The Frumious Bandersnatch (17 page)

“I do believe, yes,” Larry said, “that ‘Bandersnatch' is about a young boy coming out of the closet, yes. If we study the video carefully, we…”

“Oh, please,” Brenner said, “that's utter nonsense.”

“Why don't we take another look at it?” Curly said, and to someone off camera, “Can we roll it again, boys?”

Ollie thought, Good, let's watch the strip tease again.

This was not the tape Honey Blair and her crew had shot on the night of the kidnapping. This was the studio-shot video with its animated footage and a skimpily but fully clothed Tamar larking under a yellow sky with pastel colored clouds and whimsical budding flowers and fanciful floating insects while the sound of a synthesizer…

She looks like a shepherd boy, Ollie thought, and suddenly understood what Larry Graham had meant a moment ago.

She did not look like a boy for very long.

Within seconds after the black guy in his gray mask came whiffling out of the woods, he was clawing and biting at her and tearing her clothes to ribbons, exposing a ripe female form that Ollie was sure would promote perpetual Priapic emissions from teenage boys all over America, not to mention even more mature males in the population.

“That's exactly what I mean,” Graham's voice said over the video. “The boy has to recognize himself as female before he can realize his full power.”

Bullshit, Ollie thought, and the telephone rang.

He hit the mute button and picked up the receiver.

“Weeks,” he said.

“Oll?”

Patricia.

He grinned.

“Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

“Fine, Oll,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Watching television. You familiar with this kidnapping the 8-7 caught?”

“Yeah, this new singer.”

“Some fag is saying she's a boy.”

“Get out,” Patricia said.

“Did you see the video?”

“Sure, it's all over the place.”

“That's some boy, huh?”

“I'd like to look like a boy like that,” Patricia said.

“You look fine just the way you are,” Ollie said.

“Thanks, Oll,” she said, and was silent for a moment. “I was calling to…uh…see if we're still on for Tuesday night,” she said.

“Why shouldn't we still be on?”

“I just wondered, that's all. Also, there's this old movie playing at the Atlantis—that's like an art house, y'know—I thought I'd like to see again, if you'd like to see it. It's with Al Pacino, it's called
Looking for Richard.
That's Richard the Third, the Shakespearean character, y'know. Well, it's also a real king, but Shakespeare wrote the play.” Patricia hesitated again. “Do you think you might like to see it?”

“Sure,” Ollie said. “Whatever you say, Patricia.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive.”

“Good. You'll like it, I promise. It's not at all what you expect Shakespeare to be.”

“Hey, I
love
Shakespeare,” he said.

“Well, good. Then I made a good pick, huh?”

“You certainly did.”

He had never seen a Shakespeare play in his entire life.

“Also, how should I dress?” she asked. “I told you, I'll be working Tuesday…”

“Me, too.”

“So I won't have time to go home and change…”

“Me, neither. Just put on what's in your locker. Whatever you wear to work that morning.”

“It won't be anything fancy,” Patricia said. “Just slacks and a sweater, probably.”

“That'll be fine.”

“Okay then. You working tomorrow?”

“Oh sure.”

“See you up the precinct then.”

“See you,” Ollie said.

There was a click on the line.

He sighed heavily and put the receiver back on its cradle.

The fag and the priest were still going at it.

He hit the mute button again.

“…sending this message to adolescent boys all over America,” the Reverend Brenner was saying. “If you want to slay wild dragons…”

“It isn't a dragon,” Graham said.

“…then you have to declare yourself to be homosexual! What kind of a message…?”

“I'm sure that isn't Tamar Valparaiso's mess…”

“You just
said
the boy in that video…”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

“I'm sure her message is simply ‘Be what you wish to be. In choice, there is freedom.' ”

“Oh, are we going to get into the
abortion
issue now?”

“Not on my time,” Ollie said out loud, and turned off the set, and wondered if any of that scrumptious apple pie his sister had baked was still in the refrigerator.

 

WHAT WAS CALLED CSI
in some cities was called MCU here in the big bad city, and never the twain shall meet. The Mobile Crime Unit had struck out twice last night, once on the Rinker and again on the Ford Explorer, but that didn't mean they weren't as sharp or as perceptive as their television counterparts. On the contrary, the package they had messengered over to Carella at seven-thirty this evening, and which he now presented to The Squad downtown, included one piece of very important information.

As expected, there'd been no latent fingerprints on any of the railings or bulkheads the perps may have touched in boarding the
River Princess
and then descending into the ballroom where Tamar was performing. The intruders were wearing gloves. So much for that.

But they were also wearing running shoes with identifiable soles. And whereas they hadn't left any recoverable footprints on the rubber ladder-treads that ascended to the second level of the yacht, they had left behind some discernable prints on the mahogany steps and the parquet dance floor inside.

Together, Carella and The Squad looked over the report prepared by an MCU Detective/First named Oswald Hooper.

The report stated, unsurprisingly, that the recovered footprints had been left behind on stairway and dance floor by two separate males wearing running shoes later identified from laboratory comparison soles as Reeboks. That the persons wearing the shoes were both male was established by the size and type of the shoe and also by the angle of the foot, definitively different for male and female.

What was revealing about the separate prints, however, was the separate walking pattern for each man. The pattern for the man whose prints were consistently recovered on the
starboard
side of the stairway and dance floor was remarkably different from the pattern for the man who'd been on the
port
side of all the action.

“Starboard is right, port is left,” Corcoran told Endicott.

Endicott gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that his father had taken him sailing on Chesapeake Bay when he was still a toddler. Corcoran missed the meaning of the look.

“The guy on the right was the one who did all the hitting,” Carella said. “Have you seen the tape yet?”

“Only on television,” Endicott said.

Forbes, the other FBI agent, said, “It's all over the place.”

“I've requested a copy from Channel Four,” Corcoran said.

“Are they giving you one?” Carella asked, surprised.

“Why not?”

“Well, when I seized it as evidence, they threatened to sue the city.”

Corcoran raised his eyebrows and gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that this was the Joint Task Force here, kiddo, this was The
Squad.

“Well, good luck,” Carella said, and shrugged, but he felt he had been reprimanded. Or perhaps warned. And he realized all at once that Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran did not want him on this team. He almost walked out. Something kept him there. Maybe it was the fact that Barney Loomis had requested his presence as someone he liked and trusted.

“What's this about a walking pattern?” Endicott asked, and they all went back to reading Hooper's report.

Apparently, the man on the left possessed a normal walking pattern. That is to say, an imaginary line drawn in the direction of his walk had run through the inner edges of his heel prints. The distance between the footprints of a man walking slowly would be about twenty-seven inches. The distance for a running man would be forty inches. A man walking fast would measure thirty-five inches between footprints. The guy on the left had been moving very fast. Thirty-three inches between footprints. But it was a normal walking pattern, and not a broken one.

The guy on the right, however—the one who'd rifle-stocked the black dancer and slapped Tamar Valparaiso—had been moving more slowly, twenty-eight inches between footprints. And his walking line indicated that he was partially leaning on his left foot and slightly dragging the right foot.

“Leaning?” Endicott said.

“Dragging?” Corcoran said.

Carella almost said “Shhhhh.”

Absent any perfectly flat footprints for the right foot,
Hooper's report went on,
and given the slower gait and broken walking line, it would be safe to conclude that the suspect sustained a past injury to the right leg that manifests itself now in an existent noticeable limp.

“
That's
what it was!” Carella told them.

He was referring to what he'd noticed on the tape, but hadn't been able to pinpoint until just this minute. None of the others knew what the hell he was talking about.

“So what do we do?” Endicott asked. “Put out a medical alert?”

“The report says ‘
past
injury,' ” Corcoran said.

“How far in the past? Could've been last week.”

“A physician's bulletin can't hurt,” Carella said.

“You want to take care of that?” Corcoran suggested.

And all at once, Carella got it.

He was going to be the errand boy.

“What's my role here going to be?” he asked. Flat out. Head to head.

“What would you like it to be?” Corcoran asked right back. Straight on. Toe to toe.

“I don't want to be a gopher, that's for sure.”

“Who says that's what we want?”

“What
do
you want?”

“I think it's what
I
want that counts, isn't it?” Loomis said, stepping in. “
I'm
the one those men will be contacting,
I'm
the one they'll be expecting to pay the ransom, whatever
that's
going to be. If you don't mind, gentlemen, I believe Detective Carella is as qualified as any man in this room to handle whatever may come up in the next few days. So I'd appreciate it if you didn't assign him to running out for coffee and sandwiches.”

“I'd be happy to put out that physician's alert,” Carella said.

“Thank you, Steve,” Loomis said.

“I'll get someone in the cubbies to do it, don't sweat it,” Corcoran said.

“Who
ever
does it, let's get it
done,
” Endicott said, reminding everyone that he was the SAC around here. “Let's take a look at these DD reports, see if anything pops out at us. Steve, you want to walk us through?”

 

THE WHOLE IDEA
of this thing was to keep the girl alive for forty-eight hours. That was all the time they needed.

Avery had got all the fake stuff for the gig from a man he'd done business with before, a purveyor of false identity documents like social security cards, birth certificates, divorce decrees, gun permits, college diplomas, drivers' licenses, press credentials, and of course credit cards that actually worked when you used them. The man's name was Benny Lu, or at least that was the name he used here in the United States, preferring the nickname to the full Benjamin Lu that was on his Hong Kong birth certificate, if even that was real. Benny had migrated to the United States four years ago, after he'd almost been busted by Hong Kong's ICAC.

Avery had met him two and a half years ago, when he'd needed several false documents in order to casually prove to a certain rich fat lady in Palm Beach that he was, in fact, one Judson Fears of Gloucester County, Virginia, before she would let him into her luxurious waterfront mansion and incidentally her bed, the suspicious old bitch. He had later run off with $200,000 worth of her nice jewelry, thank you, but it served her right for not accepting him at face value, and besides, the jewelry was insured.