Mischief

4.

AT A LITTLE PAST ten o’clock that Thursday morning, the telephone on Carella’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver, said, “Eighty-Seventh Squad, Carella,” and glanced at the LED display of the caller’s number.

“Don’t bother with a trace,” the Deaf Man said. “I’m using a stolen mobile phone.”

“Okay,” Carella said, but he jotted down the number, anyway.

“And it’s not the same phone I used the other day.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

“I love modern technology, don’t you? Are you looking at a CID?”

“Yes. The area code is for Elsinore County, but I don’t suppose you’re calling from there, are you?”

“No, I’m not. In fact, I’m right across the street. In the park.”

“Mm-huh.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I don’t know where you are. Or what you want. I’m pretty busy here, though, so if you’ve got a crime to report…”

“I want to tell you what I plan to do.”

“Mm-huh.”

“That’s a nasty little tic you’re developing. The mm-huh. Makes you sound somewhat skeptical.”

“Mm.”

“Even in its abbreviated form.”

“Look, if you have something to say…”

“Patience, patie…”

Carella hung up.

Arthur Brown was just walking in, easing a man in handcuffs through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. Both men were black, an inappropriate bit of labeling in that Brown was actually the color of his surname, and the handcuffed man with him was the color of sand. African-Americans would have been a misnomer, too; the man with Brown had been born in Haiti, and Brown had been born right here in the good old U.S. of A., which made him a native son and not a hyphenate of any stripe or persuasion.

Yankee Doodle Brown was what he was, six feet four inches tall, weighing two hundred and twenty-four pounds—this morning, anyway—and looking high, wide, and handsome in a trench coat he’d worn because it had still been raining when he’d left the house this morning. The man with him was five-six, five-seven, in there, wearing green polyester slacks, a matching green windbreaker, and scuffed black loafers with white socks. His eyes were green; lots of French blood in him, Brown guessed. So far, the man had spoken only French, which Brown didn’t understand at all.

“What’ve you got?” Carella asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Brown said. “Man was turning a Korean grocery store upside down, throwing fruit and vegetables all over the place, I just happened to be passing by in my car.”

“Lucky you,” Carella said.

“Oh, don’t I know it?” Brown said, and took off the man’s handcuffs.

“Eux, ils sont débiles,”the Haitian said.

“Empty your pockets,” Brown told him. “Everything on the desk here.”

“Doesn’t he speak any English?” Carella asked.

“Not to me he doesn’t. Your pockets,” Brown said, and demonstrated by reaching into his right-hand pocket and taking from it his keys and some change, and putting these on the desk, and then pulling the pocket inside out. “Empty your pockets on the desk here. Understand?”

Being a police officer was getting to be very difficult in this city. Years ago, most of your foreigners coming to live in this city were white Europeans; for the most part, the only foreign languages you had to contend with were Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, and German. Nowadays, the immigrants were mostly black, Hispanic, and Asian. Back then, if you booked anyone Hispanic, nine times out of ten he was from Puerto Rico. Nowadays, anyone with a Puerto Rican heritage was usually a second-or third-generation American who spoke English without a trace of accent. The ones with the heavy Spanish accents were the new-comers, most of them from the Dominican Republic or Colombia. Well, that wasn’t such a problem; a lot of working cops had picked up at least a little Spanish over the years, and besides there were hundreds of cops on the force whose grandparents had come here from Guayama or San Juan and you could always count on them translating what some guy was machine-gunning in his native tongue.

But what’d you do when you came up against somebody speaking French, the way this Haitian guy was? Brown had no idea whether this was pure French or bastardized French or even the patois some of them spoke, which not even a Parisian could understand. All he knew was that he couldn’t make out a word the guy was saying. He was used to not understanding what half the people they dragged in here were saying. What were you supposed to do, for example, when you got somebody in here from Guyana? In the old days you chatted up a black man, you found out he had people in Georgia or Mississippi or South Carolina, he’d been “down home” for the holidays, or to see his sister in a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, whatever. Nowadays, you talked to a black man, you found out his relatives were in New Amsterdam or Georgetown, and he spoke a kind of English you could hardly understand, anyway. One out of every four blacks in this city was foreign-born. One out of every four. Count ’em. You got some of them from Guyana, they didn’t talk English at all, they spoke a Creole patois it was impossible to decipher. You got some of those East Indians from Guyana, they spoke either Hindi or Urdu, who the hell on the police force could understand those languages? Not to mention the Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, who they might just as well have been speaking Martian.

You took the number-seven subway train from Majesta into the city proper, you saw a third-world country on it every morning. The host on one of the city’s nighttime talk shows dubbed the number seven “The UN Express.” The immigrants riding that train didn’t know what the hell he meant. The mayor said on the radio that the city’s dramatic population change could be considered a glorious experiment in the racial forces of manifold coexistence in a continually changing kaleidoscope of cross-cultural opportunity. The people he was talking about didn’t know what the hell he meant, either. Not even Brown knew what the mayor meant.

All Brown knew was that in the old days, a person came here from a foreign country, he planned to stay here, earn a living here, raise a family here, learn the language they spoke here, become a citizen—in short, make some kind of investment in this city and this nation. Nowadays, the immigrants you got from Latin America and the Caribbean preferred remaining citizens of their native lands, shuttling back and forth like diplomats between countries, supporting nuclear families here and extended families in their homelands. This meant that the city’s largest immigrant groups were showing little if any interest in joining the mainstream of American society. Shoot a dope dealer in a neighborhood composed largely of immigrants from Santo Domingo, and the flags that came out in protest were red, white, and blue, all right, but they weren’t the Stars and Stripes, they were the flags of the Dominican Republic. No wonder so many walls in this city were covered with graffiti. If it ain’t our city, then fuck it.

The man from Haiti was carrying a green card that identified him as Jean-Pierre Chandron. Brown wondered if the card was a phony. You could buy any kind of card you needed for twenty-five bucks, sometimes less. You could also buy a bag of heroin for a mere five bucks these days and a puff of crack for seventy-five cents! The Six-Bit Hit, it was called. You couldn’t buy a candy bar for six bits anymore, but you could start frying your brain for that amount of cash anytime you took a notion. What they did, they passed the crack pipe through a slot in a locked door after you dropped in your cash in quarters or even in nickels and dimes. Only thing they wouldn’t accept was pennies cause they were too bulky; otherwise, money was money.

In much the same way that big manufacturers dumped their merchandise at ridiculously low prices in order to infiltrate new markets, the dope peddlers in this city were now dangling their bait to the uninitiated. Lookee here, man, you can fly to the moon for a scant six bits, wanna try, wanna buy, wanna fly? Or if you prefer heroin, we now have shit so pure you’d think it was virgin. You can snort it off a mirror, man, same as you do with coke, it’s that pure. You don’t have to worry about no needle, man, no fear of getting the old HIV, you can inhale this shit, man, and it’s only a nickel a bag, how can you refuse? The days of the dime bag are dead and gone, come join the party! The nickel bag is back, man, rejoice and carouse!

“Why’d you go berserk in that store?” Brown asked the Haitian.

The telephone rang.

“Eighty-Seventh Squad, Car…”

“Please don’t hang up again,” the Deaf Man said. “I’m trying to be of assistance here.”

“I’ll just bet you are.”

“I’m trying to prevent a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.”

The same CID number was showing on the display panel. Carella wondered if he really was calling from the park. Although knowing him, he’d already moved his location. He was beginning to think the lieutenant was right, though. Just ignore the son of a bitch and…

“I’ll make it easy for you,” he said.

“Thanks,” Carella said.

“No song and dance this time.”

“I’m listening.”

“The title of the novel is The Fear and the Fury . It’s science fiction. Do you like science fiction?”

“Sometimes I think you’re science fiction,” Carella said.

“I don’t particularly admire the genre,” the Deaf Man said, “but I thought its simplicity might appeal to you. The author is a Bolivian named Arturo Rivera. The chapter you’ll want to read is the very first one in the book. It’s called ‘The Rites of Spring.’ I think you may find it interesting.”

“Why should I…?”

This time the Deaf Man hung up.

“Does anybody around here speak French?” Brown asked the four walls.

“Va te faire foutre,”the Haitian told him.

Meyer and Hawes were just coming through the gate in the railing.

“You speak French?” Brown asked them.

“Oui,”Hawes said.

“Then talk to this guy, willya?”

“That’s my entire vocabulary,” Hawes said.

“How about you?”

“My wife speaks French,” Meyer said.

“Lotta help that is.”

Meyer went to the phone and dialed the Missing Persons Bureau, and asked to talk to Detective Hastings, the man he’d called earlier this morning. Behind him, Carella was trying some Italian on the Haitian, and Hawes was trying some Spanish, and Brown was trying to raise the patrol sergeant to see if any of his blues spoke French. Meyer waited.

“Hastings,” a voice said.

“Hi, this is Meyer at the Eight-Seven again, I called you around eight this morning, do you remember? To ask if you had anything on a John Doe named Charlie, guy around…”

“I can hardly remember my own name that early in the morning,” Hastings said.

“Guy around seventy-five years old, you remember we talked about it?”

“Yeah, what about it? We still don’t have anything on anybody named Charlie.”

“You mentioned something about an epidemic, though, do you remember?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What’d you mean? About an epidemic.”

“I got no idea.”

“Well, why’d you use the word epidemic ?”

“Maybe cause it’s always an epidemic here. There are times I think everybody in this fuckin city is slowly disappearing from the face of the earth.”

“But when I mentioned this guy Charlie was maybe seventy-five years old, you said, ‘What is this, an epidemic?’ Do you remember that?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, why’d you say it? Did you have another seventy-five-year-old John Doe?”

“Yeah, that’s right, now I remember.”

“Another John Doe?”

“a Jane .”

“What about her?”

“Some blues from the Eight Six found this old lady in the waiting room of the Whitcomb Avenue Station, took her over to the Chancery. I spoke to a doctor there wanted to know we had anything on her.”

“When was this?”

“Early Tuesday morning, musta been. Everybody calls first thing in the morning, why is that? I’m tryin’a have my coffee, the phone starts ringin off the hook.”

“So Tuesday this old lady gets dumped,” Meyer said, “and today it’s this guy Charlie. So that’s what you meant by an epidemic?”

“Of dumping , yeah. Not of missing persons. Missing persons, it’s always an epidemic.”

“Do you remember who you spoke to at the Chancery?”

“I’ve got it here someplace, hold on,” Hastings said.

AT ELEVEN-FIFTEEN that morning, there were only three patients in the emergency room at Old Chancery Hospital. One of these was a pregnant woman who’d been shoved down a flight of steps by her boyfriend. The other two were heroin users who’d shot up on the new stuff coming in from Asia and Colombia and were suffering the toxic aftereffects of “pure” fixes. Actually, nothing sold on the street was ever truly pure; the more the drug was stepped on, the more profit there was for everyone down the line. But the new stuff was decidedly more potent than what the city’s estimated 200,000 heroin addicts were used to, and these two old needle buddies in the E.R. had been scared half to death by sudden symptoms of heroin poisoning. One of them had already begun to turn blue before they both decided in their infinite wisdom that it was time to seek medical assistance. Elman left them in the capable hands of his team of Indian interns and led Meyer upstairs to talk to the Jane Doe the hospital had inherited two days earlier. Elman planned to leave for Maine at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, before the start of the weekend rush of bruised and bleeding bodies. Meanwhile, here was a miraculously interested detective who might just possibly help them find out who the hell she was.

“She keeps talking about somebody named Polly,” Elman said. “Doesn’t have any daughters, or so she says, which leads us to believe this Polly person may be a nurse of some sort. All the labels were cut out of her clothes, which may indicate they could have identified a nursing home, do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, I do,” Meyer said.

But if she was missing from a nursing home, why hadn’t someone notified the police?

“She’s diabetic, by the way. Whoever dumped her probably didn’t know that. Or maybe didn’t give a damn.”

“How do you mean?”

“No medication on her. Nothing in her pockets, that is. She wasn’t carrying a handbag.”

“What was she wearing?” Meyer asked.

“Nightgown, slippers, panties, diaper, and robe.”

“Labels removed from the slippers, too?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes they overlook that.”

“Not this time. Here we are.”

Elman entered the room the way doctors always entered a hospital room, never bothering to knock, just barging in without a by-your-leave. Never mind whether the patient might be moving his bowels or picking his nose, a sick person lost all privacy the moment he was admitted to a hospital.

The woman who didn’t know her own name was sitting in a chair beside the bed, watching a soap opera on television. Daytime serials, they called them. Everything politically correct in this country. Meyer still wondered what the politically correct word for bald was. This woman had hair. Lots of it. All of it white. She did not turn from the television set when they walked in.

“Excuse me,” Elman said, not because he’d walked in uninvited but because he wanted her attention. When she still didn’t turn from the set, he picked up the remote-control unit and clicked off the picture. She turned to him angrily, seemed about to protest, and then sighed heavily and sank back into her chair. In that instant, Meyer saw in her eyes the helpless resignation of an old woman accustomed to intrusions and commands.

“There’s a police officer here who’d like to talk to you,” Elman said without apology. “Detective Meyer. From the Eighty-Seventh Precinct.”

“How do you do, ma’am?” Meyer said.

The woman nodded.

“There are a few questions I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Sure,” she said.

Looking him over.

“Who’s Polly?” he asked.

Straight out. Sometimes if you took them by surprise, they blurted out a memory they didn’t even know they possessed.

“She takes care of me,” the woman said.

“Where?”

“Home.”

But was she referring to home as in house , or home as in nursing ?

“Where’s that?” he asked. “Home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who brought you here, ma’am?”

“Policemen.”

“Where’d they find you?”

“I don’t know.”

Bewildered look on her face. Eighty, eighty-five years old, Meyer guessed. Too many new things happening to her all at once. Confused. Sitting there wanting to watch her TV show, which was something she knew and understood, but instead she had to talk to this person asking her questions she couldn’t answer.

“Do you remember a railroad station?”

“No.”

“Do you remember someone taking you to a railroad station?”

“No. I remember lightning.”

“If I described a man to you, would that help you remember?”

“Maybe. It’s hard,” she said. “Remembering.”

“He would’ve been forty or forty-five years old,” Meyer said, repeating what Charlie had told him this morning. “About five feet ten, with brown eyes and dark hair.”

“Buddy,” she said.

“She’s mentioned that name before,” Elman said. “Buddy. We think he’s a grandson.”

“Buddy what, ma’am?” Meyer asked. “Can you tell me his last name?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Was he wearing blue jeans and a brown jack…?”

“I don’t remember what he was wearing.”

“Yellow shirt…”

“I told you I don’t remember ,” she said. Getting angry with herself. Getting angry with not being able to remember things.

“Ma’am, do you know whether the railroad station is close to home?”

“I was in a car,” she said suddenly.

“Driving in a car with someone?”

“Yes. Lightning.”

“Driving from home?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s that, ma’am?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

She was about to start crying. Frustration and anger were building tears behind her eyes. He did not want her to cry.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry we bothered you,” and picked up the remote-control unit and turned on her television show again. In the corridor outside, he asked Elman if he could have a look at the woman’s clothes. Elman took him downstairs to what Meyer guessed was the equivalent of the police department’s Property Clerk’s Office, asked the female attendant there to bring Mr. Meyer the clothing the Jane Doe in 305 had been wearing when the police brought her in, and then excused himself and went back to the emergency room.

Sometimes a nursing home stenciled its name into the garments its patients wore, for identification when the clothes were sent out to be laundered. There were neither stencil marks nor laundry marks in the woman’s robe or nightgown, nothing in her panties, nothing in the diaper except a dried urine stain. The corner edges of labels were still stitched to each article of clothing, but the empty space between them indicated where the labels had been scissored out. In each of the bedroom slippers a sticky rectangular-shaped residue showed where the labels had been torn from the inner soles.

For all intents and purposes, the woman was still anonymous.

THE NAME of the second victim’s wife was Debra Wilkins.

She was a petite blonde with green eyes and a Dutchboy bob, in her mid-thirties, they guessed. The driver’s license in her husband’s wallet had given Parker and Kling a name and an address; the telephone directory had given them a phone number. When they’d called her at a little before nine yesterday morning, she’d just been leaving for an exercise class. Instead, she came to meet them at the hospital morgue. They hadn’t been able to get much from her yesterday when she’d sobbingly—uncontrollably, in fact—identified the remains of her husband, Peter Wilkins.

They sat now in the living room of the Wilkinses’ three-story brownstone on Albermarle Way, a cul-de-sac off Silvermine Road, on the northernmost edge of the precinct territory. Through the living-room windows, they had a clear shot of the River Harb as dusk settled on the water. It was time to get down to business.

“Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, cautiously taking the lead, “I know this is a difficult time for you, but there are some questions we have to ask.”

“I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

She’d just got back from the funeral home. Parker was thinking that her hysterics yesterday had given the killer a healthy lead. Couldn’t talk to the goddamn woman. Every time they mentioned her husband, she’d begun wailing like a banshee. She seemed pretty much in control now. Sitting there in a simple blue suit, blue pantyhose, French-heeled blue pumps. Eyes rimmed with red, all those tears. Waiting attentively for Kling’s first question.

“Mrs. Wilkins,” he said, “your husband was found near the…”

Her lip began trembling.

Careful, Kling thought.

“Near the Reed entrance to the River Highway,” he said. “In front of an abandoned building at 1227 Harlow. That’s about a mile from here. Coroner’s Office has estimated the time of death…”

He cleared his throat, kept his eye on that trembling lip. He didn’t want her to go to pieces again.

“…at around midnight Tuesday. It was raining all that night, and it was still raining yesterday morning when we got to the scene. Ma’am, if you could tell us when you saw him last, and what he said to you before he left here, whether he gave you any…”

“The last time I saw him was after dinner on Tuesday night. He left the apartment at around eight-thirty. There was a movie he wanted to see. Something that didn’t interest me at all. A cop movie,” she said.

“What time did you expect him home?”

“Eleven, eleven-thirty.”

“But he didn’t come home.”

“No. He didn’t come home.”

Turning her head away.

“That’s why I called the police.”

Kling looked at Parker. Parker nodded. It was possible.

“When was this?” he asked.

“At midnight. I was really worried by then. I knew it was raining, but the movie theater’s only a few blocks from here, on Stemmler, and he could’ve walked it in ten minutes. And Peter isn’t the…wasn’t the sort of man who’d stop in a bar or anything on the way home. So I…I was worried. I called nine-one-one and described him and…and what he was wearing…and I told them he should have been home by then. I don’t know what they did about it.”

What they’d have done, they’d have alerted the local precinct, which in this case was the Eight-Seven, where there wouldn’t have been a chance in hell that the patrol sergeant would instruct his blues to keep an eye out for a husband who was half an hour late getting home.

“When you called yesterday morning,” Debra said, “I thought it…I thought you might have some news. I wasn’t expec…expecting what you…told me. That he was dead. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Controlling herself. Biting down hard on her lower lip again. She would not cry. She would help them. Kling admired that. Parker wondered if it was an act. In many respects, Parker and Kling were the perfect good cop/bad cop team. That was because neither of them had to act a part; Parker really was a bad cop and Kling really was a good one.

“What was he wearing when he left here, can you tell us?” Kling asked.

“Blue jeans. A T-shirt. A barn jacket. From J. Crew.”

Exactly what he’d been wearing when they’d found him painted all silver and gold with three holes in his head.

“Did he go to the movie alone?” Parker asked.

“Yes?”

Question mark at the end of her answer, asking him the significance of such a question. Was he suggesting…?

“Didn’t go with a friend or anything, huh?” Parker asked, skirting close to the edge of another Shavorskyism.

“Alone,” Debra said.

“Do you keep a car here in the city?” Kling asked.

“No. We rent one when we need one.”

“I was wondering how he ended up a mile from here. The rain and all.”

“Didn’t go with a buddy or anything, did he?” Parker asked, getting back to it. “To the movie, I mean.”

“No. He went alone.”

“Lots of people don’t like going to the movies alone,” Parker said. “They go with a boyfriend,” he said, and paused. “Or a girlfriend,” he added, and looked at her.

“He went alone ,” she said again.

“Your husband ever do any artwork around the house?” Parker said.

“Artwork?”

“Yeah. Lettering? Painting? Anything like that?”

“No.”

“He’s not a sign painter or anything, is he?”

“He’s a lawyer,” Debra said.

Until now, Parker thought he’d heard everything there ever was to hear about lawyers. But a lawyer who sprayed paint on walls?

“Did he ever go out alone at night when he wasn’t going to a movie?” Parker asked.

“We had separate interests. He sometimes went out alone, yes.”

“Like what? What separate interests?”

“He liked basketball, I didn’t. He liked poetry readings, I didn’t. Sometimes, he’d have dinner with a client. Naturally, I didn’t go along on those…”

“Did he ever leave the house late at night to pursue these separate interests?” Parker asked.

“Never.”

“But he sometimes got home late, didn’t he?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you ever see him carrying a spray can when he left the house?”

“A what?”

“A spray can. That you spray paint with.”

“No. a spray can? What on earth would he be doing with…?”

“Mrs. Wilkins, would it be all right if we looked around the apartment a little?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Look at some of his things.”

“Why?”

“See if we can’t get a bead on why somebody would’ve wanted to kill him.”

“I don’t see how…”

“My partner means like his appointment calendar, his diary, anything that…”

“He didn’t keep…”

“No, I meant…”

“…a diary.

“…like his closet .”

Debra looked him dead in the eye.

“Officer,” she said at last, “are you aware that Peter was the one who got killed here? Are you aware that my husband was the victim ?”

“Yes, ma’am, all I’m…”

“Then why do you want to look at some of his things? Why don’t you go look at the goddamn killer’s things? Why aren’t you out there in the street looking for the goddamn killer ?”

“Ma’am,” Parker said, unperturbed, “your husband is the second graffiti writer who got…”

“My husband was not a graffiti writer,” she said. “He was a lawyer .”

“All I’m saying,” Parker said, “if there’s anything in his pockets or on his shelves or in his dresser or wherever that would give us some idea what took him over to that wall last night, then maybe we can find out whether somebody he knew was a graffiti writer, is all I’m saying. Ma’am, there’s got to be a connection here, two people found dead with paint sprayed all over them, I’m sure you can see that.”

“My husband was not a graffiti writer,” she said.

“Well,” Parker said and shrugged as if to say Look, you want us to find who killed your fuckin husband, or you don’t?

She looked at him.

She looked at Kling.

“I’ll show you where he kept his things,” she said curtly, and led them into the bedroom.

On the top shelf of his closet, they found twenty-two cans of spray paint in various colors of the rainbow.

BEFORE THERE WAS detective Stephen Louis Carella in her life, there was her life.

Theodora Franklin.

Teddy Franklin.

Four fifths Irish with a fifth of Scotch thrown in, as her father was fond of telling her. Signed this to her with his hands, emphasized the joke with his wide expressive face, exaggerated the words on his lips so that she could read them while his fingers formed them, all of this because his one and only beloved daughter had been born deaf and dumb—or hearing-and speech-impaired as they said in this enlightened day and age, where a blind man was no longer blind but merely sight-impaired. Teddy felt that the word “impaired” was more heavily freighted than either “deaf”or “dumb,” more heavily burdened with derogatory meaning than even the simple designation “deaf mute”—but who was she to comment, being merely deaf and mute since birth?

But, truly, didn’t “impaired” mean defective , wasn’t that the dictionary definition of impaired? And didn’t “defective” mean damaged , or flawed , or imperfect ? And didn’t all of these imply deficient , or—worse yet—somehow bad . She did not want to think of herself as impaired. For too long a time, she had thought of herself in exactly that way.

Before Carella, there’d been only one “hearing” man in her life. Well, a boy, actually. Back then, most hearing-impaired people went to schools for the so-called deaf, but she was fortunate—perhaps—in that her Riverhead neighborhood had a high school offering special classes for people like her. People with hearing problems. Speech problems. Four of them actually. The other kids in the class were what they called “retarded” back then. Mentally deficient. Until Salvatore Di Napoli asked her out, the only boys she’d ever dated were the ones with hearing problems, the ones in the special class.

The faculty adviser of the cheerleading squad saw nothing wrong with putting Teddy on it, even though she had no voice. She was prettier than any of the other girls, with raven-black hair and expressive brown eyes and breasts that looked terrific in the white sweater with the letter on its front and legs that looked spectacular in the short pleated skirt, not inconsiderable assets for a cheerleader, so why not? It didn’t matter that she couldn’t yell out the cheers. She could certainly mouth them and dramatize them, and that was all that mattered. In a shouting crowd, no one is speechless. In a roaring crowd, it doesn’t matter if you can’t hear because nobody else can, either.

She caught Salvatore Di Napoli’s eye at one of the football games.

“Would you like to go to a movie or something?” he asked her.

This was in the hallway on the Monday after the game.

He had pale blue eyes and long slender fingers. He played the violin. Everyone called him Salvie. He confessed to her one night that he hated the name Salvatore and that when he was old enough—he was sixteen then, a year younger than she was—he would change it legally. He would pick a good WASP name that would make him feel more at home in America, even though he had been born here of parents who had also been born here.

“I might call myself Steve,” he said.

At the time, she didn’t think there was anything remarkable about what he’d said. The name he’d chosen. Steve. She didn’t even think it was a particularly WASPy name. She knew a lot of Irish Catholics named Steve, and she didn’t think they considered themselves WASPs.

His voice faltered, his fingers fumbled, the first time he asked her to go to bed with him.

“Do you…is it possible…could we…do you think…is there a chance we might…?”

She kissed him and guided his long slender fingers to the buttons on her blouse.

She went steady with him until her graduation a year later. He was in his junior year at the time. She was eighteen—what her father called “a young woman”—and Salvie was seventeen. While she was still debating whether or not she wanted to go to college, he transferred to a school specializing in music and drama, and the next time she saw him he was completely changed. He had new friends now, new pursuits, new encouraged ambitions. And although in high school he had professed his undying love for her, she now had the feeling he considered her a person from another life, a deaf person he had once known only casually.

She learned much later that he had finally changed his name. Not to Steve. To Sam. Sam Knapp. For Di Napoli. Samuel Knapp. Who’d written a musical that was being performed in Chicago, and who was dating the blonde (andhearing) actress playing the lead role. Teddy remembered that once, long ago, when they were in high school together, he had taken her to see La Traviata .

When she was twenty…

Quite out of the blue…

Steve Carella entered her life.

On the fifth day of February that winter, a Sunday, someone burglarized the offices where she worked, and on Monday morning the sixth, a detective named Stephen Louis Carella came around to ask questions.

She thought it was…well,odd …him having the very first name Salvie Di Napoli would have chosen for himself, although he’d finally ended up with Sam Knapp, dating a cute little blonde and hearing actress in the Second City.

Steve Carella.

She had already decided by then that there were two separate worlds, the world of the hearing and the world of those who could not hear. Or speak. And she had pretty much decided that she didn’t want to have anything more to do with any man in that other world, the hearing world, because Sam Knapp had in the long run made her feel hopelessly and helplessly defective . She did not want to feel defective ever again in her life. Ever.

The second time he came to the office, he brought along a police interpreter. This was two days after the burglary. Tuesday, the seventh of February. The name of the firm for which she’d been working was Endicott Mail Order, Inc., she still remembered it after all these years. She used to address envelopes for them, a not unimportant job in that most of their business was conducted by mail—well, Endicott Mail Order, would they have used carrier pigeons? He had already asked everyone in the office a lot of questions, and now he was back with an interpreter who knew how to sign, and she immediately figured he considered her a prime suspect.

“I thought we could save some time if I brought along an interpreter,” he said, and she thought He doesn’t think I’m a suspect, thank God, he only thinks I’m a dummy .

But he didn’t think that, either.

What he wanted to know was whether any of the people who made deliveries or pickups at the office might have had access to the key to the front door.

“Because you see,” he said, and waited for the interpreter to translate, “there are no marks on the door or around the keyway. There doesn’t seem to have been any forced entry, you see. So I’ve got to think someone got in with a key.”

Watching the interpreter’s flying fingers.

There are lots of people making pickups and deliveries, Teddy signed.

“What’d she say?” Carella asked.

“Lots of pickups and deliveries,” the interpreter said.

“Names,” Carella said, keeping it short, figuring it’d be easier that way. “Can she give me names?”

The interpreter’s fingers flashed.

She watched. Big brown eyes. Brownest eyes Carella had ever seen in his life.

I know a few of them by name, she signed.But usually I know them by their companies .

“She only knows the company names,” the interpreter said.

She had been watching his lips.

She shook her head.

I know some of themessengers’names, too , she signed,but not all of them .

The interpreter shrugged.

“What’d she say?” Carella asked.

“She said she knows some of the messengers’ names.”

“So why didn’t you translate it?”

“I did,” he said, and shrugged again.

“I want to hear everything she has to say.”

“Sure,” the interpreter said. His look said Fuck you.

“Ask her to write them down for me. All the company names, all the individual names.”

Teddy began writing.

“Does the key always hang in that same place?” Carella asked.

She looked up. The interpreter translated.

Yes, she signed.Because we keep the front door locked, and when anyone goes to the bathroom he has to take the door key with him, too. To get back in.

The lock on the door was a spring bolt. The key to it hung on a rack behind Teddy’s desk, alongside a key to the men’s room and a key to the ladies’ room. An experienced burglar wouldn’t have had to steal a key to get into the place. He’d have loided the lock with a credit card. Actually, the burglar who’d done the job here had only borrowed the key and replaced it before he’d left the premises. Throw the police off the scent, he probably figured. Brilliant burglar making no attempt to conceal the absence of forced entry, but hangs the key back up before he leaves. A rocket scientist, this burglar. Carella was willing to bet a week’s salary that he was one of the kids who made deliveries or pickups here. Two weeks’ salary.

He watched her as she completed the list.

Short list.

This one would be a piece of cake.

“Ask her if that’s all of them,” he said to the interpreter.

She had read his lips, she knew the question before it formed on the interpreter’s hands, answered it before he signed the first word.

Yes, she signed.That’s all I can remember .

“Ask her if she’d like to have dinner with me tomorrow night,” Carella said.

“What?” the interpreter said.

“Ask her.”

The interpreter shrugged. His fingers moved. She watched his hands. She turned to look at Carella, surprised. Her own fingers moved. Briefly.

“She wants to know why?” the interpreter said.

“Tell her I think she’s beautiful.”

He signed it to her. Teddy signed back.

“She says she knows she’s beautiful.”

“Tell her I’d like to get to know her better.”

Tell him I’m busy tomorrow night.

“She’s busy tomorrow night.”

“Then how about lunch the next day?”

I’m busy then, too.

“She’s busy then, too.”

“Then how about dinner that night? Friday night. How about dinner?”

I’m busy for dinner Friday, too.

“She’s busy all day Friday.”

Carella put his face very close to hers.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Watch my lips.” Slowly and distinctly, he said, “How about breakfast Saturday morning?”

She watched his lips.

He said it again.

“Breakfast. Saturday morning. Okay?”

He smiled.

She shook her head.

Carella turned to the interpreter.

“Did she say no ?” he asked.

“That’s what she said, pal.”

Carella looked at her.

“No?” he said incredulously.

She shook her head again.

And then spelled the word out with her right hand, letter by letter, so there’d be no mistake.

N…

O…

No.

He caught the burglar three days later. A kid who delivered lunch to the office from the local deli, got grandiose ideas about how much money the firm had to be making, concocted his brilliant caper, stole the key, and sneaked in one night to score a big two hundred and twelve dollars that would net him at least three years on a Burg Two. Eighteen years old, he’d be out of jail when he was twenty-one. Maybe.

He came to the office again on that Friday, the eleventh day of February—she remembered all these dates accurately and precisely because they all led to the beginning. Coming out of Mr. Endicott’s office where he’d just reported the results of his investigation, he stopped at Teddy’s desk to repeat the story. She listened without an interpreter this time. Studied his mouth as he spoke, his lips.

“Why won’t you go out with me?” he asked abruptly.

She shrugged.

“Tell me.”

She shook her head.

“Please,” he said.

She touched her lips.

She touched her ears.

She shook her head again.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.

She sighed heavily, spread her arms helplessly. Her face said It has everything to do with everything .

He read this on her face and in her eyes, and he said, “No, Teddy, it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

She nodded.

Yes, her face said. Her eyes said Yes, it does.

He kept looking at her.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Haven’t you ever dated men who…well, who can hear ?”

She nodded.

“And speak?”

She nodded again.

“You have ?”

She nodded again. Yes, I have.

Once, she thought.

“Well, good,” he said, “I was beginning to think…”

She pointed at him.

Shook her head.

Wagged her finger No.

“Why not?” he said.

She shrugged.

“I mean…why not ?”

She turned away.

“Well…” he said.

She did not turn to face him again. She was no longer listening. “See you around,” he said, which she didn’t hear or see. And left the office.

She had not told him she was afraid of what might happen if she started seeing this handsome detective with the slanted brown Chinese eyes and the easy smile and the long rangy look of an athlete. Never again, she thought. I will never again fall in love with a hearing man, I will never again even allow myself the opportunity …never grant myself even the possibility of it happening ever again.

But on Valentine’s Day that year…

A Monday.

It was snowing that Monday. She took the bus home from work, and walked up the street to her building, the air swirling with snowflakes, the ground underfoot white and clean, the air sharp, a spot of red up ahead in the overwhelming white, she squinted through the flying flakes and saw someone sitting on the front stoop of her building, and recognized him as Detective Stephen Louis Carella.

Steve.

His face was windblown and his hair blowing in the wind was covered with snow, and the spot of color in his gloveless hand was a single red rose.

“Change your mind,” he said, and extended the rose to her.

She hesitated.

The rose still in his hand, its petals moving in the wind.

Extended to her.

He raised the other hand.

Slowly his fingers formed the single letter O .

And then the letter K .

OK?

“Change your mind,” he said again.

And raised his eyebrows plaintively, and she found herself nodding, perhaps because he had taken the trouble to learn how to sign those two letters,O and K , OK, Okay, change your mind, okay? Or perhaps because she saw in those Chinese eyes an honesty she had never seen on the face of any man she’d ever known. She knew in that instant that this man would never hurt her. This man could be trusted with her very life.

Still nodding, she accepted the rose.

He sat across the room now, in the big easy chair before the imitation Tiffany floor lamp they’d bought when they were first furnishing the house. He was reading, his brow furrowed in concentration. He must have felt her steady gaze upon him. He lifted his eyes. From across the room, she smiled and signed I love you. He returned the smile. Returned the words. Mouthed them and signed them.I love you . And went back to the book.

She had not yet told him what she planned to do tomorrow morning.

THE FIRST CHAPTER of the book was thirty-five pages long. He had read it through once after dinner, and was now reading it for the second time, and he still didn’t understand why the Deaf Man had asked him to look at it. Well, The Rites of Spring, sure. He was planning a spring surprise of some sort. Planning to spring a surprise, so to speak. But that was too obvious, since spring was already here. And obviousness simply wasn’t the Deaf Man’s way. Direction by indirection was more his style. Tell them exactly what he planned to do but in a way that made it all seem unfathomable.

The book had originally been published in South America. Carella had no way of knowing whether the English translation was any worse than the Spanish original had been. To him, the book seemed atrocious, but then again he wasn’t used to reading science fiction, if that’s what this was. The novel’s opening chapter began with the premise that the creatures on a planet named Obadon feared nothing more than the approach of the planting season. Rivera then went on to explain how this fear of the magic of growth led the entire population of the planet to gather on a wide open plain every year, to participate in what for time immemorial had been called The Festivities.

“Here on this dusty red plain ringed by the mountains of Kahnara, here beneath the four glistening moons of the season, the Obadons gathered to shout and to chant and to stamp their feet against the swollen soil…”

God, this is awful, Carella thought.

“…so that their timeless fear of the magic of growth could once more be exorcized by a magic of their own, a magic born of ecstatic fury, presaging the moment when the plains would run red with water turned muddy and nascent.”

Carella read the paragraph again.

What the hell was the Deaf Man trying to tell him?

THERE WEREN’T ANY real writers anymore in this city, not what you could call genuine artists, there were only guys writing gang shit or dope shit, it was disgusting the way things had disintegrated the past twenty years. Nowadays, you did a whole subway car, the fuckin transit police had it acid-cleaned the very next day, it hardly paid getting the name out anymore.

Timmo considered himself one of the last great writers.

Way he put up his tag it was TMO, wrote it in one quick motion, index finger on the spray can button, paint jetting out, so it looked like:

Everybody knew this was Timmo writing.

Back in the old days, when he was doing maybe two, three trains a week—not a whole car , man, that took time—but doing a piece with the three letters TMO or sometimes a top-to-bottom with the same tag, writing in a style that was instantly recognizable by other experienced writers and also by the newer writers coming along, what you called toys. People biting his style was kind of flattering, Timmo guessed, but it always pissed him off, made him want to go find the guy stealing from him, look in his face, tell him you want to bite my style, man, come bite this . I see anything you throw up, I go over it, man, I cross it out, you dig? You get a background payback, man, each and every time.

That was in the old days.

That was when you went in a train yard with four, five other writers, you did a whole car that night, brought along a suitcase full of paint and something to eat and drink, some pot, gloves because it could get messy. You looked for a coalminer, one of the older cars that were harder to clean afterward, instead of the stainless-steel dingdongs. You looked for a yard that wasn’t hot, it became a communal kind of thing, three, four writers working on the same car, you each threw up your tag when the car was finished, you sometimes waited till the sun came up so you could see what you’d done during the night, it was satisfying. It was making a thing of beauty out of a rusting piece of shit.

There was one yard they all stayed away from back then, this was the yard they called the Screamer because there was supposed to be the ghost of a writer there who stepped on the third rail and died screaming in the night. Nobody wanted to go anywhere near that yard even though there were coalminers laid up all over the place there and all you had to do to get in was climb over this cyclone fence had no razor wire on it. His style back then was a combo of Bubble and Calm’s Point, what he called Bubble Point, and what a lot of writers bit from him cause it was an easy style to imitate, he guessed, though it had taken him a while to evolve. The style was easily adaptable to two-tone pieces, color-blended burners, 3-D pieces, you threw up your marker in the corner afterward, everybody knew your name.

His style nowadays was more a wild style, he wasn’t interested in anything but getting the name up, TMO, spray it all over the city so they’d know he was still out here, man. He’d racked up the paints he was carrying tonight, some of the old traditions were still alive, any writer didn’t steal his paints wasn’t a writer worth shit. Your experienced writer was an experienced racker, too. That didn’t make him one of these gang assholes whose main occupation was dealing dope and beating up people and spraying walls to mark their territory. Like, man, you are now enteringDEADLY SAVAGE turf! OrKiller Psyche Tribe territory, whatever dumb names they called themselves. You saw MM21 sprayed on a wall or markered on a train, no style at all, you knew it stood for the Macho Men from Twenty-first Street, they were telling you beware, man, this is the land of the super assholes! Cross out a gang tag, you were in serious trouble. Dealers, too. Dealers used their tags to mark drug territory. Don’t come sellin’ your shit on this corner, it belongs to Taco, you see the tag, man? No place left for a genuine writer to go anymore, no place at all.

Except that in the night…

Night like tonight…

You could still feel free and easy in the night.

Find yourself a wall wasn’t too crowded, take your time doing a two-tone burner in Bubble Point. Be like old times. Free and easy in the empty hours of the night, smoke a little, drink a little, look over the piece, define it, refine it, and sign it TMO. For Timmo. Yeah.

The wall he had in mind was one he’d passed by late yesterday afternoon, almost virgin. Three or four bubble tags on it, no gang markers. He’d racked up a can of blue and a can of yellow, which when you put them close together you got a greenish look he favored. He had two rolled joints in the bag with the paint, and a ham sandwich he’d bought in the deli on Culver and Tenth, and a can of Coke, he was like set, man.

Five minutes later, he was like dead, man.