Grossman was a rare man to head a laboratory because in addition to being a trained detective, he was also a damned good chemist. Most police laboratories were headed by a detective without any real scientific training but with a staff of qualified experts in chemistry, physics, and biology. Grossman had his staff, but he also had his own scientific background, and the mind of a man who had long ago wrestled with burglaries, muggings, robberies and anything a precinct detective could possibly encounter in his working day. There were times, in fact, when Grossman wished he were back in a cozy squadroom somewhere, exchanging crumby jokes with weary colleagues. There were times, like today, when Grossman wished he had stayed in bed.
He never knew what governing law of probabilities caused the laboratory to be swamped with work at times and comparatively idle at other times. He never knew whether a phase of the moon or the latest nuclear test caused a sudden increase in crimes or accidents, whether people declared a holiday for violence at a specific time of the year or month, or whether some Martian mastermind had decided that such and such a day would be a good time to bug Grossman and his hard-pressed technicians. He only knew that there were days, like today, when there was simply too much to do and not enough people to do it.
An amateur burglar had broken into a store on South Fifteenth by forcing the lock on the rear door. Grossman’s staff was now involved in comparing the marks found on the lock with specimen marks made with a crude chisel which the investigating detectives had discovered in the room of a suspect.
A woman had been strangled to death in a bedroom on Culver Avenue. Grossman’s technicians had found traces of hair on the pillow, and would first have to compare it with the woman’s own hair and, in the likelihood that it was not hers, run tests that would tell them whether the hair had been left by an animal or a human, and-if human-which part of the body the hair had come from, whether it had belonged to a man or a woman, whether it had been dyed, bleached, or cut recently, the age of the person who had carelessly left it behind, and whether or not it had been deformed by shooting, burning or scalding.
A holdup man, retreating in panic when he’d heard the siren of an approaching squad car, had fired three bullets into the wall of a gasoline station and then escaped. Grossman’s technicians were now involved in comparing the retrieved bullets with specimen bullets fired from guns in their extensive file, attempting to determine the make of firearm the criminal had used so that the cops of the 71st could dig into their M.O. file for a possible clue.
A ten-year-old girl had accused the janitor of her building of having lured her into his basement room, and then having forced her to yield to his sexual advances. The child’s garments were now being examined for stains of semen and blood.
A forty-five-year-old man was found dead on a highway, obviously the victim of a hit and run. The glass splinters embedded in his clothing were now being compared against specimens from the shattered left front headlight of an abandoned stolen car in an effort to identify the automobile as the one which had struck the man down.
Fingerprints, palm prints, fragmentary impressions of sweat pores, footprints, sole prints, sock prints, broken windows, broken locks, animal tracks and tire tracks, dust and rust and feathers and film, rope burns and powder burns, stains of paint or urine or oil-all were there on that day, all waiting to be examined and compared, identified and catalogued.
And, in addition, there was the apparent suicide the boys of the 87th had dropped into his lap.
Grossman sighed heavily and once again consulted the drawing his laboratory artist had made from an on-the-spot sketch of the death chamber:
In suicide, as in baseball, it is sometimes difficult to tell who is who or what is what without a scorecard. Grossman turned over the lucite-encased sketch and studied the typewritten key rubber-cemented to its back:
The little circles containing the letters A, B, C, D, and E, Grossman knew, indicated the camera angles of the photographs taken in the bedroom and enclosed in the folder he now held in his hands. The police photographer had taken, in order:
A. A close shot of the suicide note and the wrist watch holding it down on the dresser top.
B. A medium shot of Tommy Barlow’s clothing on the easy chair and his shoes resting beside the chair.
C. A full shot of the bed with the bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow lying on it.
D. A medium shot showing the scatter rug and the two whisky bottles, as well as the chair upon and over which were Irene Thayer’s clothes, and beside which were her shoes.
E. A close shot of the typewriter resting on an end table beside the bed.
Grossman studied the sketch and the photographs several times more, reread the report one of his technicians had prepared, and then sat down at a long white counter in the lab, took a telephone receiver from its wall bracket, and dialed Frederick 7-8024. The desk sergeant who answered the telephone connected him immediately with Steve Carella in the squadroom upstairs.
“I’ve got all this junk on your suicide,” Grossman said. “You want to hear about it?”
“I do,” Carella said.
‘Are you guys busy?”
‘Moderately so.”
“Boy, this has been a day,” Grossman said. He sighed wearily. “What’d they give you as cause of death on this one?” he asked.
“Acute carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Mmm,” Grossman said.
“Why? Did you land some spent discharge shells or something?”
“No such luck. It sure looks like a suicide, from what we’ve got here, but at the same time… I don’t know. There’s something not too kosher about this.”
“Like what?”
“You’d figure a suicide, wouldn’t you?” Grossman said cautiously. “Whisky bottles, open gas jets, an explosion. It all adds up, right? It verifies the figures.”
“What figures?”
“On deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning in this city every year. I’ve got a chart here. Shall I read you what the chart says?”
“Read to me,” Carella answered, smiling.
“Eight hundred and forty deaths a year, four hundred and forty of which are suicides. Four hundred and thirty-five of those are from illuminating gas. So it figures, doesn’t it? And add the whisky bottles. Suicides of this type will often drink themselves into a stupor after turning on the gas. Or sometimes, they’ll take sleeping pills, anything to make the death nice and pleasant, you know?”
“Yeah, nice and pleasant,” Carella said.
“Yeah. But there’s something a little screwy about this setup, Steve. I’ll tell you the truth, I wonder about it.”
“What have you got, Sam?”
“Number one, this whole business of the whisky bottles on the floor. Not near the head of the bed, but near the foot. And one of them knocked over. Why were the bottles near the foot of the bed, where they couldn’t be reached if this couple had really been drinking?”
“They weren’t drunk, Sam,” Carella said. “Not according to our toxicologist.”