"We're having a boy," the balding man said.
"That's nice," Carella said.
"She wanted a girl."
"Well, boys are nice, too," Carella said.
"What do you have?"
"One of each," Carella said.
"We're going to call him Stanley," the man said. "After my father."
"That's nice," Carella said.
"She wanted to call him Evan."
"Stanley is a very nice name," Carella said.
"I think so," the man said.
Carella looked up at the clock.
Up there for twenty minutes already. He suddenly remembered Tommy. Tommy should be here. Whatever problems they were having, Tommy should be here. He went to the phone again, took out his notebook, found the number for the room over the garage, and dialed it. He let it ring a dozen times. No answer. He hung up and went to sit with the worried balding man again.
"What's she having? Your sister."
"I don't know."
"Didn't she have all the tests?"
"I guess so. But she didn't tell me what..."
"She should have had the tests. The tests tell you everything."
"I'm sure she must have had them."
"Is she married?"
"Yes."
"Where's her husband?"
"I just tried to reach him," Carella said.
"Oh," the man said, and looked at him suspiciously.
Teddy got there some ten minutes later. The man watched them as they exchanged information in sign language, fingers moving swiftly. Signing always attracted a crowd. You could
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get a crocodile coming out of a sewer in downtown Isola, it wouldn't attract as big a crowd as signing did. The man watched, fascinated.
She was asking him if he'd called his mother.
He told her he had.
/ could have picked her up on the way, she signed.
"Easier this way," he said, signing at the same time.
The man watched goggle-eyed. All those flying fingers had taken his mind off his worries about his imminent son Stanley.
Carella's mother came into the waiting room a few minutes later. She looked concerned. She had come to this same hospital eleven days earlier, to identify her husband in the morgue. Now her daughter was here in the delivery room -and sometimes things went wrong in the delivery room.
"How is she?" she asked. "Hello, sweetie," she said to Teddy, and kissed her on the cheek.
"She went up about forty minutes ago," Carella said, looking at the wall clock.
"Where's Tommy?" his mother said.
"I've been trying to reach him," Carella said.
A look passed between him and Teddy, but his mother missed it.
Teddy signed Forty minutes isn't very long.
"She says forty minutes isn't very long," he repeated for his mother.
"I know," his mother said, and patted Teddy on the arm.
"Did Angela tell you what it would be?" Carella asked.
"No. Did she tell you?"
"No."
"Secrets," his mother said, and rolled her eyes. "With her, everything's always a secret. From when she was a little girl, remember?"
"I remember," he said.
"Secrets," she said, repeating the word for Teddy, turning to face her so she could read her lips. "My daughter. Always secrets."
Teddy nodded.
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"Mr Gordon?"
They all turned.
A doctor was standing there in a bloodstained surgical gown.
The worried balding man jumped to his feet.
"Yes?" he said.
"Everything's fine," the doctor said.
"Yes?"
"Your wife's fine . . ."
"Yes?"
"You have a fine, healthy boy."
"Thank you," the man said, beaming.
"You'll be able to see them both in ten minutes or so, I'll send a nurse down for you."
"Thank you," the man said.
Angela's doctor came down half an hour later. He looked very tired.
"Everything's fine," he said.
They always started with those words . . .
"Angela's fine," he said.
Always assured you about the mother first ...
"And the twins are fine, too."
"Twins?" Carella said.
"Two fine healthy little girls," the doctor said.
"Secrets," his mother said knowingly. And then, to Carella, "Where's Tommy?"
"I'll try to find him," Carella said.
He drove first to the house Tommy had inherited when his parents died. No lights were showing in the room over the garage. He climbed the steps, anyway, and knocked on the door. It was only a quarter past eleven, but perhaps Tommy was already in bed. There was no answer. Carella went back down to the car, thought for a moment before he started the engine, and then started the long drive downtown.
He hoped Tommy would not be with his girlfriend on the night his twin daughters were born.
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The playground across the street from the brownstone was deserted. Raindrops plinked on the metal swings and slides. This was an alternate-side-of-the-street parking zone. Water ran in sheets off the streamlined surfaces of the cars lining the curb that bordered the fenced-in playground. Carella found a spot dangerously close to a fire hydrant, threw down the visor with its police department logo, locked the car, and began running up the street in the rain.
He'd been a cop too long a time not to have noticed and recognized at once the two men sitting in a sedan parked across the street from the brownstone. He went over to the car, knocked on the passenger-side window. The window rolled down.
"Yeah?" the man sitting there said.
"Carella, the Eight-Seven," he said, showing his shield, shoulders hunched against the rain. "What's happening?"
"Get in," the man said.
Carella opened the rear door and climbed in out of the rain. Rain beat on the roof of the car. Rainsnakes trailed down the windows.
"Peters, the Two-One," the man behind the wheel said.
"Macmillen," his partner said.
Both men were unshaven. It was a look detectives cultivated when they were on a plant. Made them look overworked and underpaid. Which they were, anyway, even without the beard stubble.
"We got cameras rolling in the van up ahead," Peters said, nodding with his head toward the windshield. Through the falling rain, Carella could make out a green van parked just ahead of the car. The words hi-hat dry cleaning were lettered across the back panel, just below the painted-over rear window.
"Been sitting the building for a week now," Macmillen said.
"Which one?"
"The brownstone," Peters said.
"Why? What's going on over there?" Carella asked.
"Cocaine's going on over there," Macmillen said.
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10
It was Monday morning, and all the Monday-morning quarterbacks were out. Or at least one of them. His name was Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, and he was telling his assembled detectives what he hoped they should have known by now.
"When you're stuck," he said, "you go back to the beginning. You start where it started."
He was sitting behind his desk in the corner office he warranted as commander of the 87th Squad, a compact man with silvering hair and no-nonsense flinty-blue eyes. There were six detectives in the office with him. Four of them had already given him rundowns on the various cases they were investigating. The big case had waited patiently in the wings till now. The big case was multiple murder, the tap-dancing, singing, piano-playing star of this here little follies. Like a network television executive lecturing six veteran screenwriters on basics like motivation and such, the lieutenant was telling his men how to conduct their business.
"This case started with the dead girl," he said.
Susan Brauer. The dead girl. Twenty-two years old, a girl for sure, though Arthur Schumacher had considered her a woman for sure.
"And that's where you gotta start all over again," Byrnes said. "With the dead girl."
"You want my opinion," Andy Parker said, "you already got yourperp."