Free Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 by Fuzz Page B

then looked at his watch again, it was about eleven o’clock by then, I kept saying Yes, I want it, please let me have it, so he asked me to dance for him, he asked me to do the waltz, and then he asked me to do the shag, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, I never even heard of the shag, have you ever heard of the shag?”
    “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Hawes said.
    “So I did all that for him, I would have done anything for him, and finally he told me to get on my knees and explain to him why I felt I really needed the bag of heroin. He said he expected me to talk for five minutes on the subject of the addict’s need for narcotics, and he looked at his watch and began timing me, and I talked. I was shaking by this time, I had the chills, I needed a shot more than …” Polly closed her eyes. “I began crying. Italked and I cried, and at last he looked at his watch and said, ‘Your five minutes are up. Here’s your poison, now get the hell out of here.’ And he threw the bag to me.” “What time was this?”
    “It musta been about ten minutes after eleven. I don’t have a watch, I hocked it long ago, but you can see the big electric numbers on top of the Mutual Building from my room, and when I was shooting up later it was 11:15, so this musta been about ten after or thereabouts.”
    “And he kept looking at his watch all through this, huh?”
    “Yes. As if he had a date or something.”
    “He did,” Hawes said.
    “Huh?”
    “He had a date to shoot a man from his window. He was just amusing himself until the concert broke. A nice fellow, Mr. Orecchio.”
    “I got to say one thing for him,” Polly said.
    “What’s that?”
    “It was good stuff.” A wistful look came onto her face and into her eyes. “It was some of the best stuff I’ve had in years. I wouldn’t have heard a
cannon
if it went off next door.”
    Hawes made a routine check of all the city’s telephone directories, found no listing for an Orecchio—Mort, Morton, or Mortimer—and then called the Bureau of Criminal Identification at four o’clock that afternoon. The B.C.I., fully automated, called back within ten minutes to report that they had nothing on the suspect. Hawes then sent a teletype to the F.B.I. in Washington, asking them to check their voluminous files for any known criminal named Orecchio, Mort or Mortimer or Morton He was sitting at his desk in the paint-smelling squadroom when Patrolman Richard Genero came up to ask whether he had to go to court with Kling on the collar they had made jointly and together the week before. Genero had been walking his beat all afternoon, and he was very cold, so he hung around long after Hawes had answered his question, hoping he would be offered a cup of coffee. His eye happened to fall on the name Hawes had scribbled onto his desk pad when calling the B.C.I., so Genero decided to make a quip.
    “Another Italian suspect, I see,” he said.
    “How do you know?” Hawes asked.
    “Anything ending in O is Italian,” Genero said.
    “How about Munro?” Hawes asked.
    “What are you, a wise guy?” Genero said, and grinned. He looked at the scribbled name again, and then said, “I got to admit
this
guy has a very funny name for an Italian.”
    “Funny how?” Hawes asked.
    “Ear,” Genero said.
    “What?”
    “Ear. That’s what Orecchio means in Italian. Ear.”
    Which when coupled with Mort, of course, could mean nothing more or less than Dead Ear.
    Hawes tore the page from the pad, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the wastebasket, missing.
    “I said something?” Genero asked, knowing he’d never get his cup of coffee now.

5
    The boy who delivered the note was eight years old, and he had instructions to give it to the desk sergeant. He stood in the squadroom now surrounded by cops who looked seven feet tall, all of them standing around him in a circle while he looked up with saucer-wide blue eyes and wished he was dead.
    “Who gave you this note?”