thingless corpse.
'Where's the fire, fellas?' the man asked pleasantly; his teeth were very white in a wide smile; his light blue eyes seemed to smile, too.
'There's a guy down there,' Jimmy said.
'And he doesn't have no thing,' Petey said.
'Really,' the man said. He rose, smiled, stretched, as if awaking from a nap. 'Well, why don't I call somebody for you, then?'
'Would you, mister?' Jimmy asked. He looked toward the ramshackle house. 'They got a phone in there?'
'Sure,' the man said. He patted the boy on the shoulder. 'I'll call the railroad dicks.'
Petey winced at the word 'dicks.'
'Now,' the man said, smiling back at them as he climbed the rickety steps, 'why don't you go on back and stand guard, till help comes?'
Jimmy looked at Petey.
Petey looked at Jimmy.
'Do we got to, mister?' Jimmy asked.
'Yes,' the man said. He smiled like something was funny, but his voice was somber: 'It's your civic duty.'
And the boys went back to the Run. They stood at the edge of Jackass Hill, looking mutely toward the black socks extending from the brown bushes.
Hardly fifteen minutes had gone by when two railroad detectives arrived, and within half an hour sirens announced the arrival of Cleveland city cops-several uniformed men and a pair of detectives.
The uniformed men stayed up at the top of the incline, keeping sightseers away. The pair of detectives descended; neither man wore a topcoat, but it was cold enough for their breaths to smoke.
One of the detectives looked so young he might have been the other detective’s son; his name was Albert Curry, and he was a pasty-faced, cherubic man of twenty-seven who looked twenty. The man he was following down the step incline into the ravine was Martin Merlo, a tall, thin, serious-looking individual with glasses. He might have been a school teacher. He was, instead, one of the best homicide detectives in the bureau-partnered, at his own request, with Curry, the city's youngest detective.
Curry, whose first assignment was to partner with Merlo, and who this late Monday afternoon was going out on a murder case for the first time, had no idea why the older, well-respected cop had requested him. But he was not complaining; he felt lucky to be here.
Lucky, that is, until he saw the man with no head and black socks.
'Judas priest,' Curry said, and he turned away and threw up in a nearby bush.
Merlo came over and put his hand on Curry's shoulder as the younger cop bent forward, hands on his knees, staring whitely at what had been in his stomach.
'I'm okay, Detective Merlo,' Curry said.
'Try not to puke on any body parts,' Merlo said, not unkindly, slapping him on the back.
Merlo, notepad in hand, pearl-gray fedora tilted back on his head expos-ing his professorial brow, began questioning the two boys. The two railroad dicks, a middle-aged stocky guy and a slim guy about thirty, both in rumpled brown suits, got them dirty by kneeling in sandy earth perhaps twenty feet from the bush under which the corpse lay. They began digging with their hands, as if rooting for truffles.
Curry, feeling dizzy but better, approached them. 'What are you men doing?' he asked.
'Looked disturbed here,' the stocky one said. He had a face as rumpled as his suit.
'Looked disturbed?' Curry asked.
'The ground,' said the slim one. 'I think something's buried here
… hell-oh!'
And he withdrew from the ground his harvest: a human head, which he grasped by its long dark hair. The eyes were half-lidded, staring at Curry blankly, out of a round, jug-eared face.
Curry didn't feel so good.
But he'd be all right; Christ knew there was nothing left in his stomach to puke up.
'Bingo,' the stocky one said, and withdrew his hand from the sand and held up his palm; in it was what might have been a turnip but was in fact a severed human penis.
And Curry stumbled back to his bush and found that something had remained in his stomach, after all.
Merlo was in the process of dismissing the young boys; they had been helpful, but (Merlo told Curry, as the latter stumbled over, wiping his mouth) rounding up these body parts was nothing a kid should see. Curry couldn't have agreed more.
Meanwhile, back at the corpse, the railroad dicks were trying to put the puzzle together.
'I tell you it ain't his,' the stocky one was saying.
'The dick?' the other dick asked.
'No, you moron. The head. The head belongs to a guy in his late forties, early fifties maybe. Looks like he'd be kinda heavyset. That body is a young guy's body.'
Merlo joined them. The head had been placed on the ground above the neck of the corpse. The penis had been placed in the correct general area as well.
'The genitals don't match, either,' Merlo said dispassionately. 'Torso is white as snow, head and penis have a peculiar discoloration.'
'So would yours,' said the slim one skeptically, 'if somebody hadda whacked 'em off without so much as a howdy-do.'
'Yeah, and where's the goddamn blood?' asked the stocky one.
'Not here,' Merlo admitted.
Curry approached, tentatively. 'Detective Merlo… if that head doesn't match the body, doesn't that mean we have two homicides?'
Merlo nodded. He gestured toward nothing in particular. 'Scout the area, why don't you. Maybe you'll turn something up.'
Curry nodded back and began a reluctant search. Not thirty feet away, under more brush, was the other headless corpse. This oak-colored, stocky, emasculated body seemed a match for the items the railroad dicks had dug up in the sand.
Also under the brush was a dark blue suit coat with a B.R. Baker Com-pany label, and a white shirt and underwear. All three garments were stiff as cardboard in places where they were stained a reddish brown.
'Finally found some blood,' Curry told Merlo, handing him the pile of clothes.
'They weren't killed here, then,' Merlo said, eyes narrowing. 'These look like they belong to the older, heavier guy's clothes; he was killed wearing them, but not here. Both bodies were drained of blood, somewhere else, and in the case of the older man possibly treated with some chemical, God knows why.'
'Preservation?'
'Good guess, but why? A murderer should want his victim to decom-pose. Why preserve evidence?'
'Decay attracts attention; preservation might delay the bodies being found.'
'Maybe,' Merlo shrugged, his expression like that of a math teacher pondering a problem. 'But in Kingsbury Run, who'd notice the smell?'
'Sir, how could somebody haul these bodies here without being seen?'
'He may have done it after dark; or maybe he was seen. Only who could see him, but some 'bo?'
'Is that who these men are? Were? Hobos?'
Merlo looked in the direction of the shantytown. 'It's our job to find out, isn't it?'
About seventy-five feet from the second body was more earth that looked 'disturbed.' Curry (now wearing gloves) found the second head and the second penis buried there. He had nothing left in his stomach, by this point, and was getting numb to the horror of the afternoon. Dusk was settling in, threatening evening, and the dimness gave less reality to the round head he cupped in his palm. It had a young, curiously innocent face, male but with feminine lips.
'Who's that you have there?' Merlo asked with a thin smile. 'Yorick?'
'Who?'
'Never mind. Let's put the puzzle together.'
The body parts all matched up now, but at this hour it took flashlights to prove it.
