The fingers Hanson had sent him were tagged 1R, 3R, and 4R respectively (for the right-hand thumb, middle finger, and ring finger) and 7L and 9L respectively (for the left-hand forefinger and ring finger). Using a scalpel and an illuminating magnifying glass, Soames carefully peeled each fingertip until he had the skin shells he needed. He placed these shells in separate test tubes containing formaldehyde solution, each tube marked to correspond with Hanson’s tagging at the morgue. When the shells were ready for printing, he slipped a rubber glove onto his right hand, and then placed each shell in turn over his own index finger — an extension of his finger, in effect — and rolled it onto the inking plate and then onto the fingerprint record card. He sent the card over to the Identification Section, where, if they got lucky, the dead girl would have been fingerprinted sometime or other for a criminal offense, a security job, or admission to the armed forces.
He looked at the information chart he had received from the morgue. As far as Hanson had been able to judge from his examination of the badly decomposed remains, the girl had been somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years old, blonde, approximately five feet eight inches tall, and had weighed between 115 and 120 pounds.
Soames wondered how many young girls fitting that description were missing in the state of Florida.
In another section of the police laboratory, a technician named Oscar Delamorte was examining the dress he’d received earlier that day. It was only an occupational coincidence that Delamorte (whose name meant “of the dead” in Italian) often examined garments or objects that had once belonged to dead people. Delamorte made notes as he worked. These notes would later be typed up and sent to the Detective Division. He hoped the dress would give them some help, but you never knew.
The dress’s exposure to water and sunlight had caused it to fade from what Delamorte assumed had once been a brighter red than it was now. In his notes he wrote simply, “reddish in color.” He also noted that the action of the water had badly frayed the dress in some places and that snagging on a tree or rock had caused a tear near the hemline. He noted that there was a dark spot some four inches below the waist of the dress — what would have been the lap of the dress if its wearer had been seated — and although he tested the spot he was unable to determine what had caused it. His guess, because of its permanency, was that the spot was an ink stain.
The label on the dress indicated that it had been manufactured by a company called Pantomime, Inc., but he had no idea whether this was a firm in Calusa or indeed anywhere in Florida. He guessed not; America’s ready-to-wear garment industry was located in New York City. This same label told him that the dress was fabricated of eighty percent nylon and twenty percent cotton. The dress was sleeveless and styled as a wraparound garment, its wearer putting it on in much the same way one might a robe. Slip your arms into it, close it across the waist so that one side overlaps the other, and fasten it with a sash or belt. There were red thread loops for a belt on the dress, but no belt had been found in the water. One of the loops was torn. There was no retail outlet label in the dress; Delamorte could not zero in on a department store, a boutique, or any of the discount places that bordered both sides of Route 41. A second label in the dress, however, advised the wearer that the garment could either be washed or professionally dry-cleaned, and gave detailed instructions for laundering. Delamorte searched the dress for visible or Phantom Fast laundry marks and found none. He did find a dry cleaner’s mark, though, and when he checked against the file in the Identification Section, he discovered that the dress had been cleaned by a place called Albert Cleaners.
Albert Cleaners was in Calusa, Florida.
Before he did anything else, Delamorte picked up the phone and called Morris Bloom in the Detective Division.
At ten minutes to four that same afternoon, Bloom and his partner, Cooper Rawles, visited the dry-cleaning place. Coop wasn’t described in the report I later read — he was identified only as Detective Rawles — but I had met him previously, and I knew what he looked like. A black man with wide shoulders, a barrel chest, and massive hands, he must have stood at least six-foot-four and weighed possibly 240 pounds. I would not have liked to run into Cooper Rawles in a dark alley if I happened to be on the wrong side of the law.
The owner of the dry-cleaning store was identified in the report as Albert Barish, a resident of Calusa and described as sixty-four years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing approximately 150 pounds, and possessing brown hair and brown eyes. The detectives were there to question him about the dry-cleaning mark Delamorte had found in the dress Jane Doe had been wearing when she floated to the surface of the Sawgrass River on April 15.
The mark read:
According to the Identification Section, the “AC” stood for Albert Cleaners. Now the cops wanted to know about the “KLBN.”
Bloom’s report detailed only the outcome of the police visit, perforce only sketching in the conversation between Mr. Barish and the two detectives. In later recall, however, Bloom filled me in on what the place had looked like and what was actually said, and it was simple to reconstruct the actual event — especially since my interest at the time was intense and since the encounter with Albert Barish proved to be the first step in the positive identification of Jane Doe.
Downtown Calusa — like the main business areas of so many other American cities — is presently in a state of renewal and renovation. New banks spring up seemingly overnight, perhaps because there are a great many rich people in this city, all of them with money to invest. Like totems of some futuristic civilization, the banks rise in tinted-glass splendor, none of them taller than twelve stories high, in accordance with Calusa’s building codes. My partner Frank says they are all half-assed imitations of skyscrapers. He keeps comparing them unfairly to the World Trade Center in New York. But in addition to what would appear an overabundance of banks, with more on the way each month — all of them offering as inducements to new depositors more toasters and television sets than can be found in Calusa’s largest department store — there is also a constant influx of new restaurants, all of them vying for the big tourist buck. The restaurants come and go as steadily as Bedouin tribesmen. What was today a Japanese restaurant with low tables and shoji screens will tomorrow be an Italian restaurant with checked tablecloths and Chianti bottles holding candles. If a restaurant down here lasts more than a season, it has a fair chance of survival — provided its prices aren’t too steep. The population of Calusa, you see, is roughly divided (as perhaps is the population of the entire world) into the haves and the have-nots. Those richer folk clipping coupons at the new bank are only part of the story; the other part is constituted of redneck dirt farmers struggling for survival against unexpected but all-too-frequent freezes, blacks earning their meager daily bread by servicing the multitude of condominiums that blight the barrier islands, and retired older people who can afford to live only in trailer parks and to eat in restaurants offering discount prices if they care to dine before five-thirty. There are not any trailer parks in downtown Calusa; zoning ordinances have seen to that. But there are a great many two- and three-story apartment buildings, most of them constructed of cinder block and painted either pink or white, all of them catering to those among the population who cannot afford a $950,000 condominium (the asking price for a three-bedroom, gulf-front apartment that has just gone up on Sabal Key) or a meal in one of the new restaurants serving “Continental” cuisine. Albert Barish’s dry-cleaning store was situated in a side street near one of those low-rent apartment complexes.