Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

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.”