The Con Man (8 page)

“Why?”

Deutsch looked up at Brown, and his eyes were wide and serious. “It’s full of bums, you know that?” He paused and sucked in a deep breath. “And I ain’t a bum anymore.”

Murder will out, and it was a fine day for the outing of murder. The fiction con men could not have chosen a better day. They would have written it just this way, with the rain a fine-drilling drizzle that swept in over the River Harb, and the sky an ominous, roiling
gray behind it. The tugboats on the river moaned occasionally, and the playgrounds on the other side of the River Highway were empty, the black asphalt glistening slickly under the steady wash of the rain. The movie con men would have panned their cameras down over the empty silent playgrounds, across the concrete of the River Highway, down the slopes of the embankments leading to the river. The sound track would pick up the wail of the tugs and the sullen swish of the rain and the murmur of the river lapping at rotted wooden beams.

There would be a close-up, and the close-up would show a hand suddenly breaking the surface of the water, the fingers stiff and widespread.

And then a body would appear, and the water would nudge the body until it washed ashore and lay lifeless with the other debris while the rain drilled down unrelentingly. The con men would have written it with flourish and filmed it with style, and they had a fine day for the plying of their trades.

The men of the 87th Precinct weren’t con men.

They only knew they had another floater.

The tattoo was obviously a mistake.

Mary Louise Proschek had had an almost identical tattoo. It had nestled snugly on the fold of skin between her right thumb and forefinger. The tattoo had been a heart, and the word
MAC
had decorated that heart. Mac—and a heart. A man—and love. For the con men throughout the ages have built a legend about the heart, have made the hardworking sump pump of the body the center of emotion, have disassociated love from the mind, have given a veneer of glamour to a bundle of muscle. It could have been worse. Their efforts could have descended upon the liver. In fact, the bile or the intestinal tract could have become the citadel of romance. The con men knew their trade. The shape of the heart makes a good symbol, easily recognized, easily worshipped. The eyes, the ears, the nose, the mind—the organs which see and hear and smell and know another human being, the organs which make another human being a living breathing part of yourself, a
part as vital as your brain—these are discounted. St. Valentine had a good press agent.

The second floater was a girl.

There was a tattoo on the flap of skin between her right thumb and forefinger.

The tattoo was a heart.

There was a word in the heart.

And the word was
NAC.

And, obviously, the tattoo was a mistake. Obviously, the man or woman who had been paid to decorate the skin had made a mistake. Obviously, he had been told to needle the word
MAC
into that heart, to fasten indelibly that man’s name onto that girl’s flesh. He had goofed. Perhaps he’d been drunk, or perhaps he’d been tired, or perhaps he simply didn’t give a damn. Some people are that way, you know—no pride in their work. Whatever the case, the name had come out all wrong. Not a
MAC
this time, but a
NAC.
The man who’d thrown those girls into the water must have been absolutely furious. Nobody likes his byline misspelled.

The idea was to combine business with pleasure.

It was an idea Steve Carella didn’t particularly relish, but he’d promised Teddy he’d meet her downtown at 8:00 on the button, and the call from the tattoo parlor had been clocked in at 7:45, and he knew it was too late to reach her at the house. He couldn’t have called her, in any case, because the telephone was one instrument Carella’s wife could never use. But he had, on other occasions, illegally dispatched a radio motor patrol car to his own apartment with the express purpose of delivering a message to Teddy. The police commissioner, even while allowing that Carella was a good cop, might have frowned upon such extracurricular squad car activity. So Carella, sneak that he was, never told him.

He stood now on the corner under the big bank clock, partially covered by the canopy that spread out over the entrance, shielding the big metal doors. He hoped there would not be an attempted bank robbery. If there was anything he disliked, it was foiling attempted bank robberies when he was off duty and waiting for the most beautiful woman in the world. Naturally, he was never off duty. A cop, as he well knew, is on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, 366 days in leap year. Then, too, there was the tattoo parlor to visit, and he couldn’t consider himself officially clocked out until he’d made that call and then reported the findings back to whoever was catching at the squad.

He hoped there would not be an attempted bank robbery, and he also hoped it would stop drizzling, because the rain was seeping into his bones and making his wounds ache.
Oh, my aching wounds!

He put his aches out of his mind and fell to wool-gathering. Carella’s favorite form of wool-gathering was thinking about his wife. He knew there was something hopelessly adolescent about the way he loved her, but those were the facts, ma’am, and there wasn’t much he could do to change his feelings. There were probably more beautiful women in the world, but he didn’t know who they were. There were probably sweeter, purer, warmer, more passionate women, too. He doubted it; he very strongly doubted it. The simple truth was that she pleased him. Hell, she delighted him. She had a face he would never tire of watching, a face that was a thousand faces, each linked subtly by a slender chain of beauty. Fully made up, her brown eyes glowing, the lashes darkened with mascara, her lips cleanly stamped with lipstick, she was one person—and he loved the meticulously calculated beauty, the freshly combed, freshly powdered veneer of that person.

In the morning, she was another person. Warm with sleep, her eyes would open, and her face would be undecorated, her full
lips swollen, the black hair tangled like wild weeds, her body supple and pliable. He loved her this way, too, loved the small smile on her mouth and the sudden eager alertness of her eyes.

Her face was a thousand faces, quiet and introspective when they walked along a lonely shore barefoot and the only sound was the distant sound of breakers on the beach, a sound she could not hear in her silent world. Alive with fury, her face could change in an instant, the black brows swooping down over suddenly incandescent eyes, her lips skinning back over even, white teeth, her body taut with invective she could not hurl because she could not speak, her fists clenched. Tears transformed her face again. She did not cry often, and when she did cry, it was with completely unself-conscious anguish. It was almost as if, secure in the knowledge of her beauty, she could allow her face to be torn by agony.

Many men longed for the day when their ship would come in.

Carella’s ship
had
come in—and it had launched a thousand faces.

There were times, of course, like
now,
when he wished the ship could do a little more than fifteen knots. It was 8:20, and she’d promised to be there at 8:00 on the dot, and whereas he never grew weary of her mental image, he much preferred her in person.

Now! For the first time! Live! On our stage! In person! Imported from the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris…

There must be something wrong with me,
Carella thought.
I’m never really here. I’m always…

He spotted her instantly. By this time, he was not surprised by what the sight of her could do to him. He had come to accept the instant quickening of his heart and the automatic smile on his face. She had not yet seen him, and he watched her from his secret vantage point, feeling somewhat sneaky, but what the hell!

She wore a black skirt and a red sweater and, over that, a black cardigan with red piping. The cardigan hung open, ending just below her hips. She had a feminine walk, which was completely unconscious, completely uncalculated. She walked rapidly because she was late, and he heard the steady clatter of the black pumps on the pavement, and he watched with delighted amusement the men who turned for a second look at his wife.

When she saw him, she broke into a run. He did not know what it was between them that made the shortest separation seem like a ten-year stretch at Alcatraz. Whatever it was, they had it. She came into his arms, and he kissed her soundly, and he wouldn’t have given a damn if Twentieth Century Fox had been filming the entire sequence for a film titled
The Mating Season Jungle.

“You’re late,” he said. “Don’t apologize. You look lovely. We have to make a stop. Do you mind?”

Her eyes questioned his face.

“A tattoo parlor downtown. Guy thinks he may remember Mary Louise Proschek. We’re lucky. This is business, so I was able to check out a sedan. Means we don’t have to take the train home tonight. Some provider, your husband, huh?”

Teddy grinned and squeezed his arm.

“The car’s around the corner. You look beautiful. You smell nice, too. What’ve you got on?”

Teddy dry-washed her hands.

“Just soap and water? You’re amazing! Look how nice you can make soap smell. Honey, this won’t take more than a few minutes. I’ve got some pictures of the Proschek girl in the car, and maybe we can get a make on them from this guy. After that, we’ll eat and whatever you like. I can use a drink, can’t you?”

Teddy nodded.

“Why do people always say they can ‘use’ a drink? What, when you get right down to it, can they ‘use’ it for?” He studied
her and added, “I’m too talkative tonight. I guess I’m excited. We haven’t had a night out in a long while. And you look beautiful. Don’t you get tired of my saying that?”

Teddy shook her head, and there was a curious tenderness in the movement. He had grown used to her eyes, and perhaps he missed what they were saying to him, over and over again, repeatedly. Teddy Carella didn’t need a tongue.

They walked to the car, and he opened the door for her, went around to the other side, and then started the motor. The police radio erupted into the closed sedan.

“Car Twenty-one, Car Twenty-one, Signal One. Silvermine at North Fortieth…”

“I’ll be conscientious and leave it on,” Carella said to Teddy. “Some pretty redhead may be trying to reach me.”

Teddy’s brows lowered menacingly.

“In connection with a case, of course,” he explained.

Of course,
she nodded mockingly.

“God, I love you,” he said, his hand moving to her thigh. He squeezed her quickly, an almost unconscious gesture, and then he put his hand back on the wheel.

They drove steadily through the maze of city traffic. At one stoplight, a traffic cop yelled at Carella because he anticipated the changing of the light from red to green. The cop’s raingear was slick with water. Carella felt suddenly like a heel.

The windshield wipers snicked at the steady drizzle. The tires whispered against the asphalt of the city. The city was locked in against the rain. People stood in doorways, leaned out of windows. There was a gray quietness to the city, as if the rain had suspended all activity, had caused the game of life to be called off. There was a rain smell to the city, too, all the smells of the day captured in the steady canopy of water and washed clean by it. There was, too, and strange for the city, a curious sense of peace.

“I love Paris when it drizzles,” Carella said suddenly, and he did not have to explain the meaning of his words because she knew at once what he meant, she knew that he was not talking about Paris or Wichita, that he was talking about this city, his city, and that he had been born in it and into it, and that it, in turn, had been born into him.

The expensive apartment houses fell away behind them, as did the line of high-fashion stores, and the advertising agency towers, and the publishing shrines, and the gaudy brilliance of the amusement area, and the stilled emptiness of the garment district at night, and the tangled intricacy of the narrow side streets far downtown, the pushcarts filled with fruits and vegetables lining the streets, the store windows behind them, the Italian salami, and the provolone, and the pepperoni hanging in bright-red strings.

The tattoo parlor nestled in a side street on the fringe of Chinatown, straddled by a bar and a Laundromat. The combination of the three was somewhat absurd, ranging from the exotica of tattooing into the nether world of intoxication and from there to the plebeian task of laundering clothes. The neighborhood had seen its days of glory, perhaps, but they were all behind it. Far behind it. Like an old man with cancer, the neighborhood patiently and painfully awaited the end—and the end was the inevitable city housing project. And, in the meantime, nobody bothered to change the soiled bedclothes. Why bother when something was going to die anyway?

The man who ran the tattoo parlor was Chinese. The name on the plateglass window was Charlie Chen.

“Everybody call me Charlie Chan,” he explained. “Big detective, Charlie Chan. But me
Chen,
Chen. You know Charlie Chan, Detective?”

“Yes,” Carella said, smiling.

“Big detective,” Chen said. “Got stupid sons.” Chen laughed. “Me got stupid sons, too, but me no detective.” He was a round, fat man, and everything he owned shook when he laughed. He had a small mustache on his upper lip, and he had thick fingers, and there was an oval jade ring on the forefinger of his left hand. “You detective, huh?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“This lady police lady?” Chen asked.

“No. This lady’s my wife.”

“Oh. Very good. Very good,” Chen said. “Very pretty. She wants tattoo, maybe? Do nice butterfly for her on shoulder. Very good for strapless gowns. Very pretty. Very decorative.”

Teddy shook her head, smiling.

“Very pretty lady. You very lucky detective,” Chen said. He turned to Teddy. “Nice yellow butterfly, maybe? Very pretty?” He opened his eyes seductively. “Everybody say very pretty.”

Teddy shook her head again.

“Maybe you like red better? Red your color, maybe? Nice red butterfly?”

Teddy could not keep herself from smiling. She kept shaking her head and smiling, feeling very much a part of her husband’s work, happy that he’d had to make the call and happy that he’d taken her with him. It was curious, she supposed, but she did not know him as a cop. His function as a cop was something almost completely alien to her, even though he talked about his work. She knew that he dealt with crime, and the perpetrators of crime, and she often wondered what kind of man he was when he was on the job. Heartless? She could not imagine that in her man. Cruel? No. Hard? Tough? Perhaps.