here anyway. You haven't been the life of the party boat, boy. Rigid, tense, remote.'
I sat, fingered the knot on the top of my head. 'I ran a ten-day clinical service.'
'It wasn't that, because you were peaking very nicely when I came down to fish. Now suddenly this explosion of irritation.'
'I got tired of talking about the bitch.'
I was glowering at him. Suddenly the Meyer smile began and widened. You can't stay irritated with Meyer. He nodded and chuckled.
'I should have figured it out sooner,' he said. 'Tell me, O wise man.'
'A dedicated archaeologist, at enormous risk to himself, descends into a cavern and comes up with a lovely figurine. He is an expert. He cherishes the form of ancient art. This one is rare and beautiful. His romantic heart bubbles over. Then he turns it over and looks at the base and there is the curious inscription: 'Made in Scranton, Pennsylvania.' So it has no value. Cheap goods. But it is so damnably lovely the poor archaeologist sits and looks at it and broods over what might have been.'
'Very funny.'
'And a little sad, boy. You like women as people. You do not think of them as objects placed here by a benign providence for your use and pleasure, so in that sense you are not a womanizer. But you cherish the meaningful romantic charade. Friend, you have been sulking. You have had your nose flattened against the candy-store window, even though you knew all the candy in there was made of putty, and if you broke in and gobbled, it would make you deathly ill. Perhaps, five years ago, you would have made the ghastly mistake of trying to transform the bitch with the power of love, because she is decorative, spirited, shrewd in her fashion. You are wise enough to know she is ease-hardened beyond redemption, but it has still made you wistful and sulky and depressed.'
I pondered the diagnosis. Then I threw my head back and laughed at myself. Valiant knight trapped on a merry-goround, scowling and trying for the brass ring with the tip of the rusty lance, knowing that if he got it, all he'd get would be another ride to noplace.
'Welcome back,' Meyer said. 'What's the program?'
'Wait and see if she comes back for help. If she does, we play it by ear, with the idea of conning her into giving us the whole package and letting us line up a lawyer who can drive a good bargain with the law so she takes the smallest beating possible. If she doesn't come back, then we go find the rest of the pieces ourselves and bust the operation wide open and let the law pick up the stragglers.'
'We?'
'You're involved, Meyer. I can use that orderly Brain.'
'All my effing celebration?'
'To balance the McGee habit of bulling my way in and breaking the dishes. And if we come out of it with a little meat, we share.'
At five o'clock the following evening, I waited on a bench in the hallway of the Broward Beach police station for ten minutes until a Detective-Sergeant Kibber, a middle-aged man with a tenant-farmer face, wearing brown slacks and a shiny blue sports shirt hanging outside the slacks, came and sat down beside me and asked me my name, address and occupation. I showed him my Florida driver's license. In the blank for occupation is typed Salvage Consultant.
'Who do you think she is, Mr. McGee?'
'It's just a hunch. I had a date in Lauderdale last night with a girl named Marie Bowen. A first date. She didn't show. And... well, hell, Sergeant, I can't remember the last time anybody stood me up. I was going to meet her at a bar. She never showed up.'
'Know her address?'
'I expected to find out what it was last night. We'd been in the same party one other time, and I remember her saying she had friends up here, or a family or something. So when the description of the hit-and-run, and how it was a girl maybe her age and hair color, came over the radio, and it said you didn't have an identification, I thought I could.. find out for sure.'
'We still haven't made her, but we got the car about noon. Somebody stuck it in an empty lot, residential area. It was clouted off a shopping-center lot sometime before eleven last night. The guy who owned it was in the movies there with his wife. This year's Olds. It figures to be kids. We're getting more of that than we should. It was wiped clean. The stupidest kid knows enough for that. When they clout a car it's a pack of them, and one will open up. A thing like this, a kid can't handle it too long.'
He turned to an empty page in his pocket notebook, wrote, tore it out, handed it to rue. 'You take this over to City Memorial, give it to the fellow there that's on duty in the morgue. Six blocks west from here. If it's this Marie Bowen, you phone me from there, otherwise, thanks for the effort. And if it is or it isn't, it still won't be any fun taking a look.'
I looked at the note on the way out. It gave me a strange jolt. 'Give bearer a look at the Jane Doe. Kibber.'
The Gray Lady at the visitor's desk directed me to the right corridor. The down stairway was at the end. Basements are a rarity in Florida. It was all linoleum and battleship gray. A colorless young man sat at a steel table under a hanging lamp reading a tattered Playboy. He took the note, crumpled it and dropped it into a wastebasket, got up and led me to a heavy door, pushed it open, turned on the inside lights. It was a small chilly room with lots of pipes and duets suspended from the ceiling. They had a filing system I had never seen before. They were modular installations, looking like heavy office filing equipment. The doors were gray steel, about six and a half feet long, horizontal, and eighteen inches or so high. Each storage case was four bodies high. They had three of them. I saw that a small ruby light glowed on the edge of the case next to an off-on toggle switch on five of the drawers, the two middle ones in two of the four-high units, and one of the middle ones in the third. They were the ones at the handiest height.
He took hold of the handle on one of the doors, lifted it and slid it back into a slot above the body compartment. He pulled the shelf which held the body outward. It rolled easily on its bearings. It clicked to a stop at the limit of its transit, and a bright built-in lighting system came on automatically. All the light was focused on the cotton sheet covering the body. I felt against my face a stir of air colder than that in the small room.
He reached and took the sheet and slowly turned it down. He turned it all the way down to her waist, and moved just a little bit to the side.
I imagine they had left the eye open to aid identification. The other side of her head and the other side of her face could be identified as probably being of human origin. From the waist down it was not a woman-shape under the sheet, just a lumpiness like a bed carelessly made up to resemble someone sleeping there, and the shoulder on the bad side of her was pushed in in a curious and sickening way.
I looked at that eye. An eye which has dried has an oddly dusty look. Like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl. It was the color I knew it would be. Darker than amber. With green flecks near the pupil.
I looked at the young man. He was standing there, staring at her breasts which he had so unnecessarily uncovered, his underlip hanging away from his teeth.
'You!'
He gave a little start 'Uh... can you give us an I.D.?'
'Sorry, no.
He covered her up. As he started the drawer back in, the lights went off. He pulled the door out and swung it down and clicked it in place. As we headed back out I said, 'Why don't you go get yourself a live one?'
'Huh?' He turned the room light out, pulled the door shut. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. 'Sure, buddy, if I could find one of those. Even that messed up you can tell it was built like it wouldn't never quit. About the only thing didn't get mashed was the tits, but you can tell it had everything to go with them. A stack, buddy.' He sat down, winked, picked up his Playboy and said, 'See you around.'
It had happened a few minutes after midnight on a downtown street. The proprietor of the corner magazine store was a real expert, the kind who raises his voice to let everybody within fifty feet enjoy the analysis.
'Nighttime, friend, this street is dead, everything closed, but you know this town, it's a real fast north-south street, hardly any lights, and all stop streets coming in. I opened up real early, and this morning before I opened up, friend, I went and took me a good look and figured it out. Now those kids were going like hell, no getting around that. So right in the middle of this block that woman, more than likely a little drunk, she comes tottering right out in front of them. At that speed, the kid driving didn't have a prayer of stopping. So what is the logical thing for him to do? What would you or I do, friend? What we would do is swerve toward the curb and cut around behind her. Right? So she sees those headlights coming like hell, and instead of keeping going, and she would have been okay if she had, she spins around and tries to get back where she came from. Pow! So he was going full speed, and where he caught her was about two feet from the curb, caught her with the right side of the front of that stolen car. There were still some little bits of glass sprinkled around there at the point of impact, and the places where the cops put sand or something on the blood. I paced it off, and that poor woman went thirty feet through the air, and they hosed it clean later, but this morning you could see where she hit the front of the Exchange Building just below a second-story window, and she bounced off of the stone front, a glancing blow like, and she landed dead in the middle of the sidewalk another fifteen feet further on, so all told it
