Carella knew the quote was from Hamlet because back in his green and salad days, he'd played a bearded drama-club Claudius to a zaftig Sarah Gelb's Gertrude. Sarah
had thrown herself much too seriously into the Oedipal theory of Hamlet's relationship with his mother, French-kissing twenty-year-old Aaron Epstein during the famous 'Now, mother, what's the matter?' scene in the Queen's closet. 'What have I done that thou dar'st wag thy tongue in noise so rude against me?' young Sarah had demanded, her breasts heaving in the low-cut Elizabethan gown she wore, a crown tilted saucily on her reddish curls.
After the opening night party, Sarah performed the same osculatory acrobatics with Carella, in the back seat of his father's automobile, which led to a somewhat steamy interlude interrupted by two uniformed cops driving past in a radio motor patrol car. Tossing the beams of their torches through both open back windows, surprising the coupling young lovers — Sarah pulling up her panties, Carella zipping up his fly — those two diligent vigilantes caused him to hate all cops for a good long time. But he would never forget Hamlet, oh no, and this now was most definitely Hamlet.
Hal Willis was wondering why the Deaf Man — if indeed the Hamlet quotation had been sent by him — had chosen to bring up the second-act curtain on their dreary Saturday morning routine with perhaps the most famous soliloquy in all literature. Did he feel he had given them information enough about spears and such, and was now ready to move on to another topic? In which case, what might this new topic be, hmmm?
The note had undoubtedly been computer-generated, printed on the same white bond paper he'd used for his previous messages.
'Why Hamlet?' Willis asked.
'Why Macbeth?' Genero insisted.
'Something in Grover Park again?' Brown suggested.
'Like his mischief last time around? Some kind of event in the Cow Pasture?'
'When does Shakespeare on the Green start?' Eileen asked.
'Sometime later this month?'
'Around the fifteenth?'
'Later, I think.'
'But even if it is Shakespeare on the Green . . .'
'Right,' Eileen said.
'Of course,' Meyer agreed.
'. . . it'd be bullshit, anyway.'
'He never tells us what he's really up to.'
'So toss the letter,' Parker suggested, and shrugged.
'He's got to be telling us something,' Carella said.
'Even if it's something misleading?'
'Poetry,' Brown said, shaking his head.
'Shakespearean poetry, no less.'
'Macbeth, no less!' Genero said, agreeing.
MELISSA CALCULATED THAT of the thirty-five large Adam was allotting for operating expenses, Carter was costing her ten, and the various messengers would cost her another, say, two, three thou, depending on how far upward any of them negotiated the basic hundred-dollar delivery fee. That would leave her with a cool profit of, say, twenty thousand.
She had already given Carter three as the down payment for his work, and had paid the twelve o'clock delivery boy a hundred. Because the girl looked so neat and clean and innocent and all, Melissa had given two hundred to the four o'clock messenger Ame had sent; she wondered where the hell in Diamondback he'd found somebody who resembled a college girl. So out of the five K
Adam had laid on her rhis morning, she now had something like sixteen hundred left, after cab fares and drinks and coffees and such while she'd waited for the messengers to show up first at the Lucky Diamond and then at the Hotel Majestic lounge, the separate venues (she liked that word) she'd chosen for their meeting places.
Now what she could have done was take that sixteen hundred and buy herself some goodies with it, including the lingerie Adam had suggested, but she figured a more profitable investment would be a gift for Adam himself. She decided she'd look for a cashmere robe for him; a nice black cashmere robe would put him in a good mood, his blond hair and all.
But then, because at the back of her mind she still had the feeling that one day he might shoot her dead if he became dissatisfied with one thing or another . . .
. . . and since she was already uptown here where she knew most of the criminal element from the days when she was either on her back or her knees, working either day or night to fill the coffers, whatever they were, of her erstwhile representative, Ambrose Carter . . .
. . . she decided to visit a man named Blake Fuller, who sold her a neat little Kahr PM 9, which at only 16.9 ounces empty and measuring only four by five-and-a-half inches overall, would fit nicely into her purse, just in case push came to shove later on down the line.
Only cost her five bills, too, which Fuller advised her was a bargain.
That left eleven hundred for the robe.
Thinking she'd done a good day's work so far, she grabbed a taxi and headed for the big department stores midtown.
Along about then, the cute little college girl lookalike
was delivering the Deaf Man's third and final note of the day.
THE NOTE READ:
Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes And beat our watch, and rob our passengers.
'At least he spelled everything right this time,' Genero said. 'Didn't he?'
Carella was already at his computer, looking for RhymeZone Shakespeare Search.
An arrow again,' Eileen said, just as Carella typed in 'as stand in narrow lanes.' 'Buried in the word narrow.'
'First spears, now arrows,' Kling said.
'Arrows all day long.'
'King Richard II, Act Five, Scene Three,' Carella read from
the screen.
'First The Tempest, then Hamlet, and now Richard II,'
Willis said.
Any importance to these plays he's choosing?' Hawes asked. He was being very careful not to get his open-toed boot stepped on by any of the detectives milling around
Carella's desk.
'He's just choosing them at random,' Parker said. 'It's
all total bullshit.'
'I don't think so,' Carella said. 'First off, he's telling us it's going to happen on our watch. He's going to "beat our watch.'"
'That's very clever,' Genero said.
'Thanks,' Carella said.
'I meant him. It's very clever of him to have found that
reference.'
'He's going to rob our passengers,' Eileen said.
'We don't have any passengers,' Parker said.
'It's something to do with passengers,' she insisted.
'A train?'
'An airplane?'
A boat?'
'Oh, Jesus, not another boat.'
'Not another rock star, please!'
'Who stands in narrow lanes?' Hawes asked.
'Hookers,' Parker said at once.
This he knew for sure.
PARKER SUGGESTED THAT he should be the one who interrogated the girl because he was older and therefore more avuncular than either Hawes, Willis, Genero, or Kling, and perhaps younger but more experienced than Carella, which he wasn't; Carella had been a cop longer than Parker had, and Carella had just turned forty whereas Parker was forty-two.
In any case, because the police department was at best a sexist organization and Lieutenant Byrnes was still clinging to the notion that Eileen Burke could bring a woman's so-called intuition to this case, she was the one chosen to speak to Alison Kane that Saturday afternoon.
'So where'd you get that letter, Alison?' she asked.
Chummy sort of dormy school-girl approach.
'In the lounge at the Hotel Majestic'
'Is it nice there? I've never been there.'
'Very nice, yes,' Alison said.
She was perhaps twenty-four, twenty-five years old, some five-six or -seven, slender and curvy but not too buxom. Wearing a not-too-short dark green skirt, with a paler green twin sweater set, crew neck and buttoned