Koski looked up at Gurlid.
“Crysake, mister, I don’t know. The kid was playin’ on the slip right after breakfast. Soon’s it was light.”
Koski put his hand on Dorothy’s head, rumpled her hair. “What’d the man look like? Was he as big as your father?”
“Mh, hmm.” She stopped weeping, eyed him warily. “Bigger.”
“What kind of clothes was he wearing?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Remember his hat? His overcoat?”
“I don’t b’lieve he had any. Any overcoat, I mean. I don’t know if he had a cap...”
“Know him if you saw him again?”
She nodded.
“How would you know him? Did he have a mustache? Or a beard?”
“He was hurt.” The announcement was defiant.
“Oh!” Koski crinkled up the corners of his eyes; held out his hand. “You mean he was lame? Limping? Or where was he hurt?”
She put small fingers on his palm, timidly. “His face. It was all bandaged up.”
“Across here?” The Lieutenant ran one finger across his forehead.
“All over his chin.” She clasped her free hand over her mouth, close up under her nose. “Like this. A big white bannage.”
Gurlid tapped Koski’s shoulder. “Listen, mister. I don’t like the idea her getting her name in the papers saying she could spot this fella. Maybe he comes down here some fine night an’ Dot winds up in the river, see? I don’t like it.”
“Keep your hair on.” Koski made one more try, with the child. “How’d the man get on the pier? Come in a car? Or walk?”
“I only saw him onna wharf. Before I went over on South Street for oyster shells for the winna-box.” She pointed to a box nailed beneath the white curtains of the cabin window.
“Okay.” Koski patted her shoulder. “You’re a help, Dorothy. Now I want you to do one more thing for me.”
She waited gravely.
“Don’t tell anyone you saw this man. Understand? Not anybody at all.”
“A secret?”
“That’s it.” He turned to the boys. “Show me where you dragged this thing up.”
They led him across a bridge of barges, jumping from one to the next, over yawning gaps with swiftly flowing tidewater beneath, as if they were merely playing hopscotch. He scrambled up the string-piece, crossed the pier after them. A solitary drunk watched them owlishly from his perch on a huge, iron bollard.
“Right about here,” Herbie pointed.
“Yuh, that’s right.” The older boy indicated a row of splintered wood-fibers. “Here’s where we dragged it over.”
Koski looked around. There were no barges on this side of the wharf. A man might have dropped the suitcase overside without anyone noticing unless the pilot of a passing tug should have observed him from out in the river. “All right, boys. Don’t ask around about this bird with his face bandaged. But if you hear anyone else talking about him — or if you see him — hike for a cop. Ask him to call Koski, Harbor Precinct.”
They said they would.
He went back to the barge, took the suitcase, dropped down to the deck of the Vigilant.
Mulcahey put down the comic section he was reading by the binnacle light. “All quiet on the Potomac?”
“This guy is quiet.” He laid the suitcase flat in the cockpit. “Take it away, Irish. Want to put this on ice before it spoils.”
The Sergeant cast off, backed the patrol-boat out into the tidestream. “You’re not telling me there is a stiff in that? Unless maybe it was a contortionist?”
“Part one, only. To be continued. Maybe.” When the Vigilant hit her stride, Koski thumbed back the catches, got the lid up, pulled the cloth away. “Kid fished it up on a crab line. Sweet?”
“Holy Mother!” Mulcahey swallowed hard. “What kind of filthy devil would be hackin’ up a dead body like that, now!”
“Gent who wanted to be sure we didn’t identify his victim. All I know about the killer is he wore a bandage over the lower part of his mugg. For the same reason. So we couldn’t identify him.”
“That lug who runs the barge, mayhap?”
“Oh, sure. Bird who’s been workin’ the river tows for three years. Raising a family of five in a two-room cabin with no electric or running water. So you’d figure he was a criminal because his kid happens to dredge up a corpse!”
“Since I first started scuffing grooves in the pavement of the eighteenth parish,” Mulcahey braced himself against the wash of a railroad tug, “it has been my understanding the powers that be insist on detainment of the person reporting a homicide.”
“Want me to take a ten-year-old kid into custody? Make with the gas. Maybe the Medical Examiner’s boys can tell something from this guy’s insides.”
“They would have no trouble doing the same with me, after giving that the once-over.”
Koski pulled the wadding out of the suitcase — strips of torn sheeting, a ripped pillowslip. Something that had been caught in a fold of the fabric clattered to the cockpit floor, rolled in a corner against the tool locker. He retrieved it — a polished cylinder of brown plastic about an inch long. On one end was a narrow band of copper; from the other extended two metal prongs. He held it up so the Sergeant could see.
“Looks like one them wall plugs for an electric fixure, Steve. Some kind of a jack-plug.”
“Plug, all right. Crystal.”
“Huh?”
“Crystal. Inside this.” Koski tapped the plastic with a fingernail. “For a radio set.”
“Is it now?” Mulcahey threw the clutch into neutral, let the Vigilant coast into the quiet water of the Battery Basin. “From the looks of them mutilated remains, I would deduce they been worked over by something considerably more brutal than a loudspeaker.”
“Yair.” Koski remained in his crouching position, with the bit of plastic in his fingers, for some seconds after the police-boat came to rest rocking gently on its afterwake. “Sure. But under the right circumstances — or the wrong ones — this thing might murder a hell of a lot of men, too.”
He closed the suitcase, carried it ashore.
II
Koski snapped the metal catches, pressed the lock to one side. “It’s not much to go on, Inspector.” He lifted the lid of the suitcase.
“Ahrrr!” Deputy Inspector Nixon pressed his lips tightly; squinted as if his eyes hurt from the light funneling down out of the green conical shade over the table. “Don’t you ever get the jeebies, thinking about the floaters the Marine Division turns over to the Bureau?”
“This one’s no floater. Hadn’t been in the water long enough to bloat. Somebody packed him in the suitcase, just like this; dunked him in the East River. Barge-kid fishing for crabs hooked onto the handle, dredged it up.”
“First stiff I ever saw who really went to hell in a hand-basket.” Nixon ran fingers through graying hair, made a gargling noise in the back of his throat. “Where’s the rest of him?”
Koski spread his palms. “That’s all the murderer could get in one suitcase.”
“Just enough so the press boys can drag out those torso headlines. Holy Joe! Get busy with your grappling irons. Bring us something to work with. We can’t tell you anything from this.” Nixon jerked a thumb disgustedly toward the raw stump of flesh. “He was male, white and over twenty-one. He’d never had his appendix out. What more you expect?”
The man from the Harbor Squad pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Thought you Identification experts were supposed to have comparative tables on weights, heights, chest measurements...”