ZAGREB HATED CORONERS’ HANDS.
This one’s were like all the rest, pink and puffy, with round antiseptic nails and no hair growing on the backs. They got that way from immersion in alcohol and formaldehyde. The fingers resembled bunches of scrubbed sausages and made the lieutenant think of mannequins and the newly washed hands of corpses lying in state. He didn’t mind the specialists’ coarse jokes, intended to weed out the squeamish, and the sight and even the smell of flayed human flesh had ceased to bother him, but when introductions were made he always found something to be doing with his own hands to give him an excuse to avoid grasping those naked pink fingers. The rest of the fellow was ordinary enough, although Zagreb would never get used to the extremes of age made necessary in the workforce by wartime personnel shortages. Dr. Edouard (he’d taken pains to spell it for the lieutenant) was seventy if he was a day, with a ribbon of hair combed across the top of his bald head, satin white against pink scalp, and glass blue eyes under thistly brows that had needed plucking five years ago and now required mowing. He wore his white coat over a tweed vest that made Zagreb itch on sight, with a row of stubby yellow pencils poking out of one of the pockets and a red bow tie, the kind you tied, with yellow polka dots.
“County pulled Edouard out of retirement,” said Inspector Brandon, in his trademark Panama hat and gray double-breasted. “He owns a mortuary, which his son runs. He worked in the old morgue when it moved into the basement of the County Building in 1905.”
“Busy first week. Omnibus ran into a horse trolley.” The old man laughed without making a sound. His chest bellowed and he opened his mouth to display a horseshoe of gold molars.
Zagreb made a noise that seemed appropriate and the three went into one of the three autopsy rooms, bypassing both the viewing room with its comforting furnishings, chosen to lessen survivors’ shock, and the long, low-ceilinged cold storage room where unclaimed corpses awaited identification behind refrigerator doors. The medium-size room where they ended up gleamed with white porcelain and ceramic tile and contained a fixture that was more sink than table, white enamel with a dull zinc lining, a faucet at one end, and a drainpipe running into the floor. The metal shade of a hydraulically operated lamp hung suspended above the naked male carcass stretched out inside. The dead man was about sixty and balding, the gray skin of his face shiny where the bones seemed to be wearing through. His eyes were half-open and sunken into their sockets. His fingers and toes were long and bony, barnacled with callus, and his circumcised penis lay to one side of his deflated scrotum. His torso from collarbone to pelvis was an open, empty cavity in which Zagreb could see the inside of his ribs. A pile of entrails lay atop a rolling steel cart parked next to the table. It was a sight that never failed to remind the lieutenant of his annual hunting trip north to Grayling and the process of dressing out a slain deer. The fishy smell of stale blood and butchered meat, washed down with carbolic, was a presence in the room, very nearly alive.
Edouard’s bright eyes were on Zagreb as they entered the room. The lieutenant’s reaction to the corpse, or rather his lack of it, seemed to disappoint the specialist, who promptly lost interest. He hung back at the door, hauled out a thick pocket watch with a nicked steel case, and held it in the pink palm of his hand throughout the visit as if he were timing it.
“Simeon Yegerov.” Brandon read from a spiral pad he took from an inside pocket. “We’re still waiting for a positive, but that was the name on the papers in his wallet. He owned Empire Cleaners on Twelfth. We found him six blocks away, dead maybe ten minutes. Probably on his way home.”
“Any cash in the wallet?” Zagreb lit a Chesterfield. His throat was raw from smoking but he wanted to take the edge off the carnal stench.
The inspector turned a page. “Thirty-three dollars. It wasn’t robbery.”
“Ration stamps?”
“Third of a book, in the upper right-hand inside pocket of his coat. Butter and eggs mostly.”
“So why am I here?”
Brandon turned to Edouard, whose glass blue eyes brightened. “Single laceration, proceeding upward from first penetration at a thirty-degree oblique for sixty-six centimeters, right to left, beginning at the ilium and ending at the clavicle. Complete severance of the external iliac, inferior epigastric, sternal, musculophrenic, and superior epigastric arteries. Death by desanguination in less than two minutes. First time I ever conducted an autopsy without touching a postmortem knife.” He made his noiseless laugh.
“Shit.” Zagreb blew out smoke with the expletive.
“There’s more,” the inspector said. “Owners of businesses carry keys. No keys were found on the body. First uniform on the scene went to the dry-cleaning shop and found the door unlocked, the key still in the hole with the ring hanging from it. No sign the place was tossed, but maybe the killer knew where to look.”
“Maybe Yegerov left his keys.”
“Not on the outside of the door, on his way out. Forensics is dusting.”
“Stamps?”
“Haven’t found any. If our man knew where to look we won’t.”
“Doesn’t make sense. If he went to all that trouble he wouldn’t have left the ones on the body. He must’ve been after something else.”
“Something like what?”
The lieutenant took a haul, dropped the cigarette, and crushed it out on the tile. He was burning more these days and smoking less. “If this was Prohibition I’d say he was after cleaning fluid. Maybe he left his shirts.”
“He was probably in a hurry when he tossed the body. Maybe he overlooked the ration book.”
“It’d be the first one he’s overlooked. Any scribbles by the body or near the shop? Walls, sidewalk? ‘Kilroy Was Here,’ anything like that?”
“No, and I wouldn’t let that out if I were you. The news-hounds will sniff this one out soon enough without a hook like that.”
“How long are you suspending the uniform for?”
Brandon measured out his diplomat’s smile. With the white temples he looked more like an ambassador than the son of a German brewer. “Reprimand. Can’t spare the manpower. There’s a war on, you know? He expected me to boot him up to the squad. I said he must’ve been home sick the day they told his class at the academy it isn’t a uniform’s job to go through a victim’s pockets.”
“You should’ve booted him up. He’s got a better head on his shoulders than all of Homicide.”
“We’d’ve got to the store eventually.”
“After some Four-F burglar found the door open and tossed the place.”
The inspector stopped smiling. “The M.O.’s Kilroy’s. Right-handed sweep from behind. You want it or not? Wartime priority,” he added, showing his teeth.
“I’ll tinker with it.” Zagreb looked at Edouard. “Weapon?”
“Long blade, razor-sharp, no give. At a guess, high-tempered steel, probably double-edged. A fighting weapon.”
“Bowie?”
“Too clumsy. This was more like a long incision.”
“You mentioned a postmortem knife.”
“Possibly. Probably not. I wouldn’t want to attack a living body with a hiltless knife. The idea is to spill the victim’s blood, not yours.”
“That eliminates Jack the Ripper.” Brandon put away his notebook. “Have fun with it. I’ve got a nigger killing on Second I ought to poke my nose into. Probably just some hillbilly, but Jack Witherspoon wants brass on the scene. He had his picture taken with Eleanor Roosevelt once.”
“Once’d do it for me,” Edouard said. “She’s got a face like a Chihuahua’s ass.”
Zagreb wondered if all the Democrats were in Europe.
He remained behind to ask the coroner’s man a few questions. Edouard’s answers were brief and desultory; his interest in the lieutenant had vanished when the cut-open corpse had failed to draw the proper reaction. When he was finished Zagreb went back out to the general offices, where he found the rest of the racket squad taking up space in the reception room.
He was irked by their inactivity. Canal, who had a talent for buttonholing supernumeraries and sending them out on errands, was finishing a bottle of Coke. Two empties were already lined up on the edge of a battleship gray steel desk with a covered typewriter atop it; he averaged two minutes per 6.5-ounce bottle. Baldy McReary stood with his hands in his pockets, studying a chart of the female anatomy on a bulletin board next to the door, all its secrets exposed like the tunnels and chambers of an ant farm pressed between panes of glass. Burke had claimed a chair with square steel legs, sitting with his knees at right angles and his hands, surprisingly small and fragile-looking at the ends of his big wrists, gripping his thighs. He looked like someone determined to hold the position against a couple of regiments of Japanese. In reality he was probably struggling to maintain the flow of oxygen to his brain. The carbolic smell that dominated the autopsy rooms had penetrated to every room of the building, and Burke, who had shot and killed two men when he was with the uniform division and been suspended for strangling a third nearly to death in interrogation, hated corpses to the point of phobia. Recently he had refused to serve as pallbearer for the aunt who had raised him.
A portable radio encased in tough fabric with a Bakelite grille was going on about Pantelleria, but nobody appeared to be listening. No one in the room had ever heard of the island before the marines hit it. The announcer sounded as excited as if they’d taken Rome.
“Ladies, I guess I’m the stiff-watcher for this outfit,” said Zagreb, being sure to make the comment general. Burke was inclined to sulk.
“One gob of guts looks pretty much like all the rest.” McReary blew a kiss to the anatomy chart and turned away. “Is it our boy?”
“Brandon thinks it is.”
Canal clunked down his empty bottle and belched dramatically. “That means he don’t think he can tie it up. They ought to issue us brooms. All we do is sweep up everybody else’s crap.”
“We’d better get to sweeping quick. Three’s the limit before the papers catch wind.” The lieutenant gave them the details on Simeon Yegerov.
“It don’t figure,” Canal said. “Boys like Kilroy don’t light out till they get what they’re after. He’d frisk the stiff in the middle of the Hudson’s parade.”
Zagreb said, “We’ll park that for now. Twice he’s taken ration stamps. A lot of ration stamps. Either he likes big breakfasts and ball-busting auto trips or he’s laying them off somewhere. And there’s only one place to sell them in this town.”
Burke came out of his trance. “The Conductor.”
“Frankie Fucking Orr.” Canal tasted it, liking it more with each syllable.
McReary touched the tender spot on the side of his neck, as if it alone had prevented him from coming up with the answer first.
Zagreb’s Wittnauer had stopped. He shook it, wound the stem. The sweep hand started moving. His Timex self-winder had given up the ghost just before Dunkirk. All the other self-winders had gone to war and he hadn’t gotten into the habit of winding regularly. “What time is it?”
McReary checked the Curvex strapped to the underside of his wrist. “A little after eleven. Roma’s stopped serving an hour ago.”
“Roma’s stops serving when Frankie goes home,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve been turning over Kilroy’s dry turds long enough. Let’s just this once get out in front of the cocksucker.”