The person whose death was open to medical scrutiny in the autopsy report that Meyer brought to the lieutenant was a young girl named Jeannie Rita Paige.
The words were very cold.
Death is not famous for its compassion.
The words read:
CORONER’S AUTOPSY REPORT
PAIGE, JEANNIE RITA
Female, white, Caucasian. Apparent age, 21. Chronological age, 17. Apparent height, 64 inches. Apparent weight, 120 lbs.
GROSS INSPECTION:
Head and face:
a) FACE — Multiple contusions visible. Frontal area of skull reveals marked depression of the tablet of bone, which measures approximately 10 cm; commencing 3 cm above the right orbit, the depression then descends obliquely downward across the bridge of the nose and terminates in the mid-portion of the left maxilla.
There are marked hemorrhagic areas visible in the conjunctiva areas of both eyes. Gross examination also reveals the presence of clotted blood within the nasal and optic orifices.
b) HEAD — There is an area of cerebral concussion with depression of tablet of bone, which involves the left temporal region of the skull. The depression measures approximately 11 cm and runs obliquely downward from the bregma to a point 2 cm above and lateral to the superior aspect of left ear. There are multiple blood clots matted in the head hair.
Body:
The dorsal and ventral aspects of the thorax and chest reveal multiple superficial abrasions and slight lacerations.
The right buttock reveals an area of severe abrasion.
The right lower extremity reveals a compound fracture of the distal portion of tibia and fibula, with bone protruding through medial distal third of the extremity.
Examination of PELVIS grossly and internally reveals the following:
1) No evidence of blood in vaginal vault.
2) No evidence of attempted forced entrance or coitus.
3) No evidence of seminal fluid or sperm demonstrable on gross and microscopic examination of vaginal secretions.
4) Uterus is spherical in outline grossly and measures approximately 13.5 x 10 x 7.5 cm.
5) Placental tissue as well as chorionic and decidual tissue are present.
6) A fetus measuring 7 cm long and weighing 29 gms is present.
IMPRESSIONS:
1) Death instantaneous due to blows inflicted upon skull and face. Cerebral concussion.
2) Multiple abrasions and lacerations inflicted over body and compound fracture of lower right extremity, tibia and fibula, probably incurred by descent over cliff.
3) There is no evidence of sexual assault.
4) Examination of uterine contents reveals a three-month pregnant uterus.
8
He could not shake the dead girl from his mind.
Back on the beat Monday morning, Kling should have felt soaring joy. He had been inactive for too long, and now he was back on the job, and the concrete and asphalt should have sung beneath his feet. There was life everywhere around him, teeming, crawling life. The precinct was alive with humanity, and in the midst of all this life, Kling walked his beat and thought of death.
The precinct started with the River Highway.
There, a fringe of greenery turned red and burnt umber hugged the river, broken by an occasional tribute to World War I heroes and an occasional concrete bench. You could see the big steamers on the river, cruising slowly toward the docks farther downtown, their white smoke puffing up into the crisp fall air. An aircraft carrier lay anchored in the center of the river, long and flat, in relief against the stark brown cliffs on the other side. The excursion boats plied their idle autumn trade. Summer was dying, and with it, the shouts and joyous revelry of the sunseekers.
And up the river, like a suspended, glistening web of silver, the Hamilton Bridge regally arched over the swirling brown waters below, touching two states with majestic fingers.
At the base of the bridge, at the foot of a small stone-and-earth cliff, a seventeen-year-old girl had died. The ground had sucked up her blood, but it was still stained a curious maroon-brown.
The big apartment buildings lining the River Highway turned blank faces to the bloodstained earth. The sun was reflected from the thousands of windows in the tall buildings, buildings which still employed doormen and elevator operators, and the windows blinked across the river with fiery-eyed blindness. The governesses wheeled their baby carriages up past the synagogue on the corner, marching their charges south toward the Stem, which pierced the heart of the precinct like a multicolored, multifeathered, slender, sharp arrow. There were groceries and five-and-tens, and movie houses, and delicatessens, and butchers, and jewelers, and candy stores on the Stem. There was also a cafeteria on one of the corners, and on any day of the week, Monday to Sunday, you could spot at least twenty-five junkies in that cafeteria, waiting for the man with the White God. The Stem was slashed up its middle by a wide iron-pipe-enclosed island, broken only by the side streets that crossed it. There were benches on each street end of the island, and men sat on those benches and smoked their pipes, and women sat with shopping bags clutched to their abundant breasts, and sometimes the governesses sat with their carriages, reading paperbacked novels.
The governesses never wandered south of the Stem.
South of the Stem was Culver Avenue.
The houses on Culver had never been really fancy. Like poor and distant relatives of the buildings lining the river, they had basked in the light of reflected glory many years ago. But the soot and the grime of the city had covered their bumpkin faces, had turned them into city people, and they stood now with hunched shoulders and dowdy clothes, wearing mournful faces. There were a lot of churches on Culver Avenue. There were also a lot of bars. Both were frequented regularly by the Irish people, who still clung to their neighborhood tenaciously — in spite of the Puerto Rican influx, in spite of the Housing Authority, which was condemning and knocking down dwellings with remarkable rapidity, leaving behind rubble-strewn open fields in which grew the city’s only crop: rubbish.
The Puerto Ricans hunched in the side streets between Culver Avenue and Grover’s Park. Here were the bodegas, carnicerias zapaterias, joyerias, cuchifritos joints. Here was La Via de Putas, “The Street of the Whores,” as old as time, as thriving and prosperous as General Motors.
Here, bludgeoned by poverty, exploited by pushers and thieves and policemen alike, forced into cramped and dirty dwellings, rescued occasionally by the busiest fire department in the entire city, treated like guinea pigs by the social workers, like aliens by the rest of the city, like potential criminals by the police, here were the Puerto Ricans.
Light-skinned and dark-skinned. Beautiful young girls with black hair and brown eyes and flashing white smiles. Slender men with the grace of dancers. A people alive with warmth and music and color and beauty, 6 percent of the city’s population, crushed together in ghettos scattered across the face of the town. The ghetto in the 87th Precinct, sprinkled lightly with some Italians and some Jews, more heavily with the Irish, but predominantly Puerto Rican, ran south from the River Highway to the park, and then east and west for a total of thirty-five blocks. One-seventh of the total Puerto Rican population lived in the confines of the 87th Precinct. There were 90,000 people in the streets Bert Kling walked.