Эд Макбейн - Ice

The Dirty Panties Bandit was no small-time thief, oh no. In the two months during which he’d operated unchecked along Culver Avenue, first in the bordering precinct farther uptown, and then moving lower into the Eight-Seven’s territory, he had netted — or so the police had estimated from what the victimized women had told them — $600 in cash, twelve gold wedding bands, four gold lockets, a gold engagement ring with a one-carat diamond, and a total of twenty-two pairs of panties. These panties had not been lifted from the victims’ laundry baskets. Instead, the Dirty Panties Bandit — and hence his name — had asked all those hapless laundromat ladies to please remove their panties for him, which they had all readily agreed to do since they were looking into the rather large barrel of a .357 Magnum. No one had been raped — yet. No one had been harmed — yet. And whereas there was something darkly humorous, after all, about an armed robber taking home his victims’ panties, there was nothing at all humorous about the potential of a .357 Magnum. Sitting in the parked car outside the bar, Willis was very much aware of the caliber of the gun the Laundromat robber carried. Sitting inside the Laundromat, flanked by a Puerto Rican woman on her left and a black woman on her right, Eileen Burke was even more aware of the devastating power of that gun.

She looked up at the wall clock.

It was only 10:15, and the place wouldn’t be closing till midnight.

A little slip of paper in the program informed the audience that someone named Allison Greer would be replacing Sally Anderson that night, but none of the dancers in the show had character names, and they all looked very much alike with the exception of the two black girls (who in fact looked very much like each other) and Tina Wong, who looked like no one in the cast but herself. The blondes were indistinguishable one from the other. They were tall and leggy and, Carella thought, somewhat busty for dancers. They all had radiant smiles. They all were dressed in costumes that made them look even more alike, cut high on their thighs and hanging in tatters on their flashing legs, the sort of little nothing any young and ignorant southern girl might wear in the middle of a swamp, which was where Fatback was supposed to be taking place, and which was what the dancers in the cast were supposed to be. Given such a premise, given a curtain rising on what looked like a primeval bog, with mist floating in over it, and giant trees dripping moss onto slime-covered rocks, Carella had expected the worst. He turned to his right to look at Teddy. She was looking back at him. This was going to be yet another example of this city’s critics praising yet another lousy show to the skies, and thereby turning straw into gold — for the investors, at any rate.

Teddy Carella was a deaf-mute.

She often had difficulty at the theater. She could not hear what any of the performers were saying, of course, and usually she and Carella would be sitting too far back to read lips. Over the years, they had worked out a system whereby his hands — held chest high so as not to disturb anyone sitting behind them — flashed dialogue to her while she shifted her eyes back and forth from the stage to his rapidly moving fingers. Musicals, as a general rule, were somewhat easier for her. A singer usually faced the audience squarely when belting out a song, and his lip movements were more exaggerated than when he was simply speaking. Ballet was her favorite form of entertainment, and tonight she was delighted when — not ten seconds after the curtain had risen on that ominous bog — the entire stage seemed to fill with leaping, prancing, gyrating, twirling, frantically energetic dancers who virtually swung from the treetops and turned that steamy swamp into the sassiest, sexiest, most dazzling opening number Teddy had ever seen in her life. Spellbound, she sat beside Carella for what must have been ten full minutes of exposition through dance, squeezing his hand, her dark eyes flashing as she watched the story silently unfold. Carella sat there grinning. When the opening number ended, the house burst into tumultuous applause. He readied his hands for the translation he felt would be necessary as the act progressed, but he found that Teddy was impatiently nodding his moving fingers aside, understanding most of what was happening, able to read directly from the performers’ lips because the seats were sixth row center.

She asked him some questions during intermission. She was wearing a black, wool-knit dress with a simple cameo just above her breasts, black leather boots, a gold bracelet on her wrist. She had pulled her long black hair to the back of her head and fastened it there with a gold barrette. Except for eyeliner, shadow and lipstick, there was no makeup on her face. She needed none; she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known in his life. He watched her hands, watched the accompanying expressions that crossed her face. She wanted to know if she’d been right in assuming that the trapper and the girl moonshiner had had an affair years ago, and that this was the first time they’d seen each other since? No? Then what was all that hugging and kissing about? Carella explained, responding with his voice so that she could read his lips, accompanying his voice with hand signals (and always there were the fascinated observers in the crowd, nudging each other — Hey, take a look, Charlie, see the grown man talking to the dummy?) and she watched his lips and watched his hands and then signed, Well, they seem awfully lovey-dovey for cousins, and he explained that they were only second cousins, and she signed, Does that make incest legal?

Now, forty-five minutes into the second act, Carella looked at his watch because he sensed the evening was coming to an end and he simply did not want it to. He was having too good a time.

Eileen Burke was having a splendid time watching her laundry go round and round. The night man thought she was a little crazy, but then again everybody in this town was a little crazy. She had put the same batch of laundry through the machine five times already. Each time, she sat watching the laundry spinning in the machine. The night man didn’t notice that she alternately watched the front door of the place or looked through the plate glass window each time a car pulled in. The neon fixture splashed orange and green on the floor of the laundromat: LAVANDERÍA... LAUNDROMAT... LAVANDERÍA... LAUNDROMAT. The laundry in the machines went round and round.

A woman with a baby strapped to her back was at one of the machines, putting in another load. Eileen guessed she was no older than nineteen or twenty, a slender attractive blue-eyed blonde who directed a nonstop flow of soft chatter over her shoulder to her near dozing infant. Another woman was sitting on the yellow plastic chair next to Eileen’s, reading a magazine. She was a stout black woman, in her late thirties or early forties, Eileen guessed, wearing a bulky knit sweater over blue jeans and galoshes. Every now and then, she flipped a page of the magazine, looked up at the washing machines, and then flipped another page. A third woman came into the store, looked around frantically for a moment, seemed relieved to discover there were plenty of free machines, dashed out of the store, and returned a moment later with what appeared to be the week’s laundry for an entire Russian regiment. She asked the manager to change a $5 bill for her. He changed it from a coin dispenser attached to his belt, thumbing and clicking out the coins like a streetcar conductor. Eileen watched as he walked to a safe bolted to the floor and dropped the bill into a slot on its top, just as though he were making a night deposit at a bank. A sign on the wall advised any prospective holdup man: MANAGER DOES NOT HAVE COMBINATION TO SAFE. MANAGER CANNOT CHANGE BILLS LARGER THAN $5. Idly, Eileen wondered what the manager did when he ran out of coins. Did he run into the bar next door to ask the bartender for change? Did the bartender next door have a little coin dispenser attached to his belt? Idly, Eileen wondered why she wondered such things. And then she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who wondered the same things she wondered. That was when the Dirty Panties Bandit came into the store.