Amerikan Eagle (3 page)

“No,” Sam said. “You know the arrangement, Ralph. We get twenty-four hours, first dibs, before you use any crime scene photos in the paper.”

Another flash, and Sam blinked at the dots of light floating before his eyes. “Come on, Inspector, give me a break,” Ralph muttered. “Twelve hours, twenty-four hours. What difference does it make?”

“If it’s twenty-four hours, it makes no difference at all. If it’s twelve hours, the department makes arrangements with another photographer. You’re an educated man, Ralph, you know what the jobless numbers are like. You really want to dick around with this sweet deal?”

A third flare of light. “Some goddamn sweet deal, getting rained on in the cold, taking photos of a dead bum.”

Sam gave him a gentle slap on his back. “Just the glamour of being a newsman, right?”

“Some fucking glamour. My boss got a visit last week from some jerk in the Department of the Interior. Wanted to know how we’d survive if our newsprint ration got cut again next month. So my boss got the message—tone down the editorials, or the paper gets shut down. Yeah, that’s glamour.”

Sam said, “Spare us the whining. Just get the photos.”

“Coming right up, Inspector. I know how to keep my job, just you see.”

* * *

This was Sam’s first untimely death as an inspector. As a patrolman and, later, sergeant, he had seen a number of
bodies, from drowned hoboes pulled from Portsmouth Harbor to sailors knifed outside one of the scores of bars near Ceres Street. But as a patrolman or a sergeant, you secured the scene and waited for the inspector to arrive. That had been old Hugh Johnson, until he died of bone cancer last year.

Now it was Sam’s job, and what he did tonight could decide whether he got to keep it. He was on probation, a month left before he turned in the silver shield of an inspector on tryout, before getting the gold shield and a promised pay raise that would give his family some breathing room, a bit socked away in savings, something that would put them at the top of the heap in this lousy economy. So far, all of his cases had been minor crap, like burglaries, bunco cases, or chasing down leads for the Department of the Interior on labor camp escapees who had ties to the area. But if this turned out to be a homicide, it could help him with the Police Commission and their decision on his ultimate status.

As Ralph made his way back to the restaurant’s parking lot, Frank spoke up. “Sam, looks like this is a lucky night for all of us.”

“Not sure what you mean.”

Frank played the light over the corpse. “Doesn’t look like a political hit, which means it won’t be taken away from us. This’ll be a good first case for you, Sam.”

“Sorry, what in hell’s a political hit?” Leo asked.

Frank answered, “What I mean, kid, is that sometimes bodies pop up here and there, mostly in the big cities, where the guy has his hands tied behind him and he’s got two taps to the back of the head. None of those cases ever get solved. So it’s lucky for us that this guy’s
arms are nice and spread out. Means nothing political is involved. We can just do our jobs, and nobody from Concord is going to bother us.”

Sam squatted, winced as a cold dribble of rainwater went down the back of his neck. He looked about him: a dead body, possible homicide, his first major case. Even in the rain and darkness, everything seemed in sharp focus: the two cops and their wet slickers, the mud, and the sour tang of salt water. The scent of piss from the dead man before him, the one who’d brought him here.

The man was thin, maybe fifties, early sixties. The skin was pale and the hair was a whitish blond. No cuts or bruises on the face. Sam touched the skin. Clammy. He went through the pockets of the suit coat, taking his time. No money, no paper, no wallet, no coins, no fountain pen, no cigarettes, no lighter. He sensed the other cops watching him, evaluating him, a feeling he hated.

Sam raised each shirtsleeve, looking for a watch or jewelry. “Frank,” he said. “Bring the light closer, down to his wrist.”

Frank lowered the light, illuminating the skinny white wrist. There. A row of faint squiggles on the skin. Numerals. Sam rubbed at the numerals. They didn’t smudge or come off.

A row of numbers, tattooed along the wrist. Portsmouth was a navy town, and Sam had seen every kind of tattoo, from Neptune to mermaids to naked hula girls, but never anything like this.

The numerals were blue-gray, jagged, as if they had been quickly etched in:

9 1 1 2 8 3

“Frank? You see those numbers? You ever see anything like that before?”

Frank leaned forward, and rainwater poured off his hat brim. “Nope, never have. Maybe the coroner, maybe he’s seen something like that. But not me.”

Though it didn’t make any difference to the dead man, Sam lowered the shirtsleeve. “Leo. Give me a hand here. We need to roll him over.”

“Cripes,” Leo said, but he was a good cop and did as he was told. They rolled the corpse on its side, and Sam checked the front and rear pockets of the trousers. The fabric was sopping wet, but the pockets were empty. The stench from the body grew stronger. Frank was right. No bullet wounds to the base of the skull. Sam and Leo rolled the body back.

“No money, no wallet,” Sam told them, standing up.

Leo said, “Maybe he was stripped, robbed, by one of the bums from the camp.”

Frank laughed. “Shit, kid, don’t be dumb. There’d be footprints. Nope, the way he got here is the way he arrived: no cash and no belongings. Still, Sam …”

“Go on, Frank.”

“Those clothes. They look pretty good. You know? Not from somebody riding boxcars or hitchhiking, looking for work. No patches, no rips. Not brand-new but not … well, not beat up.”

There was noise again from the Fish Shanty parking lot, and Sam looked up to see the hearse from the Woods funeral home roll in. Saunders from the county medical examiner’s office shouldn’t be too far behind, so the body could be moved and they could all get out of this damn
rain. Sam was hungry, and it was getting late, and Sarah and Toby were waiting for him at home.

Two attendants carried a canvas stretcher from the hearse, the men holding the stretcher by its side so water didn’t pool in the canvas. Sam didn’t envy them having to haul this corpse back to the hearse, over the gravel and railroad ties, but it was their job. As everyone said nowadays, it was good just to have a job.

Frank stared at the approaching attendants, stumbling a little in the mud, and said, “Hey, Sam. All right if me and the kid take off after the body’s removed?”

“Yeah, but first I want the two of you to do a check of the buildings on this side of the tracks. See if anybody saw anything.”

“They’re mostly stores. They’re all closed by now.”

“Then it won’t take long, will it?” Sam told Frank. “If anything of interest surfaces, call me at home. If not, write up a report. Leave it on my desk when your shift’s over.”

Frank said, “All right. But hey, remember, there’s a Party meeting tomorrow night. You’ve missed the last two. You don’t want me to make a report to the county director, now, do you? Or have one of Long’s boys start asking you questions?”

“Just do the search,” Sam said. “Write something up and put it on my desk. Don’t worry about me and the Party.”

“Sam, that’s the wrong attitude, you know it is.” Frank’s tone had sharpened. “Now, I give you a break ’cause you’re on the force and all, but you better be there, no foolin’. I’d hate to make a formal report. Especially
with you being on probation and all. Hate to have something like that affect your promotion.”

Sam folded his arms, flashlight in his right hand, forcing himself not to move, forcing his voice to come out slow and deliberate. “I’ll be at the damn meeting. Okay?”

Leo was grinning, a rookie cop glad to see his mentor give the new detective a hard time. “Your brother be there, Sam?”

Sam aimed his RayoVac at the young cop’s face. “You know my brother?”

“No, but I know where he is,” Leo said. “In a labor camp up in New York.”

Sam kept quiet as the wind rose up, water striking his face, keeping the flashlight beam steady on the younger man. “Then I guess he won’t be there tomorrow night, will he, Leo.”

“Hey, Sam, just a joke. That’s all. Don’t you know how to take a joke?”

“Sure, Leo. I’m an inspector. I know a lot of things. Know how to question people. How to look at a crime scene. And how to recognize jerks when I meet them.”

Frank started to say something, but Sam turned away. “Party or no Party, brother or no brother, you’re both still beat cops, and I’m an inspector. In a couple of minutes, I’m going to be nice and dry, and you’re still going to be out here in this shitty rain, doing what I told you to do. That’s what I know. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “Now I wish this fucking guy had been a political. At least we could get out of the rain sooner.”

“We all have wishes, don’t we, Frank,” Sam said.

Ten minutes later, Sam sat in the warmth of the Fish Shanty, writing up his notes while trying to ignore the smell of fried seafood, mixed in with the smoke from cheap cigarettes and cigars. Sarah was waiting at home with his supper, and woe be to him if he went home without an appetite.

He sat on a stool at the lunch counter, and off to both sides, booths filled up with shipyard workers, a scattering of locals, and sailors getting a fast meal into them before heading out for a night of whoring and drinking.

Unbidden, an empty white coffee cup was placed on the counter, and Sam looked up from his notes to see a smiling red-haired waitress wearing a black and white uniform that was just a tad too tight. Donna Fitzgerald, a few years younger than Sam, a local girl who had hung out with him and other kids years ago, having fun, raising hell, until high school and the Depression had scattered them. He smiled back.

“Having a busy night, Sam?”

“Just working a case. How are you doing, Donna?”

“Doing okay. Last night here at the Shanty, thank God.” Her smile broadened, displaying the dimple on her left cheek.

“Really?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, filling up his cup from a dented metal coffeepot. “I start tomorrow at the Rusty Hammer,
in town. Oh, it’s still waitressing, but you get a good lunch crowd with the businessmen, with better tips. Here, well, most of the customers are tight with their money, saving it for … other things.” She winked and put a freckled hand on top of his. “Now, Sam, how come you never asked me out when we were in school together?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Donna. The age difference, I guess. Being in different classes.”

“Age doesn’t make much of a difference now, does it?” Her hand was still on his.

He smiled. “Guess it doesn’t.”

There was a shout from the kitchen; she took her hand away. “Time to get back to work. Good to see you, Sam … And did you hear? My man Larry is getting released from the camps in Utah. He should be back here in Portsmouth by the end of the week.”

“That’s … that’s good news, Donna.” For the briefest of moments, when her hand had touched his, there had been a little spark, a jolt.

She winked at him, and he remembered how pretty she’d been at fifteen. “Certainly is. You take care, Sam, okay?”

“I will,” he promised, and he watched her walk away, admiring the way the uniform hugged her hips and her other curves. He saw at the far end of the counter, sitting by themselves, a man and woman and small boy. They sat with cups of tea before them and nearly empty plates, a paper check on the countertop near the man’s elbow. They were well dressed and quiet. He knew the look. Refugees. French, Dutch, Brits, or Jews from everywhere else in Europe. Like lots of port cities up and down
the Atlantic Coast, his hometown was bursting with refugees. The family had probably come here for a hot meal, and they were stretching out the comfort of food and being warm and dry. Sam knew they were here illegally. He didn’t care. It was somebody else’s problem, not his.

He looked down at his notes again, trying to get Donna out of his mind. Not much in his notes. Dead man, no identification, nice clothes, and a tattoo: 9 1 1 2 8 3. What the hell did that mean? A series of numbers so important they couldn’t be forgotten? Like what? A bank account? A phone number? Or if they were added in some sort of combination—or did they stand for letters? He did some scribbling on his pad, substituting each number with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, and came up with IAABHC. He tried rearranging those letters and came up with nothing. So maybe it was just the numbers.

But why go to the trouble of having them tattooed?

Sam looked up from his notebook and watched the boy at the other end of the counter whisper something to his mother. She pointed to the rear of the diner. The boy slid off his stool, then walked away from the counter, toward the bathroom. The boy was about Toby’s age. Sam wondered what it must be like to be that young and torn from your home, to live in a strange land where sometimes the people treated you nice and other times they arrested you and put you in a camp.

He took his wallet out, looked inside. Sighed. Being a cop meant a paycheck, but not much of one. Still …

For the second time this night, Sam slid out a dollar bill. He waited until the boy came back out, then let the bill fall to the linoleum. As the boy went by—Sam noted
the sharp whiff of mothballs from the boy’s coat, probably a castoff from the Salvation Army—he reached out and caught his elbow. “Hey, hold on.” The child froze, and Sam felt the sudden trembling of the thin arm.

“Sir?” the boy said.

Sam pointed to the floor. “You dropped this on the way over.”

The boy—brown-eyed with olive-colored skin—shook his head gravely. Sam reached to the dirty floor, picked up the dollar bill, and pressed it into the boy’s palm. “Yes, I saw you drop it. It belongs to you.”

The boy stared, looked at Sam. Then his fingers curled around the bill and he ran back to his parents. The father started whispering furiously to the mother, but she shook her head and took the dollar bill from her boy. She picked up the check and nodded at the Shanty’s owner, Jack Tinios, who had just ambled out of the kitchen. He pocketed both the check and dollar bill, then came over to Sam, wiping his hands on a threadbare towel.