rooftops stretched far and away to the distant River Dix.
'Is the building next door a doorman building?' Eileen asked.
'Don't think so,' the super said.
'So he could've got onto this roof from the one next door,' Willis said.
'If he was of a mind to, yes,' the super said.
'Could've jumped right over.'
'If he was intent on doing mischief, yes.'
They turned back to the door behind them.
Someone had worked long and hard on the knob in order to get to the lock. Removed the knob, approached the lock from inside the door.
'No alarm on this door?' Willis said.
'No,' the super said.
'You ought to look into that,' Willis said.
Why? Eileen wondered. Horse is already out of the
barn.
The super was thinking the same thing.
'Can we go down to her apartment again?' Eileen asked.
THIS TIME THEY concentrated on the door and the lock. And this time, now that they were looking for them, they found the discreet marks a burglar's jimmy had left. So now they knew how he'd got in. Jumped onto the roof from the building next door, forced the lock on the roof door, did the same thing to the lock on Gloria Stanford's apartment. Was waiting for her when she got home that day. He'd used a gun with a silencer, Ballistics had confirmed that. So no one had heard any shots, no one had raised an alarm. Had he left the building the same way he'd got in? Probably. Easy come, easy go-
They thanked the super for his time, and left 1113 Sil-vermine Oval.
'Want to do a canvass next door?' Willis asked.
'I doubt if anyone spotted him going in or out,' she said. 'But if you want to knock on doors, I'm with you.'
'For the sake of closure,' he said.
'I hate that word,' she said. 'Closure.'
'So do I.'
'It's a lawyer's word.'
'I also hate lawyers,' Willis said.
'Me, too.'
They were out on the street now. It was almost three-thirty. Their shift was almost over.
'So what do you say?'
'Let's do it,' she said. 'Keep the Loot happy.'
THE DEAF MAN'S third and final note that day cleared up any lingering doubt that he was trying to spear the word spear, so to speak:
Yea, and to tickle our noses with spear-grass to make them bleed, and then to beslubber our garments with it and swear it was the blood of true men.
'What the hell is spear-grass?' Parker asked. 'Some kind of grass they have over there in England,' Genero said.
'How do you happen to know that?'
'Common sense. If it's Shakespeare, it has to be England.'
'This doesn't even look like Shakespeare,' Hawes said.
'That's right. It's not even poetry'
'Shakespeare also wrote prose,' Carella said.
'And this time, there is a message,' Kling said, 'prose or whatever.'
'What's prose?' Genero asked.
'What's the message?' Hawes asked.
'That it's all fake. He's misleading us. It's slander, the venom'd spear. It's a lie again.'
'Same as always.'
'Tickle your noses to make them bleed
'Must be some kind of sharp grass, don't you think? That spear-grass?'
'. . . and then beslubber your garments
'I love that word.'
'Sounds like beslobber,' Brown said. 'Beslobber the
Johnson
'Beslubber the garments
'The clothes . . .'
'. . . with the blood from the nose, make it look like battle wounds. That's what he's saying. It's all fake. He's leading us to spear, but he's going someplace
else.'
'Then why's he leading us to spear?'
'Cause he's a rotten son of a bitch,' Carella said.
THE BUILDING NEXT door to 1113 Silvermine Oval was a seventeen-story edifice with six apartments on each floor. By five-thirty that night, Willis and Eileen had knocked on the doors to a hundred and two apartments, and spoken to eighty-nine tenants who were home and who answered their knocking. The first time they'd ever dealt with the Deaf Man, they'd got a description of him from a doorman named Joey. This was a long time ago, after he'd fired a shotgun blast into Carella's shoulder and slammed the stock of the shotgun into his head again and
again and again. One could understand why Carella considered any encounter with the Deaf Man a highly personal matter.
He's around my height, Joey had told Lieutenant Byrnes. Maybe six-one, six-two, and I guess he weighs around a hun' eighty, a hun' ninety pounds. He's got blond hair and blue eyes, and he wears this hearing aid in his right ear.
This was the description they gave the tenants now. Had anyone seen a white male fitting that description, in or around the building, at anytime on Memorial Day?
No one had seen anyone fitting that description.
Not on Memorial Day or any other day.
Outside the building again, Willis said, 'Wanna catch a bite to eat?'
Eileen looked at him.
'Maybe go see a movie afterward?' he said.
She hesitated a moment longer.
Then she said, 'Sure. Why not?'
THATEVENING, CHANNEL Four's Six O'Clock News had a big story to tell.
Someone had tried to kill their star investigative reporter, Honey Blair.
Avery Knowles, the show's co-anchor, first announced it on the air at five minutes past six, following the breaking news about a big fire in Calm's Point, where two children left alone had been playing with a kerosene burner while their mother was out scratching numbers off a lottery ticket at the corner grocery store.
'Earlier today,' Avery said, 'an armed assailant tried to murder someone with whom all of our viewers are familiar. You can only see the story now, here on Channel Four, in Honey Blair's own words.'
Only a handful of literate viewers knew that if they could only see the story now, right here on Channel Four, then they could not also hear the story. However, these were probably not Avery Knowles's own words, but instead the words of some network employee who didn't realize that the correct language should have been 'You can see the story now, only here on Channel Four.'
Standing before the camera in her trademark legs-slightly-apart pose, wearing a mini that was also something of a trademark, Honey said (not in her own words, either, even though they were coming from her own mouth), 'This morning at approximately five minutes to eleven, in front of five-seventy-four Jefferson Avenue, a
