'You can see the story now, only here on Channel Four.'

Standing before the camera in her trademark legs-slightly-apart pose, wearing a mini that was also something of a trademark, Honey said (not in her own words, either, even though they were coming from her own mouth), 'This morning at approximately five minutes to eleven, in front of five-seventy-four Jefferson Avenue, a gunman fired some dozen or more shots into a Channel Four vehicle that was driving me here to the studio. I have no idea why I was the target, but if any of our listeners have any information whatsoever regarding the shooting, please call either the police hotline number at the bottom of the screen or our own hotline number listed just below it. Meanwhile, hear this loud and clear, Mr. Shooter! I don't know what might have ticked you off, but I'm going to keep doing my job, rain or shine, bullets or not! Just keep that in mind, mister!'

The camera cut back to the co-anchors. Millie Anderson, the woman on the team, said, "We're with you, Honey. Folks, if you have any information at all, please call one of those hotlines, won't you?'

She glanced at Avery and said, 'A terrible thing, Ave.' Avery nodded in solemn agreement. Millie looked back into the camera again. 'At the Federal Courthouse downtown this afternoon,'  she said,  'two women accused

of...'

Cotton Hawes snapped off his television set.

He was wondering why Honey hadn't mentioned he'd

been in the car with her. Or that someone had tried to kill him as he'd come out of her building Wednesday morning. He was merely a cop, but it seemed to him that in all probability he himself, and not Honey Blair, had been the intended target.

But he guessed that was show biz.

EILEEN DIDN'T THINK she should ask him anything about Marilyn Hollis.

Willis didn't think he should ask her anything about Bert Kling.

So over dinner, they talked mostly about the case. The two cases actually. One past, one future. The murder of Gloria Stanford and whatever monkeyshines the Deaf Man might be cooking up for the days ahead. They had worked together for a good long while now — from way back to when Eileen was still with Special Forces — but they'd socialized only once before, dinner with the four of them, Willis and Marilyn, Eileen and Kling. So to make dinner tonight a bit less awkward, they tried to figure out why the Deaf Man had anagramatically confessed to the murder of Gloria Stanford, and why he was now taunting them with Shakespearean quotes that might or might not indicate some crime he was planning for the future. 'Why us?' Willis wondered aloud. T think it's something personal,' Eileen said. 'I think he has something personal against Steve.' 'Or maybe each and every one of us.' 'Maybe. But why? What'd we ever do to him?' 'He's annoyed because we always mess him up.' 'Wellll,' Eileen said, 'I'm not sure I'd say exactly that, Hal. We've never been the ones who actually foiled his plans.'

'Foiled,' Willis said. 'I love that word. Foiled.'

'So do I.'

'You think we'll foil his plans this time?'

Smiling. Stressing the word. He had a nice smile, Eileen noticed.

'How can we foil his plans if we don't even know what they are?' she asked.

'Oh, he'll tell us, never fear.'

'You think so, huh?'