“The people deserve their rulers,” Katz said from behind his paper.
“What’s that?” Carmody said.
“I read it in a book so don’t ask me what it means,” Katz said.
The night stayed quiet, and Bannion smoked and looked out the window, thinking again of Lucy Carroway and what, if any, connection there could be between her and Max Stone. Tomorrow the shifts rotated and he would start on days for a week, working from eight till four. That meant a short night’s sleep and he was glad that nothing came up to keep them overtime. Sergeant Heineman came in at eleven, an hour early, to give them that much of a break, and Bannion headed home, wondering when and if the three-state alarm would turn up Lucy Carroway. If there was no news of her in the morning he’d have to forget about it, or send out an eight-state flyer — and he didn’t have enough to justify that trouble and expense.
News of Lucy Carroway was waiting for him the next morning. Neely, who’d come in before him, handed him a report. “You were interested in this, weren’t you, Dave?” he said.
Bannion put the carton of coffee he was carrying on the counter and took the form from Neely. He read it quickly.
The State Police at Radnor, Pennsylvania, had picked up a woman answering the description sent out the day before by the Philadelphia Homicide Bureau. Found on the Lancaster Pike at two o’clock in the morning by a passing truck driver, body of the deceased was presently at Saint Francis’ Hospital.
Bannion rubbed his forehead slowly. Deceased at Saint Francis. He was aware of the smell of coffee beside him, of Neely’s fragrant pipe, of the sunlight on the dusty floor, of all the sounds and impressions of the living world.
“I’m going out on this,” he said to Neely. “I’ll probably be back around noon. Keep an eye on things.”
“Okay, Sarge,” Neely said.
Bannion drove out along the Schuylkill, through Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, clean, pleasant Main Line villages with Packards and Buicks lining the street and housemaids doing the shopping in the business centers. The air was clear and fresh, and pale yellow sun brought the countryside to life, glinting in the river, gilding the gray Gothic heap of Villanova College, and making even the black winter woods seem warm and hospitable. It was vastly different from Philadelphia, Bannion thought. Here were first-rate schools, big homes, nice people.
What the hell had Lucy Carroway been doing out here?
Bannion turned off Lancaster Pike in Radnor and drove down an elm lined avenue to Saint Francis’ Hospital. He walked into the tile-floored accident ward and told the nurse who he was and what he wanted.
“Yes, come with me, please,” she said. She led him along a quiet, rubber-tiled corridor and stopped at a closed door. “Go right in,” she said.
Bannion opened the door and entered a small carpeted room, furnished with wicker chairs. There were flowers on a table and three hunting prints on the wall. A tall, gray-haired man stood up and put out his hand.
“I’m Parnell, County Detectives,” he said. “You’re Dave Bannion, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
“I saw your picture in the paper or something, I think,” Parnell said. He had a thin, tanned face, and a high forehead.
There was a quality of lean, whip-cord toughness about him. His hand was powerful in Bannion’s, and his eyes were those of a man who spent much of his time outdoors. “You’re interested in this girl we have here, eh?” he said.
“Yes, what happened to her?”
“She was pushed out of a car on the Pike sometime last night or early this morning. Her neck was broken and her skull fractured. She’s in the next room now, the place we use as a county morgue. I called for a Post and the doctor’s ready to go ahead. Let’s go in.”
“All right,” Bannion said, removing his hat.
The unclothed body of Lucy Carroway lay on a long, zinc-lined table, a table equipped with running water and built-up sides. There was a powerful lamp above her, about two feet from her body now, that could be raised or lowered from the ceiling by a foot pedal. She looked very small, Bannion thought, not much bigger than a child. The black bangs were still neatly in place on her forehead. There was no expression on her face; it was crumpled up like a piece of soiled white cloth. He noticed details; the grotesque angle of her head in relation to the shoulders, the smooth, cold look of her skin, the tininess of her breasts, the rough abrasions on her hips, legs and arms.
The coroner, a tired, earnest-looking man with a slight tic in his left cheek, moved his foot and brought the lamp down closer to her body. “See here,” he said, glancing at Bannion and the county Detective. He pointed to spots on her slim legs, a half-dozen of them between her ankles and knees. “Burns, cigarette burns, I’d say,” he said.
Parnell swore softly.
“Looks like it could be one of those upside-down sex crimes,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “There are rope burns on her wrists and thighs. Maybe the fellow had his fun with her and then pushed her out of the ear. You want her for something in Philly?”
“No, she was just — part of something else,” Bannion said. “Was she dead when she was pushed out of the car?”
“Can’t tell yet,” the doctor said. He tapped his scalpel on the metal edge of the table. “I’ll know in fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“Was she raped?” Bannion said.
“No, but as you know, you don’t usually find that in cases like this. Well, I’ll get started now.”
Bannion walked into the next room with Parnell. He was damning himself bitterly, thinking, if I’d worked harder, moved faster, been smarter, maybe...
“What was your interest in her?” Parnell said, beginning to fill a short, black pipe. “This is my job now, and anything may help.”
“Last week a Philadelphia cop committed suicide. Bad health, his wife said. Lucy Carroway said otherwise. She said he was in fine shape.” Bannion shrugged and got out his cigarettes. “It wasn’t much, you see, just a routine little funny business. Then Lucy disappeared. Now she’s dead.”
“That could be a coincidence,” Parnell said. “My guess is she was killed by someone she met for the first time, someone who bought her a few drinks and took her for a ride.”
“That could be,” Bannion said.
The coroner joined them fifteen minutes later, wearing a tweed jacket and adjusting a dark red, wool-knit tie. “She was alive when she was thrown from the car, I’m quite sure,” he said. “Death was caused, I’d say, by a splintered rib that went right through her heart. Of course, the broken neck, the skull fracture, either of those would have done it, too. But the rib went into her heart when she slammed onto the pavement. That’s why I say she was alive when she went out of the car.”
It seemed a moot point to Bannion.
He and Parnell went out to his car, turning up their coat collars against the wind. “Well, good luck,” Bannion said.
“I’ll need it,” Parnell said. “There’s a chance that one of our regulars can help us out. We know quite a few people who use the Pike at night. Newspapermen, some doctors, engineers for the power plants — they work nights and drive home late. We’ll check all of them, see if any of them noticed a car parked on the road or anything else funny. Outside of that, we’ll just have to pray.”
“That’s the way it is on some jobs.”
“If you run into anything in Philadelphia give me a ring,” Parnell said. “Wasn’t anything funny about that cop’s suicide, was there?”
“No, it was on the level,” Bannion said. Parnell, he realized, was no dummy.
They shook hands and Bannion slipped behind the wheel of his ear. Parnell sent his regards to some detectives he knew in Philadelphia. Then he said, again, “Let me know if you come across anything I can use.”