“Yes, sir!” Meyer snapped, and went immediately to the telephone.
“This goddamn racket drives me crazy,” Byrnes said, and started to storm back into his office, remembered that the jolly green painters were in there slopping around, and stormed into the Clerical Office instead.
“Get those files in order!” he shouted. “What the hell do you do in here all day, Miscolo, make coffee?”
“Sir?” Miscolo said, because that’s exactly what he was doing at the moment.
Bert Kling was in love.
It was not a good time of the year to be in love. It is better to be in love when flowers are blooming and balmy breezes are wafting in off the river, and strange animals come up to lick your hand. There’s only one good thing about being in love in March, and that’s that it’s better to be in love in March than not to be in love at all, as the wise man once remarked.
Bert Kling was madly in love.
He was madly in love with a girl who was twenty-three years old, full-breasted and wide-hipped, her blond hair long and trailing midway down her back or sometimes curled into a honey conch shell at the back of her head, her eyes a cornflower blue, a tall girl who came just level with his chin when she was wearing heels. He was madly in love with a scholarly girl who was studying at night for her master’s degree in psychology while working during the day conducting interviews for a firm downtown on Shepherd Street; a serious girl who hoped to go on for her Ph.D., and then pass the state boards, and then practice psychology; a nutty girl who was capable of sending to the squadroom a six-foot high heart cut out of plywood and painted red and lettered in yellow with the words Cynthia Forrest Loves Detective 3rd/Grade Bertram Kling, So Is That A Crime?, as she had done on St. Valentine’s Day just last month (and which Kling had still not heard the end of from all his comical colleagues); an emotional girl who could burst into tears at the sight of a blind man playing an accordian on The Stem, to whom she gave a five-dollar bill, merely put the bill silently into the cup, soundlessly, it did not even make a rustle, and turned away to weep into Kling’s shoulder; a passionate girl who clung to him fiercely in the night and who woke him sometimes at six in the morning to say, “Hey, Cop, I have to go to work in a few hours, are you interested?” to which Kling invariably answered, “No, I am not interested in sex and things like that,” and then kissed her until she was dizzy and afterwards sat across from her at the kitchen table in her apartment, staring at her, marveling at her beauty and once caused her to blush when he said, “There’s a woman who sells pidaguas on Mason Avenue, her name is Iluminada, she was born in Puerta Rico. Your name should be Illuminada, Cindy. You fill the room with light.”
Boy, was he in love.
But, it being March, and the streets still banked high with February snow, and the winds howling, and the wolves growling and chasing
civilians in troikas who cracked whips and huddled in bear rugs, it being a bitter cold winter which seemed to have started in September and showed no signs of abating till next August, when possibly, but just possibly, all the snow might melt and the flowers would bloom — it being that kind of a treacherous winter, what better to do than discuss police work? What better to do than rush along the frozen street on Cindy’s lunch hour with her hand clutched tightly in the crook of his arm and the wind whipping around them and drowning out Kling’s voice as he tried to tell her of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Parks Commissioner Cowper.
“Yes, it sounds very mysterious,” Cindy said, and brought her hand out of her pocket in an attempt to keep the wind from tearing the kerchief from her head. “Listen, Bert,” she said, “I’m really very tired of winter, aren’t you tired of it?”
“Yeah,” Kling said. “Listen, Cindy, you know who I hope this isn’t?”
“Hope who isn’t?” she said.
“The guy who made the calls. The guy who killed the commissioner. You know who I hope we’re not up against?”
“Who?” she asked.
“The deaf man,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“He was a guy we went up against a few years back, it must have been maybe seven, eight years ago. He tore this whole damn city apart trying to rob a bank. He was the smartest crook we ever came up against.”
“Who?” Cindy said.
“The deaf man,” Kling said again.
“Yes, but what’s his name?”
“We don’t know his name. We never caught him. He jumped in the river and we thought he drowned, but maybe he’s back now. Like Frankenstein.”
“Like Frankenstein’s monster, you mean,” Cindy said.
“Yeah, like him. Remember he was supposed to have died in that fire, but he didn’t.”
“I remember.”
“That was a scary picture,” Kling said.
“I wet my pants when I saw it,” Cindy said. “And that was on television.”
“You wet your pants on television?” Kling said. “In front of forty million people?”
“No, I saw Frankenstein on television,” Cindy said, and grinned and poked him.
“The deaf man,” Kling said. “I hope it’s not him.”
It was the first time any man on the squad had voiced the possibility that the commissioner’s murderer was the man who had given them so much trouble so many years ago. The thought was somewhat numbing. Bert Kling was a young man, and not a particularly philosophical one, but he intuitively understood that the deaf man (who had once signed a note L. Sordo, very comical, El Sordo meaning “The Deaf One” in Spanish) was capable of manipulating odds with computer accuracy, of spreading confusion and fear, of juggling permutations and combinations in a manner calculated to upset the strict and somewhat bureaucratic efficiency of a police precinct, making law enforcers behave like bumbling Keystone cops in a yellowing ancient film, knew instinctively and with certainty that if the commissioner’s murderer was indeed the deaf man, they had not yet heard the end of all this. And because the very thought of what the deaf man might and could do was too staggering to contemplate, Kling involuntarily shuddered, and he knew it was not from the cold.
“I hope it isn’t him,” he said, and his words were carried away on the wind.
“Kiss me,” Cindy said suddenly, “and then buy me a hot chocolate, you cheapskate.”
The boy who came into the muster room that Wednesday afternoon was about twelve years old.
He was wearing his older brother’s hand-me-down ski parka which was blue and three sizes too large for him. He had pulled the hood of the parka up over his head, and had tightened the drawstrings around his neck, but the hood was still too big, and it kept falling off. He kept trying to pull it back over his head as he came into the station house carrying an envelope in the same hand with which he wiped his runny nose. He was wearing high-topped sneakers with the authority of all slum kids who wear sneakers winter and summer, all year round, despite the warnings of podiatrists. He walked to the muster desk with a sneaker-inspired bounce, tried to adjust the parka hood again, wiped his dripping nose again, and then looked up at Sergeant Murchison and said, “You the desk sergeant?”
“I’m the desk sergeant,” Murchison answered without looking up from the absentee slips he was filling out from that morning’s muster
sheet. It was 2:10 P.M., and in an hour and thirty-five minutes the afternoon shift of uniformed cops would be coming in, and there’d be a new roll call to take, and new absentee slips to fill out, a regular rat race, he should have become a fireman or a postman.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” the kid said, and reached up to hand Murchison the sealed envelope.