The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  “I know what you meant, Mr. Caruthers.”

  “Do you think the Munitions Workers Union feels you’re sympathetic to their cause?” a woman’s voice called out from behind the pack of men. Harry couldn’t find the woman’s face. He just smiled out onto the crowd and held the smile. “I’ll see you all after I’ve met with the union.”

  “Hang on, Mr. Commissioner . . .”

  “Where do you think you’re . . .”

  “Just one more . . .”

  Harry raised his hand as if he were directing traffic on the street, then turned away from the reporters and went back down the stairs to his car. He took a seat behind his driver and stared out the window, across the water, to the undulating machinery crowding the Long Meadow Docks.

  A few minutes later, Faith Rapaport, a reporter on the city desk at the Globe, gently rapped on Harry’s window. When Harry rolled the window down, she said, “They do think you’re sympathetic to their cause, don’t they?”

  “I thought it was you asking that question, Miss Rapaport.”

  “Will you tell me the answer?”

  “I already said I’m not talking. Not until I’ve talked with them.”

  “Fair enough,” Faith said.

  “Let me alone for the time being?”

  “Sure,” Faith said. “I’ll just sit in my car, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  Faith smiled at Harry and opened the back passenger door of the car right next to Harry’s.

  “So that’s how it is,” Harry said.

  “That’s how it is.”

  Faith sat down and closed the door of her Hupmobile, then rolled down the window. “It’s awfully cold,” Faith said.

  Harry’s eyes slowly turned in their sockets toward Faith.

  “Can’t even talk about the weather?”

  “Yeah, Miss Rapaport—it’s cold, it’s damn cold.”

  “You know, Mr. Commissioner . . .”

  “You grew up in the newspaper business, isn’t that right, Miss Rapaport?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your father got around, Sam did.”

  “He was known for that.”

  “He always knew how to twist the knife into the right part of the body when he had you in front of the world. He could make it hurt pretty bad when he got in there nice and good.”

  “Dear old Dad, he did that to you?” Faith said with a wry smile.

  “Yeah,” Harry said, smiling back at Faith as he rolled up his window, “he sure did.”

  GLOBE METRO REPORT, OCTOBER 14, 192–

  UNDERCOVER OPERATORS

  SAM RAPAPORT

  South End—Long-sought-after lowlife flimflammers Marla Darden and Frank Diggs were arrested on assault charges late last night shortly after police happened by them and found them dragging a half-dressed unconscious man out of the Sullivan Arms Hotel on Proctor Street.

  When asked what in G-d’s name they were doing, they dropped the man in the gutter and ran for it.

  Police immediately caught up with them and took them into custody.

  While police recorded statements from Darden and Diggs, Freddy Stillman, a midtown munitions dispatcher, awoke to the sight of his embarrassed wife inside a hospital room at St. Agatha Ann’s, suddenly wishing he had more than just a grenade-sized lump on his head.

  According to police, Mr. Stillman and Miss Darden became acquainted in the back room of Lovey’s Smoke Shop, where the doorman said they left arm in arm, a little more than mellow, and a little more than just taken with each other.

  Mr. Stillman escorted the sloppy Miss Darden to the Sullivan Arms Hotel, where they paid 25 cents for an hour’s occupancy.

  Following a few steps behind them was Mr. Diggs.

  When Cecil Taylor, the desk clerk at the Sullivan Arms, saw Mr. Diggs walk after the couple, he went onto the street in search of a copper.

  According to Mr. Taylor, he recognized Mr. Diggs from a previous incident, and had no intention of “cleaning up after his mess this time.”

  With no cops to be found, Mr. Taylor went into his office for his gun and made his way upstairs.

  But it was too late. By the time he opened the door to the room, Mr. Diggs had already clobbered the half-naked Stillman with a sack full of marbles and was in the middle of removing Stillman’s wedding band.

  Needless to say, Diggs was taken by surprise at the sight of the gun, and pled with Mr. Taylor to take a piece of the action.

  Mr. Taylor, who said, “I run an upright establishment,” would have no part of it. He ordered Diggs and Darden to get the H— out and take their mark with them.

  Seductress and brute lifted Stillman over their shoulders and dragged him down the stairs to the street, where, fate would have it, an officer was standing by.

  Mr. Stillman was admitted to the hospital with a severe concussion.

  Marla Darden and Frank Diggs will be arraigned this afternoon.

  Chapter 4

  Third Precinct? . . . The trouble? There’s been a murder. . . . The Beekman Hotel for Women. . . . I said the Beekman Hotel for Women. . . . The ninth floor, south side, middle apartment. . . . No, I don’t have a room number. . . . No, I’m not at the murder scene. . . . From my office window. . . . Across the air shaft from the Fief Building. . . . Yes, I’m an employee. . . . Why do you need my . . . Yeah, all right, fine. Stillman. Freddy Stillman. . . . Midtown nine eight seven, extension three. . . . Good. . . . Good. . . . Thank you.”

  Freddy Stillman nervously hung up the phone and removed a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He struck a match and drew the fire to his lips. When he could feel the calming rush fill his lungs and the front of his head, he removed a pair of binoculars from the top drawer of his desk and edged the barrels into a small crack of light between the drawn blind and the window jamb. While standing there waiting for the police to arrive, Freddy listened to the clamor of voices outside his office, to the bustle of feet restlessly trying to find their proper places. Peering one-eyed through a short binocular tube he looked into the apartment window across the narrow air shaft, into the cold eyes of a young man with a thin smile and a crooked nose. The young man with the thin smile and the crooked nose was a painting set in a gold-leafed grand baroque frame, hung above a modest bureau covered with a mirror, perfume bottles, cosmetics, and a pearl-handled hairbrush. Waves of yellow and hues of reddish brown shaped the contours of the young man’s jaw, the curve of his hair, the ball of his fist planted under his chin. The strokes of the painting were broad and soft, so that when magnified, the features of the young man nearly blurred into obscurity, every feature, that is, except his eyes. His eyes were cold and sharp and thin, like his smile. Freddy, paying especially close attention to this figure, suddenly felt as though he knew this man, or at least a man resembling this man. A man from his past, perhaps. Or perhaps a man he occasionally saw on the street.

  Looking at the painting and the items on the bureau, Freddy remained still, until two uniformed police arrived in the woman’s apartment and entered the foreground. Both were tall and square in the shoulders, nearly identical, uncannily so. They were police, with broad chests and wide chins; clean-shaven; dark, short-cropped hair; thick long coats wrapped around the butts of their guns and billy-club handles. They searched the apartment briefly . . . jotted a few notes in their books, looked up and admired the painting of the young man above the bureau. When it appeared that they had finished looking around, they turned to the air shaft and drew their long triangular noses to the window, fogging small holes. Freddy could feel them looking at him, looking directly at him, but he wasn’t sure if they could see him. Taken by surprise at this, he stood paralyzed, with the hollow of his eye firmly pressed against the binocular eyepiece, wondering if he was being seen. One of the officers tried to open the window, then the other, and then they both walked out of sight. When Freddy thought the officers had gone, he went back to his desk and returned his binoculars to the top dra
wer, looking at them cautiously before he shut them away. He rubbed his already extinguished cigarette into his ashtray and picked up the phone again.

  “South End three nine eight. . . . Thank you. . . . Evelyn? . . . Yeah, it’s me. . . . I just wanted to see how you and the baby were. . . . C’mon, just tell me you’re all right and I’ll get off the phone. . . . I just wanted to hear something good about the world is all. . . . No, I’m all right. . . . I’m fine. . . . I’m telling you, I’m fine. . . . I know I shouldn’t be calling. . . . I just . . . I know. . . . I won’t, I promise. . . . C’mon, Evelyn, I just wanted to know the baby was doing okay, all right? . . . That’s all I wanted to know, Evey. . . . See, that wasn’t so hard, right? . . . I won’t. . . . I said I wouldn’t. . . . I will. . . . Yeah. . . . Yeah. . . . So long.”

  Freddy hung up the phone.

  When Freddy hung up the phone, an old supply clerk, whose name Freddy could never remember, opened Freddy’s door without knocking. “They’re in, Freddy,” the clerk said self-importantly as he made his way over to Freddy’s desk. The clerk’s face was sallow and craggy, the rims of his eyes purpled and yellowed. “There in for you. I know you were out, but now they’re in. You’ve been waiting patiently. I appreciate that. I really do.” The clerk placed a brown cardboard box next to the ashtray on Freddy’s green blotter. A card was taped to the top of the box by its corners. It read:

  FIEF MUNITIONS

  Freddy Stillman, Dispatcher

  Midtown 987, Ext. 3

  We hold the monopoly on domestic tranquillity!

  The slogan at the bottom of the card bubbled out of the mouth of the company’s logo—a square-jawed infantryman with a red-white-and-blue twinkle in his eye.

  “Thank you,” Freddy said, stroking the box absentmindedly with his hand.

  “You’re welcome,” the clerk said. The clerk turned on his heel and, leaving Freddy’s office door open, slowly walked in a straight line over the display floor, through moving huddles of preoccupied technicians who were preparing to merchandise a floating mobile of their newest torpedoes. Freddy watched the nameless clerk drift across the marble floor past dollies full of torpedo casings and spools of high-tension wire, through the middle of an evenly displayed colonnade of marble mannequin infantrymen perched on marble pedestals—gunmetal grenades on their hips, mortars at their feet, belts of ammunition strapped to their chests. Freddy, who was now standing in the doorway of his office, watched the clerk until he disappeared into a doorway on the other side of the floor.

  The morning light was beginning to angle through the plates of the ninth floor’s glass-ceilinged rotunda, starkly illuminating the infantrymen’s helmets and shoulders, faces and chests, all in all accentuating their predatory gestures. Watching the light wash over the figures, the floor, the pillars, Freddy momentarily felt some semblance of calm, which was abruptly interrupted when he noticed his supervisor, George Ludlow, striding determinedly across the display floor with the two officers who had responded to Freddy’s call.

  George Ludlow, an officious man with a square head, developing girth, and an unusually unreadable face, looked unusually nervous. He expressed some discomfort on the sides of his mouth, barely legible creases, very slight, very slim. Nevertheless, this barely perceptible change to George Ludlow’s unclassifiable face was clearly apparent to the technicians, who, quieted by his altered appearance, as well as the officers’ presence, froze into a messy tableau of silent gawking onlookers. “These officers are here to see you,” George said to Freddy as he reached the door to his office. At this proximity, Freddy could see he wasn’t only nervous, he was angry. He peered his head around Freddy’s shoulder in order to see into his office. Once satisfied that there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, he stepped back and allowed the two officers to approach. The two officers approached, and with the aid of George, ushered themselves in. George Ludlow, without saying a word, without making eye contact, firmly shut the door behind him and marched away, audibly. With the door securely closed—with George’s angry footsteps no longer audible—the muted voices and noises coming from the display room resumed, and one of the officers walked around Freddy’s desk to the closed blind, reached out, and snapped it open.

  “Mr. Stillman,” he said, pointing across the way, “you were the one who called?”

  Freddy’s eyes wandered across the air shaft to the apartment.

  “Yeah,” Freddy said carefully. “It was me.”

  The two officers sat on the two chairs opposite Freddy’s desk. Now that they were before him, Freddy couldn’t see any resemblance between the two men. They were as different-looking as a cactus and a pear. They were the same height and build, similar coloring, but one’s face was broader than the other’s, and one’s skin was smooth while the other’s was blotchy and whiskered.

  “I presume you’ll want to be as helpful as possible?” the one marked Reynolds said—the prickly one.

  “Of course I’ll want to be as helpful as possible.”

  “Of course you will. The helpful are always easiest to understand.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Freddy said, not liking Reynolds from the start.

  “What is it you were calling about, Mr. Stillman?” the other officer interrupted. He was marked Shaw.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What was it you were calling about?”

  “The woman.”

  Reynolds smiled and raised his eyebrows at Freddy meaningfully.

  “The woman?” Freddy said again. “Across the way?”

  “They’re all women across the way,” Reynolds said. “It’s a hotel for women.”

  Freddy nodded in agreement, then waited.

  “What about the woman?” Shaw asked.

  “Like I said to the operator when I called for you, the woman’s been murdered.”

  “What brought you to that conclusion?”

  “When I arrived at work this morning, I sat down at my desk here, and when I looked up, I saw her being strangled, right over there, right behind that window.”

  Reynolds shifted his weight in his seat. “Who? Who was doing the strangling?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you saw her being strangled.”

  “I did. But I couldn’t see who was strangling her.”

  “Big short fat thin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what do you know? What did you see?”

  “I saw a large pair of hands. Hands and arms, the sleeves of an overcoat, the rim of a hat edging out from behind the curtain, and the woman.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Well, you say you saw a woman strangled over there, but there’s no woman strangled over there,” Reynolds said. “There’s no dead body, no sign of struggle, no sign that the room was forcibly entered.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Maybe you’re seeing things? Maybe you were daydreaming?”

  “It wasn’t no dream,” Freddy said, adamantly shaking his head.

  Reynolds snickered a little. “Well, there’s still the little problem that there ain’t no body over there.”

  “Maybe he took it with him,” Freddy offered.

  “Yeah, walked right out onto Central Boulevard with it, right over his shoulder in the middle of rush hour.” Reynolds snickered some more.

  “He always like this?” Freddy asked, turning to Shaw.

  “How about a description, Mr. Stillman?” Shaw asked in return.

  “Of the woman?”

  “Yes, of the woman.”

  Freddy sat up in his seat a little. “She was, what? Maybe in her early twenties? She had a slim waist . . . I remember she had a slim waist because her waist reminded me of her neck. She had a slim waist, long auburn hair, a full round face, and . . . and that’s all that comes to mind.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She liked to get made up,” Freddy recalled ins
tantly. “Made up with cosmetics, that kind of thing. She was a smart dresser.”

  The officers exchanged glances and let a moment of silence pass before them.

  “Now,” Reynolds said, beaming a little, “do you know the woman who lives over there, Mr. Stillman? Miss . . . what’s the name the concierge gave us?” he asked Shaw.

  “Gould,” Shaw said, looking down at his notebook. “Janice Gould,” he said, looking back up at Freddy.

  “No,” Freddy said, pointing at the window. “Not beyond, no.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Freddy said, suddenly not sounding so sure.

  “The way you describe her, it sounds like you know this Janice Gould pretty well.”

  Freddy didn’t say anything. He cast his eyes down at his hands, to the desk’s blotter, where he noticed for the first time that his fingers were perspiring and that he was leaving dewy fingerprints on the blotter’s thin green felt.

  “Does she keep her curtains open often, Mr. Stillman?” Reynolds asked.

  Freddy could feel his face turn hot. “Yes, fine,” he said as he wiped his hands on his slacks. “I see what you’re getting at and . . . yes, fine.”

  “Can I take that for a ‘yes’?”

  “Yes. I said yes. She keeps her curtains open. But, I’d only seen her once or twice before. She hadn’t been living there long.”

  “What was she wearing today?”

  “A robe,” Freddy said reluctantly.

  “Did the robe have a color?”

  “Powder blue.” Freddy now smiled awkwardly. “Powder blue. The sash was pink.”

  “So then,” Shaw said, “she was a thin woman with a round face, long auburn hair, a long neck, slim waist. She was wearing a powder-blue robe and liked to get made up.”

  “Yes,” Freddy said.

  “And she was strangled by a large pair of hands,” Reynolds said with his hand covering his nose as he let out a few more snickers.

  “Yes.”

  “Good enough,” Shaw said, looking to his partner.

  “Yeah, very nice,” Reynolds said with a lascivious grin. He looked across the air shaft. “A very nice spot you have here, Mr. Stillman.”