From Potter's Field

8

More than thirty police officers searched the Bowery and its subways throughout the overcast night. No one knew how Gault had gotten into the tu

The next morning, Wesley headed for La Guardia while Marino and I returned to the morgue. I did not encounter Dr. Jonas from the night before, nor was Dr. Horowitz in, but I was told Commander Pe

Marino and I slipped in with the silence of a couple arriving late for a movie, then we lost each other in the dark. I suspected he found a wall, since he had trouble with his balance in situations like this. It was easy to get almost mesmerized and begin to sway. I moved close to the steel table, where dark shapes surrounded Davila's body, a finger of light exploring his ruined head.

'I would like one of the casts for comparison,' someone was saying.

'We've got photos of the shoe prints. I've got some here.' I recognized Commander Pe

'That would be good.'

'The labs have the casts.'

'Yours?'

'No, not ours,' said Commander Pe

'This area of abrasion and patterned contusion right here is from the heel.' The light stopped below the left ear. 'The wavy lines are fairly clear and I see no trace embedded in the abrasion. There's also this pattern right here. I can't make it out. This contusion, uh, sort of a blotch with a little tail. I don't know what that is.'

'We can try image enhancement.'

'Right, right.'

'What about his ear itself? Any pattern?'

'It's hard to tell, but it's split versus cut. The jagged edges are nonabraded and co

'That's why it's split.'

'A single blow delivered with great force.'

'Enough to kill him?'

'Maybe. We'll see. My guess is he's going to have fractures of the left temporal parietal skull and a big epidural hemorrhage.'

'That's what I bet.'

The gloved hands manipulated forceps and the light. A hair, black and about six inches long, clung to the bloody collar of Davila's commando sweater. The hair was collected and placed in an envelope as I worked my way through thick darkness, finding the door. Returning my tinted glasses to a cart, I slipped out. Marino was right behind me.

'If that hair's his,' he said in the corridor, 'then he's dyed it again.'

'I would expect him to have done that,' I said, envisioning the silhouette I had seen last night. Gault's face was very white but, I could not tell about his hair.

'So he's not a redhead anymore.'

'By now he may have purple hair, for all we know.'

'He keeps changing his hair like that, maybe it will fall out.'

'Not likely,' I said. 'But the hair may not be his. Dr. Jonas has dark hair about that long, and she was hovered over the body for a while last night.'

We were in gowns, gloves and masks and looked like a team of surgeons about to perform some remarkable procedure like a heart transplant. Men were carrying in a shipment of pitiful pine boxes destined for Potter's Field, and behind glass, the morning's autopsies had begun. There were only five cases so far, one of them a child who obviously had died violently. Marino averted his gaze.

'Shit,' he muttered, his face dark red. 'What a way to start your day.'

I did not respond.

'Davila'd only been married two months.'

There was nothing I could say.

'I talked to a couple guys who knew him.'

The personal effects of the crack addict named Be

'He always wanted to be a cop. I hear that all the damn time.'

The trash bags were heavy, a foul odor drifting from the top of them, where they were tied. I began carrying them over to table eight.

'You tell me why anybody wants to do this?' Marino was getting more furious as he grabbed a bag and followed me.

'We want to make a difference,' I said. 'We want to somehow make things better.'

'Right,' he said sarcastically. 'Davila sure as hell made a difference. He sure as hell made things better.'

'Don't take that away from him,' I said. 'The good he did and might have done is all he has left.'

A Stryker saw started, water drummed and X-rays bared bullets and bones in this theater with its silent audience and actors that were dead. Momentarily, Commander Pe

'They're pretty much to scale,' he explained. 'I will admit that the casts would be better if we could get them.'

But NYPD had those, and I was willing to bet that the Transit Police would never see them. Frances Pe

We began untying bags and placing items on the table, except for the fetid wool blankets that had been Be

'What's Be

Detective Maier answered, 'He says the stuff in that pile just showed up on his blankets. He went up on the street, came back and there it was, inside the knapsack.' He pointed to a soiled green canvas knapsack that had many stories to tell.

'When was this?' I asked.

'Well now, Be

'Did he see who left the knapsack?' Marino asked.

'He says he didn't.'

I held a photograph close to the bottom of one of the boots to compare the sole, and the size and stitching were the same. Be

'Can't we call her something?' Marino said. 'It's bugging me she's got no name.'

'What would you like to call her?' Commander Pe

'Jane.'

Detective Maier glanced up at Marino. 'That's very original. What's her last name, Doe?'

'Any possibility the saxophone reeds are Be

T don't think so,' Maier said. 'He said all this stuff was in the knapsack. And I'm not aware Be

'He plays an invisible guitar sometimes,' I said.

'So would you if you smoked crack. And that's all he does. He begs and smokes crack.'

'He used to do something before he did that,' I said.

'He was an electrician and his wife left him.'

'That's no reason to move into a sewer,' said Marino, whose wife also had left him. 'There's gotta be something else.'

'Drugs. He ended up across the street in Bellevue. Then he'd sober up and they'd let him out. Same old thing, over and over.'

'Might there have been a saxophone that went with the reeds, and perhaps Be

'I got no way to know,' Maier answered. 'Be

I thought of the mouth of this woman we now called Jane, of the cupping of the front teeth that the forensic dentist blamed on smoking a pipe.

'If she has a long history of playing a clarinet or saxophone,' I said, 'that could explain the damage to her front teeth.'

'What about the tin whistle?' Commander Pe

She bent closer to a gold metal whistle with a red mouthpiece. The brand was Generation, it was British made and did not look new.

'If she played it a lot, then that probably just added to the damage to her front teeth,' I said. 'It's also interesting that it's an alto whistle and the reeds are for an alto sax. So she may have played an alto sax at some point in her life.'

'Maybe before her head injury,' Marino said.

'Maybe,' I said.

We continued sifting through her belongings and reading them like tea leaves. She liked sugarless gum and Sensodyne toothpaste, which made sense in light of her dental problems. She had one pair of men's black jeans, size thirty-two in the waist and thirty-four in length. They were old and rolled up at the cuffs, suggesting they were hand-me-downs or she had gotten them in a secondhand clothing store. Certainly they were much too big for the size she was when she died.

'Are we certain these don't belong to Be

'He says they don't,' Maier replied. 'The stuff he says belongs to him is in that bag.' He pointed to a bulging bag on the floor.

When I slipped a gloved hand into a back pocket of the jeans, I found a red-and-white paper tag that was identical to the ones Marino and I had been given when we visited the American Museum of Natural History. It was round, the size of a silver dollar and attached to a loop of string. Printed on one side was Contributor, with the museum's logo on the other.

'This should be processed for prints,' I said, placing the tag in an evidence bag. 'She should have touched it. Or Gault may have touched it if he paid for admission into the exhibits.'

'Why would she save something like that?' Marino said. 'Usually you take it off your shirt button and drop it in the trash on your way out.'

'Perhaps she put it in her pocket and forgot,' Commander Pe

'It could be a souvenir,' suggested Maier.

'It doesn't look like she collects souvenirs,' I said. 'In fact, she seems very deliberate about what she kept and what she didn't.'

'Are you suggesting she might have kept the tag so someone would eventually find it?'

'I don't know,' I said.

Marino lit a cigarette.

'That makes me wonder if she knew Gault,' Maier said.

I replied, 'If she did, and if she knew she was in danger, then why did she go with him into the park at night?'

'See, that's what don't add up.' Marino exhaled a large cloud of smoke, his mask pulled down.

'It doesn't if she was a complete stranger to him,' I said.