Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

by Ed McBain

  “How so?”

  “Out for kicks,” Kissovsky said, tossing one hand upward in a salute to God. “Live, live, burn, burn, bright like a Roman candle, bullshit! Every port we hit, Androvich went ashore and come back drunk as a fish. And dames? All over the lot! It’s a wonder this guy didn’t come down with the Oriental Crud or something, the way he was knocking around. Kicks! That’s all he was looking for. Kicks!”

  “A girl in every port, huh?” Carella said.

  “Sure, and drunk as a pig. I used to tell him you got a sweet little wife waiting for you home, you want to bring her back a present from one of these exotic tomatoes, is that what you want to do? He used to laugh at me. Ha, ha, ha. Big joke. Life was a big joke. So he jumps ship, and he screws up the chocolate pudding. That’s a sailor, huh?”

  “Did he have a girl in this city, too, Captain Kissovsky?”

  “Lay off the captain crap, huh?” Kissovsky said. “Call me Artie, okay, and I’ll call you George or whatever the hell your name is, and that way we cut through the fog, okay?”

  “It’s Steve.”

  “Okay. Steve. That’s a good name. I got a brother named Steve. He’s strong as an ox. He can lift a Mack truck with his bare hands, that kid.”

  “Artie, did Androvich have a girl in this city?”

  Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth, maneuvered the matchbook folder around the back of his mouth, and thought. He spit a sliver of food onto the deck, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Who would know?”

  “Maybe the other guys in the crew, but I doubt it. Anything happens on this tub, I know about it. I can tell you one thing. He didn’t spend his nights sitting around holding hands with little Lulu Belle or whatever the hell her name is.”

  “Meg? His wife?”

  “Yeah, Meg. The one he’s got tattooed on his arm there. The one he picked up in Atlanta. Beats me how she ever got him to come up with a ring.” Kissovsky shrugged. “Anyway, she did get him to marry her, but that don’t mean she also got him to sit home tatting doilies. No, sir. This kid was out to live! No doilies for him. Doilies are for the Sands Spit commuters, not for the Karl Androviches. You know what he’d do?”

  “What?” Carella asked.

  “We’d pull into port, you know. I mean here, this city. So he’d wait like two weeks, living it up all over town, shooting his roll, before he’d call home to say we were in. And maybe this was like about two days before we were going to pull out again. Buddy, this kid was giving that girl the business in both ears. She seems like a nice kid, too. I feel a little sorry for her.” He shrugged and spit onto the deck again.

  “Where’d he go?” Carella asked. “When he wasn’t home? Where’d he hang out?”

  “Wherever there are dames,” Kissovsky said.

  “There are dames all over the city.”

  “Then that’s where he hung out. All over the city. I’ll bet you a five-dollar bill he’s with some dame right now. He’ll drop in on little Scarlett O’Hara or whatever the hell her name is, the minute he runs out of money.”

  “He only had thirty dollars with him when he vanished,” Carella said.

  “Thirty dollars, my eye! Who told you that? There was a big crap game on the way up from Pensacola. Androvich was one of the winners. Took away something like seven hundred bucks. That ain’t hay, Steve-oh. Add to that all of January’s pay, you know we were holding it until we hit port, and that adds up to quite a little bundle. And we were only in port here two days. We docked on the twelfth, and we were shoving off on the fourteenth, Valentine’s Day. So a guy can’t spend more than a grand in two days, can he?” Kissovsky paused thoughtfully. “The way I figure it, he started back for the ship, picked up some floozie, and has been living it high on the hog with her for the past month or so. When the loot runs out, Androvich’ll be home.”

  “You think he’s just having himself a fling, is that it?”

  “Just running true to form, that’s all. In Nagasaki, when we was there, this guy…well, that’s another story.” He paused. “You ain’t worried about him, are you?”

  “Well…”

  “Don’t be. Check the whorehouses, and the strip joints, and the bars, and Skid Row. You’ll find him, all right. Only thing is, I don’t think he wants to be found. So what’re you gonna do when you latch onto him? Force him to go back to Melissa Lee, or whatever the hell her name is?”

  “No, we couldn’t do that,” Carella said.

  “So what the hell are you bothering for?” Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth and then spat on the deck. “Stop worrying,” he said. “He’ll turn up.”

  The garbage cans were stacked in the areaway between the two tenements, and the rain had formed small pools of water on the lid of each can. The old woman was wearing house slippers, and so she stepped gingerly into the areaway and tried to avoid the water underfoot, walking carefully to the closest garbage can, carrying her bag of garbage clutched to her breast like a sucking infant.

  She lifted the lid of the can and shook the water free and was about to drop her bag into the can when she saw that it was filled. The old lady was Irish, and she unleashed a torrent of swear words that would have turned a leprechaun blue, replaced the lid, and went to the second garbage can. She was thoroughly drenched now, and she cursed the fact that she hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella down with her, cursed the lid of the second garbage can because it seemed to be stuck, finally wrenched it free, soaking herself anew with the water that had been resting on it, and prepared to toss her bag into it and run like hell for the building.

  Then she saw the newspaper.

  She hesitated for a moment.

  The newspaper had been wrapped around something, but the wrapping had come loose. Curiously, the old lady bent closer to the garbage can.

  And then she let out a shriek.

  Everything happened on Monday.

  To begin with, Blaney—the assistant medical examiner—officially studied the delightful little package that the patrolmen had dug out of the garbage can after a frantic call from the old lady.

  The bloody newspaper contained a human hand.

  And after duly examining this hand, Blaney phoned the 87th to say that it had belonged to a white male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and that unless he was greatly mistaken, it was the mate to the hand he had examined the week before.

  Bert Kling took the telephoned message. He barely had strength enough to hold the pencil in his hand as he wrote down the information.

  That was the first thing that happened on Monday, and it happened at 9:30 in the morning.

  The second thing happened at 11:00 A.M. and it seemed as if the second occurrence would solve once and for all the problem of identification. The second occurrence involved a body that had been washed ashore on the banks of the River Harb. The body had no arms and no head. It was promptly shipped off to the morgue where several things were learned about it.

  To begin with, the body was clothed and a wallet in the right hip pocket of the trousers carried a sopping-wet identification card and a driver’s license. The man in the water was known as George Rice. A call to the number listed on the identification card confirmed Blaney’s estimate that the body had been in the river for close to two weeks. Apparently, Mr. Rice had failed to come home from work one night two weeks ago. His wife had reported him missing, and a sheet on him was allegedly in the files of the MPB. Mrs. Rice was asked to come down to identify the remains as soon as she was able to. In the meantime, Blaney continued his examination.

  And he decided, even though Mr. Rice had been only twenty-six years old, and even though Mr. Rice was lacking arms and a head, and even though Mr. Rice was a good possibility for the person who had owned the two hands that had turned up—he decided after a thorough examination that the body had apparently lost its head and arms through contact with the propeller blades of either a ship or a large boat. And whereas the blood stain on the bottom of the airline bag h
ad belonged to the “O” group, the blood of Mr. Rice checked out as belonging to the “AB” group. And whereas the hugeness of the two hands indicated a big fellow, Mr. Rice, allowing for his missing head, added up to five feet eight and a half inches, and that is not big.

  When Mrs. Rice identified the remains through her husband’s clothing and a scar on his abdomen—the clothing was not in such excellent shape after having been put through the rigorous test of contact with a boat’s propeller and submersion for two weeks, but the scar was still intact—when she made the identification, she also stated that Mr. Rice worked in the next state and that he took a ferry to work each morning and returned by ferry each evening, and it therefore seemed more than likely that Mr. Rice had either jumped, been pushed, or had fallen from the stern of the ferry and thereby been mutilated by the boat’s propellers. A thorough search of the Rice apartment that same day uncovered a suicide note.

  And so it was Blaney’s unfortunate duty to call the 87th once more and report to Kling, the weary weekend horseman, that the hands he’d been examining over the past few days did not belong to the body that had been washed ashore that morning.

  So that was that, and the problem of identification still remained to be solved, with the young son of Martha Livingston and the young sailor Karl Androvich still shaping up as pretty good possibilities.

  But it was still Monday, a very blue Monday at that because it was raining, and everything was going to happen on Monday.

  At 2:00 P.M. the third thing happened.

  Two hoodlums were picked up in the next state, and both gave the police address in Isola. A teletype to City Headquarters requesting information netted a B-sheet for one of them, but no record for the other. The boys, it seemed, had held up a Shell station and then tried a hasty escape in a beat-up automobile. So hasty was their departure that they neglected to notice a police car that was cruising along the highway, with the result that they smacked right into the front right fender of the approaching black-and-white sedan, and that was the end of that little caper. The boy carrying the gun, the one with the record, was named Robert Germaine.

  The other boy, the sloppy driver who’d slammed into the motor patrol car, was named Richard Livingston.

  No matter how sloppily you drive a car, it takes two hands— and Richard Livingston was in possession of both of his.

  Kling got the information at 3:00 P.M. With weary, shaking fingers, he wrote it down and reminded himself to tell Carella to chalk off a possible victim.

  At 4:10 P.M. the telephone rang again.

  “Hello,” Kling said.

  “Who’s this?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “This is Detective Kling, 87th Squad. Who’s this?”

  “Mrs. Androvich,” the voice said. “Mrs. Karl Androvich.”

  “Oh. Hello, Mrs. Androvich. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

  “I mean, what—”

  “My husband’s back,” Meg Androvich said.

  “Karl?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s back?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did he return?”

  “Just a few minutes ago,” she said. She paused for a long time. Then she said, “He brought me flowers.”

  “I’m glad he’s back,” Kling said. “I’ll notify the Missing Persons Bureau. Thank you for calling.”

  “Not at all,” Meg said. “Would you do me a favor, please?”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Androvich?”

  “Would you please tell that other detective? Carella? Was that his name?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Would you please tell him?”

  “That your husband’s back? Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell him.”

  “No, not that. That’s not what I want you to tell him.”

  “What do you want me to tell him, Mrs. Androvich?”

  “That Karl brought me flowers. Tell him that, would you? That Karl brought me flowers.” And she hung up.

  So that was what happened on Monday.

  And that was everything.

  The boys still had a pair of hands to work with, and nobody seemed to belong to those hands.

  On Tuesday, there was a street rumble, and a fire in the neighborhood, and a woman who clobbered her husband with a frying pan, and so everybody was pretty busy.

  On Wednesday, Steve Carella came back to work. It was still raining. It seemed as if it would never stop raining. A week had gone by since Patrolman Genero had found the first hand.

  A whole week had gone by, and the boys were right back where they’d started.

  The old woman who’d discovered the second hand in the garbage can was named Colleen Brady. She was sixty-four years old, but there was about her a youthfulness that complied faithfully to her given name, so that indeed she seemed to be a colleen.

  There is an image that comes instantly to mind whenever an Irish girl is mentioned, an image compounded of one part Saint Patrick’s Day to three parts John Huston’s The Quiet One. The girl has red hair and green eyes, and she runs through the heather beneath a sky of shrieking blue billowing with clouds of pure white, and there is a wild smile on her mouth, and you know she will slap you silly if you try to touch her. She is Irish and wild and savage and pure and young, forever young, forever youthful.

  And so was Colleen Brady.

  She entertained Carella and Hawes as if they were beaux come to call on her with sprigs of hollyhock. She served them tea, and she told them jokes in a brogue as thick as good Irish coffee. Her eyes were green and bright and her skin was as smooth and as fair as a seventeen-year-old’s. Her hair was white, but you knew with certainty that it had once been red, and her narrow waist could still be spanned by a man with big hands.

  “I saw no one,” she told the detectives. “Nary a soul. It was a day to keep indoors, it was. I saw no one in the hallway, and no one on the stairs, and no one in the courtyard. It was a right bitter day, and I should have carried down me umbrella, but I didn’t. I like to have died from faint when I saw what was in that garbage can. Will y’have more tea?

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Brady. You saw no one?”

  “No one, aye. And I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, for ‘tis a gruesome thing to cut a man apart, a gruesome thing. ‘Tis a thing for barbarians.” She paused, sipping at her tea, her green eyes alert in her narrow face. “Have you tried the neighbors? Have you asked them? Perhaps they saw.”

  “We wanted to talk to you first, Mrs. Brady,” Hawes said.

  She nodded. “Are you Irish, young man?” she asked.

  “Part.”

  Her green eyes glowed. She nodded secretly and said nothing more, but she studied Hawes with the practiced eye of a young girl who’d been chased around the village green more than once.

  “Well, we’ll be going now, Mrs. Brady,” Carella said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Try the neighbors,” she told them. “Maybe they saw. Maybe one of them saw.”

  None of them had seen.

  They tried every apartment in Mrs. Brady’s building and the building adjoining it. Then, wearily, they trudged back to the squadroom in the rain. Hernandez had a message for Carella the moment he walked in.

  “Steve, got a call about a half-hour ago from a guy at the MPB. He asked for Kling, but I told him he was out, and he wanted to know who else was on the case of the hand in the airline bag, so I told him you were. He said either you or Kling should call him back the minute either of you got in.”

  “What’s his name?” Carella asked.

  “It’s on the pad there. Bartholomew or something.”

  Carella sat at his desk and pulled the pad over. “Romeo Bartholdi,” he said aloud, and he dialed the Missing Persons Bureau.

  “Hello,” he said, “this is Carella at the 87th Precinct. We got a call here a little while ago from some guy named Bartholdi, said he—”

  “This is Bartholdi.”

  “Hi. What’s up?�
�

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Carella.”

  “Hello, paisan.”

  “Hello,” Carella said, smiling. “What’s this all about?”

  “Look, I know this is none of my business. But something occurred to me.”

  “What is it?”

  “A guy named Kling was in last week some time looking through the files. I got to talking to him later, and he told me how you guys found a hand in an airline overnight bag. A guy’s hand.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Carella said. “What about it?”

  “Well, paisan, this is none of my business. Only he was looking for a possible connection with a disappearance, and he was working through the February stuff, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He said the bag belonged to an outfit called Circle Airlines, am I right?”

  “That’s right,” Carella said.

  “Okay. This may be reaching, but here it is anyway, for whatever it’s worth. My partner and I have been trying to track down a dame who vanished about three weeks ago. She’s a stripper, came here from Kansas City in January. Name’s Bubbles Caesar. That’s not the straight handle, Carella. She was born Barbara Cesare, the Bubbles is for the stage. She’s got them, too, believe me.”

  “Well, what about her?” Carella asked.

  “She was reported missing by her agent, a guy named Charles Tudor, on February thirteenth, day before Valentine’s Day. What’s today’s date, anyway?”