Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

by Ed McBain

  The average layman might have considered Grossman’s examination absurd. He was, after all, examining a stain that had obviously been left in the bag by the severed hand. What in the hell was he trying to ascertain? That the hand had been in the bag? Everyone knew that already.

  But Grossman was simply trying to determine whether or not the stain on the bottom of the bag was actually human blood; and if not blood, then what? There was the possibility, too, that an apparent bloodstain could have mingled with, or covered, another stain on the bag. And so Grossman really wasn’t wasting his time. He was simply doing a thorough job.

  The stain was a dark reddish brown in color and, because of the nonabsorbent surface of the bag’s bottom, it was somewhat cracked and chipped, resembling a dried mud flat. Grossman gingerly cut out a portion of the stain, and cut this into two smaller portions that he labeled Stain One and Stain Two, for want of a more imaginative nomenclature. He dropped his two specimens into a 0.9 percent solution of physiologic salt, and then placed them on separate slides. The slides had to stand in a covered dish for several hours, so he left them and began performing his microscopic and spectroscopic tests on the orange chalk he had found in a corner of the bag. When he returned to the slides later that day, he covered one of them with a coverslip and studied it under a high-power microscope. What he saw was a number of non-nucleated discs, and he knew instantly that the suspect blood was mammalian in origin.

  He then took the second slide and poured Wright’s Stain onto the unfixed smear, letting it stand for one minute while he timed the operation. Drop by drop, he added distilled water to the slide, waiting for a metallic scum to form on its surface. When the scum had formed, he again consulted his watch, waiting three minutes before he washed and dried the slide.

  Using a micrometer eyepiece, he then measured the various cells on the slide. The human red blood corpuscle is about 1/3200 of an inch in diameter. The cell diameter will vary in other animals of the mammalian group, the erythrocyte of the dog—at 1/3500 of an inch—being closest to the human’s.

  The specimen Grossman examined under his microscope measured 1/3200 of an inch in diameter.

  But where measurement dealt with error in thousandths of an inch, Grossman did not want to take any chances. And so he followed the usual laboratory procedure of using a precipitin reaction after either a chemical, microscopic, or spectroscopic test. The precipitin reaction would determine with certainty whether or not the stain was indeed human blood.

  The precipitin reaction is a simple one. If you take a rabbit, and if you inject into this rabbit’s blood a specimen of whole human blood or human blood serum, something is going to happen. The something that will happen is this: an antibody called a “precipitin” will develop in the rabbit’s own serum. This will then react with the proteins of the injected serum. If the reaction is a positive one, the proteins can then be identified as having come from a human being.

  The specific reaction to Grossman’s stain was positive.

  The blood was human.

  When he performed his isoreaction test, he learned that it was in the “O” blood group, and he therefore made the logical assumption that the stain on the bottom of the bag had been left by blood dripping from the severed hand and by nothing else.

  As for the bits of orange chalk dust, they turned out to be something quite other than chalk. The particles were identified as a woman’s cosmetic, further identified through a chemical breakdown and a comparison with the cards in the files as a preparation called Skinglow.

  Skinglow was a liquid powder base designed to retain face powder in a clinging veil, further designed to add a slight pink glow to very fair skin under makeup.

  It was hardly likely that a man would have used it.

  And yet the hand in the bag had definitely belonged to a man.

  Grossman sighed and passed the information on to the boys of the 87th.

  Saturday.

  Rain.

  Once, when he was a boy, he and some friends had crawled under the iceman’s cart on Colby Avenue. It had been pouring bullets, and the three of them sat under the wooden cart and watched the spikes of rain pounding the cobblestones, feeling secure and impervious. Steve Carella caught pneumonia, and shortly afterward the family moved from Isola to Riverhead. He’d always felt the move had been prompted by the fact that he’d caught pneumonia under the iceman’s cart on Colby Avenue.

  It rained in Riverhead, too. Once he necked with a girl named Grace McCarthy in the basement of her house while the record player oozed “Perfidia,” and “Santa Fe Trail,” and “Green Eyes,” and the rain stained the small crescent-shaped basement window. They were both fifteen, and they had started by dancing, and he had kissed her suddenly and recklessly in the middle of a dip, and then they had curled up on the sofa and listened to Glenn Miller and necked like crazy fools, expecting Grace’s mother to come down to the basement at any moment.

  Rain wasn’t so bad, he supposed.

  Sloshing through the puddles with Meyer Meyer on the way to question the second possibility Kling had pulled from the MPB files, Carella cupped his hand around a match, lighted a cigarette, and flipped the match into the water streaming alongside the curb.

  “You know that cigarette commercial?” Meyer asked.

  “Which one?”

  “Where the guy is a Thinking Man. You know, a nuclear physicist really, but when we first see him he’s developing snapshots in a darkroom? You know the one?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I got a good one for their series.”

  “Yeah, let’s hear it,” Carella said.

  “We see this guy working on a safe, you know? He’s drilling a hole in the face of the safe, and he’s got his safe-cracking tools on the floor, and a couple of sticks of dynamite, like that.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “And the announcer’s voice comes in and says, ‘Hello there, sir.’ The guy looks up from his work and lights a cigarette. The announcer says, ‘It must take years of training to become an expert safe-cracker.’ The guy smiles politely. ‘Oh, I’m not a safe-cracker,’ he says. ‘Safe-cracking is just a hobby with me. I feel a man should have diversified interests.’ The announcer is very surprised. ‘Not a safe-cracker?’ he asks. ‘Just a hobby? May I ask then, sir, what you actually do for a living?’ “

  “And what does the man at the safe answer?” Carella said.

  “The man at the safe blows out a stream of smoke,” Meyer said, “and again he smiles politely. ‘Certainly, you may ask,’ he says. ‘I’m a pimp,’ ” Meyer grinned broadly. “You like it, Steve?”

  “Very good. Here’s the address. Don’t tell jokes to this lady or she may not let us in.”

  “Who’s telling jokes? I may quit this lousy job one day and get a job with an advertising agency.”

  “Don’t do it, Meyer. We couldn’t get along without you.”

  Together, they entered the tenement. The woman they were looking for was named Martha Livingston, and she had reported the absence of her son, Richard, only a week ago. The boy was nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, and weighed 194 pounds. These facts, and these alone, qualified him as a candidate for the person who had once owned the severed hand.

  “Which apartment is it?” Meyer asked.

  “Twenty-four. Second floor front.”

  They climbed to the second floor. A cat in the hallway mewed and then eyed them suspiciously.

  “She smells the law on us,” Meyer said. “She thinks we’re from the ASPCA.”

  “She doesn’t know we’re really street cleaners,” Carella said.

  Meyer stooped down to pet the cat as Carella knocked on the door. “Come on, kitty,” he said. “Come on, little kitty.”

  “Who is it?” a woman’s voice shouted. The voice sounded startled.

  “Mrs. Livingston?” Carella said to the door.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Police,” Carella said. “Would you open t
he door, please?”

  “Po—”

  And then there was silence.

  The silence was a familiar one. It was the silence of sudden discovery and hurried pantomime. Whatever was going on behind that tenement door, Mrs. Livingston was not in the apartment alone. The silence persisted. Meyer’s hand left the cat’s head and went up to the holster clipped to the right side of his belt. He looked at Carella curiously. Carella’s .38 was already in his hand.

  “Mrs. Livingston?” Carella called.

  There was no answer from within the apartment.

  “Mrs. Livingston?” he called again, and Meyer braced himself against the opposite wall, waiting. “Okay, kick it in,” Carella said.

  Meyer brought back his right leg, shoved himself off the wall with his left shoulder, and smashed his foot against the lock in a flat-footed kick that sent the door splintering inward. He rushed into the room behind the opening door, gun in hand.

  “Hold it!” he yelled, and a thin man in the process of stepping out onto the fire escape, one leg over the sill, the other still in the room, hesitated for a moment, undecided.

  “You’ll get wet out there, mister,” Meyer said.

  The man hesitated a moment longer, and then came back into the room. Meyer glanced at his feet. He was wearing no socks. He glanced sheepishly at the woman who stood opposite him near the bed. The woman was wearing a slip. There was nothing under it. She was a big blowzy dame of about forty-five with hennaed hair and a drunkard’s faded eyes.

  “Mrs. Livingston?” Carella asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “What the hell do you mean busting in here?”

  “What was your friend’s hurry?” Carella asked.

  “I’m in no hurry,” the thin man answered.

  “No? You always leave a room by the window?”

  “I wanted to see if it was still raining.”

  “It’s still raining. Get over here.”

  “What did I do?” the man asked, but he moved quickly to where the two detectives were standing. Methodically, Meyer frisked him, his hands pausing when he reached the man’s belt. He pulled a revolver from the man’s waist and handed it to Carella.

  “You got a permit for this?” Carella asked.

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “You’d better have. What’s your name, mister?”

  “Cronin,” he said. “Leonard Cronin.”

  “Why were you in such a hurry to get out of here, Mr. Cronin?”

  “You don’t have to answer nothing, Lennie,” Mrs. Livingston said.

  “You a lawyer, Mrs. Livingston?” Meyer said.

  “No, but—”

  “Then stop giving advice. We asked you a question, Mr. Cronin.”

  “Don’t tell him nothing, Lennie.”

  “Look, Lennie,” Meyer said patiently, “we got all the time in the world, either here or up at the squad, so you just decide what you’re going to say, and then say it. In the meantime, go put on your socks, and you better put on a robe or something, Mrs. Livingston, before we get the idea a little hanky-panky was going on in this room. Okay?”

  “I don’t need no robe,” Mrs. Livingston said. “What I got, you seen before.”

  “Yeah, but put on the robe anyway. We wouldn’t want you to catch cold.”

  “Don’t worry about me catching cold, you son-of-a-bitch,” Mrs. Livingston said.

  “Nice talk,” Meyer answered, shaking his head. Cronin, sitting on the edge of the bed, was pulling on his socks. He was wearing black trousers. A black raincoat was draped over a wooden chair in the corner of the room. A black umbrella dripped water onto the floor near the night-table.

  “You were forgetting your raincoat and umbrella, weren’t you, Lennie?” Carella said.

  Cronin looked up from lacing his shoes. “I guess so.”

  “You’d both better come along with us,” Carella said. “Put on some clothes, Mrs. Livingston.”

  Mrs. Livingston seized her left breast with her left hand. She aimed it like a pistol at Carella, squeezed it briefly and angrily, and shouted, “In your eye, cop!”

  “Okay, then, come along the way you are. We can add indecent exposure to the prostitution charge the minute we hit the street.”

  “Prosti—! What the hell are you talking about? Boy, you got a nerve!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carella said. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

  “Why’d you have to bust in here anyway?” Mrs. Livingston said. “What do you want?”

  “We come to ask you some questions about your missing son, that’s all,” Carella said.

  “My son? Is that what this is all about? I hope the bastard is dead. Is that why you broke down the door, for Christ’s sake?”

  “If you hope he’s dead, why’d you bother to report him missing?”

  “So I could get relief checks. He was my sole means of support. The minute he took off, I applied for relief. And I had to report him missing to make it legit. That’s why. You think I care whether he’s dead or alive? Some chance!”

  “You’re a nice lady, Mrs. Livingston,” Meyer said.

  “I am a nice lady,” she answered. “Is there something wrong about a matinee with the man you love?”

  “Not if your husband doesn’t disapprove.”

  “My husband is dead,” she said. “And in hell.”

  “You both behave as if there was a little more than that going on, Mrs. Livingston,” Carella said. “Get dressed. Meyer, take a look through the apartment.”

  “You got a search warrant?” the little man asked. “You got no right to go through this place without a warrant.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Lennie,” Carella said. “We’ll come back with one.”

  “I know my rights,” Cronin said.

  “Sure.”

  “I know my rights.”

  “How about it, lady? Dressed or naked, you’re coming over to the station house. Now which will it be?”

  “In your eye!” Lady Livingston said.

  The patrolmen downstairs all managed to drop up to the Interrogation Room on one pretense or another to take a look at the fat redheaded slob who sat answering questions in her slip. Andy Parker said to Miscolo in the Clerical Office, “We take a mug shot of her like that, and we’ll be able to peddle the photos for five bucks apiece.”

  “This precinct got glamour, that’s what it’s got,” Miscolo answered, and he went back to his typing.

  Parker and Hawes went downtown for the search warrant. Upstairs, Meyer and Carella and Lieutenant Byrnes interrogated the two suspects. Byrnes, because he was an older man and presumably less susceptible to the mammalian display, interrogated Martha Livingston in the Interrogation Room off the corridor. Meyer and Carella talked to Leonard Cronin in a corner of the squadroom, far from Lennie’s overexposed paramour.

  “Now, how about it, Lennie?” Meyer said. “You really got a permit for this rod, or are you just snowing us? Come on, you can talk to us.”

  “Yeah, I got a permit,” Cronin said. “Would I kid you guys?”

  “I don’t think you’d try to kid us, Lennie,” Meyer said gently, “and we won’t try to kid you, either. I can’t tell you very much about this, but it can be very serious, take my word for it.”

  “How do you mean serious?”

  “Well, let’s say there could be a lot more involved here than just a Sullivan Act violation. Let’s put it that way.”

  “You mean because I was banging Martha when you come in? Is that what you mean?”

  “No, not that, either. Let’s say there is a very big juicy crime involved here maybe. And let’s say you could find yourself right in the middle of it. Okay? So level with us from the start, and things may go easier for you.”

  “I don’t know what big juicy crime you’re talking about,” Cronin said.

  “Well, you think about it a little,” Carella said.

  “You mean the gat? Okay, I ain’t got a permit. Is that what you mean?”

&nb
sp; “Well, that’s not too serious, Lennie,” Meyer said. “No, we’re not thinking about the pistol.”

  “Then what? You mean like because Martha’s husband ain’t really croaked? You mean like because you got us on adultery?”

  “Well, even that isn’t too serious, Lennie,” Carella said. “That we can talk about.”

  “Then what? The junk?”

  “The junk, Lennie?”

  “Yeah, in the room.”

  “Heroin, Lennie?”

  “No, no, hey, no, nothing big like that. The mootah. Just a few sticks, though. Just for kicks. That ain’t so serious, now is it?”

  “No, that could be very minor, Lennie. Depending on how much marijuana you had there in the room.”

  “Oh, just a few sticks.”

  “Well then, you’ve only got a possession rap to worry about. You weren’t planning on selling any of that stuff, were you, Lennie?”

  “No, no, hey, no, it was just for kicks, just for me and Martha, like you know for kicks. We lit a few sticks before we hopped between the sheets.”

  “Then that’s not too serious, Lennie.”

  “So what’s so serious?”

  “The boy.”

  “What boy?”

  “Martha’s son. Richard, that’s his name, isn’t it?”

  “How do I know? I never even met the kid.”

  “You never met him? How long have you known Martha?”

  “I met her last night. In a bar. A joint called The Short-Snorter, you know it? It’s run by these two guys, they used to be in the China-Burma-India—”

  “You only met her last night?”

  “Sure.”

  “She said you were the man she loved,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, it was love at first sight.”

  “And you never met her son?”

  “Never.”

  “You ever fly, Lennie?”

  “Fly? How do you mean fly? You talking about the marijuana again?”

  “No, fly. In an airplane.”

  “Never. Just catch me dead in one of them things!”

  “How long have you gone for black, Lennie?”

  “Black? How do you mean black?”