A Show of Hands Read online

  “Makes you feel like you should whisper, doesn’t she?” Gammidge murmured. It was true. There was nothing corpselike about the face. She was simply a beautiful young woman, asleep. Crisp was glad Charlie had closed her eyes. “I tell you,” Gammidge continued quietly. “I’ll never understand kids and makeup. Look at her—I guess she’s about as pretty a girl as I’ve seen, wife excepted, of course—and look at all that makeup and whatnot. So thick it’s practically chipped off in places. Look here.”

  So it was. But Crisp’s thoughts were breathless at that instant. Exclamation marks seldom found a way into his vocabulary, so whatever superlatives he knew had atrophied from disuse. Consequently even his mind was speechless. She was a beautiful child. The ghastly pastels of death, visible beneath the paint, brushed her delicate features—the turn of the nose, the sweep of the lips. She was just the kind of girl he’d have designed if given the assignment. It didn’t seem possible that those pale, peaceful lids concealed only the bald, sunken stare of death.

  The makeup was all wrong.

  Gammidge turned down the shroud. Once again Crisp was jarred to the soul. An ugly ring of rust-colored flesh banded the girl’s neck, in sharp contrast to the pale greenish alabaster of her skin. The first stages of decomposition were evident, especially in the area of her larynx, which seemed to have been compressed during the attack.

  “Crushed her windpipe,” said Gammidge. “You can see the finger--prints—you get right up close.”

  Crisp removed his bifocals from his coat pocket and wedged them on his nose. He bent over the wound. After a moment’s inspection he nodded and stood up. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Make anything of it?”

  “Pass me a couple of those, will you?” Crisp pointed at a box of swabs on the counter behind Gammidge.

  “What’re you gonna do?” said Gammidge, holding out the box.

  Crisp once again bent over the body and began sniffing in the vicinity of the shoulder. Then, with the stick end of the swab, he began delicately scraping the skin.

  “You’re not touching the fingerprints, are you?” said Gammidge, nudging himself into Crisp’s frame of reference. “Don’t do that!”

  “I won’t,” Crisp replied, raising his eyebrows but not his eyes. “I’m nowhere near . . . that’s odd.”

  Gammidge bent close. “What?”

  “Moisture seems to . . . would you mind getting me some water, Mr. Gammidge?”

  “Just water?”

  “If you would.” Crisp had produced a magnifying glass from his pocket and was minutely inspecting the girl’s flesh.

  “I thought Sherlock Holmes was the only one who used those things,” Gammidge said to himself. He went to get the water. By the time he returned, Crisp had extended his survey as far as the toes.

  “Here you go,” said Gammidge, proffering the water, which Crisp drank.

  “Thank you.”

  Gammidge was flabbergasted. “I thought you wanted it for some experiment or something.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Crisp, turning an innocent eye on Gammidge. “Oh, no. I was just . . . I get thirsty in the winter. It’s so dry indoors. Well,” he said, returning to the business at hand, “I think we can make a few assumptions.”

  “About the lead?”

  Crisp stood up and took off his rubber gloves. “Lead? Oh, I think that’s pretty high level in the makeup. No doubt.”

  “What then?”

  “Well,” Crisp said thoughtfully. “I think it’s safe to say she’d been lying out in the sun within an hour or so before she died and that she’d been wearing a . . . one of those little . . .” Crisp used sign language to supplement his vocabulary.

  “Bikinis?”

  Crisp nodded and reddened slightly. “Without a . . . that is to say . . .” Once again he let his fingers to the talking.

  “No top? You mean to say you think she was naked?”

  “Nude. Yes,” Crisp said quickly. “On the beach.”

  “What was on the beach?”

  “She was.”

  “You mean, she was on the beach when she died?”

  “If not,” Crisp said, “she had been within an hour or so before, I should imagine. You see?” he said, holding up a cotton swab with pepperlike specks on it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Beach sand.”

  “Sand?”

  “Beach sand,” Crisp corrected. “There’s a big difference between beach sand and gravel sand.” Gammidge’s expression asked, is there? “Yes. You see, gravel sand is sharper to the touch. Beach sand is almost soft. All that friction . . . washing up and down on the beach, you see . . . every wave—”

  “Rounding the edges,” Gammidge said, catching on.

  “Year after year,” said Crisp, concluding his thought. “Exactly. I got this from her toenails. They’re smooth on the edges, you see? And I’m sure if we did a chemical analysis, we’d find a trace of salt.”

  “But she was found in the quarry, Crisp,” Gammidge complained. “That’s fresh water.”

  Crisp draped the shroud over the girl’s feet as if he was tucking in a beloved grandchild. “I said we could make assumptions, Mr. Gammidge. I didn’t say they’d necessarily make sense.”

  “No. They sure don’t,” Gammidge agreed. “How did you come up with all these notions anyway?”

  Crisp took another swab from the table beside the body and held it up to Gammidge’s nose. Gammidge sniffed. “I know that smell,” he said, and sniffed again. “Don’t tell me.” Crisp waited patiently. “Coconut?” he guessed. “Coconut? Suntan oil?”

  “I’m sure it is,” Crisp replied. “I’m sure it is. And it’s only in . . . those places . . . you’d expect to find a tan.”

  “And not where you wouldn’t?” said Gammidge.

  “Except for the . . .” Crisp indicated the chest area. “I would have expected . . . ahem. Yes. But, you see there’s a film of moisture on the body—residue from the ice, probably, as the body doesn’t seem to have absorbed much in those areas where you’d expect to find a tan. It’s formed into perfect little drops. Oil, you see? Otherwise, there’s no film. If you were to paint the body with a dye, a colored water, it would adhere to the bikini area but not to the rest. It would bead.”

  “It’d look like she still had the bikini bottom on?”

  Crisp stepped to the other end of the table. “You might say that. As if . . . yes. That’s why the makeup is peeling off, you see? Because it was put on over the suntan oil. The suntan oil is meant to be absorbed—to a degree—so its molecules are smaller than those of the makeup. In effect, they repel each other.”

  Gammidge furrowed his brow. “Would they do that?”

  “What?”

  “Do they put on makeup over suntan oil? That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Crisp shrugged. “Chemically it doesn’t, no,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t speak with much confidence as far as fashion goes. Not exactly my . . . some of the things women do. Well.” He paused briefly. “Of course I don’t suppose you remember the bustle?”

  Gammidge replied that, of course, he didn’t. But he had seen pictures.

  “Well, I’ve never seen them, either,” said Crisp softly, “in person. I’m not quite that old. But my mother . . . well. I’ll have to show you my family pictures sometime. I remember my father expressing his amazement that sensible women—doesn’t matter what they are, doctors, lawyers, or charwomen—will trample one another in their rush to sacrifice good sense to the god of fashion. I think that’s how he put it. I’ve always liked that.”

  “Isn’t it the truth,” Gammidge agreed. “I can’t see putting makeup on a face like that.”

  “Much less makeup forty-odd years old,” said Crisp.

  Gammidge shook his head. “That’s a real stinker. ’Course, I’ll still have to send those samples off to Augusta.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Crisp. “As you said, it’s all academic,
isn’t it? Given the fingerprints and . . . well, we’re just satisfying our curiosity, aren’t we?”

  “I wouldn’t say my curiosity’s feeling very satisfied, Mr. Crisp. In fact, the harder you look at this case, the hungrier it gets.”

  “There’s always that danger when one approaches evidence with an open mind.”

  “What do you mean, ‘open mind’?”

  “Well, Mr. Gammidge, to paraphrase an analogy I heard recently, let’s assume you heard a shot in a closed room. You entered the room and found a man with a smoking gun in his hand standing over a dead body. The man with the gun was known to hate the dead man passionately. Now, it’s your job to provide the court with evidence in the case. What do you do?”

  “I search the victim, the room, the murderer, and the weapon and assemble the clues to hang him,” said Gammidge.

  “That’s where the error lies, you see,” said Crisp. “You assume the man with the gun is the murderer. Because of that, you approach the evidence with prejudice. So if evidence fits your view of the crime, you accept it; if it doesn’t, you ignore it—overlook it.”

  “But, I mean, it stands to reason. You make certain assumptions—”

  “In this instance you assumed wrongly,” said Crisp. “So did the jury, as it turns out.”

  “You mean that actually happened?”

  “In Baltimore. About the turn of the century. The suicide note was found under a dresser several days after the gentleman with the smoking gun had been hanged for murder. Insisted on wearing his bowler hat and a scarlet cummerbund for the occasion, as I recall.”

  “But . . . how could they overlook a suicide note?”

  Crisp cocked his head slightly and weighted his words with his eyes. “Because they weren’t looking for it,” he said. “They didn’t—”

  “. . . have an open mind,” Gammidge interjected.

  “. . . have an open mind,” Crisp said. “That’s correct. It’s important we don’t make the same mistake in this case.”

  “But, I mean, when you’ve got someone’s fingerprints on a strangle victim’s neck, that’s a lot different than a smoking gun, wouldn’t you say? After all, she didn’t strangle herself.”

  “I’d say that’s a sensible conclusion,” said Crisp. “Still, as someone once said, there are points of interest.”

  “Points of confusion, you mean.”

  “I’m simply suggesting that we don’t ignore evidence merely because it doesn’t fit with what we expect to find,” said Crisp. “Anytime facts are being overlooked, chances are the truth is as well,” he added. “And truth is the thing, you see.”

  “Well then, what are the facts so far?” Gammidge asked. “Let’s say she’d been at the beach. Why don’t you think she was murdered there?”

  Crisp rested his slim left buttock comfortably against the marble slab. “Because of the makeup,” he said. “I don’t pretend to know much about women, but what I gather is they tend to need mirrors for this sort of operation. Larger mirrors than those they carry for general maintenance. Also, if this makeup is as old as . . . old enough to contain lead, it would have come in porcelain jars and tin tubes. A little cumbersome to carry around. Especially someone so . . . lacking in pockets.”

  “She could have had a bag.”

  “Possibly,” said Crisp. “And a strong arm.” He brushed the arm of the corpse lightly through the shroud.

  After a brief silence Gammidge resumed his compilation of suppositions. “Okay. She was at the beach, or had been recently. Somebody snuck up on her, after she’d put on makeup over her suntan lotion, and strangled her.” Gammidge pantomimed the murder in the air. “Then he took her up to the quarry and dumped her. Craps! She was frozen. It didn’t freeze hard ’til almost December. What was she doing sunbathing on the beach in December?”

  “During a hard freeze,” Crisp added incidentally. He’d been spinning the magnifying glass between his thumb and fingers. He tucked it into his vest pocket. “I seem to remember someone saying she had a shirt or blouse on?”

  “That’s right. Sweatshirt. Charlie put it in a bag around here someplace. Probably in one of these . . .” The room was lined with a low bank of built-in wooden drawers. Gammidge began pulling them out and sifting through the contents. “Here it is,” he said after a brief search. He held up a plastic grocery bag to which an index card was affixed. “Her name’s on here somewhere. Here it is. Amanda Murphy.”

  “Amanda Murphy,” said Crisp softly. Sadly. Now the tragedy had a name, like a ghost ship or shipwreck: the Andrea Doria, the Mary Celeste, the Amanda Murphy. “Pretty name.”

  “Pretty girl,” said Gammidge.

  Crisp took the bag and removed a sweatshirt, which was still wet. “It’s a man’s shirt.” He spread it out on the instrument table, revealing a huge number 33 and the Yale logo. He squeezed one of the sleeves until a drop or two of water fell into his open palm. He tasted it. “Fresh,” he said.

  Gammidge nodded. “Quarry water.”

  Gently Crisp turned the shirt over and examined it. “Blood on the collar.”

  “Just where it would be if she was wearing the shirt when she was . . .” Gammidge let silence finish the sentence. “That’s what I figured was some queer, though—how she was wearing that shirt, a man’s shirt, and nothing else. I mean, nothing.”

  Crisp nodded absentmindedly. “Most peculiar,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “Queer,” Gammidge reiterated. “And if she was wearing one of those bikini things, where did it go?”

  Crisp draped the sweatshirt carefully across the table. “It would have to be near the murder scene somewhere,” he said to himself.

  “What?”

  Ignoring the question, Crisp inclined his head confidentially toward Gammidge, but he didn’t take his eyes from the shirt. “Did you happen to . . . this is rather delicate, Mr. Gammidge—Nate . . . but did you happen to notice . . . that is, did Doctor Pagitt examine the girl to see if she had been—”

  “Oh. Well, yes,” said Gammidge. “In a case like this—I mean, no clothes to speak of, and strangled—well, it’s the first thing you do, you know. No.” He reddened slightly. Gammidge didn’t make the acquaintance of many young ladies in a professional capacity. “I mean, as far as he could tell. Of course, there still have to be tests and . . . the doctor took samples. But not as far as we could tell. Maybe you could—”

  “Oh, no!” said Crisp. He could feel his feet flushing in his imitation fur-lined L.L. Bean boots. “No, I couldn’t. I’m hardly qualified. He removed a kerchief from his vest pocket and mopped his brow. “Gracious. No. I’m quite prepared to take Dr. Pagitt’s . . . Mmm.” He cleared his throat. “No signs of a struggle?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well?”

  “Well, it’s probably not important, but look at her hands.”

  “Her hands?” Crisp took one of the hands from beneath the shroud and held it in his own. It was so small. So delicate. So cold. He turned the palm upward and immediately saw what Gammidge was referring to. Across the first joint of each finger was a wound, one that must have originally been thin and superficial but had widened and deepened with decay.

  Gammidge peeked over Crisp’s shoulder. “Make anything of it?”

  Crisp motioned toward the other hand. “Is there the same—”

  “Yup.” Gammidge nodded. “Same thing on both hands.”

  “I see,” said Crisp. He studied the wound with his magnifying glass. “Something’s oxidized here.”

  “Blood, I should imagine,” said Gammidge.

  “Do you suppose so?”

  Already Gammidge had read enough of Winston Crisp to brace for the sucker punch. “Don’t you?” he said feebly.

  “Well, that would mean this wound was made after she died,” said Crisp. “You see, there’s no sign of bleeding. No. I don’t think the skin was broken, originally. I would say that whatever did this was rusty.”

  “You mean,” said Gammidge, tryi
ng to make out the ledges in the fog, “you mean . . . What in hell do you mean?”

  “I would say the wound was made by a wire of some kind.”

  “A wire?”

  “A rusty one.”

  “A rusty one? You mean they dragged a rusty wire across her hands?”

  Crisp gently tucked the arm under the shroud. “No,” he said. He began twirling the magnifying glass in his fingers again. The storm was complaining bitterly outside. His eyes drifted toward the window and he stared holes in the deep, angry night. “She was strangled with it.”

  “Strangled?”

  A length of gauze hung from the rim of the gray plastic trash can. Crisp picked it up and wound an end around each fist. “Turn around. I’ll show you.”

  It may have been the fact that they were in a funeral parlor. It may have been because the cold, soulless body of a young woman lay not three feet away. It may have been the storm, moaning through the graveyard of his unconscious, rallying the ghosts of childish fears. Whatever it was, Gammidge didn’t particularly want to turn his back on someone who was going to demonstrate a strangling. Chills ran all over him with cleats on.

  “I think I’ll get the idea if you just tell me,” he said.

  “It’s just gauze, Nate,” said Crisp. “You can do it to me, if you want.”

  Gammidge scolded the ghosts back into their graves and turned his back on Crisp. Without warning Crisp dropped the gauze around Gammidge’s neck and began to tighten. Immediately Gammidge’s hands flew to his defense, grabbing the cord on either side of his neck.

  “See?” said Crisp, loosening the tourniquet.

  It took Gammidge a second or two to swallow his heart, but—still holding the gauze with both hands—he got the message at once. “Somebody tried to strangle her with a rusty old wire. She put her hands up, just like I just did. The harder they twisted, the harder she pulled.”

  “It must have been over fairly quickly,” said Crisp. He tugged at the gauze and Gammidge let it fall. “Otherwise her fingers would have been cut through.” He rolled the gauze into a ball and dropped it into the trash can. “She didn’t suffer.”

  The rush of blood to Gammidge’s brain had a lubricating effect on his thought process. “But what about the fingerprints?” he said indignantly. He pulled down the shroud to reveal the girl’s neck. “You can see as clear as day, somebody had their hands around her neck. Are you trying to say he strangled her once with a wire, then again with his hands? Why? To incriminate himself? That makes no sense.