Hark!

WHO'S IT, ETC?

A DARN SOFT GIRL?

O, THERE'S A HOT HINT!

'Okay, the darn soft girl is the female stiff we caught. That's obvious.'

'Then why's he asking us who it is?' Carella asked.

He was driving. Meyer was riding shotgun.

'Cause he's a madman,' Meyer said. 'Lunatics don't behave like normal people.'

'He asks us who it is, etcetera, etcetera, and so on, and

then he tells us that's a hot hint} Right after he's already told us the vic is a darn soft girl who we already know is Gloria Stanford? I don't get it, Meyer, I really don't.'

'He's confessing, is all. He wants us to catch him, is all. It's like that nut years ago who wrote in lipstick on the mirror, whatever his name was.'

'Here? One of our cases?'

'No, Chicago. Catch me before I kill more. Whatever it was he wrote on the mirror.'

'That's what he wrote?'

'He wanted them to stop him.'

'But this guy doesn't want us to stop him. He doesn't say

"Stop me!'"

'"Catch me" was what he said. Heirens, that was his name. William Heirens. The guy in Chicago.'

'Our guy says I killed this girl and I'm giving you a hint who she is, that's what he says in his note.'

'In his first note. What about the other two?'

A copy of the second was on Meyer's lap.

A WET CORPUS? CORN, ETC?

'Same thing. He's telling us to pay attention here. I killed this woman, her nice white blouse is all covered with blood . . .'

'Where does it say that?'

'Metaphorically. A wet corpus. A bloody body. Is what he's saying. Do your usual corny thing, he's saying.'

'And the third note?'

Carella glanced at the copy:

BRASS HUNT? CELLAR?

'I don't know,' he said.

'I mean, she was killed in her own bedroom. What's he talking about, a cellar?'

'I don't know. The techs found spent cartridge casings, does he mean brass in that way?'

'You're thinking, like, a hunt for brass shell casings?'

'Yes, but we already ..."

'Like he's telling us we'll find shell casings cause the murder gun was an automatic?'

'But we already know that. Ballistics already told us it was a forty-five.'

'So he's telling us again.'

'Why?'

'Because he thinks he's smarter than we are. We don't know who the body is, we're totally lost, we're in the cellar. He's giving us all these hints, but we're just plain stupid. Is what he's saying.'

'Maybe,' Carella said.

'It's the next driveway,' Meyer said. 'Where it says "Main Entrance.'"

You think he may have tossed the weapon in the basement?' Carella asked. 'On his way out of the building?'

'I don't think so,' Meyer said. 'But we can ask Mobile to check again.'

'If not, why's he pointing us to the cellar?' Carella asked, and shook his head, and pulled the police sedan into Boniface's parking lot.

DETECTIVE/SECOND GRADE Cotton Hawes was enormously pissed off. Sitting up in bed, wearing a blue-striped hospital gown, a shaft of sunlight streaming through the bedside window to highlight the white

streak in his otherwise red hair, he fumed and snorted about having been cold-cocked by a rooftop sniper, and having to spend the day here . . .

'For observation!' he shouted. 'What do they have to observe? They've already cleaned and dressed the wound, what the hell do they have to observe?'

'You got shot, Cotton,' Carella observed.

'In broad daylight!' Hawes said. 'Can you imagine someone shooting a cop in broad daylight?'

Meyer could imagine it.

'What was he thinking?' Hawes said. 'A cop? Broad daylight? A good thing Sharyn yanked me out of Fluke's. They wanted to amputate the foot!'

'You didn't happen to see the shooter, did you?' Carella asked.

'I was too busy ducking. He was on one of the rooftops across the way.'

'The Eight-Six is already up there looking around,'

Meyer said.

'Silk Stocking precinct.'

'Who's on it, do you know?'

'Kling didn't say.'

'Not often the Eight-Six gets a sniper.'

'Tell them one of the slugs is in the wall to the left of the entrance doors.'

'Guy's probably in China by now.'

'Maybe not,' Hawes said, and looked suddenly concerned. 'This guy was serious. I got the distinct impression he wanted me dead.'

Carella looked at him.

Yeah,' Hawes said, and nodded. 'And also, I have to wear like this open kind of boot for the next little while.'

THE NEXT NOTE arrived ten minutes after Meyer and Carella got back to the squadroom. Yet another courier service. Same phony Adam Fen return name, same nonexistent Abernathy Station P.O. Box 4884. The note read:

PORN DIET? HELL, A TIT ON MOM!

'Party's getting rough,' Meyer said.

Carella merely nodded.

'I think he's beginning to lose it,' Meyer said. 'I mean, this is pure bullshit, is what this is here.'

You know what I think?'

'No, what do you think?' Meyer asked. He sounded angry. Not as angry as Hawes had sounded half an hour ago, but angry enough for a man who hadn't been shot in the foot.

'I think it's coffee and donuts time.'

THE THURSDAY MORNING meeting wasn't supposed to take place till tomorrow, this still being Wednesday and all, but when Carella laid out the five notes for Lieutenant Byrnes to study, he agreed that the changing of the guard this afternoon might be a good time to summon together the great minds of the 87th Squad. Coffee and donuts were de rigueur, paid for from the squad's slush fund, and arranged on top of the long bookcase on one wall of the lieutenant's corner office.

The team being relieved was Meyer, Kling, and Carella; Hawes would have been there, too, but he was in the hospital, still fuming. The relieving team was Willis, Parker, Genero, and Brown. Andy Parker, relieving five minutes late, was nonetheless the first to pour himself a

cup of coffee and heap three donuts onto his paper plate. 'So what've we got here?' Byrnes asked. 'A nut?' He sounded annoyed. White-haired and blue-eyed, the map of Ireland all over his craggy phizz, he sat behind his desk in his corner-windowed office, glaring out at his men as though challenging them to tell him this nut was as sane as any of them.

'Beginning to ramble a bit, right,' Meyer agreed, and

rolled his eyes.

'Whose mom is he referring to?' Parker asked. Naturally, his interest would have been drawn to mention of a porn diet and a tit, any tit. He had not shaved this morning. Upon awakening, he'd told himself he would shave this afternoon, before coming in. But it was now a little past four P.M., and he still hadn't shaved, and he wouldn't be relieved until midnight, so he probably wouldn't shave at all today. But such were the vagaries of police work; one never knew when he might be called upon to impersonate some kind of shabby street person.

'Who cares whose mom?' Meyer said. 'Mom's tit is where he starts to lose it.' 'And us,' Carella added.

'When were you not lost?' Byrnes wanted to know. 'Well, at first we thought he was referring to the homicide we caught yesterday morning.  In his first

note . . .'

'Let me see that again,' Byrnes said, and extended his hand across his desk. Carella gave him the note in its plastic shield:

WHO'S IT, ETC?

A DARN SOFT GIRL?

O, THERE'S A HOT HINT!

And this arrived when?' Byrnes asked.

Around this time yesterday afternoon.'

'So you figured the "darn soft girl" was . . . what was the vic's name again?'

'Gloria Stanford. Yes.'

And that was the perp's hot hint, is that what you figured? That Gloria Stanford was the darn soft girl?'

'Yes. Well. . . yes.'

'Some hint,' Parker remarked.

'He spelled oh wrong,' Genero said, sure of it now. He'd looked it up in the dictionary last night. At five feet nine inches tall, Genero thought he was very tall. From his father, he had inherited beautiful curly black hair, a strong Neapolitan nose, a sensuous mouth, and soulful brown eyes. From his mother, he had inherited the tall Milanese carriage of all his male cousins and uncles — except for his Uncle Dominick, who was only five-six.