Free The Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain Page B

right, sir,” Carella said. “Why don’t you go get your engines started?”
    Reeves hesitated a moment longer, as if there were something more he wished to say. Then he merely nodded and went off toward the pilot house.
    â€œYou don’t plan to talk to all hundred and twelve of these people, do you?” McIntosh asked.
    Carella was wondering the same thing.
    Â 
    EVERYBODY wanted to go home.
    What had started out as a nice party on a nice boat on a nice river had turned into some kind of Fellini nightmare with people in masks running around doing violence to the same pretty young girl.
    Nobody seemed to agree on exactly quite what had happened.
    Given that eye witnesses were notoriously unreliable, this bunch seemed to be more untrustworthy than most. Perhaps they’d been plied with too much alcohol before the occurrence (though the promised champagne toast had to be forsaken, given the unforeseen circumstances) or perhaps the lighting had been too dim or the power of suggestion too strong. Tamar and the young black dancer had, after all, been engaged in some pretty realistic although terpsichorean violence, and all at once two other black guys…
    The witnesses were all convinced the kidnappers were black…
    â€¦came marching down the grand stairway there, brandishing machine guns, and yelling for nobody to fucking move.
    Even Jonah Wills, Tamar’s dance partner, was convinced the two guys who’d kidnapped her were black. Perhaps this was because they were both entirely dressed in black: black denims and black sweatshirts and black running shoes and black leather gloves. Their AK-47s were black, too, which might have contributed to the overall impression of black power. Then, too, Jonah himself was black—although this wasn’t an accurate description of his color, which was more closely related to the mahogany of the stair rail than the color of anthracite, say, or obsidian—and his presence on the dance floor, muscles rippling and gleaming, wearing a mask quite different from the Hussein and Arafat masks the intruders were wearing, might also have contributed to the consensus of opinion that there were now three black men molesting this poor blond white girl wearing hardly anything at all.
    Or perhaps the words “Don’t nobody fucking move!” hadn’t sounded ofay enough to this largely white crowd, although in truth the black-to-white ratio here tonight was larger than you’d find at similar glittery events hither and yon throughout this fair city. Then again, this was the music industry here.
    Even so, everybody wanted to go home.
    Having inherited this cockamamie case from Parker—who was already nursing his third beer in a bar around the corner from his apartment, and chatting up a blonde he didn’t realize was a hooker—Carella and Hawes were reluctant to let anyone go just yet, not until they had a clearer picture of just what the hell had happened here. They were mindful of the fact that the FBI might be coming in behind them, and they didn’t want to hear the usual crap the Feebs laid down about “inefficient and insufficient investigation at the local level.” So they went through the facts—or the perceived facts—again and again until they were able to piece together a more or less scenario-by-committee, not unlike many of the movies one saw these days, where a hundred and twelve writers shared screen credit, except that it was by now almost two in the morning.
    The party guests unanimously understood that the black guy in the mask that kept changing color and shape throughout the course of the song was supposed to be some kind of mythological beast, some kind of Bandersnatch, in fact, since that was the name of the song, though the man did warn his son to beware the Jabberwock, my son, didn’t he? So maybe the beast was a Jabberwock or even a Jubjub bird. What ever the damn thing was, it was something