Outside, the experts had itemized the material clues. The Assistant Medical Examiner had been and gone. He hadn’t disclosed anything that wasn’t obvious.

An examination of the white stiff’s clothes had revealed that he was an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

“It won’t take long to check with the New York office and find out his assignment. That will tell us something,” the Homicide lieutenant said. “What did you boys find out?”

“Just what could be seen without knowing what it meant,” Grave Digger said. “This is the bartender; he saw it all.”

“Fine. We’ll get it down. Too bad you didn’t have a stenographer with you.”

“We might not have got what we did,” Coffin Ed said. “No one talks freely when it’s being taken down.”

“Anyway, you got it in your heads, if I know you two,” the Homicide lieutenant said. “As soon as they move these stiffs, we’ll all get together in the precinct station and correlate what we got.” He turned to the precinct lieutenant, Anderson. “What about those bar jockeys? You want any more of them?”

“I’m having a man take their names and addresses,” Anderson said. “I’ll go along with Jones and Johnson on the witness they picked.”

“Right,” the lieutenant said, beating the cold from his gloved hands and looking up and down the street. “What’s happening to those dead wagons?”

Chapter 6.

On his radio, Anderson got a call to come in. The bored voice of the switchboard sergeant informed him that the prowl car sent up to the convent reported a corpse, and asked what he wanted done.

Anderson told him to order the car to stay put and he’d send the Homicide crew up there.

The Homicide lieutenant ordered one of his detectives to call the Assistant Medical Examiner again.

Haggerty said, “Old Doc Fullhouse ain’t going to like spending his nights in Harlem with bodies as cold as these.”

Anderson said, “You go along with Jones and Johnson; I’ll take the witness back to the station in my car.”

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, with Haggerty in back, led the Homicide car down 125th Street to Convent Avenue and up the hill to the south side of the convent grounds.

The prowl car was parked by the convent wall in the middle of the block. There was not a pedestrian in sight.

The three cops were sitting inside their car to keep warm, but they jumped out and looked alert when the Homicide car drew up.

“There is it,” one of them said, pointing toward the convent wall. “We haven’t touched anything.”

The corpse was flattened against the wall in an upright position, with its arms hanging straight down and its feet raised several inches from the pavement. It was entirely covered, except for the head, by a long, black, shapeless coat, threadbare and slightly greenish, with a moth-eaten, rabbit-fur collar. The hands were encased in black, knitted mittens; the feet in old-fashioned, high-buttoned shoes that had recently been cleaned with liquid polish. The face seemed to be buried in the solid concrete, so that only the back of the head was visible. Glossy waves of black, oily hair gleamed in the dim light.