Heading across town, I thought of the war widow in the Times story. Unlike that woman, Sophie Carter knew what had happened to her husband, but she didn’t know the who or why of it. In that sense, she was like Katherine Goodfellowe. Despite Mrs. G’s outer coldness, no doubt she, too, grieved for her husband and wished deep in her heart for an explanation. Then there was Ruth Todd and Kathy Jones. Neither of them even knew what had happened to their loved ones, much less why. Sophie Carter, Ruth Todd, Katie Jones and even Katherine Goodfellowe: They formed a sisterhood of uncertainty. They were as different as any four people can be, except for that one unenviable tie.
J. Finnegan & Sons turned out to be a funeral parlor on the corner of 66th Street and Park Avenue. It seems they did a fine business in laying away the carriage trade.
Despite the grandiose title, the sole owner and proprietor turned out to be one Jules Finnegan, Jr. Apparently, Jules Finnegan, Sr. had already passed to the other side. Finnegan, Jr. was a short, stout man in a pinstripe suit. He had a bald pate, bushy gray eyebrows and incredibly small feet for a man of his girth.
“Mr. Finnegan, thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”
“Well, you said it was urgent.”
Not only did Finnegan resemble a banker, his office looked as though it belonged to one. That made sense, I suppose. It was important to make the customer feel comfortable and right at home. Where would a rich customer feel more at ease than in a banker’s office?
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Do you recall a Mr. Tillman Carter having phoned you and set up an appointment? It would’ve been for August 1, 1924.”
He frowned. “That was more than two years ago.”
“Yes, I understand, but is there a possibility that you kept records of appointments, maybe made a notation of what Mr. Carter wanted?”
“Just what is this all about?”
I explained about Esther and her family’s request that I write about her. “In retracing her footsteps, I came across Mr. Carter’s name.”
“You’re not saying he was involved in her disappearance?”
“No, but he may have dug up some information that would help solve it.” I explained about the research that Carter was doing. A light went on in Finnegan’s eyes.
“The Powell’s case?” Finnegan raised a pudgy finger and wagged it thoughtfully. “Now, I remember. There was this fellow who said he was a writer. Wanted to know if I’d handled the embalming. He knew we had, of course. It was right there in the paper. We specialize in restorations, you see. If the deceased has suffered extensive damage—as sometimes happens in a motor vehicle accident—then we’re often called in to repair the body and make it ready for burial. We’re able to do extensive cosmetic repairs.”
“So you did the work to restore Powell’s face?”
“I had to rebuild it. It required delicacy, fine feeling. He’d been a beautiful young man. When I saw what they brought in, it was hard to believe it was even him.”
“How so?”
“The bullets had not only ripped away the soft tissue, but done extensive damage to the skull. It’s the skull that gives a face its distinctive shape, you know, the distance of the eyes to the nose, the height of the cheekbones, the breadth of the nose and so on. Well, the bullets fired into Mr. Powell’s face had fractured much of the frontal skull. It took hours to piece it together. We used putty to fill in the holes, then laid a new kind of skin over it.”
“You can do that?”
His smile was smug. “We can do anything.”
“Did Mr. Carter want to talk to you about the restorative work, or did he mention something else?”
“He wanted pictures of the body. Before and after.”
Of course. Carter had struck out in trying to get pictures from police sources. So he’d done the next best thing. But why were the photos so important to him? What did he hope, or expect, to see?
“And you have such photos?”
“Yes, but they’re not for the general public. They were made to provide guidance. Keep track of the work.”
“Did you agree to let Mr. Carter see these photos?”
“We were ... shall we say, still in the midst of a negotiation when ...”
“I see. And what were the terms of this suspended negotiation?”
He inclined his head, as if to say, “Why? Would they interest you?”
I inclined mine with a partial smile, as if to say, “Try me.”
He raised his hand, open palmed, in a little gesture that said, “Okay, I will.”
He withdrew a notepad from his desk, took a pen and wrote a figure on it, then pushed the notepad across the desk to me. It was a four-digit sum. I could forget about getting the newspaper to pony up the money for that one.
“What was Mr. Carter’s counter offer?”
“There was none. We never heard from him again.”
Of course, not. Because Tillman Carter was off in Chicago, being killed.
“So there’s no way for me to see the photos without …” I gestured toward the sum on the notepad.
“I’m afraid not.” He stood. “If that’s all, then—”
“How do you suppose Mrs. Goodfellowe would take it if she were to learn that photos of her husband in his damaged state were on file somewhere, available for sale to the right price? How would others in her circle of friends feel if they were to learn that photos of their loved ones, might also be available for the right sum?”
He sat down heavily and was silent for one very long minute. His expression was full of resentment, his eyes full of appraisal. Then he drew back the notepad and ripped the top page away. He tore the page into bits and dropped them into the wastepaper basket.
“I could do the same to the photos,” he said.
“Word about the pictures being for sale would do the same to your reputation.”
He understood. Jaw set, he went to the next room. I heard him rifling through a file cabinet. A minute later he was back with a file. He sat down and opened the file on his desk. The photos were in a separate envelope. He took them out and slid them across the desk, one by one.
I’ve seen some gruesome and battered remains in my time. Back when I was a crime reporter, I saw bodies ripped open by machine-gun fire, mangled by speeding trains, bloated and rotting after being pulled from the river. None of it was pretty. But none of it was as ugly as this.
“The first bullet was not fatal,” Finnegan said. “It pierced his left cheek, bored a diagonal path and exited the back of his neck, on the right. The second bullet shattered his nose. He was still alive then.”
“But debilitated by pain and shock, no doubt.”
“It was most likely the third or fourth shot that killed him. The third penetrated his left eye socket. The fourth went through his temple, also on the left. The subsequent shots simply served to rip his face apart. There were ten shots in all.”
The first three photos showed Powell after he’d been washed and autopsied. The bullet holes were evident. As Finnegan said, the gunshots had battered Powell’s face into a bloody pulp of soft tissue and fragmented bone. The only distinguishing features left untouched were his hairline, his ears and his chin. The dead man had a broad forehead and smooth hairline, softly rounded ears and dimpled chin.
The second set of photos, about four in number, showed Finnegan’s progress as he systematically put the dead man’s face back together. The last photo showed the finished results.
“Here,” Finnegan said, handing me another picture. It was the same shot I’d seen at the public library.
“Very handsome,” I murmured.
“That’s what she wanted me to make him look like again.”
“She, being Mrs. Goodfellowe?”
He nodded. “I told her it would be a miracle, but I could do it.”
I compared the last shot of the restored Powell to the studio portrait. “You do excellent work.”
Finnegan beamed with pride.
I laid aside Finnegan’s photo and concentrated on the photo of Powell alive. The room he was seated in: it bothered me. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Goodfellowe having such a horribly furnished room in her house. I brought the photo closer, studying it intently.
“What is it?” Finnegan asked.
“Probably nothing,” I said. But inside, I had my answer.
No wonder they killed Carter.