The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Somebody Cares

Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1962.

Being teamed with Odus Martin wasn’t an inviting prospect, but I didn’t intend to let it blight the pleasure of my promotion to plainclothes.

His own reaction was buried deep in his personal privacy. I, the greenie fresh out of uniform, was accepted as just another chore. Martin volunteered no helpful advice; neither did he pass judgment on me. I suspected that he would be slow to praise and reluctant to criticize.

If my partner’s almost inhuman taciturnity made him a poor companion, I had compensations. A ripple of pleasure raced through me each time I entered the squad room. To me it was not a barren bleak place of scarred desks, hard chairs, dingy walls, and stale tobacco.

My first days as Martin’s partner were busy ones. We rounded up suspects in a knifing case. Martin questioned them methodically and dispassionately. He decided a man named Greene was lying. He had Greene brought back and after seven hours and fifteen minutes of additional questioning by Martin, Greene signed a statement attesting his guilt.

Martin’s attitude irritated me. A man’s life had been cut short with a knife. Another man would spend his best years behind bars. Wives, mothers, children, brothers, sisters were affected. Their lives would never again be quite the same, no matter how strong they were or how much they managed to forget.

But to Odus Martin it was all a chore, nothing more. A small chore at that, one of many in an endless chain.

When I mentioned the families, Martin looked at me as if I were a truant and not too bright schoolboy. “Everybody in this world has someone,” he said. “Accept that — and quit worrying about it.”

“I’m not necessarily worrying,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice.

He shrugged and bent over some paper work on his desk. His manner was a dismissal — a reduction of me to a neuter, meaningless zero.

“Since you put it that way,” I said argumentatively, “how about the nameless tramp the county has to bury?”

He looked up at me slowly. “Somewhere, Jenks, somebody misses that tramp. You take my word for it. There are no total strangers in this world. Somebody cares — somebody always cares.”

I hadn’t expected this bit of philosophy from him. It caused me to give him a second glance. But he still reminded me of a slab of silvery-gray casting in iron.

As the weeks passed, I learned to get along with Martin. I adopted a cool manner toward him, but only as a protective device. I told myself I’d never let a quarter of a century of violence and criminals turn me into an unsmiling robot, as had happened to Odus Martin.

I paid him the respect due a first-rate detective. His movements, mental as well as physical, were slow, thorough, and objective. He made colorless — hence, uninteresting — newspaper copy. This, coupled with his close-mouthed habits, caused most reporters to dislike him. Martin didn’t mind in the least.

But when it came to criminals he had the instincts of a stalking leopard. As I became better acquainted with him, I realized these were not natural endowments — they were the cumulative conditioning and results of twenty-five years. He seemed never to have forgotten the smallest trick that experience had taught him.

The day Greene was arraigned, I put a question to Martin that had been bothering me. “You decided Greene was lying when he told us his alibi. Why? How could you be sure?”

“He looked me straight and forthrightly in the eye with every word he spoke,” Martin explained.

This drew a complete blank with me.

Martin glanced at me and said patiently, “Greene normally was a very shifty-eyed character.”

Well, I knew I could learn a lot from this guy, if I were sufficiently perceptive and alert myself. He didn’t regard it as his place to teach. He was a cop.

As usual, I was fifteen minutes early to work the morning after the murder of Mary Smith. Martin was coming from the squad room when I arrived. He was moving with the slow-motion, elephantine gait that covered distance like a mild sprint. It was clear he’d just got in and had intended to leave without waiting for me.

I fell in step beside him. “What’s up?”

“Girl been killed.”

“Where?”

“In Hibernia Park.”

She lay as if sleeping under some bushes where she’d been dragged and hurriedly and ineffectually hidden. It was a golden day, filled with the freshness of morning, the grass and trees of the park dewy and vividly green.

Squad cars and uniformed men had already cordoned off the area. Men from the lab reached the scene about the same time as Martin and I. Efficiently, they started the routine of photography and footprint moulage.

I had not, as yet, the objectivity of the rest of them. The girl drew and held my attention. She was small, fine of bone, and sparsely fleshed. Her face had a piquant quality. She might have been almost pretty, if she’d known how to fix herself up.

As it was, she lay drab and colorless in her cheap, faded cotton dress, dull brown hair framing her face.

Her attitude of sleep, face toward the sky, became a horror when my eyes followed the lines her dragging heels had made. The lines ended beyond a flat stone. The stone was crusted with dark, dried blood. It was obvious that she’d been knocked down there, as she came along the walkway. The back of her head had struck the stone. Perhaps she’d died instantly. Her assailant had dragged her quickly to the bushes, concealing the body long enough for him to get far away from the park.

Looking again at her, I shivered slightly. What in your nineteen or twenty years, I asked silently of her, brought you to this?

The murder scene yielded little. Her purse, if she’d had one, was gone. She wore no jewelry, although she might have had a cheap watch or ID bracelet. The golden catch from such an item was found near the flat stone by one of the lab men.

Later in the squad room, Martin and I sat and looked at the golden clasp.

“Mugged, robbed, murdered,” Martin decided. “I wonder how much she was carrying in her purse. Five dollars? Ten?”

He held the catch so that it caught the light. “We’ll check the pawnshops. A hoodlum this cheap will try to pawn the watch. Nothing from Missing Persons?”

I’d just finished the routine in that department. I shook my head.

“Nothing from the lab, either,” Martin said. “Her clothes came from any bargain basement. No laundry marks. Washed them herself. No scars or identifying marks. No bridgework in the mouth. We’ll run the fingerprints, but I’m not hopeful. The P.M. will establish the cause of death as resulting from compound fracture of the skull, probably late last night.”

“None of it will tell us who she is,” I said.

“That’s what I’m saying. But somebody will turn up, asking for her. Somebody will claim her. Girl that young — she can’t die violently and disappear without it affecting someone. Meantime, all we got is this clasp.”

We took it to all the pawnshops in the city. No watch with such a clasp missing had been pawned.

Martin next picked up every punk who had a mugging or mugging attempt on his record. We questioned each one of them. The task ate up two days, and when it was over we had placed nobody near Hibernia Park at the right time.

The girl’s body remained in the morgue. No one inquired about her. She wasn’t reported missing. She continued to be an unclaimed Jane Doe.

“It means,” Martin said, “that she has no family here. She must have come here to work, maybe from a farm upstate. Lucky for us that we live in a reasonably small city. We’ll check all the rooming houses — places where such a girl might have lived.”

We did it building by building, block by teeming block, from landlord to landlady to building super.

Martin would take one side of the street, I the other. Our equipment was a picture of the girl, and the question was always-the same. So were all the answers.

We spent two fatiguing, monotonous days of this. Then about mid-afternoon the third day, I came disconsolately from a cheaper apartment building and saw Martin waving to me from a long porch across the street.

I waited for a break in traffic and crossed over. The rooming house was an old gables-and-gingerbread monstrosity, three stories, a mansion in its day, but long since chopped into small apartments and sleeping rooms.

A small, gray, near-sighted woman hovered in the hallway behind Odus Martin.

“This is Mrs. Carraway,” Martin said.

The landlady and I nodded our new acquaintance.

“May we see Mary Smith’s room?” Martin asked.

Mary Smith, I thought. I’d begun to think you’d remain Jane Doe forever, Mary Smith.

“Since you’re police officers I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Carraway said.

“You’ve seen my credentials,” Martin said. “We’ll take full responsibility.”

We followed Mrs. Carraway to a small clean room at the end of the hallway. She stood in the open doorway while we examined the room.

The furnishings were typical — mismatched bed, bureau, chest of drawers, and worn carpet, faded curtains.

A neat person, Mary Smith. The few items of clothing she’d owned were pressed and properly placed in the closet and chest of drawers.

The room reflected a lonely life. There were no photos, no letters. Nothing of a personal nature except the clothing and a few magazines on a bedside table.

“How long she lived with you?” Martin asked.

“A little over two months,” Mrs. Carraway said in her cautious, impersonal voice.

“When did you see her last?”

“A week ago Thursday when she paid a month’s rent.”

“She have any callers?”

“Callers?”

“Boy friend, perhaps.”

“Not that I know of.” Mrs. Carraway pursed her lips. “I’m not a nosy landlady. She seemed like a quiet, nice girl. So long as they pay their rent and don’t raise a disturbance — that’s all I’m concerned with.”

“Know where she came from?”

“No. She came and looked at the room and said she’d take it. She said she was employed. I checked, to make sure.”

“Where was that?”

“At the Cloverleaf Restaurant. She’s a waitress.”

Martin thanked her, and we started from the room.

Mrs. Carraway said, “Is she in serious trouble?”

“Pretty much,” Martin said. “I’m sure she won’t be coming back.”

“What’ll I do with her things?”

“We’ll let you know.”

Mrs. Carraway followed us to the front door. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’m not an unkind person. But whatever she’s done is none of my business. You’d just be wasting my time to be calling me in as a witness.”

“We’ll trouble you no more than we have to,” Martin said.

We returned to the unmarked police car parked in the middle of the block. Martin got behind the wheel and drove in silence.

“Any doubt of her identity?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. We’ll check fingerprints in the room against the Jane Doe to be sure. But the landlady showed no hesitation when she saw the picture. She was Mary Smith, right enough.”

Hello, Mary Smith, I thought. Hello, stranger. Who were you?

A man named Blakeslee was the owner of the Cloverleaf, a large drive-in on the south side of town. He was a slender, dark, harried-looking fellow, about forty.

He was checking the cash register when we arrived. We showed him our credentials, and with a gesture of annoyance he led us to a small office off the kitchen.

“Well,” he said, closing the door, “what’s this all about?”

“Got a Mary Smith on your payroll?” Martin asked.

“I did have. She quit without notice. A lot of them do. You’ve no idea what it is to keep help nowadays.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“Circumstances?” He shrugged. “She didn’t show up for a couple of days, so I put another girl on. There weren’t any circumstances, as you put it.”

“Did you wonder if maybe she was sick?”

“I figured she’d have called in. She’s not the first to quit like that. I haven’t time to be running around checking on them. What’s your interest in her?”

“She’s dead.”

“What’s that?” After his initial start, Blakeslee raised his hand and stroked his chin. “Why, that’s too bad,” he said in a tone without real meaning.

“The papers carried a story,” Martin said. “Unidentified girl murdered.”

“I don’t recall seeing it. Probably wouldn’t have connected it with Mary Smith anyway. How did it happen?”

“She was apparently on her way home. We think she was knocked down for whatever of value she was carrying.”

“It couldn’t have been much.”

“Can you tell us anything about her?”

“Only that she came to work here. She seemed nice enough, always on time. Too quiet to make many friends.”

“Where did she work formerly?”

“She came here from Cross-more.” Blakeslee spread his hands. “I wish I could help. But after all, what was she to me?”

Martin and I took the expressway out of town. The drive to Crossmore, a small town in the next county, required only forty minutes.

I wondered how many restaurants there were in Crossmore. Very few, I guessed. We had at least that much in our favor.

However, Martin drove right on through the village.

“I’m playing a hunch,” he said.

Just beyond Crossmore, overlooking the busy highway, were the rolling hills and meadows and buildings of the country-supported orphanage.

Martin turned into a winding driveway which was shaded by tall pines. He stopped before an old colonial-type home that had been converted into an administration building. More recent structures of frame and brick housed dorms and classrooms. Beyond there were barns and workshops.

A few minutes later we were in the office of Dr. Spreckles, the superintendent. A wiry, sandy man, Spreckles struck me as being a pleasant individual who nevertheless knew how to run things.

He looked at the picture of Mary Smith that the lab boys had made.

“Yes,” he said. “She was one of our girls.” His lips tightened slightly. “We hope she has done nothing to reflect on the training she received here.”

“She hasn’t,” Martin assured him. “Who were her people?”

Spreckles went behind his desk and sat down. “She had none. She was born out of wedlock in the county hospital to a woman who gave her name only as Mary Smith. As soon as she was able to get about, the mother abandoned the child.”

“The girl grew up here?”

“Yes.”

“Never adopted?”

“No,” Spreckles said slowly, resting his elbows on his desk and steepling his fingers. “As a child, she was quite awkward, too quiet, too shy. She lived here until she was eighteen.”

“Who were her friends?”

“Strangely enough,” Spreckles frowned, “I can’t say. I don’t think she had any really close ones. She was a face in a crowd, you might say. Never precocious. Not at the bottom of her classes, you understand, but not at the top. I do wish you’d tell me what difficulty she’s in.”

“She’s dead,” Martin said. “A mugger killed her during a robbery attempt.”

“How terrible!” Spreckles made an honest attempt to muster genuine grief, but he simply didn’t have it. He was shocked and upset by the passing forever of an impersonal image, but that was all...

As we drove back through Crossmore, Martin broke his silence — with a single utterance. It was softly spoken but the most vicious oath I’d ever heard. It was so unlike Martin that I stared at him out of the corner of my eyes.

But I let the silence return and stay that way. Right then, he had the look about him of a heavy-chested, steel-gray tomcat whose wounds have been rubbed with turpentine and salt.

We returned to grinding routine. The pawnshops. Still no watch. The vicinity of Hibernia Park — questioning all the people, one by one, who lived in the area. No one had glimpsed a man coming from the park about the time she was killed.

At night I was too tired to sleep. I wondered what this was getting us, if we’d ever catch the man. Yet there wasn’t the slightest letdown in Martin’s determination. I only wished I shared it...

Martin and I returned to the squad room late Wednesday afternoon. A few minutes afterward, a uniformed policeman walked in and handed Martin an inexpensive woman’s watch.

My scalp pulled tight. I crossed to Martin’s desk as he opened a drawer. He shook the golden clasp from a small manila envelope. The clasp matched the broken band of the watch perfectly.

Martin stood up. His nostrils were flaring. “Where’d this come from?”

“The personal effects of a guy named Biddix,” the man in uniform said. “He was in a poker game we just broke up in an old loft. The desk sergeant said you’d want to see the watch.”

Martin’s big hand closed over the tiny timepiece. I followed him out of the office.

Biddix was a dried-up, seedy little fellow in his late sixties. He’d been separated from the other poker players and put in a solitary cell.

When the cell door opened, Biddix took one look at Martin’s face and backed against the wall.

Martin held out his hand and opened it. “Where’d you get this?”

“Look...” Biddix swallowed. “If it’s stolen, I swear I had nothing to do with it.”

“It was torn from a murdered girl’s wrist,” Martin said.

The dead-gray of Biddix’s beard stubble suddenly blended exactly with the color of his skin.

“A guy put the watch in the game,” Biddix said. “And that’s the truth, so help me!”

“Which one?”

“He left before we was raided.”

“What’s his name?”

“Edgar Collins.”

“Know where he lives?”

“Sure. In a flop on East Maple Street, number 311.”

We went out. The cell door clanged behind us. Biddix came over and stood holding the bars. “I didn’t know anything about the watch.”

“Sure,” Martin said.

“You’ll put me in with the others now, won’t you?”

“No,” Martin said. “Not yet.”

We got the location of Edgar Collins’ room from the building super, went up one flight, and eased to the door.

The house was hot and the hallway smelled of age and many people. We listened. After a little, we heard a bedspring creak.

We put our shoulders to the door, and it flew open. A stringy, big-boned, bald-headed man sprang off the bed and dropped the tabloid he’d been reading. He was tall and stooped. He wore dirty khaki pants and a dirty undershirt.

“What’s the big idear?” he demanded.

“Your name Edgar Collins?” Martin asked.

“So what if it is?”

“We’re police officers. We want to talk to you.”

“Yeah? What about?”

“A girl who was killed in Hibernia Park. If you’re innocent, you got nothing to worry about. If not... We’ve got a shoe-track moulage to start. We’ll find plenty of other things with the help of the lab boys, once we know where to start looking.”

Collins stared at us. An explosion took place behind his pale eyes. He lunged toward the open window.

Martin got between me and Collins and grabbed the man first. He dragged Collins back in the room. Collins threw punches at Martin in blind panic.

Martin hit him three times in the face. Collins fell on the floor, wrapped his arms about his head, and began rolling back and forth.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said, babbling. “She fell on the stone. She was a stranger, nothing to me. It was an accident... please... give me a break! I didn’t mean it, I tell you.”

For a moment I thought Odus Martin was going to start hitting the man again.

A volunteer minister performed graveside rites the next morning.

Martin and I stood with our hats in our hands.

I looked at the casket and thought: Goodbye, Mary Smith — that name will do as well as any. No father, no mother, no one. Killed by a man who never saw you before.

The sun was shining, but the day felt bleak and dismal.

Then, as we returned to headquarters, it came to me that Odus Martin had been right. There are no absolute strangers in this world, no zeros.

The death of Mary Smith had affected Odus Martin. Because I was his partner, it had affected me. Through us, it seemed to me, the human race had recognized the importance of her and expressed its unwillingness to let her die as an animal dies.

Mary Smith had lived and died in loneliness, but she had not been alone.

I didn’t say anything of this to Odus Martin. He was a hard man to talk to. Anyhow, I felt that he understood it already, probably much more deeply than I ever could.