“So who’s with me?” he asked.
No one said a word.
“Okay, the meeting’s over,” Henry said.
It never occurred to him that wanting to carve his name all over the world had something to do with being only five feet six inches tall.
SHE WAS RIGHT, of course, there had to be another one.
He had planned to stop at three, but as usual she was right. You stop at three, she said, they’ll zero in right away. Why would anyone do three and then suddenly quit? This isn’t like deciding to retire after you’ve won three Academy Awards or spent three years on the best-seller list. This is killing graffiti writers, don’t forget. That’s your mission , remember? And a person with a mission doesn’t stop after the third one.
This was in bed last night.
Lying in bed talking about what they would do after the final murder. Her wondering out loud if there should be five, maybe six of them. Lying there in the purple baby-doll nightgown he’d given her for Christmas, no panties under it, one leg straight out, the other bent, lying on her side that way.
“It might be a trade-off,” she said. “You do five or six of them, you run the risk of them zeroing in, anyway. But…”
“You don’t know how scary it is out there,” he said. “Middle of the night.”
“I’m sure it is,” she said. “But you also let them know this is a real mission, you’re not just somebody fooling around out there.”
“Not a dilettante,” he said.
“A dilettante, right. You let them know this is a serious thing with you.”
“Do you see what the papers are calling me?”
“I like that,” she said, and grinned and moved her knee a little, the knee on the bent leg, just moved it slightly to the left.
He got excited just thinking about her. He was excited now, thinking about last night, about her in the short purple nightgown and the way she just sort of carelessly moved her knee back and forth so that the gown sort of fell away from her, exposing her, the grin on her face saying You want some of this, baby? Come take it, sweetheart.
Got excited all over again just thinking about it.
She wanted him to do five of these fucking vandals, he’d do five. Six, he’d do six. A dozen? Name it. Doing them was her idea to begin with. If he had to do a hundred of them, he’d do a hundred. If he could find them.
One o’clock in the morning, the streets were deserted.
It was trying to second-guess them that was difficult. Figuring out where they’d hit next. What he did was drive the car around till he found an area with a lot of graffiti on the walls, figuring this was a happy hunting ground with good buffalo, they’d be back for more, right? Tried to find a pristine wall in a neighborhood flowering with graffiti. Figured the wall would attract them.
Tonight he was midtown.
Not much graffiti down here, but he’d read in today’s paper about a gang scratching their names onto a plate-glass window down here, and he thought Hmm,this is something new, maybe there’s opportunity here.
That was after they’d made love all night long. That purple gown, Jesus. He’d left her early this morning, bought a newspaper in the corner candy store and read it on the taxi ride back to his own place. The newspaper was full of stories about the graffiti killer. One of the accompanying stories was about the jewelry-store hit this past Saturday night, though, big initials scratched into the plate-glass window fronting Hall Avenue, the letters PPWA in the lower right-hand corner, whatever that stood for, the police weren’t speculating. The story said this was a new wrinkle, defacing glass or plastic surfaces.
He’d thought about that in the shower, thought about it while he was putting on fresh clothes, thought about it in the deli around the corner from his apartment, where he had breakfast, thought about it on the subway ride downtown.
Wouldn’t the graffiti killer be attracted to this new development? he wondered.
Nip it in the bud, so to speak?
Show the world he was after anyone vandalizing this city in a serious way?
Show them he was serious?
So he’d driven uptown tonight and circled the blocks looking for anyone who seemed suspicious in any way, hoping to catch anyone writing on a store window, stop him dead in his tracks, blow him away while he was committing the act.
Nothing.
No one.
He’d been too successful, scared off all the punks.
Didn’t want to get out of the car and walk around, this was Silk Stocking territory here, a cruising cop spotted a man alone they’d think he was about to carve up a goddamn shop window. So he just kept cruising. No pattern to the way he drove, drifting down Hall for a few blocks, then turning North toward Detavoner and then driving uptown and turning south again, all the way to Jefferson, watching all the while for someone standing in front of a window doing his thing.
He spotted a man on Jefferson, standing against a window, all right, but he was just taking a leak.
Nature calls, he thought, and smiled in the darkness of the automobile.
Police car up ahead. MS letters on its side. Midtown South.
He made a right turn on the next corner, heading up to Hall again, and then continued across the avenue and on to Detavoner again, Midtown North territory, wouldn’t do to have the same police car spotting him twice in the rearview mirror, now would it?
Uptown again for six block hung a right came down to Hall again, hung a louie, and was approaching the big intersection where the jewelry store had been hit, when across the street he saw a kid with hair like a picket fence standing in front of the window of the bookstore there.
He slowed the car to a crawl.
Slid down the electric window on the passenger side, purred up the street to where the kid was busily scratching away at the plate glass.
The kid turned when he heard the car stopping. Too late.
“Here, kid!” he said, and fired two shots into his head and another into his chest and then he fired a few into the window, too, just for good measure.
WHEN A MAN tells you, quote…
“I run one of the best shelters in this city.”
Unquote.
And he also tells you, quote…
“I run a good shelter.”
Unquote.
And goes on to say, “Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here in my shelter….”
Well, one could possibly forgive an experienced cop for wondering if perhaps the gentleman didth protest too much. Especially when he went on to give you, in fits and starts, other little quotable tidbits like “Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such” and then goes on to say that fifty blankets were stolen during the last quarter of the preceding year and twenty-six stolen so far in the first two months of this year, but “we can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know….”
Wellllll…
Meyer was certain that Harold Laughton would forgive him for marching straight over to the Sixteenth Precinct last Saturday after his visit to the shelter. And then, since he was already there, where he felt comfortable in surroundings very much like those at the old Eight-Seven, and so it shouldn’t be a total waste of time, Meyer asked the desk sergeant to check the activities log for the past several months, just on the off-chance that maybe —listen, who could tell, stranger things had happened—just possibly everything wasn’t quite so kosher at DSS TEMPLE as the protesting Mr. Laughton had claimed.