The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

I fell in step beside him. “What’s up?”

“Girl been killed.”

“Where?”

“In Hibernia Park.”

She lay as if sleeping under some bushes where she’d been dragged and hurriedly and ineffectually hidden. It was a golden day, filled with the freshness of morning, the grass and trees of the park dewy and vividly green.

Squad cars and uniformed men had already cordoned off the area. Men from the lab reached the scene about the same time as Martin and I. Efficiently, they started the routine of photography and footprint moulage.

I had not, as yet, the objectivity of the rest of them. The girl drew and held my attention. She was small, fine of bone, and sparsely fleshed. Her face had a piquant quality. She might have been almost pretty, if she’d known how to fix herself up.

As it was, she lay drab and colorless in her cheap, faded cotton dress, dull brown hair framing her face.

Her attitude of sleep, face toward the sky, became a horror when my eyes followed the lines her dragging heels had made. The lines ended beyond a flat stone. The stone was crusted with dark, dried blood. It was obvious that she’d been knocked down there, as she came along the walkway. The back of her head had struck the stone. Perhaps she’d died instantly. Her assailant had dragged her quickly to the bushes, concealing the body long enough for him to get far away from the park.

Looking again at her, I shivered slightly. What in your nineteen or twenty years, I asked silently of her, brought you to this?

The murder scene yielded little. Her purse, if she’d had one, was gone. She wore no jewelry, although she might have had a cheap watch or ID bracelet. The golden catch from such an item was found near the flat stone by one of the lab men.

Later in the squad room, Martin and I sat and looked at the golden clasp.

“Mugged, robbed, murdered,” Martin decided. “I wonder how much she was carrying in her purse. Five dollars? Ten?”

He held the catch so that it caught the light. “We’ll check the pawnshops. A hoodlum this cheap will try to pawn the watch. Nothing from Missing Persons?”

I’d just finished the routine in that department. I shook my head.

“Nothing from the lab, either,” Martin said. “Her clothes came from any bargain basement. No laundry marks. Washed them herself. No scars or identifying marks. No bridgework in the mouth. We’ll run the fingerprints, but I’m not hopeful. The P.M. will establish the cause of death as resulting from compound fracture of the skull, probably late last night.”

“None of it will tell us who she is,” I said.

“That’s what I’m saying. But somebody will turn up, asking for her. Somebody will claim her. Girl that young — she can’t die violently and disappear without it affecting someone. Meantime, all we got is this clasp.”

We took it to all the pawnshops in the city. No watch with such a clasp missing had been pawned.

Martin next picked up every punk who had a mugging or mugging attempt on his record. We questioned each one of them. The task ate up two days, and when it was over we had placed nobody near Hibernia Park at the right time.

The girl’s body remained in the morgue. No one inquired about her. She wasn’t reported missing. She continued to be an unclaimed Jane Doe.

“It means,” Martin said, “that she has no family here. She must have come here to work, maybe from a farm upstate. Lucky for us that we live in a reasonably small city. We’ll check all the rooming houses — places where such a girl might have lived.”

We did it building by building, block by teeming block, from landlord to landlady to building super.

Martin would take one side of the street, I the other. Our equipment was a picture of the girl, and the question was always-the same. So were all the answers.

We spent two fatiguing, monotonous days of this. Then about mid-afternoon the third day, I came disconsolately from a cheaper apartment building and saw Martin waving to me from a long porch across the street.

I waited for a break in traffic and crossed over. The rooming house was an old gables-and-gingerbread monstrosity, three stories, a mansion in its day, but long since chopped into small apartments and sleeping rooms.

A small, gray, near-sighted woman hovered in the hallway behind Odus Martin.

“This is Mrs. Carraway,” Martin said.

The landlady and I nodded our new acquaintance.

“May we see Mary Smith’s room?” Martin asked.

Mary Smith, I thought. I’d begun to think you’d remain Jane Doe forever, Mary Smith.

“Since you’re police officers I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Carraway said.

“You’ve seen my credentials,” Martin said. “We’ll take full responsibility.”

We followed Mrs. Carraway to a small clean room at the end of the hallway. She stood in the open doorway while we examined the room.

The furnishings were typical — mismatched bed, bureau, chest of drawers, and worn carpet, faded curtains.

A neat person, Mary Smith. The few items of clothing she’d owned were pressed and properly placed in the closet and chest of drawers.