Snow White and Rose Red

5

I had occasion only much later to see the file on the Jane Doe who’d turned up in the Sawgrass River. I wish now that I had known earlier what course Bloom’s investigation was taking. But Calusa is a fair-size city where accidental meetings are rare, and I did not run into Bloom again after that meeting in his office on April 15. In reconstructing the investigation after the fact, it seems to me now that knowledge of it at the time might have spared everyone a great deal of grief.

The file consisted of photographs, bank statements, laboratory, forensic, and Detective Division reports, and verbatim transcripts of interviews in the field. When I finally saw the file, Jane Doe had long since been identified as Tracy Kilbourne. The folder was so marked: TRACY KILBOURNE. Recovered photographs of her, obviously taken while she was still alive, showed a tall blonde woman with light eyes and a slender figure. In all of the photos, she was smiling radiantly into the camera. When I saw her folder, it was still in the “open” file, which meant the case had not yet been solved.

On the morning of April 16, while I was in Dr. Helsinger’s waiting room talking to the man expecting rain, an assistant ME named Timothy Hanson was engaged in the gruesome task of examining Jane Doe’s corpse in an attempt at (a) identification and (b) establishing the cause of death and the postmortem interval.

The red dress the girl had been wearing had already been sent to the police laboratory for testing. She had been wearing no undergarments — neither panties nor brassiere — and no shoes. If she had drowned herself, she had either taken off her shoes before entering the water, or else the action of the river had washed them from her feet and deposited them somewhere else. A third possibility was that the alligators had eaten both her feet and her shoes. Hanson did not consider this a likelihood. Alligators are not sharks.

The body was badly decomposed.

In forensic pathology, a rule of thumb regarding the rate of postmortem decay equates a week in the air with either two weeks in the water or eight weeks in the soil. Even at a glance, Hanson could tell that this body had been in the water for a very long time. The head hair was entirely gone and marine animals had nibbled away the flesh around the lips, eyes, and ears. The action of the water itself had stripped away macerated flesh from the face, the hands, the arms, and the legs, but some of the fingers and one thumb were still intact.

When something is said to be adipose, it either contains animal fat or is like animal fat. If a body has lost its protective dermis and epidermis after submersion in water for a lengthy period of time, a waxy material develops in the outer layer of subcutaneous fat. Yellow-white in hue, dirty-looking, this formation is known as “adipocere,” and it is caused by the decomposition of animal fat into fatty acids. The corpse lying on Hanson’s table gave off the rancid odor typical of adipocere, but he tested several samples nonetheless — first in water, where a sample floated; next in alcohol and ether, where the second sample dissolved; and then with dilute copper sulfate, where his last sample gave off a pale greenish blue color. Hanson knew that adipocere developed first in the subcutaneous tissues and only later in the adipose tissues. The formation of adipocere in a submerged adult body would have been complete in anywhere from twelve to eighteen months. Examining Jane Doe’s corpse, Hanson estimated that it had been submerged for anywhere from six to nine months.

Although the corpse’s head hair was completely gone, there remained patches of hair in the pubic area, and samples of these were taken to support the finding that the victim had been blonde; she was, in fact, a “victim” in the police files, where suicide and homicide are investigated in exactly the same manner.

Hanson suspected she was a homicide victim.

That was because there was a bullet hole in her throat, clearly visible even though much of the skin there had been nibbled away by underwater creatures.

Suspicion, however, is not scientific evidence. Hanson was a detective only in a strictly circumscribed sense, and he was not paid to speculate, but only to deliver facts that might or might not help the police investigation. That he suspected this was a homicide had nothing at all to do with his objective approach to the examination. What he wanted to learn was whether or not this woman had died of a gunshot wound or of drowning, a determination that might mean nothing at all to the investigating detectives.

Hanson got down to serious work.

When a person is drowning, he or she inhales water into the air passages and the pulmonary alveoli. The cause of death in most drownings is asphyxia caused by this inhalation of water and the consequent exclusion of air from the lungs. Inhaled water circulates to the left side of the heart, altering the concentration of sodium chloride there. If someone dies by means other than drowning, he has not inhaled any water, and the sodium chloride content of the blood is equal on both sides of the heart.

The Gettler test is designed to reveal the relative concentrations of sodium chloride in the right and left sides of the heart, and is often conclusive — especially in cases of saltwater drowning — as to cause of death.

Jane Doe had been found floating in fresh water.

Normally, Hanson would have performed the Gettler test before disturbing or removing any of the organs. He would have wiped the surface of the heart dry. He would have punctured the heart with a dry knife. Using dry pipettes, he would have collected ten millimeters of blood from each side of the heart and placed the samples in clean, dry laboratory flasks. His chemicals would have been ready, as they were now: saturated picric acid, silver nitrate, starch nitrate, potassium iodide, sodium citrate, and sodium nitrite.

Normally the Gettler test would have told Hanson what he’d wanted to know.

But Jane Doe had been in the water for too long a time.

Postmortem putrefaction was too far advanced.

Gases had forced the blood out of the heart.

His pipettes came up dry.

Free now to examine the other viscera, Hanson went ahead with his exploration. Because the body had been submerged for such a long time, he did not expect to find any stiff foam or frothy liquid in the nasal or bronchial air passages, and he did not. Moreover, the alveolar structure of the lung had been severely damaged by decomposition so that the lung had shrunk and appeared waterlogged, dirty, and red — making it virtually impossible to detect inhaled water. He did find some bloodstained fluid in the pleural cavities, but he knew that this was not conclusive of drowning in that the same sort of fluid was often found in decomposed bodies that had not drowned. In short, he could not state conclusively that this was a drowning victim.

There remained the bullet hole in the dead girl’s throat.

According to the reports that had been delivered together with the unidentified body, the police had recovered no firearm at the scene. There was no question that this was a bullet hole, but because of the severe decomposition of the body, Hanson was unable to tell whether the wound was a contact wound, a near-contact wound, a close-up wound, or a distant wound. He knew for certain that a shotgun could not have produced this type of wound, but he was unable to determine — again because of the advanced state of decomposition — whether the weapon had been a pistol or a rifle. Nor did he, upon examination, find a bullet in the neck or the head. This did not surprise him; there was an exit wound at the back of the neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

Hanson still did not know the cause of death.

It seemed to him that there were four possibilities, none of them scientific:

1. The woman had waded into the river, gun in hand, had shot herself in the throat, and — wounded but still alive — had collapsed into the water and drowned. Cause of death: drowning.

2. The woman had similarly waded into the river, shot herself in the throat, and collapsed into the river — already dead. Cause of death: gunshot wound.

3. Someone else had wounded her and thrown her into the river to drown. Cause of death: drowning.

4. Someone else had shot her mortally and then thrown her into the river to dispose of her body. Cause of death: gunshot wound.

However you sliced it — and Hanson forgave himself the unintentional pun — the girl had been in that river for from six to nine months, and probably had been shot before her submersion in water. He could not tell the police anything more concrete about the cause of death.

Somehow, he felt like a failure.

Sighing, he picked up a scalpel and cut off the undamaged fingers on the girl’s right and left hands, and the undamaged thumb on her right hand. Then he began working to determine age, height, weight, and whatever other vital statistics the corpse on the table might reveal.

The first thing he discovered was that the corpse had no tongue.

Someone had cut out the girl’s tongue.

By one o’clock that afternoon, the thumb and four fingers dissected from the corpse of Jane Doe had been delivered to the police laboratory for fingerprinting by a technician named Larry Soames.

Soames had fingerprinted a lot of corpses in his lifetime. He had also fingerprinted a great many fingers dissected from corpses. With all the water here in Florida, he got a lot of floaters, too, and he had printed his fair share of those. The ease of fingerprinting a floater depended entirely on how long the body had been in the water. What he usually did — when he got a body that hadn’t been submerged too long and where the so-called washerwoman’s skin wasn’t too bad — was to dry the fingers with a towel, inject glycerin under the fingertips to smooth them out, and then ink and print each finger. Where the body had been in the water a longer period of time — say three or four months — he dried the dissected finger over an open flame. Actually, unless he wanted to cook the damn thing, he just kept passing it back and forth lightly over the flame, sort of a sweeping motion, until it shrank up and dried. Then he applied his ink and took his prints in the usual way. In a case like this one, though — the ME’s report estimated she’d been in the water some six to nine months, friction ridges all gone — what he had to do was to cut himself some skin shells and then ink and print those. He had to be careful detaching the skin, of course, but Soames was by nature a very careful man.

The fingers Hanson had sent him were tagged 1R, 3R, and 4R respectively (for the right-hand thumb, middle finger, and ring finger) and 7L and 9L respectively (for the left-hand forefinger and ring finger). Using a scalpel and an illuminating magnifying glass, Soames carefully peeled each fingertip until he had the skin shells he needed. He placed these shells in separate test tubes containing formaldehyde solution, each tube marked to correspond with Hanson’s tagging at the morgue. When the shells were ready for printing, he slipped a rubber glove onto his right hand, and then placed each shell in turn over his own index finger — an extension of his finger, in effect — and rolled it onto the inking plate and then onto the fingerprint record card. He sent the card over to the Identification Section, where, if they got lucky, the dead girl would have been fingerprinted sometime or other for a criminal offense, a security job, or admission to the armed forces.

He looked at the information chart he had received from the morgue. As far as Hanson had been able to judge from his examination of the badly decomposed remains, the girl had been somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years old, blonde, approximately five feet eight inches tall, and had weighed between 115 and 120 pounds.

Soames wondered how many young girls fitting that description were missing in the state of Florida.

In another section of the police laboratory, a technician named Oscar Delamorte was examining the dress he’d received earlier that day. It was only an occupational coincidence that Delamorte (whose name meant “of the dead” in Italian) often examined garments or objects that had once belonged to dead people. Delamorte made notes as he worked. These notes would later be typed up and sent to the Detective Division. He hoped the dress would give them some help, but you never knew.

The dress’s exposure to water and sunlight had caused it to fade from what Delamorte assumed had once been a brighter red than it was now. In his notes he wrote simply, “reddish in color.” He also noted that the action of the water had badly frayed the dress in some places and that snagging on a tree or rock had caused a tear near the hemline. He noted that there was a dark spot some four inches below the waist of the dress — what would have been the lap of the dress if its wearer had been seated — and although he tested the spot he was unable to determine what had caused it. His guess, because of its permanency, was that the spot was an ink stain.

The label on the dress indicated that it had been manufactured by a company called Pantomime, Inc., but he had no idea whether this was a firm in Calusa or indeed anywhere in Florida. He guessed not; America’s ready-to-wear garment industry was located in New York City. This same label told him that the dress was fabricated of eighty percent nylon and twenty percent cotton. The dress was sleeveless and styled as a wraparound garment, its wearer putting it on in much the same way one might a robe. Slip your arms into it, close it across the waist so that one side overlaps the other, and fasten it with a sash or belt. There were red thread loops for a belt on the dress, but no belt had been found in the water. One of the loops was torn. There was no retail outlet label in the dress; Delamorte could not zero in on a department store, a boutique, or any of the discount places that bordered both sides of Route 41. A second label in the dress, however, advised the wearer that the garment could either be washed or professionally dry-cleaned, and gave detailed instructions for laundering. Delamorte searched the dress for visible or Phantom Fast laundry marks and found none. He did find a dry cleaner’s mark, though, and when he checked against the file in the Identification Section, he discovered that the dress had been cleaned by a place called Albert Cleaners.

Albert Cleaners was in Calusa, Florida.

Before he did anything else, Delamorte picked up the phone and called Morris Bloom in the Detective Division.

At ten minutes to four that same afternoon, Bloom and his partner, Cooper Rawles, visited the dry-cleaning place. Coop wasn’t described in the report I later read — he was identified only as Detective Rawles — but I had met him previously, and I knew what he looked like. A black man with wide shoulders, a barrel chest, and massive hands, he must have stood at least six-foot-four and weighed possibly 240 pounds. I would not have liked to run into Cooper Rawles in a dark alley if I happened to be on the wrong side of the law.

The owner of the dry-cleaning store was identified in the report as Albert Barish, a resident of Calusa and described as sixty-four years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing approximately 150 pounds, and possessing brown hair and brown eyes. The detectives were there to question him about the dry-cleaning mark Delamorte had found in the dress Jane Doe had been wearing when she floated to the surface of the Sawgrass River on April 15.

The mark read:

According to the Identification Section, the “AC” stood for Albert Cleaners. Now the cops wanted to know about the “KLBN.”

Bloom’s report detailed only the outcome of the police visit, perforce only sketching in the conversation between Mr. Barish and the two detectives. In later recall, however, Bloom filled me in on what the place had looked like and what was actually said, and it was simple to reconstruct the actual event — especially since my interest at the time was intense and since the encounter with Albert Barish proved to be the first step in the positive identification of Jane Doe.

Downtown Calusa — like the main business areas of so many other American cities — is presently in a state of renewal and renovation. New banks spring up seemingly overnight, perhaps because there are a great many rich people in this city, all of them with money to invest. Like totems of some futuristic civilization, the banks rise in tinted-glass splendor, none of them taller than twelve stories high, in accordance with Calusa’s building codes. My partner Frank says they are all half-assed imitations of skyscrapers. He keeps comparing them unfairly to the World Trade Center in New York. But in addition to what would appear an overabundance of banks, with more on the way each month — all of them offering as inducements to new depositors more toasters and television sets than can be found in Calusa’s largest department store — there is also a constant influx of new restaurants, all of them vying for the big tourist buck. The restaurants come and go as steadily as Bedouin tribesmen. What was today a Japanese restaurant with low tables and shoji screens will tomorrow be an Italian restaurant with checked tablecloths and Chianti bottles holding candles. If a restaurant down here lasts more than a season, it has a fair chance of survival — provided its prices aren’t too steep. The population of Calusa, you see, is roughly divided (as perhaps is the population of the entire world) into the haves and the have-nots. Those richer folk clipping coupons at the new bank are only part of the story; the other part is constituted of redneck dirt farmers struggling for survival against unexpected but all-too-frequent freezes, blacks earning their meager daily bread by servicing the multitude of condominiums that blight the barrier islands, and retired older people who can afford to live only in trailer parks and to eat in restaurants offering discount prices if they care to dine before five-thirty. There are not any trailer parks in downtown Calusa; zoning ordinances have seen to that. But there are a great many two- and three-story apartment buildings, most of them constructed of cinder block and painted either pink or white, all of them catering to those among the population who cannot afford a $950,000 condominium (the asking price for a three-bedroom, gulf-front apartment that has just gone up on Sabal Key) or a meal in one of the new restaurants serving “Continental” cuisine. Albert Barish’s dry-cleaning store was situated in a side street near one of those low-rent apartment complexes.

The white cinder-block building occupied a corner lot opposite a hardware store and a place selling cowboy-styled apparel — big Stetson hats, shirts with pearl snaps on the cuffs and down the front, and wide leather belts with ornate brass buckles. The parking lot outside the dry-cleaning store was potholed and cracked, and it was often used by customers of the hardware and clothing stores, much to Mr. Barish’s annoyance. Bloom later told me Barish had complained about this the moment the detectives entered the store. They were driving an unmarked sedan and he didn’t know they were cops at first, and since he didn’t recognize them as customers coming to claim an article of clothing, and since they weren’t carrying over their arms either jackets, skirts, or slacks, he automatically assumed they wanted to buy a pair of jeans or a screwdriver, and he bawled them out at once for ignoring the signs outside. The signs, Bloom told me, warned that the parking lot was for the exclusive use of customers of Albert Cleaners.

Barish, from what Bloom reported, was a feisty little guy who resembled and sounded like a delicatessen owner Bloom had known in Brooklyn. He was wearing a Hawaiian print sports shirt and green slacks, and he was carrying a bundle of clothing to the back of the shop when Rawles and Bloom entered. Barish turned immediately when he heard the bell tinkling over the front door, and then said at once, “If you’re for the hardware or the cowboys, you can’t park here. Read the signs, for Chrissake!”

Bloom showed Barish his shield and ID card, and Barish looked at both carefully and then turned his attention to Rawles, wanting to know if he was a cop, too. Rawles, who hadn’t expected to be put through the trouble of identifying himself after Bloom already had, reluctantly dug out the leather case to which his shield was pinned, and flipped it open to the Lucite-enclosed ID card. Barish nodded. Bloom later learned that Barish was, in fact, originally from New York, and in New York it doesn’t hurt to be too careful — even my partner Frank would agree to that.

“So what is it?” Barish said. “I got my girl out sick today, I’m all alone here, I’m busy. What do you want?”

Rawles put a large manila folder on the countertop. The folder was printed with the word EVIDENCE. He unwrapped the white string that was fastened to one little brown cardboard button and wound around another. He lifted the flap on the evidence envelope, reached into it, and pulled out the red dress Jane Doe had been wearing.

“Recognize this?” he said to Barish.

“It’s a dress,” Barish said. “You know how many dresses I get in here every day of the week?”

“Red dresses like this one?” Bloom said.

“Red dresses, green dresses, yellow dresses, dresses all colors of the rainbow I get. What’s so special about this dress?”

“A dead girl was wearing it,” Rawles said.

“Hoo-boy,” Barish said.

“Your dry-cleaning mark is in it,” Bloom said.

“I get it,” Barish said at once. “You want to know who was wearing this dress, right?”

“Right,” Rawles said.

“Let me see this dress,” Barish said. “Is it okay if I look at this dress?”

“Sure,” Bloom said.

“Okay to pick it up, to handle it? I won’t be accused of murder?”

Bloom smiled.

Barish picked up the dress, looked at the label, said, ‘That’s my mark, all right,” and then began turning the dress this way and that. “Badly faded, this dress,” he said, examining the hem and the armholes and the stitching across the bodice. “A cheap dress, this dress, you could get it for fifteen dollars on sale. You see how cheap it’s made? Look how it’s falling apart.” He looked across the counter at the detectives. “How am I supposed to tell you who was wearing this cheap dress? You think I’m a mind reader?”

“Don’t you keep records?”

“I give a customer a receipt, it’s a pink piece of paper — here, you see this pad here? On the top part there’s a number and on the bottom part there’s the same number — you see this perforated line? That’s where I tear off the bottom part to give to the customer. On the top part I write the customer’s name and telephone number and what kind of garment it is. You see here where all the different kinds of garments are listed? I just check the box alongside the garment — slacks, jacket, skirt, blouse, dress, whatever the garment is. Then I tear off the bottom part that has the number on it the same as the top part, and I give that to the customer for when he comes back to get the garment.”

“What do you do with the top part?” Bloom asked.

“I pin it to the garment. You put the top part and the bottom part together, you know which garment belongs to which customer. Also, because I got the telephone number on the top part, if somebody doesn’t come back for a long time, I give him a call and say, ‘Hey, you want these slacks or should I give them to the Salvation Army?’ That’s how it works.”

“After a person claims an article of clothing,” Bloom said, “what do you do with the receipt?”

“The top part and the bottom part both, I throw them in the garbage. What do I need them for if a person already came back to get his garment?”

“Then there aren’t any records, right?” Rawles said.

“Right. Not after somebody comes back to get a garment. If I saved all these pink pieces of paper, I’d have no room for clothes here anymore. The whole place would be full of pink pieces of paper. The parking lot outside would be full of pink pieces of paper, nobody from the hardware or the cowboys would be able to park in it, those bastards.”

“Take another look at the dress,” Rawles said.

“What for?”

“See if there’s anything you might recognize about it. Any places where it was fixed, anything like that.”

“Fixed? What do you mean, fixed?”

“Patched. Repaired.”

“I don’t do repair work here. I’m not a tailor, I’m a dry cleaner.”

“Maybe somebody else patched it,” Bloom said, “and maybe you’ll recognize that you saw the patch before.”

“What patch?” Barish said. “You see a patch anyplace on this dress? There’s no patches on this dress. This dress is the same as when this girl bought it for fifteen dollars on sale. You know what you can do with a shmatte like this? You can wipe up the floor with it.”

“The girl didn’t think so,” Rawles said. “The girl was wearing it when she died.”

“That’s all this dress is good for,” Barish said. “To wear when you maybe expect to be dying.”

“Take your time,” Rawles said. “Look it over again.”

“I looked at it already,” Barish said. “How many times can I look at it when I got my girl out sick and I’m all alone here?”

“Just take your time with it,” Rawles said.

“He keeps telling me to take my time with it,” Barish said to Bloom, “when the one thing I ain’t got today is time.”

“We’d appreciate your help,” Bloom said.

Barish sighed and picked up the dress again. He studied it carefully. He turned it inside out. He turned it right side out again. “This here is where there was a spot here. It wouldn’t come out, you see it? Impossible to get a spot like this out.”

“What kind of spot?” Bloom said at once.

“An ink spot, it looks like. It’s just a tiny dot, but it don’t make no difference how small it is, you can’t get a spot like that out. What I do, when I get a spot like that, I put a little notice on the garment, it tells the customer we tried to get the spot out, but a spot like this—”

“Do you remember anybody coming in with a dress like this?” Rawles said. “With an ink spot on it?”

“Ink spots are very common,” Barish said. “Because people are writing all the time, they drop the ballpoint pen, it hits the garment, it leaves the spot. Or they keep the ballpoint pen in their jacket pocket, the cap comes off, there’s an ink spot. Very common. And impossible to get out. You get an ink spot on a white garment, forget it, you can throw it away.”

“How about a red garment?” Rawles asked.

“The same thing. You get an ink spot on a red garment, unless it’s red ink, you can—”

“How about this red garment?” Rawles persisted. “The ink spot on this red garment? Can you remember anyone coming in with a red dress and telling you there was an ink spot on it?”

“A hundred times a year this could happen.”

“How about the dry-cleaning mark?” Bloom asked. “If you look at the mark, can you tell when it was put in there?”

“The marks ain’t dated,” Barish said. “You know how this works? Dry-cleaning marks?”

“No,” Rawles said.

“No,” Bloom said.

“You come here asking about a dry-cleaning mark, you don’t even know how it works,” Barish said, and sighed. “What this is, it’s a form of identification for a garment. Not for the cops, we couldn’t care less about what problems you got. The mark is for us, ’cause, you see, there aren’t many dry-cleaning places nowadays that do their own cleaning on the premises. What we do, we send the garments out to what’s called a ‘hot plant,’ there are maybe six or seven of them in Calusa. Now these hot plants, they get thousands of garments every day from dry-cleaning places all over the city. So how are they supposed to know which store sent them the garment? These garments have to go back to the store that sent them, understand? So every dry cleaner in the city, he has his own mark. Mine is ‘AC’ for Albert Cleaners. You run a store called Ready-Quik, whatever, your mark might be ‘RQ’ or maybe even ‘QK,’ you pick your own mark.”

“And what’s the ‘KLBN’?” Bloom asked.

“For me, it’s the customer’s name, a shorthand for the customer’s name. Other shops work it different, they use number systems, but that’s too complicated. Some of them use marks you can only see under ultraviolet light, very fancy-shmancy. Me, I just use indelible ink. So first there’s the ‘AC’ for Albert Cleaners, it tells the hot plant where the dress came from, and then next there’s the letters for the customer’s name. What’d you say your name was?” he asked Bloom.

“Bloom,” Bloom said.

“Okay, so you bring me a garment, I’ll put in it ‘AC’ and then something like ‘BLM,’ which is a shorthand for Bloom. Then I can check my tickets where I wrote the customer’s name, and I can figure out what belongs to who.”

“So what does the ‘KLBN’ stand for?” Bloom asked.

“Who knows? I told you. Once a garment is claimed, I throw away the ticket.”

“Try to remember about the ink spot,” Rawles said doggedly.

“A dress like this,” Barish said, “a cheap garment like this one, somebody came in with an ink spot on it, what I’d tell them is forget even having it dry-cleaned. Tear it up, use it for wiping up shmutz on the floor.”

“Did somebody come in who you told that to?” Bloom said.

“I would tell that to anybody who came in with a dress like this with an ink spot on it. This dress here — wait a minute,” Barish said.

The detectives waited.

“Yeah,” Barish said.

“Yeah, what?” Rawles said.

“She gave me a big argument, the girl who brought this dress in. I told her I couldn’t get a spot like this out, she should throw the dress away. She told me it was her favorite dress, why should she throw it away because I was a crummy dry cleaner who couldn’t get a spot out?”

“Then you remember her,” Rawles said.

“I remember the spot on the dress and she gave me a hard time, is what I remember. I finally took the dress, but I told her I wasn’t making any promises.”

“How about the girl herself? Who was she?”

“Who knows?” Barish said. “One of the hippies used to live around here with a hundred other kids in the same apartment. You ever notice there are no more hippies left anywhere in the world but Florida? Only down here do you still see the long hair and the—”

“What was her name?” Rawles asked. “Do you remember her name?”

“You expect me to remember a name from maybe a year ago?”

“Well, you wrote ‘KLBN’ in the dress, so what does that mean to you?”

“Now? A year later? It means ‘KLBN,’ is what it means.”

“Is that when she brought the dress in?”

“Maybe not a whole year. It was in the summertime, you could die down here in the summertime, the humidity. June or July, around then. August is even worse. September ain’t no picnic, neither.”

“But this was in June or July, is that right?” Bloom asked.

“Around then. May, it coulda been, we had a hot May last year. I can’t say for sure. Sometime around then. All I know for sure is this dress had the ink spot right where it still is, and the girl gave me such an argument, I coulda shot her. Did somebody shoot her?”

“Yes,” Rawles said.

“Where? I don’t see no hole on the dress. A bullet would leave a hole, no?”

“In the throat,” Bloom said.

“Hoo-boy,” Barish said.

“And cut out her tongue afterward,” Rawles said.

“Please, I got a weak stomach,” Barish said.

“How old was she, this girl who brought the dress in?” Bloom asked.

“Nineteen, twenty? Who can tell? By me, anybody under thirty, they all look the same age.”

“How tall was she?”

“Five-eight? Five-nine?”

“White?” Rawles asked.

“Sure, white.”

“What color hair?”

“Blonde. Long blonde hair, it came halfway down her back.”

“Sounds right,” Rawles said to Bloom. “What color were her eyes?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Would you remember her address?” Bloom asked.

“I don’t take addresses. Only the telephone number in case they leave the garment here forever.”

“Her telephone number, then? Do you remember it?”

“I got to be Einstein to remember a telephone number from last May.”

“Was she driving?”

“No. I can see whoever parks here, I watch the parking lot like a hawk so the hardware or the cowboys don’t use it for their customers. She walked in. No car.”

“Alone?” Rawles asked.

Barish said nothing.

“Mr. Barish? Was she—”

“I’m trying to think, hold your horses a minute, willya?”

The detectives waited.

“She had somebody with her,” Barish said at last. “Another hippie like her.”

“Male or female?” Bloom said at once.

“A girl, a girl,” Barish said. “Don’t ask me hair, eyes, whatever, ’cause I couldn’t tell you if you stuck needles under my fingernails.”

“White or black?” Bloom asked.

“White.”

“A girl about the same age?”

“About. Who remembers?”

“You don’t remember the color of her hair?”

“I don’t.”

“Was she blonde?” Rawles asked.

“I just tell him I can’t remember,” Barish said to Bloom, “so he asks me was she blonde.”

“You’d remember two blondes coming in together, wouldn’t you?” Rawles said.

“I only remember the pretty one was blonde, the one who gave me the argument.”

“Then the other one wasn’t blonde,” Rawles said.

“I guess she wasn’t. Maybe.”

“And she wasn’t pretty, either.”

“A dog. You know what a dog is? This girl was a dog.”

“The other one was pretty, though, huh?” Bloom said. “The one who brought the dress in?”

“A knockout. You know what a knockout is? This girl was a knockout.”

“And you think she lived somewhere in the neighborhood, huh?” Rawles said.

“Who said?”

“You did. You said she lived in an apartment with a hundred other hippies.”

“Oh. I was only saying. I don’t know that for a fact. But if she walked in, she must’ve lived in the neighborhood, no?”

“You ought to become a cop,” Bloom said, and smiled.

“A traffic cop is what I ought to become, those bastards from the hardware and the cowboys.”

“What was she wearing?” Rawles asked. “The blonde.”

“Blue jeans and a T-shirt,” Barish said at once. “No bra, no shoes. A regular hippie.”

“And the other one?”

“A brown uniform. Like a uniform.”

“What kind of uniform?”

“Brown, I told you.”

“She wasn’t a meter maid, was she?”

“No, no, I could use a meter maid here, believe me, all these bastards parking on private property.”

“A brown uniform,” Bloom said, thinking out loud.

“She wasn’t a Girl Scout, was she?” Rawles asked. “A troop leader, something like that?”

“No, they wear green, the Girl Scouts, I clean a lot of uniforms for them. The girls’ uniforms smell even worse than the boys’, did you know that? They sweat a lot, girls. This wasn’t a Girl Scout uniform, this was brown. And she had a little plastic tag with her name on it, right here on the chest.”

“A waitress?” Bloom said. “Did she look like a waitress?”

“Coulda been, who knows?” Barish said. “Little name tag here on the chest, it could be.”

“A waitress,” Bloom said, and looked at Rawles.

“A nice chest, too,” Barish said. “A very nice chest on that girl.”

Both detectives were wondering how many restaurants in Calusa featured waitresses in brown uniforms.