The Con Man (5 page)

Your loving dghtr,
Mary Louise

Whoever Detective Phillips of the Missing Persons Bureau was, he had done a good job on the missing Proschek girl. He had put a call through to the Scranton police, who had then checked with the girl’s bank and discovered that $4,375 had been withdrawn from her account on October 31, the day before she’d left. The withdrawal slip had been signed by her and presented by her together with her passbook. Detective Phillips had then put a check on every bank in the city in an attempt to locate a new account started by Mary Louise Proschek. Each bank reported negatively. Phillips had checked on the stationery the girl used and found it to be five-and-dime stuff. The letter had been mailed special delivery and postmarked from a station in the heart of the city. A check had been made of hock shops in the hope the high school graduation ring would turn up. It had not. Phillips had acquired a dental chart from the girl’s parents, and that was in her folder. Kling removed it and gave it a summary glance.

He remembered that the floater’s lower front teeth had been lost in the water, but he couldn’t remember which of her other teeth had fillings or which had been extracted. He sighed and turned to some of the other information in the folder.

The preliminary investigatory work had been handled by people other than the Missing Persons Bureau, of course. When Henry Proschek had reported his daughter’s absence to the 14th Precinct, the detective he’d spoken to had immediately checked with the desk officer to ascertain whether or not Mary Louise had been either arrested or hospitalized in his precinct. He then checked with Communications and
the Bureau of Information to find out if anyone answering her description was in a hospital or a morgue at the moment. When his efforts to locate her had proved fruitless, he had then phoned the information in to the MP Bureau, where the routine business of preparing forms in triplicate had then followed. And, to confirm his phone call, he mailed on the next day one of the triplicate copies of his own report to the MP Bureau.

The MP Bureau had sent out a teletype alarm throughout the city and to nearby police areas. And the name of Mary Louise
Proschek had been added to the daily mimeographed list of missing persons that is distributed to transportation terminals, hospitals, and anyplace where a refugee might seek help or shelter.

The girl was still missing. Perhaps she was the 87th’s floater.

But if Kling could remember very little about the floater’s teeth, he could remember one important point about her right hand. There had been a tattoo on the flap of skin between the girl’s right thumb and forefinger—the word
MAC
in a heart.

On Mary Louise Proschek’s missing person report, under the heading
TATTOOS
, there was one word—and that word was “None.”

Henry Proschek was a small, thin man with deep-brown eyes and a bald head. He was a coal miner, and the grime of three decades had permanently lodged beneath his fingernails and in the seams of his face. He was dressed in his Sunday best, and he had scrubbed himself vigorously before coming up from Scranton, but he still looked grubby, and if you didn’t know his trade was the honest occupation of extracting coal from the earth, you would have considered him a dirty little man.

He sat in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct, and Carella watched him. There was indignation in Proschek’s eyes, a flaring indignation that Carella had not thought the miner capable of. Proschek had just listened to Kling’s little speech, and now there was indignation in his eyes, and Carella wondered whether or not Kling had delivered his talk wrong. He decided that Kling had done it in the only way possible. The kid was new, but he
was learning, and there are only so many ways to tell a man his daughter is dead.

Proschek sat with his indignation in his eyes, and then his anger spread to his mouth and bubbled from his lips. “She’s not dead,” he said.

“She
is,
Mr. Proschek,” Kling said. “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

“She’s not dead,” Proschek said firmly.

“Sir—”

And, again, he said,
“She’s not dead!”

Kling turned to Carella. Carella shoved himself off the desk effortlessly. “Mr. Proschek,” he said, “we’ve compared the dead girl’s teeth with the dental chart you gave to the Missing Persons Bureau. They’re identical, sir. Believe me, we wouldn’t have had this happen—”

“There’s been a mistake,” Proschek said.

“There’s been no mistake, sir.”

“How could she be dead?” Proschek asked. “She came here to start a new life. She said so. She wrote that to me. So how could she be dead?”

“Her body—”

“And you wouldn’t find my daughter drowned. My daughter was an excellent swimmer. My daughter won a medal in high school for her swimming. I don’t know who that girl is, but she’s not Mary Louise.”

“Sir—”

“I’d have broke her neck if she wore a tattoo. You said this dead girl has a tattoo on her hand. My Mary Louise would never even have considered a thing like that.”

“That’s what we wanted to find out from you, sir,” Carella said. “You told us she didn’t have a tattoo. In that case, she must have acquired the tattoo in this city. We know she wasn’t drowned, you
see. She was dead before she entered the water. So if we can tie in the tattoo with—”

“That dead girl isn’t my daughter,” Proschek said. “You brought me all the way from Pennsylvania, and she isn’t even my daughter. Why are you wasting my time? I had to lose a whole day just to come here.”

“Sir,” Carella said firmly, “that girl is your daughter. Please try to understand that.” Proschek stared at him hostilely. “Did she have any friends named Mac?” Carella asked.

“None,” Proschek said.

“MacDonald, MacDougall, MacMorrow, MacManus, MacThing, Mac-Anything?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“My daughter didn’t have many boyfriends,” Proschek said. “She…she wasn’t a very pretty girl. She had good coloring, fair, like her mother—blue eyes and blonde hair, that’s a good combination—but she didn’t…She wasn’t very pretty. I…I used to feel sorry for her. A man…It doesn’t matter if a man isn’t good looking. But, to a girl, looks are everything. I used to feel sorry for her.” He paused and looked up at Carella and then repeated, as if to clarify his earlier statements, “She wasn’t very pretty, my daughter.”

Carella looked down at Proschek, knowing the coal miner had used the past tense, knowing that the girl was already dead in Proschek’s mind, and wondering why the man fought the knowledge now, fought the indisputable knowledge that his daughter was dead and had been dead for at least three months.

“Please think, Mr. Proschek,” he said. “Did she ever mention anyone named Mac?”

“No,” Proscheck said. “Why should Mary Louise mention a Mac? That girl isn’t Mary Louise.” He paused, got a sudden idea, and said, “I want to see that girl.”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” Carella said.

“I want to see her. You say she’s my daughter, and you show me dental charts, and that’s all a lot of crap. I want to see that girl. I can tell you whether or not she’s Mary Louise.”

“Is that what you called her?” Carella asked. “Mary Louise?”

“That’s what I baptized her. Mary Louise. Everybody else called her just plain Mary, but that wasn’t the way I intended it. I intended it Mary Louise. That’s a pretty name, isn’t it? Mary Louise. Mary is too…plain.” He blinked. “Too plain.” He blinked again. “I want to see that girl. Where is that girl?”

“At the mortuary,” Kling said.

“Then take me there. A relative’s supposed to identify a…a body, isn’t he? Isn’t that the case?”

Kling looked at Carella.

“We’ll check out a car and take Mr. Proschek to the hospital,” Carella said wearily.

They did not talk much on the ride to the hospital. The three men sat on the front seat of the Mercury sedan, and the city burst with April greenery around them, but the inside of the car was curiously cheerless. They drove into the hospital parking lot, and Carella parked the police sedan in a space reserved for the hospital staff. Mr. Proschek blinked against the sunshine when he got out of the car. Then he followed Carella and Kling to the morgue.

The detectives did not have to identify themselves to the attendant. They had both been there many times before. They told the attendant the number they wanted, and then they followed him past the rows of doors set into the corridor wall, the small refrigerator doors behind each one of which was a corpse.

“We don’t advise this, Mr. Proschek,” Carella said. “Your daughter was in the water for a long time. I don’t think—”

Proschek was not listening to him. They had stopped before a door marked 28, and Proschek was watching the attendant.

“Yes or no, Steve?” the attendant asked, reaching for the handle of the door.

Carella sighed. “Show it to him, buddy,” he said, and the attendant opened the door and rolled out the slab.

Proschek looked at the decomposed, hairless body of the girl on the slab. Carella watched him, and for a brief second, he saw recognition leap into the coal miner’s eyes, shocking, sudden recognition, and he felt some of the pain the old man was feeling.

And then Proschek turned to face Carella, and his eyes were like agate, and his mouth was set into a hard, tight line.

“No,” he said. “She’s not my daughter.”

His words echoed down the long corridor. The attendant rolled the slab back into the refrigerator compartment, and the rollers squeaked.

“He claiming the body?” the attendant asked.

“Mr. Proschek?” Carella asked.

“What?” Proschek said.

“Are you claiming the body?”

“What?”

“Are you—”

“No,” Proschek said. “She’s not my daughter.” He turned and started down the corridor, his heels clacking on the concrete floor. “She’s not my daughter,” he said, his voice rising. “She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter.”

And then he reached the door at the end of the corridor, and he fell to his knees, his hand clutching the knob, and he began sobbing bitterly. Carella ran to him, and he stooped and put his arm around the old man, and Proschek buried his face in Carella’s chest, weeping, and he said, “Oh my God, she’s dead. My Mary Louise is dead. My daughter is dead. My daughter…” and then he couldn’t say anything else because his body was trembling and his tears were choking him.

The beauty of being a shoemaker, Teddy Carella thought, is that you don’t take your work home with you. You cobble so many shoes, and then you go home to your wife, and you don’t think about soles and heels until the next day.

A cop thinks about heels all the time.

A cop like Steve Carella thinks about souls, too.

She would not, of course, have been married to anyone else, but it pained her nonetheless to see him sitting by the window brooding. His brooding position was almost classical, almost like the Rodin statue. He sat slumped in the easy chair, his chin cupped in one large hand, his legs crossed. He sat barefoot, and she loved his feet.
That’s ridiculous. You don’t love a man’s feet. Well, the hell with you, I love his feet. They’ve got good clean arches and nice toes, so sue me,
she thought.

She walked to where he was sitting.

She was not a tall girl, but she somehow gave an impression of height. She held her head high, and her shoulders erect, and she walked lightly with a regal grace that added inches to her stature. Her hair was black, and her eyes were brown, and she wore no lipstick now on full lips, which needed none, anyway. The lips of Teddy Carella were decorative—decorative in that they were beautiful and decorative in that they could never form words. She had been born deaf, and she could neither hear nor speak, and so her entire face, her entire body, served as her means of communication.

Her face spoke in exaggerated syllables. Her eyes gave tongue to words she could not utter. Her hands moved fluidly, expressively, to convey meaning. When Teddy Carella listened, her eyes never left your face. When Teddy Carella “spoke,” you were compelled to give her your complete attention because her pantomime somehow enhanced the delicacy of her loveliness.

Now, standing spread-legged before her brooding husband, she put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. She wore
a red wraparound skirt, a huge gold safety pin fastening it just above her left knee. She wore red Capezio flats and a white blouse swooped low at the throat to the first swelling rise of her breasts. She had caught her hair back with a bright-red ribbon, and she stood before him now and defied him to continue with his sullen brooding.

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

At 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 ME 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.”

Quickly, Teddy unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and then pulled it open, using both hands, spreading it in a wide, dramatic V.

“The Rose Tattoo?” Carella asked. “That’s fiction.”

Teddy shrugged.

Carella grinned. “Besides, I think you just wanted an excuse to bare your bosom.”

Teddy shrugged again, impishly.

“Not that it isn’t a lovely bosom.”

Teddy’s eyebrows wagged seductively. She curved her hands through the air and moistened her lips.

“Of course,” Carella said, “I’ve seen better.”

Oh?
Teddy’s face asked, suddenly coldly aloof.

“There was this girl in burlesque,” Carella expanded. “She could set them going in opposite directions, one swinging to the right, the other to the left. Had a little light on each one. They’d turn out all the houselights, and you’d just see these two circles of light in the darkness. Fantastic!” He grinned at his wife. “Now, that’s what I call talent.”

Teddy shrugged, telling her husband that that was what she didn’t call any talent whatsoever.

“You, on the other hand…” His hand came up suddenly to cup her breast.

Gingerly, delicately, Teddy picked up his hand with her thumb and forefinger and deposited it on the arm of the chair.

“Angry?” Carella asked.

Teddy shook her head.

“Love me?” Carella asked.

Teddy shook her head most vigorously.

“Hate me?”

No.

“Who then?”

Teddy swung her forefingers in opposite directions, and Carella burst out laughing. “You hate the burlesque dancer?”