‘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 dead.
‘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.