Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

18

The room was filled with flowers. Bouquets of red roses and white roses and yellow roses, smaller bouquets of violets, long-stemmed gladioli, carnations, gardenias, rhododendron leaves in waterfilled vases. The room was filled with the aroma of flowers — fresh flowers and dying flowers, flowers that were new, and flowers that had lost their bloom. The room was filled with the overwhelming scent of flowers and the overwhelming stench of something else.

The girl, Bubbles Caesar, lay quite still on the table around which the flowers were massed. Her black hair trailed behind her head, her long body was clad only in a nightgown, her slender hands were crossed over her bosom. A ruby necklace circled her throat. She lay on the table and stared at the ceiling, and she saw nothing, because she was stone cold dead and she’d been that way for a month and her decomposing body stank to high heaven.

Tudor, on his knees, turned to look at the detectives.

“So you found us,” he said quietly.

“Get up, Tudor.”

“You found us,” he repeated. He looked at the dead girl again. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he asked of no one. “I’ve never known anyone as beautiful as she.”

In the closet, they found the body of a man. He was wearing only his undershorts. Both of his hands had been amputated.

The man was Mike Chirapadano.

Oh, he knew that she was dead; he knew that he had killed them both. They stood around him in the squadroom, and they asked their questions in hushed voices because it was all over now and, killer or not, Charles Tudor was a human being, a man who had loved. Not a cheap thief, and not a punk, only a murderer who had loved. But yes, he knew she was dead. Yes, he knew that. Yes, he knew he had killed her, killed them both. He knew.

And yet, as he talked, as he answered the almost whispered questions of the detectives, it seemed he did not know, it seemed he wandered from the cruel reality of murder to another world, a world where Barbara Cesare was still alive and laughing. He crossed the boundary line into this other world with facility, and then recrossed it to reality, and then lost it again until there were no boundaries any more, there was only a man wandering between two alien lands, a native of neither, a stranger to both.

“When they called me from the club,” he said, “when Randy Simms called me from the club, I didn’t know what to think. Barbara was usually very reliable. So I called her apartment, the one she shared with the other girls, and I spoke to one of her roommates, and the roommate told me she hadn’t seen her since early that morning. This was the twelfth, February twelfth; I’ll remember that day as long as I live, it was the day I killed Barbara.”

“What did you do after you spoke to the roommate, Mr. Tudor?”

“I figured perhaps she’d gone to the other apartment, the one on Canopy Street.”

“Were you paying for that apartment, Mr. Tudor?”

“Yes. Yes, I was. Yes. But it was our apartment, you know. We shared it. We share a lot of things, Barbara and I. We like to do a lot of things together. I have tickets for a show next week. A musical. She likes music. We’ll see that together. We do a lot of things together.”

The detectives stood in a silent knot around him. Carella cleared his throat.

“Did you go to the apartment, Mr. Tudor? The one on Canopy Street?”

“Yes, I did. I got there sometime around ten o’clock. In the night. It was nighttime. And I went right upstairs, and I used my key, and I... well, she was there. With this man. This man was touching her. In our apartment. Barbara was in our apartment with another man.” Tudor shook his head. “She shouldn’t do things like that. She knows I love her. I bought her a ruby necklace for Valentine’s Day. Did you see the necklace? It’s quite beautiful. She wears it very well.”

“What did you do when you found them, Mr. Tudor?”

“I... I was shocked. I... I... I wanted to know. She... she told me I didn’t own her. She told me she was free, she said nobody owned her, not me, not... not the man she was with and... and... and not Karl either, she said, not Karl, I didn’t even know who Karl was. She... she said she had promised this Karl she’d go away with him, but he didn’t own her either, nobody owned her, she said, and... and—”

“Yes, Mr. Tudor?”

“I couldn’t believe it because... well, I love her. You know that. And she was saying these terrible things, and this man, this Mike, stood there grinning. In his underwear, he was in his underwear, and she had on a nightgown I’d given her, the one I’d given her. I... I... I hit him. I kept hitting him, and Barbara laughed, she laughed all the while I was hitting him. I’m a very strong man, I hit him and I kept banging his head against the floor and then Barbara stopped laughing and she said, ‘You’ve killed him.’ I... I—”

“Yes?”

“I took her in my arms, and I kissed her and... and... I... my hands... her throat... she didn’t scream... nothing... I simply squeezed and... and she... she... she went limp in my arms. It was his fault I thought, his fault, touching her, he shouldn’t have touched her, he had no right to touch the woman I loved and so I... I went into the kitchen looking for a... a knife or something. I found a meat cleaver in one of the drawers and I... I went into the other room and cut off both his hands.” Tudor paused. “For touching her. I cut off his hands so that he would never touch her again.” His brow wrinkled with the memory. “There... there was a lot of blood. I... picked up the hands and put them in... in Barbara’s overnight bag. Then I dragged his body into the closet and tried to clean up a little. There... there was a lot of blood all over.”

They got the rest of the story from him in bits and pieces. And the story threaded the boundary line, wove between reality and fantasy. And the men in the squadroom listened in something close to embarrassment, and some of them found other things to do, downstairs, away from the big man who sat in the hardbacked chair and told them of the woman he’d loved, the woman he still loved.

He told them he had begun disposing of Chirapadano’s body last week. He had started with the hands, and he decided it was best to dispose of them separately. The overnight bag would be safe, he’d thought, because so many people owned similar bags. He had decided to use that for the first hand. But it occurred to him that identification of the body could be made through the finger tips, and so he had sliced those away with a kitchen knife.

“I cut myself,” he said. “When I was working on the fingertips. Just a small cut, but it bled a lot. My finger.”

“What type blood do you have, Mr. Tudor?” Carella asked.

“What? B, I think. Yes, B. Why?”

“That might explain the contradictory stain on the suit, Steve,” Kling said.

“What?” Tudor said. “The suit? Oh, yes. I don’t know why I did that, really. I don’t know why. It was just something I had to do, something I... I just had to do.”

“What was it you had to do, Mr. Tudor?”

“Put on his clothes,” Tudor said. “The dead man’s. I... I put on his suit, and his socks, and I wore his raincoat, and I carried his umbrella. When I went out to... to get rid of the hands.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why. Really, I don’t know why.” He paused. “I threw the clothes away as soon as I realized you knew about them. I went all the way out to Calm’s Point, and I threw them in a trash basket.” Tudor looked at the circle of faces around him. “Will you be keeping me much longer?” he asked suddenly.

“Why, Mr. Tudor?”

“Because I want to get back to Barbara,” he told the cops.

They took him downstairs to the detention cells, and then they sat in the curiously silent squadroom.

“There’s the answer to the conflicting stuff we found on the suit,” Kling said.

“Yeah.”

“They both wore it. The killer and the victim.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you suppose he put on the dead man’s clothes?” Kling shuddered. “Jesus, this whole damn case... ”

“Maybe he knew,” Carella said.

“Knew what?”

“That he was a victim, too.”

Miscolo came in from the Clerical Office. The men in the squadroom were silent.

“Anybody want some coffee?” he asked.

Nobody wanted any coffee.