Ed McBain: The Big Bad City

According to Blaney, before 1992 there had been three types of fillings for the implant: silicone gel, saline, or a combination of both, where saline was contained in one compartment of an elastomer shell and silicone gel in another. When it was discovered that the gel could bleed through the envelope and migrate to other parts of the body, potentially causing cancer, silicone gel implants were banned.

Sister Mary Vincent's implants were saline.

This did not necessarily mean they'd been inserted since 1992; saline implants had been on the market for more than a decade before the ban on silicone gel. But a good reason to suspect the implants had been recent was the fact that the shell had not yet turned from clear to cloudy. Apparently, when the shell was in place for any amount of time, the body's oxidizing compounds attacked it, causing discoloration. This had not yet happened in Mary's.

instance. Given the fact that Mary was only twenty-seven, given the longevity of the silicone gel ban, given as well the fact that the envelope was still clear, Blaney was willing to guess that the implants could not have been more than three or four years old.

All of this the prepubescent twins had overheard and felt compelled to repeat to their grandmother the moment they were all assembled on her backyard lawn for the big outdoor barbecue. Judging from previous Sunday afternoon feasts at his mother's house all throughout his childhood and beyond, he would not get home till eight tonight, by which time Sixty Minutes would have come and gone, oh well.

The indiscretion of the twins was compounded by the presence at the barbecue of Angela's new boyfriend, an assistant district attorney named Henry Lowell, who had merely allowed the man who'd killed Carella's father to walk out of a courtroom scot-free. He now had the balls to say, "That's privileged information, isn't it, Steve?" to which Carella replied, "Only if it's revealed by me, Henry," to which the asshole replied,. "Who else was privy to it?" to which Carella replied, "Mark and April. They're twelve.”

“Oh, let it go,”

Angela said.

The men were standing at the barbecue, Carella turning steaks, placing on Lowell chicken breasts the grill for anyone who preferred white meat.

Teddy was just coming out of the house, carrying a bowl of pasta that had been warming on the big stove in the kitchen. The screen door slammed shut behind her, the sound signaling dappled sunlight, capturing her in stuttered gold. Depending on which degree of political correctness you wished to accept, Teddy Carella was either a deaf mute, a hearing-and-speech impaired woman, or an aurally and vocally challenged person. Or else she was simply Carella's wife and the most beautiful woman in the. world, dark-haired and dark-eyed, moving with elegance and grace as she carried the steaming bowl to the wooden picnic table and set it down. Carella watched her. He loved to watch her. She caught him. Threw a brazen hip at him. He smiled. On the table, his mother's good red sauce immediately attracted bees.

Teddy ripped plastic wrap from a roll, shooed the bees, covered the steaming bowl.

"Angela, the salad!" his mother called. "The bread!”

"Getting it now, Mom!”

Angela slammed into the house, followed by her three-year-old twins.

Bang, bang, and bang again, the screen door went. Twins ran in the family. There were two sets here today, his sister's and Carella's own.

Plus Angela's seven-year-old, Tess.

"April! Mark! Dinner! Cindy! Mindy! Everybody! Henry! Come on!

Tess! Dinner!" his mother called, though this wasn't quite dinner at two in the afternoon, nor was it lunch, either, just your garden-variety, eat-till-you-bust Italian-style Sunday get-together.

We could remember hiding under the dining room table with his sister when they were kids. Now her estranged husband was a goddamn drug addict, and her boyfriend had let their father's killer walk, my how the time does fly.

His mother would not let go of the breasts, so to speak.

Kept rattling on and on about it being impossible for the woman in the park to be a nun because nuns simply didn't need or want breast implants. Sometimes she gave him a pain in the ass. Well, he guessed she was a little better nowadays, didn't as often fall into those long moments of deep silence, when she retreated to whatever private space she continued to share with her dead husband. My father, too, don't forget, Carella thought. My dead father. I mean, Mom, we all lost Pop, you know. But I don't retreat, I dare not retreat, oh dear God I would burst into tears.

Today it wasn't one of her deep meaningful silences. Instead, it was the nun and the Catholic Church, his mother seemingly having forgotten that she herself hadn't been to church for, what was it, twenty years? And, listen, don't even mention confession! On and on about the nun who had to be an impostor, while Henry Lowell sat across the table fretting over a detective's family knowing the intimate details of a case the detective was investigating, well, gee, pardon me all to hell, Henry!

Carella would be forty years old in October.

Oh, yes, no more thirty something forget it. He had read someplace that when Hollywood studios wanted to do a movie about a twelve-year-old, they hired a twelve-year-old to write the script. That was because a forty-year-old writer had never been twelve. Which meant that a seventy-year-old writer had never been forty, though a Hollywood studio would never hire a seventy-year-old to do anything but star in a movie opposite a thirty-four-year-old girl, the theory being that the gonads remembered what the heart and the head had long ago forgotten.

He sometimes watched old ladies plodding heavily across city streets where buses threatened, and knew for certain that inside those shrunken bodies were the shining faces of fourteen-year-olds.

Angela's three-year-olds were babbling in their own secret code, he remembered Mark and April when they were that age, inseparable, a gang in miniature. Twelve years old now. April blossoming into a young woman, already taller than her brother, Mark, who was essentially still a boy. Sunrise, sunset, where had the time flown? Mark favored his father, poor kid. April was the image of Teddy, who was now signing to Angela and Angela was trying to understand that her court appearance was scheduled for tomorrow morning at nine, and she was scared to death they'd find her guilty and send her to jail.

"They won't, Morn," Mark said at once, forgetting to sign, and then tapped her arm, and when she turned, reassured her in the language that had been in his hands from when he was a small boy.

"No one's going to find you guilty," Carella said aloud, simultaneously signing it, even though he knew this was no mere bullshit violation.

Assault Three was a misdemeanor for which Teddy could spend a year in jail if she was convicted. The accident leading to the assault charge had occurred so long ago that neither of them could remember exactly when, but court calendars being what they were, it was only coming to trial tomorrow morning.

"Who's the judge?" Lowell asked.

"Man named Franklin Roosevelt Pierson, do you know him?”

"Yes. He'S fair and honest. What's this all about, anyway?”

Teddy began signing, and Carella began talking at the same time, so she yielded to him for the sake of expediency since Lowell didn't understand sign language at all.

What had happened was that a woman had backed her red Buick station wagon into the grille of Teddy's little red Geo. The district attorney was insisting that a) Teddy had caused the accident, and b) Teddy had kicked the woman, and c) Teddy had taken advantage of her husband's position as a police detective to intimidate the arresting officer at the scene. The only truth to any of this was that Teddy had, in fact, kicked the woman, but only after she'd taken Teddy by the shoulders and shaken her the way some nannies do with infants.