Ed McBain - Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

They arranged a loan through the local bank (a civil service employee is considered a good risk) and less than a month after the twins were born, they found themselves living in a house of which Charles Addams would have been ecstatically proud. Along about this time, their second stroke of good luck presented itself. Fanny, who had helped them move and helped them get settled, was due to terminate her month’s employment when she offered the Carellas a proposition. She had, she told them, been making a study of the situation in the Carella household, and she could not visualize poor little Theodora (these were Fanny’s words) raising those two infants alone, nor did she understand how the children were to learn to talk if they could not imitate their mother, and how was Theodora to hear either of the infants yelling, suppose one of them got stuck with a safety pin or something, my God?

Now she understood that a detective’s salary was somewhere around five thousand a year — “You are a second/grade detective, aren’t you, Steve?” — and that such a salary did not warrant a full-time nurse and governess. But at the same time, she had the utmost faith that Carella would eventually make lst/grade — “That does pay six thousand a year, doesn’t it, Steve?” — and until the time when the Carellas could afford to pay her a decent wage, she would be willing to work for room and board, supplementing this with whatever she could earn making night calls and the like.

The Carellas would not hear of it.

She was, they insisted, a trained nurse, and she would be wasting her time by working for the Carellas at what amounted to no salary at all when she could be out earning a damned good living. And besides, she was not a truck horse, how could she possibly work all day long with the children and then hope to take on odd jobs at night? No, they would not hear of it.

But neither would Fanny hear of their not hearing of it.

“I am a very strong woman,” she said, “and all I’ll be doing all day long is taking care of the children under the supervision of Theodora who is their mother. I speak English very well, and the children could do worse for someone to imitate. And besides, I’m fifty-three years old, and I’ve never had a family of my own, and I rather like this family and so I think I’ll stay. And it’ll take a bigger man than you, Steve Carella, to throw me into the street. So that settles that.”

And, indeed, that did settle that.

Fanny had stayed. The Carellas had sectioned off one corner of the house and disconnected the heating to it so that their fuel bills were not exorbitant. Slowly but surely, the bank loan was being paid off. The children were almost a year old and showed every sign of being willing to imitate the sometimes colorful speech of their nurse. Fanny’s room was on the second floor of the house, near the children’s room, and the Carellas slept downstairs in a bedroom off the living room so that even their sex life went uninterrupted after that grisly six-weeks’ postnatal wait. Everything was rosy.

But sometimes a man came home looking for an argument, and you can’t very well argue with a woman who cannot speak. There are some men who might agree that such a state of matrimony is surely a state approaching paradise, but on that Thursday night, with the sky peppered with stars, with a springlike breeze in the air, Carella walked up the path to the old house bristling for a fight.

Teddy greeted him at the doorway. He kissed her briefly and stamped into the house, and she stared after him in puzzlement and then followed him.

“Where’s Fanny?” he asked.

He watched Teddy’s fingers as they rapidly told him, in sign language, that Fanny had left early for a nursing job.

“And the children?” he asked.

She read his lips, and then signaled that the children were already in bed, asleep.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Can we eat, please?”

They went into the kitchen, and Teddy served the meal — pork chops, his favorite. He picked sullenly at his food, and after dinner he went into the living room, turned on the television set, watched a show featuring a private eye who was buddy-buddy with a police lieutenant and who was also buddy-buddy with at least eighteen different women of assorted provocative shapes, and then snapped off the show and turned to Teddy and shouted, “If any police lieutenant in the country ran his squad the way that jerk does, the thieves would overrun the streets! No wonder he needs a private eye to tell him what to do!”

Teddy stared at her husband and said nothing.

“I’d like to see what the pair of them would do with a real case. I’d like to see how they’d manage without a dozen clues staring them in the face.”

Teddy rose and went to her husband, sitting on the arm of his chair.

“I’d like to see what they’d do with a pair of goddamn severed hands. They’d probably both faint dead away,” Carella said.

Teddy stroked his hair.

“We’re back to Androvich again,” he shouted. It occurred to him that it didn’t matter whether or not he shouted because Teddy was only reading his lips and the decibels didn’t matter one little damn. But he shouted nonetheless. “We’re right back to Androvich, and where does that leave us? You want to know where that leaves us?”

Teddy nodded.

“Okay. We’ve got a pair of hands belonging to a white male who is somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. We’ve got a bum of a sailor who flops down with any girl he meets, bong, bong, there goes Karl Androvich, who allegedly made a date to run off with a stripper named Bubbles Caesar. You listening?”

Yes, Teddy nodded.

“So they set the date for Valentine’s Day, which is very romantic. All the tramps of the world are always very romantic. Only this particular tramp didn’t show up. She left our sailor friend Androvich waiting in the lurch.” He saw the frown on Teddy’s face. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my calling Bubbles a tramp? She reads that way to me. She’s provoked fights in the joint where she stripped by leading on two men simultaneously. She had this deal going with Androvich, and she also probably had something going with a drummer named Mike Chirapadano. At any rate, she and Chirapadano vanished on exactly the same day, so that stinks of conspiracy. And she’s also got her agent, a guy named Charlie Tudor, all butterflies in the stomach over her. So it seems to me she was playing the field in six positions. And if that doesn’t spell tramp, it comes pretty close.”

He watched his wife’s fingers as she answered him.

He interrupted, shouting, “What do you mean, maybe she’s just a friendly girl? We know she was shacking up with the sailor, and probably with the drummer, and probably with the agent as well. All big men, too. She goes for them big. A tramp with—”

The drummer and the agent are only supposition, Teddy spelled with her hands. The only one you have any sure knowledge of is the sailor.

“I don’t need any sure knowledge. I can read Bubbles Caesar from clear across the bay on a foggy day.”

I thought sure knowledge was the only thing a detective used.

“You’re thinking of a lawyer who never asks a question unless he’s sure of what the answer will be. I’m not a lawyer, I’m a cop. I have to ask the questions.”

Then ask them, and stop assuming that all strippers are—

Carella interrupted her with a roar that almost woke the children. “Assuming! Who’s assuming?” he bellowed, finally involved in the argument he’d been seeking ever since he came home, a curious sort of argument in that Teddy’s hands moved unemotionally, filled with words, while he yelled and ranted to her silent fingers. “What does a girl have to do before I figure her for rotten? For all I know, she knocked off this guy Chirapadano and won’t be happy until she’s dropped his hands and his legs and his heart and his liver into the little paper sacks all over town! I won’t be surprised if she cuts off his—”