Fiddlers

came back to bed.

‘Tell me the dream,’ she said.

He hesitated, thinking. Then he said, ‘It was in Nam.’

He was still holding his belly. The chills seemed to be gone, though.

‘This woman and her baby are sitting on the hood of a Jeep. We’re supposed to transport them back to where an interpreter is waiting to question the woman. Well, the girl, actually; she’s no more than nineteen. The sergeant thinks the girl is a spy for the Vietcong, I don’t know what gave him that idea.

‘The sergeant is driving the Jeep. He likes to drive. I’m riding shotgun. M-1 in my lap. The girl is sitting on the hood of the vehicle. Baby in one arm, holding the baby tight. Other arm extended, stiff, hand clutching this like sort of handle on the hood, so she won’t fall off with her baby. The road is rutted and bumpy, these mud roads they had over there, between the rice paddies…”

He began trembling again.

‘I don’t remember the rest of it,’ he said.

When she got up to pee later, he was sound asleep.

She kept thinking about his dream. After she’d washed her hands, she opened the door to the medicine chest over the sink.

There were five bottles of prescription pain relievers in there.

She wondered if he’d had a nightmare at all.

* * * *

It certainly had been very nice to fall into two gratuitous drug busts while investigating a pair of homicides. But these windfalls hadn’t brought them any closer to learning who had killed the blind violinist, or the cosmetics sales rep, or even the university professor. Nor did it much endear them to Connors and Brancusi, the two Narcotics cops who now had Internal Affairs to deal with because some punk nightclub manager was making noises about having greased them for protection. The things a desperate ex-con would say to avoid taking another fall!

And now, to make matters worse, a dead priest had turned up last night in the Eight-Eight.

And guess who’d caught the case?

‘Now the usual thing that would happen here,’ Ollie explained to the assembled detectives of the Eight- Seven that Friday morning, ‘would be if a person caught a body that he later learned had been shot with the same pistol used in three previous murders another squad had been investigating - fruitlessly, I might add - since the sixteenth of the month

This was now the twenty-fifth day of June. The clock on the squadroom wall read 9:10 A.M.

‘The usual thing that would happen would be for the responding detective to cite FMU, and then run the paper over posthaste to the squad that originally caught the squeal, in this case yours precisely, the Famous Eighty-seventh.’

He paused to have his droll sarcasm appreciated.

‘But it so happens that my plate at the moment is both literally and figuratively empty

He did not expect any of the cops here in this room to understand or appreciate such literary terms, but the fact was that there’d been a dearth of murders in his own precinct and besides he was on a diet, hence the empty plates all around…

‘… and so I’ve decided to join forces with you, so to speak, and take upon myself the investigation of the priest’s murder, whose name happens to be Father Michael Hopwell, should this be of any interest to you. And also to lend whatever assistance I may deem myself capable of, ah yes, in the ongoing investigations of the Geezer Murders you are already pursuing.’

The Eight-Seven detectives did not know whether this was a blessing or a curse.

‘Thank you,’ Ollie said, ‘don’t bother standing, no applause necessary,’ and executed a slight but difficult bow with one hand on his still quite ample middle, empty plate or not.

Ollie’s idle comment notwithstanding, the tabloids spread on Carella’s desktop that Thursday morning were still calling the string of homicides ‘the Glock Murders.’ Now that Ollie was on the scene, would the murders be remembered from this day to the ending of the world as ‘the Geezer Murders’? Carella hoped not.

But look at the facts.

Four murders thus far, all committed with the same automatic pistol. Two of the vics in their fifties. One in her sixties. And now one in his seventies. These were not youngsters, Maude. These were people getting on in life, you might say. Given your average life span of what -seventy, seventy-five, eighty tops? - this put middle age somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Yes, kiddies, face it. You were rounding the bend at thirty, and middle-aged at thirty-five, imagine that. Fifty was fast approaching old age. Sixty was, in fact, old. Seventy was decrepit. Eighty was ready for the box. None of these victims had been skipping off to kindergarten with a lunch pail in one hand and a box of crayons in the other. In all truth, the ages of the victims made the case sort of boring. Like watching Woody Allen kissing a beautiful blonde in one of his movies. If someone’s about to die soon, anyway, what was the sense of going to all the trouble of killing him? Or her?

Well, you couldn’t say the two fifty-something-year-olds were exactly at death’s door. In fact, Alicia Hendricks had been a damn good-looking woman, in excellent health - and sexually active when she was younger, don’t forget. And whereas the wandering violinist had been blind, he was otherwise in pretty good shape and certainly not rushing out to buy himself a burial plot. But aside from those two, the others seemed unlikely candidates for termination. Ho hum, let nature take its course was what most citizens of this city were thinking as they turned the pages of their newspapers to sexier stuff like the killing and torture of Iraqi prisoners of war.

Not that the tabloids weren’t doing their best to make the murders sound as sexy as possible. The first thing they did was suggest that the Glock Murders were in fact serial murders, and then they quoted various FBI profile statistics common to most serial murders.

Never mind that until the murder of the priest last night, there had been only three killings…

(A serial killer is someone who usually kills more than five people.)

Never mind that the now-four murders had been committed in the relatively short space of six days…

(A serial killer usually slays over a longer period of time, sometimes even months or years, allowing a so- called cooling-off period between each murder.)

Never mind that the victims here were a mixed bag: a blind musician, a cosmetics saleswoman cum dope dealer, a university professor, and now a priest.

(A serial killer’s victims are usually of the same type - prostitutes, hitchhikers, postal employees, what have you, but always easily categorized.)

Never mind that all the victims here were shot in the face at close range with an automatic pistol.

(Most serial murders are committed by strangulation, suffocation, or stabbing.)

One of the tabloids suggested that the serial killer here was trying to obliterate his victims’ faces, a supposition with which a PD profiler actually agreed. All of the tabloids agreed that the primary motive of a serial killer was sexual, whether or not any sex had actually taken place before or after the murder. They also agreed that most serial killers were white males between the ages of twenty and thirty, which description fit half the stockbrokers downtown.

The detectives looking at all these statistics saw only two converging characteristics that might have marked their man as a serial killer: his victim’s ages and their race: they were all getting on in years, and they were all white.

It was Fat Ollie Weeks who came up with the notion that three of the murders might be simple smoke-screen murders.

‘Maybe he was only after one of them,’ he said. ‘Let’s say the priest last night, for example. Maybe the rest were just to throw us off the track. No connection at all between them.’

‘Among them,’ Willis corrected, though he had to admit Ollie might have a point here. Aware that Eileen Burke was watching him, waiting for his further response, he merely said, ‘In which case, which one?’

‘Was he really after, you mean?’

‘You kill four people, you’re really after each and every one of them,’ Parker said.

‘I’m inclined to agree,’ Byrnes said, surprising Parker. ‘A smoke screen isn’t usually this prolonged. Too