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“Thank God!” the man said, and then, quickly, angrily: “Where the hell is the ambulance? We called for an ambulance!”
“A rescue squad’s on the way, sir,” Wells said.
He looked down at the girl. Her eyes were open. Wells had seen enough open lifeless eyes to know this girl was dead. But he leaned over and touched the carotid artery at the rear of her ear, feeling for a pulse, to make sure.
“Can you tell me what happened, sir?” he asked.
“We found her this way, Violet found her this way.”
There came the faint wailing of a siren.
“There was a needle in her arm,” a large black woman said softly, earning a look of pained betrayal from the man holding the body.
Wells looked. There was no needle, but there was a purple puncture wound in the girl’s arm.
“Where did you find her?” Wells asked the black woman.
“Sitting up in her bed,” Violet said.
The sound of the ambulance siren had grown much louder. Then it shut off. A moment later the ambulance appeared in the driveway.
Two firemen got quickly out, pulled a stretcher from the back of the van, and, carrying an oxygen bottle and an equipment bag, ran up to the patio.
The taller of them, a very thin man, did exactly what Officer Wells had done, took a quick look at Miss Penelope Detweiler’s lifeless eyes and concluded she was dead, and then checked her carotid artery to make sure.
He met Wells’s eyes and, just perceptibly, shook his head.
“Sir,” he said, very kindly, to H. Richard Detweiler, “I think we’d better get her onto the stretcher.”
“There was, the lady said, a needle in her arm,” Wells said.
H. Richard Detweiler now gave Officer Wells a very dirty look.
The very thin fireman nodded. The announcement did not surprise him. The Fire Department Rescue Squads of the City of Philadelphia see a good many deaths caused by narcotics overdose.
Officer Wells went to his car and picked up the microphone.
“Fourteen Twenty-three,” he said.
“Fourteen Twenty-three,” Harriet Polk’s voice came back immediately.
“Give me a supervisor at this location. This is a Five Two Nine Two.”
Five Two Nine Two was a code that went back to the time before shortwave radio and telephones, when police communications were by telegraph key in police boxes on street corners. It meant “dead body.”
“Fourteen B,” Harriet called.
Fourteen B was the call sign of one of two sergeants assigned to patrol the Fourteenth Police District.
“Fourteen B,” Sergeant John Aloysius Monahan said into his microphone. “I have it. En route.”
Officer Wells picked up a clipboard from the floor of the passenger side of his car and then went back onto the patio. The firemen were just finishing lowering Miss Detweiler onto the stretcher.
The tall thin fireman picked up a worn and spotted gray blanket, held it up so that it unfolded of its own weight, and then very gently laid it over the body of Miss Detweiler.
“What are you doing that for?” H. Richard Detweiler demanded angrily.
“Sir,” the thin fireman said, “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”
