Where Is Bianca? (6 page)

“Nancy's dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I
know
. A year ago I knew. I was sick. Oh, so sick. And she never came back to me. She was my daughter and she is dead and I'm alone.”

“Do you know where Nancy was living, who her friends were?”

“No, only that she went away and died.”

Corrigan let the old woman go. She lived, he assumed, by the grace of Welfare and street handouts. One day she would be put away for good, or found dead in a bug-infested bed.

Corrigan expelled the stench of Anna Gavin from his nostrils, along with a feeling of depression, and turned back to Samuelson. The pathologist was resting his buttocks on the edge of an old desk.

“Okay,” Corrigan said, “you had a reason for calling me over to talk to this crackpot. How many times has Anna Gavin been here to identify her dead daughter?”

“Twice at least,” Samuelson said placidly. “She comes around when she gets hold of a newspaper and learns that a girl of Nancy's size and age is in the morgue.”

“But this time is different.”

“This time she came by invitation.”

“Yours?”

“Who else?”

“Why?” Corrigan asked.

“Because one of the morgue men remembered a detail. Last time Anna Gavin was here and we were trying to get her out of our hair, the old girl mentioned a birthmark. A growth on Nancy's right shoulder, just above the shoulderblade. That was a new note.”

“I don't remember anything about a growth on Jane Doe's shoulder.”

“Because there isn't any,” retorted the pathologist. “But there
is
something—at that exact spot. It's a surgical scar, very faint, almost indistinguishable. The kind of scar that might have been left by a G.P. who removed the growth in his office, depriving some impoverished surgeon of a fee.”

Corrigan stared at him. “That doesn't make Jane Doe Nancy Gavin in my book, Doc.”

“That's your business. Mine is to mention it.”

“Of course, it's possible.”

Samuelson said nothing. He seemed miffed.

“Somewhere along the line one of Nancy's men may have given her a few dollars to get herself deblemished. One of the choosier kind.”

“I point out,” said Doc Samuelson, “that Jane Doe is in the correct age range. I've already checked with Vital Statistics on the Gavin girl's birth record.”

“I wonder,” said Corrigan, paying no attention to the pathologist's stiff tone, “how reliable anything the old woman says is.”

“I wouldn't know. You're the great detective.”

“Oh, come off it, Doc.”

Samuelson seemed mollified. “Who knows what the old woman knows or doesn't know? She's probably anile. A bundle of short circuits. Her liver and kidneys are undoubtedly shot—”

“All I'm concerned with is her brain.”

“You heard her. The persistent certainty that the girl is dead, based on no facts whatever. But this business of the growth … it's not the same thing. I'm inclined to believe it.”

“So am I. When can I expect a report?”

“When I get around to it.”

“I'm in a hurry, Doc.”

“That,” said Samuelson, “is the story of my life.”

At the door Corrigan said, “By the way, I'd appreciate it if you stalled off the newsmen. There's been no leak yet that Bianca Fielding Lessard may be involved. Play the Jane Doe bit for all it's worth.”

“What do you think I am,” the pathologist said, “a first-year man? Go peddle your papers, Tim, and let me get back to work.”

Back at his office near the Main Office Squadroom, Corrigan sought out his typewriter. In the streets below, the homegoing rush hour was in full cry, but not for cops. The old building on Centre Street whirred and jangled as if it were ten o'clock in the morning. Corrigan was so used to it that he did not even hear the noise.

He typed out his report and addressed it to the Inspector who was his immediate superior. The report concluded with: “Assignment of at least two detectives will immediately be made for the purpose of tracing said Nancy Gavin from the time of her alleged disappearance.”

Corrigan pulled the sheet from his typewriter, signed it, and reached for the telephone.

Chuck Baer seemed short of breath, as if he had left his office, heard the ringing of his phone, and rushed back to answer it.

“What's up, Tim?”

“Vincent Lessard may still be your client instead of a sitting duck.”

“Talk English. There's a new wrinkle in Jane Doe's ID?”

“That's right. Bianca Fielding Lessard may not be in the morgue after all.”

“How come? What about that Mayan ring?”

“I'm damned if I know,” Corrigan confessed. “Has Lessard ever mentioned a girl named Nancy Gavin, Chuck?”

“Not to me. Who is she?”

“I can't answer a question about her yet. Apparently a tart, or easy pickings if she's playing respectable. I don't even know where she lived. But she might have been the kind to appeal to a man like Lessard.”

“Jane Doe is this Nancy Gavin?”

“Could be. If so, I want to know how she got hold of that Mayan ring, and who kept her company during the final day or night she wore it.”

“Sounds as if you're asking me to do some extracurricular snooping, Tim. Why don't you have one of your boys handle it?”

“Because Lessard may go dead cautious if the name is first put to him officially.”

“You're still suspicious of him.”

“I just don't know,” said Corrigan.

“Well, I'm seeing him this evening. To pick up my fee. If I pull this on him, he'll probably ask me to keep going.”

“Let him. You're my secret weapon.”

“I don't know,” said Baer. “I don't like this playing two sides of the street, Tim.”

“Look,” Corrigan said. “He's paying you to do a job, and you're doing it. That doesn't mean you're married to him, Chuck. Of course, if you'd rather not—”

“Oh, go to hell. How about a briefing on this possible new ID?”

“Just tell Lessard that an old woman's come in, as a result of which there are now doubts that the body is Mrs. Lessard's. That the old woman claims the body is her daughter's. Then, without seeming to make a point of it, work your way around to Nancy Gavin.”

“Are you going to tell me how to do a job?” Baer grumbled.

“Chuck, Chuck. If Lessard doesn't open up to you, he may find himself being raked over. In a way you'll be doing your client a favor.”

“Oh, sure,” said Baer. “Stop sweet-talking me, Tim. I said I'd do it, didn't I? Only I don't have to like it.”

“Of course you don't,” Corrigan said. “Check with me in the morning?”

6

Baer was on deck before 10
A
.
M
., mopping the sweat from his heavy jaw. He found Corrigan in the MOS squadroom taking his coffee break. With the big man at his heels, Corrigan retired to his office.

“Lessard scores zero on Nancy Gavin,” Baer said. “And I'm pretty sure he wasn't conning me. He'd never heard the name before, he said.”

“He keep you on the case?”

Baer nodded. “But God's gift to off-Broadway didn't like it.”

“Frances Weatherly?” Corrigan asked.

“She was there when I got to the Lessard place. Looked to me as if they'd had a fight. Maybe Lessard figures his yen for this scribbling sexpot is costing him.”

“What's your next move, Chuck?”

Baer shrugged. “I'd hit a dead end when Jane Doe turned up at the morgue. I haven't got a lead on Bianca.”

“Jean Ainsley said you visited her office.”

“I've been everywhere. For all the progress I've made, Bianca might just as well have dissolved the night she walked out on that crumb. If this Jane Doe turns out to be Nancy Gavin, I'm right back where I was—nowhere.”

The phone on the desk rang. Corrigan picked it up and said, “Corrigan.”

“Munthe.” Munthe was with Missing Persons.

“What's with you, Munnie?”

“Busy-busy-busy. That story in the papers last night about the body in the sewer has landed it right in our laps, as usual. We've already had no less than four inquiries about the dead girl.”

Corrigan came alert. Although in a city of over eight million people four inquiries about an unidentified body was not up to par—there would probably be three or four more before the day was out—it was always possible that one of them was playing the course legitimately. The trouble in this ID was that there was so little to identify. Jane Doe might well be the chick whose mama phoned in that she hadn't been home for the better part of a week. Or some lightfooted love of a wet-eared Lothario who preferred to believe that she was dead rather than admit to himself that she had gone off to shack up with a new swinger.

“One of them,” Munthe of MP said, “sounds promising, Tim. A Peggy Simpson; she's waiting right now with the desk sergeant.”

“What's her beef?”

“She waltzes in and says her roommate's turned up missing. She saw the story about the body in the morgue and thinks she ought to have a look.”

“What's promising about that?”

“Wait a minute, will you? First thing, this Simpson girl says her roomie's been missing five days. That figures out. Also she gives a description that fits in pretty well with Jane Doe.”

“That description would fit thousands of women in this town,” Corrigan said. He wasn't being difficult; he wanted to get the feel of this one.

“Yes, but Simpson comes up with a detail, Tim. Her roomie, she says, was slicing some cold cuts a couple of nights before she disappeared. The knife slipped and she cut the thumb on her left hand. A pretty good gash about half an inch across where the thumb joins the hand.

“So I call the morgue. I tell one of Doc's assistants to take a look at Jane Doe's left thumb and report back what he sees. He goes and looks and sees a cut right where Peggy Simpson said. You with it, Captain?”

“Maybe I'm a jump ahead,” Corrigan grunted. It was pure hunch. “Let's see if I can pull her roommate's name out of my hat. The roomie's initials are N.G.”

“What are you, a magician or something?” Munthe demanded. “Or did you get prior information on this?”

“Neither. It's my radar. I take it, then, that the missing roomie's name is Nancy Gavin.”

To Corrigan's astonishment Munthe laughed. “You sure gave me a turn there, Captain. You should have quit while you were ahead.”

“What d'ye mean?”

“This Peggy Simpson's roommate's name is Noreen Gardner.”

“Oh,” said Corrigan. Could Nancy Gavin have changed her name? Why not? But it did seem like a long shot. He sighed. “What's the dope on this Gardner girl?”

“She's a young off-Broadway actress. We've got a pretty full story on her—we've been interrogating this Peggy Simpson—giving her the treatment—for nearly an hour, since she came up with that cut-thumb detail.”

“Don't fry her any more,” Corrigan said sharply. “Have a matron take her to a comfortable office downstairs. See if she needs a sandwich, or wants some coffee. I'll talk to her right away.”

Corrigan hung up and rose. “A third ID,” he told Chuck Baer. “Now she's an actress named Noreen Gardner.”

“Who says so?”

“Her roommate. I'm going to talk to her. Want to come along?”

“You kidding?” Baer pushed himself to his feet. “We get further from Bianca all the time,” he complained.

As they rode the elevator down, Corrigan's mind explored possibilities. A double or even triple tentative identification was not unique. Most multiple IDs resulted from honest mistakes. People were hardly at their best, going into a morgue to view the mutilated or contorted remains of someone with whom they were emotionally involved. Corrigan knew cases in which an overwrought claimant had wrongly identified a male corpse as a female. Nearly all such IDs were resolved by patient police work.

So while this Jane Doe was not unique in posing a problem of three different identifications, she did present a twist. Three details. An unusual ring, a growth, a cut on a thumb.

A queer thought flashed into Corrigan's head.
The Three Faces of Eve
. It was a book about a multiple personality that he had read with interest and a steadily dwindling skepticism. Multiple personality—different personalities occupying the same human body—seemed to be a well-established fact of abnormal psychology, although he was aware that some authorities pooh-poohed it Could Jane Doe have been such a multiple personality?

It took courage even to pursue this outrageous theory, but Corrigan stuck to it. Life—an official life like his—was full of surprises.

He knocked out Bianca Fielding Lessard at once. Her physical history was readily separable from that of the other two.

But how about Nancy Gavin—N.G.—and Noreen Gardner—N.G.?

In the end, Corrigan decided to abandon the outré theory. If Nancy Gavin and Noreen Gardner occupied the same body, it was not because “they” were a multiple personality. A far simpler explanation presented itself.

Noreen Gardner might well be the same girl who had cursed her kookie mother and walked out of her home, such as it was, at the age of fifteen, to shack up with some man who apparently liked to live dangerously. Under the circumstances, it was not improbable that Nancy would be moved to change her name, if only to make it harder for Anna Gavin to trace her. That would explain the identical initials. It was a commonplace of such tragedies that the subject changing her name still clung to a vestige of her original identity.

The hang-up here was Bianca Lessard. If Noreen Gardner and Nancy Gavin were the same, and if Noreen-Nancy was the Jane Doe in the morgue, what was she doing wearing Bianca Lessard's Mayan ring? How had she come by it?