Nixon lit a cigarette, snorted twin jets of smoke from his nostrils. “Department of Miracles. Two doors on your left. If this damn corpse had even one arm—”
“Make a stab at it. How old was he? How much’d he weigh? How tall would he have been?”
Nixon tilted his head over on one side, assumed a fixed sweet smile. “You wouldn’t like to know his religion or how long had it been since he’d slept with his wife, would you?”
“Might help, at that.”
The Deputy Inspector groaned. “All right, all right. I’ll put somebody on it soon’s the Criminal Alien boys give us a breathing spell. They’ve got me dizzy.”
Koski tapped the damp metal of the suitcase, irritably. “Don’t stick it on your spile and forgetsis. It could be important. Somebody took a lot of trouble to see this lad wasn’t easy to identify.”
“He got away with it, too. If you only had something for us to work with...”
“There was a crystal.”
“My, my. Should have brought it along. Lieutenant. You always expect us to be clairvoyant—”
“You wouldn’t have made anything out of it,” Koski pushed his hat back on his forehead, stood with hands in his hip pockets. “It was probably dropped in the suitcase accidentally. I turned it over to the technical lab. Kind they use in, shortwave sets. Might have belonged to this guy. More likely to the murderer. I’m interested in any gent who runs around with spare short-wave parts, these days.”
“Well, listen! Don’t expect us to identify your suspects. Tough enough to trace the cadavers.”
“Then there was this.” Koski touched the sodden cloth. “Strips torn from a sheet. Old sheet. Part of a pillowslip.”
Nixon’s eyebrows went up. “Laundry mark?”
“Might be. Might have been the owner’s mark. Hotel, maybe.” Koski held up the segment that had been packed between the right arm-stump and the canvas lining of the case. “Three vertical lines and a cross-bar.”
“Not a hotel. Not one of the big ones, anyway. I’ll put Yulch on it; he’s got every cleaning plant from Washington east in that card index.” The Deputy Inspector rubbed the fabric tentatively between thumb and forefinger. “Cheap stuff. Sort they use in buck-a-night joints.”
“Likely. Shoot this over to the Examiner’s office soon’s you’re through with it, huh? They might find out what he had to eat for his last meal.”
“That’ll be a big help.”
“Give me a bell at Pier One when you’ve got something on him?”
“If we get anything.” Nixon grimaced at the contents of the suitcase, let the lid down gently. “Want a check on the luggage, too?”
Koski nodded. “Regular leather-goods store wouldn’t carry that kind of junk. Probably came from one of the gyp stores near the midtown hotels. If it didn’t come from out of town. Be a manufacturer’s lot number stamped on the inside of the frame, won’t there?”
“Sometimes is. Sometimes not. Only take two men the best part of a week to run that down.” The Deputy Inspector snapped out the light over the table. “Some day you’re going to bring in a nice clean suicide with his name and address on a label sewn inside his coat pocket. Then I’ll drop dead!”
“Don’t put that on the bulletin board. Somebody’d take you up on it.” Koski went out.
His heels clicked along the marble floor of the corridor as far as the dingy black lettering proclaiming Missing Persons Bureau.
There was one clerk in the office — a pudgy man of about thirty — picking feebly at a loose-jointed typewriter. He swung around, pushed the green visor of an eyeshade up on his forehead. “For the luva Pete, Lieutenant! Don’t tell me you’re in a swivet for some rush data. I got this report to get out...”
“Only take you a minute, Edgey.” Koski unlatched the rail-gate, stalked in.
“Yuh? Last time you told me that, I spent half the night—”
“Hoist your stern, fella. Lemme have your new cards. For, say, the last forty-eight hours.”
Patrolman Edge eyed him suspiciously. “This is only the beginning, folks,” he intoned, hollowly. “Only the be-ginning.” He moved to a row of steel files, pulled out a drawer. “I been trying to get them closed cases typed out since I come on duty at six o’clock. Every time I get started some wise guy comes along—” He stacked a sheaf of 5x7 cards on top of the file. “Who you looking for? Some dame who did a Brody?”
Koski shuffled the cards. He wasn’t interested in Mrs. Leonie Amarifa’s daughter, Isabelle, aged fifteen, dark-eyed, brunette, last seen wearing a brown-and-green plaid coat and apple-green felt hat or in George Purman Bostock, aged seven, blond, blue eyes, last seen wearing a blue corduroy on playground of Public School Number One Twenty-two.
There were about twenty cards; he went over them carefully. The only one he came back to a second time described Ansel Gjersten, thirty, brown hair and black eyes, engineer, yacht “Seavett.” At the bottom of the card, on the line marked Person Reporting Disappearance, was a slanting scrawclass="underline" Zachariah Cardiff. Beneath, next the words Relationship to Missing Person, was written Employer.
Koski held up the card. “What’s about this one, Edgey?”
The clerk thrust his index finger into his right ear, rotated his fist vigorously. “Was a phone-in. That’s Sebe Levine’s writin’. Sebe’s on the day side. Why? Got a lead to this Guh-jersten?”
“Yersten,” Koski corrected. “The G is silent, as the p in psychoanalysis. Seems to be a Scandahoovian. I’ve got part of a guy who was hacked up and dropped in the East River. From what we’ve seen of him, he could be thirty as well as any other age. There isn’t enough of him to tell about the brown hair or black eyes.” He studied the card. “Last seen at Rodd’s Dock, Brooklyn, five-thirty Sunday, the eighteenth.”
“Yeah. And that’s peculiar.” Edge jabbed a thumbnail at the date. “We don’t generally get requests to snag after guys who have done a duck-out for anyhow two, three days after they do the vanishing act. With a kid, of course, his folks are liable to throw a hysteric half an hour after the little darling was last noticed talking to a swarthy-looking foreigner on the way home from the A and P. But with guys old enough to button their own pants, it’s usually a couple days, at least. But Z. Cardiff calls up at quarter past eight this ayem to notify us about his hired hand who only dropped out of the pitcher las’ night.”
“This Cardiff took his time, at that.” Koski scowled at the ink lines drawn through the blanks next the headings: FORMER RESIDENCE, PLACES FREQUENTED, RESIDENCES OF RELATIVES, ETC., and PERSONAL ASSOCIATES, FRIENDS OR RELATIVES MOST LIKELY TO KNOW OF MOVEMENTS OR WHEREABOUTS OF MISSING PERSON OR WITH WHOM HE WOULD BE LIKELY TO COMMUNICATE. “On a yacht, ‘missing’ most likely means ‘overboard.’ Twelve hours is a hell of a long time to be overboard, in March. Make a copy of this for me, Edgey.”
The clerk puffed out his cheeks, blew a long breath, reluctantly ripped the report blank out of his typewriter. “I’d give you six, two and even, this lug has joined the Navy an’ gone to see the Japs. You oughta see the list of able-bodied males who done a skipola from the boozum of their families in order to wear them bell-bottom pants. You want all this stuff on here?”
“Yair. Maybe this Gjersten wasn’t so able-bodied. Says there he wore glasses.”
“That’s a thing I never could unnerstand.” The clerk attacked the keys of his machine. “Can’t a lad who wears cheaters haul up an anchor or swab down a deck as good as one who can read all the fine type at the bottom of the card?” The keys clattered. “Anyway, this cluck might of been in the Navy before. Had tattooing on his left bicep.”