The cop bristled. “Knock whose teeth-”
He never got to finish. Coffin Ed planted a left hook in his stomach and crossed an overhand right to the jaw. The cop went down on his hips; his head leaned slowly forward until it stopped between his knees.
No one said anything. It was a delicate situation. Coffin Ed was due a reprimand, but the lieutenant from Homicide was the ranking officer, and the cop had already riled him with the crack about the nuns.
“He asked for it,” he muttered to himself, then turned to the other prowl car cop. “Take him back to the station.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said with a dead-pan expression, giving Coffin Ed a threatening look.
Grave Digger put a hand on Coffin Ed’s arm. “Easy, man,” he murmured.
The cop helped his partner to his feet. He could stand, but he was groggy. They got in the prowl car and drove off.
The others recrossed the street and stared at the corpse. The lieutenant stuck the wig into his overcoat pocket.
“How old would you say she was?” he asked Grave Digger.
“Young,” Grave Digger said. “Middle twenties.”
”What beats me is why would a young woman masquerade as an old woman for?”
“Maybe she was trying to impersonate a nun, a Homicide detective ventured.
The lieutenant, began to turn red. “You mean so she could get into the convent?”
“Not necessarily-maybe she had a racket.”
“What kind of racket?” The lieutenant looked at Grave Digger as though he had all the answers.
“Don’t ask me,” Grave Digger said. “Folks up here are dreaming up new rackets every day. They got the time and the imagination, and all they need is a racket to make the money.”
“Well, all we can do now is leave her for Doc Fullhouse,” the lieutenant said. “Let’s go over the ground and see what it tells.”
Grave Digger got a heavy flashlight from the glove compartment of their car, and he and Coffin Ed walked back to the intersection.
The others covered the area nearer to the corpse. No tire marks were evident where a car might have braked suddenly; they found no broken glass.
Coming up the street from Convent Avenue, playing the light from right to left, Grave Digger noticed two small black marks on the gray-black asphalt, and they knelt in the street to study them.
“Somebody gunned a car here,” he concluded.
“I’d say a big car with a used tread, but we’ll leave it for the experts.”
Coffin Ed noticed a car with a wheel jacked up. On closer inspection they noticed that the opposite wheel was missing. They looked at one another.
“That’s the money,” Grave Digger said.
“For this one,” Coffin Ed agreed. “Some local tire thief witnessed the kill.”
“What he saw made him broom like the devil was after him.”
“If he wasn’t seen and taken away.”
“Not that son. He had presence of mind enough to get away with his wheel,” Grave Digger said.
“He oughtn’t to be hard to find. Any son out tire-thieving on a night like this has got some pretty hot skirt to support.”
The lieutenant listened to their findings with interest but no particular concern.
“What I want to know is how this woman got killed,” he said. “Then we’ll know what to look for.”
A car turned in from Convent Avenue, and Coffin Ed said, “We ought to soon know; that looks like Doc’s struggle-buggy.”
Doctor Fullhouse was bundled up as though on an expedition to the South Pole. He was an old, slow-moving man, and what could be seen of his face between an astrakhan cap and a thick yellow cashmere muffler made one think of a laughing mummy.
His spectacles steamed over the instant he stepped from his overheated car, and he had to take them off. He peered about from watery blue eyes, searching for the body.
“Where’s the cadaver?” he asked in a querulous voice.
The lieutenant pointed. “Stuck to the wall.”
“You didn’t tell me it was a vampire bat,” he complained.
The lieutenant laughed dutifully.
“Well, get it down,” Doc said. “You don’t expect me to climb up there and examine it.”
Grave Digger clutched one arm, Coffin Ed the other; the two detectives from Homicide took a leg apiece. The body was stiff as a plaster cast. They tried to move it gently, but the face was firmly stuck. They tugged, and suddenly the body fell.
They laid the corpse on its back. The black skin of the cheeks framing the cockscomb of frozen blood had turned a strange powdery gray. Drops of frozen blood clung to the staring eyeballs.
“My God!” one of the Homicide detectives muttered, stepped to the curb and vomited.
The others swallowed hard.
Doc got a lamp from his car with a long extension cord and focused the light on the body. He looked at it without emotion.
“That’s death for you,” he said. “She was probably a goodlooking woman.”
No one said anything. Even Haggerty’s tongue had dried up.
“All right, give me a hand,” Doc said. “We got to undress her.”
Grave Digger lifted her shoulders, and Doc peeled off the coat. The other detectives got off her gloves and shoes. Doc cut open the thick black dress with a pair of shears. Underneath she wore only a black uplift bra and lace-trimmed nylon panties. Her limbs were smooth, and well-rounded, but muscular. Falsies came off with the bra, revealing a smooth, flat, mannish chest. Underneath the nylon panties was a heavily padded, yellow satin loincloth.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed exchanged a quick, knowing glance. But the others didn’t get it until the loincloth had been cut and stripped from the hard narrow hips.
“Well, I’ll be God-damned!” the Homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “She’s a man!”
“There ain’t any doubt about that,” Haggerty said, finding his voice at last.
Doc turned the body over. Across the back, at the base of the spine, was a tremendous welt, colored dark grape-purple.
“Well, that’s what did it,” Doc said. “He was struck here by great force and catapulted into the wall.”
“By what, for chrissake?” the lieutenant asked.
“Certainly not by a baseball bat,” Haggerty said.
“My conjecture is that he was hit by an automobile from behind,” Doc ventured. “I couldn’t say positively until after the autopsy; and maybe not then.”
The lieutenant looked from the street to the convent wall. “Frankly, Doc, I don’t believe he was knocked from the street against that wall in the position that we found him,” he said. “Isn’t there a possibility that he was run over and then stuck up there afterwards?”
Doc made a bundle of the clothes, covered the body with its coat and stood up.
“Everything is possible,” he said. “If you can imagine a driver running over him, then stopping his car and getting out and propping the body against the wall, and pushing its face into that crevice until it was stuck, then-”
The lieutenant cut him off. “Well, goddammit, I can imagine that better than I can imagine the body being knocked up there from the street, no matter what hit it. Besides which, people have been known to do things worse than that.”
Doc patted him on the shoulder, smiling indulgently. “Don’t try to make your job any harder than it is,” he said. “Look for a hit-and-run driver, and leave the maniacs to Bellevue’s psychiatrists.”
Chapter 7
