Where Is Bianca?

Where is Bianca?

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

1

Wherefore is this day different from all other days? Corrigan was to ask himself before the day was over (vaguely remembering the rituals of some of the Jewish boys he had palled around with in his youth). It turned out different, all right. The girl (or woman—it was hard to tell) brought into the morgue by the meat wagon spelled the difference. And a disagreeable difference it was.

But that was later.

Corrigan's day began in the usual way. He left his bachelor pad in the Brookfield at 8:03
A
.
M
., jockeyed the balky self-service elevator down to the basement parking area, got into his deliberately meaningless black Ford with its powerful Interceptor engine and nosed it out into the sunny street, reaching for the two-way. He reported in briefly to the communications center on the top floor of headquarters and then hung up to devote himself wholemindedly to bucking the New York traffic.

As he maneuvered Car 40, NYPD, through the unorganized hell of the city streets, Corrigan kept one ear cocked for the interchange of voices coming from his loudspeaker. None of the calls concerned him; nothing was said about the discovery of the girl—or woman—in the sewer or the routine delivery of her dehumanized body to the morgue.

Downtown in the frowning old headquarters building on Centre Street, Corrigan exchanged the usual top of the morning with patrolmen, plainclothesmen, and detectives. “Hi, Mac.” “Captain.” “How's Molly, Joe?” “Great, Tim. The kid's almost eight pounds.” “Morning, Inspector. How's tricks?” “They'll have to work the street till they open up again”—this with a grin; and so it went until he reached his office. It was a small room whose dinginess belied his rank and name on the frosted glass door.

He shut the door and went quickly through his mail.

Corrigan did not look like a police officer. He was an unostentatious 5′10″, with a build that suggested he spent an hour or two a day at some businessman's gym; he was wearing a smart dark Madison Avenue type suit. His features were all angles, their sharpness softened by an amiable expression. The authority was in his eye, which was brown, steady, and watchful as a boxer's. But he could mask it, and when he did he almost contrived to look like any one of thousands of executives who stopped into side-street bars in late afternoon on their way home to Stamford or Darien. The “almost” modification was his other eye, which was not there.

The missing eye—his left—presented problems not altogether biological. For one thing, there were the department regulations. He had almost not reapplied after Korea and the hospitalization; but certain police brass with two good eyes found themselves able to wink, after carefully inspecting his pre-Korea record. For another thing, there had been that long dreary stretch in the base hospital wondering what an ex-cop with an eye gone was going to do with the rest of his life. No self-pity; Corrigan had long ago licked that in himself. It had been a cold reappraisal, with cold prospects; but that was before he was discharged and the brass winked. The third problem was appearance.

A police officer wearing an eye-patch was certainly unusual. It limited his usefulness. He could not, for example, engage in undercover police work; the patch was as identifying as the beacon on a lighthouse. Worse, it called attention to him, in a profession in which the ability to melt into the populace was often an asset and sometimes a necessity.

Corrigan made a plus out of his liability. If he could not hide, he would make himself stand out like a sore thumb. Let them be afraid of him. Here comes Corrigan, the s.o.b. It meant getting rough; he got rough, sometimes when it sickened him. He deliberately built a reputation for toughness. It worked. He was rated the most valuable man on the Main Office Squad.

Only once had he considered a glass eye, for about five seconds. Then he went into the bathroom, threw up, and that was that.

His mail this morning was not exciting: a postcard from a vacationing Safe and Loft specialist attached to the MOS; a couple of invitations to speak before groups—one from a boy's camp; he glanced at the calendar and made a note to accept this last. A note on pink, perfumed paper brought back pleasurable memories of a few weekends; this he stowed safely in his pocket, where none of the Main Office Squad, always quick with a ribbing, could be expected to chance upon it. Then a letter scrawled in pencil threatening his life; he put it aside for Fingerprint and Lab with as much concern as if it had been a pre-sale announcement about exclusive neckwear from his favorite haberdasher. Nine out of ten of these death threats were empty of content, the scrawlings of safely entrenched psychos or cranks; the tenth … well, Corrigan would have said, he hadn't joined the PD to die in a rocking chair.

He picked up the long morning teletype, copies of which went out to every precinct, bureau, and squad leader in the city. The report detailed each crime and arrest that had taken place in the city since the previous afternoon.

A rapid reader, Corrigan began checking the items against his mental file. More than once a name, an alias, or the M.O. of some crime had given him a break in an old case.

His capacity to spot and link up seemingly unrelated details was as natural to him as brushing his teeth. He had been weaned on a policeman's shield. Three generations ago, the first American Corrigan had joined New York's Finest the day after he got his citizenship papers. The name Corrigan had been on the PD roster ever since, with time out only for the Korean war. The 38th Parallel—and the rape of his eye—had given Tim Corrigan a distaste for the military, but the operative chicanery of the OSS had appealed to him, and his record had been sufficiently shiny to make a major general suggest a career in military intelligence. Corrigan had turned the general down. “I can't change my metabolism now, General,” he had said. “I'm a chronic cop, and I've got to go back and find out if they still want me.” And eventually the prodigal had found himself back in the barren squadrooms.

Corrigan's knowledgeable eye went over the teletype. It seemed to present nothing out of the ordinary. Assault with deadly weapon (switchblade knife) … stolen car … possession of heroin … assault on female … armed robbery … possession of burglar's tools … suspicion of arson.…

He read the report on the girl-woman with the same practiced half attention. But by the time he was finished with it his built-in alarm had begun to ring; and he went back and started over again.

Nude body of unidentified female … height 5′5″ … weight estimated, 118 lbs
…
age indeterminate, but probably in the mid 20's … race, Caucasian … hair and coloration, brunette … no description of facial features possible. One item of personal adornment, a sterling silver ring described by consulting expert as of Mayan motif, worn on little finger of right hand. No gunshot wounds. No (detectable) knife wounds. P.M. scheduled
.…

The details were not nice, and Corrigan, case-hardened as he was, felt gripes in his groin as he read them over.

The body had been literally brought to light late the previous day by a city employe assigned to a sewer crew. This particular crew had the unlovely job of spreading rat poison in the ceaseless underground war waged by the city on the multimillions of New York's rodent population. The workman had opened a manhole cover and descended into the dank cavern. The beam of his hand lamp had immediately caught the body. The man had gone into hysterics.

Corrigan picked up the phone and asked for Missing Persons.

“John. I just finished the morning report.…”

“And you want to know if she's been reported missing,” said Ginther's cheerful voice.

“Right,” Corrigan said.

“No. Funny thing. The general description fits enough broads in New York to repopulate Staten Island. Sometimes we get half a dozen MPs who'd match her description to a T, and then again none.”

“And this is a none day,” Corrigan said.

Ginther was afraid so. But the papers would note it, and they would get calls. They always did, from crackpots looking for a daughter dead and buried for ten years, or some sucker whose wife had run off with a whoopee-maker who had hit town with a convention.

“I'll keep in touch,” the MP man said.

“Thanks,” said Corrigan.

He was about to hang up when Ginther said, “They've pegged it homicide?”

“Not yet, John, but I've got that certain feeling.” Girls who died of natural causes were not likely to be found in sewers.

“One hell of a thing,” Ginther said. “Somebody hefting a manhole cover and dropping her down there with a reception committee of those little furry bastards waiting. You know what I'd give you for half the human race? A set of matched rat pelts from the sewer they found her in.” And the MP man, a notoriously cynical observer of the human scene, banged up.

Corrigan placed a second call.

Chuck Baer's answering service responded. Mr. Baer was not in. Would he care to leave a message?

“Please have him call Tim Corrigan at police headquarters as soon as possible.”

Corrigan hung up and spent a few minutes thinking over a conversation he had had with Baer the previous afternoon. In their OSS days, he and Chuck had been a working team; each owed his life to the other several times over. They had been mustered out at about the same time, Corrigan to return to the department, Baer to open a private detective agency.

Yesterday Chuck had mentioned to Corrigan a current case involving a client with a missing wife. The wife was rich and attractive, with no particular oddities of appearance. She was twenty-five years old. She weighed about 120 pounds, and stood 5′5½″ in her stockinged feet. Coloration brunette. And she maintained a town house not far from the East Side location where the sewer crewman had opened the manhole cover.

It could be a coincidence, and in any event it was a long shot; but Corrigan's official life was often characterized by long shots. File and remember. Meanwhile, wait for Baer's call-back.

Corrigan pursued the routine. He took the elevator to the fourth floor. The room he went into was vast. It had once housed the police gymnasium; now it was used for the daily lineup. The night's haul was in the bullpen—every size, shape, and color, brought in from precincts all over the city.

He shot the breeze briefly with several of the seventy or eighty detectives present. But he was not there for conversation. He sat down and watched and listened intently, studying the faces of the men under the lights. You never knew when the memory of some sullen mugger of today came back to nail the killer of tomorrow.

When he got back to his office, Chuck Baer was there.

“Thought I'd return your call in person. What's up?” Baer was smoking one of his endless supply of panatellas.

Corrigan delivered a left hook to Baer's belly. The big man did not even whince. “Still in condition, I see.”