Lightning

6

There were times when Cotton Hawes wished he really was named Great Farting Bull Horse. He hated the name Hawes. It was hard to say. Hawes. It sounded like yaws, a disease of some kind, he hated the name. He hated the name Cotton, too. Nobody on earth was named Cotton except Cotton Mather, and he’d been dead since 1728. But Hawes’s father had been a religious man who’d felt that Cotton Mather was the greatest of the Puritan priests and had named his son in honor of the colonial God-seeker who’d hunted witches with the worst of them. Conveniently, Hawes’s father had chalked off the Salem trials — his father had been very good at chalking off things — as the personal petty revenges of a town feeding on its own ingrown fears. Jeremiah Hawes (why hadn’t he named Hawes “Jeremiah, Jr.”?) simply exonerated Cotton Mather and the role the priest had played in bringing the delusion to its fever pitch, naming his son in the man’s honor. Why hadn’t he named him “Lefty” instead? Hawes wasn’t left-handed, but he would have preferred “Lefty” to “Cotton.” Lefty Hawes. Scare the shit out of any cheap thief on the street.

There were also times when Hawes hated anyone who wasn’t a cop. This went for cops’ wives or girlfriends, too. If they weren’t on the force, then they didn’t know what the hell it was all about. You double-dated with another cop and his girlfriend, you sat there trying to tell the women that you almost got shot that afternoon, they wanted to talk about their nails instead. Some new nail polish that made your nails grow long. Guy with a .357 Magnum tries to blow you away three hours earlier, and they want to talk about their nails. If they weren’t on the force, they just didn’t understand. Hawes once told Meyer that Star Wars had it all wrong. It shouldn’t have been, “May the force be with you.” What it should have been, instead, was, “May you be with the force.”

Anybody who wasn’t on the force didn’t really want to hear about what it was like being a cop. They all agreed that this city was a nice place to visit, but who’d want to live here? Even though they lived here, they complained about living here. But the things they complained about weren’t the things that made it really difficult to live here — and impossible to work here, if you happened to be a cop. They didn’t know about the underbelly. They didn’t want to hear about the underbelly in this city or in any city. The underbelly was pale white, and it was slimy, and maggots clung to it. The underbelly was a working cop’s life, day in and day out.

Cops’ wives and girlfriends understood that their men looked at the underbelly twenty-four hours a day, but they didn’t want to hear the underbelly defined. They said novenas in church, praying that their men wouldn’t get hurt out there, but they didn’t want to know about the underbelly, not really. Sometimes they prayed that they wouldn’t have to hear about it, know about it, that pale white, maggoty-crawling underbelly. Sometimes, they tried to forget about it by going to bed with somebody who wasn’t a cop. Later, they prayed forgiveness for their sins — but at least they hadn’t had to touch that pale white underbelly and get its slime all over their fingers.

Robin Steele’s husband worked out of the Two-Six downtown.

He was a patrolman.

He’d been on the force for three years, hardly enough time to get burned out, especially in a soft precinct like the Two-Six.

But Robin Steele had been sleeping with Martin J. Benson for the past six months now.

She confirmed that she had been with Benson on the night of October sixth, while her husband was riding shotgun in a radio motor patrol car. She confirmed that she was with him again last night, while her husband was again occupied on the city streets. She asked them please not to tell her husband any of this. She told Carella that she loved her husband very much and wouldn’t want to see him hurt in any way. She knew he was in a dangerous job, and she didn’t want him to have any worries on his mind when he was out there doing whatever it was he did. When Hawes asked her if she knew she wasn’t the only woman in Benson’s life, she said, “Oh, sure, that doesn’t matter.”

None of it mattered, Hawes guessed.

Except that somebody was hanging young girls from lampposts.

He guessed he called Annie Rawles because he wanted to be near a woman who was a cop. He wanted to be able to relax with somebody without having to explain what the hell a duty chart was. He wanted to be with someone who would automatically understand about the underbelly. At first he thought he might take a whack at Dorothy Hudd of the hanging pearls and roaming fingers. He went so far as to look up her name in the Isola directory, finding a listing for a D. Hudd (why did women use only the initial of their first name in telephone directories, a sure invitation to heavy breathers?), dialed the first two numbers, and then hung up, figuring he did not want to be with a civilian on a day when a good suspect had come up with an excellent alibi.

He called the Departmental Directory instead, identified himself as a working cop, told the clerk who took his rank and shield number that he was working a case with Detective Rawles of the Rape Squad, and got her home phone number in minutes. She’s probably married, Hawes thought as he dialed the number. But he hadn’t seen a wedding band on her hand. Maybe Rape Squad cops didn’t wear wedding bands. He listened to the phone ringing on the other end.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

“Miss Rawles?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Cotton Hawes,” he said.

“Who?” she said.

“Hawes. The Eight-Seven. You were up there last week about a rape case, we talked briefly...”

“Oh, yes, hi,” Annie said. “Hawes. The redheaded one.”

“Yes,” Hawes said.

“You got him, is that it?” she asked.

“What?”

“The rapist.”

“No, no,” Hawes said. “Eileen Burke was in late this afternoon, I gather she’s been assigned...”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t think she’s beginning till tomorrow.”

“That’s right. I just thought lightning may have struck.”

“No such luck.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“So... uh... what is it?” Annie asked.

Hawes hesitated.

“Hello?” Annie said.

“Hello, I’m still here.” He hesitated again. “You’re not married or anything, are you?”

“No, I’m not married,” Annie said. He thought he detected a smile in her voice.

“Have you had dinner yet? I know it’s past seven, maybe you’ve already...”

“No, I haven’t had dinner yet,” she said. He was sure she was smiling now. “I just got in a few minutes ago, in fact.”

“Would you... uh...?”

“Sure,” she said. “Want to pick me up here, or shall we meet someplace?”

“Eight o’clock sound all right?” Hawes asked.

They had dinner in a Chinese restaurant and went back to Annie’s place later on. She lived in an old brick building on Langley Place, near the Three-One, which was one of the oldest precincts in the city, and which still had a coal-burning furnace in the basement. She told him that she was sure her presence in the building accounted for the fact that there hadn’t been a burglary here in three years. She figured word had got around that a lady cop lived in the building. She told him this while she was pouring cognac into brandy snifters.

She was wearing a simple blue dress and blue patent-leather high-heeled pumps; he doubted she’d been dressed for work that way. She looked like any pretty civilian might look — black wedge-cut hair, brown eyes behind black-rimmed eyeglasses, the simple blue dress, a gold chain and pendant — well, no. A civilian in this city wouldn’t risk wearing a gold chain. A lady cop with a .38 in her handbag might take the chance. But otherwise, she didn’t look like a cop; some of the lady cops in this city resembled hog callers at a county fair, big guns on their hips, cartridge belts hanging, big fat asses. Annie Rawles looked like a schoolgirl. Word had it that she had blown away two hoods trying to rob a bank, but Hawes couldn’t visualize it. Couldn’t see her in a policeman’s crouch, leveling the gun and squeezing off however many shots it had taken to deck the bastards. He tried to imagine the scene. As he accepted the brandy snifter from her, he realized he was staring.

“Something?” she said, and smiled.

“No, no,” Hawes assured her. “Just remembering you’re a cop.”

“Sometimes I wish I could forget it,” Annie said.

She sat beside him on the couch, tucking her legs up under her. The room was pleasantly furnished, a Franklin stove laid with cannel coal on the wall opposite the sofa, framed prints on all of the walls, a pass-through counter leading into a tidy kitchen hung with copper-bottomed pots and pans. The furniture looked like quality stuff; he remembered she earned $37,935 a year as a detective/first. He sipped at the cognac.

“Good,” he said.

“My brother brought it back from France,” she said.

“What does he do?”

“He imports fish,” she said. “Don’t laugh.”

“What kind of fish?”

“Salmon. Irish salmon, mostly. Very expensive stuff. Something like thirty-eight dollars a pound.”

“Whoo,” Hawes said. “So how come France?”

“What? Oh. A side trip. Mixing business with pleasure.”

“I’ve never been to France,” Hawes said, somewhat wistfully.

“Neither have I,” Annie said.

“Popeye got to go to France, though.”

“Popeye?”

“The French Connection. Did you see that movie? Not the one where he goes to France, that was lousy. The first one.”

“Yeah, it was pretty authentic, I thought.”

“Yeah, standing around in the cold, and everything. That really happened to Carella, you know.”

“Who’s Carella?”

“Guy I’m working these homicides with, good cop.”

“What really happened to him?”

“They made him an addict. On a case he was working. They turned him on to heroin. Like with Popeye in the second French Connection movie. Only it happened to Carella before there even was that movie. I mean, really happened to him, never mind fiction.”

“Is he okay now?”

“Oh, sure. Well, he was hooked, but not for very long, and besides they did it to him, you know, it wasn’t a voluntary thing.”

“So he kicked it.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Some fun, huh? Being a cop?”

“A million laughs,” Hawes said. “How’d you happen to get into it?”

“I thought it would be exciting,” Annie said. “I guess it is. Don’t you think it is?”

“I guess so,” Hawes said.

“I was fresh out of college...”

“You still look like a college girl.”

“Well, thank you.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirty-four,” Annie said immediately.

He liked that about lady cops. No bullshit. Ask a question, you got a straight answer.

“Been on the job long?”

“Eight years.”

“You used to work out of Robbery, right?” Hawes said.

“Yeah. Well, I was on the Stakeout Squad before that. Right after I got the gold shield. Then Robbery, and now Rape. How about you?”

“I’ve been with the Eight-Seven for more years than I can count,” Hawes said. “Before that, I was with the Three-Oh, a silk-stocking precinct, are you familiar with it?”

“Yes,” Annie said, and nodded, and sipped at her cognac.

“I’ve learned a lot uptown,” he said.

“I’ll bet you have,” Annie said.

They were silent for a moment. He wanted to ask her where she’d gone to college, what she’d majored in, whether she’d had any qualms about working with the Stakeout Squad, whose prime purpose — before it was disbanded — was to sit in the back of stores that had been previously held up, waiting to ambush any robber who came back a second time. The Stakeout Squad had blown away forty-four armed robbers before the Commissioner decided the operation was something the Department shouldn’t be too terribly proud of. Hawes wondered if she’d shot anyone while she was working with Stakeout. He had a lot of questions he still wanted to ask her. He felt he was getting to know her a little better, but there were still a lot of questions to ask. Instead, though, suddenly feeling totally relaxed and secure, he didn’t ask a question at all. As if he had known her forever, he said only, “It gets to you after a while. The job.”

She looked at him for what seemed like a long time before she answered.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It gets to you.”

They kept looking at each other.

Hawes nodded.

“Well,” he said, and glanced at his watch. “If your day was anything like mine...”

“Rough one,” she said, and nodded.

“So,” he said, and rose awkwardly. “Thanks for the cognac, your brother’s got good taste.”

“Thanks for the dinner,” she said.

She did not rise. She kept sitting right where she was, looking up at him, her legs tucked under her.

“Let’s do it again sometime,” he said.

“I’d love to.”

“In fact... I’ve got the day off tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe we could...”

“I don’t have to be in till four,” she said.

“Maybe... well, I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Marty,” she said, and smiled. “What would you like to do?”

“I love that movie,” he said.

“I do, too.”

“I saw it on television again last week.”

“So did I.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I saw it last week.”

“Late at night, right?”

“About two in the morning.”

“How about that?” he said. “Both of us watching the same movie at opposite ends of the city.”

“What a pity,” she said.

Their eyes met.

“Well,” he said, “let me call you in the morning, okay? I’ll try to figure out something we can...”

“Let’s not be dopes,” Annie said.

Eileen Burke was in Kling’s bed.

They had known each other intimately for the better part of eight months now, but the sex tonight had been as steamy and as improvisational as it had been the first time. When at last they expired on the separate little deaths of literary reknown, and after they exchanged the obligatory assurances that it had been as good for him as it had been for her and vice versa, and after Eileen had gone to the bathroom to pee, and after Kling had crossed the room naked to open the window to the sounds of the night traffic below, they lay back against the pillows, entwined in each other’s arms, Eileen’s hand resting idly on Kling’s chest, his own hand gently cradling her breast.

It was a little while before Eileen told him what was troubling her.

“I’ve been thinking about the job,” she said.

Kling had been thinking about the job, too. Kling had been thinking that the hangings up there in the Eight-Seven were the work of the Deaf Man.

“I’m not talking about this particular job,” Eileen said. “This business of masquerading as Mary Hollings.”

“The rape victim, right,” Kling said.

“I mean the job itself.”

“Being a cop, you mean?”

“Being a particular kind of cop,” Eileen said.

It has to be the Deaf Man, Kling was thinking. It fit with the Deaf Man’s M.O. They hadn’t heard from the Deaf Man in a long time, but this sure looked like the Deaf Man. Why else would anybody have bothered to make identification of the victims so easy for them?

“A decoy, I mean,” Eileen said.

Kling was thinking back to the first time the Deaf Man had put in an appearance. That had been the most difficult time for the Eight-Seven because they hadn’t known then what they were up against. All they’d known was that somebody was trying to force a man — what had his name been, anyway? Meyer had caught the initial squeal, a guy who’d grown up with his father, came to the squadroom to tell him — what the hell had his name been? Haskins? Baskin?

“I’m beginning to think it’s demeaning,” Eileen said.

“What is?” Kling asked.

“Being a decoy. I mean, aside from the fact that it smells a lot like entrapment...”

“Well, it’s not exactly entrapment,” Kling said.

“I know it isn’t, but it feels like it is,” Eileen said. “I mean, I’m out there hoping some guy will rape me, isn’t that what it is?”

“Well, not rape you, actually.”

“Try to rape me, okay?”

“So you can stop him from raping somebody else,” Kling said.

“Well, yeah, that,” Eileen said.

Raskin, Kling remembered. His name was David Raskin. And somebody had been trying to get him to vacate a loft on Culver Avenue, crumby little loft Raskin used for storing dresses, guy was in the dress business, right, David Raskin. First he started getting calls threatening to kill him if he didn’t move out of the loft. Then the guy heckling him on the phone — they hadn’t known it was the Deaf Man at the time — began sending him stationery he hadn’t ordered, and then a catering service delivered folding chairs and enough food to feed the Russian army, and then an ad appeared in the two morning dailies advertising for redheads to model dresses, and that was when they tipped to what was going on: someone was referring them to Conan Doyle’s The Red-Headed League, and the someone had signed himself L. Sordo, which was Spanish for the Deaf Man, and he was trying to help them dope out in advance what he was planning to do.

Only he hadn’t been trying to help them at all. He was using them the way he’d been using Raskin, misdirecting them into believing he was planning to hit the bank under Raskin’s loft, when he had another bank in mind all along. Playing with them. Making them feel foolish and incompetent. Leading them a merry chase while he masterminded his break-in, probably laughing to himself all along.

Carella had got himself shot that first time the Deaf Man made himself known to the 87th Precinct.

If the Deaf Man was now responsible for the two hangings...

“It makes me feel like some kind of sex object,” Eileen said.

“You are some kind of sex object,” Kling said, and playfully tweaked her nipple.

“I’m serious,” she said.

And while she went on to tell him that she wouldn’t have been picked for this particular line of police work if she wasn’t a woman, which in itself was demeaning because nobody on the force would dream of putting a male cop in drag to lure a rapist — had he really been listening, Kling might have protested that male cops had been used on such jobs — and which was entirely against the whole psychology of the rapist, anyway. A rapist wasn’t interested in tits and ass, he wasn’t interested in a show of leg or thigh, he was interested in satisfying his own particular rage, which had nothing whatever to do with sex or lust. But the sexist meatheads in the department put her on the street to parade like a hooker in the hope she would trap — yes, trap — some lunatic out there into dragging her in the bushes where she’d stick her gun in his mouth; it was all degrading and it made her feel slimy at night when she took off her clothes, made her feel like scrubbing herself three times over to get the filth of the job off her. What the hell was a lady like Annie Rawles doing on the Rape Squad when she’d already blown away two guys when she was with Robbery, what was that if not taking the sexist view that a woman cop was suited only for a certain kind of police work while a man cop had his choice of whatever the hell job he wanted?

“What job do you want?” Kling asked.

“I may ask for a transfer to Narcotics,” she said.

“Same thing,” he said. “Only then you’ll be a decoy for pushers.”

“It’s not the same,” Eileen said.

But Kling was still thinking about the Deaf Man.

He had blown up half the city.

That was the first time.

He had set both incendiary and explosive bombs all over the city, to divert the police, to cause panic and confusion while he went about the business of robbing a bank. Not a thought in his head of the havoc he was wreaking or of the lives lost because of his clever little escapade.

That had been the first time.

Carella tended to block out that first time because that was the time he’d been shot. He did not like to think about getting shot. He’d been shot once before then, by a pusher in Grover Park, and he hadn’t enjoyed that particular fireworks display, either. So whenever he thought about the Deaf Man, as he was doing tonight, he tended to remember only the second and third times the Deaf Man had come around to plague them. It seemed incredible to him that there had been only three times. The Deaf Man, in his mind and in the minds of most of the detectives on the squad, was a legend, and legends were without origin, legends were omnipresent, legends were eternal. The very thought that the Deaf Man might already be back yet another time sent a small shiver of apprehension up Carella’s spine. Whenever the Deaf Man arrived — and surely these hangings bore his unique stamp — the men of the Eight-Seven began behaving like Keystone Kops in a silent black-and-white film. Carella did not enjoy feeling like a dope, but the Deaf Man made all of them feel stupid.

He thought it a supreme irony of his life that the man who was the nemesis of the 87th Precinct advertised himself as being deaf — if, in fact, he was — while at the same time the single most important person in his life, his wife Teddy, was truly deaf. Nor could she speak. Not with a voice, at any rate. She spoke volumes otherwise, with her hands, with her expressive face, with her eyes. And she “heard” every word her husband uttered, her eyes fastened to his lips when he spoke or to his hands when he signed to her in the language she had taught him early on in their marriage.

Teddy was talking to him now.

They had just made love.

The first words she said to him were, “I love you.”

She used the informal sign, a blend of the letters “i,” “l,” and “y,” her right hand held close to her breast, the little finger, index finger and thumb extended, the remaining two fingers folded down toward her palm. He answered with the more formal sign for “I love you”: first touching the tip of his index finger to the center of his chest; then clenching both fists in the “a” hand sign, crossing his arms below the wrists, and placing his hands on his chest; and finally pointing at her with his index finger — a simple “I” plus “love” plus “you.”

They kissed again.

She sighed.

And then she began telling him about her day.

He had known for quite some time now that she was interested in finding a job. Fanny had been with them since the twins were born, and she ran the house efficiently. The twins — Mark and April — were now eleven years old, and in school much of the day. Teddy was bored with playing tennis or lunching with the “girls.” She signed “girl” by making the “a” hand sign with her right fist, and dragging the tip of her thumb down her cheek along the jawline; to make the word plural, she rapidly indicated several different locations, pointing with her extended forefinger. More than one girl. Girls. But her eyes and the expression on her face made it clear that she was using the word derogatively; she did not consider herself a “girl,” and she certainly didn’t consider herself one of the “girls.”

Carella, listening to this — he was in fact listening, even though he was watching — thought about the second time the Deaf Man had come into the precinct’s busy life. Again, it had been Meyer who’d initially been contacted, purely by chance since he was the one who’d answered the ringing telephone. The Deaf Man himself was on the other end of the line, promising to kill the Parks Commissioner if he did not receive five thousand dollars before noon. The Parks Commissioner was shot dead the following night.

Well, I went to this real estate agency on Cumberland Avenue this morning, Teddy was saying with her hands and her eyes and her face. I’d written them a letter answering an ad in the newspaper, telling them what my experience had been before we got married and before I became a mother—

(Carella remembered. He had met Theodora Franklin while investigating a burglary at a small firm on the fringe of the precinct territory. She had been working there addressing envelopes. He had taken one look at the brown-eyed, black-haired beauty sitting behind the typewriter, and had known instantly that this was the woman with whom he wished to share the rest of his life.)

— and they wrote back setting up an appointment for an interview. So I got all dolled up this morning, and went over there.

To express the slang expression “dolled up,” she first signed “x,” stroking the curled index finger of the hand sign on the tip of her nose, twice. To indicate “doll” was in the past tense, she immediately made the sign for “finished.” For “up” she made the same sign anyone who was not a deaf-mute might have made: She simply moved her extended index finger upward. Dolled up. Carella got the message, and visualized her in a smart suit and heels, taking the bus to Cumberland Avenue, some two miles from the house.

And now her hands and her eyes and her mobile face spewed forth a torrent of language. Surprise of all surprises, she told him, the lady is a deaf-mute. The lady cannot hear, the lady cannot speak, the lady — however intelligent her letter may have sounded, however bright and perky she may appear in person — possesses neither tongue nor ear, the lady simply will not do! This despite the fact that the ad called only for someone to type and file. This despite the fact that I was reading that fat bastard’s lips and understanding every single word he said — which wasn’t easy since he was chewing on a cigar — this despite the fact that I can still type sixty words a minute after all these years, ah, the hell with it. Steve, he thought I was dumb (she tapped the knuckles of the “a” hand sign against her forehead, indicating someone stupid), the obvious mate to deaf, right? (she touched first her mouth and then her ear with her extended index finger), like ham and eggs, right? Deaf and dumb, right? Shit, she said signing the word alphabetically for emphasis, S-H-I-T!

He took her in his arms.

He was about to comfort her, about to tell her that there were ignorant people in this world who were incapable of judging a person’s worth by anything but the most obvious external evidence, when suddenly she was signing again. He read her hands and the anger in her eyes.

I’m not quitting, she said. I’ll get a goddamn job.

She rolled into him, and he felt her small determined nod against his shoulder. Reaching behind him toward the night table, he snapped off the bedside light. He could hear her breathing in the darkness beside him. He knew she would lie awake for a long time, planning her next move. He thought suddenly of the Deaf Man again. Was he lying awake out there someplace, planning his next move? Another girl hanging from a lamppost? Another young runner knocked down in her prime? But why?

That second time around, he had senselessly killed the parks commissioner, and then the deputy mayor (and a handful of unselected targets who happened to be in the immediate vicinity when the deputy mayor’s car exploded) and then had threatened to kill the mayor himself, all as part of his grander scheme. The scheme? To extort five thousand dollars from each of a hundred selected wealthy citizens. The dubious reasoning for believing they would pay? Well, the Deaf Man had warned his previous targets in advance, hadn’t he? And then had carried out his threats. And now he was promising to strike without warning if his new targets didn’t pay. So what would five thousand dollars mean to men who were worth millions? Even figuring on a mere one-percent return, the Deaf Man’s expenses would be more than covered. Never mind that he had already killed two selected victims and a handful of innocent bystanders. Never mind that he planned to kill yet a third, the mayor himself. All part of the game. Fun and games. Every time the Deaf Man put in an appearance, a laugh riot was all but guaranteed. For everyone but the cops of the 87th Precinct.

If those young girls hanging from lampposts were harbingers of something bigger the Deaf Man planned, the Eight-Seven was in for more trouble than it already had or needed. Carella shuddered with the thought, and suddenly pulled his wife close.

Sarah Meyer was wondering how to tell her husband that she thought their daughter should go on the pill. Meyer was wondering whether she liked his hairpiece. He was also wondering if the Deaf Man was once again in their midst. Not in their immediate midst, since he knew that he and Sarah were alone in bed together, but in the midst of hanging young women from lampposts.

Meyer did not like the Deaf Man. It had been Meyer’s misfortune, on three separate occasions now, to be the first detective contacted by the Deaf Man. Well, that wasn’t quite true. The first time around, it had been Dave Raskin who’d contacted him about the Deaf Man, who they didn’t even know was deaf at the time, if he really was deaf, which maybe he wasn’t. There were a lot of things they didn’t know about the Deaf Man. Like who he was, for example. Or where he’d been all these years. Or why he was back now, if indeed he was back, which Meyer hoped he wasn’t, but feared he was.

All Meyer wanted to do was ask Sarah if she liked him better with his hairpiece or without his hairpiece. He was not wearing his hairpiece to bed. If she told him she liked him better with it, he would get out of bed and put it on, and then he would make wild passionate love to her. Either way, with or without the hairpiece, he planned to make wild passionate love to her. He did not want to be thinking about the Deaf Man. He wanted to be thinking instead about Sarah’s splendid legs, thighs, and breasts.

Sarah was worrying about their only daughter, Susan, who was sixteen years old. More specifically, Sarah was worried about genetics. Her husband had told her on more occasions than she could count that she was blessed with splendid legs, thighs, and breasts. She wasn’t so sure now how she felt about her legs or thighs, but she agreed that she had very good breasts, and there was nothing she liked better (well, almost nothing) than having her breasts fondled. That was where genetics came in. She did not have to worry about her older boy, Alan, so far as genetics were concerned. Nor did she have to worry about her youngest son, Jeff. Alan was seventeen and Jeff was thirteen and the only thing she had to worry about where they were concerned was the possibility that they might begin smoking dope or something, in which case Meyer would break their respective heads. But genetics, ah, genetics.

Susan, from all external evidence, had inherited the splendid legs, thighs, and breasts Meyer was always telling Sarah she possessed. She had also inherited Sarah’s bee-stung lips, her own and Meyer’s blue eyes, plus blond hair that come from God knew where, and all of this put together made for a very attractive young lady who Sarah hoped was not as fond of being fondled as she herself was.

That was why Sarah wanted to suggest to Meyer that they both suggest to Susan that Susan suggest to their family doctor that perhaps he ought to put her on the pill. Sarah did not know whether or not her daughter was still a virgin. Susan had become awfully close-mouthed about personal matters in the past several months, a possible sign that she had already been initiated by some hot-blooded high school cowboy (I’ll kill him, Sarah thought), or, on the other hand, a possible sign that she was seriously considering initiation. Either way, Sarah did not want her daughter to become pregnant at the age of sixteen.

The problem, however, was explaining all of this to Meyer.

It was Sarah’s firm belief that Meyer thought their daughter had never been kissed.

Simultaneously, they both began speaking.

“I’ve been thinking...”

“Sarah, do you...?”

They both fell silent.

“Go ahead,” Meyer said. “You first.”

“No, you first.”

Meyer took a deep breath.

“They’re kidding me about the hairpiece,” he said.

“Who?”

“The guys.”

“So?”

“All the guys,” Meyer said.

“So?”

“So... Sarah... do you like the hairpiece?”

“It’s not me who has to like it,” Sarah said. “It’s on your head.”

“Well... do you think I look better with it or without it?”

Sarah considered this for what seemed a long time.

“Meyer,” she said, “I love you with hair or without hair. To me, you’re you, with hair or without hair. You can go around bald, if you like, or you can wear the wig you’ve already got, or you can buy a blond wig or a redheaded wig, you can grow a mustache or a beard, or you can paint your toenails purple, whatever you do I’ll love you. Because I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said, and hesitated. “But do you like the wig?”

“You want an honest answer?”

“Yes.”

“I love to kiss your shiny bald head,” she said.

“Then I’ll burn the wig,” he said.

“Yes, burn it.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Whenever,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, but he wasn’t sure he would burn it. He sort of liked the way he looked in it. The wig made him look like a detective. He liked looking like a detective. He liked being a detective. Except when the Deaf Man was around. Why did the Deaf Man have to be around again? If it was the Deaf Man. But who else would be hanging girls from lampposts and then leaving identification around to make the job easy? It had to be the Deaf Man. He wondered suddenly if the Deaf Man wore a wig? The Deaf Man was blond, Carella had positively identified him that time he’d got shot. A tall blond man wearing a hearing aid in his right ear. But suppose the blond hair was a wig. Suppose the Deaf Man was really bald? Would they have to start calling him the Bald Man? Did people call Meyer himself the Bald Man behind his back? Was he known throughout the 87th Precinct as the Bald Detective? Throughout the entire city perhaps? The world? He did not want to be known as the bald anything. He wanted to be known as Meyer Meyer. Himself.

Sarah was talking.

He had missed the first several words of what she was saying, but it had something to do with people growing up to be beautiful and naturally attracting the attention of other people. He remembered the last time the Deaf Man had come to plague them. Why didn’t he pick on some other precinct, what the hell was it with him? Why the Eight-Seven? Sent photographs to them. Sent each photograph twice. Made it easy for them — well, not so easy, a philanthropist he wasn’t. But threw the challenge in their laps: Dope out what these pictures mean, and you’ll know what I’m up to this time. The pictures, once they doped them out, indicated that he was going to rob another bank. And rob a bank he did. Twice. Sent in a team he knew would be caught if the detectives had properly figured out the pictures he’d sent them, and then sent in a second team an hour and a half later. Almost got away with it, too. Called himself “Taubman” that time around. “Taubman” was German for the Deaf Man. Der taube mann. God, Meyer hoped he wasn’t back again.

“So what do you think?” Sarah said.

“I hope he isn’t back again,” Meyer said aloud.

“Who?”

“The Deaf Man.”

“Did you hear anything I said?”

“Well, sure, I...”

“Or are you deaf, too?” Sarah asked.

“What is it?” Meyer said.

“I asked you about Susan.”

“What about Susan?”

“She’s sixteen.”

“I know she’s sixteen.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Like her mother.”

“Thank you. She’s beginning to attract boys.”

“She’s been attracting them since she was twelve,” Meyer said.

“You know that?”

“Of course I know it, am I blind? In fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Don’t you think it’s time she saw a doctor?”

“A doctor?” Sarah said.

“Yeah. To prescribe the pill for her.”

“Oh,” Sarah said.

“I know the idea may be upsetting to you...”

“No, no,” Sarah said.

“But I think it’s best to take the necessary precautions. Really. This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know.”

“I know,” Sarah said.

“So will you talk to her?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Sarah said. She was silent for a moment. Then she whispered, “I love you, you know that?” and kissed his shiny bald head.

Hawes loved to undress women.

He especially loved undressing women who wore eyeglasses.

Taking off their eyeglasses was tantamount to stripping them naked. A woman looked particularly soft and desirable once her eyeglasses were removed. He loved to kiss the closed eyelids of a woman whose eyeglasses he had just removed. When he started to take off Annie’s eyeglasses, she said, “No, don’t.”

They were in her bedroom. They had carried their brandy snifters into her bedroom, and they were sitting on the edge of Annie’s king-sized bed. They had kissed once, gently and exploratively, and then he started to take off her eyeglasses, and he was thinking now that it was starting wrong. If a woman refused to let you take off her eyeglasses, how would she react when you asked her to swing from the chandelier?

When Hawes was seventeen years old, he had dated a girl who wore eyeglasses, and he had done something he thought was very clever. He had gently taken her eyeglasses from the bridge of her nose, and had breathed on both lenses, and when she asked him why he was doing that, he replied, “So you won’t be able to see what my hands are doing.” The girl had asked him to drive her home at once. He had since learned not to breathe on girl’s eyeglasses; you could fog up a potential situation that way. The situation with Annie Rawles seemed fraught with potential, but she had just told him not to take off her eyeglasses, and he was thinking he had pulled a gaffe equal to the one when he was but a mere callow youth. He looked at her, puzzled.

“I want to see you,” she whispered.

He kissed her again. She kissed very nicely, her lips parting slightly to receive his, soft and pliable, a slight inhalation of breath causing an airtight seal between their mouths, he wondered how Sam Grossman at the lab would have explained the phenomenon of such a vacuum, lips pressing to lips, inhalation causing suction suddenly disrupted by the intrusion of probing tongues — he knew suddenly that everything was going to be all right, eyeglasses or no.

The first time was the most important time; he always listened skeptically when any of the squadroom pundits declared that sex got better as it went along, you learned with practice. In his experience, if the first time wasn’t any good, the next time would be worse, and the time after that would be impossible. In police work, that was an adage: A bad situation can only get worse. It applied to sex as well. He got a little dizzy kissing Annie Rawles, a sure indication that everything was going to be very good indeed. He could not recall ever having grown dizzy just kissing someone. There’s magic in your lips, Kate, he thought, and wondered which Shakespearean play that was from, or had Spencer Tracy said it to Katharine Hepburn in some movie? There’s magic in your lips, he thought, and said aloud, “There’s magic in your lips.”

“Kate,” Annie whispered. “Henry the Fifth,” and kissed him again.

It was funny how dizzy he got kissing her. His head was actually buzzing. Not too many people knew how to kiss nowadays. People rushed through kissing as if it were the curtain-raiser to the play itself, an introduction to be hurried through before the real performance started — Henry the Fifth? Was that where the line came from? He’d known once, he was sure, but he’d forgotten. Had Annie been an English major in college? Had she been a kissing major? Jesus, he really did like kissing her. He was reluctant to stop kissing her. He had never in his life felt that he’d be content to spend a night just kissing somebody, but he was close to feeling that now. He remembered that there were things besides kissing, but feeling the way he did — feeling! That was one of the other things besides kissing.

Once, when he was nineteen, he had dated a girl who didn’t wear eyeglasses, and he had done something else he thought was very clever, with almost the identical result. He had touched the lapel of the jacket the girl was wearing, and he had asked, “Can this be wool?” And then he had touched the collar of the blouse she was wearing, and he had asked, “Can this be silk?” And then he had put his hand on her breast and asked, “Can this be felt?” The girl hadn’t asked him to drive her home, the way the girl with the eyeglasses had. Instead, she just got out of the car and walked home.

Hawes wondered now if he should touch Annie’s breast. He was having a very good time kissing her, but he was beginning to think he should touch something, too, and her breast seemed a good place to start. His hand was cupped under her chin, he was drinking kisses from her mouth. He allowed his hand to slide tentatively over her throat, and past her collar bone, and onto the silky-feeling fabric of the blue dress she was wearing, and then onto her left breast—

“No, don’t,” Annie said.

He thought at once that there were some things grown men never learn, even if they’d been burned often as teenagers. He also thought that he’d been wrong about things going right. Maybe Annie was one of those ladies who thought it was perfectly okay to kiss the night away, something he himself had thought was okay just a moment earlier, but which was not really okay for consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, although the home was hers and not his. He was very confused all at once, in addition to being very dizzy.

“I want you to undress me first,” Annie whispered.

He was suddenly more excited than he’d ever been in his life. More excited than that first time on the roof with Elizabeth Parker (every time he saw Andy Parker in the squadroom, he thought of Elizabeth Parker, although the two were not related) when he was sixteen years old and she’d had to teach him where to find it. More excited than that time with a black whore in Panama, when he was twenty years old and serving in the U.S. Navy, a joyously beautiful woman who had taught him more about sex in two hours than he’d learned the rest of his life. (He had never mentioned this to Brown; one day he thought he might.) More excited than that time at a dinner party when the married woman sitting next to him and wearing a slinky green gown cut to her navel slid her hand under the table and onto his thigh, close to his groin, and said while forking shrimp cocktail into her deliciously wicked mouth, “Do you find you have to use your gun often, Detective Hawes?”

She looked like a schoolteacher in her simple blue dress, Annie Rawles did. Eyeglasses perched on her nose, a faint smile on her mouth. She turned her back to him as if she were about to write something on the blackboard. “The zipper,” she said, and lowered her head, even though she wore her black hair in a wedge cut that exposed the back of her slender neck and the place at the top of her dress where the zipper tab nestled. He kissed the back of her neck. He felt her shudder. He reached for the zipper tab and lowered the zipper on her back, exposing the line of her brassiere strap, a blue paler than the dress, crossing her pale white skin. He was reaching for the brassiere clasp, when again she said, “No, don’t,” and turned to face him, and shivered out of the dress, allowing it to cascade over her hips to her ankles. She stepped out of the dress.

She was wearing lingerie out of the pages of Penthouse, the schoolteacher vanishing in the crumpled pile of simple blue dress on the carpet, the hard-nosed cop transformed in the wink of an instant into a hard-porn sex goddess. A flimsy, lace-edged, pale blue bra lifted her cupcake breasts, revealing the sloping white tops of both, and — in the instance of her left breast — carelessly exposing the roseate and a stubby pink nipple already erect to bursting. The gold chain and pendant dangled between them, as if seeking sanctuary. She wore a garter belt under sheer panties of the same pale blue hue, the darker outline of her black pubic triangle forming a swelling mound at the joining of her legs, the garters taut against firm white thighs. She suddenly seemed full-blown without her protective blue dress, not half so thin as he’d imagined her to be, hips rounded and womanly, shapely legs molded by blue nylons tapering to narrow ankles and high-heeled, patent leather shoes.

A wisp of black hair curled recklessly from under the lace-edged leg of the sheer panties.

He was suddenly and outrageously erect. Her eyes moved to the bulge inside his trousers, and the smile she flashed him was as knowing as the one the black whore in Panama had given him when she’d opened the backstreet door of her narrow crib to his timorous knocking. Fiona, her name had been. Fiona of the two short hours and thousand lingering nights.

He moved toward her, suffocating on a musk he imagined or actually breathed.

“No, don’t,” she said.

He stopped.

He had the terrible feeling that this was going to be like that time in Los Angeles when he’d gone out there to extradite an armed robber, and a twenty-three-year-old television starlet had performed an elaborate striptease for him before packing him off with a peck on the cheek. “But that white streak in your hair is really very cute, honey,” she’d told him as she closed the door behind him. Back at his sleazy hotel in downtown L.A. that night, he had actually considered tinting the streak red, like the rest of his hair. He’d had a good time with the robber on the plane back, though; the guy had a wonderful sense of humor, even in handcuffs.

“Now you,” Annie whispered.

She helped him out of his jacket. She undid the knot on his tie, and then she snapped the tie out from under his collar as though she were cracking a whip. She unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. She unbuttoned all the buttons on his shirt. She kissed his chest, and then eased the shirt from his trousers. She unbuttoned the cuffs. She helped him out of the shirt, and then she tossed it across the room, where it landed on her blue dress. She took his belt out of his trouser loops. She undid the button on his pants. She lowered his zipper. She reached into his trousers and said, “Oh, my.”

Five minutes later, they were in bed together.

Hawes was naked. Annie was wearing nothing but the gold chain and pendant. He would have to ask her, sometime, why she refused to take off the pendant and chain. For now, he was content to know that he was making contact with another human being, and for the rest of the night he would not have to think about anything but loving her. The fact that she was a screamer unsettled him a bit. The last screamer he’d had was a court stenographer who also happened to wear eyeglasses. She’d worn her glasses to bed. But she’d screamed loud enough to wake the dead every time she achieved orgasm. Annie screamed almost as loud and equally as often. She told him not to worry about it; everybody in the building knew she was a cop. He had completely forgotten she was a cop.

And he had also completely forgotten that the person hanging young girls from lampposts up there in the Eight-Seven might just possibly be the Deaf Man.

Arthur Brown had already forgotten the passing thought that their lamppost murderer might be the Deaf Man. Brown had as much respect for the Deaf Man as anybody on the squad, but the way Brown figured it, a killer was a killer, and they were all the same to him; they were all bad guys, and he was the good guy, and besides he wanted to get his wife in bed.

Brown’s daughter Connie was asleep already. Brown’s wife Lucy was in the den, watching television, Brown was in the bathroom, toweling himself after a long hot shower. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw the same handsome Arthur Brown staring back at him. He smiled at his mirror reflection. He was feeling good tonight. Tonight, he would take Lucy to the stars and the moon and back again. Still smiling, he walked naked into the bedroom. He draped the damp towel over the back of the chair, spotted the morning newspaper on the floor where Lucy had left it, and immediately reached down to pick it up. He folded two pages of the newspaper open, tore out a hole in the center of the now-single large page, and grinned from ear to ear.

When Brown walked into the den, he was wearing only the morning newspaper. His penis stuck out through the hole he had torn in the page. Lucy looked up.

“Well, well,” she said.

In an exaggerated watermelon dialect, Brown said, “You s’pose it true what de white folk say ’bout de size o’ de black man’s organ?”

“Not on the evidence,” Lucy said.

“Will you settle anyhow?” Brown said.

Lucy went to him and tore the newspaper to shreds.