Ed McBain: The Con Man

To Di Angelo, he said, “You find the body, Fred?”

“Some kids,” Di Angelo said. “They come running to me. Jesus, it’s a mess, ain’t it?”

“It almost always is,” Carella said. He looked at the body again, and then because certain police formalities had to be followed whenever an unknown body turned up, he took a small black pad from his back pocket. He opened the pad, slid the pencil out from under its leather loop, and wrote:

1) Place where body found: Washed ashore on rock pile in River Harb.

2) Time when found:

He looked up at Di Angelo. “When did you get here, Fred?”

Di Angelo looked at his watch. “I’d say around one-fifteen, Steve. I was just a little bit off Silvermine, and I’m generally there around...”

“One-fifteen it is,” Carella said, and he wrote down the information. He then wrote, 3) Cause of death? and 4) Time when death occurred? and left both those items to be filled in by the ME or the coroner.

He next wrote:

5) Supposed age: 25–35.

6) Supposed profession:?

7) Description of body:

    a) Sex: Female.

    b) Color: White.

    c) Nationality:?

    d) Height:?

    e) Weight:?

There were a lot of question marks.

There were also a good many other items Carella could have listed under a description of the body. Items like build and complexion and hair and eyes and eyebrows and nose and chin and face and neck and lips and mouth and many more. And to these he could have given answers ranging from short and stocky to stout and square-shouldered, or small and pug, or square and dimpled, or thick and puffy, or any one of a hundred combinations for each category.

The trouble was that the body was a floater and pretty badly decomposed. Where an unknown body would automatically have called for a description of the eyes, the color, the shape, etc., Carella could give no such description here because the eyes had already decomposed. Where he would have liked to list the color of the girl’s hair, that hair had been washed away, and he settled for a brief note: Head hair gone. Pubic hair, blonde. He terminated his description of the body with the boldly printed word FLOATER. That, for anyone in the know, summed up the story. Then he went on to the next item:

8) Description of clothing: Single article of clothing is brassiere. Have lab check for laundry and dry-cleaning marks.

9) Jewelry and other objects on person: None.

Carella closed the notebook.

“What do you make of it?” Di Angelo asked.

“You want statistics or guesses?” Carella said.

“Gee, I don’t know. I was just asking.”

“Well, by statistics, this girl shouldn’t be dead,” Carella said. “It’s all a mistake.”

“How so?”

“From the looks of her, I’d say she’s been in the water maybe three, four months. Somebody probably reported her missing during that time — assuming she’s got family or friends — so that makes her technically a missing person.”

“Yeah?” Di Angelo asked, impressed as always by Carella. Di Angelo respected Carella a great deal. Part of this respect was due to the fact that they were both of Italian descent, and there was something immensely gratifying — to Di Angelo’s way of thinking — about an Italian boy making good. Di Angelo felt about Carella much the same way he felt about Frank Sinatra. But the major part of Di Angelo’s respect came from a thorough appreciation of the fact that Carella was a smart cop, a well-informed cop, and, on occasion, a tough cop. This, in Di Angelo’s book, was a tough combination to beat.

“So let’s look at the missing persons statistics,” Carella said. “We’ve got a girl here. Well, there are usually twenty-five percent more males than females among missing persons.”

“Yeah?” Di Angelo said.

“Two: She’s probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old. The peak age for missing persons is fifteen.”

“Yeah?” Di Angelo said.

“Three: This is April. The peak month for missing persons is May, and the second peak month is September.”

“How you like that?” Di Angelo said.

“So, statistically, this is all wrong.” Carella sighed, and again, there was a passing film of pain in his eyes. “That doesn’t make her any less dead, though,” he said.

“No,” Di Angelo said, shaking his head.

“One guess of a semi-technical nature,” Carella said. “Five’ll get you ten she’s an out-of-towner.”

Di Angelo nodded and then glanced up to the highway where two police sedans had pulled up. “Here’s the lab boys and the photographers,” he said, and then, as if he were certain such would not be the case now that they were on the scene, he looked down at the dead girl and said, “Rest in peace.”

If Carella’s interest in the floater, at this stage of the game, was a more or less fleeting one, there were those involved in police work who gave the decomposed body and its single article of clothing a much closer and more thorough inspection.

The girl’s brassiere was sent to the police laboratory. The girl’s body was sent to the morgue.

Sam Grossman was a police lieutenant and also a skilled laboratory technician. He was a big man with a rough-hewn face and big hands. He wore glasses because his eyes were not too good. There was a gentility about him that belied the fact that he dealt with cold scientific facts and often with the facts of death. He ran a clean laboratory, and his men got results. His laboratory was divided into seven sections, and it covered a good deal of the first floor of the Headquarters building on High Street downtown. The seven sections were:

1) Chemical and physical.

2) Biological.

3) General.

4) Firearms.

5) Questioned documents.

6) Photographic.

7) Mechanical.

The brassiere was turned over to the physical section first. The gentlemen who examined it there paid little or no attention to the fact that this single item of clothing is responsible for one of the most widespread and nationally advertised fetishes in America. They didn’t care whether or not the secret was in the circle, or whether or not anyone had dreamt she was a ballerina in this particular brassiere, or whether or not there was any hidden treasure to be found. They were interested in the undergarment as it applied to one thing, and one thing alone — the identity of the dead girl.

Most articles of clothing, you see, will carry either laundry or dry-cleaning marks. Sam Grossman was proud of the fact that his lab had the most comprehensive file of laundry marks in the nation. In a matter of minutes, provided there was a mark in the article of clothing, Sam’s men could pinpoint the exact laundry that had stamped the mark.

The brassiere carried no visible laundry marks. It would have been simpler if it had. It’s always simpler when you can see something with the naked eye. In truth, though, it wasn’t very much more difficult to put the brassiere on the long white counter over which hung the ultraviolet lights. A flip of the switch, and the counter turned a lovely shade of purple, and the brassiere turned a lovely shade of purple, and Sam’s men turned it over and over, searching for the luminous Phantom Fast laundry mark that many laundries use. The Phantom Fast mark is a good idea since it leaves no unsightly numbers on the back of your shirt collar or the seat of your underpants. It means compiling a separate set of marks for police files, but think of how pretty your shirts look. The only thing that’ll bring out a Phantom Fast mark is ultraviolet light, and hell, police labs are crawling with that kind of light.