Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1975

The Identification by Pauline C. Smith

There are occasions, of course, when one who will not see nor hear could be suspected of expediency.

Roseanne McCartney sat in her parlor waiting for the son who was soon to arrive; her only son, returning home.

The letter lay at her elbow to prove it, open on the table, a penciled scrawl, jaggedly following the lines of tablet paper. Dear Ma: I am comeing home, have the fatted goose ready. Long time. No see. Ben. She refused to analyze its brevity, to dwell upon its misspelling and scriptural error. This was her son who had written, at last.

Bennett was his name, Roseanne McCartney’s maiden name; good, solid, the name of a family who took care of its own, who held up its head and looked the world in the eye. For these hopeful reasons she had named him Bennett, which he had hated and shortened to Ben.

So what was wrong with the name of Ben? Nothing at all. It had the ring of strength, the sound of character. Now Ben was coming home after all these years. Perhaps her strict severity during his formative childhood was, at last, paying off.

She hadn’t wanted to be strict, heaven knows. She adored the boy, worshiped him, wished to lay out a rich and rewarding life under his feet, but because of his father, she had to construct that life along the rigid and closely confined paths of righteousness.

Roseanne McCartney turned from thoughts of Joe McCartney the moment they entered her mind; the delightful drifter, gregarious grifter who entered her life so long ago to charm the shy and not too attractive third-grade teacher into marriage, only to drift and grift again until his violent end, leaving her Bennett who, with stern and watchful care, must be formed into something very unlike his father.

She had made a good home for the boy. To prove the fact, she looked around the parlor with satisfaction; a good home, dignified and secure. So it must have seemed to him, for he was coming back to it and to her at last, after fifteen years — a man now, a good man, ready to settle down.

Thinking of Ben, the man, she rocked in the chair that had rocked Bennett, the child, while her thoughts delicately fingered those unknown fifteen years, picking uneasily at possibilities and probabilities only to flutter anxiously away.

Bennett was coming home. That’s all that mattered.

While Roseanne McCartney rocked and waited, she recalled her few good and warming memories, thinking them to be random selections from a pleasant multitude, but which were, instead, isolated incidents memorable because of their rarity. She thought of Bennett at five, reaching up with chubby fingers to wipe away the tears from her cheek, and at ten as he chanted the Thou-shalt-nots with penitent piety after discovery of his several petty thefts. She thought of Ben at fifteen, returned runaway, held close in her arms, needing her, regretful and full of promises, and at seventeen, again wiping away her tears.

Ah yes, she mused, rocking with her memories, he had always been a good boy at heart and now he is a good man at last and on his way home. She wondered if his hair were still light and bright as if tangled with sunlight, and the cleft in his chin still deep and shadowed.

The doorbell rang.

Her hand flew to her heart and the chair halted on the forward tips of the rockers. She struggled to free herself of the chair which seemed to trap her slow-moving muscles.

On her feet, she smoothed her skirt, dampened the palms of her hands with her tongue and brushed back the gray angel wings of her hair. Then she walked, with hurried dignity, to the front door and opened it upon a man and a woman.

“Mrs. McCartney?” asked the man, to which she nodded rather curtly, looking over his shoulder and down the street — looking for her son.

“Mrs. Roseanne McCartney?”

“Yes,” she said.

“May we come in?”

In answer, she moved the door from wide open to half closed and stood in the aperture. “I am quite busy,” she said politely, “you see, I am expecting company.”

“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” suggested the man and, almost reluctantly, held out a leather identification folder as did his woman companion, but Mrs. Roseanne McCartney, the badges blurred and impersonal before her preoccupation, stood her ground and kept silent.

“Mrs. McCartney,” spoke the woman, “we are sorry to trouble you, but there is a man...” She hesitated, cleared her throat and started over: “A man was killed last night, and the only identification found on him was a slip of paper with your name and address.”

Mrs. McCartney had not heard it all. She was wondering from which direction Ben would appear — and how he would come. Would he be driving? Or on foot from the bus station?

“My name and address?” she asked the woman.

“Well, yes. That was all. A slip of paper with your name and address on it, no other identification.”

The clock in the hallway behind her chimed the half-hour. Mrs. McCartney looked back, adjusted her glasses, then didn’t bother to ascertain the time after all, for there had been no arrival time in Ben’s short letter. “Well, why in the world?” she said to the woman. “My name and address!”

“What we wanted — what we hoped,” said the man almost in desperation, “was that you might accompany us to the coroner’s office.”

“Oh, my goodness, I couldn’t possibly.” Mrs. McCartney vaguely smiled. “I am having company, you see. My son is coming...” She stepped back and started to close the door. The man gently reached up a hand to hold it open.

“Mrs. McCartney, it won’t take long, I promise you,” he said, a note of entreaty in his voice, “and I am afraid I must insist.”

“But my son,” she protested.

“Leave a key,” suggested the man. “This will only take minutes. You might even be back before he gets here.” He and the woman exchanged quick, anxious glances.

Mrs. McCartney remembered how it used to be — the key under the mat, back when she was a teacher and not always at home when Ben arrived from school, forgetting how often the key remained under the mat while she worried — and refusing to remember all the years between when there had been no key under the mat at all and no reason for one.

She scurried for her pocketbook, and when she returned, both man and woman were waiting in the hall.

“You’re sure this won’t take long?” she asked them. They assured her it would not take long.

She closed the door, making certain it was securely locked, bent over and placed the key under the mat. The man helped her down the stairs and into the back seat of the sedan, the woman sat next to her while the man drove.

It was during the short trip from Mrs. McCartney’s home to the coroner’s office that she got it straight at last. This car in which she rode was an unmarked but official car and these two, the man and woman, were officers in civilian clothes. Through the blur of an earlier preoccupation, she remembered the badges held out to her; the names, even the names had become crystal-clear — Lt. Forster who sat by her side, and Lt. Barker at the wheel. Why were they taking her to the coroner’s office? She looked sideways at Lt. Forster, whose eyes were staring straight ahead. “You want me to identify this man? This dead man?” she said, bits of earlier conversations coming back to her like icy drops of water through a fog.

“If you can,” answered the woman. “He had your name and address in his pocket. We thought you might know him...” Her voice trailed off and her eyes met the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.

They were passing the bus station, easing up to a stoplight Mrs. McCartney looked out the side window and back as they passed, hoping to see a slim figure with sun-tangled hair — willing herself to see him — but of course she could not, she told herself, for Ben had not yet arrived in town, or he was on his way to the house or already there. She indulged herself in a fantasy picture in which she could see him as he turned up the walk toward the porch and, smilingly, she saw him as he leaped the steps and offered an eager code signal with his knuckles against the door — the signal, a drumbeat in her mind, grown out of her imagination, as vivid as the picture of her son eagerly at her door.

The traffic was heavy. She had not been downtown for years and the sound of it, the rush of it caused her to retreat within herself and remember again what it was these officers, this woman and the man, had said to her on the porch of her house. She turned abruptly and asked, “You say the man is dead? You say he was killed? Last night?”

“Yes.”

“How was he killed?”

Lt. Forster’s eyes met the eyes of Lt. Barker in the rear-view mirror before she answered. “A gunshot wound,” she said.

Mrs. McCartney leaned forward to look blindly out the window at her own mental image of Ben on the porch, rapping out his rhythm of greeting — would he remember the key under the mat? Such an impatient boy, so restless, always eluding her thumb... She turned toward Lt. Forster. “Look,” she said breathlessly, “I should be home. My son, you see, he might be there, and he might not wait.”

“We’re here now, Mrs. McCartney,” Lt. Forster said, and Mrs. McCartney shrank against the seat as Lt. Barker parked between slanted white lines clearly designated “Official Cars Only.”

She allowed herself to be helped from the car and led into the building. She stared at, without seeing, and listened to, without hearing, the man at the desk; and between the man and the woman who had interrupted her day of great expectation, she walked, without thought, into the next room.

The silence was heavy as they raised the covering and her indrawn breath, as she looked down at the face, was light as a gently closed door. The hair was not tangled with sunshine as she remembered it, but shadowed with years and now with death... Her voice was soft as she asked, more of the body than of the two detectives, “A gunshot wound? How did it happen? Why was he shot?”

Lt. Forster cleared her throat. Lt. Barker answered with hesitation, “He was caught while robbing a jewelry store. Do you know him, Mrs. McCartney? Can you identify him for us?” he asked.

“No,” she said quite clearly, as she looked down upon the shadowed hair and the shadowed beard that, in no way, revealed a shadowed cleft in the chin.

“Are you quite sure, Mrs. McCartney?” persisted Lt. Barker. “Are you absolutely certain you don’t know this man?”

She turned away. “I never saw him before in my life.”

Back at the desk, they showed her the slip of tablet paper found in the pocket of the dead man, and Mrs. McCartney looked at the jagged writing briefly. “I haven’t the slightest idea how he got my name and address,” she announced. “Maybe he found it somewhere. Maybe he robbed my son,” and she nodded with resolution. “Perhaps so. No one would have my name and address — no one but my son. So this man picked it up — or stole it.”

“But, Mrs. McCartney...”

She started for the door, then she turned. “What will happen to him? I mean now... about the burial...” she said hesitantly.

“If we can’t get an identification,” Lt. Barker said, “we’ll try, of course, but if no one identifies him and if we can’t find out who he is or where he came from — then, well, then the county will have to bury him.”

“Oh, no,” she gasped. “Oh, no,” and quickly she returned to the desk, opened her pocketbook and took from it several bills, all that she had. She unsnapped her coin purse and emptied the coins. “For his funeral,” she said, refusing to listen to their protests, their arguments, refusing to wait for a receipt, refusing to listen. “I am in a great hurry,” she said, now impatiently. “I must get home to my son.”

Roseanne McCartney then hurried out the door and into the car, eager to leave this building, the body and the telltale slip of paper; eager to return to her home with the key under the mat and the rocking chair in the parlor and the letter from her son on the table.