Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute.
She often had difficulty at the theater. She could not hear what any of the performers were saying, of course, and usually she and Carella would be sitting too far back to read lips. Over the years, they had worked out a system whereby his hands — held chest high so as not to disturb anyone sitting behind them — flashed dialogue to her while she shifted her eyes back and forth from the stage to his rapidly moving fingers. Musicals, as a general rule, were somewhat easier for her. A singer usually faced the audience squarely when belting out a song, and his lip movements were more exaggerated than when he was simply speaking. Ballet was her favorite form of entertainment, and tonight she was delighted when — not ten seconds after the curtain had risen on that ominous bog — the entire stage seemed to fill with leaping, prancing, gyrating, twirling, frantically energetic dancers who virtually swung from the treetops and turned that steamy swamp into the sassiest, sexiest, most dazzling opening number Teddy had ever seen in her life. Spellbound, she sat beside Carella for what must have been ten full minutes of exposition through dance, squeezing his hand, her dark eyes flashing as she watched the story silently unfold. Carella sat there grinning. When the opening number ended, the house burst into tumultuous applause. He readied his hands for the translation he felt would be necessary as the act progressed, but he found that Teddy was impatiently nodding his moving fingers aside, understanding most of what was happening, able to read directly from the performers’ lips because the seats were sixth row center.
She asked him some questions during intermission. She was wearing a black, wool-knit dress with a simple cameo just above her breasts, black leather boots, a gold bracelet on her wrist. She had pulled her long black hair to the back of her head and fastened it there with a gold barrette. Except for eyeliner, shadow and lipstick, there was no makeup on her face. She needed none; she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known in his life. He watched her hands, watched the accompanying expressions that crossed her face. She wanted to know if she’d been right in assuming that the trapper and the girl moonshiner had had an affair years ago, and that this was the first time they’d seen each other since? No? Then what was all that hugging and kissing about? Carella explained, responding with his voice so that she could read his lips, accompanying his voice with hand signals (and always there were the fascinated observers in the crowd, nudging each other — Hey, take a look, Charlie, see the grown man talking to the dummy?) and she watched his lips and watched his hands and then signed, Well, they seem awfully lovey-dovey for cousins, and he explained that they were only second cousins, and she signed, Does that make incest legal?
Now, forty-five minutes into the second act, Carella looked at his watch because he sensed the evening was coming to an end and he simply did not want it to. He was having too good a time.
Eileen Burke was having a splendid time watching her laundry go round and round. The night man thought she was a little crazy, but then again everybody in this town was a little crazy. She had put the same batch of laundry through the machine five times already. Each time, she sat watching the laundry spinning in the machine. The night man didn’t notice that she alternately watched the front door of the place or looked through the plate glass window each time a car pulled in. The neon fixture splashed orange and green on the floor of the laundromat: LAVANDERÍA... LAUNDROMAT... LAVANDERÍA... LAUNDROMAT. The laundry in the machines went round and round.
A woman with a baby strapped to her back was at one of the machines, putting in another load. Eileen guessed she was no older than nineteen or twenty, a slender attractive blue-eyed blonde who directed a nonstop flow of soft chatter over her shoulder to her near dozing infant. Another woman was sitting on the yellow plastic chair next to Eileen’s, reading a magazine. She was a stout black woman, in her late thirties or early forties, Eileen guessed, wearing a bulky knit sweater over blue jeans and galoshes. Every now and then, she flipped a page of the magazine, looked up at the washing machines, and then flipped another page. A third woman came into the store, looked around frantically for a moment, seemed relieved to discover there were plenty of free machines, dashed out of the store, and returned a moment later with what appeared to be the week’s laundry for an entire Russian regiment. She asked the manager to change a $5 bill for her. He changed it from a coin dispenser attached to his belt, thumbing and clicking out the coins like a streetcar conductor. Eileen watched as he walked to a safe bolted to the floor and dropped the bill into a slot on its top, just as though he were making a night deposit at a bank. A sign on the wall advised any prospective holdup man: MANAGER DOES NOT HAVE COMBINATION TO SAFE. MANAGER CANNOT CHANGE BILLS LARGER THAN $5. Idly, Eileen wondered what the manager did when he ran out of coins. Did he run into the bar next door to ask the bartender for change? Did the bartender next door have a little coin dispenser attached to his belt? Idly, Eileen wondered why she wondered such things. And then she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who wondered the same things she wondered. That was when the Dirty Panties Bandit came into the store.
Eileen recognized him at once from the police-artist composites Willis had shown her back at the squadroom. He was a short slender white man wearing a navy pea coat and watch cap over dark brown, wide-wale corduroy trousers and tan suede desert boots. He had darting brown eyes and a very thin nose with a narrow mustache under it. There was a scar in his right eyebrow. The bell over the door tinkled as he came into the store. As he reached behind him with his left hand to close the door, Eileen’s hand went into the bag on her lap. She was closing her fingers around the butt of the .38 when the man’s right hand came out of his coat pocket. The Magnum would have looked enormous in any event. But because the man was so small and so thin, it looked like an artillery piece. The man’s hand was shaking. The gun in it flailed the room.
Eileen looked at the Magnum, looked at the man’s eyes, and felt the butt of her own pistol under her closing fingers. If she pulled the gun now, she had maybe a thirty/seventy chance of bringing him down before he sprayed the room with bullets that could tear a man’s head off his body. In addition to herself and the robber, there were five other people in the store, three of them women, one of them an infant. Her hand froze motionless around the butt of the gun.
“All right, all right,” the man said in a thin, almost girlish voice, “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.” His eyes darted. His hand was still shaking. Suddenly, he giggled. The giggle scared Eileen more than the gun in his hand did. The giggle was high and nervous and just enough off center to send a shiver racing up her spine. Her hand on the butt of the .38 suddenly began sweating.
“All I want is your money, all your money,” the man said. “And your—”
“I don’t have the combination to the safe,” the manager said.