Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

by Ed McBain

  “We made plans,” Androvich said. His voice was curiously low now. The tic had stopped suddenly. The stammer had vanished. He did not look up at the detectives. He fastened his eyes on his big hands, and he twisted those hands in his lap, and he did not look up.

  “What kind of plans?”

  “We were going to run away together.”

  “Where?”

  “Miami.”

  “Why there?”

  “She knew of a job she could get down there. In one of the clubs. And Miami’s a big port. Not as big as this city, but big enough. I could always get work out of Miami. Or maybe I could get a job on one of the yachts. Anyway, we figured Miami was a good place for us.”

  “When were you supposed to leave?”

  “Valentine’s Day.”

  “Why then?”

  “Well, my ship was pulling out on the fourteenth, so we figured that would give us a head start. We figured Meg would think I was in South America, and then by the time she realized I wasn’t, she wouldn’t know where the hell I was. That was the way we figured it.”

  “But instead, the chief officer called here to find out where you were.”

  “Yeah, and Meg reported me missing.”

  “Why aren’t you in Miami, Karl? What happened?”

  “She didn’t show.”

  “Bubbles?”

  “Yeah. I waited at the train station all morning. Then I called her apartment, and all I got was the goddamn answering service. I called all that day, and all that day I got that answering service. I went down to The King and Queen, and the bartender there told me she hadn’t showed up for work the past two nights. That was when I began looking for her.”

  “Did you plan to marry this girl, Karl?”

  “Marry her? How could I do that? I’m already married. Bigamy is against the law.”

  “Then what did you plan to do?”

  “Just have fun, that’s all. I’m a young guy. I deserve a little fun, don’t I? Miami is a good town for fun.”

  “Do you think she could have gone to Miami without you?”

  “I don’t think so. I wired the club she mentioned, and they said she hadn’t showed up. Besides, why would she do that?”

  “Women do funny things.”

  “Not Bubbles.”

  “We’d better check with the Miami cops, Steve,” Hawes said. “And maybe a teletype to Kansas City, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He paused and looked at Androvich. “You think she isn’t here any more, huh? You think she’s left the city?”

  “That’s the way I figure it. I looked everywhere. She couldn’t be here. It’d be impossible.”

  “Maybe she’s hiding,” Carella said. “Maybe she did something and doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Bubbles? No, not Bubbles.”

  “Ever hear of a man called Mike Chirapadano?”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “A drummer.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “Bubbles ever mention him?”

  “No. Listen, she ain’t in this city, that much I can tell you. She just ain’t here. Nobody can hide that good.”

  “Maybe not,” Carella said. “But maybe she’s here, anyway.”

  “What sense does that make? If she ain’t out in the open, and she ain’t hiding, what does that leave?”

  “The river,” Carella said.

  It stopped raining that Thursday.

  Nobody seemed to notice the difference.

  It was strange. For the past nine days, it had rained steadily and everyone in the city talked about the rain. There were jokes about building arks and jokes about the rain hurting the rhubarb, and it was impossible to go anywhere or do anything without someone mentioning the rain.

  On Thursday morning, the sun came out. There was no fanfare of trumpets heralding the sun’s appearance, and none of the metropolitan dailies shrieked about it in four-point headlines. The rain just went, and the sun just came, and everyone in the city trotted about his business as if nothing had happened. The rain had been with them too long. It had become almost a visiting relative whose departure is always promised but never really expected. At last, the relative had left and—as with most promised things in life—there was no soaring joy accompanying the event. If anything, there was almost a sense of loss.

  Even the bulls of the 87th who quite naturally detested legwork in the rain did not greet the sun with any noticeable amount of enthusiasm.

  They had got their teletypes out to Miami and Kansas City, and they had received their answering teletypes, and the answering teletypes told them that Barbara “Bubbles” Caesar was not at the moment gainfully employed in any of the various clubs in either of the cities. This did not mean that she wasn’t living in either of the cities. It simply meant she wasn’t working.

  It was impossible to check bus or train transportation, but a call to every airline servicing both of the cities revealed that neither Bubbles Caesar nor a Mike Chirapadano had reserved passage out of Isola during the past month.

  On Thursday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation delivered a photostatic copy of Mike Chirapadano’s service record.

  He had been born in Riverhead twenty-three years ago. He was white, and he was obviously male. Height, six feet three inches. Weight, 185. Eyes, blue. Hair, brown. When the Korean War broke out, he was only thirteen years old. When it ended, he was sixteen, and so he had been spared the Oriental bout. He had joined the Navy for a two-year hitch in July 1956, had spent all of his service career—except for his boot training at the Great Lakes Naval Station—playing with the ComServDiv band in Miami. When he got out of the Navy in 1958, he came back to Isola. His record listed an honorable discharge in Miami, the Navy providing his transportation back to his home city. A copy of his fingerprint record was included in the data from the FBI but the prints were worthless for comparison purposes since the fingertips on both discovered hands had been mutilated. The Navy listed his blood as belonging to the “O” group.

  Carella studied the information and went home to his wife.

  Teddy Carella was a deaf mute.

  She was not a tall woman but she somehow managed to give the impression of height—a woman with black hair and brown eyes and a figure that, even after the bearing of twin children, managed to evoke street-corner whistles that—unfortunately— Teddy could not hear.

  The twins, Mark and April, had been born on a Sunday in June. June 22, to be exact. Carella would never forget the date because, aside from it being the day on which he’d been presented with two lovely children, it had also been the day of his sister Angela’s wedding, and there had been quite a bit of excitement on that day, what with a sniper trying to pick off the groom and all. Happily, the groom had survived. He had survived very well. Angela, less than a year after her marriage, was already pregnant.

  Now the problems of the care and feeding of twins are manifold even for a mother who possesses the powers of speech and hearing. The feeding problem is perhaps the least difficult because the eventuality of twins was undoubtedly considered in the design of the female apparatus and allowances made therefor. For which, thank God. But any mother who has tried to cope with the infantile madness of even one child must surely recognize that the schizophrenic rantings of twins present a situation exactly doubled in potential frenzy.

  When Steve Carella discovered that his wife was pregnant, he was not exactly the happiest man in the world. His wife was a deaf mute. Would the children be similarly afflicted? He was assured that his wife’s handicap was not an inherited trait, and that in all probability a woman as healthy in all other respects as Teddy would deliver an equally healthy baby. He had felt somewhat ashamed of his doubts later. In all truth, he never really considered Teddy either “handicapped” or “afflicted.” She was, to him, the most beautiful and desirable woman on the face of the earth. Her eyes, her face, spoke more words to him than could be found in the languages of a hundred different nations. And when he sp
oke, she heard him, she heard him with more than ears, she heard him with her entire being. And so he’d felt some guilt at his earlier unhappiness, a guilt that slowly dissipated as the time of the birth drew near.

  But he was not expecting twins, and when he was informed that he was now the father of a boy and a girl, the boy weighing in at six pounds four ounces, the girl being two ounces lighter than her brother, all of his old fears and anxieties returned. The fears became magnified when he visited the hospital the next morning and was told by the obstetrician that the firstborn, Mark, had broken his collarbone during delivery and that the doctor was placing him in an incubator until the collarbone healed. Apparently, the birth had been a difficult one and Mark had gallantly served as a trailblazer for his wombmate, suffering the fractured clavicle in his progress toward daylight. As it turned out, the fracture was simply a chipped bone, and it healed very rapidly, and the babies Carella and Teddy carried home from the hospital ten days later were remarkably healthy; but Carella was still frightened.

  How will we manage? he wondered. How will Teddy manage to feed them and take care of them? How will they learn to speak? Wasn’t speech a process of imitation? Oh, God, what will we do?

  The first thing they had to do, they discovered, was to move. The Riverhead apartment on Dartmouth Road seemed to shrink the moment the babies and their nurse were put into the place. The nurse had been a gift from Teddy’s father, a month’s respite from the task of getting a household functioning again. The nurse was a marvelous woman in her fifties named Fanny. She had blue hair and she wore pince-nez and she weighed 150 pounds and she ran that house like an Army sergeant. She took an instant liking to Carella and his wife, and her fondness for the twins included such displays of affection as the embroidering of two pillow slips with their names, action clearly above and beyond the call of duty.

  Whenever Carella had a day off, he and Teddy went looking for a house. Carella was a detective 2nd/grade and his salary— before the various deductions that decimated it—was exactly $5,555 a year. That is not a lot of loot. They had managed to save over the past years the grand total of $2,000, and they were rapidly discovering that this paltry sum could barely cover the down payment on a lawn mower, much less a full-fledged house. For the first time in his life, Carella felt completely inadequate. He had brought two children into the world, and now he was faced with the possibility of being unable to house them properly, to give them the things they needed. And suddenly the Carellas discovered that their luck, by George, she was running good!

  They found a house that could be had simply by paying the back taxes on it, which taxes amounted to $10,000. The house was a huge rambling monster in Riverhead, close to Donnegan’s Bluff, a house that had undoubtedly held a large family and an army of servants in the good old days. These were the bad new days, however, and with servants and fuel costs being what they were, no one was very anxious to take over a white elephant like this one. Except the Carellas.

  They arranged a loan through the local bank (a civil service employee is considered a good risk) and less than a month after the twins were born, they found themselves living in a house of which Charles Addams would have been ecstatically proud. Along about this time, their second stroke of good luck presented itself. Fanny, who had helped them move and helped them get settled, was due to terminate her month’s employment when she offered the Carellas a proposition. She had, she told them, been making a study of the situation in the Carella household, and she could not visualize poor little Theodora (these were Fanny’s words) raising those two infants alone, nor did she understand how the children were to learn to talk if they could not imitate their mother, and how was Theodora to hear either of the infants yelling, suppose one of them got stuck with a safety pin or something, my God?

  Now she understood that a detective’s salary was somewhere around five thousand a year—“You are a second/grade detective, aren’t you, Steve?”—and that such a salary did not warrant a full-time nurse and governess. But at the same time, she had the utmost faith that Carella would eventually make lst/grade—“That does pay six thousand a year, doesn’t it, Steve?”—and until the time when the Carellas could afford to pay her a decent wage, she would be willing to work for room and board, supplementing this with whatever she could earn making night calls and the like.

  The Carellas would not hear of it.

  She was, they insisted, a trained nurse, and she would be wasting her time by working for the Carellas at what amounted to no salary at all when she could be out earning a damned good living. And besides, she was not a truck horse, how could she possibly work all day long with the children and then hope to take on odd jobs at night? No, they would not hear of it.

  But neither would Fanny hear of their not hearing of it.

  “I am a very strong woman,” she said, “and all I’ll be doing all day long is taking care of the children under the supervision of Theodora who is their mother. I speak English very well, and the children could do worse for someone to imitate. And besides, I’m fifty-three years old, and I’ve never had a family of my own, and I rather like this family and so I think I’ll stay. And it’ll take a bigger man than you, Steve Carella, to throw me into the street. So that settles that.”

  And, indeed, that did settle that.

  Fanny had stayed. The Carellas had sectioned off one corner of the house and disconnected the heating to it so that their fuel bills were not exorbitant. Slowly but surely, the bank loan was being paid off. The children were almost a year old and showed every sign of being willing to imitate the sometimes colorful speech of their nurse. Fanny’s room was on the second floor of the house, near the children’s room, and the Carellas slept downstairs in a bedroom off the living room so that even their sex life went uninterrupted after that grisly six-weeks’ postnatal wait. Everything was rosy.

  But sometimes a man came home looking for an argument, and you can’t very well argue with a woman who cannot speak. There are some men who might agree that such a state of matrimony is surely a state approaching paradise, but on that Thursday night, with the sky peppered with stars, with a springlike breeze in the air, Carella walked up the path to the old house bristling for a fight.

  Teddy greeted him at the doorway. He kissed her briefly and stamped into the house, and she stared after him in puzzlement and then followed him.

  “Where’s Fanny?” he asked.

  He watched Teddy’s fingers as they rapidly told him, in sign language, that Fanny had left early for a nursing job.

  “And the children?” he asked.

  She read his lips, and then signaled that the children were already in bed, asleep.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “Can we eat, please?”

  They went into the kitchen, and Teddy served the meal—pork chops, his favorite. He picked sullenly at his food, and after dinner he went into the living room, turned on the television set, watched a show featuring a private eye who was buddy-buddy with a police lieutenant and who was also buddy-buddy with at least eighteen different women of assorted provocative shapes, and then snapped off the show and turned to Teddy and shouted, “If any police lieutenant in the country ran his squad the way that jerk does, the thieves would overrun the streets! No wonder he needs a private eye to tell him what to do!”

  Teddy stared at her husband and said nothing.

  “I’d like to see what the pair of them would do with a real case. I’d like to see how they’d manage without a dozen clues staring them in the face.”

  Teddy rose and went to her husband, sitting on the arm of his chair.

  “I’d like to see what they’d do with a pair of goddamn severed hands. They’d probably both faint dead away,” Carella said.

  Teddy stroked his hair.

  “We’re back to Androvich again,” he shouted. It occurred to him that it didn’t matter whether or not he shouted because Teddy was only reading his lips and the decibels didn’t matter one little damn. But he shouted nonetheless. “We�
�re right back to Androvich, and where does that leave us? You want to know where that leaves us?”

  Teddy nodded.

  “Okay. We’ve got a pair of hands belonging to a white male who is somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. We’ve got a bum of a sailor who flops down with any girl he meets, bong, bong, there goes Karl Androvich, who allegedly made a date to run off with a stripper named Bubbles Caesar. You listening?”

  Yes, Teddy nodded.

  “So they set the date for Valentine’s Day, which is very romantic. All the tramps of the world are always very romantic. Only this particular tramp didn’t show up. She left our sailor friend Androvich waiting in the lurch.” He saw the frown on Teddy’s face. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my calling Bubbles a tramp? She reads that way to me. She’s provoked fights in the joint where she stripped by leading on two men simultaneously. She had this deal going with Androvich, and she also probably had something going with a drummer named Mike Chirapadano. At any rate, she and Chirapadano vanished on exactly the same day, so that stinks of conspiracy. And she’s also got her agent, a guy named Charlie Tudor, all butterflies in the stomach over her. So it seems to me she was playing the field in six positions. And if that doesn’t spell tramp, it comes pretty close.”

  He watched his wife’s fingers as she answered him.

  He interrupted, shouting, “What do you mean, maybe she’s just a friendly girl? We know she was shacking up with the sailor, and probably with the drummer, and probably with the agent as well. All big men, too. She goes for them big. A tramp with—”

  The drummer and the agent are only supposition, Teddy spelled with her hands. The only one you have any sure knowledge of is the sailor.

  “I don’t need any sure knowledge. I can read Bubbles Caesar from clear across the bay on a foggy day.”

  I thought sure knowledge was the only thing a detective used.

  “You’re thinking of a lawyer who never asks a question unless he’s sure of what the answer will be. I’m not a lawyer, I’m a cop. I have to ask the questions.”