Ed Mcbain - Cop Hater

"You said possibly a highly skilled and highly paid one. Why?"

"The head hairs were saturated with a hair preparation. We broke it down and checked it against our sample sheets. It's very expensive stuff. Five bucks the bottle when sold singly. Ten bucks when sold in a set with the after-shave talc. This customer was wearing both the hair gook and the talc. What mechanic can afford ten bucks for such luxuries—unless he's highly paid? If he's highly paid, chances are he's highly skilled."

"How do you know he's not over fifty?" Carella asked.

"Again, by the diameter of the hair and also the pigmentation. Here, take a look at this chart" He extended a sheet to Carella.

Age 12 days 6 months 18 months 15 years Adults

Diameter mm 0.024 0.037 0.038 0.053 0.07

"Fellow's head hair had a diameter of 0.071," Grossman said.

"That only shows he's a adult."

"Sure. But if we get a hair with a living root, and there are hardly any pigment grains in the cortex, we can be pretty sure the hair comes from an old person. This guy had plenty of pigment grains. Also, even though we rarely make any age guesses on such single evidence, an older person's hair has a tendency to become finer. This guy's hair is coarse and thick."

Carella sighed.

"Am I going too fast for you?"

"No," Carella said. "How about the singe and the haircut?"

"The singe was simple. The hairs were curled, slightly swelled, and grayish in color. Not naturally gray, you understand."

"The haircut?"

"If the guy had had a haircut just before he did the shooting, the head hairs would have shown clean-cut edges. After forty-eight hours, the cut begins to grow round. We can pretty well determine just when a guy's had his last haircut"

"You said he was six feet tall."

"Well, Ballistics helped us on that one."

"Spell it," Carella said.

"We had the blood to work with. Did I mention the guy has type O blood?"

"You guys . .." Carella started.

"Aw come on, Steve, that was simple."

"Yeah."

"Yeah," Grossman said. "Look, Steve, the blood serum of one person has the ability to agglutinate . . ." He paused. "That means clump, or bring together the red blood cells of certain other people. There are four blood groups: Group O, Group A, Group B, Group AB. Okay?"

"Okay." Carella said.

"We take the sample of blood, and we mix a little of it with samples from the four groups. Oh, hell, here's another chart for you to look at." He handed it to Carella.

1. Group O — no agglutination in either serum.

2. Group A — agglutination in serum B only.

3. Group B — agglutination in serum A only.

4. Group AB — agglutination in both serums.

"This guy's blood—and he left a nice trail of it when he was running away, in addition to several spots on the back of Hank's shirt—would not agglutinate, or clump, in any of the samples. Hence, type O. Another indication that he's white, incidentally. A and O are most common in white people. 45% of all white people are in the O group."

"How do you figure he's six feet tall. You still haven't told me."

"Well, as I said, this is where Ballistics came in. In addition to what we had, of course. The blood spots on Hank's shirt weren't of much value in determining from what height they had fallen since the cotton absorbed them when they hit. But the blood stains on the pavement told us several things."

"What'd they tell you?"

"First that he was going pretty fast. You see, the faster a man is walking, the narrower and longer will be the blood drops and the teeth on those drops. They look something like a small gear, if you can picture that, Steve."

"I can."

"Okay. These were narrow and also sprinkled in many small drops, which told us that he was moving fast and also that the drops were falling from a height of somewhere around two yards or so."

"So?"

"So, if he was moving fast, he wasn't hit in the legs or the stomach. A man doesn't move very fast under those conditions. If the drops came from a height of approximately two yards, chances are the man was hit high above the waist. Ballistics pried Hank's slug out of the brick wall of the building, and from the angle—assuming Hank only had time to shoot from a draw—they figured the man was struck somewhere around the shoulder. This indicates a tall man, I mean when you put the blood drops and the slug together."

"How do you know he wasn't wounded superficially?"

"All the blood, man. He left a long trail."

"You said he weighs about 180. How ..."

"The hair was healthy hair. The guy was going fast. The speed tells us he wasn't overweight. A healthy man of six feet should weigh about 180, no?"

"You've given me a lot, Sam," Carella said. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. I'm glad I'm not the guy who has to check on doctors' gunshot wound reports, or absentee mechanics. Not to mention this hair lotion and talc. It's called 'Skylark,' by the way."

"Well, thanks, anyway."

"Don't thank me," Grossman said.

"Huh?"

"Thank Hank."

Chapter SEVENTEEN

the teletype alarm went out to fourteen states. It read:

XXXXX APPREHEND SUSPICION OF MURDER XXX

UNIDENTIFIED MALE WHITE CAUCASIAN ADULT BELOW FIFTY XXXXX

POSSIBLE HEIGHT SIX FEET OR OVER XXX

POSSIBLE WEIGHT ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY XXX

DARK HAIR SWARTHY COMPLEXION HEAVY BEARD XXXX

USES HAIR PREPARATION AND TALC TRADENAME "SKYLARK" XXXX

SHOES MAY POSSIBLY CARRY HEELS WITH "O'SULLIVAN" TRADENAME XXXX

MAN ASSUMED TO BE SKILLED MECHANIC MAY POSSIBLY SEEK SUCH WORK XXXXX

GUNWOUND ABOVE WAIST POSSIBLE SHOULDER HIGH MAN MAY SEEK DOCTOR XXXX

THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS AND ARMED WITH COLT .45 AUTOMATIC XX

"Those are a lot of 'possiblys'," Havilland said.

"Too damn many," Carella agreed. "But at least it's a place to start."

It was not so easy to start.

They could, of course, have started by calling all the doctors in the city, on the assumption that one or more of them had failed to report a gunshot wound, as specified by law. However, there were quite a few doctors in the city. To be exact, there were:

4,283 doctors in Calm's Point

1,975 doctors in Riverhead

8,728 doctors in Isola (including the Diamondback and Hillside sectors)

2,614 doctors in Majesta and 264 doctors in Bethtown for a grand total of COUNT 'EM!

17,864 DOCTORS 17,864

Those are a lot of medical men. Assuming each call would take approximately five minutes, a little multiplication told the cops it would take them approximately 89,320 minutes to call each doctor in the classified directory. Of course, there were 22,000 policemen on the force. If each cop took on the job of calling four doctors, every call could have been made before twenty minutes had expired. Unfortunately, many of the other cops had other tidbits of crime to occupy themselves with. So, faced with the overwhelming number of healers, the detectives decided to wait—instead —for one of them to call with a gunshot wound report. Since the bullet had exited the killer's body, the wound was in all likelihood a clean one, anyway, and perhaps the killer

would never seek the aid of a doctor. In which case the waiting would all be in vain.

If there were 17,864 doctors in the city, it was virtually impossible to tally the number of mechanics plying their trade there. So this line of approach was also abandoned.

There remained the hair lotion and talc with the innocent-sounding name "Skylark."

A quick check showed that both masculine beauty aids were sold over the counter of almost every drug store hi the city. They were as common as—if higher-priced than —aspirin tablets.

Good for a cold.

If you don't like them...