“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 LAVANDERÍA 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 that 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.