by Ed McBain
“No,” Carella said.
Buying the tickets came as something of a shock.
Carella had not seen a hit show in a long time, and he did not know what current prices were. When the woman in the box office shoved the little white envelope across the counter to him, he glanced at the yellow tickets peeking out, thought he saw the price on one of them, figured he must be wrong, and then had verbal confirmation when the woman said, “That’ll be eighty dollars, please.” Carella blinked. Eighty divided by two came to $40 a seat! “Will that be charge or cash?” the woman asked.
Carella did not carry a credit card; he did not know any cops who carried credit cards. He panicked for a moment. Did he have $80 in cash in his wallet? As it turned out, he was carrying $92, which meant he would have to call home and ask Teddy to bring some cash with her tonight. He parted with the money reluctantly. This had better be some show, he thought, and walked to the pay phone in the lobby. Fanny, the Carella housekeeper, answered on the fourth ring.
“Carella residence,” she said.
“Fanny, hi, it’s me,” he said. “Can you give Teddy a message? First tell her I’ve got tickets to a show called Fatback, and I thought we’d have dinner down here tonight before the show. Ask her to meet me at six-thirty, at a place called O’Malley’s; she knows it, we’ve been there before. Next, tell her to bring a lot of cash; I’m running low.”
“That’s three messages,” Fanny said. “How much cash?”
“Enough to cover dinner.”
“I planned to make pork chops,” Fanny said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This came up all of a sudden.”
“Mm,” Fanny said.
He visualized her standing by the phone in the living room. Fanny Knowles was “fiftyish,” as she put it in her faint Irish brogue, and she had blue hair, and she wore a pince-nez, and she weighed about 150 pounds, and she’d ruled the Carella household with an iron fist from the day she’d arrived there as a temporary gift from Teddy’s father—ten years ago. Fanny was a registered nurse, and she’d originally been hired to stay with the Carellas for only a month, just long enough to give Teddy a hand till she was able to cope alone with the infant twins. It was Fanny who suggested that she ought to stay on a while longer, at a salary they could afford, telling them she never again wanted to stick another thermometer into a dying old man. She was still there. Her silence on the phone was ominous.
“Fanny, I’m really sorry,” he said. “This is sort of business.”
“What do I do with a dozen pork chops?” she said.
“Make a cassoulet,” he said.
“What in hell is a cassoulet?” she asked.
“Look it up,” he said. “Will you give her my message?”
“When she gets home,” Fanny said, “which should be any minute now. She’ll have to run a foot race to meet you downtown at six-thirty.”
“Well, tell her, okay?”
“I’ll tell her,” Fanny said, and hung up.
He put the receiver back on the hook, went out of the theater, found the alley leading to the stage door, went to the door, and knocked on it.
An old man opened the door and peered out at him.
“Box office is up front,” he said.
Carella showed him his shield and ID card. “I’m supposed to pick up a list,” he said.
“What list?”
“Of everyone in the company.”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Carter phoned me about it. Come on in. I got one on the clipboard here, but I can’t let you have it, it’s the only one I got.” The old man paused. “You can copy it down, if you like.”
Carella went to the list hanging on the wall near the telephone, and looked at it. Four typewritten pages. He glanced at his watch.
“Okay if I take it out and have it Xeroxed?” he asked.
“No way,” the old man said. “Only one I got.”
“I was hoping—”
“How’re we supposed to get in touch with anybody, case he don’t show up for half hour? How we supposed to know to put in a swing dancer case somebody’s sick or something? That list has to stay right there, right where it is.” The old man paused. “You want my advice?”
Carella sighed, sat on the high stool near the wall telephone, and began copying the list into his notebook.
The Laundromat was on the corner of Culver and Tenth, a neighborhood enclave that for many years had been exclusively Irish but that nowadays was a rich melting-pot mixture of Irish, black, and Puerto Rican. The melting pot here, as elsewhere in this city, never seemed to come to a precise boil, but that didn’t bother any of the residents; they all knew it was nonsense, anyway. Even though they all shopped the same supermarkets and clothing stores; even though they all bought gasoline at the same gas stations and rode the same subways; even though they washed their clothes at the same Laundromats and ate hamburgers side by side in the same greasy spoons, they all knew that when it came to socializing it was the Irish with the Irish and the blacks with the blacks and the Puerto Ricans with the Puerto Ricans and never mind that brotherhood-of-man stuff.
Eileen Burke, what with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her red hair and green eyes, could have passed for any daughter of Hibernian descent in the neighborhood—which, of course, was exactly what they were hoping for. It would not do to have the Dirty Panties Bandit, as the boys of the Eight-Seven had wittily taken to calling him, pop into the Laundromat with his .357 Magnum in his fist, spot Eileen for a policewoman, and put a hole the size of a bowling ball in her ample chest. No, no. Eileen Burke did not want to become a dead heroine. Eileen Burke wanted to become the first lady Chief of Detectives in this city, but not over her own dead body. For the job tonight, she was dressed rather more sedately than she would have been if she’d been on the street trying to flush a rapist. Her red hair was pulled to the back of her head, held there with a rubber band, and covered with a dun-colored scarf knotted under her chin and hiding the pair of gold loop earrings she considered her good-luck charms. She was wearing a cloth coat that matched the scarf, and knee-length brown socks and brown rubber boots and she was sitting on a yellow plastic chair in the very cold Laundromat, watching her dirty laundry (or rather the dirty laundry supplied by the Eight-Seven) turn over and over in one of the washing machines while the neon sign in the window of the place flashed LAUNDROMAT first in orange, and then LAVANDERIA in green. In the open handbag on her lap, the butt of a .38 Detective’s Special beckoned from behind a wad of Kleenex tissues.
The manager of the place did not know Eileen was a cop. The manager of the place was the night man, who came on at 4:00 and worked through till midnight, at which time he locked up the place and went home. Every morning, the owner of the Laundromat would come around to unlock the machines, pour all the coins into a big gray sack, and take them to the bank. That was the owner’s job: emptying the machines of coins. The owner had thirty-seven Laundromats all over the city, and he lived in a very good section of Majesta. He did not empty the machines at closing time because he thought that might be dangerous, which in fact it would have been. He preferred that his thirty-seven night men all over the city simply lock the doors, turn on the burglar alarms, and go home. That was part of their job, the night men. The rest of their job was to make change for the ladies who brought in their dirty clothes, and to call for service if any of the machines broke down, and also to make sure nobody stole any of the cheap plastic furniture in the various Laundromats, although the owner didn’t care much about that since he’d got a break on the stuff from his brother-in-law. Every now and then it occurred to the owner that his thirty-seven night men each had keys to the thirty-seven separate burglar alarms in the thirty-seven different locations and if they decided to go into cahoots with one of the crazies in this city, they could open the stores and break open the machines—but so what? Easy come, easy go. Besides, he liked to think all of his night men were pure and innocent.
Detective Hal Willis knew for damn sure th
at the night man at the Laundromat on Tenth and Culver was as pure and as innocent as the driven snow so far as the true identity of Eileen Burke was concerned. The night man did not know she was a cop, nor did he know that Willis himself, angle-parked in an unmarked green Toronado in front of the bar next door to the Laundromat, was also a cop. In fact, the night man did not have the faintest inkling that the Eight-Seven had chosen his nice little establishment for a stakeout on the assumption that the Dirty Panties Bandit would hit it next. The assumption seemed a good educated guess. The man had been working his way straight down Culver Avenue for the past three weeks, hitting Laundromats on alternate sides of the avenue, inexorably moving farther and farther downtown. The place he’d hit three nights ago had been on the south side of the avenue. The Laundromat they were staking out tonight was eight blocks farther downtown, on the north side of the avenue.
The Dirty Panties Bandit was no small-time thief, oh no. In the two months during which he’d operated unchecked along Culver Avenue, first in the bordering precinct farther uptown, and then moving lower into the Eight-Seven’s territory, he had netted—or so the police had estimated from what the victimized women had told them—$600 in cash, twelve gold wedding bands, four gold lockets, a gold engagement ring with a one-carat diamond, and a total of twenty-two pairs of panties. These panties had not been lifted from the victims’ laundry baskets. Instead, the Dirty Panties Bandit—and hence his name—had asked all those hapless laundromat ladies to please remove their panties for him, which they had all readily agreed to do since they were looking into the rather large barrel of a .357 Magnum. No one had been raped—yet. No one had been harmed—yet. And whereas there was something darkly humorous, after all, about an armed robber taking home his victims’ panties, there was nothing at all humorous about the potential of a .357 Magnum. Sitting in the parked car outside the bar, Willis was very much aware of the caliber of the gun the Laundromat robber carried. Sitting inside the Laundromat, flanked by a Puerto Rican woman on her left and a black woman on her right, Eileen Burke was even more aware of the devastating power of that gun.
She looked up at the wall clock.
It was only 10:15, and the place wouldn’t be closing till midnight.
A little slip of paper in the program informed the audience that someone named Allison Greer would be replacing Sally Anderson that night, but none of the dancers in the show had character names, and they all looked very much alike with the exception of the two black girls (who in fact looked very much like each other) and Tina Wong, who looked like no one in the cast but herself. The blondes were indistinguishable one from the other. They were tall and leggy and, Carella thought, somewhat busty for dancers. They all had radiant smiles. They all were dressed in costumes that made them look even more alike, cut high on their thighs and hanging in tatters on their flashing legs, the sort of little nothing any young and ignorant southern girl might wear in the middle of a swamp, which was where Fatback was supposed to be taking place, and which was what the dancers in the cast were supposed to be. Given such a premise, given a curtain rising on what looked like a primeval bog, with mist floating in over it, and giant trees dripping moss onto slime-covered rocks, Carella had expected the worst. He turned to his right to look at Teddy. She was looking back at him. This was going to be yet another example of this city’s critics praising yet another lousy show to the skies, and thereby turning straw into gold—for the investors, at any rate.
Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute.
She often had difficulty at the theater. She could not hear what any of the performers were saying, of course, and usually she and Carella would be sitting too far back to read lips. Over the years, they had worked out a system whereby his hands—held chest high so as not to disturb anyone sitting behind them—flashed dialogue to her while she shifted her eyes back and forth from the stage to his rapidly moving fingers. Musicals, as a general rule, were somewhat easier for her. A singer usually faced the audience squarely when belting out a song, and his lip movements were more exaggerated than when he was simply speaking. Ballet was her favorite form of entertainment, and tonight she was delighted when—not ten seconds after the curtain had risen on that ominous bog—the entire stage seemed to fill with leaping, prancing, gyrating, twirling, frantically energetic dancers who virtually swung from the treetops and turned that steamy swamp into the sassiest, sexiest, most dazzling opening number Teddy had ever seen in her life. Spellbound, she sat beside Carella for what must have been ten full minutes of exposition through dance, squeezing his hand, her dark eyes flashing as she watched the story silently unfold. Carella sat there grinning. When the opening number ended, the house burst into tumultuous applause. He readied his hands for the translation he felt would be necessary as the act progressed, but he found that Teddy was impatiently nodding his moving fingers aside, understanding most of what was happening, able to read directly from the performers’ lips because the seats were sixth row center.
She asked him some questions during intermission. She was wearing a black, wool-knit dress with a simple cameo just above her breasts, black leather boots, a gold bracelet on her wrist. She had pulled her long black hair to the back of her head and fastened it there with a gold barrette. Except for eyeliner, shadow and lipstick, there was no makeup on her face. She needed none; she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known in his life. He watched her hands, watched the accompanying expressions that crossed her face. She wanted to know if she’d been right in assuming that the trapper and the girl moonshiner had had an affair years ago, and that this was the first time they’d seen each other since? No? Then what was all that hugging and kissing about? Carella explained, responding with his voice so that she could read his lips, accompanying his voice with hand signals (and always there were the fascinated observers in the crowd, nudging each other—Hey, take a look, Charlie, see the grown man talking to the dummy?) and she watched his lips and watched his hands and then signed, Well, they seem awfully lovey-dovey for cousins, and he explained that they were only second cousins, and she signed, Does that make incest legal?
Now, forty-five minutes into the second act, Carella looked at his watch because he sensed the evening was coming to an end and he simply did not want it to. He was having too good a time.
Eileen Burke was having a splendid time watching her laundry go round and round. The night man thought she was a little crazy, but then again everybody in this town was a little crazy. She had put the same batch of laundry through the machine five times already. Each time, she sat watching the laundry spinning in the machine. The night man didn’t notice that she alternately watched the front door of the place or looked through the plate glass window each time a car pulled in. The neon fixture splashed orange and green on the floor of the laundromat: LAVANDERIA… LAUNDROMAT… LAVANDERIA… LAUNDROMAT. The laundry in the machines went round and round.
A woman with a baby strapped to her back was at one of the machines, putting in another load. Eileen guessed she was no older than nineteen or twenty, a slender attractive blue-eyed blonde who directed a nonstop flow of soft chatter over her shoulder to her near dozing infant. Another woman was sitting on the yellow plastic chair next to Eileen’s, reading a magazine. She was a stout black woman, in her late thirties or early forties, Eileen guessed, wearing a bulky knit sweater over blue jeans and galoshes. Every now and then, she flipped a page of the magazine, looked up at the washing machines, and then flipped another page. A third woman came into the store, looked around frantically for a moment, seemed relieved to discover there were plenty of free machines, dashed out of the store, and returned a moment later with what appeared to be the week’s laundry for an entire Russian regiment. She asked the manager to change a $5 bill for her. He changed it from a coin dispenser attached to his belt, thumbing and clicking out the coins like a streetcar conductor. Eileen watched as he walked to a safe bolted to the floor and dropped the bill into a slot on its top, just as though he were making a night deposit at a ban
k. A sign on the wall advised any prospective holdup man: MANAGER DOES NOT HAVE COMBINATION TO SAFE. MANAGER CANNOT CHANGE BILLS LARGER THAN $5. Idly, Eileen wondered what the manager did when he ran out of coins. Did he run into the bar next door to ask the bartender for change? Did the bartender next door have a little coin dispenser attached to his belt? Idly, Eileen wondered why she wondered such things. And then she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who wondered the same things she wondered. That was when the Dirty Panties Bandit came into the store.
Eileen recognized him at once from the police-artist composites Willis had shown her back at the squadroom. He was a short slender white man wearing a navy pea coat and watch cap over dark brown, wide-wale corduroy trousers and tan suede desert boots. He had darting brown eyes and a very thin nose with a narrow mustache under it. There was a scar in his right eyebrow. The bell over the door tinkled as he came into the store. As he reached behind him with his left hand to close the door, Eileen’s hand went into the bag on her lap. She was closing her fingers around the butt of the .38 when the man’s right hand came out of his coat pocket. The Magnum would have looked enormous in any event. But because the man was so small and so thin, it looked like an artillery piece. The man’s hand was shaking. The gun in it flailed the room.
Eileen looked at the Magnum, looked at the man’s eyes, and felt the butt of her own pistol under her closing fingers. If she pulled the gun now, she had maybe a thirty/seventy chance of bringing him down before he sprayed the room with bullets that could tear a man’s head off his body. In addition to herself and the robber, there were five other people in the store, three of them women, one of them an infant. Her hand froze motionless around the butt of the gun.
