was thick with
dust. A baby about a year old, quite naked, was lying beside one of
the chairs; its lower body was caked in filth obviously many days
old. It was a boy, and it was crying feebly in a thin whine.
There was a man sitting on the cot, head down, a man
about thirty, with several days' growth of beard on a lantern jaw. He
was wearing a pair of dirty shorts and nothing else, and he had a fat
paunch beneath a mat of dark chest hair. Somewhere children were
crying. In addition to the dust, the floor was littered with
miscellany: scraps of dry bread, candy wrappers, beer cans, and
unmistakable human excrement.
Glasser went into the little hall off that room,
Wanda after him. At the front of the house was a tiny kitchen.
Counter and stove were littered with piles of dirty dishes and pans,
and there was mold in most of them. The floor was dirtier than that
in the first room. There was a table about a foot square by the
window, and in a chair beside it a woman sat looking dully at a can
of beer in one hand. She was a fat, dark young woman in pink pants
and a flowered top; both were soiled and spotted. Her back to them,
they could see the ingrained dirt on her neck.
Two children, three or four, were tugging at her
other arm: children in dirty rags of nondescript clothing. They were
both crying.
" Mrs. Engel?" said Glasser.
She looked around slowly. Her eyes were bloodshot,
her dark-red lipstick smeared.
" Who're you?" she asked thickly. Glasser
showed her the badge. "Oh. 'Bout Alice." She gave the
nearest child a casual slap. "Shut up, you. Poor li'l Alice.
Don' know what happened."
She waved an arm clumsily. "Inna bedroom."
They went down the hall and came to an open door. The
room was about ten feet square. It held a single bed and an unpainted
three-drawer chest. The bed was a tangle of gray sheets, an old brown
blanket half on the floor. The body was on the bed: the thin, small
body of a little girl—an undernourished-looking little girl, the
ribs starkly visible. The doctors would say exactly what had been
done to her; it was fairly obvious that she'd been beaten and raped.
There was dried blood all over her, and on the bedclothes; her face
was contorted in one last scream of agony.
Wanda made a strangled sound. Glasser backed out and
went on down the hall. Next to the bedroom was a bathroom. The toilet
had been cracked and overflowed a long time ago, and the mess never
had been cleared up; there were two ancient chamber-pots, both ready
to spill over, in the dirt-encrusted bathtub.
Wanda gulped and said faintly, "I'm s-sorry, I'm
going to be—"
" If you're sick here the lab will be mad at you
for tampering with evidence," said Glasser. "You'd better
go get some fresh air." She fled past the man on the cot, and
Glasser shook him by one shoulder. "Fratelli! Can you answer
some questions?"
The man just mumbled and shook his head. Glasser came
out into the rain and took a deep breath of cold wet air. Wanda was
sitting in the back of the squad swallowing determinedly. Glasser got
in the front and reached for the mike on the radio.
There wasn't anything for detectives to do here, for
a while. Take the man and woman in to sober up in jail. Take the kids
to Juvenile Hall where at least they'd be washed and fed. Turn the
lab loose, and get the body to the morgue. Later on, one of that pair
might answer some pertinent questions.
"You O.K.?" said Yeager to Wanda. "I
said you'd better not go in—"
"I'm O.K.," said Wanda faintly.
" She's getting street
experience," said Glasser, and flicked on the mike.
* * *
At five o'clock Landers and Grace were talking again
to the two security guards from Bullock's, Dick Lee and Bob Masters,
who had spent the afternoon looking at mug-shots down in records.
They had come up blank.
" I guess I shouldn't have said I might make one
of them," said Masters ruefully. He was black; Lee was white.
"It was just a second, when those last two took their masks off,
just as the elevator