The police assumed, therefore, that the girl and her murderer had been driving west on the River Highway, had pulled into the emergency repairs cutoff, and had then proceeded on foot to the top of the cliff.
The girl had been killed at the top of the cliff.
She had been alive up to then. There were no bloodstains along the path leading upward. With a head wound such as she had suffered, her blood would have soaked the rocks on the path if she had been killed earlier and then carried from the car.
The instrument used to split her skull and her face had been heavy and blunt. The girl had undoubtedly reached for her killer’s face, snatching off the sunglasses. She had then gone over the cliff, and the sunglasses had left her hand.
It would have been easy to assume that the lens of the glasses had shattered upon contact with the ground. This was not the case. The technicians could find not a scrap, not a sliver of glass, on the ground. The sunglasses, then, had been shattered before they went over the side of the cliff. Nor had they been shattered anywhere in the area. The lab boys searched in vain for glass. The notion of a man wearing sunglasses with one ruptured lens was a curious one, but the facts stood.
The sunglasses, of course, had drawn a blank. Five-and-dime stuff.
The tire tracks had seemed promising at first. But when the cast was studied and comparison data checked, the tires on the car proved to be as helpful as the sunglasses had been.
The tire size was 6.70–15.
The tire weight was twenty-three pounds.
The tire was made of rubber reinforced with nylon cord, the thread design featuring hook “sipes” to block skids and sideslip.
The tire retailed for $18.04, including federal tax.
The tire could be had by any man jack in the US of A who owned a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. The trade name of the tire was “Allstate.”
You could order one or a hundred and one by sending your dough and asking for catalogue number 95N03067K.
There were probably 80,000 people in the city who had four of the tires on each of their cars, not to mention a spare in the trunk.
The tire tracks told Grossman one thing: The car that had pulled into the cutoff was a light car. The tire size and weight eliminated any of the heavier cars on the road.
Grossman felt like a man who was all dressed up with no place to go.
Resignedly, he turned to the pocket patch Eileen Burke had ripped from the mugger’s jacket.
When Roger Havilland stopped by for the test results that Friday afternoon, Grossman said the patch was composed of 100 percent nylon and that it belonged to a suit, which retailed for $32 in a men’s clothing chain. The chain had sixty-four stores spread throughout the city. The suit came in only one color: blue.
Havilland gravely considered the impossibility of getting any lead from a suit sold in sixty-four stores. He scratched his head in misery.
And then he said, “Nylon? Who the hell wears nylon in the fall?”
Meyer Meyer was exuberant.
He burst into the squadroom, and he waltzed over to where Temple was fishing in the file, and he slapped his partner on the back.
“They cracked it!” he shouted.
“What?” Temple said. “Meyer, you damn near cracked my back. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The cats,” Meyer said, shrewdly studying Temple.
“What cats?”
“The 33rd Precinct. This guy who was going around kidnapping cats. I tell you this is the eeriest case they’ve ever cracked. I was talking to Agnucci. Do you know him? He’s third grade down there, been working on this one all along, handled most of the squeals. Well, man, they’ve cracked it.” Meyer studied Temple patiently.
“So what’d it turn out to be?” Temple asked, his interest piqued.
“They got their first lead the other night,” Meyer said. “They got a squeal from some woman who said an Angora had been swiped. Well, they came upon this guy in an alleyway, and guess what he was doing?”
“What?” Temple asked.
“Burning the cat!”
“Burning the cat? You mean, setting fire to the cat?”
“Yep,” Meyer said, nodding. “He stopped when they showed, and he ran like hell. They saved the cat, and they also got a good description of the suspect. After that, it was duck soup.”
“When’d they get him?” Temple asked.
“This afternoon. They broke into his apartment, and it was the damnedest thing ever, I’m telling you. This guy was actually burning up the cats, burning them to this powdery ash.”
“I don’t believe it,” Temple said.
“So help me. He’d kidnap the cats and burn them into ashes. He had shelves and shelves of these little jars, full of cat ashes.”
“But what in hell for?” Temple asked. “Was the guy nuts?”
“Nossir,” Meyer said. “But you can bet the boys at the 33rd were asking the same question.”
“Well, what was it?”
“They asked him, George. They asked him just that. Agnucci took him aside and said, ‘Listen, Mac, are you nuts or something? What’s the idea burnin’ up all them cats and then puttin’ the ashes in jars like that?’ Agnucci asked, all right.”
“Well, what’d the guy say?”
Meyer patiently said, “Just what you’d expect him to say. He explained that he wasn’t crazy and that there was a good reason for those cat ashes in all those jars. He explained that he was making something.”
“What?” Temple asked anxiously. “What in hell was he making?”
“Instant pussy,” Meyer said softly, and then he began chuckling.
15
The report on the package of Pall Mall cigarettes and the match folder came in later that afternoon. It simply stated that each article, as such articles are wont to be, had been fingered a good many times. The only thing the fingerprint boys got from either of them was an overlay of smeared, worthless latents.
The match folder, with its blatant advertisement for the Three Aces, was turned over to the Detective Bureau, and the detectives of Homicide North and the 87th Precinct sighed heavily because the match folder meant more goddamned legwork.
Kling dressed for his date carefully.
He didn’t know exactly why, but he felt that extreme care should be exercised in the handling and feeding of Claire Townsend. He admitted to himself that he had never (well, hardly ever) been so taken with a girl and that he would probably be devastated forever (well, for a long time) if he lost her. He had no ideas on exactly how to win her, except for this intuition that urged him to proceed with caution. She had, after all, warned him repeatedly. She had put out the KEEP OFF! sign, and then she had read the sign aloud to him, and then she had translated it into six languages, but she had, nonetheless, accepted his offer.
Which proves beyond doubt, he thought, that the girl is wildly in love with me.
Which piece of deduction was about on a par with the high level of detective work he had done so far. His abortive attempts at getting anywhere with the Jeannie Paige murder left him feeling a little foolish. He wanted very much to be promoted to detective 3rd/grade someday, but he entertained severe doubts now as to whether he really was detective material. It was almost two weeks since Peter Bell had come to him with his plea. It was almost two weeks since Bell had scribbled his address on a scrap of paper, a scrap still tucked in one of the pockets of Kling’s wallet. A lot had happened in those nearly two weeks. And those happenings gave Kling reason for a little healthy soul-searching.