The Lady in the Morgue

by Jonathan Latimer

  O’Malley said, “He probably figured she wouldn’t be needin’ them.”

  “Shut up,” said Williams. “This is interesting.”

  “That’s about all.” Crane’s voice was weary. “The caller left with the shoes and clothes and any other articles which he thought might help in identifying the girl. He may have even taken her money, if she had more than was found in her purse.”

  “I follow your reconstruction all right,” Courtland’s voice was puzzled. “But I still don’t see how you can be sure it’s murder. Wouldn’t it have been possible for the girl herself to dispose of her things, so she could commit suicide without having her identity disclosed?”

  “No,” Crane said. “It wouldn’t. You see her wet heel marks on the door were two feet above the floor. The murderer wanted the police to think she had jumped from the bathroom scales and hung herself. If she had her heel marks would have been below the scales, which is only a foot high. Instead, her heel marks were more than a foot above the scales, an obvious impossibility if she had hung herself.”

  “Pretty clever.” Courtland’s voice was awed. “How did you happen to think of it?”

  “That’s an old gag. I remember a Sûreté case involving a milking stool in much the same way,” said Crane. “And there have been others. Criminals seem to have a habit of repeating themselves, or rather, their mistakes.”

  Williams asked for the second time, “Well, what are you going to do now?”

  Crane stood up, stretched his arms. “I’d like to get the body in a place where we could show it to the Udonis and to Paletta and French.” He tightened the leash, pulled Champion to his feet. “What time is it?”

  “Five minutes of one,” said O’Malley.

  “Is that all?” exclaimed Williams. “It seems like we’ve been here all night.”

  Courtland said, “You’ll have to take the body somewhere. You won’t be able to bring the gangsters and the Udonis out here very well.”

  “That’s what I’m wondering about.” Crane moved toward the place where Williams was sitting. “Doc, you’re an old Chicagoan. Do you know any undertakers?”

  “Sure. I know one named Barry, over on State Street and Forty-seventh.”

  Crane asked, “Are you trying to be funny?” Then he said, “Never mind. Do you think he would take the body?”

  “For me he would.”

  “Fine.” Crane patted the bulldog. “We’ll take her over there and have the others come to look at her.”

  O’Malley said, “If I know my gangsters you’ll have a hell of a time gettin’ French and Paletta to come in a strange undertakin’ shop to look at some girl. They’d think you were trying to put ’em on the spot.”

  “That’s right,” said Crane.

  Courtland asked, “Why do you want them to see the body?”

  “I want to be sure they don’t know her.” Champion trotting at his heels, Crane was pacing back and forth along the tomb steps. “I’m not so sure now about that Miss Renshaw. She might not be Mrs. Paletta after all, although I’d bet my shirt on it. She never admitted it, you remember?”

  O’Malley said, “She wouldn’t have admitted Roosevelt was president.”

  Now the thunder was louder. They had to raise their voices against it.

  Moisture soaked the still air; clung to their skin, their clothes; tickled their nostrils, dampened their hair.

  “The only place you could get those guys to come,” said Williams, “would be the county morgue. They’d feel safe there.”

  “Let’s get out of here, anyway,” yelled O’Malley. “It’s going to rain like hell in a couple of minutes.”

  Crane spoke to Williams. “But I don’t want the cops to know I’ve found the body. If we took it to the morgue again the keeper would notify them.”

  “Not if the undertaker brought her in.” Williams’ voice was pitched high. “He could say that somebody left the body with him to be buried and then disappeared, and that he wasn’t going to bury it for nothing.” He moved closer to Crane. “The night attendant would notify the coroner in the morning.”

  “That would give us the rest of the night.” Crane nodded his head. “All right; let’s get going. Doc, you and O’Malley carry the body over to the wall.”

  Williams said, “If you think I’m going to touch that body …”

  “She won’t hurt you,” said Crane.

  Courtland said, “I’ll help.” He led the way inside the tomb. While Crane flashed the light on the floor O’Malley and Courtland raised the body. “Stiff as a statue!” exclaimed O’Malley.

  Crane handed the flashlight to Williams. “Lead the way, Doc. Champ and I’ll bring up the rear.”

  Slowly, carefully, they crossed the graveyard. Courtland had the body’s feet, one in each hand, like a wheelbarrow, and O’Malley had his hands hooked under the arms, which were folded over her breasts. The woman’s face, in the glaring lightning, had the half-human, half-artificial, altogether horrible appearance of a figure in a waxworks. Champion kept close to Crane’s heels.

  In a moment of silence between bursts of thunder Williams called back, “How we going to get her over the wall?”

  “Two of you will have to get up on top,” said Crane. “We’ll hand her up to you, and then one of you can hold her while the other jumps down on the other side.”

  They halted at the foot of the wall.

  “I bet I could toss her over,” said O’Malley.

  Thunder pounded their eardrums.

  Crane and Williams helped O’Malley onto the wall, while Courtland held the body. When it came Courtland’s turn to be helped Crane said, “Lean her up against the wall.” Once the two were on top Crane and Williams had no difficulty lifting the corpse up to them. “There,” said Crane, “now one of you jump down.”

  Courtland jumped down, and O’Malley stood there with his arm about the body’s waist. “May I have the pleasure of the next waltz, madam?” he asked.

  “For God’s sake!” said Williams.

  To Crane the scene looked like one of those horror movies in which mad scientists bring monsters back to life. In the flickering blue-white light O’Malley’s face was fish-belly white; the girl’s serene, peaceful, terrible. O’Malley held her away from the wall, let her drop. “Good catch,” he said, and turning to Crane and Williams, watching bug-eyed, added “Come on, you mugs.”

  In the space of a dozen major claps of thunder they were beside the rented car. “How’re we going t’ get her inside?” Williams wanted to know. “You can’t bend her.”

  They finally angled her in the rear door and propped her up in one corner. Crane got in beside her, asked dubiously, “I wonder if she’ll act as a conductor for lightning?”

  On their way to Forty-seventh Street they halted at an all-night drugstore while Williams telephoned the undertaker, Barry, and gained his reluctant permission to bring him the corpse. They all felt a sensation of relief as Williams climbed back into the driver’s seat, meshed the gears, jerked them forward. Crane patted the corpse’s shoulder. “I was never so glad to catch up with a dame in my life,” he said.

  O’Malley was critically examining Miss Castle’s face. He said, “She don’t seem so damn glad to see you.”

  “You are glad to see me, though, aren’t you, tutz?” asked Crane. He moved the upper portion of the body with the palm of his hand, made it appear as though Miss Castle was nodding, yes.

  Williams, watching lollipop-eyed through the mirror, said, “Omi-god, don’t do that.” He gave the gas pedal a convulsive kick.

  They skidded around a corner, and it began to rain huge drops like quarter dollars which made wet plops when they hit the windshield. Now the thunder was right on the heels of each lightning flash. Street lights made egg-yolk stains on the gleaming pavement.

  O’Malley said, “I like a babe that can hold up her end of the conversation.”

  “You mean like Aggie here?” Crane asked. “Aggie here is a brilliant conversationalis
t.”

  O’Malley leaned over Crane and peered in the corpse’s face. “Do you like the weather we’re having, Miss Castle?”

  Crane made the corpse’s head move negatively.

  O’Malley asked, “Perhaps you think it is a bit humid, Miss Castle?”

  Crane moved the head up and down.

  So horribly fascinated was Williams with this conversation that he overlooked a red light at Fifty-first Street and Woodlawn Avenue. There was the scream of a siren behind them, and a Ford squad car cut them to the curb. A crimson-faced officer in uniform stuck his head out into the driving rain, put the spotlight on them. “Where’s the fire?” he demanded.

  Crane put his arm protectively around Miss Castle’s body, let her head rest on his shoulder. Thunder crashed directly over their heads.

  “We’re sorry, officer,” said Courtland. “We didn’t see the light because of the rain.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said the officer. He swung the spotlight on the back seat. Crane hunched his shoulder so that Miss Castle’s face was in shadow.

  “The young lady doesn’t feel so well,” Courtland explained. “We’re hurrying to get her home.”

  The officer sniffed the air. “Stiff?”

  “Yeah,” said Crane hurriedly. “Stiff.”

  The officer was indignant. “A fine bunch of men you are, taking a poor girl out and getting her drunk.”

  “She’s stiff practically all the time,” said Crane.

  “Well, I’d like to say …” began the officer.

  “Aw, come on, Jim,” said the driver of the squad car. “I’m getting wet sittin’ here.”

  “Be careful you don’t get run in for drunken driving,” warned the officer. “Yer car smells like a saloon.”

  Sheets of black rain hid the retreating back of the squad car.

  “You see,” said Crane. “It pays to smell of liquor. If we hadn’t, the cop would have been suspicious of poor Aggie here.”

  “Hell,” said O’Malley; “he smelled the embalming fluid.”

  Williams started the car with elaborate care and they drove along Forty-seventh Street until they came to a sign, Barry and Son. They turned into an alley beside the establishment and drew up at the rear entrance.

  Mr. Barry was a small, brown, elderly man, and his brown eyes were alert. He grinned at them. “So you’re up to your old tricks, Doc Williams?” he said. He had on a black suit, a white silk shirt and a bow tie.

  Introductions performed, Mr. Barry eyed the corpse. “So that’s the girl I’ve been reading so much about in the papers.” His little head, brown-skinned and wrinkled, looked as though South Sea bushmen had started to preserve it and had been called away when the job was half done. “She ain’t a bad looker.”

  Crane explained what they wanted him to do.

  “That’s going to be tough.” Mr. Barry had false teeth and they clicked while he talked. “Undertakers ain’t supposed to be able to bring corpses into the morgue after they’ve embalmed them. Once an undertaker has accepted a party he’s responsible for the burial.” There was a tremendous flash of lightning and a burst of thunder immediately afterward. “Holy cow! Come inside before they take us all down to the morgue.”

  In the bare, cement-walled rear room of the building the noise of the thunder diminished. Crane asked, “Then you don’t think you can get her into the morgue for us?”

  “Oh, I guess I can.” Mr. Barry’s sparrow eyes were bright. “But it may mean a jam.”

  Crane said, “Well, we don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “I been in trouble before.” Mr. Barry led the way through a small wooden door into a garage. A battle-ship gray hearse stood with its blunt nose toward a big door hung by wires from the ceiling. Mr. Barry jerked a rope and the big door swung upward. “Stick your girl in here, and we’ll be off.”

  Crane and O’Malley carried the body into the garage, shoved her on the flat stretcher in the hearse, and climbed in beside her. Mr. Barry stepped on the hearse’s starter and the engine roared like a tractor. “You guys follow us,” shouted Crane to Courtland and Williams. With a jerk the hearse leaped from the garage, raced down the alley. Mr. Barry crouched over the wheel like a monkey. Water made a noise like a falling tree against the four fenders of the hearse. Mr. Barry switched on the siren, the red-and-blue headlights.

  The new morgue attendant was a young man with a pale skin, patchy black whiskers and practically no chin. He opened the door to the receiving room, turned on the driveway light and said, “Bring her in.” He rolled one of the white-enameled operating tables toward them. “Stick her on this.”

  They carried Miss Ross’s body through a rectangle of rain, through the door, and laid her on the table. The rain had dampened her cheap dress, made it cling to her slender hips, her long legs.

  “The hell!” The attendant’s voice was outraged. “You can’t bring an embalmed body in here.”

  “The hell I can’t.” Mr. Barry launched on a long explanation.

  The idea was that some dirty so-and-so—Mr. Barry said “so-and-so,” not son of a bitch—had brought the body to him and had promised to pay for its burial. But the dirty so-and-so had never showed up again, and when Mr. Barry had looked up the address the dirty so-and-so had given him the fellow didn’t live there at all. And did the morgue attendant, or the County of Cook, for that matter, think that he, Mr. Barry, was going to pay out sixty bucks to bury the girl? If they did they had another think coming.

  The attendant finally agreed to let them leave the body in the receiving room. He took Mr. Barry’s name and address. “I’ll have to make a report to the coroner,” he said.

  “Yeah, get the coroner,” Mr. Barry urged. “I’ll talk to the coroner.” He hopped up and down in front of the attendant’s worried face. “Get him right now.”

  “At two o’clock in the morning?” The attendant was horrified. “Not much, I won’t. I want to keep my job. I’ll report to him in the morning.”

  “O. K.” Mr. Barry winked at Crane. “Then I’ll leave the girl here.”

  The attendant found a sheet and tossed it over the girl’s body, and rolled the operating table away from the alley door. A gust of wind blew rain into the room, but as Crane moved to close the door Williams and Courtland appeared.

  “It’s about time you got here,” said Mr. Barry. He turned to the attendant. “You been pretty good about this girl, so I’m going to do you a favor. These men work for me, that is, all but this one—” he indicated Williams, “—and we may be able to find somebody to take care of the girl tonight. This fellow—” indicating Williams again “—thinks he knows some people who know the girl. I’m going to have him find them tonight and bring them down here to look at the girl. Then, if they do know her, they can claim her.”

  “Why don’t he claim her?” asked the attendant.

  “Do you think I’m going to pay out a hundred bucks to bury some dame I think I seen once before?” Williams pulled his mustache. “I ain’t that dumb.”

  “All right.” The attendant’s eyes were watery. He shrugged his shoulders. “Bring ’em down, and I’ll let them take a look at her. That’s what this place is for.” He started through the door leading to the stairs and the storage vaults where Miss Ross had originally been. “Close the alley door when you leave.”

  When the attendant had gone Mr. Barry said gleefully, “Well, that’s that. I’m going home.”

  “You did swell,” said Crane. “Now, I’ll telephone French and Paletta and have them come over here. Doc, you and O’Malley better go and get Udoni and Mrs. Udoni. You can take the dog back to the Cavern and look for Udoni there. Do it as quick as you can.”

  Courtland asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “You might as well stay here with me. I might need some help.” Crane shook Mr. Barry’s hand. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”

  “Aw, hell,” said Mr. Barry. “I’m always glad to oblige Doc.”

  “Y
eah,” said Williams, “we been buddies ever since we run a load of liquor down from Canada in a hearse and cleaned up five grand.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE ATTENDANT looked at them moodily as they approached the oak rail dividing his office from the waiting room. “You guys still here?” The clock with the cracked glass read 2:12. Outside it continued to rain, lighten, thunder.

  “We let the others go for the people to look at the body,” said Crane. “We don’t want to get our feet wet.”

  “Well, you needn’t think you’re going to sit around and bother me,” said the attendant. He moved papers about the surface of his desk. “I got work to do.”

  “Go right ahead,” said Crane. He grinned at Courtland. “We wouldn’t think of disturbing you.” He crossed the marble floor to the public telephone booth and looked up the number of the City News Bureau. It was State 8100. He dropped a coin in the slot and called the number and asked for Johnson. Jerry Johnson. The man at the switchboard said Johnson was covering west police and would probably be at the Canalport Station. He gave Crane the number.

  Johnson was at the Canalport Station. He said, hell, yes, he remembered Bill Crane.

  “Look,” said Crane, “I’ve got a good story for you, but you’ll have to agree not to break it until I give the word.”

  “What have you done?” Johnson’s voice was eager. “Found the girl?”

  “How about your word?”

  “O.K. I won’t bust the story until you give me a nod. What is it?”

  “You better come over to the morgue.”

  “I’ll be right over.…”

  “Wait a minute.” Crane was afraid Johnson had hung up. He spoke loudly. “I want you to do me a favor first.”