On Sunday morning, the visiting hours at Buena Vista Hospital were from ten to twelve. It was a busy day, busier than Wednesday, for example, because Saturday night encourages broken arms and legs, bloody pates and shattered sternums. There is nothing quite so hectic as the Emergency Room of a big city hospital on a Saturday night. And on Sunday morning it’s only natural for people to visit the friends and relatives who were unfortunate enough to have met with assorted mayhem the night before.
Steve Carella had met with assorted mayhem on Thursday night, and here it was Sunday morning, and he sat propped up in bed expecting Teddy’s arrival and feeling gaunt and pale and unshaven even though he had shaved himself not ten minutes ago. He had lost seven pounds since his admission to the hospital (it being singularly difficult to eat and breathe at the same time when your nose is taped and bandaged) and he still ached everywhere, seemed in fact to discover new bruises every time he moved, which can make a man feel very unshaven.
He had had a lot of time to do some thinking since Thursday night, and as soon as he had got over feeling, in sequence, foolish, angry, and murderously vengeful, he had decided that the deaf man was responsible for what had happened to him. That was a good way to feel, he thought, because it took the blame away from two young punks (for Christ’s sake, how could an experienced detective get smeared that way by two young punks?) and put it squarely onto a master criminal instead. Master criminals are very handy scapegoats, Carella reasoned, because they allow you to dismiss your own inadequacies. There was an old Jewish joke Meyer had once told him, about the mother who says to her son, “Trombenik, go get a job,” and the son answers, “I can’t, I’m a trombenik.” The situation now was similar, he supposed, with the question being altered to read, “How can you let a master criminal do this to you?” and the logical answer being, “It’s easy, he’s a master criminal.”
Whether or not the deaf man was a master criminal was perhaps a subject for debate. Carella would have to query his colleagues on the possibility of holding a seminar once he got back to the office. This, according to the interns who’d been examining his skull like phrenologists, should be by Thursday, it being their considered opinion that unconsciousness always meant concussion and concussion always carried with it the possibility of internal hemorrhage with at least a week’s period of observation being de rigueur in such cases, go argue with doctors.
Perhaps the deaf man wasn’t a master criminal at all. Perhaps he was simply smarter than any of the policemen he was dealing with, which encouraged some pretty frightening conjecture. Given a superior intelligence at work, was it even possible for inferior intelligences to secondguess whatever diabolical scheme was afoot? Oh, come on now, Carella thought, diabolical indeed! Well, yeah, he thought, diabolical. It is diabolical to demand five thousand dollars and then knock off the parks commissioner, and it is diabolical to demand fifty thousand dollars and then knock off the deputy mayor, and it is staggering to imagine what the next demand might be, or who the next victim would be. There most certainly would be another demand which, if not met would doubtless lead to yet another victim. Or would it? How can you second-guess a master criminal? You can’t, he’s a master criminal.
No, Carella thought, he’s only a human being, and he’s counting on several human certainties. He’s hoping to establish a pattern of warning and reprisal, he’s hoping we’ll attempt to stop him each time, but only so that we’ll fail, forcing him to carry out his threat. Which means that the two early extortion tries were only preparation for the big caper. And since he seems to be climbing the municipal government ladder, and since he multiplied his first demand by ten, I’m willing to bet his next declared victim will be James Martin Vale, the mayor himself, and that he’ll ask for ten times what he asked for the last time: five hundred thousand dollars. That is a lot of strawberries.
Or am I only second-guessing a master criminal?
Am I supposed to be second-guessing him?
Is he really preparing the ground for a big killing, or is there quite another diabolical (there we go again) plan in his mind?
Teddy Carella walked into the room at that moment.
The only thing Carella had to second-guess was whether he would kiss her first or vice versa. Since his nose was in plaster, he decided to let her choose the target, which she did with practiced ease, causing him to consider some wildly diabolical schemes of his own, which if executed would have resulted in his never again being permitted inside Buena Vista Hospital.
Not even in a private room.
Patrolman Richard Genero was in the same hospital that Sunday morning, but his thoughts were less erotic than they were ambitious.
Despite a rather tight official security lid on the murders, an enterprising newspaperman had only this morning speculated on a possible connection between Genero’s leg wound and the subsequent killing of Scanlon the night before. The police and the city officials had managed to keep all mention of the extortion calls and notes out of the newspapers thus far, but the reporter for the city’s leading metropolitan daily wondered in print whether or not the detectives of “an uptown precinct bordering the park” hadn’t in reality possessed foreknowledge of an attempt to be made on the deputy mayor’s life, hadn’t in fact set up an elaborate trap that very afternoon, “a trap in which a courageous patrolman was destined to suffer a bullet wound in the leg while attempting to capture the suspected killer.” Wherever the reporter had dug up his information, he had neglected to mention that Genero had inflicted the wound upon himself, due to a fear of dogs and criminals, and due to a certain lack of familiarity with shooting at fleeing suspects.
Genero’s father, who was a civil service employee himself, having worked for the Department of Sanitation for some twenty years now, was not aware that his son had accidentally shot himself in the leg. All he knew was that his son was a hero. As befitted a hero, he had brought a white carton of cannoll to the hospital, and now he and his wife and his son sat in the semi-private stillness of a fourth floor room and demolished the pastry while discussing Genero’s almost certain promotion to Detective 3rd/Grade.
The idea of a promotion had not occurred to Genero before this, but as his father outlined the heroic action in the park the day before, Genero began to visualize himself as the man who had made the capture possible. Without him, without the warning shot he had fired into his own leg, the fleeing Alan Parry might never have stopped. The fact that Parry had turned out to be a wet fuse didn’t matter at all to Genero. It was all well and good to realize a man wasn’t dangerous after the fact, but where were all those detectives when Parry was running straight for Genero with a whole lunch pail full of God-knew-what under his arm, where were they then, huh? And how could they have known then, while Genero was courageously drawing his pistol, that Parry would turn out to be only another innocent dupe, nossir, it had been impossible to tell.
“You were brave,” Genero’s father said, licking pot cheese from his lips. “It was you who tried to stop him.”
“That’s true,” Genero said, because it was true.
“It was you who risked your life.”
“That’s right,” Genero said, because it was right.