Night and Day (4 page)

“I should be back before dark,” I said to Cynthia as I crossed the reception room. “If you get
any calls and they sound important, take a message and I’ll get back to them when I get in.
Otherwise have them call back tomorrow.”

“Mrs. Klinger has been calling every day. What do you want me to say to her?”

I stopped. “Tell her whatever you’ve been telling her.”

A second later, I shook my head. “Scratch that. Tell her I’m out of the office, but that we’ll
give her a call in the morning.”

Before Cynthia could ask what I was going to say to Jane Klinger, I was through the door,
heading for the stairs. It wasn’t a question I wanted to think about.

Chapter Three

Gasoline rationing means cabs are few and far between, and a ride usually costs more than
Sara is willing to overlook on my expense report. There’s a bus that runs up and down Third,
but I’d missed the 7:30 run and there wouldn’t be another till nearly noon. And the subway . . .
well, even if the trains were running regularly this far downtown, nobody with half a brain goes down those stairs to
a place where the sun never shines.

It makes traveling an adventure. Walk five or ten blocks, hitch a ride with a delivery truck
for twenty blocks, walk another five or ten blocks till you can catch another ride. Most of the
truck drivers aren't supposed to carry passengers, but if you're discreet about it, they’ll give
you a ride, as long as you're willing to ride in the back with their load. A small tip doesn't hurt
either.

I spent the better part of the morning hunkered down with loaves of bread and crates of
vegetables. The worst was the half hour I spent freezing my ass off with some sides of beef. It
was better than walking, but not by much.

At the Uptown District line, the rides dried up. Uptown cops are a lot more likely to do a
random stop and search for passengers or contraband. Nobody was gonna lose their job, or
worse, no matter how good the tip. So I walked.

There weren’t a lot of people on the streets. Uptown doesn’t start hopping till after dark.

I got the eye from a couple of two-man police patrols as I walked through the silent, mostly-empty streets toward the Uptown station. None of the cops approached me, but they wanted me
to know that they were watching. And the closer I got to the station, the more patrols I saw, the
harder the stares.

Two blocks from the station, I ran into the perimeter they’d thrown up. They'd apparently
stretched crime scene tape around 25 square blocks, and put a patrolman every fifty feet or so
inside the tape. A lot of tape, and a lot of cops. Nobody was getting a day off today. Like
Nedelmann said, a real genius had come up with the idea.

The cop on my stretch of street wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. He wasn’t
interested in my private investigator license. And he certainly wasn’t interested in calling Sgt.
Montez on the radio to get approval to let me through the perimeter.

I finally suggested he call somebody a little higher up the food chain to handle the situation,
and I emphasized that it was in his best interest to do so, professionally and personally.

It was a bluff, but he didn’t know that, and with things being the way they are, he couldn’t
be completely sure. In the end, it didn’t matter if he’d bought the bluff or not. I’d made it easy
for him to pass the buck. That was all he was looking for.

The cop got on the radio. A couple of minutes later, a squad car pulled to the curb and a
patrol lieutenant climbed out.

“This area is temporarily off-limits to civilians,” the lieutenant said before I could open my
mouth. The tag on his uniform said “Iverson”.

“I understand that . . . ”

“Then why are you still standing here?” Iverson interrupted. “You’re wasting my time.
Move along, or you go through that tape with handcuffs on your wrists.”

It didn’t look like Lt. Iverson was any more interested in what I had to say than the
patrolman. It was time to try something else. Something I’d never tried before.

A couple of months after Joshua and I started working together, he’d asked me stay in the
office until he got there, after sundown. He’d sat down on the other side of my desk and put a
small blue oval disk between us. Etched on the disk was the image of a bird of prey,
maybe a falcon.

The thought of wearing a pendant wasn’t an attractive one, but I was the junior partner, so I
could either go along or quit. But that wasn’t what it was for.

Joshua told me that if I ever got in trouble with a Vee, flashing the disk might get me out of
the jam, or at least keep me alive until he could get there. He hadn’t mentioned trouble with
humans, but it was worth a shot.

I pulled out my wallet and grabbed the disk from behind my driver’s license. “This mean
anything to you, Lieutenant?” I asked.

Iverson’s eyes flickered. “Interesting,” he said. “Don’t see many of those.”

“I bet.”

“You have ID to go along with that, right?”

I took out my private investigator license and held it up. It wasn’t what he was expecting. “I mean . . . ” He paused. “You know, official ID.”

“That’s what I have.”

I had no idea what kind of ID he was expecting me to flash. I didn’t even know what the
disk meant. It was a start, but it didn’t look like it was going to close the deal. Iverson was
expecting more. I didn’t have more. So he had to make a decision.

“Look, Mr. . . . Welles,” he said, glancing at my license card. “We’ve got a very difficult
situation up here . . .”

“I know,” I replied. “My business at the station isn’t connected with that.”

“You know?”

“I have contacts with Downtown District.”

Iverson was silent as he digested what I’d said. I could almost see the gears turning in his
head. Contacts with Downtown District could mean almost anything. Maybe my brother-in-law
was a patrol cop. Or maybe I played poker with the District Commander every night.

He was reaching for his radio, probably to call it in and dump it on somebody with more
pips on his collar. I didn’t have the time or the desire to be passed up the chain-of-command.
MaryAnn Klinger had a date with the incinerator.

Iverson knew what the disk meant, and his response was to pass the buck to somebody else.
It was time to try something different.

He was in his early forties, about the right age. I moved close to him. “Look, Lieutenant,” I
said softly. “You have any kids?”

His eyes opened wide, and he took a step back. It was a strange reaction. Almost like
the disk made him think my question was a threat. “Yeah,” he said after a
moment. “Two sons. Why?”

“Because somebody else’s kid is lying on a slab in the station morgue. Girl named
MaryAnn Klinger. Your men pulled her out of a dumpster yesterday morning.”

Iverson nodded. “I saw the report. She’d been...”

“That’s the one,” I said. “The girl’s mother hired me to find her daughter.” I paused. “I
can’t bring MaryAnn back to her alive, but I can sure as hell bring her back. As long as
somebody doesn’t toss her corpse into the incinerator.”

Before he could say anything, I continued, “If it was one of your sons, you’d want somebody
to bring him home, wouldn’t you? So you could do the right thing, see he got a proper burial.
You wouldn’t want him tossed into the incinerator like so much trash, right?”

“I can put a hold on the body,” Iverson said slowly. “Tomorrow morning you can come
back and do whatever you have to do.”

“It’s somebody’s daughter,” I said flatly. “Tomorrow morning I have to talk to the mother.”
I stepped close to him. “You want me to tell her that her daughter is stretched out on a metal tray
in a police morgue, that with any luck she’ll still be there when I get back to make the
arrangements? Is that what you’d want to hear?”

Iverson sighed. “Mister Welles, I’d really like to help, but . . .”

“Put an officer with me,” I said. “He can escort me to the station morgue, standby while I
check the body and make some calls, then escort me back here. Simple. Quick. I’m not
interested in your other problem. I just need to take care of the girl.”

Iverson was silent for a moment, then pulled the portable radio from his belt and keyed the
transmit button. “This is Fox Zone One. I’ll be busy for a while. Have Echo Zone One cover
for half an hour.”

He lowered the radio and nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

The morgue was in the basement of the Uptown station. Four coolers in the wall and a large
metal autopsy table in the middle of the room. There’s a full morgue at Central District station,
but unless it’s a complicated case, or a Vee, they handle it at the local stations.

The morgue attendant checked his clipboard and opened Cooler Two. “MaryAnn Klinger,”
he said as he pulled out the tray. “Good thing you got here when you did. She’s marked for
disposal this afternoon.”

“Little quick, isn’t it?” I asked. “She’s barely been here a day. I thought you held for 72
hours.”

The attendant shrugged. “We got four coolers here. They don’t like us to get stacked up.
We’re supposed to hold them for three days . . .” His eyes met those of Lt. Iverson. “. . . but if
the log says disposal, that’s what we do.”

There was a sheet over the corpse and I pulled it back to reveal the face. I hadn’t known
MaryAnn in life, but I’d been carrying her picture around in my pocket for the better part of a
month, so I knew what she looked like. I also wanted to get a look at the wound in her neck, the
wound caused by what the investigating officer had called an unknown object.

“What the hell is this,” I muttered, looking down at her.

The morgue attendant glanced over and nodded. “Oh, yeah, log says they took part of her
neck for the docs at Central to examine. Try to identify what made the wound, I guess.”

The right side of the girl’s neck was missing, from ear to shoulder. Whoever had removed it
hadn’t done a particularly clean job of it. It looked like it had been hacked out of her.

“What butcher did this?” I asked softly.

Before the attendant could speak, Iverson held up his hand. “No,” he said firmly. “I
understand you want to see that the girl is taken care of. But questions about internal department
procedures have nothing to do with that, and I’m not going to allow it.”

I walked to the black telephone on the wall next to the coolers and dialed a number.
“Charlie Welles,” I said when it was answered. “I have a pickup for you at Uptown District
police station. Name on the DB is MaryAnn Klinger. Destination is Downtown District police
station. They’ll be expecting you at both ends. Do it before sundown today.”

Iverson started toward me, but I ignored him. I hung up and dialed another number.
“Charlie Welles, calling for Captain Mutz.” I stared at Iverson. “Hey Jimmy. B&P are going to
bring in a DB from Uptown station later today. Name is MaryAnn Klinger. Could you
make sure there’s no trouble at your end?”

I listened. “Yeah, missing person case. Uptown found her tapped dry in a dumpster
yesterday morning.” I listened again. “No, no problem. Just put her in the cooler overnight, till
I have a chance to talk to the mother. Once I get an okay, I’ll get B&P back over tomorrow to
handle the rest.”

I hung up the phone. Ignoring Iverson, I looked at the morgue attendant. “When do you go
off duty?”

The attendant hesitated, looking at Iverson, then said, “Six-thirty.”

I nodded and looked at Iverson. “The same with you?”

Iverson nodded slowly.

“Okay, this is what’s going to happen,” I said. “A Browne and Poole hearse will be arriving
to pick up this girl sometime today. You can let them do the pickup here at the station, or you
can load her into a meatwagon and meet the hearse at the perimeter. All the same to me.” I
paused. “But if there’s any problem...if anything happens to the corpse, or if anything keeps that
hearse from making the pickup, I swear to God that neither of you will be alive when the sun
rises tomorrow morning. Am I making myself completely clear?”

It was complete bullshit. I couldn’t make that kind of trouble for anybody, anymore than I
could bring MaryAnn Klinger back to life. But they didn’t know that. And frankly, it felt good
saying it.

The morgue attendant was looking at Iverson. He didn’t know who I was or if I could make
a threat like that. Iverson didn’t know either, but he clearly had a good imagination. He’d seen
the disk, and whatever it meant, he wasn’t laughing.

“I’ll handle it,” Iverson said stiffly.

I walked back to the cooler, stared down into the sightless eyes of MaryAnn Klinger for a
moment, then covered her face with the sheet. “Let’s go,” I said, turning to Iverson. “I’m done
here.”

My second stop uptown was a boarding house on Clinton Avenue. The 15-year old missing
girl I was looking for, Rachel Stein, supposedly lived there. At least that’s what she’d told a
friend downtown.

Her friend hadn’t been anxious to rat Rachel out, but when I explained what happens to
young girls alone in the city, the girl had produced a postcard, sent a week earlier. The postcard
had a Clinton Avenue return address.