“After dinner. She does the dishes and goes.”
Carella turned toward Kling and said, “That means she wouldn’t have been here on the morning the murders were committed. It’d have been too early for her.”
He turned back toward Mrs. Leibowitz, who smiled, said, “Mmmm,” nodded, and then fastened her eyes to his face again. There was something terribly familiar about her scrutiny. It made Carella uncomfortable, creating a vague and elusive aura of déjà vu, the certain knowledge that he had been looked at in this same way by this same woman many many times before. And yet he knew he had never met her before this morning. Frowning, he said, “Were you at home on the morning of the murders, Mrs. Leibowitz?”
“Yes, I was,” she said.
“Did you hear anything across the hall?” he asked.
“I’m a very heavy sleeper,” she said.
“These would have been shotgun blasts,” Kling said, and she turned toward him and smiled. “Four of them,” he continued. “They would have been very loud.”
“The shots, do you mean?” she asked.
“Yes,” Kling said, and frowned. “The shotgun blasts.”
“I was asleep,” Mrs. Leibowitz said. “The newspapers said it happened in the middle of the night. I was asleep.”
“These shots would have been loud enough to have wakened you,” Carella said.
She turned to him, and did not answer.
“But you slept through them,” he said.
Studying his face, she said, “Yes. I slept through them.”
“We figure the murders took place sometime between three-thirty and four-thirty,” Carella said, “about that time. Would you remember—?”
“I’m sure I was asleep,” Mrs. Leibowitz said, watching him.
“And heard nothing?”
“I’m a very heavy sleeper,” she said again, and waited, watching Carella’s face. He suddenly knew what she was watching, suddenly knew why her expression looked so familiar. He rose abruptly, turning his back to her, walking from the settee and saying in a normal speaking voice, “I think you’re hard of hearing, Mrs. Leibowitz, am I right?” and then turned immediately, and looked at her, and saw that she was smiling and watching him, still waiting expectantly for him to speak.
His wife Teddy was a deaf-mute.
He had lived with her for a long time now, and he knew the look that came over her face, knew the intense concentration in her eyes whenever she “listened” to him, whenever she read his lips or his hands. That same expression was on Mrs. Leibowitz’s face now as she waited for him to speak again. The part of his face she studied so intently was his mouth.
“Mrs. Leibowitz,” he said gently, “who else lives on this floor?”
“There are only three apartments on the floor,” she said.
“Who’s in the third one?” Kling asked.
She turned quickly at the sound of his voice, but did not answer him. Kling glanced at Carella.
“The third apartment,” Carella said gently. “Who’s in it, Mrs. Leibowitz?”
“A family named Pimm. Mr. and Mrs. George Pimm. They’re not here now.”
“Where are they?”
“In Puerto Rico.”
“On vacation?”
“Vacation, yes,” she said.
She really carries it off very well, Carella thought. So long as she’s facing you, she can read your lips like an expert, even Teddy misses a word every now and then, but not Carmen Leibowitz, who fixes you with those very blue eyes of hers, clamps them to your lips, and refuses to let go until she has wrung from them the meaning of their movement, but only when she’s facing you. If she turns away, she misses the sense completely, probably hearing only a faint rumble that causes her to turn toward the speaker. She’s developed a lovely smile and a faint encouraging nod and a look of patient empathy, and she pulls off her deception really quite well because it would not do to wear a hearing aid, a hearing aid would not look good on a woman so chic, a woman so well-groomed. I wish she could meet Teddy, he thought. I wish she could meet my wonderful wife, who is as deaf and as mute as a sunrise.
“When did they leave?” he asked, taking pains to face her directly and to exaggerate each word.
“A week ago Sunday.”
“Then they were gone before the murders?”
“Yes, before.”
“When will they be back, do you know?”
“George said two weeks, I think. I’m not sure.”
“That would be... ” he started, inadvertently turning toward Kling, and then immediately correcting his oversight, and turning back to find Mrs. Leibowitz sitting with that same painfully expectant smile on her face, not having heard a word he’d said. “That would be next Sunday,” Carella said.
“Yes,” she answered. She knew now that he knew, but she sat in unshakable confidence that she could continue to deceive, or perhaps only confidence that he would allow her to deceive.
“So with the Pimms gone,” he said, “you’d have been the only person on this floor. And you of course were asleep.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, then, I guess there’s nothing further to ask,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“Thank you,” she said, and showed them to the door.
They talked to everyone in the building that afternoon, hoping to find someone who might have been awakened by the shots, someone who might have gone to the window and looked outside, seen a car downstairs perhaps, a yellow Buick perhaps, read a license number and remembered it.
Seven people admitted they had heard the shots. Two of them said they figured it was a truck downstairs, the backfire cliché apparently having been pounded into the unconscious of the average man as a reasonable explanation for any loud and sudden noise. A man on the fourth floor said he had got out of bed when he heard the first explosions...
“Two of them?” Carella asked.
“Yes, two, and very loud. I got out of bed and then heard someone yelling—”
“A man or a woman?”
“Hard to tell, just somebody yelling, you know, and then two more explosions, also very loud.”
“What did you do?” Carella asked.
“I went back to bed,” the man said.
A woman on the ninth floor had heard the shots only distantly, and had been frightened by them, and had stayed in bed for a full five minutes before going to the window to investigate. She had seen a car pulling away from the curb.
“What kind of a car?” Carella asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell makes.”
“What color was it?”
“A dark color.”
“Not yellow?”
“No. Oh, no. Definitely not yellow.”
“Did you see the license plate?”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t.”
The remaining three people said they had known immediately that the noise was gunfire. They also said they’d thought it had come from the street, but none of them had gone to the window for a look outside, nor had any of them thought of telephoning the police. Par for the course, Carella thought, and thanked them, and wearily trudged downstairs with Kling.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“The car pulling away could have been anybody,” Kling said. “Couple of kids necking, guy going to work, anybody.”
“Or maybe Walter Damascus.”
“His girlfriend drives a yellow Buick.”
“Sure, but what does he drive?”
“Nothing is my guess. Otherwise, why would he need her to pick him up?”
“It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Carella said.
“What doesn’t?”
“That a guy could vanish into thin air this way. We know his name, we know where he lives, we’ve got his fingerprints, we’ve even got a good description of him. The only thing we haven’t got is him.”