Ed McBain: The Con Man

The only trouble with the dead girl’s brassiere was that it didn’t carry a Phantom Fast mark, either.

Faced with the fact that the girl probably did her own laundry, but otherwise unfazed, Sam’s men began putting the bra through a series of chemical tests to determine whether or not it held any peculiar stains.

Meanwhile, back at the morgue...

The assistant medical examiner was a man named Paul Blaney. He had been examining dead bodies for a good many years, but he still could not get used to floaters. He had been examining this particular dead body for nigh onto two hours, and he still could not get used to floaters. He had estimated that the dead girl was approximately thirty-five years of age, that her weight while she was alive (according to her five-foot-three-and-a-half-inch height and her large bone structure) was probably somewhere around 125 pounds, and that her head hair (judging from the color of her pubic hair) was probably blonde.

Her lower front teeth had been lost in the water, and her upper front teeth were in good condition, although her upper back teeth and her lower back teeth had a good many fillings and a good many cavities. The upper right second molar had been extracted a long time ago and never replaced. Blaney had prepared a dental chart to be compared with the dental chart of any suspected missing person.

He had also made a methodical scrutiny of the girl’s body for identifying marks or scars and had concluded that she’d once had an appendectomy (there was a long scar across her belly), that she’d been vaccinated on her left thigh rather than on either of her arms, that there was a duster of birthmarks at the base of her spinal column, and unusual in a woman, that there was a small tattoo on the fold of skin between her right thumb and forefinger. The tattoo was a simple heart, the point of which ran toward the arm. There was a single word within the heart. The tattoo looked like this:

Blaney estimated that the body had been submerged for at least three to four months. The epidermis of both hands was lost, and he sighed a forlorn sigh for his brothers of toil in the police laboratory because he knew this would mean extra work for them. And then, with a great show of distaste and a maximum of somehow remarkably detached efficiency, he cut off the fingers and thumb of each hand and wrapped them up for delivery to Sam Grossman.

Then he began working on the dead girl’s heart.

It requires a certain amount of dispassionate, emotionless patience to lift fingerprint impressions from fingers and thumbs that have been cut from a cadaver.

If the dead girl had been in the water for a comparatively short period of time, Sam Grossman’s men could have dried off each finger with a soft towel and then — in order to smooth out the so-called washerwoman’s skin effect — have injected glycerin beneath the fingertip skin. They could then have taken their prints with ease.

Unfortunately, the girl had not been in the water for a short period of time.

Nor had she been in the water only long enough to wear away the friction ridges of her fingers. Had this been the case, the lab boys would have cut away the skin of each fingertip, placing these snips in separate test tubes with formaldehyde solution. Assuming the papillary ridges were intact on the outer surface of the skin, one of Sam’s men would have put on a rubber glove, placed the piece of skin on his index finger, and then rolled finger, glove, and skin on an inking plate — as if the piece of skin were actually his own finger — and then recorded it on the fingerprint form.

Even if the papillary ridges had been destroyed, the papillary pattern would be found on the inner surface of the skin, and a good photograph could be had if the skin were attached to a piece of cardboard, inner surface out, and the picture taken in oblique light.

Unfortunately, the unidentified dead girl had been in the water for close to four months, and the laboratory technicians had to turn to more tedious and inventive methods of getting their fingerprints.

In the hands of less-skilled operators than Sam Grossman’s men, an attempt at the papillary method may have proved less expedient and less fruitful. But Sam’s men were whizzes, and so they took each finger and each thumb, and they stood over Bunsen burners and slowly, methodically, doggedly dried the fingers, passing them over the flame, their hands moving in short arcs, back and forth, back and forth, until each finger had shrunk and dried.

Then, at last, they were able to touch each finger lightly with printer’s ink and take their impressions.

Their impressions did not tell them who the dead girl was.

One copy of her prints was sent to the Bureau of Criminal Identification.

One copy was sent to the FBI.

A third copy was sent to the Bureau of Missing Persons.

A fourth was sent to Homicide North — since all suicides or suspected suicides are treated exactly like homicides.

And, finally, a copy was sent to the Detective Division of the 87th Precinct, in which territory the body had been found.

Sam Grossman’s men washed their hands.

There was something about Paul Blaney that made Carella’s flesh crawl. Perhaps it was the idea of Blaney dealing with death as an occupation, but Carella suspected it was the man’s personality and not his job. He had, after all, dealt with many men whose occupation was death. With Blaney, however, it seemed to be more a preoccupation than an occupation, and so Carella stood before him, towering over him, and he could feel a nest of spiders in his stomach, and he wanted to scratch himself or take a bath.

The two men stood in the clean antiseptic examination room of the morgue alongside the stainless steel table, with its troughs to gather in the flow of blood, with its stainless steel basin to capture the blood and hold it in a ruby pool. Blaney was a short man with a balding head and a scraggly black mustache. He was the only man Carella had ever met who owned violet eyes.

Carella stood opposite him, a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of athletic tightness; every muscle and sinew in his body pulled into a wiry bundle of power. His eyes were brown, slanting downward to meet high cheekbones so that his face had an almost Oriental look. He wore his brown hair short. He wore a gray sports jacket and charcoal slacks, and the jacket stretched wide across the breadth of his shoulders, angled in sharply to cover narrow hips and a flat, hard stomach.

“What do you make of it?” he asked Blaney.

“I hate floaters,” Blaney said. “I hate to look at them. The goddamned things make me sick.”

“Nobody likes floaters,” Carella said.

“Me especially,” Blaney said, nodding vigorously. “They always give me the floaters. If you’ve got seniority around here, you can pull anything you want. So I’m low man on the totem pole. So whenever a goddamned floater comes in, everybody else suddenly has corpses in Siberia. Is that fair? That I should get the floaters?”

“Somebody’s got to get them.”

“Sure, but why me? Listen, I don’t complain about anything they give me. We’ve had stiffs in here so burned up you wouldn’t even know they were human. You ever handle charred flesh? Okay, but do I complain? We get automobile accident victims where a guy’s head is hanging from his neck by one strand of skin. I take it in stride. I’m an ME, and you’ve got to take the good ones with the bad ones. But why should I get all the floaters? How come nobody else gets the floaters?”

“Look—” Carella started, but Blaney was just gathering steam, just picking up speed.