“No.”
“Then how’d you get them?”
“I was on a numbers investigation last October. Remember when they brought a lot of us in on...”
“Yes, I remember.”
“We put in wires all around town. I was working with the tech guys who planted the bugs. That’s when I got hold of the keys.”
“What else are you into, Mike? Are you just burglarizing apartments?”
“Nothing, I swear!”
“Or are you selling dope to school kids, too?”
“Come on, Bert, what do you think I am?”
“I think you’re a cheap thief!”
“I needed money!”
“We all need money!”
“Yeah, so name me a cop in the precinct who isn’t on the take. When the hell did you get so fucking pure?”
“I’ve never taken a nickel, Mike.”
“How many meals have you had on the arm?”
“Are you trying to equate a free cup of coffee with a string of felonies? Jesus Christ!”
“I’m trying to tell you...”
“Yeah, what, Mike?”
The room went silent. Ingersoll shrugged and said, “Look, I wanted to keep you out of this. Why do you think I suggested the stakeout? I didn’t want anybody to think you were connected. I was...”
“The stakeout was a smoke screen,” Kling said flatly. “That’s why you wanted the walkie-talkies, isn’t it? So I’d think you were sitting in the dark where you were supposed to be, when instead you were ripping off an apartment down the block. And the glass kitten! ‘Guess he’s running out of live ones,’ isn’t that what you said, Mike? Running out, my ass. You couldn’t carry a live one last night because even a dummy like me would’ve tipped to a goddamn cat in your coat pocket.”
“Bert, believe me...”
“Oh, I believe you, Mike. It’s the lieutenant who might not. Especially when he hears Fred Lipton’s story.”
“I have no connection with Fred Lipton.”
“No? Well, we’ll find out about that in just a little while, won’t we? Hawes is picking him up right this minute. It’s my guess he’s your fence. Yes or no, Mike?”
“I told you I don’t know him.”
“Then why were you so anxious to get us off his trail? What’d you do, give Rhonda Spear a description of every cop in the squadroom? We were beginning to think she was a goddamn mind reader!” Kling paused, and then said, “Get her out here, Mike. We might as well take her along with us.”
“What? Who?”
“The broad in the other room. It is Rhonda Spear, isn’t it?”
“No, there’s nobody...”
“Is she the one you were telling me about? The nice girl you want to marry, Mike? The reason you were so anxious to catch the burglar?”
“Bert...”
“Well, we’ve caught him. So how about introducing me to the bride? Miss!” he shouted. “Come out here with your hands over your head!”
“Don’t shoot,” a woman’s voice said from behind the closed door. The door opened. A beefy blonde wearing a blue robe over a long pink nightgown came into the living room, her hands up over her head, her lip trembling.
“What’s your name, miss?” Kling asked.
“Which one?” she asked.
“What?”
“Stage or real?”
“Are you Rhonda Spear?”
“Yes.”
“Get dressed, Miss Spear. You, too, Mike.”
“Bert, for Christ’s sake... give me a break, will you?”
“Why?” Kling asked.
The motion picture had been a bad choice for Teddy Carella. It was full of arty shots in which the actors spoke from behind vases, trees, lampshades, or elephants, seemingly determined to hide their lips from her so that she would not know what was happening. When they weren’t speaking with their faces hidden or their backs turned, the actors made important plot points offscreen, their voices floating in over the picture of a rushing locomotive or a changing traffic light.
Teddy normally enjoyed films, except when she was submitted to the excesses of a sadistic nouvelle vague camera. Tonight was such a night. She sat beside Carella and watched the film in utter helplessness, unable to “hear” long stretches of it, grateful when it ended and they could leave the theater.
It had been almost balmy when they’d left the house, and they had elected to walk the six blocks to the theater on Dover Plains Avenue. The walk home was a bit chillier, the temperature having dropped slightly, but it was still comfortable, and they moved without hurry beside old trees that spread their branches over the deserted Riverhead sidewalks. Carella, in fact, seemed to be dawdling. Teddy was anxious to ask him all sorts of questions about the movie as soon as they got home; he was breathing deeply of the night air and walking the way an old man does in the park on Sunday morning, when there are pigeons to imitate.
The attack came without warning.
The fist was thrown full into his face, as unexpected as an earthquake. He was reaching for his gun when he was struck from behind by a second assailant. A third man grabbed for Teddy’s handbag, just as the first attacker threw his clenched fist into Carella’s face again. The man behind him was wielding a sap. Carella’s gun came clear of his topcoat just as the sap grazed him above and behind the ear. There was the sound of the gun’s explosion, shockingly loud on the still suburban street, and then the sap caught him again, solidly this time, at the base of the skull, and he toppled to the sidewalk.
The embarrassment was almost worse than the pain. A half hour later, in the muster room of the 103rd Precinct, he explained to an incredulous desk sergeant that he was a police officer and that he and his wife had been mugged on the way home from the movies. The attackers had stolen his wife’s handbag and wristwatch, as well as his own watch, his wallet, and, most shameful to admit, his service revolver.
The sergeant took down all the information, and promised to get in touch.
Carella felt like a horse’s ass.
15
Something was wrong with the day.
Heady breezes blew in off the River Harb, brilliant sunshine touched avenue and street; May was just around the corner, and April seemed bent on jubilant collision.
But there was no further communication from the Deaf Man. The first mail had already been delivered, and there was no manila envelope addressed to Carella, no duplication of the football team. Had this been an oversight, or was it a deliberate act of omission with deep significance? The detectives of the 87th Squad pondered this with the concern of a proctological convention considering oral hygiene. The case had been turned over to the stalwarts of the 86th; let their mothers worry.
The clock on the sidewalk outside the bank read twelve minutes past nine. Sitting on a bench in the small park around which ran Van Buren Circle, the Deaf Man checked his own watch, and then glanced up the street. In three minutes, if the armored truck followed its usual Friday morning routine, enough cash to cover the combined McCormick, Meredith, and Holt payrolls would be delivered to the bank. At eleven o’clock, the money would be withdrawn, despite the efforts of the toy police, who were already inside the bank. The Deaf Man had seen them arriving at a little past nine, three burly detectives and one lady cop, undoubtedly there to replace the tellers. He credited them with having enough intelligence to realize he might strike at some time other than the announced eleven o’clock, but then even a cretin might have surmised that. And besides, they were wrong. The bank would be robbed at eleven. Whatever else the Deaf Man was, he was scrupulously fair. When dealing with inferiors, there was no other way.