Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 13

Sam Dressen, the Sheriff’s identification man, was in his cubicle at the courthouse. Lieutenant Cleat was a more efficient officer, but I was feeling a little soured on Cleat. Sam was biting on a hangnail, and his eyes were heavy with woe. His gray hair had been pulled and worried into spikes and whorls like a last-year’s thistle patch.

Sighing with the effort, he lifted his eyes to the level of my face. “Hello, Howie. Two will get you twenty you dropped in to tell me what a flop I am. That’s the big fad in law-enforcement agencies all over the country these days – telling Sam Dressen where to turn in. First the Chief lets me have it, then those goldarn federal–”

“Wait a minute, Sam. You’re talking about the bureau I love. What’s the trouble?”

“Job trouble. What other kind of trouble is there?”

“Woman trouble, for instance.”

“Not at my age, boy. I got one and a half years to go for the County pension, and the whole gang of them want to cut me off from it. Everybody from J. Edgar Hoover down to the Chief are out to get me. You know that, Howie?”

“I hear you telling me.”

“The Chief used to be my buddy, but he’s a changed man. Ever since he took that course in F.B.I. School, he’s so goldarn spit-and-polish you wouldn’t recognize him. Know what he said to me today? He said if I don’t brush up on my fingerprinting technique, he said he’d fire me, just like that.” The old man tried to snap his fingers, unsuccessfully. “Me with eighteen years in the department, going on nineteen. They think I can afford to retire, on the salaries they pay?”

“What is it, Sam, a kickback on the February deal?”

He jerked at the hangnail with yellow teeth. “You heard about it, eh?”

“I heard they couldn’t use the prints you took from that hit-run victim.”

“That’s right, they flung them back in my face, said they were too faint to classify.”

“Were they?”

“I guess so, that’s what they said, they’re the experts.” He looked at me from the corners of his vein-webbed eyes to see if I was with him. “You don’t know the difficulties I was working under, Howie. Rigor mortis, and the stiff had awful faint markings, you could barely see them with the naked eye. All right, so I fluffed it. Everybody fluffs now and then. I’m only human like the rest of us. They didn’t have to write that snooty letter to the Chief. What does it matter who the guy was? He’s dead.”

“It’s beginning to look as if it might be important, Sam. I’m thinking of asking for an exhumation order.”

“On account of the killing this morning? You think there’s a tie-up?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Well, don’t expect me to know nothing about it. I just went over to take a look at that new stiff, and the morgue was crawling with federal men. They wouldn’t even let me near it, said they were handling the identification routine themselves. How do you like that, Howie?”

Since Sam had been slipping for a year or more, I liked it fairly well. On the other hand he was an old friend, and a useful one. I made a sympathetic noise in the back of my throat.

He wasn’t consoled. “So the Chief bawls me out all over again. I made him lose face, he said. I said if I had a face like that, I wouldn’t mind losing a piece of it–”

“You said that?”

“Not out loud, I didn’t. Under my breath. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I said it out loud. I got a pension to protect. But it don’t look as if I’m going to make it.” He sighed like a wind-broken horse. “Well, what is it you want, Howie? You never come over to bat the breeze any more unless you want something.”

“I have something for you.” I took the bent business-card out of my wallet and laid it on the desk under his melancholy nose. “This belonged to the man in the mortuary. He gave it to Larry Seifel in February.” I described the circumstances briefly. “Show it to the Sheriff. It should do his face some good. Tell him to get a statement from Seifel. You know Seifel?”

“Sure I know him. He’s another,” he said obscurely. “There’s two kinds of young twerps. He’s the kind with no respect for their elders, he’d push an older man right out of the picture to make room for himself. You’re the other kind, Howie,” he added as an afterthought.

“Did you have trouble with Seifel?”

“No trouble, he can’t make trouble for me. But he was in last week, fretting about that body in the Miner case. I’m sorry I ever heard of the Miner case.”

“You’re going to hear more, I’m afraid. What did he want?”

“Information. I told him I didn’t have any new information. He seemed to think I should have. Shucks, I got more to think about than that one case. That armed-robbery gang we nabbed on Tuesday, there’s inquiries on ’em from six states, fourteen police departments. I’m over my ears in paperwork.” He grabbed a wad of papers from his in-basket and slammed it down in front of him.

“Forget about them for now. Just what information do you have, Sam?”

“Nothing new. I followed down a lead this week. It turned out to be a dead end. It was the last decent lead I had – the cleaner’s mark on the suit the guy was wearing.”

“No maker’s label?”

“The maker’s label had been removed. Know why? The suit was stolen. I found out that much.”

“Go on.”

“This cleaner’s is in Westwood. It’s a new business, just started last year, and independent, so it wasn’t so easy to trace. Missing Persons didn’t even have it on file. Anyway, I finally got a chance to go up to L.A. on Wednesday – I had some stuff to deliver to Ray Pinker. The cleaner’s gave me the name and address of the people the suit was stolen from. I didn’t know at the time the suit was stolen, though. I thought I was getting somewhere.”

I was getting impatient. The afternoon was fading towards its close, and I was wasting what was left of it. “What did you find out, Sam? You interviewed the people it was stolen from?”

“I tried to. They weren’t home. I talked to the maid on the telephone from the cleaner’s. I described the suit. She said it was stolen, along with a lot of other loot, about four months ago. So apparently the guy was a burglar. Anyway, it explains what he was doing out on Ridgecrest Road that night, probably casing a joint he was going to rob. When Miner run him down, he did somebody a big favor.”

“Give me the name and address.”

“What name and address? I just got finished telling you it was a dead end.”

“The people the suit was stolen from. I’m going to Westwood and talk to them.”

“What’s the use? They never caught the burglar.”

“Any lead is better than none. Let’s have it, Sam.”

“Sure, if you want to go to all that trouble.” He rummaged in an overflowing drawer, and came up with a cleaner’s invoice blank on which he had written in pencil:

“Better warn them you’re coming,” Sam said. “It’s a long way to drive for nothing, and they’re gallivanters.”

“I’ll do that. There’s one more thing.”

“Aren’t we even yet?” He bared his teeth in a shrewd smile. “Want me to throw in the shirt off my back?”

I pretended not to notice the needle. The old man had been having a hard day. “The Sheriff will sit up and beg when you show him that card. You’ll give it to him right away?”

“As soon as I get the heck rid of you, Howie.”

“That won’t be hard. All I want is the pictures you took of Miner’s victim.”

“They’re not supposed to go out of here, you know that.”

“I promise to bring them back.”

“You think you can establish identification?”

“I’m going to try. If I do, you get first crack at it.”

“I’ll take your word on that, Howie. I don’t think you can do it, though, unless you got a tip I don’t know about.” His wrinkled smile was like an old scar that still hurt sometimes. There was a time when Sam had hoped to be sheriff.

“Set your mind at rest. I haven’t. Let’s have the pictures, Sam.”

He unlocked a green metal cabinet against the wall, and pawed the dark shelves. A shaft of sunlight, almost horizontal, thrust through the tall barred window behind his desk. In the faint and broken sunlight, his searching profile was dark and poignant. It was like an old stone face roughed and eroded by too many rainy seasons.

“Don’t worry, Sam,” I said in a low voice that he could choose not to hear. “You’ll make your pension.”

He found the folder he was looking for, and opened it on the desk. I had my first look at the face of the first anonymous man. He had probably been younger and better-looking than the second, the one in the mortuary, but that was before Miner’s car had smashed his features. They were badly damaged: jaw dislocated, nose flattened, cheeks and brow abraded, one eye gone. The one good identifying feature was the light wavy hair growing low and thick on the cut forehead.

“The impact bust the fog lamp,” Sam was saying. “Both the wheels passed over him. Caved his chest in, cracked his skull like a pecan, drove the glass into his face.”

“Blond hair?”

“That’s right. Gray-blue eyes. Five nine, about one sixty, twenty-nine or thirty. The way I reconstruct him, he was a nice-looking boy.”

“Special characteristics?”

“Just this.” He turned over to a closeup of an arm, captioned “Left Forearm.” It was tattooed with a hula girl wearing a lei, and the word Aloha. “I figure he was in the Navy, probably. Too bad he didn’t have his serial number tattooed on him.”

He closed the manila folder and tied it with tape. It took him quite a long time, because his hands were shaking.

“Feeling all right, Sam?”

“I’m all right. It’s just these bodies get me down, lately even the pictures get me down. I know darn well I fluffed this print job last February. It was terrible, Howie. I couldn’t hardly bring myself to handle him. It’s a rough experience for an old guy like me to see any young fellow cut off. It makes you think dark thoughts, boy, it does me anyway.” His large bony hand clutched my arm and held on desperately. “Am I losing my grip, Howie?’

“We’re all afraid of death,” I said. “It’s normal to be afraid.”

“Don’t say that word, Howie. I can’t stand to hear that word. I seen so many of them. I only realized the last couple of years that any day now it’s going to be me.”

“Morbid thoughts,” I said cheerfully as I went out. But they trailed my car like black crepe all the way to Los Angeles. I drove as if death were behind me on a motorcycle.