Give the Boys a Great Big Hand
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Серия: 87th Precinct #11
- Год: 1960
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «Give the Boys a Great Big Hand». Краткое содержание книги:
“Hey!” he yelled after the bus. “You forgot your bag!”
Genera picked up the bag — a small, blue overnight bag issued by an airline. He unzipped the bag and reached into it. Then he gripped the bus-stop sign for support.
The bag held... a severed human hand.
The police lab gave both bag and hand a thorough examination and discovered next to nothing. Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer and the other 87th Precinct detectives had a murderer to find, and they had to begin without even knowing who the victim was.
The Missing Persons Bureau files supplied two leads, both of which led nowhere.
Everything that looked even faintly like a clue was checked and double-checked and they all led to the same place — a dead end.
Then, when the break finally came and several clues turned up at once, they neatly contradicted each other. It was the toughest case the 87th Precinct detectives had ever faced.
“Did he have a girl in this city, too, Captain Kissovsky?”
“Lay off the captain crap, huh?” Kissovsky said. “Call me Artie, okay, and I’ll call you George or whatever the hell your name is, and that way we cut through the fog, okay?”
“It’s Steve.”
“Okay. Steve. That’s a good name. I got a brother named Steve. He’s strong as an ox. He can lift a Mack truck with his bare hands, that kid.”
“Artie, did Androvich have a girl in this city?”
Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth, maneuvered the matchbook folder around the back of his mouth, and thought. He spit a sliver of food onto the deck, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know.”
“Who would know?”
“Maybe the other guys in the crew, but I doubt it. Anything happens on this tub, I know about it. I can tell you one thing. He didn’t spend his nights sitting around holding hands with little Lulu Belle or whatever the hell her name is.”
“Meg? His wife?”
“Yeah, Meg. The one he’s got tattooed on his arm there. The one he picked up in Atlanta. Beats me how she ever got him to come up with a ring.” Kissovsky shrugged. “Anyway, she did get him to marry her, but that don’t mean she also got him to sit home tatting doilies. No, sir. This kid was out to live! No doilies for him. Doilies are for the Sands Spit commuters, not for the Karl Androviches. You know what he’d do?”
“What?” Carella asked.
“We’d pull into port, you know. I mean here, this city. So he’d wait like two weeks, living it up all over town, shooting his roll, before he’d call home to say we were in. And maybe this was like about two days before we were going to pull out again. Buddy, this kid was giving that girl the business in both ears. She seems like a nice kid, too. I feel a little sorry for her.” He shrugged and spit onto the deck again.
“Where’d he go?” Carella asked. “When he wasn’t home? Where’d he hang out?”
“Wherever there are dames,” Kissovsky said.
“There are dames all over the city.”
“Then that’s where he hung out. All over the city. I’ll bet you a five-dollar bill he’s with some dame right now. He’ll drop in on little Scarlett O’Hara or whatever the hell her name is, the minute he runs out of money.”
“He only had thirty dollars with him when he vanished,” Carella said.
“Thirty dollars, my eye! Who told you that? There was a big crap game on the way up from Pensacola. Androvich was one of the winners. Took away something like seven hundred bucks. That ain’t hay, Steve-oh. Add to that all of January’s pay, you know we were holding it until we hit port, and that adds up to quite a little bundle. And we were only in port here two days. We docked on the twelfth, and we were shoving off on the fourteenth, Valentine’s Day. So a guy can’t spend more than a grand in two days, can he?” Kissovsky paused thoughtfully. “The way I figure it, he started back for the ship, picked up some floozie, and has been living it high on the hog with her for the past month or so. When the loot runs out, Androvich’ll be home.”
“You think he’s just having himself a fling, is that it?”
“Just running true to form, that’s all. In Nagasaki, when we was there, this guy... well, that’s another story.” He paused. “You ain’t worried about him, are you?”
“Well... ”
“Don’t be. Check the whorehouses, and the strip joints, and the bars, and Skid Row. You’ll find him, all right. Only thing is, I don’t think he wants to be found. So what’re you gonna do when you latch onto him? Force him to go back to Melissa Lee, or whatever the hell her name is?”
“No, we couldn’t do that,” Carella said.
“So what the hell are you bothering for?” Kissovsky sucked air through his teeth and then spat on the deck. “Stop worrying,” he said. “He’ll turn up.”
The garbage cans were stacked in the areaway between the two tenements, and the rain had formed small pools of water on the lid of each can. The old woman was wearing house slippers, and so she stepped gingerly into the areaway and tried to avoid the water underfoot, walking carefully to the closest garbage can, carrying her bag of garbage clutched to her breast like a sucking infant.
She lifted the lid of the can and shook the water free and was about to drop her bag into the can when she saw that it was filled. The old lady was Irish, and she unleashed a torrent of swear words that would have turned a leprechaun blue, replaced the lid, and went to the second garbage can. She was thoroughly drenched now, and she cursed the fact that she hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella down with her, cursed the lid of the second garbage can because it seemed to be stuck, finally wrenched it free, soaking herself anew with the water that had been resting on it, and prepared to toss her bag into it and run like hell for the building.
Then she saw the newspaper.
She hesitated for a moment.
The newspaper had been wrapped around something, but the wrapping had come loose. Curiously, the old lady bent closer to the garbage can.
And then she let out a shriek.
9
Everything happened on Monday.
To begin with, Blaney — the assistant medical examiner — officially studied the delightful little package that the patrolmen had dug out of the garbage can after a frantic call from the old lady.
The bloody newspaper contained a human hand.
And after duly examining this hand, Blaney phoned the 87th to say that it had belonged to a white male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and that unless he was greatly mistaken, it was the mate to the hand he had examined the week before.
Bert Kling took the telephoned message. He barely had strength enough to hold the pencil in his hand as he wrote down the information.
That was the first thing that happened on Monday, and it happened at 9:30 in the morning.
The second thing happened at 11:00 A.M. and it seemed as if the second occurrence would solve once and for all the problem of identification. The second occurrence involved a body that had been washed ashore on the banks of the River Harb. The body had no arms and no head. It was promptly shipped off to the morgue where several things were learned about it.
To begin with, the body was clothed and a wallet in the right hip pocket of the trousers carried a sopping-wet identification card and a driver’s license. The man in the water was known as George Rice. A call to the number listed on the identification card confirmed Blaney’s estimate that the body had been in the river for close to two weeks. Apparently, Mr. Rice had failed to come home from work one night two weeks ago. His wife had reported him missing, and a sheet on him was allegedly in the files of the MPB. Mrs. Rice was asked to come down to identify the remains as soon as she was able to. In the meantime, Blaney continued his examination.
And he decided, even though Mr. Rice had been only twenty-six years old, and even though Mr. Rice was lacking arms and a head, and even though Mr. Rice was a good possibility for the person who had owned the two hands that had turned up — he decided after a thorough examination that the body had apparently lost its head and arms through contact with the propeller blades of either a ship or a large boat. And whereas the blood stain on the bottom of the airline bag had belonged to the “O” group, the blood of Mr. Rice checked out as belonging to the “AB” group. And whereas the hugeness of the two hands indicated a big fellow, Mr. Rice, allowing for his missing head, added up to five feet eight and a half inches, and that is not big.