The Con Man Read Free

looked up at Di Angelo. “When did you get here, Fred?”
    Di Angelo looked at his watch. “I’d say around one-fifteen, Steve. I was just a little bit off Silvermine, and I’m generally there around…”
    “One-fifteen it is,” Carella said, and he wrote down the information. He then wrote, 3) Cause of death? and 4) Time when death occurred? and left both those items to be filled in by the ME or the coroner.
    He next wrote:
5) Supposed age: 25-35.
    6) Supposed profession: ?
    7) Description of body:
        a) Sex: Female.
        b) Color: White.
        c) Nationality: ?
        d) Height: ?
        e) Weight: ?
    There were a lot of question marks.
    There were also a good many other items Carella could have listed under a description of the body. Items like build and complexion and hair and eyes and eyebrows and nose and chin and face and neck and lips and mouth and many more. And to these he could have given answers ranging from short and stocky to stout and square-shouldered, or small and pug, or square and dimpled, or thick and puffy, or any one of a hundred combinations for each category.
    The trouble was that the body was a floater and pretty badly decomposed. Where an unknown body would automatically have called for a description of the eyes, the color, the shape, etc., Carella could give no such description here because the eyes hadalready decomposed. Where he would have liked to list the color of the girl’s hair, that hair had been washed away, and he settled for a brief note: Head hair gone. Pubic hair, blonde. He terminated his description of the body with the boldly printed word FLOATER . That, for anyone in the know, summed up the story. Then he went on to the next item:
8) Description of clothing: Single article of clothing is brassiere. Have lab check for laundry and dry-cleaning marks.
    9) Jewelry and other objects on person: None.
    Carella closed the notebook.
    “What do you make of it?” Di Angelo asked.
    “You want statistics or guesses?” Carella said.
    “Gee, I don’t know. I was just asking.”
    “Well, by statistics, this girl shouldn’t be dead,” Carella said. “It’s all a mistake.”
    “How so?”
    “From the looks of her, I’d say she’s been in the water maybe three, four months. Somebody probably reported her missing during that time—assuming she’s got family or friends—so that makes her technically a missing person.”
    “Yeah?” Di Angelo asked, impressed as always by Carella. Di Angelo respected Carella a great deal. Part of this respect was due to the fact that they were both of Italian descent, and there was something immensely gratifying—to Di Angelo’s way of thinking—about an Italian boy making good. Di Angelo felt about Carella much the same way he felt about Frank Sinatra. But the major part of Di Angelo’s respect came from a thorough appreciation of the fact that Carella was a smart cop, a well-informed cop, and, on occasion, a tough cop. This, in Di Angelo’s book, was a tough combination to beat.
    “So let’s look at the missing persons statistics,” Carella said. “We’ve got a girl here. Well, there are usually twenty-five percent more males than females among missing persons.”
    “Yeah?” Di Angelo said.
    “Two: She’s probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old. The peak age for missing persons is fifteen.”
    “Yeah?” DiAngelo said.
    “Three: This is April. The peak month for missing persons is May, and the second peak month is September.”
    “How you like that?” Di Angelo said.
    “So, statistically, this is all wrong.” Carella sighed, and again, there was a passing film of pain in his eyes. “That doesn’t make her any less dead, though,” he said.
    “No,” Di Angelo said, shaking his head.
    “One guess of a semi-technical nature,” Carella said. “Five’ll get you ten she’s an out-of-towner.”
    Di Angelo nodded and then glanced up to the highway where two police sedans had pulled up.