Ed McBain: Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

The man who received it at the morgue was an assistant medical examiner named Paul Blaney, a short man with a scraggly black mustache and violet eyes. Blaney didn’t particularly enjoy handling the remains of dead people, and he often wondered why he — the junior member on the medical examiner’s staff — was invariably given the most particularly obnoxious stiffs to examine, those who had been in automobile accidents, or fires, or whose remains had been chewed to ribbons by marauding rats. But he knew that he had a job to do. And that job was — given a human hand that has been severed at the wrist from the remainder of the body, how can I determine the race, sex, age, probable height, and probable weight of the person to whom it belonged?

That was the job.

With a maximum of dispatch, and a minimum of emotional involvement, Blaney set to work.

Fortunately, the hand was still covered with skin. A lot of bodies he received simply weren’t. And so it was quite simple to determine the race of the person to whom the hand had belonged. Blaney determined that race rather quickly, and then jotted the information on a slip of paper.

RACE: White.

Sex was another thing again. It was simple to identify the sex of an individual if the examiner was presented with remains of the breasts or sexual organs, but all Blaney had was a hand. Period. Just a hand. In general, Blaney knew, the female of the species usually had less body hair than the male, more delicate extremities, more subcutaneous fat and less musculature. Her bones, too, were smaller and lighter, with thinner shafts and wider medullary spaces.

The hand on the autopsy table was a huge one. It measured twenty-five centimeters from the tip of the middle finger to the base of the severed wrist, and that came to something more than nine and a half inches when translated into laymen’s English. Blaney could not conceive of such a hand having belonged to a woman, unless she were a masseuse or a female wrestler. And even granting such exotic occupations, the likelihood was remote. He had, nonetheless, made errors in determining the sex of a victim from sex-unrelated parts in the past, and he did not wish to make such an error now.

The hand was covered with thick, black, curling hair, another fact that seemed to point toward a male identification; but Blaney carried the examination to its conclusion, measuring the bone shafts, studying the medullary spaces, and jotting down his estimate at last.

SEX: Male.

Well, we’re getting someplace, he thought. We now know that this gruesome and severed member of a human body once belonged to a white male. Wiping his forehead with a towel, he got back to work again.

A microscopic examination of the hand’s skin told Blaney that there had been no loss of elasticity due to the decrease of elastic fibers in the dermis. Since he was making his microscopic examination in an effort to determine the victim’s age, he automatically chalked off the possibility of the man’s having been a very old one. He knew, further, that he was not likely to get anything more from a closer examination of the skin. The changes in skin throughout the growth and decline of a human being very seldom provide accurate criteria of age. And so he turned to the bones.

The hand had been severed slightly above the wrist so that portions of the radius and ulna, the twin bones that run from the wrist to the elbow, were still attached to the hand. Moreover, Blaney had all the various bones of the hand itself to examine: the carpus, the metacarpal, the phalanx.

He mused, as he worked, that the average layman would — just about now — begin to consider all of his devious machinations as scientific mumbo jumbo, the aimless meanderings of a pseudo-wizard. Well, he thought, the hell with the average layman. I know damn well that the ossification centers of bones go through a sequence of growth and fusion, and that this growth and fusion takes place at certain age levels. I know further that by studying these bones, I can come pretty close to estimating the age of this dead white male, and that is just what I am going to do, average layman be damned.

The entire examination that Blaney conducted on the bones took close to three hours. His notes included such esoteric terms as “proximal epiphysial muscle” and “os magnum” and “multangulum majus” and the like. His final note simply read:

AGE: 18–24.

When it came to the probable height and weight of the victim, Blaney threw up his hands in despair. If he had been presented with a femur, a humerus, or a radius in its entirety, he would have measured any one of them in centimeters from joint surface to joint surface with the cartilage in place, and then made an attempt at calculating the height using Pearson’s formula. For the radius, if he’d had a whole one and not just a portion of one, the table would have read like this:

MALE FEMALE 86.465 plus 3.271 times 82.189 plus 3.343 times length of radius. length of radius.

Then, to arrive at an estimate of the height of the living body, he’d have subtracted one and a half centimeters from the final result for a male, and two centimeters for a female.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have a whole radius, so he didn’t even make an attempt. And although the hand gave him a good knowledge of the size of the victim’s bones, he could not make a guess at the weight of the victim without a knowledge of the muscular development and the adipose tissue, so he quit. He wrapped the hand and tagged it for delivery to Lieutenant Samuel G. Grossman at the Police Laboratory. Grossman, he knew, would perform an isoreaction test on a blood specimen in order to determine the blood group. And Grossman would undoubtedly try to get fingerprint impressions from the severed hand. In this respect, Blaney was positively certain that Grossman would fail. Each finger tip had been neatly sliced away from the rest of the hand by the unknown assailant. A magician couldn’t have got a set of prints from that hand, and Grossman was no magician.

So Blaney shipped off the hand, and he concluded his notes; and what he finally transmitted to the bulls of the 87th was this:

RACE: White.

SEX: Male.

AGE: 18–24.

The boys had to take it from there.

Detective Steve Carella was the first of the boys to take it from there.

He took it early the next morning. Sitting at his desk near the grilled squadroom windows, watching the rain ooze along the glass panes, he dialed Blaney’s office and waited.

“Dr. Blaney,” a voice on the other end of the wire said.

“Blaney, this is Carella up at the 87th.”

“Hello,” Blaney said.

“I’ve got your report on that hand, Blaney.”

“Yeah? What’s wrong with it?” Blaney asked, immediately on the defensive.

“Nothing at all,” Carella said. “In fact, it’s very helpful.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Blaney said. “It’s very rare that anyone in the goddamn department admits a medical examination was helpful.”

“We feel differently here at the 87th,” Carella said smoothly. “We’ve always relied very heavily upon information provided by the medical examiner’s office.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that,” Blaney said. “A man works here with stiffs all day long, he begins to have his doubts. It’s no fun cutting up dead bodies, you know.”

“You fellows do a wonderful job,” Carella said.

“Well, thank you.”

“I mean it,” Carella said fervently. “There isn’t much glory in what you fellows do, but you can bet your life it’s appreciated.”