“If I got on that ten-thirty train,” he asked, “where would I get off a half hour from now?”
“Say, I don’t know,” Ruth said. He thought for a moment. “Can tell you how to find out, though.”
“Yes?”
“Get on it,” Ruth said.
“Thanks.”
“Not at all. Glad to be of help.” He turned back to his comic book, anxious to get back to the funny pages about the sick widow.
The train screeched through the heart of the city, on intimate terms with the windows of the buildings it passed. Kling sat and watched the city pass by in review outside. It was a big city, and a dirty city, but when you were born and raised in it, it became as much a part of you as your liver or your intestinal tract. He watched the city, and he watched the hands of his timepiece.
Jeannie Paige had told Claire there was a half-hour ride ahead of her. She had generally boarded a 10:30 train, and so Kling watched the advancing hands of his watch. The train swooped underground, piercing the bowels of the city. He sat and waited. Passengers came and went. Kling’s eyes did not leave his watch.
At 11:02, the train pulled into a station platform underground. The last stop had been at 10:58. It was a tossup, either way. He left the train and went up to the street.
He was in the heart of Isola.
The buildings reached up to touch the sky, tinting the night with gaudy smears of red and orange and green and yellow light. There was a men’s clothing store on the corner, and a bakery shop, and a hack stand, and a dress shop, and a bus stop up the street, and a movie marquee, and a candy store, and a Chinese restaurant, and a bar, and all the stores and signs that clustered together like close relatives of the same family all over the city.
He sighed heavily.
If Jeannie had met her boyfriend here, and if her boyfriend’s name was Clifford, combing the area would be like searching for a blade of hay in a mountain of needles.
He went to the subway kiosk again, boarding an uptown train this time. He traveled for one stop, figuring the half hour Jeannie had estimated could just as easily have brought her to this station.
The stores and signs he encountered on the street were much the same as those he had just seen. The trappings of a busy intersection. Hell, this stop was almost a dead ringer for the one he’d just visited.
Almost — but not quite.
Kling boarded the train again and headed for his furnished room.
There had been one landmark at the first stop that had been missing at the second stop. Kling’s eyes had recorded the item on his brain and buried it in his unconscious.
Unfortunately, however, it was useless there at the moment.
14
Science, as any fool knows, is the master sleuth.
Give the police lab a sliver of glass and they can tell you what make car the suspect was driving, when he last had it washed, what states he’d visited, and whether or not he’d ever necked in the backseat.
Provided the breaks are with them.
When the breaks are going the wrong way, science is about as master a sleuth as the corner iceman.
The breaks in the Jeannie Paige case managed to show a total disregard for the wishes and earnest endeavors of the boys in the police laboratory. There had, in all truth, been a good thumbprint on one lens of the sunglasses found near the girl’s body. Unfortunately, it is about as difficult to trace a single print as it is to unmask a Moslem woman. This did not faze the boys in the lab.
Sam Grossman was a lab technician and a police lieutenant.
He was tall and thin, a gentle man with gentle eyes and a quiet manner. He wore glasses, the only sign of science on a rock-hewn face that seemed to have been dispossessed from a New England farm. He worked at Headquarters in the clean, white lab that stretched across half the first-floor length of the building. He liked police work. He owned an orderly, precise mind, and there was something neat and truthful about the coupling of indisputable scientific fact to police theory.
He was an emotional man, but he had long ago ceased identifying the facts of sudden death with the people it summarily visited. He had seen too many bundles of bloody clothing, had studied the edges of too many powder burns, had analyzed the liquid contents of too many poisoned stomachs. Death, to Sam Grossman, was the great equalizer. It reduced human beings to arithmetical problems. If the breaks went with the lab, two and two added up to four.
If the breaks were indifferent or downright ornery, two and two sometimes equaled five, or six, or eleven.
There had been a man at the scene of Jeannie Paige’s death. The man had been equipped with a soft-pine sketch board attached to a photographic tripod. He had also carried a small alidade, a compass, graph paper, a soft-lead pencil, India rubber, common pins, a wooden triangle with scale, a scale, a tape measure, and a flexible steel ruler.
The man had worked quietly and efficiently. While photographers swarmed over the site, while technicians dusted for latent prints, while the position of the body was marked, and while the body was transported into the waiting meat wagon, while the area was carefully scrutinized for footprints or tire tracks — the man stood like an artist doing a picture of a farmer’s barn on Cape Cod.
He said hello to the detectives who occasionally stopped to chat with him. He seemed unmindful of the activity that erupted everywhere around him.
Quietly, efficiently, carefully, methodically, he sketched the scene of the crime. Then he packed up and went to his office, where, working from the preliminary sketches, he made a more detailed drawing. The drawing was printed up and, together with the detailed photos taken at the site, sent to the many departments interested in solving the mugger murder.
Sam Grossman’s interest was definitely turned in that direction, and so a copy of the drawing reached his desk. Since color, or the lack of color, played no important part in this particular homicide, the drawing was in black and white.
Grossman studied it with the dispassionate scrutiny an art dealer gives a potentially fake van Gogh.
The girl had been found at the base of a fifteen-foot drop, one of the shelflike levels that sloped down in a cliff to the riverbed. A footpath led through evergreens and maples from an emergency repairs turnoff to the highest point of the cliff, some thirty feet above the River Harb.
The repairs cutoff was plainly visible from the River Highway, which swung around in a wide arc under the Hamilton Bridge approach. The footpath, however, was screened from the highway by trees and shrubs, as were the actual sloping sides of the cliff itself.
A good set of tire tracks had been found in a thin layer of earth caked on the river side of the repairs cutoff. A pair of sunglasses had been found alongside the dead girl’s body.
That was all.
Unfortunately, the sides of the cliff sloped upward in igneous formidability. The path wound its way over solid prehistoric rock. Neither the girl nor her murderer had left any footprints for the lab boys to play with.
Unfortunately, too, though the path was screened by bushes and trees, none of the plant life encroached upon the path’s right to meander to the top of the cliff. In short, there was no fabric, leather, feathers, or telltale dust caught upon twigs or resting upon leaves.
It was a reasonable assumption that the girl had been driven to the spot of her death. There were no signs of any repairs having been made in the cutoff. If the auto had pulled in with a flat tire, the jack would have left marks on the pavement, and the tools might have left grease stains or metal scrapings. There was the possibility, of course, that the car had suffered an engine failure, in which case the hood would have been lifted and the mechanism studied. But the caked earth spread in an arc that covered the corners and sides of the cutoff. Anyone standing at the front of the car to lift the hood would surely have left footprints. There were none, nor were there any signs of prints having been brushed away.