by Alan Glenn
A series of bells rang somewhere. Something nudged his foot. Sam opened his eyes.
“That was the station,” Sarah said. “Someone’s found a body.”
* * *
The taller cop said, “Sorry to get you wet, Sam. You okay with that?” His companion laughed. The tall cop was Frank Reardon, and his shorter and younger partner was Leo Gray. The third man stood behind them, silent, arms folded, shivering.
“I’ll be just fine,” Sam answered. The body beside the tracks was splayed out like a starfish, mouth open to the falling rain, eyes closed. The man had on black shoes and dark slacks and a white shirt and a dark suit coat. No necktie. No overcoat. Sam stepped closer, stopped at the gravel edge of the tracks. The man lay on a stretch of ground that was a smooth outcropping of mud, with just a few tufts of faded grass.
“How long have you been here?” Sam asked Frank.
“ ’Bout ten minutes. Just long enough to make sure there was something here.”
“That our witness?”
“Yeah.” Frank grabbed the third man by the elbow and tugged him forward. “Lou Purdue, age fifty. Claims he found the body about an hour ago.”
“An hour?” Sam asked. “That’s a long time. Why did it take you so long to call us?”
Purdue was bearded and smiled with embarrassment, revealing bad teeth. He wore a tattered wool watch cap and a long army overcoat missing buttons and held together with safety pins. “I tried, I really tried.” His voice was surprisingly deep. “But the Shanty place, I went there and asked them to call, and they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even give me a nickel for the pay phone. So I went out in the street and waited till I saw a cop car come by. I waved them down, that’s what I did.”
Sam asked Frank Reardon, “That true?”
“Yeah, Sam. Almost ran over the poor bastard. Said there was a dead guy by the tracks, we had to come up to see it. We came up, saw what was what, then I sent Leo back to make the call. And here you are. Pulled you away from dinner, I bet.”
“That’s right,” Sam said, playing the beam from the flashlight over the body. The man’s clothes were soaked through, and he felt a flicker of disquiet, seeing the falling rain splatter over the frozen features, the skin wet and ghostly white.
The younger cop piped up. “Who was there? The mayor?”
Sam tightened his grip on his flashlight, then turned and played the beam over Leo Gray’s face. The young cop was smiling but closed his eyes against the glare. “No, Leo. The mayor wasn’t there. Your wife was there. And we were having a nice little chat about how she peddles her ass to pipefitters from the shipyard ’cause you waste so much money on the ponies at Rockingham. Then I told her I’d arrest her if I ever saw her on Daniel Street at night again.”
Frank laughed softly, and Leo opened his eyes and lowered his head. Sam, feeling a flash of anger at losing his temper to the young punk because of his father-in-law, turned back to the witness. “How’d you find the body?”
Purdue wiped at his runny nose. “I was walking the tracks. Sometimes you can find lumps of coal, you know? They fall off the coal cars as they pass through, and I bring ’em back. That’s when I saw him over there. I figured he was drunk or something, and I kept trying to wake him up by callin’ to him, and he didn’t move.”
“Did you touch the body?”
Purdue shook his head violently. “Nope. Not going to happen. Saw lots of dead men back in the Great War, in the mud and the trenches. I know what they look like. Don’t need to see anyone up close. No sir.”
The wind gusted some and Purdue rubbed his arms, shivering again, despite the tattered army overcoat. Sam looked back at the Fish Shanty, saw a flashlight bobbing toward them from the parking lot. “What’s your address?” he asked Purdue.
“None, really. I’m staying with some friends … you know.” He gestured to the other end of the tracks, where the hobo encampment was clustered near a maple grove. “Originally from Troy. New York.”
“How did you end up here?”
“Heard a story that the shipyard might be hiring. That they needed strong hands, guys who could take orders. I took orders plenty well in the army, and I figured it was best to come out here. Maybe they’d be a veteran’s preference. So far—well, no luck. But my name’s on the list. I go over every week, make sure my name’s still there. You know how it goes.”
Sam knew, and spared a glance at the lights staining the eastern horizon. The federal Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, set on an island in the middle of the Piscataqua River, an island claimed bitterly by both New Hampshire and Maine for tax purposes, and busily churning out submarines for the slowly expanding U.S. Navy. The world was at war again, decades after this filthy soul before him and Sam’s father had suffered to make the world safe for democracy. Some safety.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I know. I might need to talk to you again. How can I do that?”
“The place—you know the place down there. Just ask for me. Lou from Troy. I can be found pretty easy, don’t you worry.”
“I won’t. Hold on.” Sam reached under his coat, took out his wallet, and slipped a dollar bill out of the billfold, along with his business card. He folded the dollar bill over the card and passed it to the soaked and trembling man. “Go get some soup or coffee to warm up, okay? Thanks for grabbing a cop, and thanks for not disturbing the body. And call me if you think of anything else.”
The dollar bill vanished into the man’s hand. He snickered and walked in the direction of the camp, calling back through the darkness, “Hell, a damn thing for that guy to end up dead. But hell. That’s a lucky walk, you’ve got to say, finding a body like that and making a buck … a hell of a lucky walk.”
Frank shuffled his feet, “So the bum gets to go someplace dry. You gonna look at the dead guy some, or you gonna keep us freezing out here?”
“Going to wait a bit longer,” Sam replied. “Don’t worry. The coffee and chowder will be waiting for you, no matter the time.”
“What are you waiting for, then?”
“To record history, Leo, before we disturb it. That’s what.”
Frank muttered, “Ah, screw history.”
“You got that wrong, Frank,” Sam said. “You can’t screw history, but history can always screw you.”
Another minute or two passed. From the distance, near where the fires of the hobo camp flickered, came a hollow boom, and then another.
“Sounds like a gunshot, don’t it,” Frank said, his voice uneasy.
The younger cop laughed. “Maybe somebody just shot that hobo for the dollar you gave him.”
Sam looked to the thin flames from the hobo camp. He and the other cops stayed clear of the camps, especially at night. Too many shadows, and too many angry men with knives or clubs or firearms lived in those shadows. He cleared his throat. “We got one dead man here. If another one appears later, we’ll take care of it. In the meantime, you guys looking for extra work?”
The other cops just hunched their shoulders up against the driving rain, stayed quiet. That was the way of their world, Sam thought. Just do your job and keep your mouth shut. Anything else was too dangerous.
CHAPTER TWO
From the rainy gloom, another man stumbled toward them, swearing loudly, carrying a leather case over his shoulder, like one of the hordes of unemployed men who went door-to-door during this second decade of the Great Depression, peddling hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shoelaces. But this man was Ralph Morancy, a photographer for the Portsmouth Herald and sometime photographer for the Portsmouth Police Department.
He dropped the case on the railroad ties and said, “Inspector Miller. Haven’t seen you since your promotion from sergeant to inspector, when I took that lovely page-one photo of you, your wife, the police marshal, and our mayor.”
Sam said, “That’s right. A lovely photo indeed. And I’m still waiting for the copy you promised me.”
Ralph spat as he removed his Speed Graphic camera from the case. “Lots of people
ahead of you. Can’t do your photo and be accused of favoritism, now, can I?”
“I guess not. I remember how long it took you to get me another copy of a photograph, back when I was in high school.”
The older man rummaged through his case, clumsily sheltering it from the rain with his body. “Ah, yes, our star quarterback, back when Portsmouth won the championship. How long did it take for me back then?”
“A year.”
“Well, I promise to be quicker this time.”
Sam said, “Just take the damn photos, all right?”
Ralph put a flashbulb in the camera with ease, like a magician performing the same trick for the thousandth time. “Anything special, Inspector?”
“The usual body shots. I also want the ground around the body.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I want photos of what’s not there,” Sam said.
Frank Reardon stirred. “What’s not there? What kind of crap is that?”
Sam played the flashlight beam around the corpse, the raindrops sparking in the light. “What do you see around the body?”
“Nothing,” Leo said. “Mud and grass.”
“Right,” Sam said. “No footprints. No drag marks. No sign of a struggle. Just a body plopped down in the mud, like he dropped from the sky. And I want to make sure we get the photos before the body’s moved.”
He kept the flashlight beam centered on the corpse. The rain fell in straight lines, striking the dead man’s face. To Sam, the dead man looked like a wax dummy. There was a sudden slash of light, and Sam flinched as Ralph took the first photo. As Ralph replaced the bulb, he groused, “Plenty of time for me to make tomorrow’s edition.”
“No,” Sam said. “You know the arrangement, Ralph. We get twenty-four hours, first dibs, before you use any crime scene photos in the paper.”
Another flash, and Sam blinked at the dots of light floating before his eyes. “Come on, Inspector, give me a break,” Ralph muttered. “Twelve hours, twenty-four hours. What difference does it make?”
“If it’s twenty-four hours, it makes no difference at all. If it’s twelve hours, the department makes arrangements with another photographer. You’re an educated man, Ralph, you know what the jobless numbers are like. You really want to dick around with this sweet deal?”
A third flare of light. “Some goddamn sweet deal, getting rained on in the cold, taking photos of a dead bum.”
Sam gave him a gentle slap on his back. “Just the glamour of being a newsman, right?”
“Some fucking glamour. My boss got a visit last week from some jerk in the Department of the Interior. Wanted to know how we’d survive if our newsprint ration got cut again next month. So my boss got the message—tone down the editorials, or the paper gets shut down. Yeah, that’s glamour.”
Sam said, “Spare us the whining. Just get the photos.”
“Coming right up, Inspector. I know how to keep my job, just you see.”
* * *
This was Sam’s first untimely death as an inspector. As a patrolman and, later, sergeant, he had seen a number of bodies, from drowned hoboes pulled from Portsmouth Harbor to sailors knifed outside one of the scores of bars near Ceres Street. But as a patrolman or a sergeant, you secured the scene and waited for the inspector to arrive. That had been old Hugh Johnson, until he died of bone cancer last year.
Now it was Sam’s job, and what he did tonight could decide whether he got to keep it. He was on probation, a month left before he turned in the silver shield of an inspector on tryout, before getting the gold shield and a promised pay raise that would give his family some breathing room, a bit socked away in savings, something that would put them at the top of the heap in this lousy economy. So far, all of his cases had been minor crap, like burglaries, bunco cases, or chasing down leads for the Department of the Interior on labor camp escapees who had ties to the area. But if this turned out to be a homicide, it could help him with the Police Commission and their decision on his ultimate status.
As Ralph made his way back to the restaurant’s parking lot, Frank spoke up. “Sam, looks like this is a lucky night for all of us.”
“Not sure what you mean.”
Frank played the light over the corpse. “Doesn’t look like a political hit, which means it won’t be taken away from us. This’ll be a good first case for you, Sam.”
“Sorry, what in hell’s a political hit?” Leo asked.
Frank answered, “What I mean, kid, is that sometimes bodies pop up here and there, mostly in the big cities, where the guy has his hands tied behind him and he’s got two taps to the back of the head. None of those cases ever get solved. So it’s lucky for us that this guy’s arms are nice and spread out. Means nothing political is involved. We can just do our jobs, and nobody from Concord is going to bother us.”
Sam squatted, winced as a cold dribble of rainwater went down the back of his neck. He looked about him: a dead body, possible homicide, his first major case. Even in the rain and darkness, everything seemed in sharp focus: the two cops and their wet slickers, the mud, and the sour tang of salt water. The scent of piss from the dead man before him, the one who’d brought him here.
The man was thin, maybe fifties, early sixties. The skin was pale and the hair was a whitish blond. No cuts or bruises on the face. Sam touched the skin. Clammy. He went through the pockets of the suit coat, taking his time. No money, no paper, no wallet, no coins, no fountain pen, no cigarettes, no lighter. He sensed the other cops watching him, evaluating him, a feeling he hated.
Sam raised each shirtsleeve, looking for a watch or jewelry. “Frank,” he said. “Bring the light closer, down to his wrist.”
Frank lowered the light, illuminating the skinny white wrist. There. A row of faint squiggles on the skin. Numerals. Sam rubbed at the numerals. They didn’t smudge or come off.
A row of numbers, tattooed along the wrist. Portsmouth was a navy town, and Sam had seen every kind of tattoo, from Neptune to mermaids to naked hula girls, but never anything like this.
The numerals were blue-gray, jagged, as if they had been quickly etched in:
9 1 1 2 8 3
“Frank? You see those numbers? You ever see anything like that before?”
Frank leaned forward, and rainwater poured off his hat brim. “Nope, never have. Maybe the coroner, maybe he’s seen something like that. But not me.”
Though it didn’t make any difference to the dead man, Sam lowered the shirtsleeve. “Leo. Give me a hand here. We need to roll him over.”
“Cripes,” Leo said, but he was a good cop and did as he was told. They rolled the corpse on its side, and Sam checked the front and rear pockets of the trousers. The fabric was sopping wet, but the pockets were empty. The stench from the body grew stronger. Frank was right. No bullet wounds to the base of the skull. Sam and Leo rolled the body back.
“No money, no wallet,” Sam told them, standing up.
Leo said, “Maybe he was stripped, robbed, by one of the bums from the camp.”
Frank laughed. “Shit, kid, don’t be dumb. There’d be footprints. Nope, the way he got here is the way he arrived: no cash and no belongings. Still, Sam …”
“Go on, Frank.”
“Those clothes. They look pretty good. You know? Not from somebody riding boxcars or hitchhiking, looking for work. No patches, no rips. Not brand-new but not … well, not beat up.”
There was noise again from the Fish Shanty parking lot, and Sam looked up to see the hearse from the Woods funeral home roll in. Saunders from the county medical examiner’s office shouldn’t be too far behind, so the body could be moved and they could all get out of this damn rain. Sam was hungry, and it was getting late, and Sarah and Toby were waiting for him at home.
Two attendants carried a canvas stretcher from the hearse, the men holding the stretcher by its side so water didn’t pool in the canvas. Sam didn’t envy them having to haul this corpse back to the hearse, over the gravel and railroad ties, but it wa
s their job. As everyone said nowadays, it was good just to have a job.
Frank stared at the approaching attendants, stumbling a little in the mud, and said, “Hey, Sam. All right if me and the kid take off after the body’s removed?”
“Yeah, but first I want the two of you to do a check of the buildings on this side of the tracks. See if anybody saw anything.”
“They’re mostly stores. They’re all closed by now.”
“Then it won’t take long, will it?” Sam told Frank. “If anything of interest surfaces, call me at home. If not, write up a report. Leave it on my desk when your shift’s over.”
Frank said, “All right. But hey, remember, there’s a Party meeting tomorrow night. You’ve missed the last two. You don’t want me to make a report to the county director, now, do you? Or have one of Long’s boys start asking you questions?”
“Just do the search,” Sam said. “Write something up and put it on my desk. Don’t worry about me and the Party.”
“Sam, that’s the wrong attitude, you know it is.” Frank’s tone had sharpened. “Now, I give you a break ’cause you’re on the force and all, but you better be there, no foolin’. I’d hate to make a formal report. Especially with you being on probation and all. Hate to have something like that affect your promotion.”
Sam folded his arms, flashlight in his right hand, forcing himself not to move, forcing his voice to come out slow and deliberate. “I’ll be at the damn meeting. Okay?”
Leo was grinning, a rookie cop glad to see his mentor give the new detective a hard time. “Your brother be there, Sam?”
Sam aimed his RayoVac at the young cop’s face. “You know my brother?”
“No, but I know where he is,” Leo said. “In a labor camp up in New York.”
Sam kept quiet as the wind rose up, water striking his face, keeping the flashlight beam steady on the younger man. “Then I guess he won’t be there tomorrow night, will he, Leo.”