A Matter of Time Read online

  “You guys get anything?” Cash asked.

  “Pee-pneumonia.”

  “Frostbite, maybe.”

  “John thinks maybe he was visiting somebody’s wife. Any possibles?”

  Tucholski exhaled a stormcloud. “Broad at... shit. Middle of the block. Kid’s got it in the book. What was her name?”

  There were two Kids in the squad. Harald by Railsback’s designation, Smith by Tucholski’s. Both were in their late twenties.

  Smith, a black, was the smartest of the new generation coming into the department. Cash figured he would go far even without affirmative action. He stayed even with Tucholski by having a Polish joke for every occasion.

  “Gobielowski. Wouldn’t you know it? All we have to do is find the bowling shirt the guy left behind.”

  Smith and Tucholski bickered constantly, yet were close. Their feud was entirely in honor of tradition.

  It was lucky, Cash thought, that neither had a hair-trigger temper.

  “John?”

  Harald, too, had to keep the notes. “A Mrs. McDaniel. Looked the type, too. In the upstairs flat in the first building east of the old lady’s.”

  “Put them down for a followup.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Railsback, “it’s almost shift’s end and I know you want to finish your paperwork so you can get home and shovel the sidewalks, so we’ll start in the morning.”

  “Shit,” said Tucholski. “He’s had one of his brainstorms.”

  “Tomorrow,” Railsback said, “you guys are going to take the pictures around to the coin shops. Somebody’ll know him.”

  “You want to bet?” Cash asked. “I’ve got a hunch we imagined this guy.”

  “It’s too early for pessimism,” Smith observed. “The body’s hardly cold.” The investigative machinery had barely started rolling.

  “FBI will ID him,” said Railsback. “They’ll find him in the military files.”

  “Or we might get a confession from a wife with a guilty conscience,” said Harald, without conviction. “Or a witness might pop up like a genie out of a bottle.”

  “We might find an illegally parked car come sweeper day,” Cash suggested. “Wednesdays and Thursdays are street-sweeping days over there.”

  “A thought,” Railsback agreed. “I’ll have a car check it.”

  Fifteen minutes later Cash finished his paperwork and left.

  Annie had haddock on for dinner, because of his cholesterol. On the bad days, if it were not for her, he would break down and hit a dozen pork chops like Attila the Hun. He had a little sign on his desk at work, one of several homespun gems: You know you’re past it when a doctor, not the law or church, takes away everything you like. He was supposed to shun coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, and cholesterol. He did all right on the latter two.

  Sometimes it was a pain in the butt. He managed with cussing and little self-reminding notes about having to hang on long enough to collect the pension he had been getting ripped off for all these years.

  “Bad day?” Annie guessed.

  “The worst.” He explained. She had a good head. Interested in his work. He told her what he could. But she was a little drifty about it. She was a mystery buff. Any given time there would be ten to fifteen paperbacks scattered round the house. She came up with some weird suggestions.

  “He wasn’t dumped? There’s that drug war on the North Side.”

  “No. The doctor says not. The scene agrees. With the snow and everything, they got it pinned. He died where they found him when there was an inch of snow on the ground. He was barely cold when they spotted him. This fish isn’t bad. What’d you do?”

  “No tire tracks or anything?” Her quick little mind was cataloging possibilities from mysteries read. She had the memory of the proverbial elephant, though it was as cluttered as a scrapyard.

  “Not even tracks for him past three steps. They claim they went over that alley with everything. It’s like he stepped out of thin air, walked a few steps, then croaked.”

  “Kaspar Hauser,” she mumbled. “How about a fall?”

  “Nope. Nothing he could’ve fallen from. No bruises or anything, either. Just some passion scratches on his back.” Her eyebrows arched. “That’s what John thinks.”

  “There goes my helicopter idea. Eat your broccoli.”

  Ech, he thought. Especially broccoli. But cauliflower was worse and he would get that tomorrow if he didn’t eat up today. He was the only baby she had now.

  “Matthew called,” she said, and was off with the latest from their youngest, who was at UMC and costing more than some of Uncle Sam’s earlier wars. His major was Criminal Science. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, he said. Cash was not sure why, did not understand, but was pleased. Most kids weren’t interested in their old man’s work. Especially cops’ kids. They all wanted to make a new world and a million bucks. Cash wasn’t against doing either. It was just that the youngsters apparently believed in witchcraft, that somewhere, maybe in Washington, there was a magic button. If you were to push it, all the bad guys would get good, all the poor people would get rich, and all the starving would be fed. But the Powers had hidden it, because for some obscure reason that was to their advantage.

  Talking about Matthew inevitably led to their other son, Michael. Obliquely, Annie asked, “When are you going to have John and Carrie over again?”

  John Harald and Michael had grown up together, gone to college together, and had been in the war together. Vietnam. That had been “The War” to them. To Cash it was that nearly forgotten playground squabble with the Madman of Berlin. To each generation its own, he thought.

  Michael Cash had not come home from his. He was still technically MIA. It was a thing between John and Cash that sometimes made them uncomfortable with one another, though they had few differences over the war itself.

  “Did you hear me, Norman?”

  “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?” C
ash 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.”

  It was nice having people around sometimes, Cash reflected, though the children made him nervous. And Carrie and Nancy, who were cousins, made these evenings together a sort of wake. Michael’s body might be gone, but his ghost remained very much among them.

  Following dinner the children established squatter’s rights to the TV while the women caucused in the kitchen, so Cash and Harald retreated to the rathskeller.

  “Something bothering you?” John asked, letting Cash pour him a scotch and water.

  “The case. The damned John Doe.” He repeated Annie’s story about Miss Groloch and her mysteriously missing lover.

  “Coincidence,” said John. “Or a grisly joke.”

  “That’s what Annie thought. Wanted me to check for body snatchings.”

  “No go. Front page.”

  “That’s what I told her. And how to get it there still warm, during a snowstorm, without leaving a trace?”

  Against one wall stood a crude set of shelves, boards on cinder blocks, that Cash had erected for his wife’s old mysteries. Somehow, when Michael had gotten married, a lot of his science fiction had migrated into them rather than out of the house. Nancy’s people were stodgy. He had preferred to hide his reading tastes the way his father’s generation had hidden their Playboys from their wives in the fifties. John pulled out a couple and tossed them onto the bar.

  “Tried to read The Time Machine once,” Cash said. “Didn’t grab me. Never noticed this other one before.” It was The Corridors of Time by Isaac Asimov. Its dog-eared look suggested that it had been one of Michael’s favorites.

  It was Cash’s fault that his son had gotten started reading that stuff. He had brought home a book called The Naked Sun, same author, given him by someone at the station who had thought Annie would like it. “But I get your drift.”

  John looked expectant in the way a pup does when his master catches him peeing off the paper.

  Cash shrugged. “There’s a more reasonable explanation.”

  “Tell you what,” John replied. “Let’s check the files. See what the reports have to say.”

  “John, I wouldn’t know where to look. I mean, sure, they keep the files open forever. Supposedly. But where? We’d really have to dig. First just to find out where they keep records of where they keep records from fifty years ago. And on our own time....” The case bothered him, yes, but twenty-three years of homicide investigations had put calluses on his curiosity. He had not worked on his own time for ten years, since the bizarre rape-murders around Mullanphy School.

  John seemed disappointed. �
��All right. I’ll do the digging. If I locate the file, I’ll have it sent over.”

  “Railsback would crucify us just for thinking about it. No imagination, old Hank.”

  Cash was saved John’s stronger opinion of Railsback by Carrie.

  “I’m sorry, Norm. We’re going to have to go. It’s my head, John.”

  “Didn’t you bring your pills?”

  “I didn’t think...”

  “We’ve got aspirin, Carrie,” said Norm.

  “No. Thanks. I’m sorry. With aspirin I have to take so. many I make myself sick at my stomach.”

  “Okay,” said Harold. “Get your coat. I’ll be ready as soon as the kids are.”

  Carrie’s headaches were genuine, but Cash suspected they were a psychological convenience. Judging from the past, she had gotten Annie and Nancy going on Michael, real soap-opera stuff. Cash had been through a few of those sessions himself. Carrie was good at starting them. But she didn’t like being around the people she made unhappy or depressed.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see Nancy and the kids get home. John, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  Thursday they got another negative on cars illegally parked and more silence from Missing Persons around the country. FBI produced nothing. Railsback decided to release photos for television and the papers. John got on the phone and started trying to locate Homicide records for 1921. Friday lunch he disappeared, turned up late with a crusty file, thick, handwritten, almost illegible.

  They never got into it. The new case, that had held off longer than seemed believable, finally broke. It was a holdup-murder. Two partners in a cheap used-furniture store had been killed, and an officer wounded. One freelance socialist was dead and two more were fleeing on foot, one of them hit. The whole division was on it till dark, and by then they had another. The weekend had begun. It was Tuesday again before Cash had a chance to worry about the mystery corpse.

  On Sunday the story hit the papers. On Monday the Channel Four evening newscast mentioned the case in passing. Tuesday morning, at 8:30, Cash got a buzz from Tom Kurland on the booking desk.

  “Norm? Got a live one down here. Voluntary confession on that John Doe stiff from last week.”