He jerked her head savagely to one side. “You read all about how they wanted me for murder, damn you!”
“No!”
“Well, you ain’t putting me in no chair. Nobody as dumb as you is going to help fry me, by God. I knew you’d have to get off at the end of the line, so I just got off at the stop before that and run along behind the hedges till I found a proper spot to wait for you. I knew damn well you’d head straight back to the station house.”
“Please, please...” She tried to say something else, but the words would not come. She was still trying when the grass sickle sliced through her throat and into the earth beneath it.
The Floater
by Jonathan Craig
The girl had tried very hard to be lucky, but it hadn’t done much good. When the cops found her, she was dead.
1.
She was a small girl, and she looked even smaller, lying there at the river end of the vast, empty pier. A tugboat captain had sighted her body off Pier 90, radioed the Harbor Precinct, and a police launch had taken her from the water and brought her ashore. There was a chill wind blowing in from the Hudson and the pale October sun glinted dully on the girl’s face and arms and bare shoulders. The skirt of her topless dress was imprinted with miniature four-leaf clovers and horseshoes and number 7’s, and on her right wrist there was a charm bracelet with more four-leaf clovers and horseshoes.
A sergeant and three patrolmen from the Uniform Force had arrived in an RMP car a few minutes before my partner, Paul Brader, and I. They had just finished their preliminary examination of the body.
The sergeant glanced at me and then back down at the girl. “They’d didn’t do her a hell of a lot of good, did they? The lucky symbols, I mean.”
“Not much,” I said.
“How old do you figure her for, Jim?” Paul Brader asked.
“Eighteen, maybe,” I said. “No more than that.”
“Well, we’ve got a homicide all right,” Paul said. “She sure wasn’t alive when she hit the water. You notice the skin?”
I’d noticed. It wasn’t pale, the way it would have been had she drowned. The river water was cold, and cold water contracts the blood vessels and forces the blood to the inner part of the body.
“And there’s no postmortem lividity in the head and neck,” Paul went on. “Floaters always hang the same way in the water, with the head down. If she had been alive when she went in, she’d be a damned sight less pretty than she is now.” He stepped close and knelt beside the girl. “How long would you say she was in the water, Jim?”
“That’s always tough to figure,” I said. “Taking the weather into consideration, and the fact that she’s a little thin, I’d say anywhere from three to five days.” I looked at the sergeant. “Any label in that dress, Ted?”
“No, sir.”
“How about the underclothes?”
“Just brand names. No shop names at all.”
Paul gently rolled the girl over on her left side. “Take a look at these lacerations on the back of her head,” he said.
I knelt down beside him. There were two lacerations, apparently quite deep, and about three inches long. But lacerations and other mutilations of bodies found in the water are often misleading. Marine life takes its toll, and bodies frequently bob for hours against pilings and wharves and the sides of boats before they are discovered.
“We’ll have to wait and see what the M.E.’s shop says about those,” I said. I looked at both the girl’s palms. There were no fingernail marks, such as are usually found in drownings. It’s true that drowning people clutch at anything; and when there’s nothing to grasp, they clench their hands anyhow, driving the nails into the flesh.
The girl had pierced ears, and the small gold rings in them appeared expensive. So did the charm bracelet, and the dress was obviously no bargain-counter item. There were four dollar bills tucked into the top of one of her stockings.
The uniformed sergeant removed the jewelry and the bills and listed them on his report sheet. “Four bucks,” he murmured. “Mad money, probably.”
Paul and I straightened up. “You want to wait for the doc?” he asked.
“Not much point,” I said. “He won’t be able to tell us anything until after he autopsies her. We don’t need him to tell us we got a homicide.”
“No I guess not,” Paul said. He stared down at the girl a moment. “Tough, Jim. There’s something about pulling a pretty girl out of cold water that gets me. Every time.”
I nodded, and we turned back toward our prowl car. I knew what he meant. We handle about four hundred floaters a year in New York, most of them in the spring and summer. The majority of them are accidental drownings. A number are suicides, though there are fewer than is generally supposed. An even smaller number are homicides. And of the homicides, only about one in ten are women.
I got behind the wheel and we drove along the pier and turned downtown toward Centre Street, where the Missing Persons Bureau is located.
“You going to hit the station house first?” Paul asked.
“No. We can call in from the Bureau. I’ve got a hunch we’ll save time if we go through the MP reports ourselves.” The first thing a detective does when he has an unidentified body — provided it’s a homicide and the body has been dead more than a day or so — is check the reports of missing persons. In the event of a routine drowning, the investigating officer’s report is sent to the Bureau and the description matched against MP reports by MP personnel.
2.
We found the matching MP report almost at once.
I scanned the rest of the MP form. It was all there — a close physical description of the girl, the skirt with the lucky symbols, the pierced ears and gold earrings, the charm bracelet. There was, however, one item of jewelry listed on the report which had not been on the girl when she’d been taken from the river. A diamond engagement ring, assumed to be about half a carat.
“You were off a year on the age, Jim,” Paul said, grinning.
“All right, so fire me,” I said.
“I’ll take it up with the commissioner,” he said. “You want me to handle the ID confirmation?”
“Might as well,” I said. “No use both of us killing time with it.” I glanced down at the bottom of the form. The report had been phoned in by a Mrs. Edward Carpenter, with the same address as the girl’s. Mrs. Carpenter, it seemed, was the girl’s aunt. I wrote down the name and address on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to Paul. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “You get Mrs. Carpenter and take her over to Bellevue for the ID, and I’ll handle the paper work on this.”
“All the way through?”
“Sure. What’d you think?”
“You’ve got yourself a deal. You want me to take her home, after the ID?”
“Nope. Take her to the precinct... That’s if she isn’t too upset. If she takes it too hard, drive her home and call me from there.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, you might get her to fill you in on the girl, if you can. Don’t push too hard, unless you think she can take it.”
He nodded. “You going back to the station house now?”
“Uh-huh. I’ll ride that far with you, and then you can go on up to Seventy-second Street and get Mrs. Carpenter.”
3.
Back in the squad room, I finished typing up some 61’s in connection with other cases Paul and I were working on, completed several Wanted cards on a gang of Philadelphia hoods a stool had told me were now in New York, and then rolled a fresh 61 form into the Underwood and began the suspected homicide report on Lucille M. Taylor. I kept remembering how small she had looked there on the end of the big pier, and how angry the river had sounded as Paul and I stood there in the chill wind.