Macalay fought it back, made himself go slow, slow for effect, slow for the big one, the play that he’d suffered for; in the fish tank, in cells, in The Hole, in the concrete block plant...
Slow, he told himself, slow to scare him, not fast to kill him. He’s a squealer and a yellow belly and he’ll break right down the middle. Take it slow, slow...
Then the mutton-fat face split, and Hanning was screaming: “Don’t kill me! Lemme go, I can give you some dope you can use. You were a cop.” He was playing his hole ace; every con had one, fondled and held onto, for just such a time. “It could do you good. Yeah — yeah, it could.”
Macalay hesitated. This had to be right, this had to be acting like no guy on the screen had ever done. His voice had to be hard and contemptuous. “What you got? You got something on the P.K.? You going to tell me he’s a swish?”
“It could maybe spring you,” Hanning screeched again. “I know the guys who—” he stopped.
Macalay’s heart began to pound, hard. But he had to keep that sneer on his face, in his voice. “Still squealing, huh?”
“Russ knew the ones pulled that loft job,” Hanning said. “His brother got it on that job. Ya — ya, just like that buddy-cop of yours. I’m levelling with ya. Russ told me when we first saw ya. Told me who—” He broke off.
“What good’ll that do me?” Macalay asked. He moved the knife forward; it touched Hanning’s shirt, just below and to the right of the number sewed on the pocket. “What good, squealer?”
“I can give you names and dates and where to pick ’em up,” Hanning said. “I got it all. You wanta get them, don’t you? They killed that cop pal of yours. You wanta get ’em don’t yuh?”
“Yeah,” Macalay said. “Yeah, I want to get them. Start talking. An’ it better be right, because if it ain’t, I’ll still be in here, and so will you.”
He shifted the knife to his left hand, under the clipboard, and started writing as Hanning babbled.
He could sneak a letter out with the noon mail that went from the office. Inspector Strane would get it tomorrow, and come get him.
He’d be out soon — a free man, a rich man... But, hell, it would be a pleasure to kill Hanning when the squealer got through squealing. It sure would. And maybe necessary now, to keep Hanning from squealing on him. In any case, he’d have to travel fast and far to get beyond the clutch of the grapevine.
Suddenly, Macalay threw the knife away, hard, into the far black depths of the icebox. It landed in the sawdust, barely made a noise. Looking at Hanning, crouched, panting, the refrigerator light glinting off his cold sweat, Macalay wondered if it was going to be as hard living what the hundred grand as it had been getting it.
The Floater
by Jonathan Craig
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.