Ed McBain - The Con Man

The preliminary investigatory work had been handled by people other than the Missing Persons Bureau, of course. When Henry Proschek had reported his daughter’s absence to the 14th Precinct, the detective he’d spoken to had immediately checked with the desk officer to ascertain whether or not Mary Louise had been either arrested or hospitalized in his precinct. He then checked with Communications and the Bureau of Information to find out if anyone answering her description was in a hospital or a morgue at the moment. When his efforts to locate her had proved fruitless, he had then phoned the information in to the MP Bureau, where the routine business of preparing forms in triplicate had then followed. And, to confirm his phone call, he mailed on the next day one of the triplicate copies of his own report to the MP Bureau.

The MP Bureau had sent out a teletype alarm throughout the city and to nearby police areas. And the name of Mary Louise Proschek had been added to the daily mimeographed list of missing persons that is distributed to transportation terminals, hospitals, and anyplace where a refugee might seek help or shelter.

The girl was still missing. Perhaps she was the 87th’s floater.

But if Kling could remember very little about the floater’s teeth, he could remember one important point about her right hand. There had been a tattoo on the flap of skin between the girl’s right thumb and forefinger — the word MAC in a heart.

On Mary Louise Proschek’s missing person report, under the heading TATTOOS, there was one word — and that word was “None.”

Henry Proschek was a small, thin man with deep-brown eyes and a bald head. He was a coal miner, and the grime of three decades had permanently lodged beneath his fingernails and in the seams of his face. He was dressed in his Sunday best, and he had scrubbed himself vigorously before coming up from Scranton, but he still looked grubby, and if you didn’t know his trade was the honest occupation of extracting coal from the earth, you would have considered him a dirty little man.

He sat in the squad room of the 87th Precinct, and Carella watched him. There was indignation in Proschek’s eyes, a flaring indignation that Carella had not thought the miner capable of. Proschek had just listened to Kling’s little speech, and now there was indignation in his eyes, and Carella wondered whether or not Kling had delivered his talk wrong. He decided that Kling had done it in the only way possible. The kid was new, but he was learning, and there are only so many ways to tell a man his daughter is dead.

Proschek sat with his indignation in his eyes, and then his anger spread to his mouth and bubbled from his lips. “She’s not dead,” he said.

“She is, Mr. Proschek,” Kling said. “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

“She’s not dead,” Proschek said firmly.

“Sir—”

And, again, he said, “She’s not dead!”

Kling turned to Carella. Carella shoved himself off the desk effortlessly. “Mr. Proschek,” he said, “we’ve compared the dead girl’s teeth with the dental chart you gave to the Missing Persons Bureau. They’re identical, sir. Believe me, we wouldn’t have had this happen—”

“There’s been a mistake,” Proschek said.

“There’s been no mistake, sir.”

“How could she be dead?” Proschek asked. “She came here to start a new life. She said so. She wrote that to me. So how could she be dead?”

“Her body—”

“And you wouldn’t find my daughter drowned. My daughter was an excellent swimmer. My daughter won a medal in high school for her swimming. I don’t know who that girl is, but she’s not Mary Louise.”

“Sir—”

“I’d have broke her neck if she wore a tattoo. You said this dead girl has a tattoo on her hand. My Mary Louise would never even have considered a thing like that.”

“That’s what we wanted to find out from you, sir,” Carella said. “You told us she didn’t have a tattoo. In that case, she must have acquired the tattoo in this city. We know she wasn’t drowned, you see. She was dead before she entered the water. So if we can tie in the tattoo with—”

“That dead girl isn’t my daughter,” Proschek said. “You brought me all the way from Pennsylvania, and she isn’t even my daughter. Why are you wasting my time? I had to lose a whole day just to come here.”

“Sir,” Carella said firmly, “that girl is your daughter. Please try to understand that.” Proschek stared at him hostilely. “Did she have any friends named Mac?” Carella asked.

“None,” Proschek said.

“MacDonald, MacDougall, MacMorrow, MacManus, MacThing, Mac-Anything?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“My daughter didn’t have many boyfriends,” Proschek said. “She...she wasn’t a very pretty girl. She had good coloring, fair, like her mother — blue eyes and blonde hair, that’s a good combination — but she didn’t...She wasn’t very pretty. I...I used to feel sorry for her. A man...It doesn’t matter if a man isn’t good looking. But, to a girl, looks are everything. I used to feel sorry for her.” He paused and looked up at Carella and then repeated, as if to clarify his earlier statements, “She wasn’t very pretty, my daughter.”

Carella looked down at Proschek, knowing the coal miner had used the past tense, knowing that the girl was already dead in Proschek’s mind, and wondering why the man fought the knowledge now, fought the indisputable knowledge that his daughter was dead and had been dead for at least three months.

“Please think, Mr. Proschek,” he said. “Did she ever mention anyone named Mac?”

“No,” Proschek said. “Why should Mary Louise mention a Mac? That girl isn’t Mary Louise.” He paused, got a sudden idea, and said, “I want to see that girl.”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” Carella said.

“I want to see her. You say she’s my daughter, and you show me dental charts, and that’s all a lot of crap. I want to see that girl. I can tell you whether or not she’s Mary Louise.”

“Is that what you called her?” Carella asked. “Mary Louise?”

“That’s what I baptized her. Mary Louise. Everybody else called her just plain Mary, but that wasn’t the way I intended it. I intended it Mary Louise. That’s a pretty name, isn’t it? Mary Louise. Mary is too...plain.” He blinked. “Too plain.” He blinked again. “I want to see that girl. Where is that girl?”

“At the mortuary,” Kling said.

“Then take me there. A relative’s supposed to identify a... a body, isn’t he? Isn’t that the case?”

Kling looked at Carella.

“We’ll check out a car and take Mr. Proschek to the hospital,” Carella said wearily.

They did not talk much on the ride to the hospital. The three men sat on the front seat of the Mercury sedan, and the city burst with April greenery around them, but the inside of the car was curiously cheerless. They drove into the hospital parking lot, and Carella parked the police sedan in a space reserved for the hospital staff. Mr. Proschek blinked against the sunshine when he got out of the car. Then he followed Carella and Kling to the morgue.

The detectives did not have to identify themselves to the attendant. They had both been there many times before. They told the attendant the number they wanted, and then they followed him past the rows of doors set into the corridor wall, the small refrigerator doors behind each one of which was a corpse.

“We don’t advise this, Mr. Proschek,” Carella said. “Your daughter was in the water for a long time. I don’t think—”