"Sorry. It's the case."
"I asked what block."
"Eh? Oh. Forty-two hundred. Four or five places west of where you used to live."
"Ech. Good place for it. Right behind old spooky Groloch's. Is she still there? Did you meet her?"
"Yeah. Nice old lady. Reminded me of Auntie Gertie."
"We thought she was a witch when I was little. Took a dare to get us to go past on her side of the street."
"She's been there that long?"
"Was I born in the Dark Ages? Just because little Mike thinks I polished cannonballs for George Washington…"
"You know what I mean. Nobody stays around over there. She's probably the only one on the block that was there five years ago."
"Another murder mystery at Miss Groloch's," Annie mused. "What do you want to watch tonight? There's a Tony Curtis movie on Channel Five. An original, one of those pilot things. Or 'Hawaii Five-O'?"
"Cop shows, cop shows, that's all you get on Tuesday. Let's watch the movie. What do you mean, another murder mystery?"
"Oh, a long time ago, before I was born, they tried to get Miss Groloch for murdering her… lover, I guess. Only they never found the body."
"Warm up the time machine. I'll send them mine. Then we'll all be happy."
"That's not fair. I think she was innocent. He probably ran off with her money. He was a rat."
"If you weren't even born…"
"Mom told me about him. Even if she was guilty, she should've gotten a medal. When I was a kid, people still talked about how rotten Jack O'Brien was. Most of them did think she killed him, but they were on her side. They said he was a liar, a thief, a cheat, that he never worked a day. And that the only reason he would've hung around an older woman was to use her somehow. But nobody ever figured how she could've done it. That's how come we were scared."
"How old is she, anyway?"
"I don't know. At least eighty-five. That was in nineteen twenty-one…"
"Twenty-one?" Cash echoed, startled.
"Yes. So?"
"This guy… he had a pocketful of old coins. A twenty-one dime was the newest."
They stared at one another.
"A practical joke?"
"Annie, people don't kill people for a joke. But I'll check it out. See if anybody's got it in for her, or if there's any bodies missing…"
"You never did say. You think it's murder?"
"I don't know, hon. When we get bodies in alleys, we have to dig. He could've escaped from a funeral parlor."
"You said he died there."
"Yeah. So let's do the dishes and watch the movie, or something. Before it drives me crazy."
Next morning, before beginning the rounds of the coin shops, Cash cornered Railsback. "Hank, you ever heard of a Lieutenant Carstairs?"
"On the force?"
"Yeah."
"Can't say that I have."
"He'd go back a ways."
"I can ask the old man. Is it important?"
Old Man Railsback had retired in 1960, but still hung around the station more than home. He lived with his son, which Cash felt was explanation enough.
"Not really. Just curiosity."
The old man seemed to know everything that had happened since Laclede's landing. Apparently, he had been there. Or so his reminiscences made one think.
Cash shifted subjects. "Annie thinks our John Doe might have been lowered from a helicopter."
"No way," Railsback said. "I thought of that myself, Norm. I called Lambert Field. They said not even a nut would fly a chopper in that."
"I didn't think so. But Annie-"
"Annie should write mysteries, not solve ours. Now, if you've got the time, find John and do the coin shops. Maybe we can wrap this up before the next one comes floating belly up. Here's your list."
It was no go. They got shrugs, blank stares, and a few definite negatives. They wasted half a day. But that was the nature of the job. You always played out every chance.
"What I think," said John, around his Big Mac at lunch, "is we should put his picture on the wire. Guy's probably got a wife and seven kids in Little Rock, or someplace."
"Maybe. But you've got the feeling too, don't you? This one's going in the files unsolved."
"Yeah. It's weird. Like in Nam, you could tell Charlie had an ambush set without seeing a thing…" He turned it off because of what he saw in Cash's face.
Funny how it keeps on hurting, Cash thought.
He had had an uncle who had gotten it in Italy, 88 mm in the chest while standing half out of his tank turret. That had never bothered him the way Michael's loss did. He supposed it was this not knowing for sure, this perpetual half-suspicion that the boy was alive somewhere in the Asian jungles. And it was worse for Nancy and the kids. Their lives were drifting away while they marked time.
"Maybe FBI will find something."
"They're running out of places to look. What do we do then? Call the CIA? Interpol? Or put his picture in the papers?"
Cash got a new angle on John there. This case was bothering his partner as much as it was him. He thought he understood why. It did not seem right that a man should die, murdered or not, without so much as a memorial in a police record. A man should have a monument, like maybe: "Here Lies the Unknown Victim, A Casualty in the Cops-and-Robbers War."
They were remembering Michael, that was why. Michael would have no memorial either. His war had cast him into a limbo where there were no monuments, no eulogies, no benefits for his survivors… Only their memories would ever show that he had existed. And here they had the mirror image, a corpse that was the only proof that a man had ever lived.
One wake without a ship, and one ship without a wake.
"Maybe Tucholski got something," Cash said.
"Want to bet?"
"Not a doughnut hole."
John was right. The women on the reinterview list had ironclad alibis. One had a mother, and the other a boyfriend very much alive and kicking about being hassled. And of the cars illegally parked on the Wednesday side of the street only one could not be accounted for. That was a junker without plates the neighbors said had been there for months.
Dead ends. It was all dead ends. They still had nothing from FBI. Missing Persons across the country had come back with nothing. Lieutenant Railsback got growly when he heard his brainchild had been stillborn, grumbled about putting the case on a back burner till something concrete turned up.
It had begun bugging them all. Nobody wanted to do it slow and by the numbers.
"I talked to the old man at lunch," Railsback told Cash later, as he and John were about to go home. "He said there was a Colonel Carstairs on the Board of Commissioners in the late thirties. Came up out of Homicide. That's the only Carstairs he remembered."
"Probably the same man. Thanks, Hank."
"What was that?" John asked on the way down to the parking lot.
"Just checking something the old woman said the other day. About a Lieutenant Carstairs. You and Carrie coming by?" Annie had insisted that morning so he had extended an invitation.
"Yeah. We'll bring Nancy and the kids, too. Carrie called Nancy and Nancy said Annie had already called…"
"I get the picture."