Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Teccard slid the folders back in place. “The old come-on. What do you tap them for giving out with the address?”

The proprietor of the Herald frowned. “Our fee is five dollars.”

“At each end of the transaction? Five from the snappy skirt who wants the address of some dope who’s given her a line of mush? And another five from the dope himself, if he wants to get in touch with her direct?”

“I don’t like the way you put it, Lieutenant.”

“Catch them coming and going, don’t you! Next thing you know, you’ll catch five years in the pen.” Teccard drifted toward the rack of pigeonholes. There were letters and folded carbon copies in most of them. Under each space was pasted a copy of some Herald advertisement.

Helbourne watched him sullenly. “I’m not responsible for what my subscribers do after I’ve performed an introduction.”

“Hell you aren’t! You’re wide open for prosecution. You were warned some New York crut has been rooking old maids from upstate, using you as a go-between.” There was a cubbyhole with two letters, over an advertisement reading:

YOUNG LADY OF BREEDING

seeks companionship of amiable, sober businessman, under fifty, with quiet tastes. One who would appreciate a better-than-average table and a comfortable home. Not wishing to be supported, as have slight means of own. Able and active, though slight spinal injury. Brunette, thirty-one, former trained nurse. Box LL27.

Helen was a brunette — the age and the references to the spinal injury and having been a nurse clinched it. Teccard reached for the letters.

The fat man caught his arm. “You’ll have to get a court order, if you’re going to ransack my mail, Lieutenant.”

Teccard disengaged the pudgy fingers. “One side, mister. A minute ago you told me to help myself. I am. You want any trouble, I’ll see you get plenty.” He crackled the letters open. The first one read:

Dear Miss Box LL27.

Your ad made a great deal of an appeal to me. I am a farmer, widower five years now, age forty-six. It’s a seventy-acre fruit farm, paying good, too. I have a piano, radio, Chevrolet, nice furniture. The part about better than average cooking appealed to me. Do you play the piano? Hoping to hear from you,

Very sincerely yours,

HERMAN 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. His 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,

HAROLD 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. His 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...”