It was the city’s first shooting that day.
Another one would take place fifteen hours later.
3.
“WE WERE BEGINNING to wonder when you’d put in an appearance,” Parker said.
“Sure, sure,” Monoghan said.
“Sure,” Monroe said.
“This is now getting to be worthy of Homicide’s close attention, am I right?” Parker said. “A serial sprayer?”
“Sure, sure,” Monoghan said.
“Which is why we’re graced with your company, am I right?” Parker said, and winked at Kling.
“Yeah, bullshit,” Monroe said.
He and his partner were dressed identically, and they now waved away Parker’s wise-ass remarks in unison. As the forecasters had promised, it had begun raining a few hours ago. Now, at seven in the morning, the four men were standing—or trying to stand—under an overhang that might have accommodated only two of them if neither was as wide of girth as the two Homicide cops. Monoghan and Monroe were wearing belted black trench coats, in keeping with an unwritten rule they had formulated for themselves, which dictated that they dress in basic black since they considered the color, or lack of it, fashionable. In truth, they sometimes did look dapper, though not as dapper as they thought , and certainly not today, standing under the dripping overhang in wet and rumpled raincoats. They looked, in fact, like some dark stout seabirds that had just swum ashore in a foul climate somewhere. Both of them kept trying to shoulder Parker and Kling out from under the slim protection of the overhang and onto the sidewalk where the dead man lay all covered with paint and blood.
The rain was relentless.
It washed away the blood, but not the paint.
The dead man had been painted in two metallic tones, gold and silver all over his face and his hands and the front of his T-shirt and barn jacket. He looked like a robot whose wires had been pulled, lying there on the sidewalk all limp and gilded in front of the graffiti-sprayed wall.
“Those are designer jeans he’s wearing,” Monoghan said.
He himself wasn’t feeling quite as sartorially elegant as he preferred looking. That was because he hadn’t wanted to get his black bowler all wet in the rain and had left it home in his closet. Whenever he wore his bowler, Monoghan felt very British. Whenever he and Monroe were out together in their identical bowlers, they called each other “Inspector.” Wot say you, Inspector Monroe?Cheer -ee-oh, Inspector Monoghan. And so on. Actually, they were not inspectors, but mere detectives/first grade—as distinguished from first-grade detectives. No one in the police department—or in his right mind, for that matter—would have called either of them a first-grade detective. In fact, their roles were merely supervisory at best, intrusive at worst.
Monoghan and Monroe frequently showed up at homicide crime scenes even though they never actively investigated a case; that was the job of whichever precinct detectives happened to catch the squeal. Later on, you sent Homicide the paperwork and they’d make a few calls to see how you were doing, but most of the time they stayed out of your way unless you were taking forever to come up with a lead on a case that was making newspaper and television headlines. The murder of the first graffiti artist had captured the attention of the television newscasters because it had been a very pictorial crime, what with all the red letters scribbled on the wall behind the Herrera kid. Also, everybody in this city hated graffiti writers, and was silently cheering on the killer, hoping he would wipe out every fucking one of them. So Monoghan and Monroe had decided to drop in this morning, see how things were coming along now that they had a second victim painted all silver and gold and bleeding from three holes in his forehead.
“How old you think he is?” Monroe asked.
“Thirty-five, forty,” Monoghan said.
“I didn’t think they came that old, these writers,” Monroe said.
“They come in all ages,” Parker said. “The one the other night was only eighteen.”
“This one looks a lot older than that,” Monroe said.
“You know how old Paul McCartney is?” Monoghan asked.
“What’s that got to do with graffiti writers?” Monroe said.
“I’m saying graffiti writers came along around the same time the Beatles did. So you get some of these veteran writers, they could be the same age as McCartney.”
“What’s McCartney? Forty, in there?”
“He’s got to be forty-five, forty-six years old, you could have graffiti writers that old, too,” Monoghan said. “Is what I’m saying.”
“Fifty,” Kling said.
“Fifty? Who?”
“At least.”
“McCartney? Come on. Then how old is Ringo?”
“Even older,” Kling said.
“Come on, willya?” Monoghan said.
“Anyway, this guy don’t look no fifty,” Monroe said.
“What I’m saying, he could be McCartney’s age, though McCartney’s no fifty, that’s for sure,” Monoghan said, and glared at Kling.
“Thirty-five, forty is what this guy looks,” Monroe said, also shooting Kling a dirty look. “Which, you ask me, is old for one of these punks.”
The assistant medical examiner arrived some five minutes later. He was smoking a cigarette when he got out of his car. He coughed, spit up some phlegm, shook his head, ground out the cigarette under the sole of his shoe, and went over to where the men were trying to keep out of the rain, standing against the graffiti-covered wall under the overhang.
“Anybody touch him?” the M.E. asked.
“Yeah, we had our hands all over him,” Monroe said.
“Don’t laugh,” the M.E. said. “I had one last month, the blues went through his pockets before anybody else got there.”
“You had another writer last month ?”
“No, just this person got stabbed.”
“This one got shot,” Monoghan said.
“Who’s the doctor here?” the M.E. said testily, and lighted another cigarette. Coughing, he knelt beside the painted body on the sidewalk and began his examination.
The rain kept falling.
“Rain makes some people cranky,” Monroe observed.
The M.E. didn’t even look up.
“You think this guy’s gonna go through every writer in the city?” Monoghan asked.
“We don’t catch him, he will,” Monroe said.
“What you mean we , Kimosabe?” Parker said, and Monroe looked at him blankly.
Kling was staring at the falling rain.
“Did a nice job on his face, didn’t he?” Monroe said.
“You mean the holes in it, or the artwork?”
“Both. He blended the artwork nice around the holes, you notice? Made like gold and silver circles coming out from the holes. Like ripples? In a river? When you throw in a stone? That’s hard to do with a spray can.”
“The Stones are even older,” Monoghan said, reminded again. “Mick Jagger must be sixty, sixty-five.”
“What was he spraying?” Kling asked suddenly.
“What do you think he was spraying? The face, the chest, the hands, the guy’s clothes. He went crazy with the two spray cans.”
“I mean the writer.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t see any gold or silver paint on the wall here.”
They all looked at the wall.
The graffiti artists had been busy here forever. Markers and tags fought for space with your color-blended burners, and your two-tone and even 3-D pieces. But Kling was right. There wasn’t any gold or silver paint on the wall. Nor did there seem to be any fresh paint at all.