‘They’re pretty much to scale,’ he explained. ‘I will admit that the casts would be better if we could get them.’
But NYPD had those, and I was willing to bet that the Transit Police would never see them. Frances Penn almost did not look like the same woman I had visited last night, and I wondered why she really had invited me to her apartment. What might she have confided had we not been summoned to the Bowery?
We began untying bags and placing items on the table, except for the fetid wool blankets that had been Benny’s home. These we folded and stacked on the floor. The inventory was an odd one that could be explained in only two ways. Either Benny had been living with someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men’s boots. Or he had somehow acquired the possessions of someone who owned a pair of size seven and a half men’s boots. Benny’s shoe size, we were told, was eleven.
‘What’s Benny got to say this morning?’ Marino asked.
Detective Maier answered, ‘He says the stuff in that pile just showed up on his blankets. He went up on the street, came back and there it was, inside the knapsack.’ He pointed to a soiled green canvas knapsack that had many stories to tell.
‘When was this?’ I asked.
‘Well now, Benny isn’t real clear on that. In fact, he’s not real clear on just about anything. But he thinks it was in the last few days.’
‘Did he see who left the knapsack?’ Marino asked.
‘He says he didn’t.’
I held a photograph close to the bottom of one of the boots to compare the sole, and the size and stitching were the same. Benny had somehow acquired the belongings of the woman we believed Gault had savaged in Central Park. The four of us were silent for a while as we began going through each item we believed was hers. I felt lightheaded and weary as we began reconstructing a life from a tin whistle and rags.
‘Can’t we call her something?’ Marino said. ‘It’s bugging me she’s got no name.’
‘What would you like to call her?’ Commander Penn asked.
‘Jane.’
Detective Maier glanced up at Marino. ‘That’s very original. What’s her last name, Doe?’
‘Any possibility the saxophone reeds are Benny’s?’ I asked.
T don’t think so,’ Maier said. ‘He said all this stuff was in the knapsack. And I’m not aware Benny’s musically inclined.’
‘He plays an invisible guitar sometimes,’ I said.
‘So would you if you smoked crack. And that’s all he does. He begs and smokes crack.’
‘He used to do something before he did that,’ I said.
‘He was an electrician and his wife left him.’
‘That’s no reason to move into a sewer,’ said Marino, whose wife also had left him. ‘There’s gotta be something else.’
‘Drugs. He ended up across the street in Bellevue. Then he’d sober up and they’d let him out. Same old thing, over and over.’
‘Might there have been a saxophone that went with the reeds, and perhaps Benny hocked it?’ I asked.
‘I got no way to know,’ Maier answered. ‘Benny said this is all there was.’
I thought of the mouth of this woman we now called Jane, of the cupping of the front teeth that the forensic dentist blamed on smoking a pipe.
‘If she has a long history of playing a clarinet or saxophone,’ I said, ‘that could explain the damage to her front teeth.’
‘What about the tin whistle?’ Commander Penn asked.
She bent closer to a gold metal whistle with a red mouthpiece. The brand was Generation, it was British made and did not look new.
‘If she played it a lot, then that probably just added to the damage to her front teeth,’ I said. ‘It’s also interesting that it’s an alto whistle and the reeds are for an alto sax. So she may have played an alto sax at some point in her life.’
‘Maybe before her head injury,’ Marino said.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
We continued sifting through her belongings and reading them like tea leaves. She liked sugarless gum and Sensodyne toothpaste, which made sense in light of her dental problems. She had one pair of men’s black jeans, size thirty-two in the waist and thirty-four in length. They were old and rolled up at the cuffs, suggesting they were hand-me-downs or she had gotten them in a secondhand clothing store. Certainly they were much too big for the size she was when she died.