Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man

5

Detective Cotton Hawes looked at the photostat that came in Tuesday morning’s mail and decided it was General George Washington.

“Who does that look like to you?” he asked Miscolo, who had come out of the Clerical Office to pick up the weekend’s D.D. reports for filing.

“Napoleon Bonaparte,” Miscolo said dryly. Shaking his head, he went out of the squadroom muttering. Hawes still thought it looked like Washington.

He had been filled in on the latest activities of the Deaf Man, and he assumed now that the photostat was intended as a companion piece to the pictures of J. Edgar Hoover. He immediately connected Hoover and Washington in the obviously logical way — the main office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was in the city of Washington, D.C. Hoover, Washington, simple. When dealing with the Deaf Man, however, nothing was simple; Hawes recoiled from his first thought as though bitten by it. If the Deaf Man’s planned crime was to take place in Washington, he would not be pestering the hard-working cops (Oh, how hard they worked!) of the 87th. Instead, he would be cavorting on the Mall, taunting the cops of the District of Columbia, those stalwarts. No. This picture of the father of the country was meant to indicate something more than the name of a city, Hawes was certain of that. He was equally certain that J. Edgar’s fine face was meant to represent something more than the name of a vacuum cleaner, splendid product though it was. He suddenly wondered what the “J.” stood for. James? Jack? Jerome? Jules?

“Alf!” he shouted, and Miscolo, down the corridor in the Clerical Office, yelled, “Yo?”

“Come in here a minute, will you?”

Hawes rose from behind his desk and held the picture of Washington out at arm’s length. Hawes was a big man, six feet two inches tall, weighing 190 pounds, give or take a few for sweets or pizza. He had a straight unbroken nose, a good mouth with a wide lower lip, and red hair streaked with white over the left temple, where he had once been knifed by a building superintendent who had mistaken him for a burglar. His eyes were blue, and his vision had been as sharp as a hatpin when he’d joined the force. But that was many years ago, and we all begin to show the signs of age, sonny. He held the picture at arm’s length now because he was a trifle far-sighted and not at all certain that Miscolo hadn’t identified it correctly.

No, it was Washington, all right, no question about it.

“It’s Washington,” he said to Miscolo as he came into the squadroom carrying a sheaf of papers.

“You don’t say?” Miscolo said dryly. He looked harried, and hardly in the mood for small talk. Hawes debated asking his question, figured What the hell, and plunged ahead regardless.

“What does the ‘J.’ in J. Edgar Hoover stand for?”

“John,” Miscolo said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“John,” Hawes said.

“John,” Miscolo repeated.

The two men looked at each other.

“Is that all?” Miscolo asked.

“Yes, thanks a lot, Alf.”

“Don’t mention it,” Miscolo said. Shaking his head, he went out of the squadroom muttering.

John Edgar Hoover, Hawes thought. John. And George, of course. Names fascinated him. He himself had been named after the fiery Puritan preacher Cotton Mather. Hawes had never felt comfortable with the name and had debated changing it legally some ten years ago, when he was going with a Jewish girl named Rebecca Gold. The girl had said, “If you change your name, Cotton, I’ll never go out with you again.” Puzzled, he had asked, “But why, Rebecca?” and she had answered, “Your name’s the only thing I like about you.” He had stopped seeing her the next week.

He still thought wistfully of what he might have become — a Cary Hawes, or a Paul, or a Carter, or a Richard. But more than any of those, the name he most cherished (and he had never revealed this to a soul) was Lefty. Lefty Hawes. Was there a criminal anywhere in the world who would not tremble at the very mention of that dread name, Lefty Hawes? Even though he was right-handed? Hawes thought not. Sighing, he moved the picture of the first president so that it was directly below him on the desk top. Fiercely, he stared into those inscrutable eyes, challenging them to reveal the Deaf Man’s secret. Washington never so much as blinked back. Hawes stretched, yawned, picked up the photostat, and carried it to Carella’s desk, where it would be waiting when he got back to the office.

The tall blond man, hearing aid in his right ear, came through the revolving doors of the bank at fifteen minutes before noon. He was wearing a custom-tailored beige gabardine suit, an oatmeal-colored shirt, a dark brown tie, brown socks, and brown patent leather shoes. He knew from his previous visits to the bank that there were cameras focused on the area just inside the revolving doors, and cameras covering the five tellers’ cages on the left as well. The cameras, if they operated like most bank cameras he had investigated, took a random picture once every thirty seconds, and did not begin taking consecutive and continuous frames for a motion picture unless activated by a teller or some other member of the bank’s staff. He had no fear of his picture being taken, however, since he was a bona-fide depositor here on legitimate business.

He had been here for the first time a month ago, on legitimate business, to deposit $5,000 into a new savings account that paid 5 percent interest if the money was not withdrawn before the expiration of ninety days. He had assured the assistant manager that he had no intention of withdrawing the money before that time. He had been lying. He had every intention of withdrawing his $5,000, plus $495,000 more, on the last day of April. But his visit to the bank had been legitimate.

On two occasions last week, he had again visited the bank on legitimate business — to make small deposits in the newly opened account. Today, he was here on further legitimate business — to deposit $64 into the account. In addition, he was here to determine exactly how he would deploy his task force of five on the day of the robbery.

The bank guard stood just inside the revolving doors, at almost the exact focal point of the camera on the left. He was a man in his sixties, somewhat paunchy, a retired mailroom clerk or messenger who wore his uniform with shabby authority and who would probably drop dead of fright if he was ever forced to pull the.38 caliber revolver holstered at his side. He smiled at the Deaf Man as he came into the bank, his patent leather shoes clicking on the marbled floors. The Deaf Man returned the smile, his back to the camera that angled down from the ledge on the right of the entrance doors. Immediately ahead of him were two marble-topped tables secured to the floor and compartmentalized below their counters to accommodate checking-account deposit slips and savings-account withdrawal and deposit slips. He walked to the nearest table, stood on the side of it opposite the tellers’ cages, and began a quick drawing.

Looking into the bank from the entrance, there were three cages on the right side. He stood facing those cages now, his back turned to the clerical office and the loan department. Angling off from these, and running across the entire rear wall of the bank, was the vault, its shining steel door open now, its body encased in concrete and steel mesh interlaced with wires for the alarm system. There was no feasible way of approaching that vault from above it, below it, or behind it. The assault would have to be head-on, but not without its little diversions.

Smiling, the Deaf Man considered the diversions. Or, to be more accurate, the single diversion that would ensure the success of the robbery. To say that he considered the police antiquated and foolish would have been unfair to the enormity of his disdain; in fact, he considered them obsolete and essentially hebephrenic. Paradoxically, the success of his scheme depended upon at least some measure of intelligence on the part of his adversaries, so he was making it as simple as he could for them, spelling it out in pictures because he sensed words might be too confusing. He had begun explaining exactly where and when he would strike, and he had played fair and would continue to play fair; cheating the police would have been the equivalent of tripping a cripple in a soccer match. Although he suspected himself of sadistic tendencies, he could best exorcise those in bed with a willing wench rather than take advantage of the bumbleheads who worked in the 87th Precinct. He looked upon them almost fondly, like cretinous children who needed to be taken to the circus every now and then. In fact, he rather liked the concept of himself as a circus, complete with clowns and lion-taming acts and high-wire excitement, a one-man circus come to set the city on its ear again.

But in order for the diversion to work, in order for the spectator’s eye to become captured by the prancing ponies in the center ring while man-eating tigers consumed their trainer in the third ring, the diversion had to be plain and evident. The key to his brilliant scheme (he admitted this modestly), the code he had concocted, was simple to comprehend. Too simple? No, he did not think so. They would learn from the photostats only what he wanted them to learn; they would see only the ponies and miss the Bengal tigers. And then, thrilled with their own perception, inordinately proud of having been able to focus on the flashing hoofs, they would howl in pain when bitten on the ass from behind. All fair and above board. All there for the toy police to see, if only they were capable of seeing, if only they possessed the brains of gnats or the imagination of rivets.

The Deaf Man finished his floor plan of the bank. He folded the deposit slip as though he had been making money calculations in the secret manner of bank depositors everywhere, put it into his pocket, and then took another slip from the rack. He quickly filled it out, and walked to the nearest teller’s cage.

“Good morning, sir,” the teller said, and smiled pleasantly.

“Good morning,” the Deaf Man said, and returned the smile. Bored, he watched as the teller went about the business of recording the deposit. There were alarm buttons on the floor behind each of the tellers’ cages and scattered elsewhere throughout the bank. They did not overly concern him.

The Deaf Man thought it fitting that a police detective would help him rob the bank.

He also thought it fitting that the police detective who would lend his assistance was Steve Carella.

Things had a way of interlocking neatly if one bided his time and played his cards according to the laws of permutation and combination.

“Here you are, sir,” the teller said, and handed back the passbook. The Deaf Man perfunctorily checked the entry, nodded, slipped the book back into its plastic carrying case, and walked toward the revolving doors. He nodded at the security guard, who politely nodded back, and then he went into the street outside.

The bank was a mile outside the 87th Precinct territory, not far from three large factories on the River Harb. McCormick Container Corp. employed 6,347 people. Meredith Mints, Inc. employed 1,512. Holt Brothers, Inc. employed 4,048 for a combined work force of close to twelve thousand and a combined payroll of almost $2 million a week. These weekly salaries were paid by check, with roughly 40 percent of the personnel electing to have the checks mailed directly to banks of their own choice. Of the remaining 60 percent, half took their checks home to cash in supermarkets, whiskey stores, department stores, and/or banks in their own neighborhoods. But some 30 percent of the combined work force of the three plants cashed their checks each and every week at the bank the Deaf Man had just visited. Which meant that every Friday the bank expected to cash checks totaling approximately $600,000. In order to meet this anticipated weekly drain, the bank supplemented its own cash reserve with money shipped from its main branch. This money, somewhere in the vicinity of $500,000, depending on what cash the bank already had on hand, was delivered by armored truck at nine-fifteen each Friday morning. There were three armed guards on the truck. One guard stayed behind the wheel while the other two, revolvers drawn, went into the bank carrying two sacks of cash. The manager accompanied them into the vault, where they deposited the money, and then left the bank, revolvers now holstered. At eleven-thirty the cash was distributed to the tellers in anticipation of the lunch-hour rush of factory workers seeking to cash their salary checks.

The Deaf Man had no intention of intercepting the truck on its way from the main branch bank. Nor did he wish to hit any one of the individual tellers’ cages. No, he wanted to get that money while it was still neatly stacked in the vault. And whereas his own plan was far less dangerous than sticking up an armored truck, he nonetheless felt it to be more audacious. In fact, he considered it innovative to the point of genius, and was certain it would go off without a hitch. Ah yes, he thought, the bank will be robbed, the bank will be robbed, and his step quickened, and he breathed deeply of the heady spring air.

The tennis sneaker found in the abandoned building was in shabby condition, a size-twelve gunboat that had seen better days when it was worn on someone’s left foot. The sole was worn almost through in one spot, and the canvas top had an enormous hole near the area of the big toe. Even the laces were weary, having been knotted together after breaking in two spots. The brand name was well-known, which excluded the possibility of the sneaker having been purchased (as part of a pair, naturally) in any exotic boutique. The only thing of possible interest about this left-footed sneaker, in fact, was a brown stain on the tip of it, near the small toe. This was identified by the Police Laboratory as microcrystalline wax, a synthetic the color and consistency of beeswax, but much less expensive. A thin metallic dust adhered to the wax; it was identified as bronze. Carella was not particularly overjoyed by what the lab delivered. Nor was he thrilled by the report from the Identification Section, which had been unable to find any fingerprints, palm prints, or footprints that matched the dead man’s. Armed with a somewhat unflattering photograph (it had been taken while the man lay stone-cold dead on a slab at the morgue), Carella went back to the Harrison Street neighborhood that afternoon and tried to find someone who had known him.

The medical examiner had estimated the man’s age as somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. In terms of police investigation, this was awkward. He could have been running with a younger crowd of teenagers, or an older crowd of young adults, depending on his emotional maturity. Carella decided to try a sampling of each, and his first stop was a teenage coffee house called Space, which had over the years run the gamut from kosher delicatessen to Puerto Rican bodega to store-front church to its present status. In contradiction to its name, Space was a ten-by-twelve room with a huge silver espresso machine on a counter at its far end. Like a futuristic idol, the machine intimidated the room and seemed to dwarf its patrons. All of the patrons were young. The girls were wearing blue jeans and long hair. The boys were bearded. In terms of police investigation, this was awkward. It meant they could be (a) hippies, (b) college students, (c) anarchists, (d) prophets, (e) all of the foregoing. To many police officers, of course, long hair or a beard (or both) automatically meant that any person daring to look like that was guilty of (a) possession of marijuana, (b) intent to sell heroin, (c) violation of the Sullivan Act, (d) fornication with livestock, (e) corrupting the morals of a minor, (f) conspiracy, (g) treason, (h) all of the foregoing. Carella wished he had a nickel for every clean-shaven, crew-cutted kid he had arrested for murdering his own brother. On the other hand, he was a police officer and he knew that the moment he showed his badge in this place, these long-haired youngsters would automatically assume he was guilty of (a) fascism, (b) brutality, (c) drinking beer and belching, (d) fornication with livestock, (e) harassment, (f) all of the foregoing. Some days, it was very difficult to earn a living.

The cop smell seeped into the room almost before the door closed behind him. The kids looked at him, and he looked back at them, and he knew that if he asked them what date it was, they would answer in chorus, “The thirty-fifth of December.” He chose the table closest to the door, pulling out a chair and sitting between a boy with long blond hair and a dark boy with a straggly beard. The girl opposite him had long brown hair, frightened brown eyes, and the face of an angel.

“Yes?” the blond boy asked.

“I’m a police officer,” Carella said, and showed his shield. The boys glanced at it without interest. The girl brushed a strand of hair from her cheek and turned her head away. “I’m trying to identify a man who was murdered in this area.”

“When?” the boy with the beard asked.

“Sunday night. April eighteenth.”

“Where?” the blond boy asked.

“In an abandoned tenement on Harrison.”

“What’d you say your name was?” the blond boy asked.

“Detective Steve Carella.”

The girl moved her chair back, and rose suddenly, as though anxious to get away from the table. Carella put his hand on her arm and said, “What’s your name, miss?”

“Mary Margaret,” she said. She did not sit again. She moved her arm, freeing it from Carella’s hand, and then turned to go.

“No last name?” he said.

“Ryan,” she said. “See you guys,” she said to the boys, and this time moved several paces from the table before she was stopped again by Carella’s voice.

“Miss Ryan, would you look at this picture, please?” he said, and removed the photo from his notebook. The girl came back to the table, looked at the picture, and said nothing.

“Does he look familiar?” Carella asked.

“No,” she said. “See you,” she said again, and this time she walked swiftly from the table and out into the street.

Carella watched her going, and then handed the photograph to the blond boy. “How about you?”

“Nope.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bob.”

“Bob what?”

“Carmody.”

“And yours?” he asked the boy with the beard.

“Hank Scaffale.”

“You both live in the neighborhood?”

“On Porter Street.”

“Have you been living here long?”

“Awhile.”

“Are you familiar with most of the people in the neighborhood?”

“The freaks, yeah,” Hank said. “I don’t have much to do with others.”

“Have you ever seen this man around?”

“Not if he really looked like that,” Hank said, studying the photo.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s dead in that picture, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well, that makes a difference,” Hank said. “The juices are gone,” he said, and shook his head. “All the juices are gone.” He studied the photograph again, and again shook his head. “I don’t know who he is,” he said, “poor bastard.”

The responses from the other young people in the room were similar. Carella took the photograph around to the five other tables, explained what he was looking for, and waited while the dead man’s frozen image was passed from hand to hand. None of the kids were overly friendly (you can get hit on the head by cops only so often before you decide there may not be a basis there for mutual confidence and trust), but neither were they impolite. They all looked solemnly at the picture, and they all reported that they had not known the dead man. Carella thanked them for their time and went out into the street again.

By five o’clock that afternoon he had hit in succession two head shops, a macrobiotic food store, a record store, a store selling sandals, and four other places catering to the neighborhood’s young people — or at least those young people who wore their hair long. He could not bring himself to call them “freaks” despite their apparent preference for the word; to his way of thinking, that was the same as putting an identifying tag on a dead man’s toe before you knew who he was. Labels annoyed him unless they were affixed to case report folders or bottles in a medicine cabinet. “Freaks” was a particularly distressing label, demeaning and misleading, originally applied from without, later adopted from within in self-defense, and finally accepted with pride as a form of self-identification. But how in hell did this in any way lessen its derogatory intent? It was the same as cops proudly calling themselves “pigs” in the hope that the epithet would lose its vilifying power once it was exorcised by voluntary application. Bullshit. Carella was not a pig, and the kids he’d spoken to this afternoon were not freaks.

They were young people in a neighborhood as severely divided as any war-torn Asian countryside. In the days when the city was young, or at least younger, the neighborhood population had been mostly immigrant Jewish, with a dash of Italian or Irish thrown in to keep the pot boiling. It boiled a lot in those days (ask Meyer Meyer, who lived in a similar ghetto as a boy, and who was chased through the streets by bigots shouting, “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire!”), and eventually simmered down to a sort of armed truce between the old-timers, whose children went to college or learned New World trades and moved out to Riverhead or Calm’s Point. The next wave of immigrants to hit the area were United States citizens who did not speak the language and who enjoyed all the rights and privileges of any minority group in the city; that is to say, they were underpaid, overcharged, beaten, scorned, and generally made to feel that Puerto Rico was not a beautiful sun-washed island in the Caribbean but rather a stink hole on the outskirts of a smelly swamp. They learned very rapidly that it was all right to throw garbage from the windows into the backyard, because if you didn’t the rats would come into the apartment to eat it. Besides, if people are treated like garbage themselves, they cannot be castigated for any way they choose to handle their own garbage. The Puerto Ricans came, and some of them stayed only long enough to earn plane fare back to the island. Some followed the immigration pattern established by the Europeans: they learned the language, they went to school, they got better jobs, they moved into the outlying districts of the city (where they replaced those now-affluent Americans of European stock who had moved out of the city entirely, to private homes in the suburbs). Some remained behind in the old neighborhood, succumbing to the deadly grinding jaws of poverty, and wondering occasionally what it had been like to swim in clear warm waters where the only possible threat was a barracuda.

The long-haired youths must have seemed like invading immigrants to the Puerto Ricans who still inhabited the area. It is easy to turn prejudice inside out; within every fat oppressor, there lurks a skinny victim waiting to be released. The hippies, the flower children, the “freaks” if you prefer, came seeking peace and talking love, and were greeted with the same fear, suspicion, hostility, and prejudice that had greeted the Puerto Ricans upon their arrival. In this case, however, it was the Puerto Ricans themselves who were doing the hating — you cannot teach people a way of life, and then expect them to put it conveniently aside. You cannot force them into a sewer and then expect them to understand why the sons and daughters of successful Americans are voluntarily seeking residence in that very same sewer. If violence of any kind is absurd, then victims attacking other victims is surely ludicrous. Such was the situation in the South Quarter, where the young people who had come there to do their thing had taken instead to buying pistols for protection against other people who had been trying to do their thing for more years than they could count. In recent months, bikies had begun drifting into the area, sporting their leather jackets and their swastikas and lavishing on their motorcycles the kind of love usually reserved for women. The bikies were bad news. Their presence added a tense note of uneasiness and unpredictability to an already volatile situation.

The Puerto Ricans Carella spoke to that afternoon did not enjoy talking to a cop. Cops meant false arrests, cops meant bribes, cops meant harassment. It occurred to him that Alex Delgado, the one Puerto Rican detective on the squad (in itself a comment) might have handled the investigation better, but he was stuck with it, and so he plunged ahead, showing the picture, asking the questions, getting the same response each time: No, I do not know him. They all look alike to me.

The bikie’s name was Yank, meticulously lettered in white paint on the front of his leather jacket, over the heart. He had long frizzy black hair and a dense black beard. His eyes were blue, the right one partially closed by a scar that ran from his forehead to his cheek, crossing a portion of the lid in passing. He wore the usual gear in addition to the black leather jacket: the crushed peaked cap (his crash helmet was on the seat of his bike, parked at the curb), a black tee shirt (streaked white here and there from bleach-washing), black denim trousers, brass-studded big-buckled belt, black boots. An assortment of chains hung around his neck and the German iron cross dangled from one of them. He was sitting on a tilted wooden chair outside a shop selling posters (LBJ on a motorcycle in the window behind him), smoking a cigar and admiring the sleek chrome sculpture of his own bike at the curb. He did not even look at Carella as he approached. He knew instantly that Carella was a cop, but bikies don’t know from cops. Bikies, in fact, sometimes think they themselves are the cops, and the bad guys are everybody else in the world.

Carella didn’t waste time. He showed his shield and his I.D. card, and said, “Detective Carella, 87th Squad.”

Yank regarded him with cool disdain, and then puffed on his cigar. “Yeah?” he said.

“We’re trying to get a positive identification on a young man who may have been living in the neighborhood...”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you might be able to help.”

“Why?”

“Do you live around here?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you been living here?”

“Three of us blew in from the Coast a few weeks back.”

“Transients, huh?”

“Mobile, you might say.”

“Where are you living?”

“Here and there.”

“Where’s that?”

“We drop in various places. Our club members are usually welcome everywhere.”

“Where are you dropping in right now?”

“Around the corner.”

“Around the corner where?”

“On Rutland. Listen, I thought you were trying to identify somebody. What’re all these questions about? You charging me with some terrible crime?”

“Have you got a terrible crime in mind?”

“The bike’s legally parked, I was sitting here smoking a cigar and meditating. Is that against the law?”

“Nobody said it was.”

“So why all the questions?”

Carella reached into his jacket pocket, took out his notebook, and removed from it the photograph of the dead man. “Recognize him?” he asked, and handed the picture to Yank, who blew out a cloud of smoke, righted his chair, and then held the picture between his knees, hunched over it, as he studied it.

“Never saw him in my life,” he said. He handed the picture back to Carella, tilted the chair against the wall again, and drew in another lungful of cigar smoke.

“I wonder if I could have your full name,” Carella said.

“What for?”

“In case I need to get in touch with you again.”

“Why would you need to get in touch with me? I just told you I never saw this guy in my life.”

“Yes, but people sometimes come up with information later on. Since you and your friends are so mobile, you might just hear something that...”

“Tell you what,” Yank said, and grinned. “You give me your name. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.” He blew two precise smoke rings into the air, and said, “How’s that?”

“I’ve already given you my name,” Carella said.

“Shows what kind of memory I’ve got,” Yank said, and again grinned.

“I’ll see you around,” Carella said.

“Don’t count on it,” Yank answered.