Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

Do you play the piano? Hoping to hear from you,

Very sincerely yours,

MERMAN SCHICHTE

Rural Route Six

Pathanville. N. Y.

The lieutenant stuck it back in the pigeonhole. “Park your pants in a chair, mister. It makes me nervous to have anyone reading over my shoulder.”

Helbourne sat down. Has mouth was open and he was panting as if he’d been climbing stairs. He kept rubbing his palms on his knees while he watched Teccard run through the other letter.

Your message in the Herald was like music heard far off over the water at night. Perhaps I am wrong, dear LL27, but I sense in your heart an aching desire for the finer things which life too often denies those best fitted to enjoy them. If I have understood you rightly, your appeal for companionship strikes a very sympathetic chord in my own soul.

I am thirty-five, dark and, though no Adonis, not bad to look upon, I have been told. I have a comfortable business and am fond of travel, theater and books. Possibly you would care to write me so we could exchange photographs and perhaps — quien sabe — perhaps, some day, rings to symbolize even more than companionship!

With eager anticipation,

Your friend,

MAROLD WILLARD

971 East 88th Street

New York City

Teccard put the letter in his pocket. East Eighty-eighth wasn’t so far from the pier where that grisly bone had been found.

“This Harold Willard,” he said. “Let’s see the other letters you’ve had from him.”

Helbourne shook his head quickly. “That’s the only one. I never heard of the man before. I can’t keep track—”

“Yair. I heard that one. You recognize his signature?”

“No. Not at all.”

“You sent the copy of this drool along to Box LL27?”

“Not yet. It was going out today,” Helbourne said.

“Don’t send it. And don’t send out copies of any letters that come to you from New York City. Not until I’ve had a look at them. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Helbourne held his head sideways, as if he expected the lieutenant to take a punch at him. “Is there — ah — any cause for you to believe the writer of that letter — has been involved in these — ah — irregularities you are investigating?”

Teccard stuffed a copy of the Herald into his coat pocket. “Only that he writes phoney as hell. You ought to have your butt booted for handling that kind of sewage. And if I find you’ve passed on any more of it, I’m coming back and rub your nose in it.”

It was dusk when the sedan reached the Twenty-third Precinct station house. Teccard was glad to get out of the chill wind whistling across Harlem from the river. “Cap Meyer around?” he inquired of the desk sergeant.

“You’ll find him in the muster room, with a couple boys from Homicide, Lieutenant.”

Teccard strode into the back room. Four men stood about the long table under a green-shaded bulb. Three were in plain-clothes, the fourth was in uniform. There was a black rubber body-bag at the one end of the table, at the other a piece of wax paper with as grisly a collection as the Identification man had ever seen.

“What you got, Meyer?”

The captain turned. Has face was a curious greenish-yellow in the cone of brilliance. “I wouldn’t know, Teccard. But whatever it is, you can have it.”

One of the Homicide men finished tying a tag to the third finger of a skeleton hand. “All we’re sure of, it was an adult female.”

His partner stripped off a pair of rubber gloves. “That’s all you’ll ever establish, for certain. Person who hacked this woman up was pretty tricky.” He indicated the cracked and flattened end of the finger bones. “Mashed the tips to prevent any print-work.”

Meyer tongued around his stub of cigar. “Wasn’t really necessary, though. The rats took care of that.”

The uniformed man spoke up. “All this mess had been dumped under the shore end of that Ninety-eighth Street pier, Lieutenant. There was a loose plank there, somebody must of ripped it up. It was near covered by muck, but we shoveled it out and used the hose on it, well as we could.”

“Including that thigh bone, we got everything but one foot now,” the first Homicide man said. “But it wouldn’t do any good to try a reconstruction. All the teeth were hammered out of that head, before it was dropped in the mud.”

Teccard bent over the yellowish skull, stained with dirty, grayish mold. “Parts of some fillings left. Jaw still shows where she had some bridge-work done. We can check the dentists, up around Tannersville.”

Captain Meyer exclaimed: “You got a line on her, already?”

“Yair. Schoolteacher who thought she was coming to town for her wedding ceremony. ‘Till death do ye part.’ It parted her, to hell and gone, didn’t it?” He turned away. “How about letting me have one of your men who knows the Eighty-eighth Street beat? In the nine hundreds.”

Meyer and the uniformed man looked at each other. The captain gestured. “Patrolman Taylor, here, had that beat up to a month ago. How long you need him?”

“Depends. Bird we’re after may have flown the coop already.”

“O.K. You’re relieved, Taylor. And if you have any trouble when it comes to putting the arm on the crut who did this,” the captain jerked his head toward the table, “do me one favor.”

The policeman touched the rim of his cap. “Yuh?”

“Shoot him a couple times where it’ll really hurt. All he’ll feel, if he goes to the chair, will be a few seconds’ jolt. Way I feel, that’d be letting him off easy...”

Out in the car, Taylor pulled a folded-up newspaper from his hip pocket. “That kid who found the leg this morning squawked all over the neighborhood. We warned him to keep his puss shut — but the papers got it just the same.”

Teccard didn’t read it. “They can’t print much, if they don’t know any more than we do, Taylor. What you know about number 971?” He pulled up half a block away.

The patrolman craned his neck. “Nine-seven-one? The old brick house? Nothing much. Just four- or five-buck-a-week furnished rooms. No apartments.”

“Who runs it?”

“Old dodo named Halzer. Ham and his wife. They got 969, too — operate ’em together. He’s harmless, stewed about half the time.”

“Yair? You ever hear of a guy, name of Harold Willard, in this parish?”

“Harold Willard. Harold Willard. I don’t recall it, Lieutenant. What’s he look like?”

“Dark, about thirty-five years old. That’s all we’ve got to go on. My guess is he fancies himself for a double of one of the movie stars. Likely to be a flash dresser.”

“I can’t seem to place him. Maybe he’s just moved in. They keep coming and going in a joint like this.”

“Yair. If he happens to be in now, we’ll keep him from going.”

“We can do that, Lieutenant. There’s no rear doors on this side of the block.”

“You go on ahead, then. Go into 969. Find out from Halzer what room Willard has. When you know, stand in the door of 969 and wait for me to come past. You can give me the high sign without anyone watching you from one of the windows next door,” Teccard explained.

“Check.”

“And after I go in, nobody comes out. I mean nobody. Until I say so.”

“Got you, Lieutenant.” The patrolman strolled away, idly twisting his night-stick.

Teccard stood on the curb, tamping out his pipe. He gazed curiously up at the lighted windows of 971. What kind of murderer could it be who took such care to hack his victim to pieces — only to attempt to hide all the remains in one spot? There had been other instances of dismembered corpses in the records of the Criminal Identification Bureau but, so far as Teccard could remember, limbs and head and torso had invariably been strewn far and wide, to prevent any reconstruction of the body. Was he up against one of those unpredictable, pathological cases of sadism — where mutilation gives the killer a diabolical satisfaction? That didn’t seem to match up with the carefully planned disposition of the victim’s funds...