Too Soon Dead (26 page)

Drier led us into an inner room, and through that to a metal staircase which let out a thunderous ringing as we tramped down one flight to the basement. He pushed through two more doors and turned the lights on in a large, white room with metal tables and oversized file drawers set into the far wall. “Refrigeration’s been acting up,” he said, “but it seems to be all right now.” He crossed the room and pulled open one of the drawers. “Haven’t autopsied her yet. Doc won’t be here until Tuesday.” He pulled the white sheet down, revealing the object under it that had recently been a woman.

Brass and Raab moved forward to stare down at the body. I stayed a little back, but I looked. What had caused us to give up our Sunday and cross the river was Captain McVinnie telling Raab that the corpse had been “mutilated.” His description of the hacking done to the body reminded Raab of the corpse of a certain defunct photographer, and so he had called Brass, and Brass me. And so we were staring with interest at the body of a young girl, and McVinnie was wondering why we cared, and nobody would tell him.

The girl was blond, in her early twenties or even younger, and had been very good looking. This was no longer so. Her body was pale white, blotched with brown and crisscrossed with welts. My impression was that she had been thoroughly beaten, as well as slashed at with a whip or belt. It didn’t appear to be nearly as severe as the torture poor Hermann Dworkyn had suffered, but she couldn’t have enjoyed it. For a couple of minutes nobody said anything, and then Raab turned to the coroner. “Do you mind if we turn the body over?” he asked.

“I don’t mind if she don’t mind,” Drier said.

Between them Raab and Brass flipped the body over. The back showed a regular pattern of parallel stripes as though the girl had been whipped by someone who was practiced and precise at his job. I stepped closer to get a better look, recognizing in myself a growing callousness toward dead bodies. I suppose this was good if I was going to keep running into them.

After a minute they returned the body to its supine position. Brass took the bag I was carrying, opened it, and pulled from its depths a roll film camera with a bellows lens and a flash gun. He turned the dead girl’s face sideways, stepped back, and took four flash pictures from varying distances.

“Say,” McVinnie said, “what’d you do that for? You’re not going to use them pictures—”

“You know I couldn’t do that if I wanted to,” Brass reassured him, tossing the camera, the flash, and the spent bulbs back in the bag. “The public isn’t ready for photographs of corpses in their morning papers. This just might help identify her, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” McVinnie said. “I guess that’s right.”

“I would say we’ve seen enough,” Brass said, drawing back from the table.

“Yes,” Raab agreed. “I think we can take this problem off your hands, Captain. If you’ll bring the remains over to our side of the river, I’ll tell the ME to expect it.”

“I’ll get the complete paperwork to you tomorrow,” Captain McVinnie said. “But I’ll sign ‘one unidentified white female, deceased’ over to you right now. Charlie, if you’ll take one of them fine hearses of yours and deliver the body to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital sometime in the next couple of hours, I’d appreciate it.”

“Fine,” Drier said. “Who do I bill?”

We stared at him. He looked back unabashed. McVinnie sighed. “Bill the department, Charlie.”

We returned to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel and headed uptown to the
World
building. Raab dismissed his driver and came upstairs with us. Brass tossed me the roll of film and I took it downstairs to the photo-processing department and gave it to the on-duty man, who promised to call as soon as he had prints. I went out to pick up some sandwiches since we hadn’t eaten lunch. I had to go about six blocks to find a joint that was open on Sunday, but that’s the great thing about New York. At any time of the day or night there’s always someplace. I got meatball sandwiches on kaiser rolls from a little luncheonette on Tenth and Sixty-fifth that catered to cabbies.

When I returned to the office, Raab was lying on the couch and Brass was in his desk chair, his back to the room, staring out at the river. I put a sandwich on Brass’s desk and on Raab’s chest and flopped into an armchair next to the couch. Neither of them moved. I stared from one to the other. “Well,” I said, “what do we know?”

Raab raised his head from the couch cushion to look at me. “Too damn much,” he said. He let his head drop back down.

“I’ve called Gloria,” Brass said without turning. “She was home. She is coming up. We are going to share information with Inspector Raab. He is not happy about this, as there is nothing he can do with the information at the moment.”

“What information?” I asked.

Brass swiveled in his chair and picked up a handful of eight-by-ten photographs from his desk blotter. “Here,” he said, tossing them in the general direction of my chair. “These were on the desk when I got here.” There were twenty of them and they scattered to twenty separate destinations around the room.

I retrieved them. “Good toss,” I said, pulling one from under the couch, but I was speaking to Brass’s back; he had already returned to analyzing the traffic patterns on the Hudson River. I dropped back down in my chair and examined the pictures.

They were photographs of naked women. No; they were all photographs of the same naked woman in a variety of poses. Unlike our previous collection, there was nobody else evident in any of the pictures, and the poses didn’t seem particularly erotic. The pictures were fairly grainy and seemed to have scratches or lines running through them. Then I realized what I was seeing: the lines weren’t on the photograph; they were on the girl. “She’s been cut!” I said.

“Whipped,” Brass said. “Whipped and beaten. Use the glass.” He pushed a large magnifying glass across the desk and I got up and retrieved it.

“Where did these come from?” I asked.

“They’re blowups of the contact sheet Bobbi Dworkyn found in her brother’s files,” Brass explained. He unwrapped his sandwich and turned back to contemplate the passing garbage scows.

I studied the photographs through Brass’s magnifying glass and reached two conclusions: that it was the same girl we had recently viewed on a slab in Jersey City, and that she was alive when these pictures were taken. She didn’t even seem particularly unhappy, morose, or angry. She was just standing passively with her arms raised or leaning forward or with her leg up on a chair displaying the inner thigh, the clear intent being to document her cuts, slashes, and bruises.

“Somebody was beating up on this girl,” I said. Brass turned to stare at me without saying anything.

“And now she’s dead,” Inspector Raab said without bothering to look up. “Can we assume there’s a connection? Don’t all speak at once.” He had covered his shirt and tie with the butcher paper his sandwich had been wrapped in, and was eating the sandwich without raising his head. I decided not to mention the strong possibility that he would choke on a meatball if he didn’t sit up.

Gloria came in about ten minutes later. Brass had the original batch of pictures on the desk and was slowly going through them and comparing them with the new group. Gloria smoothed her skirt and sat in the chair next to the desk. “It’s just started to rain,” she said. “I understand you’ve had a hell of a morning.”

“We’ve been to New Jersey,” Brass told her. “This seems to be our month for going to New Jersey. We went to Jersey City and examined the body of what had been an attractive young girl.”

“So you said over the phone,” Gloria said. “What killed her?”

Raab sat up and crumpled the butcher paper in a ball and threw it at the wastebasket. He missed. “She was fished out of the Hudson,” he said. “Couldn’t have been there long, not as long as a day. But she’s been dead two or three days, which means…”

“Which means what?” Gloria asked.

“I’m not sure, but it’s strange. Somebody’s been warehousing a corpse, which is a dangerous and unlikely thing to do. She was beaten and whipped, but that was at least a week before she died. The pictures we have here, pictures taken while she was still alive, were taken shortly after the beating. The bruises hadn’t had time to develop yet. And the other mutilations to the body, they were done after she was dead. Which is even odder. As far as what actually caused her death, there were no obvious fatal wounds, so we’ll have to wait for the postmortem.”

“You have pictures of the same girl when she was alive?” Gloria asked.

“They’re from the Dworkyn collection,” Brass said. “Which is why we’re assuming that this is all related.”

“Some kind of strange sexual deviate?” Gloria suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Raab said. “Too many different things happened to this poor girl. It would take a clan of deviates, each with his own particular deviation. Although that, itself, is not outside the bounds of human possibility.”

Brass leaned forward and laid out six photographs across the front of his desk,
slap, slap, slap
, one at a time, like a gin rummy player laying out his hand. “One more piece of the puzzle,” he said.

Inspector Raab and I came up next to Gloria and stared down at the exhibits. Two pictures from the original collection, given to us by Dworkyn, and four of the new ones. Just then a copy boy came in with an envelope holding the newly printed photographs of our Jersey City expedition. Brass went through them and picked out two, which he added to the six.

Raab straightened up. “Son of a—” he said. “It’s the senator!”

Brass looked from one to the other of us. “Are we agreed?” he asked. “The girl whose corpse showed up in the Hudson River this morning is the girl who is sharing an intimate moment with Senator Childers in these two photographs?”

Inspector Raab put a finger on one picture contemplatively, and then shifted it to another. “Romans, six, twenty-three,” he murmured.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“‘For the wages of sin is death,’” Raab said.

“Don’t get mystical,” Brass said. “The wages of everything is death. Some of us just have to wait longer to get paid off.”

I
nspector Raab stared glumly at the litter of photographs in front of him and then raised his eyes to gaze out the window behind Brass. He pushed his chair away from the desk. “Well,” he said, “only one thing for me to do now.”

We looked at him. Brass made a grunting sound that could have been a question.

“Retire,” Raab said firmly. “If I put the paperwork in today it’ll go through in a week or two, maybe—I can stretch the investigation for a couple of weeks; slow, methodical work is good police work—and then Johnson or O’Farrell will have the pleasure of arresting a United States senator.”

“You think Childers killed that girl?” Brass asked. “That’s kind of a leap.”

“We don’t have enough to hold him now, although if he were a regular citizen we’d certainly bring him in for questioning. I’m not even sure that you can arrest a United States senator. I think they have immunity.”

“That’s only on the floor of the Senate,” Brass told him.

“Yeah, well, I’d have to go into New Jersey and get some local police chief to agree to help me. And Childers owns most of New Jersey and rents the rest. But it for sure looks like somebody’s going to have to ask him something. First he’s photographed with the girl, then pictures are taken showing that she has been truly and thoroughly beaten, and then she turns up dead. During this time a photographer who is somehow involved with the first set of photographs and a reporter who was following that photographer for reasons of his own are both killed. There are men who like to beat women, some for sexual satisfaction, and others just to show what big men they are. Is Childers one of them? If he has a record of it, it’s certainly been suppressed. Money and power buy a lot of suppression. But I can ask a few questions of the New Jersey State Police. Their chief, Colonel Schwarzkopf, is a good guy. They might know something. I’ll do that. They may tell me off the record; they may not. I wouldn’t want to bet my house that Childers killed the girl, but neither would I want to bet my front porch that he didn’t. As for Fox and Dworkyn, perhaps he was eliminating witnesses. I don’t say he killed them himself, but he could have had it done. There’s no question about that. You have a better suggestion?”

“Who took the photographs?” Brass asked.

Raab slumped in his chair and stared at the ceiling, silently thinking that one over. We silently watched him. After a minute he sat up. “Those middle photographs—the ones that show her alive but whipped and contused—where’d you get those?”

A smile crossed Brass’s face.
“Contused,”
he said. “Right off a police report. I like it.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a business card. “We have no proof yet, but this gentleman may have had something to do with it.” He flipped the card across the desk.

Raab picked up the card and examined it while Brass explained where it came from and why the name “Vogel” was of interest.

“I knew we should have spent more time questioning that stripper,” Raab said. “Bird, eh?” He tapped the card. “Vogel. Also a photographer. Also lives in Yorkville. And you saw him at a party at Senator Childers’s estate. The connections are getting inescapable. It would be pushing the bounds of coincidence if Herr Dieter Vogel were not the bird in question. And yet another reason to wonder about the senior senator from New Jersey.”

Raab stood up. He had come to a decision. “I’ll take those pictures,” he said. “Not the first set; the ones from the Bird folder. We will ignore the fact that you’ve been withholding evidence—”

“Come on, Inspector,” Brass said. “We didn’t know they were evidence of anything until we had them blown up, and then you saw them at the same time I did.”

Gloria smiled sweetly. “Is this the thanks he gets for letting you sleep on his couch?” she asked.

“Yeah, I read the column,” Raab said. “We’ll discuss that some other time.” He gathered the photographs and stuffed them into his pocket. “I’ll pull this Vogel bird in and see what he has to say about taking pictures of the dead girl.” He reached for the telephone, but then pulled his hand back. “I guess I’d better set this up in person,” he said. “Then if anything goes wrong, I know who to blame.” He grabbed his hat and headed for the door.