The Con Man (87th Precinct)

The Missing Persons Bureau is a part of the Detective Division, and so the two men Bert Kling talked to were detectives.

One was called Ambrose.

The other was called Bartholdi.

“Naturally,” Bartholdi said, “we got nothing to do here but concern ourselves with floaters.”

“Naturally,” Ambrose said.

“We only got reports on sixteen missing kids under the age of ten today, but we got nothing to do but worry about a stiff been in the water for six months.”

“Four months,” Kling corrected.

“Pardon me,” Bartholdi said.

“With dicks from the 87th,” Ambrose said, “you got to be careful. You slip up by a couple of months, they jump down your throat. They got very technical flatfoots at the 87th.”

“We try our hardest,” Kling said drily.

“Humanitarians all,” Bartholdi said. “They worry about floaters. They got concern for the human race.”

“Us,” Ambrose said, “all we got to worry about is the three-year-old kids who vanish from their front stoops. That’s all we got to worry about.”

“You’d think I was asking to spend the night with your sister,” Kling said. “All I want is a look at your files.”

“I’d rather you spent the night with my sister,” Bartholdi said. “You might be disappointed since she’s only eight years old, but I’d still rather.”

“It ain’t that we don’t believe in interdepartmental cooperation,” Ambrose said. “There ain’t nothing we like better than helping out fellow flatfoots. Ain’t that a fact, Romeo?”

Romeo Bartholdi nodded. “Tell him about our war record, Mike.”

Ambrose said, “It was us who went to the Pacific after World War II to help clear up all that unidentified dead problem.”

“If you cleaned up the whole Pacific Theater,” Kling said, “you should be able to help me with one floater.”

“The trouble with flatfoots,” Bartholdi said, “is they got no heads for clerical work. We’ve got a dandy filing system here, you see? If we let dicks from all over the city come in and foul it up, we’d never be able to identify anybody anymore.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got such a real nice filing system,” Kling said. “Do you plan on keeping it a secret from the rest of the department, or will you throw open the files during Open School Week?”

“Another thing I like about the bulls from the 87th,” Ambrose said, “is that they are all so comical. When one of them is around, you can hardly keep from wetting your pants.”

“With glee,” Bartholdi said.

“That’s what makes a good cop,” Ambrose expanded. “Humor, humaneness, and devotion to detail.”

“Plus, the patience of Job,” Kling said. “Do I get a peek at the goddamn files, or don’t I?”

“Temper, temper,” Bartholdi said.

“How far back do you want to go?” Ambrose asked.

“About six months.”

“I thought she was in the water for only four?”

“She may have been reported missing before then.”

“Clever, clever,” Bartholdi said. “God, this city would fall to smoldering ashes were it not for the 87th Precinct.”

“All right, screw you,” Kling said, turning. “I’ll tell the lieutenant your files aren’t open for our inspection. So long, fellers.”

“He’s running home to mama,” Bartholdi said, unfazed.

“Mama’s liable to be upset,” Kling said. “Mama doesn’t mind a good joke, but not on the city’s time.”

“All work and no play…” Bartholdi started and then cut himself short when he saw that Kling actually was leaving. “All right, sorehead,” he said, “come look at the files. Come drown in the files. We’ve got enough missing persons here to keep you going for a year.”

“Thanks a lot,” Kling said, and he followed the detectives down the corridor.

“We try to keep them cross-indexed,” Ambrose said. “This ain’t the IB, but we do our level best. We got ’em alphabetically, and we got ’em chronologically—according to when they were reported missing—and we got ’em broken down male and female.”

“The boys with the boys, and the girls with the girls,” Bartholdi said.

“There’s everything you need in each of the separate folders. Medical reports where we could get ’em, dental charts, even letters and documents in some of the folders.”

“Don’t mix the folders up,” Bartholdi said. “That would mean getting a beautiful blonde police stenographer in to straighten them out again.”

“And we don’t cotton to beautiful blondes around here,” Ambrose said.

“We kick ’em out in the street whenever they come knocking.”

“That’s because we’re both respectable married men.”

“Who resist all temptations,” Bartholdi concluded. “Here are the files.” He made a grandiloquent sweeping gesture with one arm, indicating the banks and banks of green filing cabinets that lined the walls of the room. “This is April, and you want to go back six months. That’d put you in November.” He made a vague gesture with one hand. “That’s over there someplace.” He winked at Ambrose. “Now, are we cooperating, or are we?”

“You’re the most cooperative,” Kling said.

“Hope you find what you need,” Ambrose said, opening the door. “Come on, Romeo.”

Bartholdi followed him out. Kling sighed, looked at the filing cabinets, and then lighted a cigarette. There was a sign on one of the walls, and the sign read: SHUFFLE THEM, JIGGLE THEM, MAUL THEM, CARESS THEM—BUT LEAVE THEM THE WAY YOU FOUND THEM!

He walked around the room until he came to the cabinet containing the file of persons who were reported missing in November of the preceding year. He opened the top drawer of the cabinet, pulled up a straight-back wooden chair upon which to prop his foot, and doggedly began leafing through the folders.

The work was not exactly unpleasant, but it was far from exciting. The average misconception of the city detective, of course, is one of a tough, big man wearing a shoulder holster facing a desperate criminal and shooting it out in the streets. Kling was big, not so tough, and he carried his service revolver in a leather holster clipped into his right back pocket. He was not shooting it out with anyone at the moment, desperate or not. The only desperation he knew was of a quiet sort, which drives many city detectives into the nearest loony bin, where they silently pick at the coverlets. Kling, at the moment, was involved in routine—and routine is the most routine thing in the world.

Routine is what makes you wash your face and shave and brush your teeth in the morning.

Routine is the business of inserting a key into the ignition switch, twisting the key, starting the car, and putting it into drive before you can go anyplace.

Routine is answering a letter with a polite thank-you and then answering the resultant thank-you letter with another letter stating, “You’re welcome.”

Routine is the list of questions you ask the surviving wife of an automobile accident victim.

Routine is the tag you fill out and attach to a piece of evidence.

Routine is the report you type back at the squadroom.

Routine is a deadly dull bore, and it isn’t even crashing, and detectives know routine in triplicate, and the detective who isn’t patient with a typewriter—no matter what his method of typing may be—doesn’t last very long in the detective division.

When you’ve looked at missing person report after missing person report, you begin to wish you were missing yourself. After a while, they all begin to blend together into a big mass of humanity that has formed a conspiracy to bore you to death. After a while, you don’t know who has the birthmark on her left breast or who has the tattoo on his big toe. After a while, you don’t even care. There are amusing breaks in the routine, of course, but these are few and far between. Like the husband and wife, for example, who both vanished on the same day and who later filed missing person reports for each other. Very comical. Kling grinned, picturing the husband as an Alec Guinness type of character lolling with a brunette in Brazil. He formed no mental picture of the wife. He lighted another cigarette and continued his search for someone who might possibly resemble the 87th’s floater.

He consumed two packages of cigarettes while perusing the files. He had finished the first pack before lunch. He went out for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, which he took back to the bureau with him, together with a fresh package of cigarettes and a warning to himself to go slow on the coffin nails. By the end of the day, he had finished the second pack, and he’d also collected a sizable pile of folders that could possibly tie in with the floater. One report looked particularly promising. Kling opened the folder again and went over the material inside it.





There were, Kling noticed, certain inconsistencies in the report. Early in the report, for example, the girl was “last seen at” her “home address” on October 31 at 11:45 P.M. Later in the report, under REMARKS, the girl was last seen at the Scranton railroad station the next morning. Kling surmised, as he was forced to surmise, that police procedure was responsible for the foul-up. Henry Proschek was the man who’d reported his daughter missing. And he had probably last seen her in his own home on the night of October 31. Someone else, apparently, had seen her at the railroad station the next morning, had observed her carefully enough to describe what she was wearing. But this someone else was not the person filing the complaint, hence the inconsistency. There was, Kling further noticed, a question mark under the word luggage. He wondered if she had, indeed, gone baggageless or if the observer at the station had simply failed to notice any luggage.

The report was somewhat vague when it said, “See letter in folder.” Did this mean the first letter the girl had written or the longer letter she’d promised? And which of these letters was the last contact the parents had had? The answer, obviously, was in the folder.

Kling opened it again.

There was only one letter in the folder. Apparently, the second longer letter had never been written. And, apparently, it was this lack of further clarifying communication that had brought Henry Proschek to the city in search of his daughter, culminating in his phone call to the closest police station.

Feeling somewhat like a Peeping Tom, Kling began reading Mary Louise Proschek’s letter to her parents:

November 1st

Dear Mom and Daddy:

I know your not worried I was kidnapped or anything because Betty Anders happened to spy me at the station this morning and by now it is probly all over town. So I know your not worried but I suppose you are wondering why I have left and when I am coming back.

I suppose I shouldn’t have left without an explanation, but I don’t think you would understand or improve what Im about to do. I have been planning on it for a long time, and it is something I have to do which is also why I have been staying on at Johnson’s because I was saving my money all these years. I now have more than $4,000 dollars, you have to hand it to me for being persistint, ha ha.

I will write you a longer letter when everything here is settled. I am starting a new life here, Daddy, so please don’t be too angry with me. Try to understand. Love and kisses.

Your loving dghtr,

Mary Louise



Whoever Detective Phillips of the Missing Persons Bureau was, he had done a good job on the missing Proschek girl. He had put a call through to the Scranton police, who had then checked with the girl’s bank and discovered that $4,375 had been withdrawn from her account on October 31, the day before she’d left. The withdrawal slip had been signed by her and presented by her together with her passbook. Detective Phillips had then put a check on every bank in the city in an attempt to locate a new account started by Mary Louise Proschek. Each bank reported negatively. Phillips had checked on the stationery the girl used and found it to be five-and-dime stuff. The letter had been mailed special delivery and postmarked from a station in the heart of the city. A check had been made of hock shops in the hope the high school graduation ring would turn up. It had not. Phillips had acquired a dental chart from the girl’s parents, and that was in her folder. Kling removed it and gave it a summary glance.





He remembered that the floater’s lower front teeth had been lost in the water, but he couldn’t remember which of her other teeth had fillings or which had been extracted. He sighed and turned to some of the other information in the folder.

The preliminary investigatory work had been handled by people other than the Missing Persons Bureau, of course. When Henry Proschek had reported his daughter’s absence to the 14th Precinct, the detective he’d spoken to had immediately checked with the desk officer to ascertain whether or not Mary Louise had been either arrested or hospitalized in his precinct. He then checked with Communications and the Bureau of Information to find out if anyone answering her description was in a hospital or a morgue at the moment. When his efforts to locate her had proved fruitless, he had then phoned the information in to the MP Bureau, where the routine business of preparing forms in triplicate had then followed. And, to confirm his phone call, he mailed on the next day one of the triplicate copies of his own report to the MP Bureau.



The MP Bureau had sent out a teletype alarm throughout the city and to nearby police areas. And the name of Mary Louise Proschek had been added to the daily mimeographed list of missing persons that is distributed to transportation terminals, hospitals, and anyplace where a refugee might seek help or shelter.

The girl was still missing. Perhaps she was the 87th’s floater.

But if Kling could remember very little about the floater’s teeth, he could remember one important point about her right hand. There had been a tattoo on the flap of skin between the girl’s right thumb and forefinger—the word MAC in a heart.

On Mary Louise Proschek’s missing person report, under the heading TATTOOS, there was one word—and that word was “None.”





Henry Proschek was a small, thin man with deep-brown eyes and a bald head. He was a coal miner, and the grime of three decades had permanently lodged beneath his fingernails and in the seams of his face. He was dressed in his Sunday best, and he had scrubbed himself vigorously before coming up from Scranton, but he still looked grubby, and if you didn’t know his trade was the honest occupation of extracting coal from the earth, you would have considered him a dirty little man.

He sat in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct, and Carella watched him. There was indignation in Proschek’s eyes, a flaring indignation that Carella had not thought the miner capable of. Proschek had just listened to Kling’s little speech, and now there was indignation in his eyes, and Carella wondered whether or not Kling had delivered his talk wrong. He decided that Kling had done it in the only way possible. The kid was new, but he was learning, and there are only so many ways to tell a man his daughter is dead.

Proschek sat with his indignation in his eyes, and then his anger spread to his mouth and bubbled from his lips. “She’s not dead,” he said.

“She is, Mr. Proschek,” Kling said. “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

“She’s not dead,” Proschek said firmly.

“Sir—”

And, again, he said, “She’s not dead!”

Kling turned to Carella. Carella shoved himself off the desk effortlessly. “Mr. Proschek,” he said, “we’ve compared the dead girl’s teeth with the dental chart you gave to the Missing Persons Bureau. They’re identical, sir. Believe me, we wouldn’t have had this happen—”

“There’s been a mistake,” Proschek said.

“There’s been no mistake, sir.”

“How could she be dead?” Proschek asked. “She came here to start a new life. She said so. She wrote that to me. So how could she be dead?”

“Her body—”

“And you wouldn’t find my daughter drowned. My daughter was an excellent swimmer. My daughter won a medal in high school for her swimming. I don’t know who that girl is, but she’s not Mary Louise.”

“Sir—”

“I’d have broke her neck if she wore a tattoo. You said this dead girl has a tattoo on her hand. My Mary Louise would never even have considered a thing like that.”

“That’s what we wanted to find out from you, sir,” Carella said. “You told us she didn’t have a tattoo. In that case, she must have acquired the tattoo in this city. We know she wasn’t drowned, you see. She was dead before she entered the water. So if we can tie in the tattoo with—”

“That dead girl isn’t my daughter,” Proschek said. “You brought me all the way from Pennsylvania, and she isn’t even my daughter. Why are you wasting my time? I had to lose a whole day just to come here.”

“Sir,” Carella said firmly, “that girl is your daughter. Please try to understand that.” Proschek stared at him hostilely. “Did she have any friends named Mac?” Carella asked.

“None,” Proschek said.

“MacDonald, MacDougall, MacMorrow, MacManus, MacThing, Mac-Anything?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“My daughter didn’t have many boyfriends,” Proschek said. “She…she wasn’t a very pretty girl. She had good coloring, fair, like her mother—blue eyes and blonde hair, that’s a good combination—but she didn’t…She wasn’t very pretty. I…I used to feel sorry for her. A man…It doesn’t matter if a man isn’t good looking. But, to a girl, looks are everything. I used to feel sorry for her.” He paused and looked up at Carella and then repeated, as if to clarify his earlier statements, “She wasn’t very pretty, my daughter.”

Carella looked down at Proschek, knowing the coal miner had used the past tense, knowing that the girl was already dead in Proschek’s mind, and wondering why the man fought the knowledge now, fought the indisputable knowledge that his daughter was dead and had been dead for at least three months.

“Please think, Mr. Proschek,” he said. “Did she ever mention anyone named Mac?”

“No,” Proscheck said. “Why should Mary Louise mention a Mac? That girl isn’t Mary Louise.” He paused, got a sudden idea, and said, “I want to see that girl.”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” Carella said.

“I want to see her. You say she’s my daughter, and you show me dental charts, and that’s all a lot of crap. I want to see that girl. I can tell you whether or not she’s Mary Louise.”

“Is that what you called her?” Carella asked. “Mary Louise?”

“That’s what I baptized her. Mary Louise. Everybody else called her just plain Mary, but that wasn’t the way I intended it. I intended it Mary Louise. That’s a pretty name, isn’t it? Mary Louise. Mary is too…plain.” He blinked. “Too plain.” He blinked again. “I want to see that girl. Where is that girl?”

“At the mortuary,” Kling said.

“Then take me there. A relative’s supposed to identify a…a body, isn’t he? Isn’t that the case?”

Kling looked at Carella.

“We’ll check out a car and take Mr. Proschek to the hospital,” Carella said wearily.

They did not talk much on the ride to the hospital. The three men sat on the front seat of the Mercury sedan, and the city burst with April greenery around them, but the inside of the car was curiously cheerless. They drove into the hospital parking lot, and Carella parked the police sedan in a space reserved for the hospital staff. Mr. Proschek blinked against the sunshine when he got out of the car. Then he followed Carella and Kling to the morgue.

The detectives did not have to identify themselves to the attendant. They had both been there many times before. They told the attendant the number they wanted, and then they followed him past the rows of doors set into the corridor wall, the small refrigerator doors behind each one of which was a corpse.

“We don’t advise this, Mr. Proschek,” Carella said. “Your daughter was in the water for a long time. I don’t think—”

Proschek was not listening to him. They had stopped before a door marked 28, and Proschek was watching the attendant.

“Yes or no, Steve?” the attendant asked, reaching for the handle of the door.

Carella sighed. “Show it to him, buddy,” he said, and the attendant opened the door and rolled out the slab.

Proschek looked at the decomposed, hairless body of the girl on the slab. Carella watched him, and for a brief second, he saw recognition leap into the coal miner’s eyes, shocking, sudden recognition, and he felt some of the pain the old man was feeling.

And then Proschek turned to face Carella, and his eyes were like agate, and his mouth was set into a hard, tight line.

“No,” he said. “She’s not my daughter.”

His words echoed down the long corridor. The attendant rolled the slab back into the refrigerator compartment, and the rollers squeaked.

“He claiming the body?” the attendant asked.

“Mr. Proschek?” Carella asked.

“What?” Proschek said.

“Are you claiming the body?”

“What?”

“Are you—”

“No,” Proschek said. “She’s not my daughter.” He turned and started down the corridor, his heels clacking on the concrete floor. “She’s not my daughter,” he said, his voice rising. “She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter. She’s not my daughter.”

And then he reached the door at the end of the corridor, and he fell to his knees, his hand clutching the knob, and he began sobbing bitterly. Carella ran to him, and he stooped and put his arm around the old man, and Proschek buried his face in Carella’s chest, weeping, and he said, “Oh my God, she’s dead. My Mary Louise is dead. My daughter is dead. My daughter…” and then he couldn’t say anything else because his body was trembling and his tears were choking him.





The beauty of being a shoemaker, Teddy Carella thought, is that you don’t take your work home with you. You cobble so many shoes, and then you go home to your wife, and you don’t think about soles and heels until the next day.

A cop thinks about heels all the time.

A cop like Steve Carella thinks about souls, too.

She would not, of course, have been married to anyone else, but it pained her nonetheless to see him sitting by the window brooding. His brooding position was almost classical, almost like the Rodin statue. He sat slumped in the easy chair, his chin cupped in one large hand, his legs crossed. He sat barefoot, and she loved his feet. That’s ridiculous. You don’t love a man’s feet. Well, the hell with you, I love his feet. They’ve got good clean arches and nice toes, so sue me, she thought.

She walked to where he was sitting.

She was not a tall girl, but she somehow gave an impression of height. She held her head high, and her shoulders erect, and she walked lightly with a regal grace that added inches to her stature. Her hair was black, and her eyes were brown, and she wore no lipstick now on full lips, which needed none, anyway. The lips of Teddy Carella were decorative—decorative in that they were beautiful and decorative in that they could never form words. She had been born deaf, and she could neither hear nor speak, and so her entire face, her entire body, served as her means of communication.

Her face spoke in exaggerated syllables. Her eyes gave tongue to words she could not utter. Her hands moved fluidly, expressively, to convey meaning. When Teddy Carella listened, her eyes never left your face. When Teddy Carella “spoke,” you were compelled to give her your complete attention because her pantomime somehow enhanced the delicacy of her loveliness.

Now, standing spread-legged before her brooding husband, she put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. She wore a red wraparound skirt, a huge gold safety pin fastening it just above her left knee. She wore red Capezio flats and a white blouse swooped low at the throat to the first swelling rise of her breasts. She had caught her hair back with a bright-red ribbon, and she stood before him now and defied him to continue with his sullen brooding.

Neither spoke—Teddy because she could not, and Carella because he would not. The silent skirmish filled the small apartment.

At last, Carella said, “All right, all right.”

Teddy nodded and cocked one eyebrow.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m emerging from my shell.”

She hinged her hands together at the wrist and opened them slowly and then snapped them shut.

“You’re right,” Carella said. “I'm a clam.”

She pointed a pistol-finger at him and squeezed the trigger.

“Yes, my work,” he said.

Abruptly, without warning, she moved onto his lap. His arms circled her, and she cuddled up into a warm ball, pulling her knees up, snuggling her head against his chest. She looked up at him, and her eyes said, Tell me.

“This girl,” he said. “Mary Louise Proschek.”

Teddy nodded.

“Thirty-three years old, comes to the city to start a new life. Turns up floating in the Harb. Letter to her folks was full of good spirits. Even if we suspected suicide, which we don’t, the letter would fairly well eliminate that. The ME says she was dead before she hit the water. Cause of death was acute arsenic poisoning. You following me?”

Teddy nodded, her eyes wide.

“She’s got a tattoo mark right here”—he showed the spot on his right hand—”the word MAC in a heart. Didn’t have it when she left Scranton, her hometown. How many Macs do you suppose there are in this city?”

Teddy rolled her eyes.

“You said it. Did she come here to meet this Mac? Did she just run into him by accident? Is he the one who threw her in the river after poisoning her? How do you go about locating a guy named Mac?”

Teddy pointed to the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger.

“The tattoo parlors? I’ve already started checking them. We may get a break because not many women wear tattoos.”

Quickly, Teddy unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and then pulled it open, using both hands, spreading it in a wide, dramatic V.

“The Rose Tattoo?” Carella asked. “That’s fiction.”

Teddy shrugged.

Carella grinned. “Besides, I think you just wanted an excuse to bare your bosom.”

Teddy shrugged again, impishly.

“Not that it isn’t a lovely bosom.”

Teddy’s eyebrows wagged seductively. She curved her hands through the air and moistened her lips.

“Of course,” Carella said, “I’ve seen better.”

Oh? Teddy’s face asked, suddenly coldly aloof.

“There was this girl in burlesque,” Carella expanded. “She could set them going in opposite directions, one swinging to the right, the other to the left. Had a little light on each one. They’d turn out all the houselights, and you’d just see these two circles of light in the darkness. Fantastic!” He grinned at his wife. “Now, that’s what I call talent.”

Teddy shrugged, telling her husband that that was what she didn’t call any talent whatsoever.

“You, on the other hand…” His hand came up suddenly to cup her breast.

Gingerly, delicately, Teddy picked up his hand with her thumb and forefinger and deposited it on the arm of the chair.

“Angry?” Carella asked.

Teddy shook her head.

“Love me?” Carella asked.

Teddy shook her head most vigorously.

“Hate me?”

No.

“Who then?”

Teddy swung her forefingers in opposite directions, and Carella burst out laughing. “You hate the burlesque dancer?”

Teddy gave one emphatic nod.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “She was an old bag.”

Teddy beamed and threw her arms around his neck.

“Now do you love me?”

Yes, yes, yes.

“What’d you do all day?” he asked, holding her close, beginning to relax, succumbing to the warmth of her.

Teddy opened her hands like a book.

“Read?” Carella watched while she nodded. “What’d you read?”

Teddy scrambled off his lap and then clutched her middle, indicating that she had read something that was very funny. She walked across the room, and he watched her when she stooped alongside the magazine rack.

“If you’re not careful,” he said, “I’m going to undo that damn safety pin.”

She put the magazines on the floor, stood up, and undid the safety pin. The skirt hung loose, one flap over the other. When she stooped to pick up the magazine again, it opened in a wide slit from her knee to almost her waist. Wiggling like the burlesque queen Carella had described, she walked back to him and dumped the magazines in his lap.

“Pen pal magazines?” Carella asked, astonished.

Teddy hunched up her shoulders, grinned, and then covered her mouth with one hand.

“My God!” he said. “Why?”

With her hands on her hips, Teddy kicked at the ceiling with one foot, the skirt opening over the clean line of her leg.

“For kicks?” Carella asked, shrugging. “What kind of stuff is in here? ‘Dear Pen Pal: I am a cocker spaniel who always wanted to be in the movies…’”

Teddy grinned and opened one of the magazines for him. Carella thumbed through it. She sat on the arm of his chair, and the skirt opened again. He looked at the magazine, and then he looked at his woman, and then he said, “The hell with this noise,” and he threw the magazine to the floor and pulled Teddy onto his lap.

The magazine fell open to the personals column.

It lay on the floor while Steve Carella kissed his wife. It lay on the floor when he picked her up and carried her into the next room.

There was a small ad in the personals column.

It read:



* * *



Widower. Mature. Attractive. 35 years old. Seeks alliance with understanding woman of good background. Write P.O. Box 137.



* * *