by Ed McBain
‘Naomi,’ Brown said, and winked. ‘She said you’d know who.’
The phone rang again.
Brown picked up the receiver.
‘Eighty-seventh Squad, Brown,’ he said.
‘Hello, it’s Naomi again,’ the voice said, still sounding nervous. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ll be leaving for work in a few minutes, and I’m not sure he has the number there.’
‘Hold on, he just came in,’ Brown said, and held the phone out to Carella. ‘Naomi,’ he said.
Carella looked at him.
‘Naomi,’ Brown said again, and shrugged.
‘You kidding?’ Carella asked.
‘It’s Naomi,’ Brown said. ‘Would I kid you about Naomi?’
Carella walked to his own desk.
‘What extension is she on?’ he asked.
‘Six. You want a little privacy? Shall I go down the hall?’
Carella pushed the six button on the base of his phone and lifted the receiver. ‘Detective Carella,’ he said.
‘Steve?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘It’s Naomi.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, and looked at Brown.
Brown rolled his eyes.
‘You promised you’d call,’ she said.
‘Uh-huh,’ Carella said, and looked at Brown again. The way he figured it, there were only two possible explanations for the youngish-sounding lady on the phone. One: she was someone he’d dealt with before in the course of a working day, an honest citizen with one complaint or another, and he’d simply forgotten her name. Or two, and he considered this more likely: the witty gents of the Eight-Seven had concocted an elaborate little gag, and he was the butt of it. He remembered back to last April, when they’d asked a friendly neighborhood hooker to come up here and tell Genero she was pregnant with his child. Now there was Naomi. City-honed voice calling him ‘Steve’ and telling him he’d promised to call. And Brown sitting across the room, watching him expectantly. Okay, he thought, let’s play the string out. ‘Steve?’ she said. ‘Are you still there?’ ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Still here. What’s this in reference to, Miss?’
‘It’s in reference to your pistol.’
‘Oh, I see, my pistol,’ he said.
‘Yes, your big pistol.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said.
‘When am I going to see you again, Steve?’
‘Well, that all depends,’ he said, and smiled at Brown. ‘Who’d you say this was?’
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Can’t you talk just now?’
‘Yes, Miss, certainly,’ he said. ‘But police regulations require that we get the name and address of anyone calling the squadroom. Didn’t they tell you that?’
‘Didn’t who tell me that?’
‘Whoever put you up to calling me.’
There was a long silence on the line.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to talk to me?’
‘Miss,’ Carella said, ‘I would love to talk to you, truly. I would love to talk to you for hours on end. It’s just that these jackasses up here’—he looked meaningfully at Brown—‘don’t seem to understand that a dedicated and hardworking policeman has better things to do at eight o’clock in the morning than...’
‘Why are you acting so peculiarly?’ she said.
‘Would you like to talk to Artie again?’ Carella said.
‘Who’s Artie?’
‘Or did Meyer set this up?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘Cotton, right? It was Cotton.’
‘Am I talking to the right person?’ she asked.
‘You are talking to the person they asked you to talk to,’ he said, and winked at Brown. Brown did not wink back. Carella felt suddenly uneasy.
‘Is this Detective Steve Carella?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said cautiously, beginning to think he’d made a terrible mistake. If this was an honest citizen calling on legitimate police business...
‘Who ties girls to beds and plays Russian roulette,’ she said. ‘With a wooden bullet.’
Uh-oh, he thought, a bedbug. He signaled to Brown to pick up the extension, and then he put his forefinger to his temple and twirled it clockwise in the universal sign language for someone who’d lost his marbles.
‘Can you let me have your last name, please?’ he said. He was all business now. This was someone out there who might need help. Brown had picked up the phone on his desk. Both men heard a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you want to play games, we’ll play games. This is Naomi Schneider.’
‘And your address, please?’
‘You know my address,’ she said. ‘You spent a whole goddamn weekend with me.’
‘Yes, but can you give it to me again, Miss?’
‘No, I won’t give it to you again. If you’ve forgotten where I live, for Christ’s sake...’
‘Are you alone there, Miss?’ he asked. They sometimes called in desperation. They sometimes asked the department sergeant to put them through to the detectives, and sometimes the sergeant said, ‘Just a moment, I’ll connect you to Detective Kling,’ or Brown or whoever the hell—Detective Carella in this case—but how did she know his first name?
‘Yes, I’m alone,’ she said. ‘But you can’t come over just now, I’m about to leave for work.’
‘And where’s that, Miss? Where do you work?’
‘I’m wearing what you told me to wear,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wearing it every day.’
‘Yes, Miss, where do you work?’
‘The garter belt and stockings,’ she said.
‘Can you tell me where you work, Miss?’
‘No panties,’ she said seductively. ‘No bra.’
‘If you’ll tell me where you work...’
‘You know where I work,’ she said.
‘I guess I’ve forgotten.’
‘Maybe you weren’t listening.’
‘I was listening, but I guess I...’
‘Maybe you should have turned up your hearing aid,’ she said.
‘My what?’ Carella asked at once.
‘What?’ Naomi said.
“What makes you mention a hearing aid?’ Carella said. There was a long silence on the line.
‘Miss?’ he said.
‘Are you sure this is Steve Carella?’ she said.
‘Yes, this is...’
‘Because you sound strange as hell, I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Listen, I’d like to see you,’ Carella said, ‘really. If you’ll give me your address...’
‘I told you I’m leaving for work in a few minutes...’
‘And where’s that? I’d like to talk to you, Naomi...’
‘Is that all you’d like to do?’
‘Well, I...’
‘I thought you might want to fuck me again.’
Brown raised his eyebrows. Jesus, Carella thought, he thinks I really know this girl! But she had mentioned a hearing aid, and right now he didn’t give a damn what Brown thought.
‘Yes, I’d like to do that, too,’ he said.
‘At last,’ she said, and sighed again. ‘It’s like pulling teeth with you, isn’t it?’
‘Tell me where you work,’ he said.
‘You already know where I work. Anyway, why would you want to come there?’
‘Well, I thought...’
‘We couldn’t do anything there, could we, Steve?’ she said, and giggled. ‘We’d get arrested.’
‘Well, what time do you get off tonight?’ he asked.
‘Five.’
‘Okay, let me have your address, I’ll come by as soon as...’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Naomi...’
‘You try to remember my address, okay?’ she said. ‘I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll be wide open and waiting for you.’
There was a click on the line.
‘Miss?’ he said.
The line was d
ead.
‘Shit,’ he said.
Brown was staring at him.
Carella put the receiver back on its cradle. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you’re thinking...’
‘No, I’m not,’ Brown said. ‘I’m thinking the Deaf Man.’
* * * *
If this had been a smaller city, the man from the telephone company might have been more conspicuous, arriving as he did at precincts all over town and claiming he was there to clear the trouble on the line. But this was a bigger city than most, one of the biggest cities in the world, in fact, and not many cops paid too much attention to a telephone repairman in their midst. Noticing a telephone repairman would have been like noticing an electrician or a plumber. The man who came and went at will was virtually invisible.
There were rules and regulations, of course, that pertained to anyone entering a police station. Ever since the bomb scares several years back, a uniformed cop stood at the entrance door to every precinct, and he asked any visitor what his business there might be. Or at least he was supposed to ask. Not many of them bothered. That was because most cops hated pulling what they called ‘door duty.’ They had not joined the force so that they could stand around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for terrorist attacks that never came. Police work meant action. There was as much action standing outside a precinct door as there was in an undertaker’s shop.
So most cops on door duty, they gauged a citizen coming up the steps, nodded him in, and went back to watching the street, where—if they were lucky—the wind would blow a girl’s dress up every now and then. Besides, if a guy was wearing coveralls that had the telephone company’s name on the back and if there was a little plastic telephone company ID card pinned to the pocket of those coveralls and if there was a yellow lineman’s phone hanging from his belt together with a lot of other wires and crap and if he was carrying a canvas bag with tools in it (some of the door-duty cops actually looked inside the bag to see if there was a bomb or something in it), then they automatically figured the guy was just what he claimed to be, a telephone company repairman there to clear the trouble on the line.
When Henry Caputo entered the Twelfth Precinct downtown, he stopped at the muster desk, just as the sign behind the desk advised him, and he stated his business to the desk sergeant.
‘Telephone company,’ he said. ‘Here to clear the trouble on the line.’
‘What trouble on the line?’ the desk sergeant asked. He had been answering the telephone all morning, and he wasn’t aware of any trouble on the line.
Henry reached into a pocket, pulled out a white slip of paper, read it silently, and said, ‘This the Twelfth Precinct?’
‘You got it, pal,’ the sergeant said.
‘Okay, so there’s trouble on the line. You want me to fix it or what?’
‘Be my guest,’ the sergeant said, and Henry disappeared into the busy precinct boil.
Henry had hair the color of iodine and eyes the color of coal, and even in his telephone company coveralls he looked like a man who would slit your throat if you didn’t hand over your watch the instant he asked for it. He had, in fact, once slit a man’s throat, which was why he’d served time in a maximum security prison in Oklahoma. He had not slit the man’s throat over anything as inconsequential as a watch. He had slit the man’s throat because he’d interrupted a conversation Henry was having with a hooker in a bar in downtown Tulsa. The hooker had been a true racehorse, the hundred-dollar variety, not one of your scaly-legged dogs who’d do a ten-dollar blowjob in a pickup truck. Henry had not enjoyed having his train of thought interrupted, especially when he had a hard-on. The man was very surprised to find his throat open and blood spilling down the front of his white shirt. All he’d said was, excuse me, mister, would you please pass the ...’ and the knife had appeared suddenly in Henry’s hand, and the next thing the man knew he was trying to talk through a bubbling red froth in his mouth, and he never did get out the word “peanuts.’
Fortunately, for both of them, the man didn’t die. Henry was only locked up for the equivalent of what in this city would have been First-Degree Assault, a Class-C felony punishable by a minimum of three and a maximum of fifteen. Henry was now out on the street again, back east again, where he’d been born and raised—the hell with all them cowboys and Indians out west, people with no manners, who interrupted a conversation a person was having with a lady. Henry was ready to take his place in civilized society again, and a good way to start seemed to be the job—or, more accurately, the series of jobs—this guy Dennis Dove had asked him to do. Henry did not particularly like cops. Henry thought all cops were crooks with badges. So the idea of stealing from cops tickled the shit out of him.
The only thing Henry couldn’t dope out was why this Dennis Dove character with the hearing aid in his ear wanted all this stuff Henry was stealing from police stations all over town. And paying pretty good for it besides. Two grand up front—plus another two grand when Henry delivered all the stuff—wasn’t exactly potato chips. Actually Henry would have done the job for much less. A fun job like this one was difficult to come by these days. Besides, being in police stations, he was learning a lot about cops. He was learning they were all pricks, which is just what he’d thought all along. It was terrific to be stealing from these pricks, especially since they kept asking him all the time how the phones were coming along.
He’d go in and unscrew the mouthpiece from a phone, fiddle with the wires, check out some panels in the basement, and then come upstairs again and go into this room and that room and say hello to the prisoners in the holding cells and the squadroom detention cage and pop into the men’s room to take a leak and go back to another phone and unscrew another mouthpiece, and meanwhile he was lifting little things here and there and dropping them in his canvas bag, while the cops kept telling rotten jokes about all the crooks out there in the city, never once realizing that a crook was right there in the police station with them, stealing them blind.
So far, Henry had stolen four walkie-talkies from the charging racks they had on the ground floor of the precincts on the far wall past the muster desk, and he had stolen three badges from uniform tunics in locker rooms while some guy was taking a shower or a nap, and he had a nightstick and a whole stack of Detective Division forms from the clerical office in one of the precincts, and he had stolen two police hats and a pair of handcuffs, and when he walked out of here today, he hoped to have another walkie-talkie, which would make five altogether, and maybe another badge or two and also some wanted flyers from one of the bulletin hoards, though it was pretty risky to take something from a bulletin board, the fuckin’ cops were always reading the bulletin boards like there was something important on them.
He wondered what this Dennis Dove character with the hearing aid in his ear wanted with seven different wanted flyers. That was on the list he’d given Henry: seven wanted flyers. If Henry had known wanted flyers were so valuable, he’d have asked the cops to send him the one of him that had been in a couple of post offices after he’d killed that hooker in New Orleans. They were still looking for him for that one. That one was after he’d got out of prison for slitting that guy’s throat in Tulsa. He’d headed back east by way of New Orleans, and he’d got into an argument with this hooker who kept insisting he’d given her a phony C-note, which happened to be true, but it wasn’t fuckin’ polite to tell a man he was passing Monopoly money, not after you’d just blown him. So he’d slapped her around a little, and when she started screaming she was gonna get her pimp to beat the shit out of him, he juked her, plain and simple. Served her right, the dumb cunt. Accusing him of handing her a phony bill, true or not. A customer was a customer. And anyway it had been a lousy blowjob.
He wondered if there were any wanted flyers of him up here in any of the precincts. Be a real gas if he walked into a station house in his telephone company suit and saw his own face looking down at him from a bulletin board. Well, that’s what made his line of work so interesting. Y
ou never knew what was gonna happen next.
‘Where you got your primary terminal?’ he asked a cop who was taking a walkie-talkie from the charging rack in the muster room. Henry didn’t know what a primary terminal was. He’d made that up on the spot.
‘How the fuck do I know?’ the cop said.
‘They’re usually in the basement,’ Henry said.
‘So go down the basement,’ the cop said, and hung the walkie-talkie on his belt.
Henry waited until he turned his back. He took a quick look at the muster desk, lifted a walkie-talkie from the rack, and dropped it into his canvas bag.