“Mmm?”
“It was Maigret. The inspector.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Silence. On the street outside, the sound of a wailing police siren. Silence again.
“Ashley?”
“Mmmm?”
“It was Poirot”
Alone in bed together that night, she told him she’d been charged with assault. Her eyes blazed, her fingers flew, she was still mad as hell. He watched her hands, troubled by the fact that she’d been given a summons here in their local precinct, charged with a misdemeanor, no less.
“What did you do to this woman?” he asked, saying the words, signing them at the same time.
What did I do to her? she signed. Why don’t you ask what she did to me? bobbing her head whenever she emphasized a word, underscoring it further with dark laser beams that flashed from her darker brown eyes.
He could not resist smiling, and made the mistake of signing and simultaneously saying, “You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” which Teddy didn’t find too terribly amusing at all.
Do you want to hear this, she shouted with her hands, or do you want to bring me chocolates in jail?
“I’m listening,” he said.
The way she told it, before a patrol car could respond to the frantic call April made from a phone booth not five feet from where the irate woman was still screaming at Teddy, refusing to let go of the lapels of her suit jacket even though Teddy kept kicking at her repeatedly…
I was wearing French heels, she signed, I had lunch downtown with Eileen…
“How is she?” Carella said.
First, I came straight home to pick up April, drove her over to her ballet class. French heels with a little pointed toe, she signed. Which is how she got the cut on her leg.
Carella thought Uh-oh.
The woman, according to Teddy, was a behemoth weighing some two thousand pounds, shaking her till her teeth rattled, virtually lifting her off the ground while Teddy kept trying to kick her again. The woman’s piercing shrieks finally attracted the attention of a police officer patrolling the parking lot on foot…
The dunce of the One-Five-Three, Teddy signed, naming their local Riverhead precinct, where six detectives had recently been arrested for stealing money and dope from various dealers.
The officer told them to break it up, calm down, relax, words to that effect, and then listened to the fat woman’s account of how Teddy had smashed into the rear of her Buick, a total lie which Officer Stupid listened to gravely and solemnly, wagging his head in wonder and amazement. Little April kept trying to tell him that none of this was true, it was the fat lady who’d smashed into their car, which prompted Officer Fool to tell her to please let her mother speak for herself. April then had to explain that their mother was both hearing- and speech-impaired and could not convey her thoughts except through signing, which language perhaps Officer Incompetent comprehended. He admitted he did not. But he now looked at Teddy as if wondering whether or not it was legal for a deaf-and-dumb person to be driving in the first place.
By now, the fat lady had lifted her skirt to show her tree-trunk legs, one of which was bleeding from a small cut undoubtedly caused by Teddy’s first kick to the shin. There were no visible signs of abuse or assault on Teddy herself, however, since all the woman had done was shake her till all her internal organs were hopelessly entangled. Officer Idiot was debating whether to just advise the ladies to exchange insurance information, and shake hands, and call it a day when the fat woman began screaming about her attacker being a police detective’s wife, and all the cops in this city were the same, and how could she expect any justice from a cop protecting his own, and I want your name and your badge number, and I intend to take this to the Supreme Court, you hear? So Officer Imbecile, perhaps remembering the recent riot in Grover Park, and not wishing any kind of trouble at all on his hitherto peaceful little beat outside a shopping mall, decided in his Solomon-like street wisdom that it would be far easier to ask the dummy to come back to the precinct with him, where someone would write out a Desk Appearance summons for her. His exact words were Let the court work this out, the coward!
Seething, Teddy showed Carella the summons now:
“I see you signed it,” Carella said.
Teddy nodded.
“What happened to the woman?”
She came to the police station with us. Stood with her hands on her hips, scowling, while a detective wrote the summons.
“You say she was screaming at you…”
Yes.
“Shaking you…”
Yes.
“Was she charged with anything?”
No.
“Those jackasses just let her walk?”
Yes.
Carella looked at the detective’s name in the space on the summons. He did not recognize it.
“I see they fingerprinted you, too,” he said.
She nodded.
“Took your picture…”
She nodded again. All her anger was gone now. She merely looked terribly worried.
Shaking his head, he looked back to the due date on the summons. “This is returnable in two weeks,” he said. “Your attorney’ll want to…”
My attorney!
“Honey, this is a misdemeanor here,” he said, “you can go to jail for a year on it. We’ll get somebody terrific, go for outright dismissal, or dismissal in the interests of justice, or even adjournment in contemplation of dismissal. If the D.A. pursues, we’ll file a cross-complaint against the woman, harassment for sure, maybe jazz it up to attempted assault. Don’t worry, honey,” he said, “really,” and held her close, and kissed the top of her head.
She lay very still in his arms.
“This never should’ve got this far,” he said. “The beat officer should have settled it on the spot, a goddamn traffic incident. They must be scared to death up there. All those detectives who got burned.”
She said nothing. He could feel her tenseness through her thin nightgown.
“Don’t worry about it.” he said. “Any reasonable D.A.’ll dismiss this in a minute.”
She nodded.
“This cop who took you in?” he said. “Was he white?”
Yes.
“And the detective who wrote the summons? Endicott? Was he white, too?”
Yes.
“How about the fat woman?”
Black.
Carella sighed heavily.
But I really don’t see what difference that makes, Teddy signed.
“Well, it shouldn’t,” he said.
The bedside clock read a quarter past ten.
He reached over to turn off the lamp.
He brought her hand to his lips.
“Goodnight, honey,” he said against her fingers.
Exactly one hour and ten minutes later, a naked man came hurtling through the open window of an apartment at 355 North River Street in downtown Isola, twisting and falling toward the sidewalk ten stories below.
His name was Chuck Madden.
11
MARVIN MORGENSTERN CALLED EARLY THE NEXT MORNING TO tell Carella his stage manager had jumped out a window the night before.
This was the first Carella had heard of it.
The incident had occurred downtown, in the Two-One Precinct, and none of the detectives there had made any immediate connection between the apparent suicide they’d caught, and the murder that had been all over everywhere for the past four days.