“You won’t. Just relax, Tommy. Just remember that you love her, and that you married her, and that you’re going to be together for the rest of your lives.”
“Gee, I’ll tell you the truth, Steve, even that scares me.”
“Don’t let it.” He paused. “Adam and Eve didn’t have an instruction booklet, Tommy. And they made out all right.”
“Yeah, well I hope so. I sure hope so. I just wish I knew what the hell to say to her.” A pained look crossed his face, and Carella was momentarily amused.
“Maybe you won’t have to say anything,” Carella said. “Maybe she’ll get the idea.”
“Boy, I hope so.” Tommy put the coffeepot on the stove and then slid two slices of bread into the toaster. “But I didn’t call you so you could hold my hand. There’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I told you I couldn’t sleep all night. So I guess I got up kind of early, and I went to take in the milk. They leave it right outside the door. When I first got out of the Army, I used to go down to the grocery store each morning. But now I have it delivered. It’s a little more expensive, but...”
“Go ahead, Tommy.”
“Yeah, well I was taking in the milk when I saw this little box resting on the floor, just outside the door.”
“What kind of a box?”
“A little tiny box. Like the boxes rings come in, you know? So I picked it up and looked at it and there was a note on it.”
“What did the note say?” Carella asked.
“Well, I’ll show it to you in a few minutes. I took in the milk, and I carried the box into the bedroom. It was very nicely wrapped, Steve, fancy paper and a big bow and the note sticking up out of the bow. I couldn’t figure out who’d left it. I thought it was probably a gag. One of the fellows. You know.”
“Did you open it?”
“Yes.”
“What was in it?”
“I’ll let you see for yourself, Steve.”
He walked out of the kitchen and through the apartment. Carella heard a drawer opening and then closing in the bedroom. Tommy came back into the kitchen. “Here’s the note,” he said.
Carella studied the handwritten message on the small rectangle:
“And the box?” he said.
“Here,” Tommy said. He extended the small box to Carella. Carella put it on the kitchen table and lifted the lid. Then, quickly, he snapped the lid into place again.
Crouched in one corner of the box was a black widow spider.
Chapter 2
Carella shoved the box away from him instantly. A look of utter horror had crossed his face, and it lingered still in his eyes and around the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “That’s just the way I felt.”
“You could have told me what was in the box,” Carella said, beginning to think his future brother-in-law was something of a sadist. He had never liked spiders. During the war, stationed on a Pacific island, he had fought as bitterly against crawling jungle arachnids as he had against the Japanese. “You think this is a gag somebody played?” he asked incredulously.
“I did before I opened the box. Now I don’t know. You’d have to have a pretty queer sense of humor to give somebody a black widow spider. Or any kind of a spider, for Christ’s sake!”
“Is that coffee ready?”
“Just about.”
“I’m really going to need a cup. Spiders have two effects on me. My mouth dries up, and I get itchy all over.”
“I just get itchy,” Tommy said. “When I was in basic training in Texas, we had to shake our shoes out every morning before we put them on. To make sure no tarantulas had crawled into them during the—”
“Please!” Carella said.
“Yeah, it gives you the creeps, don’t it?”
“Do any of your friends have... odd senses of humor?” He swallowed hard. There seemed to be no saliva in his mouth.
“Well, I know some crazy people,” Tommy said, “but this is a little far out, don’t you think? I mean, this is slightly offbeat.”
“Slightly,” Carella said. “How’s the coffee?”
“In a minute.”
“Of course it may be a gag, who knows?” Carella said. “A sort of a wedding joke. After all, the spider is a classic symbol.”
“Of what?”
“Of the vagina,” Carella said.
Tommy blushed. A bright crimson smear started at his throat and quickly worked its way onto his face. If Carella had not seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. He quickly changed the topic.
“Or maybe it’s just a feeble pun on marriage in general. You know. The female black widow is supposed to devour her mate.”
Again Tommy blushed, and Carella realized there was no safe ground with a prospective bridegroom. Besides, he felt itchy. And his throat was dry. And no future brother-in-law had the goddamn right to spring a spider on a man so early in the morning — especially on Sunday morning.
“And of course,” Carella went on, “there are more ominous overtones — if we’re looking for them.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. He glanced at the stove. “Coffee’s ready.” He carried the pot to the table and began pouring. “A gag is a gag, but suppose I’d reached into that box and got bit? The black widow is poisonous.”
“Suppose I’d reached into it?” Carella asked.
“I wouldn’t have let you, don’t worry. But there was no one here when I opened it. I could’ve got bit.”
“I doubt if it would have killed you.”
“No, but it could have made me pretty sick.”
“Maybe somebody wants you to miss your own wedding,” Carella said.
“I thought of that. I also thought of something else.”
“What?”
“Why send a black widow? A widow, do you follow me? It’s almost as if... well... maybe it’s a hint that Angela’s gonna be a bride and a widow on the same day.”
“You’re talking like a man with a lot of enemies, Tommy.”
“No. But I thought it might be a hint.”
“A warning, you mean.”
“Yes. And I’ve been wracking my brain ever since I opened that box, trying to think of anybody who’d... who’d want me dead.”
“And who’d you come up with?”
“Only one guy. And he’s three thousand miles away from here.”
“Who?”
“A guy I knew in the Army. He said I was responsible for his buddy getting shot. I wasn’t, Steve. We were on patrol together when a sniper opened up. I ducked the minute I heard the shot, and this other guy got hit. So his buddy claimed I was responsible. Said I should have yelled there was a sniper. How the hell was I supposed to yell it? I didn’t even know it until I heard the shot — and then it was too late.”
“Was the man killed?”
Tommy hesitated. “Yeah,” he said at last.
“And his buddy threatened you?”
“He said he was gonna kill me one day.”
“What happened after that?”
“He got shipped back home. Frostbite or something. I don’t know. He lives in California.”
“Have you ever heard from him since?”
“No.”
“Was he the kind of a person who’d do a thing like this? Send a spider?”
“I didn’t know him very well. From what I did know, he seemed like the kind of guy who ate spiders for breakfast.”
Carella almost choked on his coffee. He put down his cup and said, “Tommy, I’m going to give you some advice. Angela is a very sensitive girl. I guess it runs in the Carella family. Unless you want to wind up getting a divorce real soon, I wouldn’t discuss hairy or crawly or...”