The same CID number was showing on the display panel. Carella wondered if he really was calling from the park. Although knowing him, he’d already moved his location. He was beginning to think the lieutenant was right, though. Just ignore the son of a bitch and…
“I’ll make it easy for you,” he said.
“Thanks,” Carella said.
“No song and dance this time.”
“I’m listening.”
“The title of the novel is The Fear and the Fury . It’s science fiction. Do you like science fiction?”
“Sometimes I think you’re science fiction,” Carella said.
“I don’t particularly admire the genre,” the Deaf Man said, “but I thought its simplicity might appeal to you. The author is a Bolivian named Arturo Rivera. The chapter you’ll want to read is the very first one in the book. It’s called ‘The Rites of Spring.’ I think you may find it interesting.”
“Why should I…?”
This time the Deaf Man hung up.
“Does anybody around here speak French?” Brown asked the four walls.
“Va te faire foutre,”the Haitian told him.
Meyer and Hawes were just coming through the gate in the railing.
“You speak French?” Brown asked them.
“Oui,”Hawes said.
“Then talk to this guy, willya?”
“That’s my entire vocabulary,” Hawes said.
“How about you?”
“My wife speaks French,” Meyer said.
“Lotta help that is.”
Meyer went to the phone and dialed the Missing Persons Bureau, and asked to talk to Detective Hastings, the man he’d called earlier this morning. Behind him, Carella was trying some Italian on the Haitian, and Hawes was trying some Spanish, and Brown was trying to raise the patrol sergeant to see if any of his blues spoke French. Meyer waited.
“Hastings,” a voice said.
“Hi, this is Meyer at the Eight-Seven again, I called you around eight this morning, do you remember? To ask if you had anything on a John Doe named Charlie, guy around…”
“I can hardly remember my own name that early in the morning,” Hastings said.
“Guy around seventy-five years old, you remember we talked about it?”
“Yeah, what about it? We still don’t have anything on anybody named Charlie.”
“You mentioned something about an epidemic, though, do you remember?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What’d you mean? About an epidemic.”
“I got no idea.”
“Well, why’d you use the word epidemic ?”
“Maybe cause it’s always an epidemic here. There are times I think everybody in this fuckin city is slowly disappearing from the face of the earth.”
“But when I mentioned this guy Charlie was maybe seventy-five years old, you said, ‘What is this, an epidemic?’ Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, why’d you say it? Did you have another seventy-five-year-old John Doe?”
“Yeah, that’s right, now I remember.”
“Another John Doe?”
“a Jane .”
“What about her?”
“Some blues from the Eight Six found this old lady in the waiting room of the Whitcomb Avenue Station, took her over to the Chancery. I spoke to a doctor there wanted to know we had anything on her.”
“When was this?”
“Early Tuesday morning, musta been. Everybody calls first thing in the morning, why is that? I’m tryin’a have my coffee, the phone starts ringin off the hook.”
“So Tuesday this old lady gets dumped,” Meyer said, “and today it’s this guy Charlie. So that’s what you meant by an epidemic?”
“Of dumping , yeah. Not of missing persons. Missing persons, it’s always an epidemic.”
“Do you remember who you spoke to at the Chancery?”
“I’ve got it here someplace, hold on,” Hastings said.
AT ELEVEN-FIFTEEN that morning, there were only three patients in the emergency room at Old Chancery Hospital. One of these was a pregnant woman who’d been shoved down a flight of steps by her boyfriend. The other two were heroin users who’d shot up on the new stuff coming in from Asia and Colombia and were suffering the toxic aftereffects of “pure” fixes. Actually, nothing sold on the street was ever truly pure; the more the drug was stepped on, the more profit there was for everyone down the line. But the new stuff was decidedly more potent than what the city’s estimated 200,000 heroin addicts were used to, and these two old needle buddies in the E.R. had been scared half to death by sudden symptoms of heroin poisoning. One of them had already begun to turn blue before they both decided in their infinite wisdom that it was time to seek medical assistance. Elman left them in the capable hands of his team of Indian interns and led Meyer upstairs to talk to the Jane Doe the hospital had inherited two days earlier. Elman planned to leave for Maine at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, before the start of the weekend rush of bruised and bleeding bodies. Meanwhile, here was a miraculously interested detective who might just possibly help them find out who the hell she was.
“She keeps talking about somebody named Polly,” Elman said. “Doesn’t have any daughters, or so she says, which leads us to believe this Polly person may be a nurse of some sort. All the labels were cut out of her clothes, which may indicate they could have identified a nursing home, do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I do,” Meyer said.
But if she was missing from a nursing home, why hadn’t someone notified the police?
“She’s diabetic, by the way. Whoever dumped her probably didn’t know that. Or maybe didn’t give a damn.”
“How do you mean?”
“No medication on her. Nothing in her pockets, that is. She wasn’t carrying a handbag.”
“What was she wearing?” Meyer asked.
“Nightgown, slippers, panties, diaper, and robe.”
“Labels removed from the slippers, too?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes they overlook that.”
“Not this time. Here we are.”
Elman entered the room the way doctors always entered a hospital room, never bothering to knock, just barging in without a by-your-leave. Never mind whether the patient might be moving his bowels or picking his nose, a sick person lost all privacy the moment he was admitted to a hospital.
The woman who didn’t know her own name was sitting in a chair beside the bed, watching a soap opera on television. Daytime serials, they called them. Everything politically correct in this country. Meyer still wondered what the politically correct word for bald was. This woman had hair. Lots of it. All of it white. She did not turn from the television set when they walked in.
“Excuse me,” Elman said, not because he’d walked in uninvited but because he wanted her attention. When she still didn’t turn from the set, he picked up the remote-control unit and clicked off the picture. She turned to him angrily, seemed about to protest, and then sighed heavily and sank back into her chair. In that instant, Meyer saw in her eyes the helpless resignation of an old woman accustomed to intrusions and commands.
“There’s a police officer here who’d like to talk to you,” Elman said without apology. “Detective Meyer. From the Eighty-Seventh Precinct.”
“How do you do, ma’am?” Meyer said.
The woman nodded.
“There are a few questions I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Sure,” she said.
Looking him over.