The assistant M.E. walked over, looking bored.
Five minutes later, he expressed his opinion that the girl was dead, and that the probable cause was fracture of the cervical vertebrae.
Her name was Nancy Annunziato.
A card in her wallet identified her as a student at Calm’s Point College, one of the city’s five tuition-free colleges. C.P.C. was away over at the other end of the city, across the Calm’s Point Bridge and the River Dix, at least an hour by car from Riverhead, an hour and a half if you took the subway. The detectives did not think anybody in his right mind would have carried a dead body on the subway, however bizarre the system had become over the years, however inured its riders had become to peculiar happenings underground. But assuming the girl had been killed elsewhere (as had supposedly been the case with Marcia Schaffer) and further assuming that the body had then been transported here to this lovely garden spot of the city, the murderer had come a hell of a long way in an attempt to cover his tracks. Why, then, had he left behind a wallet with the girl’s identification in it?
The call to Manhattan, Kansas, informing Marcia Schaffer’s father of her death, had been painful enough, but Carella had not had to look him in the eye when he gave him the news. This one would be more difficult. According to the I.D. card in her wallet, the girl had lived in Calm’s Point, not far from the school, and presumably with her parents. This one would be face-to-face. This one would hurt both ways. He was glad Hawes would be with him, and not a jackass like Genero. Genero had once asked the wife of a murder victim if she had already arranged for a funeral plot: “It’s always best to think of such things far in advance,” Genero had told her. He later told Carella that his mother had already purchased funeral plots for herself and his father. “With lifetime maintenance,” he’d said. Carella had wondered whose lifetime?
They got caught in rush-hour traffic on the way to Calm’s Point, and the ride took them an hour and fifteen minutes. They did not know how bad the confrontation would be until they arrived at the house and discovered that Mr. Annunziato had suffered a heart attack only yesterday and was at the moment in the Intensive Care Unit at Saint Anthony’s Hospital, some six blocks away. The neighborhood was largely Italian, a bustling ghetto that reminded Carella of the one in which he’d been born and raised. The street cries, the shouted greetings, even the clapboard two-story houses with their fig trees, all brought a rush of memory that was somehow as painful as the task that lay before him. There were no babies crying on this tree-shaded street; you never heard a baby crying in an Italian neighborhood. Whenever an Italian baby showed the slightest sign of bursting into tears, there was always a mother, an aunt, a cousin or a grandmother there to pick him up and console him. Mrs. Annunziato looked like Carella’s Aunt Amelia; the resemblance only made his job more difficult.
She had thought at first that they were there to investigate the automobile accident. Her husband had been driving a car when he’d had his heart attack, and he’d smashed into another car when he lost control of the vehicle. This was how she happened to tell them, the moment they identified themselves, that he was now in intensive care, with a mild concussion in addition to the heart attack. They now had to tell her that her daughter was dead.
Hawes busied himself looking at his shoes.
Carella broke the news to Mrs. Annunziato, partially in English, partially in Italian. She listened carefully and disbelievingly. She asked for details; she was certain they were making a mistake. They showed her the dead girl’s wallet. She identified it positively. They were reluctant to show her the Polaroids taken at the scene; they did not want to risk yet another heart attack. She finally burst into tears, rushing into the house to get her mother, who came out not a moment later — a short, gray-haired Italian woman dressed entirely in black, she herself crying as she pressed the detectives for yet more details. The women stood hugging each other and weeping on the sidewalk in front of the house. A crowd had gathered. An ice cream truck’s bells tinkled in the bright October stillness of the tree-shaded street.
“Signore,” Carella said, “scusami, ma ci sono molti domande...”
“Sì, capisco,” Mrs. Annunziato said. “Parla Inglese, per piacere.”
“Grazie,” Carella said, “il mio Italiano non è il migliore. I have to ask these questions if we’re to find who did this to your daughter, lei capisce, signore?”
The grandmother nodded. She was embracing Mrs. Annunziato, clinging to her, patting her, squeezing her, comforting her.
“When did you see her last?” Carella asked. “L’ultima volta che...”
“La notte scorsa,” the grandmother said.
“Last night,” Mrs. Annunziato said.
“A che ora?” Carella asked. “What time was that?”
“Alle sei,” the grandmother said.
“Six o’clock,” Mrs. Annunziato said. “She just come home from the school. She was practice.”
“Scusi?” Carella said. “Practice?”
“Sì, era una corridora,” the grandmother said.
“Corridora?” Carella said, not understanding the word.
“A runner,” Mrs. Annunziato said. “She was on the team, cognesce? Come si chiama? La squadra di pista, capisce? La pista... how do you say? The track. She was on the track team.”
There were two packets from the Police Laboratory waiting for them when they got back to the squadroom. It was still only eleven in the morning. Both men had been working the Graveyard Shift when the call had come from the 101st. They were supposed to be relieved at a quarter to 8:00, but it was now eleven, and the lab report was on Carella’s desk, and another dead girl was awaiting autopsy in the morgue at Mercy General. In the new-penny brilliance of the squadroom, burnished October sunlight streaming through grill-covered windows opened wide to the street outside, they broke open the seal on the first packet. Meyer Meyer was sitting at his own desk, typing, his hairpiece rakishly askew on top of his head. Hawes kept looking across the room to stare at the wig. Meyer pretended he didn’t know he was being observed.
The first packet contained a report on the rope section and the hangman’s knot recovered at the scene, together with a report on the photographs of the knot fastening the other end of the rope to the lamppost. The rope was fashioned of a fiber called sisal, a product of the agave plant, which grew in the Indies and in some parts of Africa. Sisal rope was not quite as strong as Manila rope, which came from the abaca plant in the Philippines. A Manila rope with a one-and-a-half-inch diameter could lift a weight of 2,650 pounds. But sisal was a widely used substitute for the stronger rope, and Marcia Schaffer had weighed only a hundred and twenty-four pounds. The rope used in the hanging was the most common type: a three-strand rope that could not support as much weight as a four-strand, and nowhere near as much weight as a so-called cable-laid rope. Again, Marcia Schaffer had weighed only a hundred and twenty-four pounds.
The technician writing the report went to great lengths explaining that the fibers on the rope clearly indicated in which direction a rope had been pulled. In a legal hanging, or in a true hanging suicide, a person dropped downward when the support was pulled or kicked from under his feet. This downward motion caused the fibers of the rope to rise in a direction opposite to the fall. Conversely, if a person had been hauled up by rope over some sort of substructure like a tree branch, or in this case, the arm of a lamppost, the fibers rose in a direction opposite to the pulling or lifting motion. As regarded the direction of fibers in general, the technician quoted a rule to the effect that drop down resulted in fibers up, and pull up caused fibers down.