The first message came fifteen minutes after they'd signed in. It was delivered by a Caucasian drug addict, aged eighteen, nineteen, in there. The sealed envelope was addressed to Carella.
'I thought we were through with this guy,' Parker said.
Apparently not,' Meyer said, and called Carella at home. Carella was already up and having breakfast. The wedding was scheduled for noon.
'Want me to open it?' Meyer asked.
'Be my guest,' Carella said.
There was a single note in the envelope. It read:
GO TO A PRECINT'S SHIT!
'He spelled precinct wrong,' Genero said. 'Didn't he?' Meyer read the note to Carella, misspelling and all. 'He doesn't make spelling mistakes,' Carella said. 'Unless he's quoting Shakespeare.'
'This isn't Shakespeare.' 'What do you think?'
'An anagram,' Carella said. 'He's starting all over again.' 'Or is he just telling us it's going to happen right here,' Meyer said. 'In the Eight-Seven Precinct.' 'Maybe that, too. Let me talk to my son.' 'Huh?' Meyer said.
THE NAME IN the mailbox was Edward Cudahy.
Hawes had not got the address until eight this morning when finally he'd reached Rudy Mancuso, who'd told him Saturday was Eddie's day off, and wanted to know why Hawes wanted to talk to him again. Hawes told him he needed to confirm some information he'd got from Cudahy's partner, Franklin Hopper. A total fabrication, but Mancuso gave him the address.
The apartment number was 3B.
There was no lock on the glass-paneled inner lobby door. Hawes opened it and found himself facing a steep flight of stairs. A narrow corridor to the right of the steps led to an apartment at the end of the ground-floor level. He began climbing. It was now eight-thirty in the morning, and the building was heavy with sleep. On the third floor, he took his gun from its shoulder holster.
There was no sound from behind the door to apartment 3B. He listened a moment longer, and then tapped at the door. Waited. A voice called, 'Yes?'
'Federal Express,' he said.
'Fed . . . ?'
A puzzled silence.
He waited.
The door came open some four inches, held by a night chain. Eddie Cudahy's face appeared in the narrow open-
ing. His eyes widened the moment he recognized Hawes. The door was already starting to close again. In that single instant, Hawes had to decide whether or not to kick it in. He was not armed with a No-Knock warrant, but the guy in there might have fired a rifle at him on two separate occasions. Possibly blow the later court case, or lose the perp now? Which? Choose!
His flat-footed kick snapped the chain and sent the door flying inward. He followed it into the room, saw Cudahy running for the window and the fire escape beyond, saw too in those next immediate sudden seconds that the walls of the single room were covered with photographs of Honey Blair.
'Stop or I'll shoot!' he shouted, and was grateful when Cudahy stopped and put his hands up over his head.
IT'S EASY TO find things when you're a kid.
It's even easy to find 1,253 anagrams for the words GO TO A PRECINT'S SHIT! because that's exactly how many there were on the internet site Young Sherlock Holmes called up for his big detective father. Scattered among those that made no sense at all were some actual phrases or sentences that seemed to mean something:
GO STOP A CRETIN!
'He's calling himself a cretin,' Mark said. 'That, he ain't,' Carella said.
NICE GROT STOP!
'What's a grot?' Carella asked.
'British slang,' Mark said. 'Brit kid in my class says
that all the time. "I feel a bit grot today.'" 'So what's a "grot stop"?' 'A break when you're not feeling too good?' 'I'm not feeling too good right this minute,' Carella
said, and rolled his eyes.
GRITS TO A PONCE!
'What's grits?' Mark asked.
'Some kind of Southern dish,' Carella said. 'Made out of corn, I think. What's a ponce?'
'That's British, too,' Mark said. 'It's somebody who's gay.' He turned from the computer. 'Is this guy gay? The one who's sending you these notes?'
'I don't think so.'
A NEGRO COP TITS!
'Well, hello,' Mark said, and grinned.
But the anagram the Deaf Man seemed to be indicating, the words that seemed best to fit GO TO A PRE-CINT'S SHIT!, was all the way down near the end of the list:
PROGNOSTICATE THIS!
He was asking them to predict.
He was asking them to forecast exactly what precinct shit would go down in which precinct on the twelfth day of June.
Today.
And she goes down at twelve. GO TO A PRECINT'S SHIT!
PROGNOSTICATE THIS!
But when on the twelfth? And where?
If not the library or the concert hall, then where in their very own precinct?
HAWES MARCHED HIS prisoner into the stationhouse moments after the second note that day was delivered. The clock over the muster desk read 9:10 a.m.
'You want to take this upstairs?' Murchison asked him, and handed the envelope across the desk. He was not wearing gloves. They had given up wearing gloves when handling these envelopes because they knew there'd be no prints on them except those left by the delivering junkies.
On the second floor, Hawes dropped the envelope on Meyer's desk, and then said, 'This way, Eddie.'
'Who's that?' Meyer asked.
'Guy tried to kill me,' Hawes said.
'He's dreaming,' Cudahy told Meyer, but he accompanied Hawes down the hall toward the Interrogation Room.
Meyer shrugged and opened the envelope.
One, two, three: time, time!
'What's that supposed to mean?' Parker asked.
'It means three o'clock,' Meyer said, 'what do you think it means? One, two, three, bingo! He's giving us the exact time, the time\ It's either the folio or the violinist.'
'Or something else at one, is a possibility,' Parker said. 'Or even something at two.'
'I thought it was supposed to be precinct shit now,' Genero said.
He had gone outside to look at the word lettered across the top of the entrance doors, and sure enough the Deaf Man had spelled it wrong.
'Maybe it is something in the precinct,' Parker said. 'At one or two o'clock.'
Actually, he didn't care where it was or when it was. All he knew was that at four o'clock he'd go home.
Meyer was already on the phone with Carella, reading him the note.
'What happened to the anagrams?' Carella asked.
'This is what we got,' Meyer said.
'Call me if anything else comes in,' Carella told him. 'I'll be here till eleven.'
'I SAW YOU the first time you came up to the station,' Cudahy told Hawes. He had decided that maybe it was best to cooperate here. Maybe if he explained his side of it, Hawes would understand. On television, there were sympathetic cops who understood a person's side of it.
'This was after she taped the Valparaiso kidnapping last month,' Cudahy said. 'I spotted you going into the screening room together to watch the tape. The screening room is right down the hall from Transportation. I saw you when you went in, and I saw you when you came out together. I knew something was going on right then. Knew it right off. Figured I had to stop it.'
'Why?' Hawes asked.
'Why? Because I have an investment in her.'
'Oh, you do, huh? What kind of investment, if you don't mind?'
An emotional investment. I watched her from the very
beginning, from when she first came to the station from Iowa, when they had her doing these remotes from godforsaken places all over the city, in weather you could freeze yourself, those little skirts she wears, in rainstorms, snowstorms, even places that were dangerous, drug dealers, hookers, they sent her everywhere! And I was watching her. So I wasn't about to let somebody step in and take my place, not after all those years of her paying her dues.'