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.
“Ride, my ass! I don’t know anything about where she is, dammit! If I knew, do you think I’d—”
“What? Finish it, Androvich! Say what you’ve got to say!”
“Do you think I’d be here? Do you think I’d be playing hubby and wifey with that mealy-mouthed hunk of Southern garbage? Do you think I’d be listening to this molasses dribble day in and day out? Kahl, honeh, cain’t we-all go back t’Atlanta, honeh? Cain’t we, Kahl? Do you think I’d be here listening to that crap if I knew where Bubbles was?”
“What would you be doing, Androvich?”
“I’d be with her, goddamnit! Where do you think I spent the last month?”
“Where?”
“Looking for her. Searching this city, every c-c-corner of it. Do you know how big this city is?”
“We’ve got some idea.”
“Okay, I p-p-picked through it like somebody looking through a scalp for lice. And I didn’t find her. And if I couldn’t find her, she isn’t here, believe me, because I covered every place, every place. I went to places you guys have never even heard of, l-l-looking for that broad. She’s gone.”
“She was that important to you, huh?”
“Yeah, she was that important to me.”
Androvich fell silent. Carella stared at him.
“What did you talk about that afternoon, Karl?” he asked gently.
“We made plans,” Androvich said. His voice was curiously low now. The tic had stopped suddenly. The stammer had vanished. He did not look up at the detectives. He fastened his eyes on his big hands, and he twisted those hands in his lap, and he did not look up.
“What kind of plans?”
“We were going to run away together.”
“Where?”
“Miami.”
“Why there?”
“She knew of a job she could get down there. In one of the clubs. And Miami’s a big port. Not as big as this city, but big enough. I could always get work out of Miami. Or maybe I could get a job on one of the yachts. Anyway, we figured Miami was a good place for us.”
“When were you supposed to leave?”
“Valentine’s Day.”
“Why then?”
“Well, my ship was pulling out on the fourteenth, so we figured that would give us a head start. We figured Meg would think I was in South America, and then by the time she realized I wasn’t, she wouldn’t know where the hell I was. That was the way we figured it.”
“But instead, the chief officer called here to find out where you were.”
“Yeah, and Meg reported me missing.”
“Why aren’t you in Miami, Karl? What happened?”
“She didn’t show.”
“Bubbles?”
“Yeah. I waited at the train station all morning. Then I called her apartment, and all I got was the goddamn answering service. I called all that day, and all that day I got that answering service. I went down to The King and Queen, and the bartender there told me she hadn’t showed up for work the past two nights. That was when I began looking for her.”
“Did you plan to marry this girl, Karl?”
“Marry her? How could I do that? I’m already married. Bigamy is against the law.”
“Then what did you plan to do?”
“Just have fun, that’s all. I’m a young guy. I deserve a little fun, don’t I? Miami is a good town for fun.”
“Do you think she could have gone to Miami without you?”
“I don’t think so. I wired the club she mentioned, and they said she hadn’t showed up. Besides, why would she do that?”
“Women do funny things.”
“Not Bubbles.”
“We’d better check with the Miami cops, Steve,” Hawes said. “And maybe a teletype to Kansas City, huh?”
“Yeah.” He paused and looked at Androvich. “You think she isn’t here any more, huh? You think she’s left the city?”
“That’s the way I figure it. I looked everywhere. She couldn’t be here. It’d be impossible.”
“Maybe she’s hiding,” Carella said. “Maybe she did something and doesn’t want to be found.”
“Bubbles? No, not Bubbles.”
“Ever hear of a man called Mike Chirapadano?”
“No. Who’s he?”
“A drummer.”
“I never heard of him.”
“Bubbles ever mention him?”
“No. Listen, she ain’t in this city, that much I can tell you. She just ain’t here. Nobody can hide that good.”
“Maybe not,” Carella said. “But maybe she’s here, anyway.”
“What sense does that make? If she ain’t out in the open, and she ain’t hiding, what does that leave?”
“The river,” Carella said.
13
It stopped raining that Thursday.
Nobody seemed to notice the difference.
It was strange. For the past nine days, it had rained steadily and everyone in the city talked about the rain. There were jokes about building arks and jokes about the rain hurting the rhubarb, and it was impossible to go anywhere or do anything without someone mentioning the rain.
On Thursday morning, the sun came out. There was no fanfare of trumpets heralding the sun’s appearance, and none of the metropolitan dailies shrieked about it in four-point headlines. The rain just went, and the sun just came, and everyone in the city trotted about his business as if nothing had happened. The rain had been with them too long. It had become almost a visiting relative whose departure is always promised but never really expected. At last, the relative had left and — as with most promised things in life — there was no soaring joy accompanying the event. If anything, there was almost a sense of loss.
Even the bulls of the 87th who quite naturally detested legwork in the rain did not greet the sun with any noticeable amount of enthusiasm.
They had got their teletypes out to Miami and Kansas City, and they had received their answering teletypes, and the answering teletypes told them that Barbara “Bubbles” Caesar was not at the moment gainfully employed in any of the various clubs in either of the cities. This did not mean that she wasn’t living in either of the cities. It simply meant she wasn’t working.
It was impossible to check bus or train transportation, but a call to every airline servicing both of the cities revealed that neither Bubbles Caesar nor a Mike Chirapadano had reserved passage out of Isola during the past month.
On Thursday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation delivered a photostatic copy of Mike Chirapadano’s service record.
He had been born in Riverhead twenty-three years ago. He was white, and he was obviously male. Height, six feet three inches. Weight, 185. Eyes, blue. Hair, brown. When the Korean War broke out, he was only thirteen years old. When it ended, he was sixteen, and so he had been spared the Oriental bout. He had joined the Navy for a two-year hitch in July 1956, had spent all of his service career — except for his boot training at the Great Lakes Naval Station — playing with the ComServDiv band in Miami. When he got out of the Navy in 1958, he came back to Isola. His record listed an honorable discharge in Miami, the Navy providing his transportation back to his home city. A copy of his fingerprint record was included in the data from the FBI but the prints were worthless for comparison purposes since the fingertips on both discovered hands had been mutilated. The Navy listed his blood as belonging to the “O” group.
Carella studied the information and went home to his wife.
Teddy Carella was a deaf mute.
She was not a tall woman but she somehow managed to give the impression of height — a woman with black hair and brown eyes and a figure that, even after the bearing of twin children, managed to evoke street-corner whistles that — unfortunately — Teddy could not hear.