He loved it, and he wandered into it like a small boy each time, often forgetting that he had come there to discuss the facts of violence or death.
Sam Grossman never forgot the facts of violence or death. He was a tall man, big-boned, with the hands and face of a New England farmer. His eyes were blue and guileless behind thick-rimmed eyeglasses. He spoke softly and with a gentility and warmth reminiscent of an era long past, even though his voice carried the clipped stamp of a man who dealt continually with cold scientific fact. Taking off his glasses in the police lab that Monday morning, he wiped the lenses with a corner of his white lab coat, put them back on the bridge of his nose, and said, “You gave us an interesting one this time, Bert.”
“How so?”
“Your man was a walking catalog. We found traces of everything but the kitchen sink in that fragment.”
“Anything I can use?”
“Well, that depends. Come on back here.”
The men walked the length of the lab, moving between two long white counters bearing test tubes of different chemicals, some bubbling, all reminding Kling of a Frankenstein movie.
“Here’s what we were able to isolate from that fragment. Seven different identifiable materials, all embedded in, or clinging to, or covering the basic material, which in itself is a combination of three materials. I think you were right about him having carried it on his shoe. Any other way, he couldn’t have picked up such a collection of junk.”
“You think it was caught on his heel?”
“Probably wedged near the rear of the shoe, where the sole joins the heel. Impossible to tell, of course. We’re just guessing. It seems likely, though, considering the garbage he managed to accumulate.”
“What kind of garbage?”
“Here,” Grossman said.
Each minute particle or particles of “garbage” had been isolated and mounted on separate microscope slides, all of them labeled for identification. The slides were arranged vertically in a rack on the counter top, and Grossman ticked off each one with his forefinger as he explained.
“The basic composition is made up of the materials on these first three slides, blended to form a sort of mastic to which the other elements undoubtedly clung.”
“And what are those three materials?” Kling asked.
“Suet, sawdust, and blood,” Grossman replied.
“Human blood?”
“No. We ran the Uhlenhuth precipitin reaction test on it. It’s definitely not human.”
“That’s good.”
“Well, yes,” Grossman said, “because it gives us something to play with. Where would we be most likely to find a combination of sawdust, suet, and animal blood?”
“A butcher shop?” Kling asked.
“That’s our guess. And our fourth slide lends support to the possibility.” Grossman tapped the slide with his finger. “It’s an animal hair. We weren’t certain at first because the granulation resembled that of a human hair. But the medullary index—the relation between the diameter of the medulla and the diameter of the whole hair—was zero point five. Narrower than that would have indicated it was human. It’s definitely animal.”
“What kind of an animal?” Kling asked.
“We can’t tell for certain. Either bovine or equine. Considering the other indications, the hair probably came from an animal one would expect to find in a butcher shop, most likely a steer.”
“I see,” Kling said. He paused. “But…” He paused again. “They’re stripped by the time they get to a butcher shop, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the hide’s been taken off by that time.”
“So?”
“Well, you just wouldn’t find a hair from a steer’s hide in a butcher shop, that’s all.”
“I see what you mean. A slaughterhouse would be a better guess, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Kling said. He thought for a moment. “There’re some slaughterhouses here in the city, aren’t there?”
“I’m not sure. I think all the slaughtering’s done across the river, in the next state.”
“Well, at least this gives us something to look into.”
“We found a few other things as well,” Grossman said.
“Like what?”
“Fish scales.”
“What?”
“Fish scales, or at least a single minute particle of a fish scale.”
“In a slaughterhouse?”
“It doesn’t sound likely, does it?”
“No. I’m beginning to like your butcher shop idea again.”
“You are, huh?”
“Sure. A combined butcher shop and fish market, why not?”
“What about the animal hair?”
“A dog maybe?” Kling suggested.
“We don’t think so.”
“Well, how would a guy pick up a fish scale in a slaughter-house?”
“He didn’t have to,” Grossman said. “He could have picked it up wherever he went walking. He could have picked it up anyplace in the city.”
“That narrows it down a lot,” Kling said.
“You’ve got to visualize this as a lump composed of suet, blood—”
“Yeah, and sawdust—”
“Right, that got stuck to his shoe. And you’ve got to visualize him walking around and having additional little pieces of garbage picked up by this sticky wad of glopis—”
“Sticky wad of what?”
“Glopis. That’s an old Yiddish expression.”
“Glopis?”
“Glopis.”
“And the animal hair was stuck to the glopis, right?”
“Right.”
“And also the fish scale?”
“Right.”
“And what else?”
“These aren’t in any particular order, you understand. I mean, it’s impossible to get a progressive sequence of where he might have been. We simply—”
“I understand,” Kling said.
“Okay, we found a small dot of putty, a splinter of creosoted wood, and some metal filings that we identified as copper.”
“Go on.”
“We also found a tiny piece of peanut.”
“Peanut,” Kling said blankly.
“That’s right. And to wrap it all up, the entire sticky suet mess of glopis was soaked with gasoline. Your friend stepped into a lot.”
Kling took a pen from his jacket pocket. Repeating the items out loud, and getting confirmation from Grossman as he went along, he jotted them into his notebook:
“That’s it, huh?”
“That’s it,” Grossman said.
“Thanks. You just ruined my day.”
The drawing from the police artist was waiting for Kling when he got back to the squadroom. There were five artists working for the department, and this particular pencil sketch had been made by Detective Victor Haldeman, who had studied at the Art Students League in New York and later at the Art Institute in Chicago before joining the force. Each of the five artists, before being assigned to this special duty, had held other jobs in the department: two of them had been patrolmen in Isola, and the remaining three had been detectives in Calm’s Point, Riverhead, and Majesta respectively. The Bureau of Criminal Identification was located at Headquarters on High Street, several floors above the police lab. But the men assigned to the artists’ section of the bureau worked in a studio annex at 600 Jessup Street.