The Mugger

by Ed McBain

  Shuffle the deck of Cliffords, cut, and then pick a Clifford, any Clifford.

  This was not a time for picking Cliffords.

  This was a time for walks in the country, with the air spanking your cheeks, and the leaves crisp and crunching underfoot, and the trees screaming in a riot of splendid color. This was a time for brier pipes and tweed overcoats and juicy red McIntosh apples. This was a time to contemplate pumpkin pie and good books and thick rugs and windows shut tight against the coming cold.

  This was not a time for Clifford, and this was not a time for murder.

  But murder had been done, and the Homicide cops were cold-eyed men who had never been seventeen.

  Kling had once been seventeen.

  He walked down the steps and directly to the change booth. The man behind the grilled window was reading a “comic” book. Kling recognized it as one of the more hilarious attempts now on the stands, a strip dealing with a widow who had multiple sclerosis. The attendant looted up.

  “Good evening,” Kling said.

  The attendant eyed him suspiciously. “Evening,” he replied.

  “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Depends what the questions are,” the attendant said.

  “Well—”

  “If you’re planning a holdup, young man, forget it,” the attendant advised. “You won’t get a hell of lot for your trouble, and the cops in this town are pretty damn good on transit stickups.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t planning a holdup.”

  “Good thing. My name’s Ruth, Sam Ruth. The fellows call this ‘Ruth’s Booth.’ What can I do for you?”

  “Are you usually working nights?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Why?”

  “I’m trying to trace a young girl who generally boarded a train from this platform.”

  “Lots of young girls get on trains here.”

  “This one usually came up between ten and ten-thirty. Are you on at that time?”

  “When I work the afternoon shift, I come on at four, and I go off at midnight.”

  “Then you’re on at ten.”

  “It would appear that way, yeah.”

  “This girl was a blonde,” Kling said. “A very pretty blonde.”

  “There’s a blonde widow works in the bakeshop downstairs. She comes up about eight each night.”

  “This girl was young. Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t recall,” Ruth said.

  “Think.”

  “What for? I don’t recall her.”

  “Very pretty. If you’d seen her, you’d remember her. Well built, big blue eyes, a knockout.”

  Ruth squinched up his eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I remember. Nice young kid. Yeah, I remember.”

  “What time did she come up?”

  “‘Bout ten twenty-five usually. Yeah, I remember her, all right. Always went up the downtown side of the platform. Used to watch her all the way. A damn pretty girl. Only seventeen, you say? Seemed a lot older.”

  “Only seventeen. Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl?”

  “Listen, how do I know? This blonde came up about ten twenty-five most of the time. Reason I remember her is she once asked me to change a ten-dollar bill. We ain’t allowed to change bigger than two dollars, not that many folks carry two-dollar bills, you know. Consider it hard luck. Superstition’s bad, bad.” Ruth shook his head.

  “Did you change it for her?” Kling asked.

  “Out of my own pocket. That’s how I remember her. She gave me a big smile. Nice smile, that girl. Nice everything, you ask me. Yeah, she’s the one, all right. Used to go up on the downtown side, caught the ten-thirty train.” Ruth pulled a gold watch from his pocket. He nodded, replaced the watch. “Yeah, caught the ten-thirty.”

  “All the time?”

  “Whenever I seen her, she caught the same train. After I cashed that bill for her, she always give me a smile. She was worth looking at, all right.”

  Kling glanced over his shoulder. The clock on the wall read 10:16.

  “If I got on that ten-thirty train,” he asked, “where would I get off a half hour from now?”

  “Say, I don’t know,” Ruth said. He thought for a moment. “Can tell you how to find out, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Get on it,” Ruth said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. Glad to be of help.” He turned back to his comic book, anxious to get back to the funny pages about the sick widow.

  The train screeched through the heart of the city, on intimate terms with the windows of the buildings it passed. Kling sat and watched the city pass by in review outside. It was a big city, and a dirty city, but when you were born and raised in it, it became as much a part of you as your liver or your intestinal tract. He watched the city, and he watched the hands of his timepiece.

  Jeannie Paige had told Claire there was a half-hour ride ahead of her. She had generally boarded a 10:30 train, and so Kling watched the advancing hands of his watch. The train swooped underground, piercing the bowels of the city. He sat and waited. Passengers came and went. Kling’s eyes did not leave his watch.

  At 11:02, the train pulled into a station platform underground. The last stop had been at 10:58. It was a tossup, either way. He left the train and went up to the street.

  He was in the heart of Isola.

  The buildings reached up to touch the sky, tinting the night with gaudy smears of red and orange and green and yellow light. There was a men’s clothing store on the corner, and a bakery shop, and a hack stand, and a dress shop, and a bus stop up the street, and a movie marquee, and a candy store, and a Chinese restaurant, and a bar, and all the stores and signs that clustered together like close relatives of the same family all over the city.

  He sighed heavily.

  If Jeannie had met her boyfriend here, and if her boyfriend’s name was Clifford, combing the area would be like searching for a blade of hay in a mountain of needles.

  He went to the subway kiosk again, boarding an uptown train this time. He traveled for one stop, figuring the half hour Jeannie had estimated could just as easily have brought her to this station.

  The stores and signs he encountered on the street were much the same as those he had just seen. The trappings of a busy intersection. Hell, this stop was almost a dead ringer for the one he’d just visited.

  Almost—but not quite.

  Kling boarded the train again and headed for his furnished room.

  There had been one landmark at the first stop that had been missing at the second stop. Kling’s eyes had recorded the item on his brain and buried it in his unconscious.

  Unfortunately, however, it was useless there at the moment.

  Science, as any fool knows, is the master sleuth.

  Give the police lab a sliver of glass and they can tell you what make car the suspect was driving, when he last had it washed, what states he’d visited, and whether or not he’d ever necked in the backseat.

  Provided the breaks are with them.

  When the breaks are going the wrong way, science is about as master a sleuth as the corner iceman.

  The breaks in the Jeannie Paige case managed to show a total disregard for the wishes and earnest endeavors of the boys in the police laboratory. There had, in all truth, been a good thumbprint on one lens of the sunglasses found near the girl’s body. Unfortunately, it is about as difficult to trace a single print as it is to unmask a Moslem woman. This did not faze the boys in the lab.

  Sam Grossman was a lab technician and a police lieutenant.

  He was tall and thin, a gentle man with gentle eyes and a quiet manner. He wore glasses, the only sign of science on a rock-hewn face that seemed to have been dispossessed from a New England farm. He worked at Headquarters in the clean, white lab that stretched across half the first-floor length of the building. He liked police w
ork. He owned an orderly, precise mind, and there was something neat and truthful about the coupling of indisputable scientific fact to police theory.

  He was an emotional man, but he had long ago ceased identifying the facts of sudden death with the people it summarily visited. He had seen too many bundles of bloody clothing, had studied the edges of too many powder burns, had analyzed the liquid contents of too many poisoned stomachs. Death, to Sam Grossman, was the great equalizer. It reduced human beings to arithmetical problems. If the breaks went with the lab, two and two added up to four.

  If the breaks were indifferent or downright ornery, two and two sometimes equaled five, or six, or eleven.

  There had been a man at the scene of Jeannie Paige’s death. The man had been equipped with a soft-pine sketch board attached to a photographic tripod. He had also carried a small alidade, a compass, graph paper, a soft-lead pencil, India rubber, common pins, a wooden triangle with scale, a scale, a tape measure, and a flexible steel ruler.

  The man had worked quietly and efficiently. While photographers swarmed over the site, while technicians dusted for latent prints, while the position of the body was marked, and while the body was transported into the waiting meat wagon, while the area was carefully scrutinized for footprints or tire tracks—the man stood like an artist doing a picture of a farmer’s barn on Cape Cod.

  He said hello to the detectives who occasionally stopped to chat with him. He seemed unmindful of the activity that erupted everywhere around him.

  Quietly, efficiently, carefully, methodically, he sketched the scene of the crime. Then he packed up and went to his office, where, working from the preliminary sketches, he made a more detailed drawing. The drawing was printed up and, together with the detailed photos taken at the site, sent to the many departments interested in solving the mugger murder.

  Sam Grossman’s interest was definitely turned in that direction, and so a copy of the drawing reached his desk. Since color, or the lack of color, played no important part in this particular homicide, the drawing was in black and white.

  Grossman studied it with the dispassionate scrutiny an art dealer gives a potentially fake van Gogh.

  The girl had been found at the base of a fifteen-foot drop, one of the shelflike levels that sloped down in a cliff to the riverbed. A footpath led through evergreens and maples from an emergency repairs turnoff to the highest point of the cliff, some thirty feet above the River Harb.

  The repairs cutoff was plainly visible from the River Highway, which swung around in a wide arc under the Hamilton Bridge approach. The footpath, however, was screened from the highway by trees and shrubs, as were the actual sloping sides of the cliff itself.

  A good set of tire tracks had been found in a thin layer of earth caked on the river side of the repairs cutoff. A pair of sunglasses had been found alongside the dead girl’s body.

  That was all.

  Unfortunately, the sides of the cliff sloped upward in igneous formidability. The path wound its way over solid prehistoric rock. Neither the girl nor her murderer had left any footprints for the lab boys to play with.

  Unfortunately, too, though the path was screened by bushes and trees, none of the plant life encroached upon the path’s right to meander to the top of the cliff. In short, there was no fabric, leather, feathers, or telltale dust caught upon twigs or resting upon leaves.

  It was a reasonable assumption that the girl had been driven to the spot of her death. There were no signs of any repairs having been made in the cutoff. If the auto had pulled in with a flat tire, the jack would have left marks on the pavement, and the tools might have left grease stains or metal scrapings. There was the possibility, of course, that the car had suffered an engine failure, in which case the hood would have been lifted and the mechanism studied. But the caked earth spread in an arc that covered the corners and sides of the cutoff. Anyone standing at the front of the car to lift the hood would surely have left footprints. There were none, nor were there any signs of prints having been brushed away.

  The police assumed, therefore, that the girl and her murderer had been driving west on the River Highway, had pulled into the emergency repairs cutoff, and had then proceeded on foot to the top of the cliff.

  The girl had been killed at the top of the cliff.

  She had been alive up to then. There were no bloodstains along the path leading upward. With a head wound such as she had suffered, her blood would have soaked the rocks on the path if she had been killed earlier and then carried from the car.

  The instrument used to split her skull and her face had been heavy and blunt. The girl had undoubtedly reached for her killer’s face, snatching off the sunglasses. She had then gone over the cliff, and the sunglasses had left her hand.

  It would have been easy to assume that the lens of the glasses had shattered upon contact with the ground. This was not the case. The technicians could find not a scrap, not a sliver of glass, on the ground. The sunglasses, then, had been shattered before they went over the side of the cliff. Nor had they been shattered anywhere in the area. The lab boys searched in vain for glass. The notion of a man wearing sunglasses with one ruptured lens was a curious one, but the facts stood.

  The sunglasses, of course, had drawn a blank. Five-and-dime stuff.

  The tire tracks had seemed promising at first. But when the cast was studied and comparison data checked, the tires on the car proved to be as helpful as the sunglasses had been.

  The tire size was 6.70-15.

  The tire weight was twenty-three pounds.

  The tire was made of rubber reinforced with nylon cord, the thread design featuring hook “sipes” to block skids and sideslip.

  The tire retailed for $18.04, including federal tax.

  The tire could be had by any man jack in the US of A who owned a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. The trade name of the tire was “Allstate.”

  You could order one or a hundred and one by sending your dough and asking for catalogue number 95N03067K.

  There were probably 80,000 people in the city who had four of the tires on each of their cars, not to mention a spare in the trunk.

  The tire tracks told Grossman one thing: The car that had pulled into the cutoff was a light car. The tire size and weight eliminated any of the heavier cars on the road.

  Grossman felt like a man who was all dressed up with no place to go.

  Resignedly, he turned to the pocket patch Eileen Burke had ripped from the mugger’s jacket.

  When Roger Havilland stopped by for the test results that Friday afternoon, Grossman said the patch was composed of 100 percent nylon and that it belonged to a suit, which retailed for $32 in a men’s clothing chain. The chain had sixty-four stores spread throughout the city. The suit came in only one color: blue.

  Havilland gravely considered the impossibility of getting any lead from a suit sold in sixty-four stores. He scratched his head in misery.

  And then he said, “Nylon? Who the hell wears nylon in the fall?”

  Meyer Meyer was exuberant.

  He burst into the squadroom, and he waltzed over to where Temple was fishing in the file, and he slapped his partner on the back.

  “They cracked it!” he shouted.

  “What?” Temple said. “Meyer, you damn near cracked my back. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The cats,” Meyer said, shrewdly studying Temple.

  “What cats?”

  “The 33rd Precinct. This guy who was going around kidnapping cats. I tell you this is the eeriest case they’ve ever cracked. I was talking to Agnucci. Do you know him? He’s third grade down there, been working on this one all along, handled most of the squeals. Well, man, they’ve cracked it.” Meyer studied Temple patiently.

  “So what’d it turn out to be?” Temple asked, his interest piqued.

  “They got their first lead the other night,” Meyer said. “They got a squeal from some woman who said an Angora had been swiped. Well, they came upon this guy in an alleyway, a
nd guess what he was doing?”

  “What?” Temple asked.

  “Burning the cat!”

  “Burning the cat? You mean, setting fire to the cat?”

  “Yep,” Meyer said, nodding. “He stopped when they showed, and he ran like hell. They saved the cat, and they also got a good description of the suspect. After that, it was duck soup.”

  “When’d they get him?” Temple asked.

  “This afternoon. They broke into his apartment, and it was the damnedest thing ever, I’m telling you. This guy was actually burning up the cats, burning them to this powdery ash.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Temple said.

  “So help me. He’d kidnap the cats and burn them into ashes. He had shelves and shelves of these little jars, full of cat ashes.”

  “But what in hell for?” Temple asked. “Was the guy nuts?”

  “Nossir,” Meyer said. “But you can bet the boys at the 33rd were asking the same question.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “They asked him, George. They asked him just that. Agnucci took him aside and said, ‘Listen, Mac, are you nuts or something? What’s the idea burnin’ up all them cats and then puttin’ the ashes in jars like that?’ Agnucci asked, all right.”

  “Well, what’d the guy say?”

  Meyer patiently said, “Just what you’d expect him to say. He explained that he wasn’t crazy and that there was a good reason for those cat ashes in all those jars. He explained that he was making something.”

  “What?” Temple asked anxiously. “What in hell was he making?”

  “Instant pussy,” Meyer said softly, and then he began chuckling.

  The report on the package of Pall Mall cigarettes and the match folder came in later that afternoon. It simply stated that each article, as such articles are wont to be, had been fingered a good many times. The only thing the fingerprint boys got from either of them was an overlay of smeared, worthless latents.

  The match folder, with its blatant advertisement for the Three Aces, was turned over to the Detective Bureau, and the detectives of Homicide North and the 87th Precinct sighed heavily because the match folder meant more goddamned legwork.