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He was dead. No doubt about that.
His head bobbed on dark and brackish water, his hair floating among the debris like a weary, lost animal.
A drowned river rat, Constable Ichabod Crane had thought at first.
Perhaps he should have left it at that, but something about the object had stopped him: the languid movement, the suggestion of weight underneath the hair.
Approaching the edge of the Hudson River, Ichabod Crane swallowed hard. At times such as these, he wished he didn't see so much.
It was his nature, for better or worse. He carried himself with an edge of caution, a sharp and suspicious eye, and a healthy disrespect for normal police procedure. That made him, among his fellow New York City constables, either the most innovative or the most annoying man on earth.
As Ichabod leaned over the pier, his lantern's fight revealed an outline below the surface of the river: a body -- male.
With his free hand, he rang his alarm bell as hard as he could.
Footsteps echoed from the cobbled streets behind him. "Where are you?" a voice rang out.
"Over here!" Ichabod shouted. Looking over his shoulder, he saw two familiar silhouettes emerge into the light of a streetlamp -- Constables Green and Witherspoon. "I need your help with this!"
Ichabod set down his alarm bell and reached underwater, hooking his arm under the body's shoulders.
"Constable Crane -- Ichabod Crane?" came Green's wary voice. "Is that you?"
The body was heavy, unbelievably heavy. Ichabod planted one foot firmly against a wood piling to keep from falling in. "None other," he grunted. "And not only me. I have found something."
The body emerged from the murk. Straining against the weight, Ichabod dragged it onto the dock. Its face was a swollen caricature, a balloon image of a man. Its clothes strained against the bloat of a waterlogged torso. Ichabod forced himself to breathe deeply, to avoid an overpowering wave of nausea.
"I have found something which was lately a man," Ichabod told the other officers.
Even in the darkness, Ichabod could see the faces of his two colleagues. Green murmured something about a wheelbarrow, and then they were gone.
How did this happen? Ichabod asked himself. An accident. A drunken plunge after a night of carousing. That was the usual explanation. Well, that and suicide -- the Hudson River had claimed its share of men with broken dreams.
Or was it murder -- a bad debt, perhaps?
Ichabod held his lantern over the body, searching for bruises or cuts. But the light was too erratic, too faint. Clearly the body must be examined. If it was murder, the offender was still at large.
The creaking and scraping of rusted metal wheels preceded Green and Witherspoon. As the men finally came into the light, Ichabod was relieved to see that along with the wheelbarrow they had brought a blanket. Already the eyes of the dead man seemed to have burned a place in Ichabod's brain.
The three constables loaded the corpse onto the wheelbarrow. Ichabod made sure to drape the blanket so that the face was covered. Grimly, wordlessly, the men pushed the creaky cart toward the center of the metropolis.
The watchhouse yard was empty, giving it an absurdly peaceful quality. That would shatter at dawn's first light, of course. Throughout the daytime any visitor not used to the ways of New York might mistake the grounds for a madhouse.
But now, in the empty blackness of night, the cart's wheels echoed loudly as Ichabod and his cohorts entered the main watchhouse chamber. Through the bars of the jail cells, the yellow eyes of convicts followed the men's movements.
The high constable was waiting. His features, smothered beneath a thicket of mustache and beard, remained unmoved as he lifted the blanket to examine the body. "Burn it," he said.
"Yes, sir," snapped Constable Green.
Immediately Constable Witherspoon began wheeling the body away.
Ichabod was stunned. Surely the high constable knew better than to destroy evidence.
"Just a moment, if I may," Ichabod blurted out. "We do not yet know the cause of death."
"When you find 'em in the river," the high constable replied slowly, "the cause of death is drowning."
"Possibly so, if there is water in the lungs," Ichabod said. "But by pathology we might determine whether or not he was dead when he went into the river."
The high constable stiffened. "Cut him up? Are we heathens? Let him rest in peace -- in one piece, as according to God and the New York Department of Health!"
Ichabod stifled a protest. It was no use. The high constable was not to be contradicted -- by anyone.
A flurry of shouts and scuffles broke the tense quiet. Through the watchhouse entrance, two other constables dragged in another victim. This one was alive but bloody and half senseless.
"What happened to him?" the high constable demanded.
"Nothing, sir," one of the officers replied. "Arrested for burglary."
The two men shoved the victim against the iron bars. He hit with a loud, sickening clang and cried out in pain.
One constable threw open the jail-cell door, then pulled out his leather truncheon. Together the two men bludgeoned their victim until he fell writhing into the cell.
Ichabod averted his eyes.
"Good work," the high constable said.
No, the worst work, Ichabod said to himself. The work of a society whose growth has exceeded its compassion and logic.
If the high constable would not listen to his plea personally, Ichabod was determined to seek a public forum. The next morning a semiannual crime-fighting presentation was to occur at the watchhouse. At the invitation of the besieged police department, citizens were to present crime-fighting ideas. The high constable, the burgomaster, the aldermen, and the magistrates would offer a cash contract for the best of the presentations.
Ichabod decided to attend -- as a civilian participant, not a constable.
He arrived at the watchhouse shortly after dawn. Through the windows came the deafening clamor of a New York morning: milkmen and chimney sweeps, bakers and bellmen, hot-corn girls whose overflowing baskets sent a sweetly warm aroma into the sweatchoked room.
The presentations were loud and rushed. It seemed every inventor, eccentric, and crank in New York was attending, many having arrived before daybreak. Each idea seemed more ludicrous than the lastmost, Ichabod noticed, motivated more by greed than justice.
"And in a few weeks, the plague of pickpockets will be a thing of the past!" announced a shifty-eyed man, shouting to be heard. He held up an odd-looking leather wallet. Onto it had been sewn a metallic gadget resembling a mousetrap. "Give me a dozen constables in gentlemen's dress mixing with the crowds where pickpockets are rife!"
He pocketed the trap. Then, with a flourish, he held aloft a short stick attached at one end to a wooden hand. Slowly he moved the hand toward his own pocket. "A stealthy hand dips into the gentleman's pocket, and -- "
Snap! The trap lurched.
With a grin of triumph, the man withdrew the wooden hand. Its fingers had been cut off.
Ichabod winced. The device was ridiculous, barbaric.
"Thank you," the burgomaster said with a polite nod. "We will take your device under consideration, Mr. Vanderbilt. Next?"
Ichabod leaned forward, trying to attract the officials' attention. Surely they'd see him before seeing another of these Gothic monstrosities.
The high constable ignored him. "Mr. Tomkins!"
Mr. Tomkins was even more ragged than the last man. His invention resembled an animal cage.
Ichabod sprang to his feet, unable to restrain himself "Gentlemen!" he cried out. "In a few months we will be living in the nineteenth century -- "
"Wait your turn, Constable Crane," the high contable interrupted.
Ichabod barreled on. "These devices are unworthy of a modern civilization -- "
"Quiet!" the burgomaster barked. "Next, I say!"
"Thank you, sir," Tomkins shouted, pulling open the cage door. The floor was solid steel. A writing board dangled by a string on the cage's bars, and a metal clamp hung from the ceiling like a chandelier. "The Tomkins self-locking confessional is cheap -- and it will last for years with just an occasional wipe with a damp cloth!"
Ichabod began writing furiously on a sheet of blank paper.
"When the villain steps on the metal floorplate -- " Tomkins continued.
"Arrest this man!" Ichabod shouted.
The high constable glared at him. "Arrest?"
"I accuse him of murder!" Ichabod insisted.
"What are you talking about, you loon?" Tomkins said.
Ichabod gave the man a shove, sending him backward into the cage. Instantly the door slammed shut. The clamp dropped from the ceiling, gripping Tomkins's head.
As the man screamed, the room erupted in bewildered shouting.
Ichabod slapped his sheet on the writing board. "Sign here."
"The...release handle!" Tomkins groaned.
"Not until you confess!" Ichabod replied.
Tomkins quickly signed, his face twisted with agony.
Ichabod grabbed the paper, then pulled the release handle. "I have here a confession!" he shouted. "To the murder of a man I fished out of the river last night!"
Tomkins fell limply to the floor. A group of men lumbered to the cage and dragged him away. The platform was in pandemonium.
The high constable stood up, bristling with indignation. "Stand down!"
"I stand up, for sense and justice!" Ichabod retorted. "Our jails overflow with men and women convicted on confessions worth no more than this one!"
As the high constable banged his gavel for silence, the burgomaster leaned forward over his dais. "Constable, this is a song we have heard from you more than once, but never before with this discordant accompaniment. I have two courses open to me. First, I can let you cool your heels in the cells until you learn respect for the dignity of my office -- "
"I beg your pardon," Ichabod cut in. "I only meant well. Why am I the only one who sees that to solve crimes, to detect the guilty, we must use our brains? To recognize vital clues, using up-to-date scientific -- "
"Which brings me to the second course," the burgomaster continued. "Constable Crane, there is a town upstate, two days' journey to the north in the Hudson Highlands. It is a place called Sleepy Hollow. Have you heard of it?"
"I have not," Ichabod said warily.
"An isolated farming community, mostly Dutch," the burgomaster explained. "Three persons have been murdered there, all within a fortnight -- each found with his or her head lopped off "
Ichabod blanched. "Lopped off?"
"Clean as dandelion heads, apparently. Now, these ideas of yours, they have never been put to the test -- "
"I have never been allowed to put them to the test!"
"Granted. So you take your experimentations to Sleepy Hollow and deduce -- er, detect -- the murderer. Bring him here to face our good justice. Will you do this?"
The prospect was appalling.
Revolting.
And a golden opportunity.
Ichabod swallowed his doubt. "I shall," he said, "gladly." The burgomaster smiled. "And remember: it is you, Ichabod Crane, who is now put to the test."
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