In Calusa, it isn’t even called a police station, it’s called the Public Safety Building, and I happened to know where it was only because I’d had opportunity to visit it in the past. The Public Safety Building looks like a bank, of which there are many in Calusa. I’m glad there are a lot of banks in Calusa, because most of my law practice revolves around “closings.” If you practice a lot of real-estate law, closings are good. If you are in the business of producing plays, closings ain’t so hot. If you are looking for a police station and you wander into a bank, that ain’t so hot, either. In Calusa, nothing is very hot except the months of August and September, at which time it is possible to melt into a blot on the sidewalk outside the Public Safety Building, which is probably a misdemeanor that will run you afoul of the law. You can only occasionally melt into the sidewalk in April, which may be the cruelest month, but not in Calusa.
I was here on the sidewalk outside the Public Safety Building at eleven o’clock on the morning of April 15 because I wanted to talk to Detective Morris Bloom about the uniformed police officer who had barged into Sarah Whittaker’s bedroom at a little before midnight last September 27. The pittosporum bushes flanking the brown metal entrance doors were in bloom, their white flowers bursting like tiny stars against the deep green of the leaves. The leaves themselves partially obscured the words POLICE DEPARTMENT on the building’s tan brick walls, rather less conspicuously noticeable than the larger white letters affixed to the low wall surrounding a bed of gloxynias that bloomed in riotous purple confusion. What you saw first — if you were coming to report that someone had broken your head and stolen your purse — were the words PUBLIC SAFETY BUILDING. Only after you had climbed the steps and opened one of the bronzelike doors did you know you were also entering a police station; Calusa is a very discreet town.
I found Morrie Bloom on the third floor of the building.
He looked harried.
Maybe that was because the police had just discovered a body in the river.
“The Sawgrass,” Bloom said, “that runs through the bird sanctuary.”
He was leafing through the Polaroid photos the Criminalistics Unit had taken at the scene. The pictures showed — in full color — the badly decomposed body of a woman who had been in the water a long time. I knew it was a woman only because the corpse was wearing a dress. Aside from that, it was impossible to tell from the hairless skull and macerated flesh on the limbs and face.
“Alligators ate both her feet,” Bloom said. “Guess they didn’t like the taste or they’da done the whole job, huh? No ID on her or anywhere around the site. God knows how long she’s been in the water. Nice to come into the office on a Monday morning and find this on your desk, huh? I’m heading over to the morgue, you want to come with me?”
“No,” I said.
I had been to the morgue with him on one previous occasion, when he was investigating what he still referred to as “the Beauty and the Beast case,” although I thought of it as the George Harper tragedy. I could still remember the smell of the morgue. For weeks afterward I kept washing my hands and rinsing out my nostrils with salt water. I did not want to visit a morgue again as long as I lived. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to visit one when I was dead.
Bloom seemed in the pink of condition. He was drinking again after his recent bout with hepatitis, and I guessed He’d gained a good fifteen pounds. The weight sat well on his huge frame. I’m an even six feet tall, and I weigh 170 pounds. Bloom is a good inch taller than I, and I suspected he now weighed in at a solid 220. He kept staring mournfully at the photographs of the dead girl; Bloom always looked as if he were ready to burst into tears. In his wrinkled blue suit, he also looked as if He’d just been paroled from a penitentiary someplace. He had the big hands and oversize knuckles of a street fighter, a fox face with shaggy black eyebrows, brown eyes, and a nose that appeared to have been broken more than once. I wondered if he had any tattoos. I was willing to bet he had a tattoo or two.
He tossed the pictures onto his desk. “What brings you here?” he asked.
“The night of September twenty-seventh last year,” I said. “A uniformed cop went to the Whittaker mansion on Belvedere Road, took into custody a woman named Sarah Whittaker, and escorted her to the Dingley Wing at Good Samaritan Hospital.”
“So?” Bloom said.
“I’d like to talk to the arresting officer.”
“You’ll have to see Lieutenant Hanscomb,” he said. “He’s in command of the blues. You sure you don’t want to come to the morgue with me?”
Lieutenant Roger L. Hanscomb (the plaque on his desk informed me) was busy on the telephone with the man in charge of searching the crime scene out at the bird sanctuary. I gathered from Hanscomb’s end of the conversation that they were still looking for anything that would lead to a positive identification of the woman who’d washed ashore on the southern bank of the Sawgrass at six o’clock this morning. The search party, it seemed, wasn’t overly eager to work this particular spot because a family of alligators had taken up residence in the mangroves, and all of the men knew that the unidentified woman’s feet had been chewed off. Hanscomb kept telling the man on the phone that it was his job to search that site for any clues to the woman’s identity. He told the man that he didn’t give a damn if an alligator chewed a big piece out of his ass; all he wanted was the job done.
He was somewhat red in the face when he slammed the receiver back onto the cradle. But Bloom had told him on the phone to expect me, and in deference to his colleague he became immediately polite and accommodating. He called in his secretary — a big redheaded girl wearing a tight black skirt, a scoop-necked white blouse, and high-heeled black patent-leather pumps — and asked her to bring him the call-and-response file for last September 27. (Actually, he called it the C&R file. I learned only later that it was a list of calls made to the police, together with an accompanying list detailing the disposition of those calls.) The secretary came back some ten minutes later with a manila folder containing a sheaf of computer printouts. Hanscomb leafed through the file, zeroed in on the printout for September 27, and then ran his finger down the page until he came to the eleven-thirty-to-midnight time slot.
“The Whittaker place, you say?” he asked me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah, here it is. Response at eleven-forty-five, call clocked in at eleven-thirty-two. Complainant... well, just a second now. This wasn’t a telephone complaint, the man came here personally. A Dr. Nathan Helsinger with a certificate for emergency admission under the Baker Act. He spoke to Lieutenant Tyrone, who verified the authenticity of the certificate and then dispatched Officer Ruderman to the scene. Dr. Helsinger accompanied him in the car. They arrived at the Whittaker place at eleven-forty-five, as cited, and Ruderman made the arrest — if you want to call it that — at a little before midnight. That what you’re looking for?”
“Would it be possible to talk to Officer Ruderman?” I asked.
“Well... let me find out where he is right now, okay?” Hanscomb said.
He called in the secretary in the tight clothes, who checked with the dispatcher’s office and reported back that Officer Ruderman was on his lunch break. I looked up at the wall clock. It was twenty minutes past eleven; the police in Calusa apparently took their midday meals a bit earlier than the rest of us did.