He removed the cap from the oil can and impregnated the paper towel with oil. He folded it carefully into wax paper, then wrapped the whole thing in aluminum foil, pressing down hard on the folds so the oil wouldn’t seep out. He put the package in a heavy manila envelope.
Then he sharpened a pencil, using his penknife to scrape the graphite to a long point. He placed the ice ax head on a sheet of good rag stationery and carefully traced a profile with his sharpened pencil, going very slowly, taking particular care to include the four little saw teeth on the underside of the point.
Then he took out his desk ruler and measured the size of the spike where it left the head, as a square. Each of the four sides, as closely as he could determine, was 15/ 16th of an inch. He then drew a square to those dimensions on the same sheet of paper with the silhouette of the pick. He folded the sheet, tucked it into his breast pocket. He took the envelope with the oil-impregnated paper towel and started out. He pulled on his overcoat and hat, shouted upstairs to Mary to tell her he was leaving, and heard her answering shout. At the last minute, halfway out the door, he remembered his letter of condolence to Monica Gilbert and went back into the study to pick it up. He dropped it in the first mailbox he passed.
“Better make this quick, Edward,” Dr. Ferguson said. “Broughton is sending one of his boys down to witness the autopsy. He wants a preliminary verbal report before he gets the official form.”
“I’ll make it fast. Did the doctors at Mother of Mercy tell you anything?”
“Not much. As I told you, Gilbert was struck from the front, the wound about two inches above the normal hair line. The blow apparently knocked him backward, and the weapon was pulled free before he fell. As a result, the penetration is reasonably clean and neat, so I should be able to get a better profile of the wound than on the Lombard snuff.”
“Good.” Delaney unfolded his paper. “Doctor, this is what I think the penetration profile will look like. It’s hard to tell from this, but the spike starts out as a square. Here, in this little drawing, are the dimensions, about an inch on each side. If I’m right, that should be the size of the outside wound, at scalp and skull. Then the square changes to a triangular pick, and tapers, and curves downward, coming to a sharp point,”
“Is this your imagination, or was it traced from an actual weapon?”
“It was traced.”
“All right. I don’t want to know anything more. What are these?”
“Four little saw teeth on the underside of the point. You may find some rough abrasions on the lower surface of the wound.”
“I may, eh? The brain isn’t hard cheddar, you know. You want me to work with this paper open on the table alongside the corpse?”
“Not if Broughton’s man is there.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Couldn’t you just take a look at it, doctor? Just in case?”
“Sure,” Ferguson said, folding up the paper and sliding it into his hip pocket. “What else have you got?”
“In this envelope is a folded packet of aluminum foil, and inside that is an envelope of wax paper, and inside that is a paper towel soaked in oil. Light machine oil.”
“So?”
“You mentioned there were traces of oil in the Lombard wound. You thought it was probably Lombard’s hair oil, but it was too slight for analysis.”
“But Gilbert was bald-at least where he was hit he was bald.”
“That’s the point. It couldn’t be hair oil. But I’m hoping there will be oil in the Gilbert wound. Light machine oil.” Ferguson pushed back in his swivel chair and stared at him. Then the doctor pulled his wool tie open, unbuttoned the neck of his flannel shirt.
“You’re a lovely man, Edward,” he said, “and the best detective in town, but Gilbert’s wound was X-rayed, probed and flushed at Mother of Mercy.”
“If there was any oil in it, there couldn’t be any now?”
“I didn’t say that. But it sure as hell cuts down on your chances.”
“What about the Olfactory Analysis Indicator?”
“The OAI? What about it?”
“How much do you know about it, doctor?”
“About as much as you do. You read the last bulletin, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Sort of inconclusive, wasn’t it?”
“It surely was. The idea is to develop a sniffer not much larger than a vacuum cleaner. Portable. It could be taken to the scene of a crime, inhale an air sample, and either identify the odors immediately or store the air sample so it could be taken back to the lab and analyzed by a master machine. Well, they’re a long way from that right now. It’s a monstrous big thing at this point, very crude, but I saw an impressive demonstration the other day. It correctly identified nine smokes from fifteen different brands of cigarettes. That’s not bad.”
“In other words, it’s got to have a comparison to go by? Like the memory bank in a computer?”
“That’s right. Oh-ho. I see what you’re getting at. All right, Edward. Leave me your machine oil sample. I’ll try to get a reading on tissue from Gilbert’s wound. But don’t count on it. The OAI is years away. It’s just an experiment now.”
“I realize that. But I don’t want to neglect any possibility.”
“You never did,” Dr. Ferguson said.
“Should I wait around?”
“No point in it. The OAI analysis will take three days at least. Probably a week. As far as your drawing goes, I’ll call you this afternoon or this evening. Will you be home?”
“Probably. But I may be at the hospital. You could reach me there.”
“How’s Barbara?”
“Getting along.”
Ferguson nodded, stood, took off his tweed jacket, hung it on a coat tree, began to shrug into a stained white coat. “Getting anywhere, Edward?” he asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Captain Delaney grumbled. “I just keep going.”
“Don’t we all?” the big man smiled.
Delaney called Ivar Thorsen from a lobby phone. The answering service got back to him a few minutes later and said Mr. Thorsen was not available and would he please call again at three in the afternoon.
It was the first time Thorsen had not returned his call, and it bothered Delaney. It might be, of course, that the deputy inspector was in a meeting or on his way to a precinct house, but the Captain couldn’t shake a vague feeling of unease.
He consulted his pocket notebook in which he had copied the address of Outside Life. He took a taxi to Spring Street, and when he got out of the cab, he spent a few minutes walking up and down the block, looking around. It was a section of grimy loft buildings, apparently mostly occupied by small manufacturers, printers, and wholesalers of leather findings. It seemed a strange neighborhood for Outside Life.
That occupied the second and third floors of a ten-story building. Delaney walked up the stairs to the second floor, but the sign on the solid door said “Offices and Mailing. Store on third floor.” So he climbed another flight, wanting to look about before he talked to-to-He consulted his notebook again: Sol Appel, the owner.
The “store” was actually one enormous, high-ceilinged loft with pipe racks, a few glass showcases, and with no attempts made at fashionable merchandizing. Most of the stock was piled on the floor, on unpainted wooden shelves, or hung from hooks driven into the whitewashed walls.
As Langley had said, it was a fascinating conglomeration: rucksacks, rubber dinghies, hiking boots, crampons, dehydrated food, kerosene lanterns, battery-heated socks, machetes, net hammocks, sleeping bags, outdoor cookware, hunting knives, fishing rods, reels, creels, pitons, nylon rope, boating gear-an endless profusion of items ranging from five-cent fishhooks to a magnificent red, three-room tent with a mosquito-netted, picture window, at $1,495.00.
Outside Life seemed to have its devotees, despite its out-of-the-way location; Delaney counted at least 40 customers wandering about, and the clerks were busy writing up purchases. The Captain found his way to the mountaineering department and inspected pitons, crampons, web belts and harnesses, nylon line, aluminum-framed backpacks, and a wide variety of ice axes. There were two styles of short-handled axes: the one purchased by Langley and another, somewhat similar, but with a wooden handle and no saw-tooth serrations under the spike. Delaney inspected it, and finally found “Made in U.S.A.” stamped on the handle butt.