Ed McBain - Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

At 8:00 P.M. that night, Cotton Hawes called in to report that Tudor had shaken the tail at 7:30.

“I’m sorry as hell,” he said.

“Yeah,” Carella answered.

The clothes turned up the next morning.

They were wrapped in a copy of the New York Times. A patrolman in Calm’s Point found them in a trash basket. His local precinct called Headquarters because there was a bloodstain on the black raincoat, and Headquarters promptly called the 87th. The clothes were sent to the lab where Grossman inspected them thoroughly.

Besides the raincoat, there was a black flannel suit, a pair of black lisle socks, and a black umbrella.

An examination of the clothing turned up some rather contradictory facts, and all of these were passed on to Carella who studied them and then scratched his head in puzzlement.

To begin with, the bloodstain on the raincoat belonged to the “O” group, which seemed to tie it in with the hands, and to further tie in with Mike Chirapadano whose service record had listed him as belonging to that blood group. But a careful examination of the black suit had turned up a subsequent small bloodstain on the sleeve. And this bloodstain belonged to the “B” group. That was the first contradiction.

The second contradiction seemed puzzling all over again. It had to do with three other stains that were found on the black suit. The first of these was of a hair preparation, found on the inside of the collar where the collar apparently brushed against the nape of the neck. The stain was identified as coming from a tonic called Strike. It was allegedly designed for men who had oily scalps and who did not wish to compound the affliction by using an oily hair tonic.

But side by side with this stain was the second stain, and it had been caused by a preparation known as Dram, which was a hair tonic designed to fight dandruff and dry, flaky scalps. It seemed odd that these two scalp conditions could exist in one and the same man. It seemed contradictory that a person with a dry, flaky scalp would also be a person with an oily scalp. Somehow, the two hair preparations did not seem very compatible.

The third stain on the suit jacket was identified as coming from the selfsame Skinglow cosmetic that had been found in the corner of the airline’s bag, and this led to some confusion as to whether a man or a woman had worn the damn suit. Carella concluded that a man had worn it, but that he had embraced a woman wearing Skinglow. This accounted for that stain, but not for the hair tonic stains, which were still puzzling and contradictory.

But there were more contradictions. The human hairs that clung to the fiber of the suit, for example. Some were brown and thin. Others were black and thick and short. And still others were black and thin and very long. The very long black ones presumably were left on the suit by the dame who’d worn the Skinglow. That embrace was shaping up as a very passionate one. But the thin brown hairs? And the thick black short ones? Puzzlement upon puzzlement.

About one thing, there was no confusion. There was a label inside the suit jacket, and the label clearly read: Urban-Suburban Clothes.

Carella looked up the name in the telephone directory, came up with a winner, clipped on his holster, and left the squadroom.

Cotton Hawes was somewhere in the city glued to Charles Tudor, whose trail he had picked up again early in the morning.

Urban-Suburban Clothes was one of those tiny shops that are sandwiched in between two larger shops and that would be missed entirely were it not for the colorful array of offbeat clothes in the narrow window. Carella opened the door and found himself in a long narrow cubicle that had been designed as a coffin for one man and that now held twelve men, all of whom were pawing through ties and feeling the material of sports coats and holding Italian sports shirts up against their chests. He felt an immediate attack of claustrophobia, which he controlled, and then he began trying to determine which of the twelve men in the shop was the owner. It occurred to him that thirteen was an unlucky number, and he debated leaving. He was carrying the bundle of clothes wrapped in brown paper and the bundle was rather bulky and this did not ease the crowded atmosphere of the shop at all. He squeezed past two men who were passing out cold over the offorange tint of a sports shirt that had no buttons.

“Excuse me,” he said, “excuse me.” And he executed an offtackle run around a group of men who were huddled at the tie rack. The ties apparently were made of Indian madras in colors the men were declaring to be simultaneously “cool,” “wild,” and “crazy.” Carella felt hot, tamed, and very sane.

He kept looking for the owner of the shop, and finally a voice came at his elbow. “May I help you, sir?” And a body materialized alongside the voice. Carella whirled to face a thin man with a Fu Manchu beard, wearing a tight brown suit over a yellow weskit, and leering like a sex maniac in a nudist camp.

“Yes, yes, you can,” Carella said. “Are you the owner of this shop?”

“Jerome Jerralds,” the young man said, and he grinned.

“How do you do, Mr. Jerralds?” Carella said. “I’m—”

“Trouble?” Jerralds said, eying the bundle of wrapped clothes. “One of our garments didn’t fit you properly?”

“No, it’s—”

“Did you make the purchase yourself, or was it a gift?”

“No, this—”

“You didn’t buy the garment yourself?”

“No,” Carella said. “I’m a—”

“Then it was a gift?”

“No. I’m—”

“Then how did you get it, sir?”

“The police lab sent the clothes over,” Carella answered.

“The poli—?” Jerralds started, and his hand went up to stroke the Chinese beard, a cat’s-eye ring gleaming on his pinky.

“I’m a cop,” Carella explained.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a pile of clothes here. I wonder if you can tell me anything about them.”

“Well, I—”

“I know you’re busy, and I won’t take much of your time.”

“Well, I—”

Carella had already unwrapped the package. “There’s a label in the suit,” he said. “Urban-Surburban Clothes. This your suit?”

Jerralds studied it. “Yes, that is our suit.”

“How about the raincoat? It looks like the kind of thing you might sell, but the label’s been torn out. Is it your coat?”

“What do you mean, it looks like the kind of thing we might sell?”

“Stylish,” Carella said.

“Oh, I see.”

“With a flair,” Carella said.

“Yes, I see.”

“Important-looking,” Carella said.

“Yes, yes.”

“Cool,” Carella said. “Wild. Crazy.”

“That’s our raincoat, all right,” Jerralds said.

“How about this umbrella?”

“May I see it, please?”

Carella handed him the tagged umbrella.

“No, that’s not ours,” Jerralds said. “We try to offer something different in men’s umbrellas. For example, we have one with a handle made from a ram’s horn, and another fashioned from a Tibetan candlestick, which—”

“But this one is yours, right?”

“No. Were you interested in—?”

“No, I don’t need an umbrella,” Carella said. “It’s stopped raining, you know.”

“Oh, has it?”

“Several days ago.”

“Oh. It gets so crowded in here sometimes—”

“Yes, I can understand. About this suit and this raincoat, can you tell me who bought them?”

“Well, that would be difficult to... ” Jerralds stopped. His hand fluttered to the jacket of the suit, landed on the sleeve, scraped at the stain there. “Seem to have got something on the sleeve,” he said.