by Ed McBain
She had never heard her husband’s voice.
She had never heard her children’s laughter.
She had never heard the pleasant wintry jingle of automobile skid chains on an icy street, the big-city cacophony of jackhammers and automobile horns, street vendors and hawkers, babies crying. As she passed a souvenir shop whose window brimmed with inexpensive jade, ivory (illegal to import), fans, dolls with Oriental eyes (like her husband’s), she did not hear drifting from a small window on the side wall of the shop the sound of a stringed instrument plucking a sad and delicate Chinese melody, the notes hovering on the air like ice crystals—she simply did not hear.
The tattoo parlor was vaguely anonymous, hidden as it was on a narrow Chinatown side street. The last time she’d been here, the place had been flanked by a bar and a Laundromat. Today, the bar was an offtrack betting parlor and the Laundromat was a fortune-telling shop run by someone named Sister Lucy. Progress. As she passed Sister Lucy’s emporium, Teddy looked over the curtain in the front window and saw a Gypsy woman sitting before a large phrenology poster hanging on the wall. Except for the poster and the woman, the shop was empty. The woman looked very lonely and a trifle cold, huddled in her shawl, looking straight ahead of her at the entrance door. For a moment, Teddy was tempted to walk into the empty store and have her fortune told. What was the joke? Her husband was very good at remembering jokes. What was it? Why couldn’t women remember jokes? Was that a sexist attitude? What the hell was the joke? Something about a Gypsy band buying a chain of empty stores?
The name on the plate glass window of the tattoo parlor was Charlie Chen. Beneath the name were the words Exotic Oriental Tattoo. She hesitated a moment, and then opened the door. There must have been a bell over the door, and it probably tinkled, signaling Mr. Chen from the back of his shop. She had not heard the bell, and at first she did not recognize the old Chinese man who came toward her. The last time she’d seen him, he had been a round fat man with a small mustache on his upper lip. He had laughed a lot, and each time he laughed, his fat little body quivered. He had thick fingers, she remembered, and there had been an oval jade ring on the forefinger of his left hand.
“Yes, lady?” he said.
It was Chen, of course. The mustache was gone, and so was the jade ring, and so were the acres of flesh, but it was surely Chen, wizened and wrinkled and shrunken, looking at her now out of puzzled brown eyes, trying to place her. She thought I’ve changed, too, he doesn’t recognize me, and suddenly felt foolish about what she was here to do. Maybe it was too late for things like garter belts and panties, ribbed stockings and high-heeled, patent leather pumps, merry widows and lacy teddies, too late for Teddy, too late for silly, sexy playfulness. Was it? Oh my God, was it?
She had asked Fanny to call yesterday, first to find out if the shop would be open today, and next to make an appointment for her. Fanny had left the name Teddy Carella. Had Chen forgotten her name as well? He was still staring at her.
“You Missa Carella?” he said.
She nodded.
“I know you?” he said, his head cocked, studying her.
She nodded again.
“You know me?”
She nodded.
“Charlie Chen,” he said, and laughed, but nothing about him shook, his laughter was an empty wind blowing through a frail old body. “Everybody call me Charlie Chan,” he explained. “Big detective Charlie Chan. But me Chen, Chen. You know Charlie Chan, detective?”
The same words he had spoken all those years ago.
Oddly, she felt like weeping.
“Big detective,” Chen said. “Got stupid sons.” He laughed again. “Me got stupid sons, too, but me no detec—” And suddenly he stopped, and his eyes opened wide, and he said, “Detective wife, you detective wife! I make butterfly for you! Black lacy butterfly!”
She nodded again, grinning now.
“You no can talk, right. You read my lips, right?”
She nodded.
“Good, everything hunky-dory. How you been, lady? You still so pretty, most beautiful lady ever come my shop. You still got butterfly on shoulder?”
She nodded.
“Best butterfly I ever make. Nice small butterfly. I want do big one, remember? You say no, small one. I make tiny delicate black butterfly, very good for lady. Very sexy in strapless gown. You husband think was sexy?”
Teddy nodded. She started to say something with her hands, caught herself—as she so often had to—and then pointed to a pencil and a sheet of paper on Chen’s counter.
“You wanna talk, right?” Chen said, smiling, and handed her the pencil and paper.
She took both, and wrote: How have you been, Mr. Chen?
“Ah, well, not so good,” Chen said.
She looked at him expectantly, quizzically.
“Old Charlie Chen gotta Big C, huh?” he said.
She did not understand him for a moment.
“Cancer,” he said, and saw the immediate shocked look on her face and said, “No, no, lady, don’t worry, old Charlie be hunky-dory, yessir.” He kept watching her face. She did not want to cry. She owed the old man the dignity of not having to watch her cry for him. She opened her hands. She tilted her head. She raised her eyebrows ever so slightly. She saw on his face and in his eyes that he knew she was telling him how sorry she was. “Thank you, lady,” he said, and impulsively took both her hands between his own, and, smiling, said, “So, why you come here see Charlie Chen? You write down what you like, yes?”
She picked up the pencil and began writing again.
“Ah,” he said, watching. “Ah. Very smart idea. Very smart. Okay, fine.”
He watched the moving pencil.
“Very good,” he said, “come, we go in back. Charlie Chen so happy you come see him. My sons all married now, I tell you? My oldest son a doctor Los Angeles. A head doctor!” he said, and burst out laughing. “A shrink! You believe it? My oldest son! My other two sons…come in back, lady…my other two sons…”
From where Captain Sam Grossman stood at the windows looking down at High Street, he could see out over almost all of the downtown section of the city. The new Headquarters Building was a structure made almost entirely of glass (or so it appeared from the outside) and Grossman sometimes wondered if anyone down there in the street was watching him as he went about his daily commonplace chores—like trying to get through to the Eight-Seven on the telephone, which was both commonplace and irritating. Actually, Grossman rarely thought of his work in the lab as being anything but important and exciting and very far from commonplace, but he would not have admitted that to anyone in the world, with the possible exception of his wife. The number was still busy. He momentarily pressed one of the receiver rest buttons, got a fresh dial tone, and dialed the number again. He got another busy signal. Sighing, Grossman cradled the receiver and looked at his watch. I shouldn’t even be here today, he thought. This is Sunday.
He was here today because someone thought it might be amusing to restage the Valentine’s Day Massacre right here in this city instead of in Chicago, where it had originally taken place in 1929. What had happened back then, if Grossman’s memory of history served, was that some nice fellows from Al Capone’s gang forced seven unarmed but equally nice fellows from the Bugs Moran gang to line up against a garage wall and then shot them down with machine guns. Oh boy, that was some massacre. It was also a pretty good joke since the guys from the Capone gang were all dressed as policemen. There were some wags in Chicago at the time who maintained that the hoods were only behaving like policemen, too, but that was mere conjecture. Nonetheless, at 9:00 this morning—which by Grossman’s watch was almost three hours ago—several uniformed “policemen” had broken into a garage housing not bootleggers but instead narcotics traffickers, and had asked them to line up against the wall, and had shot them down in cold blood. One of the surprise-shooters had spray-painted the outline of a big red heart on the wall. The killers hadn’t even bothered to take with them
the estimated four kilos of heroin the traffickers had been processing when they’d broken in; perhaps they felt the red heart on the wall, and the red blood all over the floor, complemented the pristine white of the uncut heroin on the table. Either way, there were seven dead men on the Lower Platform, as the area closest to the city’s Old Quarter was called, and those men had bullets in them, and those bullets had been recovered from their respective cadavers and sent to the laboratory together with the empty spray can and a slew of fingerprints lifted from hither and yon, not to mention some paint scrapings taken from the lamppost opposite the garage, presumably left there when the getaway car backed into it, leaving as well a deposit of taillight glass splinters on the pavement, all in all a nice batch of material for the lab to ponder on a nice Sunday morning.
Grossman dialed the number again.
Would miracles never? It was actually ringing!
“87th Squad, Genero,” a harried-sounding voice said.
“Detective Carella, please,” Grossman said.
“Can he call you back?” Genero said. “We’re very busy up here just now.”
“I’ve been trying to get through for the past ten minutes,” Grossman said.
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause the lines’ve been busy,” Genero said. “All hell is busting loose up here. Give me your name and I’ll ask him to call back.”
“No, give him my name and tell him I’m on the line waiting,” Grossman said, annoyed.
“Well, what is your name, mister?” Genero said, somewhat snottily.
“Captain Grossman,” Grossman said. “What’s your name?”
“He’ll be right with you, sir,” Genero said, forgetting to tell Grossman his name. Grossman heard the receiver clattering onto a hard surface. There was a great deal of yelling and hollering in the background, but that was usual for the Eight-Seven, even on a Sunday.
“Detective Carella,” Carella said. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Steve, this is Sam Grossman.”
“Sam? He told me it was a Captain Holtzer.”
“No, it’s a Captain Grossman. What’s going on up there? It sounds like World War Three.”
“We have a delegation of angry citizens,” Carella said.
“Angry about what?”
“A person shitting in the hallways.”
“Don’t send me samples,” Grossman said at once.
“You may think it’s comical,” Carella said, lowering his voice, “and frankly, so do I. But the tenants of 5411 Ainsley do not find it amusing at all. They are here en masse, demanding police action.”
“What do they want you to do, Steve?”
“Apprehend the Mad Shitter,” Carella said, and Grossman burst out laughing. Carella started laughing, too. In the background, over Carella’s laughter, Grossman could hear someone yelling in Spanish. He thought he detected the word mierda.
“Steve,” he said, “I hate to take you away from matters of great moment—”
“Matters of great movement, you mean,” Carella said, and both men burst out laughing again; there was nothing a grown cop liked better than a scatological joke unless it was a joke about a cop on the take. Both cops laughed for what must have been a full two minutes while behind them everyone was shouting like the Bay of Pigs. At last, the laughter subsided. So did all the Spanish voices in the background.
“Where’d they all go, all of a sudden?” Grossman asked.
“Home!” Carella said, and burst out laughing again. “Genero told them he’d arrange a lineup for them! Can you picture eight cops and a possible perp throwing moons at twenty-six concerned Hispanic tenants?”
Grossman began laughing so hard he thought he would wet his pants. Another two minutes went by before either of the men could speak. It was not always like this when Carella and Grossman got on the phone together, but both men were grateful for those times when it was. Usually, Grossman presented a much soberer demeanor to the detectives with whom he worked. Tall and blue eyed, rather somber looking in his unrimmed spectacles, he resembled a New England farmer more than he did a scientist, and his clipped manner of speaking did little to belie the notion. Standing face to face with Sam Grossman in the sterile orderliness of his laboratory, you had the feeling that if you asked him directions to the next town, he’d say you couldn’t get there from here. But every so often, perhaps because he liked Carella so much, Grossman seemed to forget momentarily that his job was often inextricably linked with violent death.
“About this girl’s handbag,” he said, and Carella knew he was getting down to business.
“The Anderson girl?” he said.
“Sally Anderson, right,” Grossman said. “I’ll send you the full report later, right down to what brand of cigarettes she smoked. But for now…this was flagged for possible cocaine, wasn’t it?”
“Because the other victim was a—”
“That’s what the card says, anyway.”
“Did you find anything that might be cocaine?”
“A residue on the bottom of the bag. Not enough to run as many tests as I’d have liked.”
“How many did you run?”
“Four. Which in the process of elimination—you should pardon the expression—isn’t a hell of a lot. But I knew what you were looking for, so I deliberately chose my color tests for the most dramatic reactions. For example, cocaine shows colorless on both the Mercke and the Marquis, so I avoided those. Instead, I went with nitrosylsulfuric acid for my first color test. I got a pale yellow reaction, with no change when ammonia was added, and with a change to colorless when water was added. That’s a cocaine reaction. For the second color test—am I boring you?”
“No, no, go on,” Carella said. He considered himself a scientific nitwit and was in fact fascinated whenever Grossman began spewing formulas and such.
“For the second color test, I used tetranitromethane, which again—if we’re looking for cocaine—would give us a more dramatic reaction than some of the other tests. Sure enough, we initially got yellow with an orange cast to it, turning eventually to full yellow. Cocaine,” Grossman said.
“Cocaine,” Carella repeated.
“And when I ran my tests for precipitation and crystallization, I got virtually the same results. With platinum chloride as my reagent and normal acetic acid as my solvent, I got an immediate cocaine reaction—thousands of aggregate crystalline blade forms, arranged in bizarre fashion, moderate birefringence, predominantly—”
“You’re losing me, Sam,” Carella said.
“No matter. It was typically cocaine. When I used gold chloride with the acid, I got ruler-edged crystals forming from amorphous…again, no matter. It, too, was typically cocaine.”
“So…are you saying the substance you found at the bottom of her bag is cocaine?”
“I’m saying there’s a very strong likelihood it’s cocaine. I can’t say positively, Steve, without having run a great many more tests, but I simply ran out of available substance before I could. If it makes you any happier…you are looking for a drug connection here, I assume.”
“I am.”
“Well, we found shreds of marijuana, as well as marijuana seeds at the bottom of the bag. Ladies’ handbags are wonderful receptacles for all kinds of crap.”
“Okay, thanks, Sam.”
“Would it help further to know that the girl chewed sugarless gum?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“In that case, I won’t mention that she chewed sugarless gum. Good luck, Steve, I have bullets here from seven people who were shot by cops today.”
“What?” Carella said, but Grossman had hung up.
Smiling, Grossman stood with his hand on the cradled receiver for a moment, and then looked up when he heard the door opening. He was surprised to see Bert Kling coming into the room, not because Kling never visited the lab, but only because Grossman had not ten seconds earlier been talking to another cop from the Eight-Seven. Considering the laws of probability, Grossman would have gu
essed…well, no matter.
“Come in, Bert,” he said. “How’s it going?”
He knew how it was going. Everyone in the department knew how it was going. Bert Kling had found his wife in bed with another man last August, that’s how it was going. He knew that Kling and his wife were now divorced. He knew that Carella was concerned about him because Carella had expressed that concern to Grossman, who had suggested that he talk to one of the department psychologists, who in turn had advised Carella to try to get Kling to come in personally, which Carella had not been able to convince Kling to do. Grossman liked Kling. There were not many cops in the Eight-Seven he disliked, as a matter of fact—well, yes, Parker, he guessed. Parker very definitely. Parker was mean-spirited and lazy and altogether a person to dislike passionately. Grossman liked Kling and he hated seeing him looking this way, like a man who’d just been released from the state penitentiary at Castleview and was still wearing the ill-fitting civilian threads the state gave him gratis with his parole papers and his minimum-wage check. Like a man who needed a shave, even though the blond stubble on Kling’s cheeks and jaws was less noticeable than it might have been on a man with a heavier beard. Like a man carrying an enormous weight on his shoulders. Like a man whose eyes appeared a trifle too moist, a bit too precariously poised on the edge of tears. Grossman looked into those eyes as the men shook hands. Was Carella’s concern a legitimate one? Did Kling look like a man who might one day decide to chew on the barrel of his gun?
“So,” Grossman said, smiling, “what brings you down here?”