Exactly what he’d been wearing when they’d found him painted all silver and gold with three holes in his head.
“Did he go to the movie alone?” Parker asked.
“Yes?”
Question mark at the end of her answer, asking him the significance of such a question. Was he suggesting…?
“Didn’t go with a friend or anything, huh?” Parker asked, skirting close to the edge of another Shavorskyism.
“Alone,” Debra said.
“Do you keep a car here in the city?” Kling asked.
“No. We rent one when we need one.”
“I was wondering how he ended up a mile from here. The rain and all.”
“Didn’t go with a buddy or anything, did he?” Parker asked, getting back to it. “To the movie, I mean.”
“No. He went alone.”
“Lots of people don’t like going to the movies alone,” Parker said. “They go with a boyfriend,” he said, and paused. “Or a girlfriend,” he added, and looked at her.
“He went alone ,” she said again.
“Your husband ever do any artwork around the house?” Parker said.
“Artwork?”
“Yeah. Lettering? Painting? Anything like that?”
“No.”
“He’s not a sign painter or anything, is he?”
“He’s a lawyer,” Debra said.
Until now, Parker thought he’d heard everything there ever was to hear about lawyers. But a lawyer who sprayed paint on walls?
“Did he ever go out alone at night when he wasn’t going to a movie?” Parker asked.
“We had separate interests. He sometimes went out alone, yes.”
“Like what? What separate interests?”
“He liked basketball, I didn’t. He liked poetry readings, I didn’t. Sometimes, he’d have dinner with a client. Naturally, I didn’t go along on those…”
“Did he ever leave the house late at night to pursue these separate interests?” Parker asked.
“Never.”
“But he sometimes got home late, didn’t he?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did you ever see him carrying a spray can when he left the house?”
“A what?”
“A spray can. That you spray paint with.”
“No. a spray can? What on earth would he be doing with…?”
“Mrs. Wilkins, would it be all right if we looked around the apartment a little?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Look at some of his things.”
“Why?”
“See if we can’t get a bead on why somebody would’ve wanted to kill him.”
“I don’t see how…”
“My partner means like his appointment calendar, his diary, anything that…”
“He didn’t keep…”
“No, I meant…”
“…a diary.
“…like his closet .”
Debra looked him dead in the eye.
“Officer,” she said at last, “are you aware that Peter was the one who got killed here? Are you aware that my husband was the victim ?”
“Yes, ma’am, all I’m…”
“Then why do you want to look at some of his things? Why don’t you go look at the goddamn killer’s things? Why aren’t you out there in the street looking for the goddamn killer ?”
“Ma’am,” Parker said, unperturbed, “your husband is the second graffiti writer who got…”
“My husband was not a graffiti writer,” she said. “He was a lawyer .”
“All I’m saying,” Parker said, “if there’s anything in his pockets or on his shelves or in his dresser or wherever that would give us some idea what took him over to that wall last night, then maybe we can find out whether somebody he knew was a graffiti writer, is all I’m saying. Ma’am, there’s got to be a connection here, two people found dead with paint sprayed all over them, I’m sure you can see that.”
“My husband was not a graffiti writer,” she said.
“Well,” Parker said and shrugged as if to say Look, you want us to find who killed your fuckin husband, or you don’t?
She looked at him.
She looked at Kling.
“I’ll show you where he kept his things,” she said curtly, and led them into the bedroom.
On the top shelf of his closet, they found twenty-two cans of spray paint in various colors of the rainbow.
BEFORE THERE WAS detective Stephen Louis Carella in her life, there was her life.
Theodora Franklin.
Teddy Franklin.
Four fifths Irish with a fifth of Scotch thrown in, as her father was fond of telling her. Signed this to her with his hands, emphasized the joke with his wide expressive face, exaggerated the words on his lips so that she could read them while his fingers formed them, all of this because his one and only beloved daughter had been born deaf and dumb—or hearing-and speech-impaired as they said in this enlightened day and age, where a blind man was no longer blind but merely sight-impaired. Teddy felt that the word “impaired” was more heavily freighted than either “deaf”or “dumb,” more heavily burdened with derogatory meaning than even the simple designation “deaf mute”—but who was she to comment, being merely deaf and mute since birth?
But, truly, didn’t “impaired” mean defective , wasn’t that the dictionary definition of impaired? And didn’t “defective” mean damaged , or flawed , or imperfect ? And didn’t all of these imply deficient , or—worse yet—somehow bad . She did not want to think of herself as impaired. For too long a time, she had thought of herself in exactly that way.
Before Carella, there’d been only one “hearing” man in her life. Well, a boy, actually. Back then, most hearing-impaired people went to schools for the so-called deaf, but she was fortunate—perhaps—in that her Riverhead neighborhood had a high school offering special classes for people like her. People with hearing problems. Speech problems. Four of them actually. The other kids in the class were what they called “retarded” back then. Mentally deficient. Until Salvatore Di Napoli asked her out, the only boys she’d ever dated were the ones with hearing problems, the ones in the special class.
The faculty adviser of the cheerleading squad saw nothing wrong with putting Teddy on it, even though she had no voice. She was prettier than any of the other girls, with raven-black hair and expressive brown eyes and breasts that looked terrific in the white sweater with the letter on its front and legs that looked spectacular in the short pleated skirt, not inconsiderable assets for a cheerleader, so why not? It didn’t matter that she couldn’t yell out the cheers. She could certainly mouth them and dramatize them, and that was all that mattered. In a shouting crowd, no one is speechless. In a roaring crowd, it doesn’t matter if you can’t hear because nobody else can, either.
She caught Salvatore Di Napoli’s eye at one of the football games.
“Would you like to go to a movie or something?” he asked her.
This was in the hallway on the Monday after the game.
He had pale blue eyes and long slender fingers. He played the violin. Everyone called him Salvie. He confessed to her one night that he hated the name Salvatore and that when he was old enough—he was sixteen then, a year younger than she was—he would change it legally. He would pick a good WASP name that would make him feel more at home in America, even though he had been born here of parents who had also been born here.