That was Halloween, Carella thought.
Today...
Well, today, for example, two kids had broken the plate-glass window of a bakery shop on Ainsley Avenue because the owner had refused to give them money for UNICEF. They had gone into the shop carrying their orange-and-black milk containers with the UNICEF wrappers and asked the man to contribute to the relief fund and the man had said, Get the hell out of my shop. So they had got out of his shop and hurled two bricks through his window besides, executing the trick because they’d been refused the treat. Now, surely there was something insane about smashing a man’s window because he refused to contribute to the welfare of starving children all over the world, something almost as insane as fighting wars to preserve peace. It seemed to Carella that a man accused of assault could not reasonably offer as his defense the statement, “I punched him in the nose because I wanted to prevent a fight.” This was no more reasonable than smashing a plate-glass window costing $500 merely because some bastard had refused to contribute a nickel to a worthwhile cause. With this sort of reasoning afoot, even on Halloween when all reason was distorted, the lunatics were well on their way to taking over the asylum.
Other “mischievous” happenings that day seemed to confirm the uprising of the inmates.
Six boys, inspired by the thought that this was Halloween — and anything goes on Halloween because boys will be boys and what’s wrong with letting go once a year — six boys dragged a twelve-year-old girl into an alley and raped her one after the other because she was carrying a shopping bag full of Halloween treats that she refused to share with them. The boys ranged in age from sixteen to eighteen, and none of them would have given a seventh-grade girl a glance had this not been the day of the year when the banshees were supposed to howl.
Over on South Eleventh, a high-school senior shoved her classmate off the roof because she insisted on chalking “Irene Loves Pete” in a heart on the roof’s brick parapet. Irene explained to the police that she did not love Pete, she really loved Joey, and she had pleaded with her friend not to write such libel on the wall, but her friend had insisted, so she had shoved her over the low parapet. She could not explain why she had shouted, “Halloween!” as her friend plummeted the seven stories to the pavement below.
On Culver Avenue, a grownup man chasing a fifteen-year-old boy who had sprayed shaving cream onto the windows of his parked automobile only happened to knock down a woman wheeling a baby carriage, which baby carriage and its four-month-old occupant rolled into the street to be squashed flat by an oncoming milk truck. The man told the police that he was of course sorry about the accident, but why didn’t they do something about all this rampant vandalism?
On The Stem, near Twentieth Street, two enterprising professionals entered a delicatessen wearing rubber Halloween masks, shouted “Trick or treat!” at the owner of the place, and promptly stuck loaded revolvers across the counter. The owner, imbued with a bit of Halloween spirit himself, threw a pound and a half of pastrami at one of the men and then stabbed the other with a very sharp carving knife that entered his throat just where the rubber mask ended. The second man, his mask and his coat dripping very good lean pastrami, fired at the owner and left him dead, and a kid running past the shop did a little excited jig in the doorway and chanted, “Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.”
It was a great little holiday, Halloween.
Cops just loved it.
Nevertheless, at 6:00 on Allhallows Even, after a tiring day of inactivity on the Leyden case and all sorts of activity in the streets preventing and discouraging mayhem, not to mention arresting people here and there who had allowed their celebrating to become a bit too uninhibited, Steve Carella watched his wife as she painted the face of his son, and prepared to go out into the streets once again.
“I got a great idea, Pop,” Mark said. He was the oldest of the twins by seven minutes, which gave him seniority as well as masculine superiority over his sister April. It was Mark who generally had the “great” ideas and April who invariably put him down with something sweet like, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard in my life.”
“What’s your idea?” Carella asked.
“I think we should go to Mr. Oberman’s house—”
“Oberman the Creep,” April observed.
“That’s not a nice way to talk about an old man,” Carella said.
“But he is a creep, Daddy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Carella said.
“Anyway,” Mark said, “I think we should go to his house, and April and me’ll knock on the door—”
“April and I,” Carella corrected.
Mark looked up at his father, wondering whether he should try to joke about, “Oh, are you going to knock on the door, too?” and decided in his infinite wisdom that he’d better not risk it, even though it had gone over pretty well once with Miss Rutherford, who taught the third grade at the local elementary school. “April and I,” he said, and smiled at his father angelically, and then beamed at his mother as she continued drawing a black mustache under his nose, and then said, “April and I will knock on Mr. Oberman’s door and yell, ‘Trick or treat,’ and when he opens it, you stick your gun in his face.”
Teddy, who was watching her son’s lips as he talked, shook her head violently, and looked up at her husband. Before Carella could answer, April said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard in my life,” her life to date having consisted of eight years, four months, and ten days.
Mark said, “Shut up, who asked you?” and Teddy scowled at her husband, warning him to put an end to this before it got out of hand, and then grasping both of Mark’s shoulders to turn him toward her so that she could properly finish the job. She was using felt-tipped watercolor markers, and whereas her makeup artistry might not have passed muster with the National Repertory, it looked pretty good to her from where she knelt beside her son. She had enlarged and angled Mark’s eyebrows with the black marker, and had then used green eye shadow on his lids, and the black marker again to draw a sinister, drooping mustache and an evil-looking goatee. Her son was supposed to be Dracula, who did not have either a mustache or a beard, but she felt he looked far too cherubic without them, and had taken artistic license with the Bram Stoker character. She was now using the bright-red marker to paint in a few drops of blood under his lip, and since her back was to Carella, she did not hear him admonish Mark first for his idiotic idea about brandishing a real gun, and next for yelling at his sister. She dotted a last tiny dribble of blood below the other three larger drops, and then rose and stepped back to admire her handiwork.
“How do I look?” Mark asked Carella.
“Horrible.”
“Great!” Mark shouted, and ran out of the room to search for a mirror.