by Ed McBain
“I don’t think I follow you, Blaney?”
“You’ve seen dismemberment cases before, Carella. We usually find the head, and then the trunk, and then the four extremities. But if a person is going to cut off an arm, why then cut off the hand? Do you know what I mean? It’s an added piece of work that doesn’t accomplish very much.”
“Yeah, I see,” Carella said.
“Most bodies are dismembered or mutilated because the criminal is attempting to avoid identification of the body. That’s why the fingertips of that hand were mutilated.”
“Of course.”
“And sometimes your killer will cut up the body to make disposal easier. But cutting off a hand at the wrist? How would that serve either purpose?”
“I don’t know,” Carella said. “In any case, we’re not dealing with a surgeon or a doctor here, is that right?”
“I would say not.”
“How about a butcher?”
“Maybe. The bones were severed with considerable force. That might imply a man familiar with his tools, the fingertips were neatly sliced.”
“Okay, Blaney, thanks a lot.”
“Any time,” Blaney said happily, and hung up.
Carella thought for a moment about dismembered bodies. There was suddenly a very sour taste in his mouth. He went into the Clerical Office and asked Miscolo to make a pot of coffee.
In Captain Frick’s office downstairs, a patrolman named Richard Genero was on the carpet. Frick, who was technically in command of the entire precinct—his command, actually, very rarely intruded upon the activities of the detective squad—was not a very imaginative man, nor in truth a very intelligent one. He liked being a policeman, he supposed, but he would rather have been a movie star. Movie stars got to meet glamorous women. Police captains only got to bawl out patrolmen.
“Am I to understand, Genero,” he said, “that you don’t know whether the person who left this bag on the sidewalk was a man or a woman, is that what I am made to understand, Genero?”
“Yes, sir,” Genero said.
“You can’t tell a man from a woman, Genero?”
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I can sir, but it was raining.”
“So?”
“And this person’s face was covered. By an umbrella, sir.”
“Was this person wearing a dress?”
“No, sir.”
“A skirt?”
“No, sir.”
“Pants?”
“Do you mean trousers, sir?”
“Yes, of course I mean trousers!” Frick shouted.
“Well, sir, yes, sir. That is, they could have been slacks. Like women wear, sir. Or they could have been trousers. Like men wear, sir.”
“And what did you do when you saw the bag on the sidewalk?”
“I yelled after the bus, sir.”
“And then what?”
“Then I opened the bag.”
“And when you saw what was inside it?”
“I…I guess I got a little confused, sir.”
“Did you go after the bus?”
“N…n…no, sir.”
“Are you aware that there was another bus stop three blocks away?”
“No, sir.”
“There was, Genero. Are you aware that you could have hailed a passing car, and caught that bus, and boarded it, and arrested the person who left this bag on the sidewalk? Are you aware of that, Genero?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, I wasn’t aware of it at the time, sir. I am now, sir.”
“And saved us the trouble of sending this bag to the laboratory, or of having the Detective Division trot all the way out to International Airport?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Or of trying to find the other pieces of that body, of hoping we can identify the body after we have all the pieces, are you aware of all this, Genero?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then how can you be so goddamn stupid, Genero?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“We contacted the bus company,” Frick said. “The bus that passed that corner at two-thirty—was that the time, Genero?”
“Yes, sir.”
“—at two-thirty was bus number 8112. We talked to the driver. He doesn’t remember anyone in black boarding the bus at that corner, man or woman.”
“There was a person, sir. I saw him. Or her, sir.”
“No one’s doubting your word, Genero. A bus driver can’t be expected to remember everyone who gets on and off his goddamn bus. In any case, Genero, we’re right back where we started. And all because you didn’t think. Why didn’t you think, Genero?”
“I don’t know, sir. I was too shocked, I guess.”
“Boy, there are times I wish I was a movie star or something,” Frick said. “All right, get out. Look alive, Genero. Keep on your goddamn toes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go on, get out.”
“Yes, sir.” Genero saluted and left the captain’s office hurriedly, thanking his lucky stars that no one had discovered he’d had two glasses of wine in Max Mandel’s shop just before finding the bag. Frick sat at his desk and sighed heavily. Then he buzzed Lieutenant Byrnes upstairs and told him he could deliver the bag to the lab whenever he wanted to. Byrnes said he would send a man down for it at once.
The photograph of the bag lay on Nelson Piat’s desk.
“Yes, that’s one of our bags, all right,” he said. “Nice photograph, too. Did you take the photograph?”
“Me, personally, do you mean?” Detective Meyer Meyer asked.
“Yes.”
“No. A police photographer took it.”
“Well, it’s our bag, all right,” Piat said. He leaned back in his leather-covered swivel chair, dangerously close to the huge sheet of glass that formed one wall of his office. The office was on the fourth floor of the Administration Building at International Airport, overlooking the runway. The runway now was drenched with lashing curtains of rain that swept its slick surface. “Damn rain,” Piat said. “Bad for our operation.”
“Can’t you fly when it rains?” Meyer asked.
“Oh, we can fly all right. We can fly in almost everything. But will the people fly, that’s the question. The minute it begins raining, we get more damn cancellations than you can shake a stick at. Afraid. They’re all afraid.” Piat shook his head and studied the photo of the bag again. It was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven glossy print. The bag had been photographed against a white backdrop. It was an excellent picture, the company’s name and slogan leaping out of the print as if they were molded in neon. “Well, what about this bag, gentlemen?” Piat said. “Did some burglar use it for his tools or something?” He chuckled at his own little joke and looked first to Kling and then to Meyer.
Kling answered for both of them. “Well, not exactly, sir,” he said. “Some murderer used it for part of a corpse.”
“Part of a…? Oh. I see. Well, that’s not too good. Bad for our operation.” He paused. “Or is it?” He paused again, calculating. “Will this case be getting into the newspapers?”
“I doubt it,” Meyer said. “It’s a little too gory for the public, and so far it doesn’t contain either a rape or a pretty girl in bloomers. It would make dull copy.”
“I was thinking…you know…a photo of the bag on the front pages of a mass circulation newspaper, that might not be bad for our operation. Hell, you can’t buy that kind of advertising space, now can you? It might be very good for our operation, who knows?”
“Yes, sir,” Meyer said patiently.
If there was one virtue Meyer Meyer possessed, that virtue was patience. And it was, in a sense, a virtue he was born with or, at the very least, a virtue he was named with. Meyer’s father, you see, was something of a practical joker, the kind of man who delighted in telling kosher dinner guests during the middle of a meat meal that they were eating off the dairy dishes. Oh, yes, he was a gasser, all right. Well, when this gasser was well past the age when changing diapers or wip
ing runny noses was a possibility, when his wife had in fact experienced that remarkable female phenomenon euphemistically known as change of life, they were both somewhat taken aback to learn that she was pregnant.
This was a surprising turn of events indeed, the practical joke supreme upon the king of the jesters. Meyer’s father fretted, pouted, and sulked about it. His jokes suffered while he planned his revenge against the vagaries of nature and birth control. The baby was born, a bouncing, blue-eyed boy delivered by a midwife and weighing in at seven pounds six ounces. And then Meyer’s pop delivered the final hilarious thrust. The baby’s first name would be Meyer, he decreed, and this handle when coupled with the family name would give the boy a title like a ditto mark: Meyer Meyer.
Well, that’s pretty funny. Meyer’s old man didn’t stop laughing for a week after the bris. Meyer, on the other hand, found it difficult to laugh through bleeding lips. The family was, you understand, practicing Orthodox Judaism and they lived in a neighborhood that housed a large Gentile population, and if the kids in the neighborhood needed another reason besides Meyer’s Jewishness for beating him up every day of the week, his name provided that reason. “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire!” the kids would chant, and POW! Meyer got it in the kisser.
Over the years, he learned that it was impossible to fight twelve guys at once, but that it was sometimes possible to talk this even dozen out of administering a beating. Patiently, he talked. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But patience became a way of life. And patience is a virtue, we will all admit. But if Meyer Meyer had not been forced to sublimate, if he had for example just once, just once when he was a growing boy been called Charlie or Frank or Sam and been allowed to stand up against one other kid, not a dozen or more, and bash that kid squarely on the nose, well perhaps, just perhaps, Meyer Meyer would not have been completely bald at the tender age of thirty-seven.
On the other hand, who would have been so cruel as to deprive an aging comedian of a small practical joke?
Patiently, Meyer Meyer said, “How are these bags distributed, Mr. Piat?”
“Distributed? Well, they’re not exactly distributed. That is to say, they are given to people who fly with our airline. It’s good for the operation.”
“These bags are given to every one of your passengers, is that correct?”
“No, not exactly. We have several types of flights, you see.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. We have our Luxury flight, which gives more space between the seats, a big, big twenty inches to stretch those legs in, and drinks en route, and a choice of several dinners, and special baggage accommodations—in short, the finest service our operation can offer.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. And then we have our First-Class flight, which offers the same accommodations and the same seating arrangement except that drinks are not provided—you can buy them, of course, if you desire—and there is only one item on the dinner menu, usually roast beef, or ham, or something of the sort.”
“I see.”
“And then we have our Tourist flight.”
“Tourist flight, yes,” Meyer said.
“Our Tourist flight, which gives only sixteen inches of leg room, but the same accommodations otherwise, including the same dinner as on the First-Class flight.”
“I see. And this bag—”
“And then there is our Economy flight, same amount of leg room, but there are three seats on one side of the aisle, instead of two, and the dinner is not a hot meal, just sandwiches and, of course, no drinks.”
“And of all these flights, which—”
“Then there’s our Thrift flight, which is not too comfortable, I’m afraid, that is to say not as comfortable as the other flights, but certainly comfortable enough, with only twelve inches of leg room, and—”
“Is that the last flight?” Meyer asked patiently.
“We’re now working on one called the Piggy Bank flight, which will be even less expensive. What we’re trying to do, you see, we’re trying to put our operation within reach of people who wouldn’t ordinarily consider flying, who would take the oldfashioned means of conveyance, like trains, or cars, or boats. Our operation—”
“Who gets the bags?” Kling asked impatiently.
“What? Oh, yes, the bags. We give them to all passengers on the Luxury or First-Class flights.”
“All passengers?”
“All.”
“And when did you start doing this?”
“At least six years ago,” Piat said.
“Then anyone who rode either Luxury or First-Class in the past six years could conceivably have one of these bags, is that right?” Meyer asked.
“That is correct.”
“And how many people would you say—”
“Oh, thousands and thousands and thousands,” Piat said. “You must remember, Detective Meyer…”
“Yes?”
“We circle the globe.”
“Yes,” Meyer said. “Forgive me. With all those flights zooming around, I guess I lost sight of the destinations.”
“Is there any possibility this might get into the newspapers?”
“There’s always a possibility,” Meyer said, rising.
“If it does, would you contact me? I mean, if you know about it beforehand. I’d like to get our promotion department to work.”
“Sure thing,” Meyer said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Piat.”
“Not at all,” Piat said, shaking hands with Meyer and Kling. “Not at all.” As they walked across the room to the door, he turned to the huge window and looked out over the rain-soaked runway. “Damn rain,” he said.
Friday morning.
Rain.
When he was a kid, he used to walk six blocks to the library in the rain, wearing a mackinaw with the collar turned up, and feeling very much like Abraham Lincoln. Once there, he would sit in the warmth of the wood-paneled reading room, feeling strangely and richly rewarded while he read and the rain whispered against the streets outside.
And sometimes, at the beach, it would begin raining suddenly, the clouds sweeping in over the ocean like black horsemen in a clanging cavalry charge, the lightning scraping the sky like angry scimitar slashes. The girls would grab for sweaters and beach bags, and someone would reach for the portable record player and the stack of 45-rpms, and the boys would hold the blanket overhead like a canopy while they all ran to the safety of the boardwalk restaurant. They would stand there and look out at the rain-swept beach, the twisted, lipsticked straws in deserted Coca-Cola bottles, and there was comfort to the gloom somehow.
In Korea, Bert Kling learned about a different kind of rain. He learned about a rain that was cruel and driving and bitter, a rain that turned the earth to a sticky clinging mud that halted machines and men. He learned what it was to be constantly wet and cold. And ever since Korea, he had not liked the rain.
He did not like it on that late Friday morning, either.
He had started the day by paying a visit to the Missing Persons Bureau and renewing his acquaintance there with Detectives Ambrose and Bartholdi.
“Well, well, look who is here,” Bartholdi had said.
“The Sun God of the 87th,” Ambrose added.
“The Blond Wonder himself.”
“In person,” Kling said dryly.
“What can we do for you today, Detective Kling?”
“Who did you lose this week, Detective Kling?”
“We’re looking for a white male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four,” Kling said.
“Did you hear that, Romeo?” Ambrose said to Bartholdi.
“I heard it, Mike,” Bartholdi answered.
“That is an awful lot to go on. Now how many white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four do you suppose we have records on?”
“At a conservative estimate,” Bartholdi answered, “I would say approximately six thousand seven hundred and twenty-three.”
“Not counting the ones
we ain’t had time to file yet.”
“With bulls from all over the city popping in here at every hour of the day, we don’t get much time to do filing, Detective Kling.”
“That’s a shame,” Kling said dryly. He wished he could shake the feeling he constantly experienced in the presence of older cops who’d been on the force longer than he. He knew he was a young detective and a new detective, but he resented the automatic assumption that because of his age and inexperience he must, ipso facto, be an inept detective. He did not consider himself inept. In fact, he thought of himself as being a pretty good cop, Romeo and Mike be damned.
“Can I look through the files?” he asked.
“But of course!” Bartholdi said enthusiastically. “That’s why they’re here! So that every dirty-fingered cop in the city can pore over them. Ain’t that right, Mike?”
“Why, certainly. How else would we keep busy? If we didn’t have dog-eared record cards to retype, we might have to go outside on a lousy day like this. We might have to actually use a gun now and then.”
“We prefer leaving the gunplay to you younger, more agile fellows, Kling.”
“To the heroes,” Ambrose said.
“Yeah,” Kling answered, and he searched for a more devastating reply, but none came to mind.
“Be careful with our cards,” Bartholdi cautioned. “Did you wash your hands this morning?”
“I washed them,” Kling said.
“Good. Obey the sign.” He pointed to the large placard resting atop the green filing cabinets.
SHUFFLE THEM, JUGGLE THEM, MAUL THEM, CARESS THEM— BUT LEAVE THEM THE WAY YOU FOUND THEM!
“Got it?” Ambrose asked.
“I’ve been here before,” Kling said. “You ought to change your sign. It gets kind of dull the hundredth time around.”
“It ain’t there for entertainment,” Bartholdi said. “It’s there for information.”