“How long has he been this way?” Dellarosa asked.
“Too long,” Margaret said, and sighed again.
THE STENCILED black lettering read:
This was not the name of a synagogue.
The DSS stood for Department of Social Services. The Temple stood for Temple Street Armory. Yesterday afternoon, Meyer had gone back to the Old Chancery for yet another visit, this time to check the stenciling on the blanket that had been wrapped around Jane Doe when she was dropped off at the railroad station. The stenciling was, in fact, identical to what he’d seen lettered in one corner of Charlie’s blanket. But while he was there, Dr. Elman had informed him of something more important.
During the night, Jane Doe had died of cardiac arrest. It was Dr. Elman’s theory that the woman may have had a history of ventricular arrhythmia. If she’d been taking medication for the ailment, something like Quinidine three times a day in 320 mg doses, and then was suddenly deprived of the drug, abandoned without the drug and unable to tell anyone she’d been on the drug…well, the results were inevitable. Was what Dr. Elman had theorized. Which was why Meyer was here at the Temple Street Shelter today. Or maybe he’d have been here, anyway. Maybe tracking down whoever had dumped those two old people was terribly important to him. Maybe he thought too often of the little old lady who’d drowned in her own bathtub after putting her wig on a stand across the room.
He had called the shelter the moment Elman gave him the news, and was told that the supervisor had left for the day and wouldn’t be in again till sometime after noon Saturday, nice hours supervisors kept. So here was Meyer now—on his day off, no less—talking to a man named Harold Laughton, who immediately told him that the reason he’d left so early yesterday was that he’d had to go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled and his dentist had warned him beforehand that there might be some pain the morning after, in which case he might want to take it a bit easy, which was why he’d left word that he might not be in till after noon sometime. So here he was, too, even though his mouth was killing him. So what did Meyer want, anyway?
Meyer wanted to know if Mr. Laughton recognized either of these blankets.
Mr. Laughton certainly did.
“Those blankets belong to my shelter,” he said.
They were talking in Laughton’s jerry-built office at the rear of the old brick building on Temple Street. There was a wooden desk in the office and a wooden coatrack and two wooden chairs. One wall of the office had a plate-glass panel that started at about waist high and overlooked the armory’s drill floor, furnished now with hundreds of cots crammed head to toe from brick wall to brick wall. At the foot of each cot was a khaki-colored blanket identical to the ones Meyer had placed on Laughton’s desk.
“Where’d you get these?” Laughton asked.
Meyer told him where he’d got them.
“If one of them was wrapped around a woman, she’s not one of my people,” Laughton said. “My shelter’s exclusively for men. Nine hundred and twenty cots out there, all for men.”
With nine hundred and twenty blankets on them, Meyer thought.
“I run one of the best shelters in this city,” Laughton said. “Other shelters, you have rats running across the floor all night long, keeping the men awake, biting them. Not here at Temple. I run a good shelter.”
“I’m sure you do,” Meyer said.
“Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here, not in my shelter. The guards I have here make certain that nothing like that happens to the men here. I have a top-notch notch psychiatrist assigned here. The social workers I have here are among the best in the city. This is more than just three hots and a cot here, this is a shelter with a heart. I’m very proud of my shelter here.”
“Any idea how these blankets got on those two people?” Meyer asked.
Laughton looked at him as if he’d just made a disparaging remark about this shelter he was very proud of here. He was a man in his late forties, Meyer guessed, virtually as bald as Meyer himself, but with a ferocious-looking handlebar mustache compensating for the lack of hair anywhere else on his head. Some five feet eight inches tall, give or take. His jaw swollen where the tooth had been pulled. Fierce blue eyes studying Meyer now, trying to decide whether the police were here to make some kind of trouble for him.
“We do have occasional thefts,” he said. “The men here aren’t the cream of society, you know. They come and go. Some of them—manyof them—have criminal records. Things occasionally stick to their fingers. Anything that isn’t nailed down, in fact. Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such—as I told you, the guards here are very good—but occasionally things will disappear.”
“Blankets?”
“Blankets, yes. Occasionally. In fact,some homeless people come in here just to steal blankets. And bedding. Especially during the wintertime. And spring’s been so late coming this year.”
“Yes.”
“So, yes, we’ve had blankets stolen. Occasionally.”
“Assuming these blankets were stolen…”
“Well, how else would they have left the premises?”
“Assuming that to be the case then…”
“Yes?”
Impatiently.
Meyer was taking up too much of his time, and besides he had a goddamn toothache.
Patiently, Meyer said, “Is there any way you can tell when these blankets might have been stolen?”
“No.”
“Nothing about them that would distinguish…”
“Nothing.”
“Have you had any blanket thefts recently ?”
“I wouldn’t know. We take inventory at the beginning of each month. We won’t be taking inventory again until the first of April.”
“What did your inventory show at the beginning of March?”
“We’d lost something like fourteen blankets the month before.”
“Fourteen blankets were stolen…”
“Or lost…”
“During February alone?”
“Yes.New blankets, too.”
“Are these blankets…?”
“That figure is low, by the way, when you compare it with other shelters in the city. But excuse me, Detective Meyer, why are you…?”
“Excuse me , but are these blankets new?”
“Yes, I would expect so.”
“You can tell they’re new?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What do you mean by new?”
“We received an allotment at the beginning of the year.”
“Then there is a way of determining when they were stolen. Or lost.”
“Well, yes, I suppose…”
“When in January did you receive your allotment?”
“Around the fifteenth.”
“How many blankets?”
“Fifty. To replace what had been stolen in the past quarter.”
“Fifty blankets had been stolen in the previous three months?”
“Roughly that many. I put in for fifty in replacement. That was a round number.”
“So you’d lost…what would you say…approximately sixteen, seventeen blankets a month.”
“About that many, yes.”
“And the city sent you fifty new blankets to replace them.”
“Yes.”
“How many of those blankets do you have left now?”
“I told you. We don’t take inventory till the first of each month.”