The ceiling above their heads was bloated with water, the plaster dangerously loose and close to falling. The room in which the boy hung dead and crucified had one shattered window, and no door in its frame. It had been used as a makeshift garbage dump by the building’s squatters, and the garbage was piled three feet high, a thick carpet of moldering food, rusting cans, broken bottles, newspapers, used condoms, and animal feces, topped, as though with a maraschino cherry, with a swollen dead rat. For anyone to have entered the room, it would have been necessary to climb up onto the ledge formed by the garbage. The ceiling was perhaps twelve feet high, and the man’s impaled feet were crossed some six inches above the line of garbage. He was a tall young man. Whoever had driven the spikes through his extended hands had been even taller, but the body had sagged of its own weight since, dislocating both shoulders and wreaking God knew what internal damage.
“You hear me?” the M.E. said.
“Do what you like,” Carella answered.
“I will.”
“Just make sure we get a full necropsy report.”
“You think he was alive when they nailed him there?” Meyer asked.
“Maybe. The stabbing may have been an afterthought,” Carella said.
“I’m not taking him down, and that’s that,” the M.E. said.
“Look,” Carella said angrily, “take him down, leave him there, it’s up to you. Send us your goddamn report, and don’t forget prints.”
“I won’t.”
“Footprints, too.”
“More crazy bastards in this city,” the M.E. said, and walked off sullenly, picking his way through the rubble in the corridor, and starting down the staircase to the street, where he hoped to sell his case to the ambulance people when they arrived.
“Let’s check the rest of the floor,” Meyer said.
There were two other apartments on the floor. The locks on the doors to both had been broken. In one apartment there were the remains of a recent fire in the center of the room. A worn tennis sneaker was in the corner near the window. Meyer lifted it with his handkerchief, and then bagged and tagged it for transportation to the lab. The second room was empty except for a soiled and torn mattress covered with rat leavings.
“What a shit hole,” someone said behind them, and Meyer and Carella turned to find Detective Monoghan in the doorway. Detective Monroe was immediately behind him. Both Homicide cops had gray fedoras on their heads, black topcoats on their backs, and pained expressions on their faces.
“People actually live in these shit holes, can you imagine that?” Monroe said.
“Incredible,” Monoghan said, wagging his head.
“Unbelievable,” Monroe said.
“Where’s the stiff?” Monoghan asked.
“Down the hall,” Carella said.
“Want to show me?”
“You’ll find it,” Carella answered.
“Come on,” Monoghan said to his partner, and both of them went down the hallway, big-shouldered men pushing their way through the empty corridor as though dispersing a crowd. “Holy mother of God!” Monoghan said.
Carella nodded.
There were footfalls on the steps. Two men in white picked their way over fallen plaster and lathe, looked up when they reached the landing, saw Carella, and walked to him immediately.
“Listen, are you in charge here?” one of them asked.
“It’s my case, yes,” Carella said.
“I’m Dr. Cortez, what’s this about wanting me to get somebody off the wall?”
“He’s got to be taken to the mortuary,” Carella said.
“Fine, we’ll get him to the mortuary. But your medical examiner says he’s nailed to the goddamn wall. I don’t...”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t plan to take him down, pal.”
“Who do you suggest for the job, pal?” Carella asked.
“I don’t care who. You look strong enough, why don’t you handle it yourself?”
“That’s a murder victim in there,” Carella said flatly.
“That’s a corpse in there,” Cortez answered, equally flatly.
Monoghan was coming back down the corridor, holding his nose. Monroe was a step behind him, his hand cupped over the lower part of his face.
“These men are from Homicide,” Carella said. “Talk to them about it.”
“Who’s supposed to take down the corpse?” Cortez asked.
“The M.E. through with it?” Monoghan said.
“He won’t examine it here,” Carella said.
“He’s got to examine it here. Those are regulations. We can’t move the body till the M.E. examines it, pronounces it dead, and...”
“Yeah, go tell that to him,” Cortez said.
“Where is he?” Monoghan asked.
“Downstairs. Puking out his guts.”
“Come on,” Monoghan said to his partner, and they headed for the staircase. “You wait here, Carella.”
They listened to the two Homicide cops making their way downstairs. Their footfalls died. There was a strained silence in the corridor.
“Listen, I’m sorry I got so snotty,” Cortez said.
“That’s okay,” Carella answered.
“But he knows the regulations as well as I do. He’s just trying to get out of a messy job, that’s all.”
“Um-huh,” Carella said.
“He knows the regulations,” Cortez repeated.
The assistant medical examiner, if he had not previously known the regulations, knew them letter-perfect by the time Monoghan and Monroe got through with him downstairs. With a handkerchief tied over his nose, and wearing rubber gloves, he took down the impaled body of the unidentified white male, and performed a cursory examination before declaring him officially dead.
Everybody could now begin tackling the next unpleasant task of finding out who had made him that way.
5
Detective Cotton Hawes looked at the photostat that came in Tuesday morning’s mail and decided it was General George Washington.
“Who does that look like to you?” he asked Miscolo, who had come out of the Clerical Office to pick up the weekend’s D.D. reports for filing.
“Napoleon Bonaparte,” Miscolo said dryly. Shaking his head, he went out of the squadroom muttering. Hawes still thought it looked like Washington.
He had been filled in on the latest activities of the Deaf Man, and he assumed now that the photostat was intended as a companion piece to the pictures of J. Edgar Hoover. He immediately connected Hoover and Washington in the obviously logical way — the main office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was in the city of Washington, D.C. Hoover, Washington, simple. When dealing with the Deaf Man, however, nothing was simple; Hawes recoiled from his first thought as though bitten by it. If the Deaf Man’s planned crime was to take place in Washington, he would not be pestering the hard-working cops (Oh, how hard they worked!) of the 87th. Instead, he would be cavorting on the Mall, taunting the cops of the District of Columbia, those stalwarts. No. This picture of the father of the country was meant to indicate something more than the name of a city, Hawes was certain of that. He was equally certain that J. Edgar’s fine face was meant to represent something more than the name of a vacuum cleaner, splendid product though it was. He suddenly wondered what the “J.” stood for. James? Jack? Jerome? Jules?
“Alf!” he shouted, and Miscolo, down the corridor in the Clerical Office, yelled, “Yo?”
“Come in here a minute, will you?”