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.
When Mrs. Rice identified the remains through her husband’s clothing and a scar on his abdomen — the clothing was not in such excellent shape after having been put through the rigorous test of contact with a boat’s propeller and submersion for two weeks, but the scar was still intact — when she made the identification, she also stated that Mr. Rice worked in the next state and that he took a ferry to work each morning and returned by ferry each evening, and it therefore seemed more than likely that Mr. Rice had either jumped, been pushed, or had fallen from the stern of the ferry and thereby been mutilated by the boat’s propellers. A thorough search of the Rice apartment that same day uncovered a suicide note.
And so it was Blaney’s unfortunate duty to call the 87th once more and report to Kling, the weary weekend horseman, that the hands he’d been examining over the past few days did not belong to the body that had been washed ashore that morning.
So that was that, and the problem of identification still remained to be solved, with the young son of Martha Livingston and the young sailor Karl Androvich still shaping up as pretty good possibilities.
But it was still Monday, a very blue Monday at that because it was raining, and everything was going to happen on Monday.
At 2:00 P.M. the third thing happened.
Two hoodlums were picked up in the next state, and both gave the police address in Isola. A teletype to City Headquarters requesting information netted a B-sheet for one of them, but no record for the other. The boys, it seemed, had held up a Shell station and then tried a hasty escape in a beat-up automobile. So hasty was their departure that they neglected to notice a police car that was cruising along the highway, with the result that they smacked right into the front right fender of the approaching black-and-white sedan, and that was the end of that little caper. The boy carrying the gun, the one with the record, was named Robert Germaine.
The other boy, the sloppy driver who’d slammed into the motor patrol car, was named Richard Livingston.
No matter how sloppily you drive a car, it takes two hands — and Richard Livingston was in possession of both of his.
Kling got the information at 3:00 P.M. With weary, shaking fingers, he wrote it down and reminded himself to tell Carella to chalk off a possible victim.
At 4:10 P.M. the telephone rang again.
“Hello,” Kling said.
“Who’s this?” a woman’s voice asked.
“This is Detective Kling, 87th Squad. Who’s this?”
“Mrs. Androvich,” the voice said. “Mrs. Karl Androvich.”
“Oh. Hello, Mrs. Androvich. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.
“I mean, what—”
“My husband’s back,” Meg Androvich said.
“Karl?”
“Yes.”
“He’s back?”
“Yes.”
“When did he return?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” she said. She paused for a long time. Then she said, “He brought me flowers.”
“I’m glad he’s back,” Kling said. “I’ll notify the Missing Persons Bureau. Thank you for calling.”
“Not at all,” Meg said. “Would you do me a favor, please?”
“What’s that, Mrs. Androvich?”
“Would you please tell that other detective? Carella? Was that his name?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Would you please tell him?”
“That your husband’s back? Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell him.”
“No, not that. That’s not what I want you to tell him.”
“What do you want me to tell him, Mrs. Androvich?”
“That Karl brought me flowers. Tell him that, would you? That Karl brought me flowers.” And she hung up.
So that was what happened on Monday.
And that was everything.
The boys still had a pair of hands to work with, and nobody seemed to belong to those hands.
On Tuesday, there was a street rumble, and a fire in the neighborhood, and a woman who clobbered her husband with a frying pan, and so everybody was pretty busy.
On Wednesday, Steve Carella came back to work. It was still raining. It seemed as if it would never stop raining. A week had gone by since Patrolman Genero had found the first hand.
A whole week had gone by, and the boys were right back where they’d started.
10
The old woman who’d discovered the second hand in the garbage can was named Colleen Brady. She was sixty-four years old, but there was about her a youthfulness that complied faithfully to her given name, so that indeed she seemed to be a colleen.
There is an image that comes instantly to mind whenever an Irish girl is mentioned, an image compounded of one part Saint Patrick’s Day to three parts John Huston’s The Quiet One. The girl has red hair and green eyes, and she runs through the heather beneath a sky of shrieking blue billowing with clouds of pure white, and there is a wild smile on her mouth, and you know she will slap you silly if you try to touch her. She is Irish and wild and savage and pure and young, forever young, forever youthful.
And so was Colleen Brady.
She entertained Carella and Hawes as if they were beaux come to call on her with sprigs of hollyhock. She served them tea, and she told them jokes in a brogue as thick as good Irish coffee. Her eyes were green and bright and her skin was as smooth and as fair as a seventeen-year-old’s. Her hair was white, but you knew with certainty that it had once been red, and her narrow waist could still be spanned by a man with big hands.
“I saw no one,” she told the detectives. “Nary a soul. It was a day to keep indoors, it was. I saw no one in the hallway, and no one on the stairs, and no one in the courtyard. It was a right bitter day, and I should have carried down me umbrella, but I didn’t. I like to have died from faint when I saw what was in that garbage can. Will y’have more tea?
“No, thank you, Mrs. Brady. You saw no one?”
“No one, aye. And I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, for ‘tis a gruesome thing to cut a man apart, a gruesome thing. ‘Tis a thing for barbarians.” She paused, sipping at her tea, her green eyes alert in her narrow face. “Have you tried the neighbors? Have you asked them? Perhaps they saw.”
“We wanted to talk to you first, Mrs. Brady,” Hawes said.
She nodded. “Are you Irish, young man?” she asked.
“Part.”
Her green eyes glowed. She nodded secretly and said nothing more, but she studied Hawes with the practiced eye of a young girl who’d been chased around the village green more than once.
“Well, we’ll be going now, Mrs. Brady,” Carella said. “Thank you very much.”
“Try the neighbors,” she told them. “Maybe they saw. Maybe one of them saw.”
None of them had seen.
They tried every apartment in Mrs. Brady’s building and the building adjoining it. Then, wearily, they trudged back to the squadroom in the rain. Hernandez had a message for Carella the moment he walked in.
“Steve, got a call about a half-hour ago from a guy at the MPB. He asked for Kling, but I told him he was out, and he wanted to know who else was on the case of the hand in the airline bag, so I told him you were. He said either you or Kling should call him back the minute either of you got in.”
“What’s his name?” Carella asked.
“It’s on the pad there. Bartholomew or something.”
Carella sat at his desk and pulled the pad over. “Romeo Bartholdi,” he said aloud, and he dialed the Missing Persons Bureau.
“Hello,” he said, “this is Carella at the 87th Precinct. We got a call here a little while ago from some guy named Bartholdi, said he—”
“This is Bartholdi.”
“Hi. What’s up?”
“What’d you say your name was?”