The Paw of the Cat

Chapter One Prettiest Corpse in Town

Stenn came down the subterranean corridor of the emergency ward, his big hands swinging at his sides, an inch of damp cigarette pasted to his lower lip at the left corner of his wide mouth.

The prowl-car cop was young, with nervousness hiding behind his blunt Slavic features. He pushed himself away from the wall at Stenn strode toward him.

“Are you—”

“I’m Detective-Sergeant Stenn.”

“Patrolman Matchic. They’re working on her in there.”

“How did it happen?” Stenn said.

“Didn’t Kevan report it all in?”

Stenn pinched the cigarette out of the comer of his mouth, dropped it and scuffed it with his foot. He shoved the grey hat with the stained sweatband back off his broad forehead and looked at Matchic with distant annoyance.

“I’d like for you to tell me.”

“Sure. We were over by the station, cruising slow. A guy comes running out into the street yelling about an accident. I pulled over and Kevan and I ran in. It was on Track 7. A big mob was waiting to grab the 5:28, a commuter train. What always happens, they back it down beside the platform. Anyway this girl had gone over the edge, nobody knew how. It was up near the front end of the platform so that the engineer didn’t know it and they backed seven coaches over her before the train stopped in the usual place. It was a mess, with women down on the platform and guys fanning them and everybody running back and forth. As we were running we found a doc in the crowd. You couldn’t get at her from the side she fell off of on account of the platform is high. We went around the end of the last coach. It’s a double track there and we could get to her. The little doc, his name is Fenner, he got a couple of neckties and he had a pipe and one of the other guys gave him a pipe and he went under there and put a tourniquet on each leg.” Matchic swallowed hard.

“It got the legs?”

“Both of ’em. Just above the knee. The ambulance guys got there then and they got her out and then, right there, they gave her that stuff, the white stuff out of a bottle with a tube.”

“Plasma?”

“That’s it. We got a couple witnesses, Kevan and me, with the names and where they were standing and all. I think maybe she fainted and—”

“All I want is what happened. Any thinking you do is on your own time.”

“Sure, sure. I just—”

“Kevan didn’t report in no name for this woman.”

“He checked her pocketbook but there wasn’t anything in there to tell what the name is. Kevan’s got the pocketbook out in the car.”

The door opened and a young doctor came out, his mask down around his neck, peeling his gloves off. There was an impassive, too-old weariness in his face.

“Too much shock,” he said. “I thought for a while we’d make it.”

Matchic swallowed again, his throat moving convulsively.

“You people hold her until we get an identification,” Stenn said. “We don’t get it by tomorrow noon, we’ll move her down to the city icebox. Mind if I take a look?”

The young doctor shrugged. “If you want to.”

Two nurses were on the other side of the small operating room, animatedly discussing the proper care of a nylon dress. They gave the three men a casual look. Bored attendants had moved the body off the table onto a large-wheeled mortuary cart.

“Hold it a minute, boys,” the young doctor said.

Stenn looked down at her face. The mouth and nostrils had a white, pinched look, but he guessed that it was an effect of death. He squinted and tried to see the face as it would have looked in life. Blonde hair grew thick from a rather low scalp line. The eyes and cheekbones were set wide, the nose was snub, the mouth was wide, with a great disparity between the lips, the upper one thin, the lower one so heavy as to give almost the impression of being bruised.

Absently he fingered the blonde hair by her ear, rubbing the tiny harshness of the hair between thumb and finger. He stood, a wide, heavy man, his eyes half closed, and years were gone, the clock spinning crazily back to a time when he had investigated the accident on the bay road and found Jeana, her fragrance stilled by death, all her lies suddenly transparent. And over the years the memory had never lost the power to cut into his heart like a splinter stabbed up under a fingernail. Jeana dead beside the man with whom she had...

Stenn shook himself like a dog awakening sleepily. He looked up. The doctor was staring at him curiously. “A natural blonde,” Stenn said.

“And whistle-bait, I guess,” the doctor said. “One of those leggy, chin-up dollies with an expensive look and a go-to-hell expression. Maybe she likes it better this way.”

Stenn stepped around the cart and picked up the flaccid cool left hand and turned it toward the light. On the third finger was the circular compressed area that a ring would cause, the skin faintly shiny.

He turned to Matchic. “Anybody take her ring?”

“There’s one in the bag.” Matchic used a hushed, reverent tone in the presence of the dead.

“Help me with her, Doc,” Stenn said. “I got to see if there’s any distinguishing marks.” They found a tiny mole at the small of her back, nothing else. As the moments passed Matchic became paler. “Check the legs, Doc, please, and let me know about them. And we’ll need the clothes.”

“The nurse out at the reception desk can fix you up.”

A tiny warning bell rang harshly. The nurses broke off their conversation and began to work briskly. “Better clear out,” the young doctor said! “Another one on the way in.” He walked toward the anteroom sink to wash for the next case.

Outside, in the hall, Stenn paused to light a cigarette. Matchic’s relief was evident. “It makes you think,” he said expansively, “of what a hell of a waste it is. A dish like that.”

“Yeah,” said Stenn coldly. They got the clothes in a neatly tagged bundle.

“Everything here?” Stenn asked the nurse.

“All but the stockings.”

“We’ll phone you if we get a quick identification. Otherwise tell your morgue boy we’ll send for her early tomorrow afternoon.”

The ambulance was growling to a stop as they went up the ramp to the parking area. Kevan was half asleep in the prowl car off to the right. He came to life as they approached. The dusk was beginning to blur the outlines of the trees in the hospital grounds.

Stenn took the pocketbook and copied the names of the witnesses in his notebook. Matchic got behind the wheel and the car went down the drive to pick up the interrupted tour. Stenn stood in the dusk for a few moments. The early evening traffic was thinning. The softness under his chin blurred the line of the solid jaw. His heavy features held the constant expression of stubborn weariness. Pale eyes, as expressionless as a pair of blue dice, were half hooded by the lids.

Morganson of the Courier came out of the hospital. He peered at Stenn in the dusk and then came over. “What’s on the station accident, Paul?” he asked. “In there a reporter gets classed with bacteria.”

“Unidentified blonde of about twenty-four died of shock after both legs were severed when she fell, jumped or was pushed in back of the 5:28.”

“So much I knew. That her stuff?”

“It is.”

“Anything with a twenty-four-year-old blonde in it is news, Paul. Going down now to check the stuff over? Mind if I come along?”

“Dirty scavenger,” Stenn said mildly.

“Bone-head cop,” Morganson retorted. They walked together to the department car and got in.

Stenn pulled the chain on the shaded light over the table. Morganson stood back in the shadows. The stenographer opened his notebook under the glare.

Stenn chanted in a low monotone, “Alligator purse with shoulder strap, not new, apparently hand-sewn, with brass or bronze clip; no label or maker’s designation. Contents: One-half pack of Camels, two partially used packages of book matches, both advertising Harold’s Club in Reno, one small wide-rib Dunhill lighter, one gold bill clip made of a... a Mexican fifty-peso gold piece, forty-two dol-dollars in bills, one round leather coin purse containing fifty-one cents, one coach ticket from here to Dumont, one partially used lipstick labeled Duchay’s Tangent, one dime-store compact with cracked mirror, one plastic red comb, miscellaneous light-colored bobby pins.”

He turned the purse under the light and fingered its depth. “No identification, keys or anything like that.” He looked toward Morganson. “Not much, eh?”

“Enough to know that somebody will claim her, Paul. That money clip is worth the price of admission. Isn’t that a ring there?”

“I was about to cover that. One ring, white gold or platinum, containing one diamond of an estimated one-carat size plus two small green stones, on either side, which could be emeralds.”

He placed the enumerated objects back in the purse, broke the string on the package. “Okay. Clothes. One brassiere, pale yellow and pants, same, both labeled Oxford of San Francisco. One grey flannel suit, hand-made. No label. No apparent cleaner’s marking. Jacket intact. Skirt badly ripped and bloodied. One white nylon blouse. One imitation-jade lapel ornament. Grey snakeskin shoes, size seven quad A, labeled Rodriguez of Mexico, D.F. Left shoe scraped, right shoe intact. Nothing in jacket pockets.”

He looked again over at where Morgan-son stood. “I don’t like it,” he said.

“Why?”

“Nothing to tie to this city. Smells like a transient. If so, identity may be tough. She might have been running from something.”

“She’d have to have a place to live, wouldn’t she?”

“You mean a hotel. How about if her stuff was checked some place? We can’t go pouring over all the stuff in all the check rooms. It might be thirty days before we get a look at unclaimed stuff. You notice anything that maybe I didn’t, Al?”

Morganson stepped into the light. He fingered the purse. “I bought my wife one of those once. It’s Mexican or Guatemalan, but you can’t tell how old. They wear like iron. Catherine still uses hers for best.”

“Tell you what,” Stenn said. “Maybe you save me a little time. I’ll fix it so one of your boys can take a picture. The face is okay. Have one of your staff artists fix it so it doesn’t look dead. You know what I mean. Ask the public who she is. But don’t put it in the works until morning. We got to give the relatives all night before they start checking. And get me a half-dozen of the prints fast so I can put some boys on the hotels. But on this I got a hunch.”

“Care to tell me?”

“I figure it like this. She was a big, strong girl. Maybe five-eight, around one-thirty or a little over. Not the kind to faint. No liquor in her, according to that doc. She’s a good-looking dish. Show me a good-looking woman who messes herself up knocking herself off and I give you a big cigar. The only way I get her under that train is somebody shoving her.”

“I can’t print that!”

“Did I say you should? It’s a hunch, that’s all. You ask me — I tell you.”