Free Manhattan 62 by Reggie Nadelson Page B

death warmed over.
    Nancy always told me that I used Tommy Perino. “Use him for what?” I said. “For company,” she says, “you make believe he’s your son. You ought to get married, and have some kids.” She tells me all the time. “What about you?” I say. “Not me,” she says. “I don’t want to be tied down. Not me.”
    Tommy was a loner, kept to himself, but he liked a little change jingling in his pockets to make him feel good and right with the other kids. He never took a handout. Not since I met him, first day I move into the building in ’57, would he take money for nothing.
    So, over the years, I gave him little errands, got him to pick up some smokes, take a package over to the precinct, and I gave him a quarter, and sometimes a buck.
    Maybe it’s wrong when I ask Tommy to help me on the High Line case. I say, listen, Tom, it’s about this arm. We can’t find the poor girl’s arm. And he says, sure Pat, sure I can help you out. I tell him there’s a brand new crisp fiver for him in it, maybe a sawbuck. Tommy’s a garbage rat, always diving into the cans, looking for something to sell or salvage. Maybe it’s wrong, asking him. But I got nothing else.
    It’s the end of July, and we’re not making any progress. After we fix the victim up some—people react bad when they look at a mutilated girl—we put out a picture of her to the papers; nothing comes back. Jane Doe remains unidentified.
    Takes Tommy two days to find the arm. Takes him two days of searching the meat market until he finds the arm in one of the garbage bins. Put his arm right in it, and pulls the thing out. I call it in, and somebody, a couple of cops on that beat, one of the medics, get it and take it away before I see it. Did I ever worry about how it affected Tommy?
    Did I notice he wasn’t exactly the same kid after that?
    â€œWhat did it look like, Tom?”
    â€œLike? Like a hunk of old meat, maggots all over it,” he says. “It stank. Whadya expect when it’s boiling stinking hot in the city,” he adds and then goes upstairs to his own apartment.
    But this gives us something. The coroner examines the arm. It’s a match for the dead girl, he says. The top of the arm matches the wound where they sawed it off, and he explains some process by which he can tell if the flesh, the skin and bone, once belonged to the girl. Also, most important, there’s the tattoo; on the inside of her arm, the worm, the words Cuba Libre.
    We get the news out that the Jane Doe is probably Cuban. We put the tattoo in the papers. It’s only time until we get an ID, and catch the bastard who killed her and hung her from the High Line.
    You say the word Cuba, you get a lot of conspiracy theories. In the next few days, after the papers print the story, the phone at the office rings off the hook. People telling me Castro is the actual devil. Castro’s spies murdered the girl. No one is sure what the worm means, not at first, but the words Cuba Libre get plenty of reaction.
    If the girl is fighting Castro, she is a martyr, people say. The New York Diocese takes up her case, says they will post a reward; anything for someone who fights the Communist evil. One caller informs me that Russians landed on the High Line in a spaceship and did the job.
    A lady whose husband was in the 2506 Brigade and died at the Bay of Pigs, says to me, and I’m scribbling it down fast as I can, phone under my chin. “They let us down,” she says. “Them Kennedys, they left my husband and his men on that beach to die. The Kennedys killed him, they’re killers, they don’t care for nobody, and that Bobby Kennedy, he’s the worst of all, you ask me they had a hand in this terrible death, poor dead girl.” The next caller wants Bobby on the case, he’s the Attorney General, he cares for the people of Cuba, he hates Castro,