Ed McBain - Shotgun

A hospital mortuary is never a cheerful place, but it is perhaps least cheerful on a Saturday afternoon. The weekend is not a good time for dying, you should never die anytime between Friday evening and Monday morning. Wednesday is the best day for dying except in some towns in Connecticut where even the barber shops are closed on Wednesday. But as a general rule, if you’re going to die, Wednesday is a nice day for it. This was Saturday, and a lot of people had inconsiderately and with absolutely no regard for the calendar died in the hospital that morning and had been taken downstairs to be put on ice. In addition, through assorted accidents and acts of violence, a lot of other people had died elsewhere in the city and had been transported to the hospital for autopsy and what-have-you; so the mortuary attendant had been very busy, and he didn’t need a cop coming around at 2:00 P.M. with a fat lady in a corset right when he was in the middle of reading a dirty book. The dirty book was a very good one, he was up to the part where they were whipping the girl and telling her she must never raise her eyes and must obey them and be ready at all times, it was a very good book.

“Leyden,” Carella said to the attendant, “Andrew and Rose.”

“We got no Leydens here,” the attendant said, “neither Andrew nor Rose.”

“They came in sometime this morning,” Carella said.

“I been here since eight o’clock this morning, and there ain’t no Leydens,” the attendant said.

“Well, check your list there,” Carella said.

“I looked at the list when I came on.”

“Well, look at it again.”

“I know every name on this list.”

“Pal... ” Carella started.

“Okay, okay,” the attendant said, and put down his book, and studied the list and said, “Leyden, Andrew and Rose, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“I musta missed them when I checked the list earlier.”

“Yeah, you must have.”

“Which one you want to see?”

“Both,” Carella said.

“They’re not together. I got the woman over here and the man over there.”

“Well, let’s see the woman first,” Carella said.

“Suit yourself, six of one, half a dozen of the other,” the attendant said, and rose, and led them across the room. The room was large and echoing, lighted with fluorescent, stinking of antiseptic. The name LEYDEN, ROSE was lettered in pencil on a cardboard tag that had been slipped into a holder on the small door set in a row of identical small doors. There was a handle on the door. The attendant grabbed the handle and opened the door, and a rush of cold air touched Carella’s face like a breath from the grave, and then the metal drawer came out a trifle on its ball-bearing rollers, and they looked down at the shattered head and missing face of the person they presumed was Rose Leyden. The attendant rolled the drawer out further, showing the woman’s naked body, the bloodstains still on her neck and breasts and belly. Beside him, Mrs. Gloria Leyden gasped and turned away.

“Is it your daughter-in-law?” Carella asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Leyden said.

“How do you know?”

“The beauty spot.”

“Which beauty spot, ma’am?”

“On her... just above her breast. She... my son thought it was very attractive... it... you could see it whenever Rose wore anything low cut... it... that’s my daughter-in-law. That’s Rose.”

Carella nodded to the attendant, who rolled the drawer back into the refrigerator compartment, and then closed the door.

“Want to see the man?” he asked.

“Mrs. Leyden?”

“I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Then, Mrs. Leyden, can you tell me if your son had any scars or tattoos? Any visible markings on his body that—”

“What?” Mrs. Leyden said.

“Any scars or—”

“Yes, he had a tattoo.”

“Where would that be, Mrs. Leyden?”

“What? I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“The tattoo. Where... ?”

“His arm. It was on his arm.”

“What sort of a tattoo?”

“A very simple one. He had it done when he was a boy. He must have been seventeen or eighteen. He’d been rejected by the service, you see, he had a punctured eardrum and... and I guess he wanted to feel grownup and... manly. So he had himself tattooed.”

“And what does the tattoo look like, Mrs. Leyden?”

“It’s a dagger. A dagger in blue outline. And across it, in red, is his name, Andy.”

“I see,” Carella said. “Would you... Mrs. Leyden, would you mind waiting here a moment, please?”

“Are you going to look to see if he... if the... if the man has a tattoo?”

“Yes.”

“It’s his left arm,” Mrs. Leyden said, and turned away.

Carella followed the attendant across the room to where the male corpses were stacked in their refrigerated compartments. “Leyden, Leyden, Leyden,” the attendant said, “here we are, Leyden,” and opened one of the doors and pulled out the drawer. The faceless dead man had a blue dagger, two inches long, tattooed on his left arm. The single word “Andy,” in red letters, ran horizontally across the blade of the dagger.

“Okay,” Carella said.

The attendant slid back the drawer. Carella walked across the room to where Mrs. Leyden was standing. She looked up at him.

“It’s your son,” he said.

Mrs. Leyden nodded and said nothing.

They began walking toward the exit door together. Carella was a tall man wearing a brown business suit, his hair brown, his eyes brown, a pained expression sitting on them now as he walked beside the small corseted lady with the large sloping bosom and the ridiculous violet-white hair, a ludicrous couple with nothing more in common than death. At the door, she stopped and put her hand on Carella’s arm and looked up into his face, and very softly said, “I think I will have to see him.”

“Mrs. Leyden—”

“Because if I don’t... if I don’t look at him and see for myself... I’ll never believe he’s dead. I don’t think I could bear going through life hoping he’ll suddenly turn the next corner.”

They went back across the room, their heels clicking on the vinyl-tile floor. The attendant rolled out the drawer and Mrs. Leyden looked into the open red and gaping hole in the head of the corpse that lay stiff and cold on the cold aluminum rack, and then the attendant pulled the drawer further out, and she looked at the corpse’s arm silently, and then reached out as though to trace the outline of the blue dagger with its red letters, but stopped her hand in mid-motion instead, and covered her face and said, “Yes, it’s my son, yes,” and began weeping.

There were wild prints in the apartment.

Most of the prints, as expected, belonged to the dead man and his wife, but there were other prints as well, wild prints that belonged to neither of them.

The wild prints had been left by someone with very large hands, presumably a man, but possibly a woman. The wild prints were on doorknobs and doorjambs, the wild prints were on a glass in the kitchen, the wild prints were on a dresser top. But most important, the wild prints were all over the shotgun. The third party who had been in that apartment on the night the Leydens were killed had roamed the place at will, gloveless, touching things freely and with apparent immunity, feeling confident enough to have left perfectly clear latent impressions on the shotgun stock and barrel, and a portion of a print on the trigger itself.

The laboratory technicians were jubilant.

They sent their prints over to the Bureau of Criminal Identification, the ones they had lifted from Rose and Andrew Leyden, and the ones they had discovered all over the apartment, the wild prints belonging to the big-handed man or woman who had possibly committed the murders. The BCI reported back late that afternoon, stating that they had no record for either Rose or Andrew Leyden, which was not surprising since neither of the pair had ever been arrested in their lives.