Ed McBain - The Mugger

If the breaks were indifferent or downright ornery, two and two sometimes equaled five, or six, or eleven.

There had been a man at the scene of Jeannie Paige’s death. The man had been equipped with a soft-pine sketch board attached to a photographic tripod. He had also carried a small alidade, a compass, graph paper, a soft-lead pencil, India rubber, common pins, a wooden triangle with scale, a scale, a tape measure, and a flexible steel ruler.

The man had worked quietly and efficiently. While photographers swarmed over the site, while technicians dusted for latent prints, while the position of the body was marked, and while the body was transported into the waiting meat wagon, while the area was carefully scrutinized for footprints or tire tracks — the man stood like an artist doing a picture of a farmer’s barn on Cape Cod.

He said hello to the detectives who occasionally stopped to chat with him. He seemed unmindful of the activity that erupted everywhere around him.

Quietly, efficiently, carefully, methodically, he sketched the scene of the crime. Then he packed up and went to his office, where, working from the preliminary sketches, he made a more detailed drawing. The drawing was printed up and, together with the detailed photos taken at the site, sent to the many departments interested in solving the mugger murder.

Sam Grossman’s interest was definitely turned in that direction, and so a copy of the drawing reached his desk. Since color, or the lack of color, played no important part in this particular homicide, the drawing was in black and white.

Grossman studied it with the dispassionate scrutiny an art dealer gives a potentially fake van Gogh.

The girl had been found at the base of a fifteen-foot drop, one of the shelflike levels that sloped down in a cliff to the riverbed. A footpath led through evergreens and maples from an emergency repairs turnoff to the highest point of the cliff, some thirty feet above the River Harb.

The repairs cutoff was plainly visible from the River Highway, which swung around in a wide arc under the Hamilton Bridge approach. The footpath, however, was screened from the highway by trees and shrubs, as were the actual sloping sides of the cliff itself.

A good set of tire tracks had been found in a thin layer of earth caked on the river side of the repairs cutoff. A pair of sunglasses had been found alongside the dead girl’s body.

That was all.

Unfortunately, the sides of the cliff sloped upward in igneous formidability. The path wound its way over solid prehistoric rock. Neither the girl nor her murderer had left any footprints for the lab boys to play with.

Unfortunately, too, though the path was screened by bushes and trees, none of the plant life encroached upon the path’s right to meander to the top of the cliff. In short, there was no fabric, leather, feathers, or telltale dust caught upon twigs or resting upon leaves.

It was a reasonable assumption that the girl had been driven to the spot of her death. There were no signs of any repairs having been made in the cutoff. If the auto had pulled in with a flat tire, the jack would have left marks on the pavement, and the tools might have left grease stains or metal scrapings. There was the possibility, of course, that the car had suffered an engine failure, in which case the hood would have been lifted and the mechanism studied. But the caked earth spread in an arc that covered the corners and sides of the cutoff. Anyone standing at the front of the car to lift the hood would surely have left footprints. There were none, nor were there any signs of prints having been brushed away.

The police assumed, therefore, that the girl and her murderer had been driving west on the River Highway, had pulled into the emergency repairs cutoff, and had then proceeded on foot to the top of the cliff.

The girl had been killed at the top of the cliff.

She had been alive up to then. There were no bloodstains along the path leading upward. With a head wound such as she had suffered, her blood would have soaked the rocks on the path if she had been killed earlier and then carried from the car.

The instrument used to split her skull and her face had been heavy and blunt. The girl had undoubtedly reached for her killer’s face, snatching off the sunglasses. She had then gone over the cliff, and the sunglasses had left her hand.

It would have been easy to assume that the lens of the glasses had shattered upon contact with the ground. This was not the case. The technicians could find not a scrap, not a sliver of glass, on the ground. The sunglasses, then, had been shattered before they went over the side of the cliff. Nor had they been shattered anywhere in the area. The lab boys searched in vain for glass. The notion of a man wearing sunglasses with one ruptured lens was a curious one, but the facts stood.

The sunglasses, of course, had drawn a blank. Five-and-dime stuff.

The tire tracks had seemed promising at first. But when the cast was studied and comparison data checked, the tires on the car proved to be as helpful as the sunglasses had been.

The tire size was 6.70–15.

The tire weight was twenty-three pounds.

The tire was made of rubber reinforced with nylon cord, the thread design featuring hook “sipes” to block skids and sideslip.

The tire retailed for $18.04, including federal tax.

The tire could be had by any man jack in the US of A who owned a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. The trade name of the tire was “Allstate.”

You could order one or a hundred and one by sending your dough and asking for catalogue number 95N03067K.

There were probably 80,000 people in the city who had four of the tires on each of their cars, not to mention a spare in the trunk.

The tire tracks told Grossman one thing: The car that had pulled into the cutoff was a light car. The tire size and weight eliminated any of the heavier cars on the road.

Grossman felt like a man who was all dressed up with no place to go.

Resignedly, he turned to the pocket patch Eileen Burke had ripped from the mugger’s jacket.

When Roger Havilland stopped by for the test results that Friday afternoon, Grossman said the patch was composed of 100 percent nylon and that it belonged to a suit, which retailed for $32 in a men’s clothing chain. The chain had sixty-four stores spread throughout the city. The suit came in only one color: blue.

Havilland gravely considered the impossibility of getting any lead from a suit sold in sixty-four stores. He scratched his head in misery.

And then he said, “Nylon? Who the hell wears nylon in the fall?”

Meyer Meyer was exuberant.

He burst into the squadroom, and he waltzed over to where Temple was fishing in the file, and he slapped his partner on the back.

“They cracked it!” he shouted.

“What?” Temple said. “Meyer, you damn near cracked my back. What the hell are you talking about?”

“The cats,” Meyer said, shrewdly studying Temple.

“What cats?”

“The 33rd Precinct. This guy who was going around kidnapping cats. I tell you this is the eeriest case they’ve ever cracked. I was talking to Agnucci. Do you know him? He’s third grade down there, been working on this one all along, handled most of the squeals. Well, man, they’ve cracked it.” Meyer studied Temple patiently.

“So what’d it turn out to be?” Temple asked, his interest piqued.

“They got their first lead the other night,” Meyer said. “They got a squeal from some woman who said an Angora had been swiped. Well, they came upon this guy in an alleyway, and guess what he was doing?”