Kuntz saw the look of confusion on Eleanor’s face.
“May I show her this?” he asked.
“Sure,” O’Hara said. “It’s not like it’s a secret or anything.”
“Did the other papers get this, Mickey, do you think, or just Philly’s ace crime writer?” Lowenstein asked.
“I didn’t ask, but I’ll bet they did.”
“What’s a—what did you say before, ‘Schwartz’?” Eleanor asked.
“Schwartzes,” Lowenstein explained. “It’s Yiddish. Means ‘blacks.’”
“I don’t understand,” Kuntz confessed.
“Offhand, Rabbi,” O’Hara said, “it’s obviously one of two things: a group of master criminals cleverly trying to get Sherlock Holmes here and his gumshoes off their trail, or the opening salvo of the Great Race War.”
“What the hell is it, if you’re so smart, wiseass?” Lowenstein asked.
“Or it could be a couple of guys named O’Shaughnessy and Goldberg, college kids, maybe, trying to pull the chain of the newspapers,” O’Hara said.
“You really think so?” Lowenstein asked, his tone of voice making it clear that possibility had not occurred to him.
“I really don’t know what to think, Matt,” Mickey replied.
“What did you write?”
“About the Islamic Liberation Army, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Just because somebody sends me a piece of paper that says they’re the Islamic Liberation Army and that they’ve declared war on the Jews doesn’t make it so. You tell me you think the Islamic Liberation Army shot up Goldblatt’s and murdered that maintenance man, and I’ll write it. But not until.”
“You got that after the robbery, right?”
“Of course,” O’Hara said. “And Joe D’Amata told me that the Central Detective is on the job, Pelosi?”
“Jerry Pelosi,” Lowenstein furnished.
“He’s got a damned good idea who the doers are. And he doesn’t think they’re a bunch of looney-tune amateur Arabs.”
Lieutenant Jack Malone was not equipped with the necessary household skills for happy bachelorhood. He was the fourth of five children, the others all female. Jack and his father (a Fire Department captain) had met what the Malone family perceived to be the responsibility of the male gender: They moved furniture, washed the car, cut the grass, painted, and even moved the garbage cans from beside the kitchen door to the curb, and then moved them back.
But the other domestic tasks in the house were clearly feminine responsibilities, and Mrs. Jeannette Malone and her daughters shopped, cooked, laundered, ironed, made beds, set and cleaned the table, and washed the dishes.
This arrangement lasted until, a week after he graduated from North Catholic High School, Jack enlisted in the Army. For four years thereafter, except for the making of his bunk in the prescribed manner and shining of boots and brass, the Army took over for his mother and sisters. He ate in mess halls. Once a week he carried a bag full of dirty clothing to the supply room and picked up last week’s laundry, now washed, starched, and pressed by an Army laundry for a three-dollar-a-month charge.
When he got out of the Army, he immediately took both the Fire Department and Police Department tests. The Police Department came up first, and he became a cop. He really had not wanted to be a fireman, although, rather than hurt his father’s feelings, he would have joined the firemen if that test had come back first.
He lived at home until, fifteen months after he got out of the Army, he had married Ellen Fogarty. Ellen had been reared under a comparable perception of the roles and responsibilities of the sexes in marriage. The man went to work, and the woman kept house. The only real difference, aside from the joys of the marriage bed, in living with Ellen as opposed to living with his mother and sisters was that Ellen put some really strange food on the table. Mexican, Chinese, even Indian-Indian, things like that.
He had pretended to like it, and after a while had even grown used to it.
When he had reentered the single state, he was for the first time in his life forced to fend for himself. Obviously, he could not move back into his parents’ house. For one thing, his sister Deborah had married a real loser who couldn’t hold a job for more than three months at a time, and Charley and Deborah and their two kids were “until things worked out for Charley” living in the house.