Proschek was not listening to him. They had stopped before a door marked 28, and Proschek was watching the attendant.
“Yes or no, Steve?” the attendant asked, reaching for the handle of the door.
Carella sighed. “Show it to him, buddy,” he said, and the attendant opened the door and rolled out the slab.
Proschek looked at the decomposed, hairless body of the girl on the slab. Carella watched him, and for a brief second, he saw recognition leap into the coal miner’s eyes, shocking, sudden recognition, and he felt some of the pain the old man was feeling.
And then Proschek turned to face Carella, and his eyes were like agate, and his mouth was set into a hard, tight line.
“No,” he said. “She’s not my daughter.”
His words echoed down the long corridor. The attendant rolled the slab back into the refrigerator compartment, and the rollers squeaked.
“He claiming the body?” the attendant asked.
“Mr. Proschek?” Carella asked.
“What?” Proschek said.
“Are you claiming the body?”
“What?”
“Are you—”
“No,” Proschek said. “She’s not my daughter.” He turned and started down the corridor, his heels clacking on the concrete floor. “She’s not my daughter,” he said, his voice rising. “She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter.”
And then he reached the door at the end of the corridor, and he fell to his knees, his hand clutching the knob, and he began sobbing bitterly. Carella ran to him, and he stooped and put his arm around the old man, and Proschek buried his face in Carella’s chest, weeping, and he said, “Oh my God, she’s dead. My Mary Louise is dead. My daughter is dead. My daughter...” and then he couldn’t say anything else because his body was trembling and his tears were choking him.
The beauty of being a shoemaker, Teddy Carella thought, is that you don’t take your work home with you. You cobble so many shoes, and then you go home to your wife, and you don’t think about soles and heels until the next day.
A cop thinks about heels all the time.
A cop like Steve Carella thinks about souls, too.
She would not, of course, have been married to anyone else, but it pained her nonetheless to see him sitting by the window brooding. His brooding position was almost classical, almost like the Rodin statue. He sat slumped in the easy chair, his chin cupped in one large hand, his legs crossed. He sat barefoot, and she loved his feet. That’s ridiculous. You don’t love a man’s feet. Well, the hell with you, I love his feet. They’ve got good clean arches and nice toes, so sue me, she thought.
She walked to where he was sitting.
She was not a tall girl, but she somehow gave an impression of height. She held her head high, and her shoulders erect, and she walked lightly with a regal grace that added inches to her stature. Her hair was black, and her eyes were brown, and she wore no lipstick now on full lips, which needed none, anyway. The lips of Teddy Carella were decorative — decorative in that they were beautiful and decorative in that they could never form words. She had been born deaf, and she could neither hear nor speak, and so her entire face, her entire body, served as her means of communication.
Her face spoke in exaggerated syllables. Her eyes gave tongue to words she could not utter. Her hands moved fluidly, expressively, to convey meaning. When Teddy Carella listened, her eyes never left your face. When Teddy Carella “spoke,” you were compelled to give her your complete attention because her pantomime somehow enhanced the delicacy of her loveliness.
Now, standing spread-legged before her brooding husband, she put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. She wore a red wraparound skirt, a huge gold safety pin fastening it just above her left knee. She wore red Capezio flats and a white blouse swooped low at the throat to the first swelling rise of her breasts. She had caught her hair back with a bright-red ribbon, and she stood before him now and defied him to continue with his sullen brooding.
Neither spoke — Teddy because she could not, and Carella because he would not. The silent skirmish filled the small apartment.
At last, Carella said, “All right, all right.”
Teddy nodded and cocked one eyebrow.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m emerging from my shell.”
She hinged her hands together at the wrist and opened them slowly and then snapped them shut.
“You’re right,” Carella said. “I'm a clam.”
She pointed a pistol-finger at him and squeezed the trigger.
“Yes, my work,” he said.
Abruptly, without warning, she moved onto his lap. His arms circled her, and she cuddled up into a warm ball, pulling her knees up, snuggling her head against his chest. She looked up at him, and her eyes said, Tell me.
“This girl,” he said. “Mary Louise Proschek.”
Teddy nodded.
“Thirty-three years old, comes to the city to start a new life. Turns up floating in the Harb. Letter to her folks was full of good spirits. Even if we suspected suicide, which we don’t, the letter would fairly well eliminate that. The ME says she was dead before she hit the water. Cause of death was acute arsenic poisoning. You following me?”
Teddy nodded, her eyes wide.
“She’s got a tattoo mark right here” — he showed the spot on his right hand — ”the word MAC in a heart. Didn’t have it when she left Scranton, her hometown. How many Macs do you suppose there are in this city?”
Teddy rolled her eyes.
“You said it. Did she come here to meet this Mac? Did she just run into him by accident? Is he the one who threw her in the river after poisoning her? How do you go about locating a guy named Mac?”
Teddy pointed to the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
“The tattoo parlors? I’ve already started checking them. We may get a break because not many women wear tattoos.”
Quickly, Teddy unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and then pulled it open, using both hands, spreading it in a wide, dramatic V.
“The Rose Tattoo?” Carella asked. “That’s fiction.”
Teddy shrugged.
Carella grinned. “Besides, I think you just wanted an excuse to bare your bosom.”
Teddy shrugged again, impishly.
“Not that it isn’t a lovely bosom.”
Teddy’s eyebrows wagged seductively. She curved her hands through the air and moistened her lips.
“Of course,” Carella said, “I’ve seen better.”
Oh? Teddy’s face asked, suddenly coldly aloof.
“There was this girl in burlesque,” Carella expanded. “She could set them going in opposite directions, one swinging to the right, the other to the left. Had a little light on each one. They’d turn out all the houselights, and you’d just see these two circles of light in the darkness. Fantastic!” He grinned at his wife. “Now, that’s what I call talent.”
Teddy shrugged, telling her husband that that was what she didn’t call any talent whatsoever.
“You, on the other hand...” His hand came up suddenly to cup her breast.
Gingerly, delicately, Teddy picked up his hand with her thumb and forefinger and deposited it on the arm of the chair.
“Angry?” Carella asked.
Teddy shook her head.
“Love me?” Carella asked.
Teddy shook her head most vigorously.
“Hate me?”
No.
“Who then?”
Teddy swung her forefingers in opposite directions, and Carella burst out laughing. “You hate the burlesque dancer?”
Teddy gave one emphatic nod.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “She was an old bag.”
Teddy beamed and threw her arms around his neck.