“How’s that for a bunch of sick fucks?” Rocco said. “The rat brigade.”
“Tell me the truth, Coop, was that guy at your deb ball? Your coming-out party? Tallyho and all that?”
“Sorry to disappoint again, Mr. Chapman. Never was a deb,” I said. “I would, however, dearly like to take Mr. Straight’s pants off.”
“Here and now?”
“Didn’t you see the blood on his pants leg? And his shirtsleeves?”
“He dragged the dead guy, who’s oozing from a stab wound,” Mike said. “Or maybe it’s rat blood. What’s your point?”
“Who are these men and why are you treating them so lightly?” I said. “Because they’re rich white boys from the burbs?”
Mike was standing behind the deputy ME, who was on his knees next to the corpse, looking over the young doctor’s shoulder.
“Anybody home? They’re into blood sports, Mike.”
“Relax, Alex,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve got all their names and numbers.”
“What’s with those marks?” Mike asked the doctor.
“Postmortem scrapes. No active bleed.”
“Never helps when somebody moves the body before you see it,” Mike said. “The man’s stabbed in the back. How come the blood’s on his sneakers?”
“The fellow who found him,” the deputy doc said, “told me he dragged him out of that passageway over to here while his friends called 911. Turned him over first to see whether he was still breathing, so the blood got all over his hands. I had to get him facedown again to examine the wound. Then one last turn so Crime Scene could photo his face.”
It was impossible to know what amount of trace evidence had been lost in all that movement. That, coupled with the fact that the outdoor location-impossible to scour in the dark-would be teeming with commercial workmen by daybreak and any efforts to retrieve more clues of value would be futile.
“The fingernails?” Mercer asked.
“Chipped and full of dirt to begin with. I don’t think there was any kind of struggle.”
It looked as if the man’s pants legs-the only thing the deceased was still wearing-had been pulled up to his knees during the move, and his skin had abrasions from being dragged across the pavement.
“I’d like to get the body out of here.”
“We need to see the marks on his skin,” Mike said.
“That means I have to roll him again?” the doctor asked.
“I’ll scope it when you lift to put him in the body bag. How’s that?”
“Better for my purposes. Would you call in the attendants to get to work?”
Mike signaled to the uniformed cop who was standing with the ratters. “The morgue van out on the street? Get those guys in here, stat.”
“Are you swabbing the hunters for DNA?” I asked, seemingly to anyone who would listen to me.
“Last thing on my mind, blondie,” Mike said.
The two attendants trudged in from the street with the large vinyl sack that would carry the remains to the autopsy room.
“You want to see the clothing before I pack it up?” the doctor asked, unfolding a stack of brown paper bags, each one of which would hold a separate item.
Mercer stepped in. “What have you got? The jeans look pretty raggedy.”
“He was wearing this,” the deputy ME said, holding out a dirty men’s sport shirt, pale yellow with long sleeves and a button-down collar. “I had to cut it off him to get at the wound, but otherwise it’s in pretty good shape.”
Mercer put the tip of his pen under the shirt collar and held it up, turning it around slowly so we could look at it. The rear panel was blood-soaked, and there were some pulls in the fabric that had probably been caused when Toby Straight pulled him out onto DePew Place.
“Looks almost new otherwise, unlike the denim, which is full of holes,” Mercer said. “It’s got a Gap label.”
“And this,” the doctor added. “A baseball cap. Mr. Straight says it was on the body when he first saw it but fell off while he was dragging the man.”
I looked at the shaggy brown hair that reached the dead man’s shoulders. There seemed to be the slight indentation of a cap mark.
“What’s his team?” I asked.
Mercer, having put the shirt in the paper bag and closed it, held up the cap with his pen. It was navy blue but didn’t bear any sports logo.
“Poor guy didn’t even have this long enough to get grease marks in the lining,” Mike said. “Looks like one of those generic hats from a tourist stand in the city. At least we didn’t lose a Yankees fan.”
The attendants got in place on either end of the corpse. As they lifted him to put him into the bag that would lie on the stretcher for the ride downtown, the three of us squatted.
Mike shined a light on the man’s back. The wound was wide-probably deep-and had caused blood to spurt and drain all over the skin. Then, in an almost v-shape design leading down to the waist, were a series of evenly sketched ladders-or train tracks-just like the ones on the body of Corinne Thatcher.
“Got it,” Mike said. “He’s all yours.”
“Hey, Officer,” the doctor called out to the uniformed cop who’d been standing beside Toby Straight and his friends. “Would you mind giving us a hand?”
The cop walked over to help lift the stretcher into place as the taller attendant was pulling the zipper up to the top of the bag.
“Holy shit,” the cop said, as the man’s face disappeared. “I think I know this guy.”
Mercer raised his hand like an officer stopping traffic on a freeway. “Hold on.”
The attendant stopped and opened the bag again.
“That’s Carl,” the cop said. “I’ve been on this beat for more than ten years. Known him the last three or four.”
“You’re sure?” Mercer said. “No ID on him. We were thinking homeless. But you know his name?”
This was a great stroke of luck-for the dead man and for our work. One of the traditional reasons for cops working neighborhood patrols was about to pay off. The beat cop knew his territory and knew the people who lived and worked in it.
“Carl. He once told me his name was Carl. So my partner and me, we called him Carl Spackler.”
“Carl Spackler?” Mike said, the irrepressible grin reemerging on his face. “The same name as the Bill Murray character in Caddyshack? The guy who killed gophers on the golf course?”
“Yeah, that’s why we called him Carl Spackler.”
“You mean that’s not his real name?” I asked.
“Like I said, it’s how we knew him. First-name basis, and my partner likes to goof with all the characters we meet around here. This Carl guy, he’s sort of homeless.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean he killed gophers? What does that have to do with the fact that his name is Carl?”
The cop was as impatient with me as Mike was. “I mean he’s like a gopher, Counselor. We don’t got gophers in the city.”
“And this guy,” I said. “This-this-Carl?”
“He lives underground, Ms. Cooper. He lives in the train tunnels right below us,” the cop said. “Pops up every now and then from underground. That’s how come we know he’s one of them moles.”
FOURTEEN
At six forty-five on Thursday morning, I met Mercer and Mike at the information booth on the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. As directed, I was dressed down in my shabbiest jeans, old sneakers, and a polo shirt.
Sergeant Hank Brantley of the Transit police had been assigned to accompany P.O. Joe Sammen-the cop who had recognized “Carl” the evening before-and us into the community of tunnel dwellers referred to as “mole people.”
In the pecking order of the homeless in New York City, moles had been given the most pejorative name. They were likened to animals, while others who slept in church doorways or on park benches were not.
Hank was stationed in Grand Central, with a specific duty to do outreach to homeless people in the area.