Ed McBain - Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

“You think he’s just having himself a fling, is that it?”

“Just running true to form, that’s all. In Nagasaki, when we was there, this guy... well, that’s another story.” He paused. “You ain’t worried about him, are you?”

“Well... ”

“Don’t be. Check the whorehouses, and the strip joints, and the bars, and Skid Row. You’ll find him, all right. Only thing is, I don’t think he wants to be found. So what’re you gonna do when you latch onto him? Force him to go back to Melissa Lee, or whatever the hell her name is?”

“No, we couldn’t do that,” Carella said.

“So what the hell are you bothering for?” Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth and then spat on the deck. “Stop worrying,” he said. “He’ll turn up.”

The garbage cans were stacked in the areaway between the two tenements, and the rain had formed small pools of water on the lid of each can. The old woman was wearing house slippers, and so she stepped gingerly into the areaway and tried to avoid the water underfoot, walking carefully to the closest garbage can, carrying her bag of garbage clutched to her breast like a sucking infant.

She lifted the lid of the can and shook the water free and was about to drop her bag into the can when she saw that it was filled. The old lady was Irish, and she unleashed a torrent of swear words that would have turned a leprechaun blue, replaced the lid, and went to the second garbage can. She was thoroughly drenched now, and she cursed the fact that she hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella down with her, cursed the lid of the second garbage can because it seemed to be stuck, finally wrenched it free, soaking herself anew with the water that had been resting on it, and prepared to toss her bag into it and run like hell for the building.

Then she saw the newspaper.

She hesitated for a moment.

The newspaper had been wrapped around something, but the wrapping had come loose. Curiously, the old lady bent closer to the garbage can.

And then she let out a shriek.

Everything happened on Monday.

To begin with, Blaney — the assistant medical examiner — officially studied the delightful little package that the patrolmen had dug out of the garbage can after a frantic call from the old lady.

The bloody newspaper contained a human hand.

And after duly examining this hand, Blaney phoned the 87th to say that it had belonged to a white male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and that unless he was greatly mistaken, it was the mate to the hand he had examined the week before.

Bert Kling took the telephoned message. He barely had strength enough to hold the pencil in his hand as he wrote down the information.

That was the first thing that happened on Monday, and it happened at 9:30 in the morning.

The second thing happened at 11:00 A.M. and it seemed as if the second occurrence would solve once and for all the problem of identification. The second occurrence involved a body that had been washed ashore on the banks of the River Harb. The body had no arms and no head. It was promptly shipped off to the morgue where several things were learned about it.

To begin with, the body was clothed and a wallet in the right hip pocket of the trousers carried a sopping-wet identification card and a driver’s license. The man in the water was known as George Rice. A call to the number listed on the identification card confirmed Blaney’s estimate that the body had been in the river for close to two weeks. Apparently, Mr. Rice had failed to come home from work one night two weeks ago. His wife had reported him missing, and a sheet on him was allegedly in the files of the MPB. Mrs. Rice was asked to come down to identify the remains as soon as she was able to. In the meantime, Blaney continued his examination.

And he decided, even though Mr. Rice had been only twenty-six years old, and even though Mr. Rice was lacking arms and a head, and even though Mr. Rice was a good possibility for the person who had owned the two hands that had turned up — he decided after a thorough examination that the body had apparently lost its head and arms through contact with the propeller blades of either a ship or a large boat. And whereas the blood stain on the bottom of the airline bag had belonged to the “O” group, the blood of Mr. Rice checked out as belonging to the “AB” group. And whereas the hugeness of the two hands indicated a big fellow, Mr. Rice, allowing for his missing head, added up to five feet eight and a half inches, and that is not big.

When Mrs. Rice identified the remains through her husband’s clothing and a scar on his abdomen — the clothing was not in such excellent shape after having been put through the rigorous test of contact with a boat’s propeller and submersion for two weeks, but the scar was still intact — when she made the identification, she also stated that Mr. Rice worked in the next state and that he took a ferry to work each morning and returned by ferry each evening, and it therefore seemed more than likely that Mr. Rice had either jumped, been pushed, or had fallen from the stern of the ferry and thereby been mutilated by the boat’s propellers. A thorough search of the Rice apartment that same day uncovered a suicide note.

And so it was Blaney’s unfortunate duty to call the 87th once more and report to Kling, the weary weekend horseman, that the hands he’d been examining over the past few days did not belong to the body that had been washed ashore that morning.

So that was that, and the problem of identification still remained to be solved, with the young son of Martha Livingston and the young sailor Karl Androvich still shaping up as pretty good possibilities.

But it was still Monday, a very blue Monday at that because it was raining, and everything was going to happen on Monday.

At 2:00 P.M. the third thing happened.

Two hoodlums were picked up in the next state, and both gave the police address in Isola. A teletype to City Headquarters requesting information netted a B-sheet for one of them, but no record for the other. The boys, it seemed, had held up a Shell station and then tried a hasty escape in a beat-up automobile. So hasty was their departure that they neglected to notice a police car that was cruising along the highway, with the result that they smacked right into the front right fender of the approaching black-and-white sedan, and that was the end of that little caper. The boy carrying the gun, the one with the record, was named Robert Germaine.

The other boy, the sloppy driver who’d slammed into the motor patrol car, was named Richard Livingston.

No matter how sloppily you drive a car, it takes two hands — and Richard Livingston was in possession of both of his.

Kling got the information at 3:00 P.M. With weary, shaking fingers, he wrote it down and reminded himself to tell Carella to chalk off a possible victim.

At 4:10 P.M. the telephone rang again.

“Hello,” Kling said.

“Who’s this?” a woman’s voice asked.

“This is Detective Kling, 87th Squad. Who’s this?”

“Mrs. Androvich,” the voice said. “Mrs. Karl Androvich.”

“Oh. Hello, Mrs. Androvich. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

“I mean, what—”

“My husband’s back,” Meg Androvich said.

“Karl?”

“Yes.”

“He’s back?”

“Yes.”

“When did he return?”

“Just a few minutes ago,” she said. She paused for a long time. Then she said, “He brought me flowers.”

“I’m glad he’s back,” Kling said. “I’ll notify the Missing Persons Bureau. Thank you for calling.”

“Not at all,” Meg said. “Would you do me a favor, please?”