He studied the ring on the third finger of her left hand. It was an ornately carved gold wedding band, very pretty, it would go into the estate of Rose Leyden, some relative would claim it, together with all her other worldly possessions, what a goddamn waste death was.
“How we doing there?” a voice behind him asked.
Detective 3rd/Grade Marshall Davies, Police Laboratory, looked up and over his shoulder into the face of Detective 3rd/Grade Richard Genero, 87th Squad. Genero was a new detective, too, having been promoted from patrolman only this past April after cracking a case in which two young hoodlums were running around setting fire to drunken vagrants. He was the youngest detective on the squad, and the greenest, and so he got all the lousy jobs nobody else wanted, like hanging around an apartment and watching new laboratory technicians fingerprint corpses.
“Oh, so-so,” Davies said, thinking he did not need conversation with a flatfoot, not while he was busy with such gruesome work.
“What’s that thing there?” Genero asked.
Davies looked at him.
“There,” Genero said, as though repetition would make his question more meaningful.
“It’s a semilunar-shaped piece of wood,” Davies replied, and sighed.
“What’s it used for?”
Davies, who considered himself something of a wit, looked at Genero again, and then said, “Can’t you see I’m giving the lady a manicure?”
“Huh?” Genero said.
“Sure. I use this piece of wood to hold each finger while I paint her nails. What’d you think I used it for?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Genero, who was something of a wit himself, replied. “I thought it was a wooden thermometer you were planning to shove up your ass.”
The two new detectives glared at each other.
“Buzz off,” Davies said flatly.
“My pleasure,” Genero said, and walked off steaming.
Goddamn flatfoot, Davies thought, got nothing to do but bother a man trying to do a day’s work. Diligently, he inked each of Rose Leyden’s fingers and thumbs, making his impressions, keeping the slips of paper separated and in sequence so that he could later mark each one according to finger. He sometimes wondered why the police bothered with fingerprints at all, especially in a case like this where it was obvious that the dead people were decent citizens living in a good neighborhood. Neither of them would have a police record, of course, and unless the guy had been in the armed forces at one time or another, his fingerprints would not be in the FBI files either. So what was the point? Did anyone ever stop to realize how many people in the United States, especially women, had never in their lives been fingerprinted? Of course not. This whole thing about fingerprints was something invented by the police in order to scare not criminals but civilians. The criminal doing a job knew that his prints already were on file someplace, or would be one day, so he wore gloves as a matter of course. The civilian committing a crime usually acted in the heat of passion, and when it’s hot you don’t wear gloves. But the civilian cracks under pressure more easily than the habitual criminal does, especially if the cops come out suddenly with a statement like, “And the fingerprints on the gun happen to match the fingerprints we found on your toothbrush in the bathroom, ah-ha, got you!” All bullshit, Davies thought, and continued fingerprinting a dead lady who, like most other ladies in America, dead or alive, had probably never had her prints taken before. It’s a shame the honor had to wait till now, Davies thought, when you’re laying stone-cold dead in your own living room, missing all of your face and part of your head, and soaked with blood and whatever other corruption, Jesus, I’ll be sick in a minute, Davies thought.
Do the job, he thought.
Stop thinking.
He stopped thinking, and he did the job.
The jewelry was spread on top of Carella’s desk, and the woman sitting opposite him studied it with a careful eye but said nothing.
Her name was Mrs. Gloria Leyden, and she was the widowed mother of Andrew Leyden, and she sat in corseted disbelief in the squadroom and looked at the jewelry and refused to commit herself because committing herself would be the same thing as acknowledging that her son was dead.
“Well?” Carella said.
“Well, what?” she answered. She was a red-faced woman with a pug nose and puffy cheeks. Her hair was a violet-white, neatly coiffed, her bosom as ample as a pouter pigeon’s, her eyes small and sharp and blue behind harlequin spectacles.
“Do you recognize any of this jewelry?”
“Why is it important that I recognize any of it?” Mrs. Leyden asked.
“Well,” Carella said, “we try to make a positive identification wherever possible. In a case like this, where the bodies—”
“It’s hard to tell anything from jewelry,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Well, take this ring for example, it’s from the University of Wisconsin, and there’s a date inside it, June 1950, and also the engraved initials ALL. It was found on the right ring finger of the dead man, and I’m asking you now if you recognize it.”
“There are a lot of rings from the University of Wisconsin,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Did your son go to the University of Wisconsin?”
“Yes.”
“When was he graduated?”
“In June of 1950.”
“And his name is Andrew Leyden?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his middle name?”
“Lloyd.”
“Then the initials in this ring, ALL, could be your son’s initials.”
“There are lots of people with the initials ALL.”
“Yes,” Carella said. “Well, how about this other ring, Mrs. Leyden? It was found on the man’s third finger left hand, and it’s obviously a wedding band. The woman was wearing the same ring, narrower and smaller of course, but the same design. Do you recognize this ring?”
“Who looks at rings?” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Well, it’s very nicely carved, and it’s an unusual wedding band, so perhaps you would have noticed if your son and daughter-in-law ever wore wedding bands similar to it.”
“Similar?”
“Identical to it,” Carella amended. “The other wedding band there was taken from the woman’s hand.” He pointed at it with a pencil.
“All wedding rings look alike to me,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“This locket was around the dead woman’s neck,” Carella said. He lifted the locket, a gold heart on a slender gold chain. “There are two pictures in it,” he said, and opened the locket. “Do you recognize either of these people in the pictures?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Leyden said.
“Who are they?”
“The man is my son. The woman is my daughter-in-law.” Mrs. Leyden nodded. “That doesn’t mean either of them is dead,” she said.
“Mrs. Leyden—”