“About the photograph,” Brown said gently.
“Yeah, yeah, the fucking photograph. Let me see what’s in the closet here.”
She went across the room, and opened the door to the closet. A black cloth coat hung on a wire hanger. Beside it was a blue satin dress. Nothing else was hanging on the wooden bar. On the floor of the closet, there were two pairs of high-heeled pumps. A cardboard box and a candy tin were on the shelf over the bar. Dorothea reached up, and came back to the bed with the candy tin in her hands. She pried off the lid.
“Not much here,” she said. “I don’t like to keep things.”
There was a birth certificate, a marriage certificate (Dorothea Pierce to Richard McNally), a snip of hair in a cheap gold-plated locket, a Playbill for an opening night long long ago, a photograph of a very young girl sitting on a swing behind a clapboard house, a faded valentine card, and a copy of Ring magazine with a picture of Tiger Willis on the cover.
“That’s all of it,” Dorothea said.
“Want to dump it all on the bed here?” Brown suggested. “What we’re looking for may be very small.” He picked up the Playbill and shook out its pages. Nothing. He picked up the copy of Ring magazine.
“Be careful with that,” Dorothea warned.
He gave it a single shake. The pages fluttered apart, and a glossy black-and-white photograph scrap fell onto the soiled sheets:
“Is that what you’re looking for?” Dorothea asked.
“That’s what I’m looking for,” Brown said.
“It resembles Donald Duck,” she said. “Or Woody Woodpecker.”
“Or the extinct dodo bird,” Brown said.
“I don’t remember Petey giving it to me,” Dorothea said, and shook her head. “I suppose he must have, but I really don’t remember.” Her look hardened. She held out her hand to Brown, and said, “That’s thirty-five bucks, mister.”
The address for the Robert Coombs who lived in Riverhead was 6451 Avondale, two miles from Carella’s house. Carella got there at about 4:30, pulling into the tree-lined street just behind a Good Humor ice-cream truck, the first he had seen this season. The houses on the block were mostly two-family homes. The community gave an appearance of neat lower-middle-class respectability. This was Sunday afternoon, and the Riverhead burghers were out on their front stoops reading their newspapers or listening to transistor radios. Carella counted twelve kids on bicycles as he drove up the street searching for 6451.
The house was on the corner of Avondale and Birch, a big brick-and-clapboard building on a comfortable plot. As Carella stepped out of the car, he smelled the aroma of cooking steak. He had eaten only a hamburger for lunch, and he was hungry as hell. A small black sign on the front lawn was lettered in white with the name R. COOMBS. Carella went up the walk to the front door, rang the bell, and waited. There was no answer. He rang again. He waited several moments more, and then walked around toward the back of the house. A man in a white apron was standing near an outdoor grille, a long fork in his right hand. Another man and two women were sitting at a redwood picnic table opposite the grille. The foursome was in conversation as Carella came around the side of the house, but they stopped talking the moment they saw him.
“I’m looking for Robert Coombs,” Carella said.
“Yes, I’m Coombs,” the man at the grille said.
“Sorry to intrude like this, Mr. Coombs,” Carella said, walking over to him. “I’m Detective Carella of the 87th Squad. I wonder if I might talk to you privately.”
“What is it, Bobby?” one of the women said, and rose immediately from where she was sitting at the picnic table. She was a tall woman wearing a blond fall, a snug blue cashmere sweater, tight navy-blue slacks. Her eyes were a shade lighter than the sweater, and she squinted them in suspicion, if not open hostility, as she approached the grille. “I’m Mrs. Coombs,” she said, as if she were announcing exactly who ran this household. “What is it you want?”
“He’s a detective, hon,” Coombs said.
“A detective? What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Coombs,” Carella said. “I simply wanted to ask your husband some questions.”
“What about? Are you in some kind of trouble, Bobby?”
“No, no, hon, I...”
“He’s not in any trouble, Mrs. Coombs. This has to do with...”
“Then it can wait,” Mrs. Coombs said. “The steaks are almost done. You just come back later, Detective...”
“Coppola,” Coombs said.
“Carella,” Carella said.
“We’re about to eat,” Mrs. Coombs said. “You come back later, do you hear?”
“Can you come back in an hour?” Coombs asked gently.
“Make it an hour and a half,” Mrs. Coombs snapped.
“Honey, an hour’s more time than...”
“I don’t want to rush through my Sunday dinner,” Mrs. Coombs said flatly. “An hour and a half, Detective Coppola.”
“Carella,” he said, “bon appétit,” and walked out of the yard, the aroma of the cooking steak nearly destroying him forever. He found an open luncheonette on Birch, ordered a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish, and then went out for a stroll around the neighborhood. Four little girls on the sidewalk ahead were skipping rope, chanting their ritualistic ditty, “Double-ee-Dutch, double-ee-Dutch,” and from the open lot on the corner, there came the crack of a bat against a baseball, and a shout went up from the middle-aged men in shirtsleeves who were watching their sons play. The sky, magnificently blue all day long, virtually cloudless, was succumbing to the pale violet of dusk. The balmy afternoon breeze was turning a bit cooler. All up and down the street, he could hear mothers calling their children in to dinner. It was the time of day when a man wanted to be home with his family. Carella looked at his watch and sighed.
Isabel Coombs was a ventriloquist, of that Carella was certain.
The Coombs’s guests had gone indoors the moment he’d returned, and he could see them now through the rear sliding glass doors of the house, standing near the record player and browsing through the album collection. He sat with Mr. and Mrs. Coombs at the redwood table and even though Robert Coombs occasionally tried to answer a question, he was really only the dummy in the act, and Isabel Coombs was doing most of the talking.
“Mr. Coombs,” Carella said, “I’ll make this as brief as I can. We found your name on a list allegedly...”
“His name?” Isabel said. “You found Bobby’s name on some list?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Carella said, “a list...”
“His name is not on any list,” Isabel said.
“Well, maybe it is, hon,” Robert said.
“It is not,” Isabel said. “Detective Caretta...”
“Carella.”
“Yes, perhaps before we talk any further, we’d better get a lawyer.”
“Well, that’s entirely up to you, of course,” Carella said, “but there’s no intention here of charging your husband with any crime. We’re merely seeking information about...”
“Then why is his name on a list?” Isabel demanded.
Carella’s wife was a deaf mute. He looked at Isabel Coombs now, wearing her blond fall and her brassy voice, and silently contrasted her with Teddy — black hair and brown eyes, voiceless, gentle, beautiful.
Mrs. Coombs’s blue eyes flashed. “Well?” she said.
“Mrs. Coombs,” Carella said patiently, “maybe it’d be better if you just let me ask the questions before you decide what they’re going to be.”