‘Huh?’ the man said.
‘Where’d you get this?’
‘Guy up the street handed it to me.’
‘What guy?’
‘Guy up the street. Blond guy with a hearing aid.’
‘What?’ the desk sergeant said.
‘You deaf, too?’ the man said.
‘What’s your name?’ the desk sergeant asked.
‘Pete MacArthur. What’s yours?’
‘Don’t get smart with me, mister,’ the desk sergeant said.
‘What is this?’ MacArthur said. ‘Guy gives me five bucks, asks me to deliver this for him, that’s a crime?’
‘Sit down on the bench over there,’ the desk sergeant said.
‘What for?’
‘Sit down till I tell you it’s okay to go.’
He picked up a phone and buzzed the squadroom. A detective named Santoro picked up the phone.
‘We got another one,’ the desk sergeant said.
‘There ain’t no mail deliveries today,’ Santoro said.
‘This one came by hand.’
‘Who delivered it?’
‘A guy named Pete MacArthur.’
‘Hold him there,’ Santoro said.
Santoro talked to MacArthur until they were both blue in the face. MacArthur kept repeating the same thing over and over again. A tall blond guy wearing a hearing aid had handed him the envelope and offered him five bucks to deliver it here. He’d never seen the guy before in his life. He’d taken the five bucks because he figured an envelope so skinny couldn’t have a bomb in it and also because it was a cold, snowy night, and he thought maybe he could find an open liquor store, even though it was Thanksgiving, and buy himself a bottle of wine. Santoro figured MacArthur was telling the truth. Only an exceedingly stupid accomplice would march right into a police station. He took his address—which happened to be a bench in Grover Park—told him to keep his nose clean, and sent him on his way.
These days Carella’s mail was everybody’s mail.
Santoro took the envelope up to the squadroom and opened it.
He looked at what was inside, shrugged, and then tacked it to the bulletin board:
* * * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carella had been shot twice since he’d been a cop, one of those times by the Deaf Man. He did not want to get shot ever again. It hurt, and it was embarrassing. There was something even more embarrassing than getting shot, however, and the Deaf Man had been responsible for that, too.
Once upon a time, when the Deaf Man was planning a bank holdup for which he’d fairly and scrupulously prepared the Eight-Seven far in advance, two hoods jumped Carella and Teddy on their way home from the movies. The men got away with Teddy’s handbag and wristwatch as well as Carella’s own watch, his wallet with all his identification in it, and—most shameful to admit—his service revolver.
The most recent message from the Deaf Man depicted eleven Colt Detective Specials.
The pistol the Deaf Man had shown to Naomi Schneider had been a Colt Detective Special, probably the same one he’d photographed and then Xeroxed for his pasteup. The pistol Carella had been carrying for some little while now was also a Colt Detective Special. In fact, this was the pistol of choice for most of the cops on the squad.
Pinned to the bulletin board, slightly to the left of the picture of the eleven revolvers, was the picture of the six police shields.
Carella’s shield and his ID card had been used during the bank job the day alter they’d been stolen from him. The man who’d gone in claiming to be Detective Carella was also carrying the gun he had taken from Carella the night before.
Was there some connection between that long-ago theft of pistol and shield and the current messages depicting pistols and shields?
There were now seven messages in all, each posted to the bulletin board in ascending numerical order:
Two nightsticks.
Three pairs of handcuffs.
Four police hats.
Five walkie-talkies.
Six police shields.
Eight black horses.
Eleven Colt Detective Specials.
One thing Carella knew for certain about the Deaf Man was that he worked with different pickup gangs on each job, rather like a jazz soloist recruiting sidemen in the various cities on his tour. In the past any apprehended gang members did not know the true identity of their leader; he had presented himself once as L. Sordo, another time as Mort Orecchio, and—on the occasion of his last appearance—simply as Taubman. In Spanish el sordo meant ‘the Deaf Man.’ Loosely translated, mort’orecchio meant ‘dead ear’ in Italian. And in German der taube Mann meant ‘the Deaf Man.’ If indeed he was deaf. The hearing aid itself may have been a phony, even though he always took pains to announce that he was hard of hearing. But whatever he was or whoever he was, the crimes he conceived were always grand in scale and involved large sums of money.
Nor was conceiving crimes and executing them quite enough for the Deaf Man. A key element in his M.O. was telling the police what he was going to do long before he did it. At first Carella had supposed this to be evidence of a monumental ego, but he had come to learn that the Deaf Man used the police as a sort of second pickup gang, larger than the nucleus group, but equally essential to the successful commission of the crime. That he had been thwarted on three previous occasions was entirely due to chance. He was smarter than the police, and he used the police, and he let the police know they were being used.
Knowing they were being used but not knowing how, knowing he was telling them a great deal about the crime but not enough, knowing he would do what he predicted but not exactly, the police generally reacted like hicks on a Mickey Mouse force. Their behavior in turn strengthened the Deaf Man’s premise that they were singularly inept. Given their non-demonstrated ineffectiveness, he became more and more outrageous, more and more daring. And the bolder he became, the more they tripped over their own flat feet.
And yet, he always played the game fair.
Carella hated to think of what might happen if all at once he decided not to play the game fair.
What if those seven messages on the bulletin board had nothing whatever to do with the crime he was planning this time around? What if each of them taken separately had nothing to do with all of them as a whole? In short, what if he was cheating this time?
There seemed no question now—if ever there had been—that the man who’d dropped Elizabeth Turner’s corpse in the park across the street was the Deaf Man. Josie Sears hadn’t seen a hearing aid in the man’s ear, but she’d described him as tall and blond. Given the circumstances, that was close enough. No cigar, but damn close.