Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

You woke up every morning on sodden sheets, the air heavy with moisture, the bloodred line of the thermometer already standing at seventy-five degrees, and you knew the temperature would climb high into the nineties before the day was done. In August, the heat was relentless.

It rained every afternoon, whether for five minutes or an hour. Torrents of rain spilling from a swollen black sky. The asphalt steamed under the onslaught of the rain. Great clouds of steam rising. But the rain cooled nothing, and the heat persisted.

There was no relief at night either. Even with the sun gone, the humidity was there, a twin to the heat. In August, there wasnt a breath of air to be had anywhere in Florida, day or night. You suffered.

The room smelled of blood.

Blood wasnt supposed to smell, but the aroma was palpable. Or maybe it was only the stink of torn yellow flesh. Outside in the palmettos, the insects chattered. Full moon tonight, a person could clearly read the dial of a watch in the moonspill. Eleven-twenty. And ticking. Waiting for Ho Dao Bat to get home from The Pagoda. Waiting to bid him good night.

The other two were already dead to the world.

A joke, grant me my little joke.

So solly, sleep tight.

Ho Dao Bat was next.

Dead on a hot, moist night in the middle of August. So solly, plick.

The house was in a section of Calusa known as Little Asia, so-named because of the many Orientals whod settled here over the past several years. In a city not particularly famous for its hospitality to nonwhites, any Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese who came here invariably drifted to this area between Tango and Langhorn, just west of the Tamiami Trail. At the turn of the century thered been only a whorehouse and a saloon on these two and a half acres of land. Now there were more than three dozen tiny wooden houses strewn among the palmettos. Brimming with Orientals. Night like tonight, they were all outdoors, vainly hoping for a breeze to remind them of a mountain village halfway across the world.

So solly, no bleeze.

Only knife.

See plitty knife?

The blade of the knife glittered in the moonlight spilling through the open window. The two little men lay dead and bleeding on the floor, one on either side of the bed closest to the door. Three single beds in this ground-floor room, the stink of yellow everywhere, the stink of red, the stink of blood. A calendar on the wall, pretty Chinese girl on it, wearing a kimono and smiling shyly over a fan. The kimono was red, the color of luck, the color of blood, where was Ho Dao Bat? The job would not be done until Ho got his.

Another look at the watch.

Eleven-thirty.

Come on. Ho. Come meet the knife.

Somewhere outside, there was laughter. Drifting on the stillness of the night, floating in through the window and into the room where the two men lay unhearing on the floor. A voice singsonged something unintelligible on the night, and there was more laughter, men and women laughing, foreigners from another world enjoying the steamy Florida night, come meet the knife. Ho, come say hello to the knife.

Waiting.

Time.

The buzz of a fly discovering the blood on the corpses.

Ho would be here soon. Ho Dao Bat, the third little man in the triumvirate. The leader. A follower tonight, in that the other two had already led the way to perdition, the other two were now on the floor waiting sightlessly and mutely for Ho to join them. Come on. Ho, come join the party, see how the other two are enjoying the food?

Another little joke, you must forgive me.

More flies now.

Buzzing in through the open window where a moment earlier there had been the rush of laughter and the babble of voices, a squadron of flies buzzing in and seeking the runway, circling the faces with their bleeding sockets, their bleeding towers. Fly One to Tower, request permission to land. The room buzzed with flies greedily drinking, a veritable fly frenzy, try that on your Asian tongue, try this, Ho Dao Bat!

And thrust the knife at the air.

This!

Again.

There were sudden footsteps on the gravel path outside.

Someone was approaching the front door.

Detective Morris Bloom stood tall and wrinkled and grizzled in the early-morning sunlight streaming into the room. No time to shave this morning, not when the seven a.m. call from downtown had reported three dead men in a room that reeked of ritual murder. No time to search in his closet for a freshly dry-cleaned suit. Time only to throw on a clean shirt and the rumpled seersucker draped over the chair near the dresser, time only to quickly knot a tie and then telephone Rawles to pass on the address of the crime scene.

The two detectives stood side by side in the sunlight. Across the room, the Medical Examiner kept trying to shoo the flies away from the corpses. It was a thankless job. Rawles looked bandbox fresh. Tan tropical suit, pale lemon-colored shirt, striped brown and gold tie, dark brown loafers. He resembled a stylish cop on the defunct Miami Vice, but this was Calusa, on the opposite coast.

Rawles was bigger and heavier than Bloom. Some six feet four inches tall and weighing in at two forty, he was the kind of mountainous black man people down here crossed the street to avoid. Bloom, at six one and two twenty, with a broken nose and the oversized knuckles of a streetfighter, wasnt the kind of person youd care to meet in a dark alley, either. Together, they made a formidable pair, except that it was almost impossible for them to play good cop/bad cop since they both looked like bad cops. Well, perhaps there was a slight difference. In Blooms dark and somber eyes, there was always a look of ineffable sadness, an unfortunate failing for a police detective.

Mighty pretty, Rawles said.

He was not normally given to irony, but the bodies across the room demanded a certain dryness of humor. Either that, or you went outside to throw up. The only time he had thrown up recently was on a rough cruise to romantic Bermuda, which hed taken with a girl who worked as a legal stenographer at the courthouse. Bloom, on the other hand, had been married for a good long time now and did not take too many cruises to romantic Bermuda. The last time hed thrown up was Saturday night, when hed eaten a bad fish at Marina Lous. This was now Tuesday morning, and he felt like throwing up again.

The three men across the room had had their throats slit.

And their eyes gouged out.

And their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths.

Rawles had seen things like this in the jungles of Vietnam. The Cong had done things like this to the grunts in Vietnam. It was he whod suggested that maybe these were intra-racial murders. This being an Asian community and all, and the way the bodies had been mutilated. Alex McReady, the sergeant whod first responded to the radio call from the car patroling Charlie sector, was of the opinion that these were drug-related murders, probably Jamaican in origin. The Jamaican posses that had filtered into some parts of Florida were particularly vicious in their killing techniques. And it was a known fact that in their homelands, Asians smoked dope as a matter of course.

Bloom wondered about the validity of this. To him, this business did not seem drug-related, Jamaican or otherwise. Rawles may have had a point about it being linked to something in the community, but then again you did not have to be Asian to do unspeakable things to a fellow human being, dead or alive.

He walked over to where the M.E. was closing his satchel. Flies swarmed up around the M.E.s head as he got to his feet. Both men shooed them away.