“Musta caught him before he got started,” Monroe said.
“The Herrera kid was writing when the killer done him,” Parker said, picking up on Kling’s thought.
“Don’t mean anything,” Monoghan assured him. “You get these guys doing missionary murders, they don’t necessarily follow any set M.O.”
“Missionarymurders?” Monroe said.
“Yeah, these guys on a mission.”
“I thought you meant the fuckin stiff was a priest or something.”
“a quest ,” Monoghan said. “Shooting all the fuckin writers in the city, is what I mean. Like a quest . Like the fuckin impossible dream , you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure.”
“A man on a mission , a missionary murderer, he doesn’t need an M.O., he just shoots and sprays, or sprays and shoots, there doesn’t have to be a pattern.”
“Even so, Parker said, and shrugged. “The Herrera kid was doing his fuckin masterpiece when the killer done him.”
“Don’t mean a thing,” Monoghan said.
“Cause of death is gunshot wounds to the head,” the M.E. said, and lighted another cigarette.
THE PERSON SITTING with the Deaf Man was called Florry Paradise. This was the name he’d used when he was the lead guitarist in a rock group called the Meteors, not too prophetic in that it never did achieve any measure of fame, its streak across the stratosphere being confined to the single gig it played in the local high school gymnasium. The rest of the time, the group spent rehearsing in their parents’ garages. This was when Florry was eighteen years old and there was a rock group rehearsing in every garage in America.
Florry’s legacy from those days was threefold.
He had always hated the name Fiorello Paradiso, which he felt had been foisted upon him at birth rather than offered to him as a matter of choice. Everything in America these days was either pro-choice or no-choice and it seemed to him that a person should at least have the right to choose his own fucking name , which he’d done when he was eighteen and which, at the age of forty-two, he still had: Florry Paradise. That was the first thing he’d inherited from those joyous days with the unmeteoric Meteors.
The second thing was a little bit of deafness primarily due to keeping the volume controls up so loud when the group was practicing and due secondarily to listening to rock stations on the radio with the volume turned up to the same decibels. Florry shared this same slight loss of hearing with anyone who back then had learned three guitar chords and talked their parents into buying them twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of amplifiers and speakers for which they needed only one other cord (his father was fond of saying) to plug into an electric outlet, har, har, har, Dad.
But all this fiddling around with expensive and very heavy-to-carry paraphernalia had inadvertently provided the former Fiorello Paradiso with a vast knowledge of electronics that years later enabled him to open and operate a shop specializing in sound systems and equipment. The name of Florry’s business, of which he was the president and sole stockholder, was Meteor Sound Systems, Inc., a nod in the direction of the old group, which was also responsible for him having met his wife, though back then she wore granny gowns and beads and no bra and flowers in her hair. Maggie Paradise used to be the band’s female vocalist, her name back then being Margaret Riley, Irish to the core and fair as a summer morn. He did not, however, think of her as another Meteor legacy; three of those were quite enough, and besides she was now fat and forty and Florry was screwing the firm’s bookkeeper, whose name was Clarice like the woman in Silence of the Lambs , the movie, only with bigger tits, usually after hours while the speakers in his shop blared the Stones’ “Lady Jane.” Florry was fascinated by anything that transported or amplified or modified or enhanced sound, the Deaf Man’s hearing aid included. He was thinking of getting one for himself, though he would never in the world admit to anyone—not even his wife and especially not Clarice—that he sometimes couldn’t hear exactly everything a person was saying.
He heard everything the Deaf Man was saying now; he guessed the acoustics in this apartment were exceptionally fine. The apartment itself was on Grover Avenue, overlooking Grover Park, which was where the concert would be taking place. The Deaf Man had given Florry a map of the park, and he referred to that now as he listened to what would be needed from him, looking up at the Deaf Man’s lips every now and then because no matter how good the acoustics were, you could sometimes miss a word or two, hmm?
“Do you see the largest patch of blue on the map?” the Deaf Man asked.
“Yes, I do,” Florry said.
“It’s called the Swan. It’s an artificial lake.”
“I see that,” he said, and looked at the map again.
“Just below that is an area tinted green. That’s called the Cow Pasture. It’s the largest grassy area in the park.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where the concert will be held.”
“That’s where they do all the outdoor theater stuff, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful spot. The lake in the background to the east, the buildings lining Grover Avenue to the north—well, you can see it from here,” he said, and walked to the wide expanse of windows lining the southern wall of the apartment. Florry went to stand beside him. Both men looked down the twelve stories to the park across the street.
There was the faintest hint of green on trees moving into timid leaf, but nothing was flowering yet, neither forsythia nor cornelian cherry shrub added touches of yellow or pink to the panorama below. Yet even in the rain, at three in the afternoon, there was a simple beauty to the starkness of naked trees against a gray and solemn sky. The lawn itself looked patchy and brown from above, but if the intermittent rains persisted, it would be green enough in time for the concert. And, of course, the lake beyond looked magnificent from this viewpoint, a dark patch of blue spreading amoebalike between the Cow Pasture to the west and the tennis courts to the east. Both men looked down appreciatively. There were still some things that could be enjoyed in this city—if only from a distance.
“They’re estimating a crowd of some two hundred thousand people,” the Deaf Man said.
“Be quite a bash,” Florry said. “Did you go to Woodstock that time?”
“No,” the Deaf Man said.
“August of 1969? You didn’t go that time? Man, you really missed something. There were four hundred thousand people there that time. What a thing that was! I got laid eight times in two days!Eight different girls! What a thing!”
“This won’t be like that,” the Deaf Man said.
“Oh, i know . Nothing could be like Woodstock. Ever again. Nothing.”
The Deaf Man suddenly wondered if he’d chosen the wrong man for the job. Would an anachronistic hippie be capable of shouldering such a huge responsibility? And yet, he had come highly recommended, a man who possessed not only the skills the Deaf Man required but who, in addition, held the quaint precepts of the law in rightful contempt. According to what the Deaf Man had learned, Florry—on thirteen separate occasions and for compensation far more generous than what Meteor Sound Systems, Inc. could ever provide—had been instrumental , one might say, in circumventing some rather elaborate alarm systems, thereby enabling easy access to the people who’d hired him. Since all of these burglaries—a round baker’s dozen, so to speak—had been committed in dwellings during the nighttime, this made Florry an accomplice to precisely thirteen committed Burg Ones, for which he could have been sentenced to a good long time in a state penitentiary if ever he were caught and convicted.