“Then you came to the station.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you see his face?”
“Sort of, but not to know him, gee, if I saw him on the street. When it’s dark like that, a face is just a pale thing.”
“How big was he?”
“Pretty big, I guess.”
“Young or old?”
“I don’t know. I’d guess old. Maybe thirty. But I don’t know why I’d think that.”
“Did he wear a hat?”
“No. I’m sure he didn’t wear any hat.”
“How about his clothes?”
“I think they were dark, sort of.”
“How about his voice?”
“He didn’t say anything. He did kinda grunt when I clawed him down the cheeks with both hands, but that was the only sound he made. I marked him up, you bet.”
“Now, Hazel, I know it was a terrible experience, but I want you to close your eyes and think back. Think of it all over again, and try to remember any little impression you might have had that you haven’t told me. Anything that might help us get a line on him.”
The girl closed her eyes obediently. Her lips were compressed. He added softly, “Go through all the senses. Sound, touch, sight, smell.”
She opened her eyes. “There’s something about smell. Sure. He had some drinks, I guess. I could smell that.” She frowned. “But there’s something else too. I can’t quite remember.”
“Try hard, Hazel.”
“Gee, I am. But I guess it wasn’t a special smell like you could give a name to. He just smelled... well, clean.”
“Clean?”
“Gee, the boys I know. When it’s hot like this, they get a kind of sweaty smell I don’t like. But he smelled... oh, like soap and pine trees and talcum powder. Except for the drinking smell, just... kind of clean.”
Tate questioned her further, but she couldn’t add anything. She hadn’t gotten much, but at least she’d given them two things the others had not been able to do. She had marked him, and she had given a clue to social strata. Up until this incident, they hadn’t known if he was a bum, a tough neighborhood kid, a visitor from the suburbs. And he somehow trusted her estimate of age, though to classify thirty as old made him feel a bit rueful.
He stood up. “Thanks a lot, Hazel.”
“Will someone tell my folks? They’ll wonder where I am.”
“I stopped by. They’ll be over in the morning.”
“Oh. Look, did you have to tell them what... happened to me?”
“I thought they ought to know.”
He saw her eyes fill, and she turned her head away. That gesture seemed to be more that of a woman than a child. He said good night to her, but she didn’t turn back or speak. He looked down at her for a few moments, then patted her lax cool hand a bit awkwardly and left. Benny Darmond of the Bulletin was waiting for him out by the main desk, and fell in step with him.
“Making five in six weeks?” Benny asked.
“Making five. You better come on in with me. Maybe the paper can help, but I got to get permission. And I want to phone Feltman too before I give you the dope — that is, if I can get permission.”
“Can she identify?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to tell me yet.”
“Not yet.”
Benny Darmond waited. Tate made his calls, got his permission, checked with Feltman, went back out and sat down by Benny. “I’ve got permission, but it’s got to go in the other two papers too, Benny.”
“Oh, fine!”
“It’s a public service. Relax. Maybe you can prove newspapers are good for something. Don’t use the girl’s name, of course. She’s got long fingernails. Feltman said she really gouged the guy. There was enough meat under her nails so the lab can get a blood type. Both cheeks she said. So we want it spread around. Be a good citizen. Report immediately to the police if you see or hear of a man with hamburg where his cheeks should be. Anybody with fresh facial bandages. And be on a special lookout for a man who might be around thirty, and who is in a good income bracket. Comfortable, anyway.”
Benny nodded. He looked bored, but his eyes were bright and shrewd. He said, “Once in my gayer more reckless days a young lady sharpened her claws on my kisser. It was a source of painful embarrassment to me. And it took two weeks to heal. I think she had them dipped in some exotic oriental poison. Any thing else?”
“Facial lacerations could be combined with bruised knuckles, but we can’t be sure of that.”
Benny hurried off to the press phones upstairs. Dan Tate went home. Jen sat at the kitchen table. She gave him a long cool look. “Name, please?”
He sat down opposite her and tried to smile. The look of coolness changed to one of concern. “What is it, Dan? What is it, honey?”
“It’s another one.”
She put her hand over his. “I’m... sorry, Dan. It’s sickening. But you’ve got to stop making it a personal crusade. It isn’t worth what it does to you.”
He told her about this one. This scared little kid, who had run up against a dark place in the human soul. He told her about the plan, and he shut his hands hard and he said, “This time we get him. What can he do? Wear a Halloween costume? Hide in the closet until his face heals? This time we get him good.”
The papers cooperated. They all gave it page one-boxes. An hour after the papers hit the streets it became obvious that Tate and Ricks would need five more men in addition to the three extra men assigned. By midnight they had cleared thirty-one men and had a backlog of twenty more. There were absurdities. A man of seventy-eight with a recently lanced boil. A husky twelve-year-old boy whose puppy had bitten him on the cheek. A weighty and indignant banker whose old-fashioned straight razor had slipped. One husky young millworker looked for a time like a hot prospect. But the gouges on both cheeks were in payment for a term of less than endearment that he had used on his young wife, and he was able to prove he had been on night shift, from four to midnight the previous night.
The papers ran it again and again, but in each successive edition they gave it a bit less space. After five days had passed, it was a disconsolate paragraph on page eleven, and Dan Tate realized he was becoming most difficult to live with, even to the extent of snarling at Adele and sending her trotting off in tears.
Tate and Ricks were the only ones still assigned, and it had become a part-time project even for them, and Tate knew that his idea had gone sour to the extent that they were, though not admitting it, merely waiting for the next victim to report, or, as in the case of the second victim of the five, waiting to get the report after the examination of the body of the deceased.
Seven days after the papers gave up, Dan Tate took Jen and the kids on a Sunday picnic out at McGell Falls. He ate hugely of cold chicken and potato salad and stretched out with his head propped against a tree.
How did the guy get away with it? Flesh-colored bandages? No, in those first two days, those would have been spotted. What kind of a job could he have where he didn’t show his face? Deep-sea diver? Not five hundred miles from the ocean.
Try again, Daniel, my boy. Slow and easy. The guy we will say has a good job. A home. Maybe, like some of them, he has a wife and kids of his own. Would the little woman patch him up and hide him? Not very damn likely.
No, he’d just take off. He’d go far far away...
Tate sat up. He stared at Jen.