Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

She started her nightly round at the trash receptacle behind the Elite Bakery. Working in the dark, she searched a long time before finding and consuming a couple of stale rolls. Then she emptied a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag of its contents and set off to fill it with aluminum cans picked up from the wayside and salvaged from the hundred or so trashcans along her regular route.

She kept to the alleys, the unlighted passages, the dark sides of walls and fences. It wasn’t other nocturnal predators she feared — on them she could exercise nails and teeth, and fists hardened by hunger into hammers. But the police were merciless toward vagrants, and she had vowed not to survive another stretch in the workhouse.

Around two o’clock in the morning, with her bag full of cans, she slipped through a hedge and followed her usual course along Pemberton Avenue, a.k.a. Business Route 5. A high chain-link fence followed the curve of the road here, hugging the gravelly shoulder so closely as to leave no room for pedestrians. Midgy Lunken’s path lay between the fence and a dense thicket that cloaked the slope rising sharply to her right, above which the rooflines of houses showed vaguely against the velvet sky.

The traffic on Route 5 never quite died down at any hour of the night. Guided by the lights of passing cars, Midgy made her way with ease through the shadows. All the same, she nearly fell over the figure huddled motionless on the path before a stray beam of light limned it momentarily.

A hungry belly has no conscience, much less a scrap of compassion. Midgy had rolled a few drunks in her day. Her only concern was that some sharp-eyed driver would see her at it and have the police on the scene before she could get away. She knelt quickly in the mud and ran her hands over the prostrate form. A man — a big man, muscular, but just now limp as a rag. A wallet where it ought to be. She snatched it and scampered back along the path by which she’d come, trailing her bag of empty cans noisily behind her.

At length she stopped under a viaduct to examine her spoils by the feeble glow of a streetlight. Besides the usual cards and papers, the wallet contained a substantial wad of bills. With many a glance over her shoulder she counted them out — sixty-eight dollars’ worth of them.

Midgy Lunken dropped the plundered wallet down a storm sewer and left her bag of cans tumbled in the gutter for somebody else to find and redeem. She padded off into the night, her mind astir with plans for spending her windfall. First a visit to the coffeeshop at the bus station. Then a bath and a four dollar bed for the rest of the night at the Brethren’s Hostel. And in the morning, Eleanor’s Beauty Salon as soon as it opened — if they’d let her in.

Not long after first fight, two people on their way to work called the police on cellular phones to report that they’d seen what looked like a man lying inert against the fence alongside Route 5. A patrol crew dispatched to the scene found the dead body of an adult white male in his thirties facedown on the narrow path that ran along the fence on the side away from the road. Death had apparently resulted from a severe head wound, which had crushed in the right temple. No identification was found on the body.

When Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn reported for duty at eight A.M., his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, met him in the hall outside his office. “Don’t take off your jacket,” said Savage. “We’ve got a citizen down, over in Harmony Heights.”

Auburn had no trouble finding the place along Route 5 where the body was lying, covered now by a blanket and surrounded by an investigative team. Figuring out where they’d parked and how they had made their way to the site on the other side of the fence took considerably more effort.

A chance glimpse of a strip of yellow plastic tape fluttering in the morning breeze led him to a cul-de-sac under a viaduct where a cruiser and an evidence van were parked. As he pulled in next to them, another van, belonging to the coroner’s office, stopped behind him with a squeal of brakes. A dark-haired, heavy-featured man stepped out and pulled a camera case and a square leather grip after him with an air of urgency.

“Turn off your siren, Nick,” said Auburn. “They don’t call you for live ones, remember?”

Nick Stamaty’s greeting was goodnatured but sardonic. “I want to get in there before Kestrel has him posted and pickled and shoved in a box.”

Together they walked along the fence and passed under the yellow tape with which the first officers on the scene had cordoned off the area. Three ten-year-olds, who should have been on their way to school, were hovering near the tape, seeing nothing but hiding their disappointment under a brave show of nonchalance.