Lady Killer

CHAPTER FIVE

Sam Grossman was a police lieutenant, a laboratory technician, and the man in charge of the Police Laboratory at Headquarters on High Street, downtown.

Sam was a tall, loosely jointed man who moved with angular nonchalance and ease. He was a gentle man with a craggy face, a man who wore glasses because too much reading as a child had ruined his eyesight. His eyes were blue and mild, guileless eyes that denied the fact that their owner used them to pry into the facts of crime and violence—and very often death. Sam loved lab work, and when he was not busy with his test tubes in an effort to prove the lab's effectiveness in crime detection, he could be found talking to the nearest detective, trying to impress upon him the need for cooperation with the lab.

When the letter from the 87th Precinct had arrived by messenger that morning, Sam had put his men to work on it immediately. The phone call preceding it had urged speed. His men had photographed the letter and sent the photo back to the 87th at once. And then they had begun the task of scrutinizing the letter and the envelope for latent fingerprint impressions before beginning their other tests.

The original letter was handled with the utmost care. Sam sourly reflected that half the cops in the city had probably handled it already, but he had no desire to compound the felony. Carefully, methodically, his men put a very thin, uniform layer of a ten per cent solution of silver nitrate onto the letter, passing the sheet of paper between two rollers that had been moistened with the solution. They waited while the sheet of paper dried, and then they put it under the ultraviolet light. In a few seconds, the prints appeared.

This is what the letter looked like:

There were a lot of fingerprints all over the letter. Sam Grossman had expected as much. The letter had been created by snipping words from newspapers or magazines and pasting them to a sheet of paper. Sam expected that the pasting process would have left fingermarks all over the page, and such was exactly the case. Each snip of paper had been pressed to the page so that it would stick. Each word on the page carried its own full complement of prints.

And each print on the page was hopelessly smeared or blurred or overlaid with another print—except for two thumbprints. These thumbprints were on the left hand side of the page; one close to the top, the other just a little below centre. Both were good prints.

Both—unfortunately—belonged to Sergeant Dave Murchison.

Sam sighed. It was a crying shame. He always had to make his point the hard way.

Hawes took the call from Grossman in the Interrogation Room, where he had gone to study the photo of the letter. The call came at 11.17.

'Hawes?' Grossman said.

'Yes.'

'Sam Grossman at the lab. I've got a report on that letter. Since there's a time element on this, I thought I'd give it to you on the phone.'

'Shoot,' Hawes said.

'Not much help on the prints,' Grossman said. 'Only two good prints on the letter itself, and they're your desk sergeant's.'

'This is the front of the letter?'

'Yes.'

'How about the back?'

'Everything smeared. The letter was folded. Whoever folded it ran his bunched fist along the crease. Nothing there, Hawes. I'm sorry.'

'And the envelope?'

'Murchison's prints—and yours. Nothing else except some good prints left by a child. Did a child handle the envelope?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I've got a good batch of his prints, in case you need them for comparison. Want me to send them over?'

'Please,' Hawes said. 'What else have you got?'

'On the letter itself, we dug up a few items that might help you. The paste used was five-and-dime stuff put out by a company called Brandy's. They manufacture it in ajar and in a tube. We found a microscopic blue-metallic-paint scraping stuck to one corner of the letter. Their tube is blue, so chances are your letter writer used the tube. That's no help, though. He could have bought the paste anywhere. It's a common item. The paper, though…'

'Yes, what about that?'

'It's a good-rag-content bond, manufactured by the Cartwright Company in Boston, Massachusetts. We checked our watermark file. The catalogue number on the paper is 142-Y. It costs about five and a half bucks a ream.'

'But it's a Boston company, huh?'

'Yes, but distributed nationally. There's a distributor in this city. Want the name?'

'Please.'

'Eastern Shipping. That's on Gage Boulevard in Majesta. Want the phone number?'

'Yes.'

'Princeton 4-9800.'

Hawes jotted it down. 'Anything else?'

'Yes. We know where the letter writer got his words.'

'Where?'

'The tip-off was the T in the word tonight. That T is famous, Hawes.'

'It's the New York Times, isn't it?

'Exactly. Distributed here, as in every city in the country. I'll confess our newspaper and magazine file doesn't go back too far. But we try to keep abreast of the major dailies and all the big publications. We sometimes get parts of bodies wrapped in newspapers or portions of newspapers. Every once in a while it helps to have a file.'

'I see,' Hawes said.

'This time we were lucky. Using that New York Times was a springboard, we looked through what we had and pinpointed the sections of the Times he used, and the date.'

'And they were?'

'He used the magazine section and the book section of the Times for Sunday, June twenty-third. We've located enough of the words he's used to eliminate coincidence. For example, The Lady came from the book section. Snipped from an ad for the Conrad Richter novel. The word can was from an ad in the magazine section for Scandale. That's a woman's undergarment trade name.'

'Go ahead.'

The figure eight was obvious, again from the magazine section. An ad for Ballantine beer.'

'Anything else?'

'The word kill was easy. Not many advertisers use that word unless it's pertinent to their product. This ad said something about killing bathroom odours. "Kill bathroom odours with—" and the name of the product. In any case, there's no doubt in our minds. He used the June twenty-third Times'

'And this is July twenty-fourth,' Hawes said.

'Yeah.'

'In other words, he planned this thing as long as a month ago, made up his letter, and then held it until he'd decided on the date for the murder.'

'It would seem that way. Unless he used an old paper that was around.'

'It would also seem to eliminate a crank.'

'It looks legit to me, Hawes,' Grossman said. 'I was talking to our psychologist upstairs. He didn't seem to think a crank would wait a month between composing a letter and delivering it. He also feels the delivery of the letter was an act of compulsion. He thinks the guy wants to be stopped, and he further thinks the letter will give you a clue about how to stop him.'

'How?' Hawes asked.

'He didn't say.'

'Mmmm. Well, have you got anything else for me?'

'That's it. Oh, wait. The guy smokes cigarettes. There were a few grains of tobacco in the envelope. We tested them, but they could have come from any of the major brands.'

'Okay, Sam. Thanks a lot.'

'Don't mention it. I'll send that kid's prints over. So long.'

Grossman hung up. Hawes lifted his copy of the letter from the desk, opened the door, and started for Lieutenant Byrnes's office. It was then that he noticed the chaos in the squad-room.

It was the noise that first attracted him, the sound of shrill voices raised in protest, speculation, and wonder. And then his eyes were assailed with what seemed like an overly patriotic display, a parade for the dead-and-gone Fourth of July. The squad-room was bursting with red, white, and blue. Hawes blinked. Crowding the slatted rail divider, lined up against the desks and the file cabinets and the windows and the bulletin boards, slouched into every conceivable corner of the room, were at least eight thousand kids in blue dungarees and red-and-white-striped tee shirts.

'Shut up!' Lieutenant Byrnes shouted. 'Now, just knock off all this chatter!'

The room modulated slowly into silence.

'Welcome to the Grover Park Nursery School,' Carella said to Hawes, smiling.

'Jesus,' Hawes said, 'we sure as hell have an efficient bunch of patrolmen in this precinct.'

The efficient bunch of patrolmen had followed their orders to the letter, rounding up every ten-year-old kid wearing dungarees and a red-striped shirt. They had not asked for birth certificates, and so the kids ranged from seven to thirteen. The tee shirts, too, were not all tee shirts. Some of them sported collars and buttons. But the patrolmen had done their job, and a hasty count of the kids revised Hawes's earlier estimate of eight thousand. There were only seven thousand. Well, at least three dozen, anyway. Apparently there had been a run on red-striped tee shirts in the neighbourhood. Either that, or a new street gang was forming and they had decided upon this as their uniform.

'Which of you kids delivered a letter to this precinct this morning?' Byrnes asked.

'What kinda letter?' one kid asked.

'What difference does it make? Did you deliver it?'

'Naw,' the kid answered.

'Then shut up. Which one of you delivered it?'

Nobody answered.

'Come on, come on, speak up,' Byrnes said.

An eight-year-old kid, obviously impressed by the Hollywood effort, piped, 'I wanna call my lawyer.'

The other kids all laughed.

'Shut up!' Byrnes roared. 'Now, listen, you're not in any trouble. We're only trying to locate the man who gave you that letter, that's all. So if you delivered it, speak up.'

'What'd he do, this guy?' a twelve-year-old asked.

'Did you deliver the letter?'

'No. I just wanna know what he done, this guy.'

'Any of you deliver the letter?' Byrnes asked again. The boys were all shaking their heads. Byrnes turned to Murchison. 'How about it, Dave? Recognize one of them?'

'Hard to say,' Murchison said. 'One thing for sure, he was a blond kid. You can let all the dark-haired kids go. We've got a couple of redheads in there, too. They're no good. This kid was blond.'

'Steve, keep only the blonds,' Byrnes said, and Carella began walking through the room, tapping boys, telling them to go home. When he'd finished the culling process, the room had thinned down to four blond boys. The other boys idled on the other side of the slatted rail divider, watching.

'Beat it,' Hawes said. 'Go home.'

The boys left reluctantly.

Of the four blonds remaining, two were at least twelve years old.

'They're too old,' Murchison said.

'You two can go,' Byrnes told them, and the boys drifted out. Byrnes turned to one of the remaining two.

'How old are you, sonny?' he asked.

'Eight.'

'What do you say, Dave?'

'He's not the kid.'

'How about the other one?'

'Him neither.'

'Well, that's—' Byrnes seemed suddenly stabbed with pain. 'Hawes, stop those other kids before they get past the desk. Get their names, for Christ's sake. We'll put them on the radio. Otherwise we'll be getting the same damn kids in here all day long. Hurry up!'

Hawes went through the railing and sprinted for the steps. He stopped some of the kids in the muster-room, rounded up the rest on the sidewalk, and sent them all back into the precinct. One kid sighed reluctantly and patted a huge German shepherd on the head.

'You wait, Prince,' he said. 'I gotta handle this again,' and then he walked into the building.

Hawes looked at the dog. The idea clicked into his mind. He ran into the building, climbed the steps, and rushed into the squad-room.

'A dog!' he said. 'Suppose it's a dog!'

'Huh?' Byrnes asked. 'Did you stop those kids?'

'Yes, but it could be a dog!'

'What could be a dog?'

'Lady! The Lady!'

Carella spoke instantly. 'He could be right, Pete. How many dogs named Lady do you suppose there are in the precinct?'

'I don't know,' Byrnes said. 'You think the nut who wrote that letter…?'

'It's a possibility.'

'All right, get on the phone. Meyer! Meyer!'

'Yah, Pete?'

'Start taking these kids' names. Jesus, this place is turning into a madhouse!'

Turning, Byrnes stamped into his office.

Carella's call to the Bureau of Licenses revealed that there were thirty-one licensed dogs named Lady within the precinct territory. God alone knew how many unlicensed dogs of the same name there were.

He reported his information to Byrnes.

Byrnes told him that if a man wanted to kill a goddamn lady dog, that was his business and Byrnes wasn't going to upset his whole damn squad tracking down every bitch in the precinct. They'd find out about it the minute the dog was killed, anyway, and then they might or might not try to find the canine killer.

He suggested that in the meantime Hawes call Eastern Shipping in an attempt to find out whether or not any shops in the precinct carried the paper the letter was pasted on.

'And close the goddamn door!' he shouted as Carella left.