“Take them back,” Raskin said, and he pulled the telephone to him.
“Who you calling?” the second man said. “The manufacturer?”
“No,” Raskin answered. “The police.”
TEDDY CARELLAwas in a robe when her husband came home from work that night. He kissed her as he crossed the threshold of the big monstrous house they lived in, and didn’t truly realize she was so attired until they’d gone into the kitchen together. Then, surprised because the house was so still at six-thirty in the evening, surprised that Teddy was wearing high-heeled bedroom slippers with the robe—hersilk robe, at that—he asked first, “Where are the children?”
Teddy’s hands moved in silent answer.Asleep .
“And Fanny?” he asked.
Her fingers moved again.Thursday.
“Oh yeah, her day off,” and suddenly it was all very clear to him. He did not acknowledge that he’d tipped to her plans or her preparations. He pretended he did not see the bottle of white wine resting on its side in the refrigerator when she opened the door to take out the melon. He pretended that he didn’t notice the exaggeratedly female way in which Teddy moved this evening, or the fact that she was wearing a subtly penetrating perfume, or that she had made up her eyes, startlingly wide and brown in her oval face, but that her lips carried not a trace of lipstick, her lips seemed more than anxious to be kissed—he pretended he noticed none of these things.
He went into the bathroom to wash, and then he took off his holster and gun and put them into the top drawer of their dresser, and then he put on a tee shirt and threw his soiled white shirt into the hamper, and then he came downstairs. Teddy had set the table outdoors on the patio. A cool breeze rustled through the grape arbor, crossed the patio, lifted the skirt of her robe to reveal the long lissome curve of her leg. She did not move to flatten the skirt.
“Guess who I ran into today?” Carella said, and then realized that Teddy’s back was to him, and that she could not hear him. He tapped her gently and she turned, her eyes moving instantly to his lips.
“Guess who I ran into today” he repeated, and her eyes followed each muscular contraction and relaxation of his mouth so that—though she was born a deaf mute—she could almost hear each separate word as it rolled from his tongue. She raised her eyebrows in question. There were times when she used sign language to convey her thoughts to her husband; other times, when there was no real necessity for a formal language between them, when the simple cocking of an eye or nuance of mouth, sometimes a glint, sometimes the rarest of subtle expressions served to tell him what she was thinking. He loved her most during those times, he supposed. Her face was a beautiful thing, oval and pale, with large brown eyes and a full sensuous mouth. Black hair curled wildly about her head, echoing the color of her eyes, setting the theme for the rest of the woman who was Teddy Carella, a theme of savagery which sprang through the blatant curve of her breast and the ripe swelling of hip and thigh and splendid calf, narrow ankles, narrow waist, a woman with the body of a barbarian and the gentle tenderness of a slave. And never was she more lovely than when her face explained something to him, never more lovely than when her eyes “spoke.” She raised her eyebrows in question now, and fastened her eyes to his mouth again, waiting.
“Cliff Savage,” he said.
She tilted her head to one side, puzzled. She shrugged. Then she shook her head.
“Savage. The reporter. Remember?”
And then she remembered all at once, and the light broke over her face and her hands moved quickly, bursting with questions.What did he want? My God, how many years has it been? Do you remember what that fool did? We weren’t even married then, Steve. Do you remember? We were so young.
“One at a time, will you?” Carella said. “He was beefing because I’d sent that I.D. photo to every newspaper but his.” Carella chuckled. “I thought that’d get a rise out of the bastard. And it did. Man, was he steaming! Do you know something honey? I don’t think he even realizes what he did. He doesn’t even know he could have got you killed.”
Carella shook his head.
What Savage had done, actually, was run a story in his newspaper several years back, a story which had strongly hinted that a detective named Steve Carella had confided to his fiancée, a girl named Theodora Franklin, some suspicions he had about a series of cop killings. In addition, Savage had also listed Teddy’s address in the newspaper, and he could not have fingered her more effectively than if he’d led the killer to her apartment in person. The news story had indeed smoked out the killer. It had also damn near got Teddy killed.
Do you remember?she said with her hands again, and an expression of total sadness crossed her face and Carella remembered what she had said to him not a moment ago,We were so young, and he wondered what she’d really meant and suddenly he took her into his arms.
She came to him desperately, as if she had been waiting for his arms all day long. She clung to him, and he was not surprised to find her hot tears on the side of his neck.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” he said. Weeping, she kept her face buried against the side of his neck so that she could not “hear” him. He twisted his right hand in her hair and pulled back her head. “What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
“Tired of your humdrum existence?” he asked.
She did not answer.
“Bored by the four walls?”
Still she would not answer.
“Long for a life of romantic adventure?” Carella paused. “What’s the matter, honey? Look, your eyes are running all over your face, and after you spent so much time making them up.”
Teddy sat bolt upright in his lap, an expression of shocked outrage on her face. Her black brows swooped down. Her right hand darted up in front of his face. Rapidly the fingers spelled out their message.
My eyes!
“Well, honey—”
Then youdidnotice! And you probably noticed everything else, too! The—
“Honey, what are you getting all—?”
Shut up! Get away from me!
She tried to get off his lap, but his hands slid up under the robe, and though she struggled to free herself, his hands were strong upon her and at last she relaxed in his arms, and his hands roamed beneath the loose gown, touching her belly and her smooth flanks, stroking her gently as he spoke, his lips moving beneath her listening fingers.
“So sometimes you feel like an old matron,” he said. “Sometimes you roam this big shell of a house in your dirty dungarees and you wipe runny noses all day long and keep cigarette butts out of the twins’ mouths, and wonder when the hell your adventuresome husband is coming home. And sometimes you long for it to be the way it used to be, Teddy, before we were married, when every time was like the first time and the last time rolled into one, when my eyes went up like butane every time I saw you, when it was young, Teddy, when it was new and shining and young.”
She stared at her husband in solemn wonder because there were times when he seemed to be such an insensitive lout, times when he seemed to be only the uncouth slob who told dirty jokes in a detective squadroom and who brought all of his grubbiness home with him, times when she felt alone in her silent world without even the comfort of the person who had been to her the one shining spark in her life, and then suddenly—suddenly there he was again, the person she had known all along, her Steve, the person who knew the things she was feeling, who had felt them himself, and who could talk about them until, until….