Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man

1

Fat balmy breezes wafted in off the park across the street, puffing lazily through the wide-open windows of the squadroom. It was the fifteenth of April, and the temperature outside hovered in the mid-sixties. Sunshine splashes drenched the room. Meyer Meyer sat at his desk idly reading a D.D. report, his bald pate touched with golden light, a beatific smile on his mouth, even though he was reading about a mugging. Cheek cradled on the heel and palm of his hand, elbow bent, blue eyes scanning the typewritten form, he sat in sunshine like a Jewish angel on the roof of the Duomo. When the telephone rang, it sounded like the trilling of a thousand larks, such was his mood this bright spring day.

“Detective Meyer,” he said, “87th Squad.”

“I’m back,” the voice said.

“Glad to hear it,” Meyer answered. “Who is this?”

“Come, come, Detective Meyer,” the voice said. “You haven’t forgotten me so soon, have you?”

The voice sounded vaguely familiar. Meyer frowned. “I’m too busy to play games, mister,” he said. “Who is this?”

“You’ll have to speak louder,” the voice said. “I’m a little hard of hearing.”

Nothing changed. Telephones and typewriters, filing cabinets, detention cage, water cooler, wanted posters, fingerprint equipment, desks, chairs, all were still awash in brilliant sunshine. But despite the floating golden motes, the room seemed suddenly bleak, as though that remembered telephone voice had stripped the place of its protective gilt to expose it as shabby and cheap. Meyer’s frown deepened into a scowl. The telephone was silent except for a small electrical crackling. He was alone in the squadroom and could not initiate a trace. Besides, past experience had taught him that this man (if indeed he was who Meyer thought he was) would not stay on the line long enough for fancy telephone company acrobatics. He was beginning to wish he had not answered the telephone, an odd desire for a cop on duty. The silence lengthened. He did not know quite what to say. He felt foolish and clumsy. He could think only, My God, it’s happening again.

“Listen,” he said, “who is this?”

“You know who this is.”

“No, I do not.”

“In that case, you’re even more stupid than I surmised.”

There was another long silence.

“Okay,” Meyer said.

“Ahh,” the voice said.

“What do you want?”

“Patience, patience,” the voice said.

“Damn it, what do you want?”

“If you’re going to use profanity,” the voice said, “I won’t talk to you at all.”

There was a small click on the line.

Meyer looked at the dead phone in his hand, sighed, and hung up.

If you happen to be a cop, there are some people you don’t need.

The Deaf Man was one of those people. They had not needed him the first time he’d put in an appearance, wreaking havoc across half the city in an aborted attempt to rob a bank. They had not needed him the next time, either, when he had killed the Parks Commissioner, the Deputy Mayor, and a handful of others in an elaborate extortion scheme that had miraculously backfired. They did not need him now; whatever the hell he was up to, they definitely did not need him.

“Who needs him?” Detective-Lieutenant Peter Byrnes asked. “Right now, I don’t need him. Are you sure it was him?”

“It sounded like him.”

“I don’t need him when I got a cat burglar,” Byrnes said. He rose from his desk and walked to the open windows. In the park across the street lovers were idly strolling, young mothers were pushing baby buggies, little girls were skipping rope, and a patrolman chatted with a man walking his dog. “I don’t need him,” Byrnes said again, and sighed. He turned from the window abruptly. He was a compact man, with hair more white than gray, broad-shouldered, squat, with rough-hewn features and flinty blue eyes. He gave an impression of controlled power, as though a violence within had been tempered, honed, and later protectively sheathed. He grinned suddenly, surprising Meyer. “If he calls again,” Brynes said, “tell him we’re out.”

“Very funny,” Meyer said.

“Anyway, we don’t even know it’s him yet.”

“I think it was him,” Meyer said.

“Well, let’s see if he calls again.”

“If it’s him,” Meyer said with certainty, “he’ll call again.”

“Meanwhile, what about this goddamn burglar?” Byrnes said. “He’s going to walk off with every building on Richardson if we don’t get him soon.”

“Kling’s over there now,” Meyer said.

“As soon as he gets back, I want a report,” Byrnes said.

“What do I do about the Deaf Man?”

Byrnes shrugged. “Listen to him, find out what he wants.” He grinned again, surprising Meyer yet another time. “Maybe he wants to turn himself in.”

“Yeah,” Meyer said.

Richardson Drive was a side street behind Silvermine Oval. There were sixteen large apartment buildings on that street, and a dozen of them had been visited by the cat burglar during the past two months.

According to police mythology, burglars are the cream of the criminal crop. Skilled professionals, they are capable of breaking and entering in a wink and without a whisper, making on-the-spot appraisals of appliances or jewelry, ripping off an entire apartment with speed and dexterity, and then vanishing soundlessly into the night. According to further lore, they are gentlemen one and all, rarely moved to violence unless cornered or otherwise provoked. To hear the police talk about burglars (except junkie burglars, who are usually desperate amateurs), one would guess that the job required rigorous training, intense dedication, enormous self-discipline, and extraordinary courage. (Not for nothing had the phrase “the guts of a burglar” entered everyday language directly from police lexicon.) This grudging respect, this tip of the investigatory hat, was completely in evidence that afternoon of April 15, when Detective Bert Kling talked to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Angieri in their apartment at 638 Richardson Drive.

“Clean as a whistle,” he said, and raised his eyebrows in admiration. He was referring to the fact that there were no chisel marks on any of the windows, no lock cylinders punched out, no evidence of any fancy glass cutter or crowbar work. “Did you lock all the doors and windows when you went away?” he asked.

“Yes,” Angieri said. He was a man in his late fifties, wearing a wildly patterned short-sleeved shirt, and sporting a deep suntan, both of which he had acquired in Jamaica. “We always lock up,” he said. “This is the city.”

Kling looked at the door lock again. It was impossible to force this type of lock with a celluloid strip, nor were there any pick marks on it. “Anybody else have a key to this apartment?” he asked, closing the door.

“Yes. The super. He’s got a key to every apartment in the building.”

“I meant besides him,” Kling said.

“My mother has a key,” Mrs. Angieri said. She was a short woman, slightly younger than her husband, her eyes darting anxiously in her tanned face. She was, Kling knew, reacting to the knowledge that she had been burglarized — that someone had violated this private space, someone had entered her home and roamed it with immunity, had handled her possessions, had taken things rightfully belonging to her. The loss was not the important factor; the jewelry was probably covered by insurance. It was the idea that staggered her. If someone could enter to steal, what would prevent someone from entering to kill?

“Might she have been here while you were away? Your mother?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Just to look in...”

“No.”

“Water the plants...”

“We don’t keep plants,” Angieri said.

“Besides, my mother’s eighty-four years old,” Mrs. Angieri said. “She hardly ever leaves Riverhead. That’s where she lives.”

“Might she have given the key to anyone else?”

“I don’t think she even remembers she has a key. We gave it to her years ago, when we first moved in. I don’t think she’s ever used it.”

“Because, you see,” Kling said, “there are no marks anywhere. So it’s reasonable to assume the man came in with a key.”

“Well, I don’t think it was Mr. Coe,” Angieri said.

“Who?”

“Mr. Coe. The super. He wouldn’t do something like this, would he, Marie?”

“No,” Mrs. Angieri said.

“I’ll talk to him, anyway,” Kling said. “The thing is, there’ve been twelve burglaries on this same block, and the M.O.’s been the same — the modus operandi — it’s been the same in each one, no marks, no signs of entry. So unless there’s a ring of burglars who’re all building superintendents...” Kling smiled. Mrs. Angieri smiled with him. He reminded her of her son, except for the hair. Her son’s hair was brown, and Kling’s hair was blond. But her son was a big boy, over six feet tall, and so was Kling, and they both had nice boyish smiles. It made her feel a little better about having been robbed.

“I’ll need a list of what was taken,” Kling said, “and then we’ll...”

“Is there any chance of getting it back?” Angieri asked.

“Well, that’s the thing, you see. We’ll get the list out to all the hockshops in the city. Sometimes we get very good results that way. Sometimes, though, the stuff’s gotten rid of through a fence, and then it’s difficult.”

“Well, it isn’t likely that he’d take valuable jewelry to a hockshop, is it?”

“Oh, yes, sometimes,” Kling said. “But to be honest with you, I think we’re dealing with a very high-caliber thief here, and it’s my guess he’s working with a fence. I could be wrong. And it won’t hurt to let the hockshops know what we’re looking for.”

“Mmm,” Angieri said doubtfully.

“I meant to ask you,” Kling said. “Was there a kitten?”

“A what?”

“A kitten. He usually leaves a kitten.”

“Who does?”

“The burglar.”

“Leaves a kitten?”

“Yes. As a sort of calling card. A lot of these thieves are wise guys, you know, they like to think they’re making fools of honest citizens. And the police, too.”

“Well,” Angieri said bluntly, “if he’s committed twelve burglaries so far, and you still haven’t caught him, I guess he is making fools of you.”

Kling cleared his throat. “But there was no kitten, I gather.”

“No kitten.”

“He usually leaves it on the bedroom dresser. Tiny little kitten, different one each time. Maybe a month old, something like that.”

“Why a kitten?”

“Well, you know, cat burglar, kitten, that’s his idea of a joke, I guess. As I said, it’s a sort of calling card.”

“Mmm,” Angieri said again.

“Well,” Kling said, “would you like to tell me what’s missing, please?”

The superintendent was a black man named Reginald Coe. He told Kling that he had been working here in the building ever since his discharge from the United States Army in 1945. He had fought with the infantry in Italy, which was where he’d got the leg wound that caused his noticeable limp. He now received a pension that, together with his salary as building superintendent, enabled him to provide adequately for his wife and three children. Coe and his family lived in a six-room apartment on the ground floor of the building. It was there that he talked to Kling in the waning hours of the afternoon, both men sipping beer at a spotlessly clean enamel-topped table in the kitchen. In another room of the house the Coe children watched an animated television program, their shrill laughter punctuating the conversation of the two men.

In the Cops-Bending-Over-Backwards Department, Reginald Coe had a great deal going for him. He was black, he was a wounded war veteran, he was a hard-working man, a devoted husband and father, and a genial host. Any cop who did not respond to a man like Coe had to be a racist, a traitor, an ingrate, a loafer, a home wrecker, and a bad guest. Kling tried to be fair in his questioning, but it was really quite impossible to remain unprejudiced. He liked Coe immediately, and knew at once that the man could not have had anything at all to do with the burglary upstairs. But since Coe possessed a duplicate key to the apartment, and since even angelic cherubs have been known to clobber their mothers with hatchets, Kling went through the routine anyway, just so he’d have something to do while drinking the good cold beer.

“Mr. and Mrs. Angieri tell me they left for Jamaica on the twenty-sixth of March. Does that check out with your information, Mr. Coe?”

“That’s right,” Coe said, nodding. “They caught a late plane Friday night. Told me they were going. So I’d keep an eye on the apartment. I like to know who’s in the building and who isn’t.”

“Did you keep an eye on the apartment, Mr. Coe?”

“I did,” Coe said, and lifted his beer glass and drank deeply and with obvious satisfaction.

“How?”

“I stopped up there twice.”

“When was that?”

“First time on the Wednesday after they left, and again last Wednesday.”

“Did you lock the door after you?”

“I did.”

“Did it look as if anyone had been in there?”

“Nope. Everything was in its place, all the drawers closed, no mess, no nothing. Not like they found it when they got home last night.”

“This was Wednesday, you say? When you were in there?”

“Yes. Last Wednesday.”

“That would be the...” Kling consulted his pocket calendar. “The seventh of April.”

“If that’s what it says there. I wouldn’t know the exact date.”

“Yes, the seventh.”

“Then that’s when it was,” Coe said, and nodded.

“Which means the place was hit sometime between then and last night. Did you see any strangers in the building during that time?”

“No, I didn’t. I try to keep a careful eye on what’s going on. You get a lot of crooks coming around saying they’re repairmen or delivery men, you know, and all they want to do is get in here and carry off anything that ain’t nailed down. I watch that very careful. Cop on the beat’s a good man, too, knows who lives in the neighborhood and who don’t, stops a lot of strangers on the street just to find out what they’re up to.”

“What’s his name, would you know?”

“Mike Ingersoll. He’s been on the beat a long time.”

“Yes, I know him,” Kling said.

“Started here around 1960, sometime around then. He’s younger than I am, must be in his late thirties. He’s a good cop, been cited for bravery twice. I like him a lot.”

“When did you discover the burglary, Mr. Coe?” Kling asked.

“I didn’t discover it. Everything was all right last time I went in there. Mr. and Mrs. Angieri discovered it when they got home last night. They called the police right off.” Coe drank more beer, and then said, “You think this is connected with the other ones on the block?”

“It looks that way,” Kling said.

“How do you think he gets in?” Coe asked.

“Through the front door.”

“But how?”

“With a key,” Kling said.

“You don’t think...”

“No.”

“If you do, Mr. Kling, I wish you’d say so.”

“I don’t think you had anything to do with this burglary or with any of the others. No, Mr. Coe.”

“Good,” Coe said. He rose, opened the refrigerator, and said, “Would you care for another beer?”

“Thank you, I’ve got to be going.”

“It’s been nice having you visit,” Coe said.

The call from Joseph Angieri came to the squadroom at close to six o’clock that evening, just as Kling was preparing to go home.

“Mr. Kling,” he said, “we found the cat.”

“I beg your pardon?” Kling said.

“The kitten. You said your man always left a...”

“Yes, yes,” Kling said. “Where’d you find it?”

“Behind the dresser. Dead. Tiny little thing, gray and white. Must have fallen off and banged its head.” Angieri paused. “Do you want me to keep it for you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What should I do with it?” Angieri asked.

“Well... dispose of it,” Kling said.

“Just throw it in the garbage?”

“I suppose so.”

“Maybe I’ll take it down and bury it in the park.”

“Whatever you prefer, Mr. Angieri.”

“Tiny little thing,” Angieri said. “You know, I happened to remember something after you left.”

“What’s that?”

“The lock on the front door. We had it changed just before we left for Jamaica. Because of all the burglaries on the block, figured we’d better change the lock. If somebody got in here with a key...”

“Yes, Mr. Angieri, I follow you,” Kling said. “What’s the locksmith’s name?”