Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man

2

Detective Steve Carella was a tall man with the body and walk of a trained athlete. His eyes were brown, slanting peculiarly downward in an angular face, giving him an oriental appearance that was completely at odds with his Italian background. The downward tilt of the eyes also make him look a trifle mournful at times, again in contradiction to his basically optimistic outlook. He glided toward the ringing telephone now like an outfielder moving up to an easy pop fly, lifted the receiver, sat on the edge of the desk in one fluid motion, and said, “87th Squad, Carella here.”

“Have you paid your income tax, Detective Carella?”

This was Friday morning, the sixteenth of April, and Carella had mailed his income tax return on the ninth, a full six days before the deadline. But even though he suspected the caller was Sam Grossman at the lab, or Rollie Chabrier in the D.A.’s office (both of whom were fond of little telephone gags), he nonetheless felt the normal dread of any American citizen when confronted with a voice supposedly originating in the offices of the Internal Revenue Service.

“Yes, I have,” he said, carrying it off rather well, he thought. “Who’s this, please?”

“No one remembers me anymore,” the voice said dolefully. “I’m beginning to feel neglected.”

“Oh,” Carella said. “It’s you.”

“Ahh, yes, it’s me.”

“Detective Meyer mentioned that you’d called. How are you?” Carella said chattily, and signaled to Hal Willis across the room. Willis looked at him in puzzlement. Carella twirled his forefinger as though dialing a phone. Willis nodded, and immediately called the Security Office at the telephone company to ask for a trace on Carella’s line, the Frederick 7-8025 extension.

“I’m all right now,” the voice said. “I got shot a while back, though. Did you know that, Detective Carella?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“In a tailor shop. On Culver Avenue.”

“Yes.”

“In fact, if I recall correctly, you’re the man who shot me, Detective Carella.”

“Yes, that’s my recollection, too.” Carella looked at Willis and raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Willis nodded and made an encouraging hand gesture — keep him talking.

“Quite painful,” the Deaf Man said.

“Yes, getting shot can be painful.”

“But then, you’ve been shot, too.”

“I have indeed.”

“In fact, if I recall correctly, I’m the man who shot you.”

“With a shotgun, wasn’t it?”

“Which makes us even, I suppose.”

“Not quite. Getting shot with a shotgun is more painful than getting shot with a pistol.”

“Are you trying to trace this call, Detective Carella?”

“How could I? I’m all alone up here.”

“I think you’re lying,” the Deaf Man said, and hung up.

“Get anything?” Carella asked Willis.

“Miss Sullivan?” Willis said into the phone. He listened, shook his head, said, “Thanks for trying,” and then hung up. “When’s the last time we successfully traced a telephone call?” he asked Carella. He was a short man (the shortest on the squad, in fact, having barely cleared the Department’s 5'8" minimum height requirement), with slender hands and the alert brown eyes of a frisky terrier. He walked toward Carella’s desk with a bouncing stride, as though he were wearing sneakers.

“He’ll call back,” Carella said.

“You sounded like two old buddies chatting,” Willis said.

“In a sense, we are old buddies.”

“What do you want me to do if he calls again? Go through the nonsense?”

“No, he’s hip to it. He’ll never stay on the line more than a few minutes.”

“What the hell does he want?” Willis asked.

“Who knows?” Carella answered, and thought about what he’d said just a few moments before. In a sense, we are old buddies.

He had, he realized, stopped considering the Deaf Man a deadly adversary, and he wondered now how much this had to do with the fact that his wife, Teddy, was a deaf mute. Oddly, he never thought of her as such — except when the Deaf Man put in an appearance. There had never been anything resembling a lack of communication in his relationship with Teddy; her eyes were her ears, and her hands spoke volumes. Teddy was capable of screaming down the roof in pantomime and dismissing his own angry response by simply closing her eyes. Her eyes were brown, almost as dark as her black hair. She watched him intently with those eyes, watched his lips, watched his hands as they moved in the alphabet she had taught him, and which he spoke fluently and with a personality distinctly his own. She was beautiful and passionate and responsive and smart as hell. She was also a deaf mute. But he equated this with the lacy black butterfly she’d had tattooed on her right shoulder more years ago than he could recall; they were both superficial aspects of the woman he loved.

He had once hated the Deaf Man. He no longer did. He had once dreaded his intelligence and nerve. He no longer did. In a curious way he was glad the Deaf Man had returned, but at the same time he sincerely wished the Deaf Man would go away. To return again? It was all very puzzling. Carella sighed and wheeled a typing cart into position near his desk.

From his own desk Willis said, “We don’t need him. Not at this time of year. Not with the warm weather starting.”

The clock on the squadroom wall read 10:51 A.M.

A half hour had passed since the Deaf Man’s last call. He had not called again, and Carella was not disappointed. As if to support Willis’s theory that the Deaf Man was not needed, not with the warm weather starting, the squadroom was now thronged with cops, lawbreakers, and victims — all on a nice quiet Friday morning with the sun shining in a clear blue sky, and the temperature sitting at seventy-two degrees.

There was something about the warm weather that brought them out like cockroaches. The cops of the 87th Precinct rarely enjoyed what could be called a “slow season,” but it did appear to them that less crimes were committed during the winter months. During the winter months, it was the firemen who had all the headaches. Slum landlords were not particularly renowned for their generosity in supplying adequate heat to tenement dwellers, despite the edicts of the Board of Health. The apartments in some of the buildings lining the side streets off Culver and Ainsley avenues were only slightly warmer than the nearest igloo. The tenants, coping with rats and faulty electrical wiring and falling plaster and leaking pipes, often sought to bring a little extra warmth into their lives by using cheap kerosene burners that were fire hazards. There were more fires in the 87th Precinct on any given winter’s night than in any other part of the city. Conversely, there were less broken heads. It takes a lot of energy to work up passion when you’re freezing your ass off. But winter had all but fled the city, and spring was here, and with it came the attendant rites, the celebrations of the earth, the paeans to life and living. The juices were beginning to flow, and nowhere did they flow as exuberantly as in the 87th, where life and death sometimes got a little bit confused and where the flowing juices were all too often a bright red.

The man clinging to the patrolman’s arm had an arrow in his chest. They had called for a meat wagon, but in the meantime they didn’t know what the hell to do with him. They had never before had a man up here with an arrow sticking in his chest and protruding from his back.

“Why’d you bring him up here?” Willis whispered to the patrolman.

“What’d you want me to do? Leave him wandering around in the park?”

“Yeah, that’s what you should have done,” Willis whispered. “Let the Department of Hospitals worry about him. This guy can sue us, did you know that? For bringing him up here?”

“He can?” the patrolman whispered, and went immediately pale.

“All right, sit down,” Willis said to the man. “Can you hear me? Sit down.”

“I got shot,” the man said.

“Yeah, yeah, we know that. Now sit down. Will you please sit down? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I got shot,” the man said.

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know. Are there Indians in this city?”

“The ambulance is coming,” Willis said. “Sit down.”

“I want to stand up.”

“Why?”

“It hurts more when I sit.”

“You’re not bleeding much,” Willis said softly.

“I know. But it hurts. Did you call the ambulance?”

“I just told you we called the ambulance.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven.”

“I was taking a walk in the park,” the man said. “I felt this sharp pain in my chest, I thought I was having a heart attack. I look down, there’s an arrow in me.”

“All right, sit down, will you, you’re making me nervous.”

“Is the ambulance coming?”

“It’s coming, it’s coming.”

In the detention cage across the room, a tall blond girl wearing a white blouse and a short tan skirt paced nervously and angrily, and then stepped up to the grilled metal and shouted, “I didn’t do nothing, let me out of here.”

“The patrolman says you did plenty,” Carella said. “You slashed your boyfriend across the face and throat with a razor blade.”

“He deserved it,” the girl shouted. “Let me out of here.”

“We’re booking you for first-degree assault,” Carella said. “As soon as you calm down, I’m going to take your fingerprints.”

“I ain’t never calming down,” the girl shouted.

“We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“You know what I’m going to do?”

“You’re going to calm down, and then we’re going to take your fingerprints. And then, if you’ve got any sense, you’re going to start praying your boyfriend doesn’t die.”

“I hope he dies. Let me out of here!”

“Nobody’s letting you out. Stop yelling, you’re busting my ears.”

“I’m going to rip off all my clothes and say you tried to rape me.”

“Go ahead, we’ll enjoy the show.”

“You think I’m kidding?”

“Hey, Hal, the girl here’s going to take off her clothes.”

“Good, let her,” Willis said.

“You mother-fuckers,” the girl said.

“Nice talk,” Carella said.

“You think I won’t do it?”

“Do it, who cares?” Carella said, and turned away from the cage to walk toward a patrolman who stood behind two teenage boys handcuffed to each other and to the heavy wooden leg of the fingerprinting table. “What’ve we got here, Fred?” Carella asked the patrolman.

“Smashed a Cadillac into the window of a grocery store on the Stem. They’re both stoned,” the patrolman said. “The Caddy was stolen two days ago on the South Side. I’ve got it on my hot-car list.”

“Take off your blouse, honey,” one of the boys yelled across the room. “Show us your tits.”

“We’ll say they jumped you,” the other boy yelled, giggling. “Go ahead, baby, do it.”

“Anybody injured?” Carella asked the patrolman.

“Nobody in the store but the owner, and he was behind the counter.”

“How about it?” Carella asked the boys.

“How about what?” the first boy said. He had long black curly hair and a thick black beard. He was wearing blue jeans and a striped polo shirt over which was a tan windbreaker. He kept looking toward the detention cage, where the girl had begun pacing again.

“You crash that car into the window?”

“What car?” he said.

“The blue Caddy that was stolen from in front of 1604 Stewart Place Wednesday night,” the patrolman said.

“You’re dreaming,” the boy answered.

“Rip off your blouse, honey!” the second boy shouted. He was shorter than his companion, with long stringy brown hair and pale blue eyes. He was wearing tan chinos and a Mexican poncho. He did not have a shirt on under the poncho. He, too, kept watching the detention cage, where the girl had approached the locked door again and was peering owlishly into the room, as though contemplating her next move. “Do it!” he shouted to her. “Are you chicken?”

“Shut up, punk,” she answered.

“Did you steal that car?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know what car you’re talking about,” the boy said.

“The car you drove through the grocery-store window.”

“We weren’t driving no car, man,” the first boy said.

“We were flying, man,” the second boy said, and both of them began giggling.

“Better not book them till they know what’s going on,” Carella said. “Take them down, Fred. Tell Sergeant Murchison they’re stoned and won’t understand their rights.” He turned to the nearest boy and said, “How old are you?”

“Fifty-eight,” the boy answered.

“Sixty-five,” the second boy said, and again they giggled.

“Take them down,” Carella said. “Keep them away from anybody, they may be juveniles.”

The patrolman unlocked the cuff holding them to the leg of the table. As he led them toward the slatted railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor, the bearded boy turned toward the detention cage again and shouted, “You got nothing to show, anyway!” and then burst into laughter as the patrolman prodded him from behind with his nightstick.

“You think I won’t do it?” the girl again said to Carella.

“Sweetheart, we don’t care what you do,” Carella answered, and walked to Kling’s desk, where an old woman sat in a long black overcoat, her hands folded demurely in her lap.

“Che vergogna,” the woman said, nodding her head in disapproval of the girl in the cage.

“Yes,” Carella answered. “Do you speak English, signora?”

“I have been in America forty years.”

“Would you like to tell me what happened?”

“Someone steal my pocketbook.”

Carella moved a pad into place before him. “What’s your name, signora?”

“Caterina Di Paolo.”

“And your address?”

“Hey, is this a gag?” somebody called from the railing. Carella looked up. A white-suited ambulance attendant was standing there, looking disbelievingly into the squadroom. “Did somebody really get shot with an arrow?”

“There he is,” Willis said.

“That’s an arrow, all right,” the attendant said, his eyes bugging.

“Rape, rape!” the girl in the detention cage suddenly shouted, and Carella turned and saw that she had removed her blouse and brassiere.

“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered, and then said, “Excuse me, signora,” and was walking toward the cage when the telephone on his own desk rang.

He lifted the receiver.

“Come on, mister,” the ambulance attendant said.

“They ripped off my clothes!” the girl shouted. “Look at me!”

“Che vergogna,” the old lady said, and began clucking her tongue.

“With your assistance,” the Deaf Man said, “I’m going to steal five hundred thousand dollars on the last day of April.”