Ed McBain - McBain's Ladies - The Women of the 87th Precinct

Neither spoke. Teddy because she could not, and Carella because he would not. The silent skirmish filled the small apartment.

Al 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 M.E. 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.

“What’d you do all day?” he asked, holding her close, beginning to relax, succumbing to the warmth of her.

Teddy opened her hands like a book.

“Read?” Carella watched while she nodded. “What’d you read?”

Teddy scrambled off his lap and then clutched her middle, indicating that she had read something that was very funny. She walked across the room and he watched her when she stooped alongside the magazine rack.

“If you’re not careful,” he said, “I’m going to undo that damn safety pin.”

She put the magazines on the floor, stood up, and undid the safety pin. The skirt hung loose, one flap over the other. When she stooped to pick up the magazine again, it opened in a wide slit from her knee to almost her waist. Wiggling like the burlesque queen Carella had described, she walked back to him and dumped the magazines in his lap.

“Pen pal magazines?” Carella asked, astonished.

Teddy hunched up her shoulders, grinned, and then covered her mouth with one hand.

“My God!” he said. “Why?”

With her hands on her hips, Teddy kicked at the ceiling with one foot, the skirt opening over the clean line of her leg.

“For kicks?” Carella asked, shrugging. “What kind of stuff is in here? ‘Dear Pen Pal: I am a cocker spaniel who always wanted to be in the movies…’”

Teddy grinned and opened one of the magazines for him. Carella thumbed through it. She sat on the arm of his chair, and the skirt opened again. He looked at the magazine, and then he looked at his woman, and then he said, “The hell with this noise,” and he threw the magazine to the floor and pulled Teddy onto his lap.

The magazine fell open to the Personals column.

It lay on the floor while Steve Carella kissed his wife. It lay on the floor when he picked her up and carried her into the next room.

There was a small ad in the Personals column.

It read:

The idea was to combine business with pleasure.

It was an idea Steve Carella didn’t particularly relish, but he’d promised Teddy he’d meet her downtown at eight on the button, and the call from the tattoo parlor had been clocked in at seven forty-five, and he knew it was too late to reach her at the house. He couldn’t have called her in any case because the telephone was one instrument Carella’s wife could never use. But he had, on other occasions, illegally dispatched a radio motor patrol car to his own apartment with the express purpose of delivering a message to Teddy. The police commissioner, even while allowing that Carella was a good cop, might have frowned upon such extracurricular squad car activity. So Carella, sneak that he was, never told him.

He stood now on the corner under the big bank clock, partially covered by the canopy which spread out over the entrance, shielding the big metal doors. He hoped there would not be an attempted bank robbery. If there was anything he disliked, it was foiling attempted bank robberies when he was off duty and waiting for the most beautiful woman in the world. Naturally, he was never off duty. A cop, as he well knew, is on duty twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, three hundred and sixty-six days in leap year. Then, too, there was the tattoo parlor to visit, and he couldn’t consider himself officially clocked out until he’d made that call, and then reported the findings back to whoever was catching at the squad.

He hoped there would not be an attempted bank robbery, and he also hoped it would stop drizzling because the rain was seeping into his bones and making his wounds ache, oh, my aching wounds!

He put his aches out of his mind and fell to woolgathering. Carella’s favorite form of woolgathering was thinking about his wife. He knew there was something hopelessly adolescent about the way he loved her, but those were the facts, ma’m, and there wasn’t much he could do to change his feelings. There were probably more-beautiful women in the world, but he didn’t know who they were. There were probably sweeter, purer, warmer, more-passionate women, too. He doubted it. He very strongly doubted it. The simple truth was that she pleased him. Hell, she delighted him. She had a face he would never tire of watching, a face which was a thousand faces, each linked subtly by a slender chain of beauty. Fully made up, her brown eyes glowing, the lashes darkened with mascara, her lips cleanly stamped with lipstick, she was one person — and he loved the meticulously calculated beauty, the freshly combed, freshly powdered veneer of that person.

In the morning, she was another person. Warm with sleep, her eyes would open, and her face would be undecorated, her full lips swollen, the black hair tangled like wild weeds, her body supple and pliable. He loved her this way, too, loved the small smile on her mouth and the sudden eager alertness of her eyes.

Her face was a thousand faces, quiet and introspective when they walked along a lonely shore barefoot and the only sound was the distant sound of breakers on the beach, a sound she could not hear in her silent world. Alive with fury, her face could change in an instant, the black brows swooping down over suddenly incandescent eyes, her lips skinning back over even white teeth, her body taut with invective she could not hurl because she could not speak, her fists clenched. Tears transformed her face again. She did not cry often, and when she did cry it was with completely unself-conscious anguish. It was almost as if, secure in the knowledge of her beauty, she could allow her lace to be torn by agony.

Many men longed for the day when their ship would come in.

Carella’s ship had come in — and it had launched a thousand faces.