Jack Rosselli slammed the phone down and roared to no one in particular, “Doesn’t anyone speak English anymore? Goddammit!” Another detective, flipping through a file across the room, glanced up and grinned at the burly, middle-aged man. Rosselli’s thick, brown hair was graying at the temples. He studied the file on the murder of a Salvadoran couple by a gang of blacks shouting “Kill the crackers! They’re stealing our jobs! No justice, no peace!” One victim had been a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant on State Street for six years, seven days a week, fifteen hours a day.
Juan Samaniego had been granted political asylum in the United States although he had lied about having been pursued by ‘death squads’ in San Salvador. In fact, Samaniego’s house in Quetzaltepeque had once been mistakenly peppered with bullets by a roving band of yahoos who thought it their birthright to torment their rivals. Juan and his wife, Clarita, fled El Salvador and its culture of random violence. But unfortunately, in the United States, they crossed paths with another gang and another violent society.
The months before, Detective Rosselli had heard about a clandestine group from Hartford, Connecticut. They took bats to workers at construction sites and other businesses that lacked the “proper” proportion of African Americans. The rapid, smash raids had left two people dead, several with broken arms or legs, and one man had suffered a spinal injury. The authorities got a break when one gang member defected and agreed to be a mole. “Martin” was a Southern Baptist who had been appalled by the violence and the increasingly random attacks against those having nothing to do with racial discrimination.
The mole had recently revealed the organization’s plan to attack other minorities believed to be responsible for keeping blacks in oppressive conditions. Mexican Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans. So maybe the murder of the Salvadoran couple was linked to the Hartford group.
But there was just one problem. No one could—or would—identify the members of the gang. The closest eye-witnesses were a young mother and a grandmother who lived across the street from the Samaniego residence. They told police they had heard gunshots, then seen three, maybe four, black men bolt out the apartment’s front door.
The police canvassed the area for other witnesses, but discovered no reliable information. No one had heard or seen anything at all. The apartment had been ransacked; the television kicked in. Clothes were strewn everywhere, as if the hooligans had been searching for something in particular. Money and jewelry were missing, but it didn’t appear the Samaniegos had had that much to begin with.
Rosselli had tried to call a Salvadoran refugee center in New Haven. The woman who answered the phone said, “Ahorita viene el jefe de comer.” A big waste of time.
He still had to check out Juan Samaniego’s place of work. Maybe someone there could give him a piece of useful information. Didn’t anyone give a damn anymore? Maybe he could get Frankie Rodriguez to take over this idiotic case. At least Frankie could call the damn refugee center and use his broken Spanglish. Jack Rosselli only knew ‘mañana’ and ‘chingada.’ Anyway, Frankie owed him big for the Cowboys-Giants game.
A secretary dropped a manila folder in his in-box. He frowned at her and then winked. It was the dead professor’s preliminary autopsy report. Rosselli wondered whether and why the old guy had fought back.
Show one ounce of disrespect to a mugger and you’re dead, Rosselli thought. Give him a bad look. Bingo. The professor probably understood only the never-never land of Yale. Maybe the old guy didn’t know the language of the streets. The right and wrong looks. The movements. The absolutely wrong thing to do. Never fight back. They hated it when you fought back. They hated when a victim told them, in words or looks, that he was better than they were, that a gun in the face made him angry, not pliant. Fuck morality, should and shouldn’t. The only thing that mattered was who was on the wrong side of the gun or knife, and who wasn’t. The power of hate. The power behind hate. The power to hate. The punks on the street thought: If I can kill you, I can own you. They never taught that at Yale, Rosselli imagined. The muck of raw life. It was worse than the wild kingdom, because on the streets they didn’t always kill you to eat you. Sometimes they just wanted you dead. Period. Why? Who knew? It was society. It was people who found out they could win at certain murderous games. Rosselli was just there to do his job. His game was to find them and stop them.
He read a certain section of the report over and over. It was a description of the angle of the two wounds, their approximate size and nature, and the damage caused by them. One wound had pierced the heart and part of the left lung. The angle of this wound was about forty-five degrees, if the professor had been standing straight at the point of attack. The wound was jagged and by itself would have eventually been fatal. This was probably the first wound; it caused a shock reaction as soon as the knife went in. An instinctual lurch that only helped the blade cut enough of the tissue and arteries near the heart to cause massive internal bleeding. The second wound was almost exactly perpendicular to the line of the body. Cleaner and deeper than Wound A. The coroner suspected, and Rosselli agreed, that Wound B occurred after Wound A. The professor was probably not moving much at the time of this second attack. Because of the clean entry and exit of this wound, right into the abdomen, deflecting off the spinal cord, and slipping out through the back, this wound suggested the body was braced against a hard surface. No convulsive lurch forward or backward had “dirtied” this trajectory. The professor was probably on the ground at that point, right where he was found in the morning. That second thrust had been the coup de grace, for insurance and out of pure malice. The coroner had discovered metallic fragments embedded in the spinal cord, which might give them a better idea of the make or composition of the blade.
Rosselli had already found something interesting about the murder weapon. The width of the knife was estimated to be between one and a half and two inches. The length about nine to ten inches. Jesus. This part of the coroner’s report only confirmed what Jack Rosselli had suspected when the New Haven police conducted its initial investigation of the crime scene. On Whitney Avenue, Rosselli had examined the wounds and immediately noticed their size. For knife wounds—and he had seen hundreds of varying shapes and sizes during his twelve years as a regular cop and ten years as a homicide detective—the professor’s wounds were on the large side.
At the scene, Rosselli had thought that maybe after the professor had been stabbed a struggle had enlarged the entry points and distorted the external perspective. He had hoped the coroner would give him more definitive conclusions. His first suspicions had been absolutely correct. One-and-a-half to two inches wide. Nine to ten inches long. This matched the rough average ratio of length to width of the knives he had read about, and what he had experienced in the field. His quick and dirty numbers had been right on the money, almost too perfect. His own calculations at the scene, although he had at first hesitated to believe them, had the length of the knife to be no less than eight inches and probably not more than ten inches. Now he had no doubt at all. Hopfgartner’s killer had used a huge knife. A butcher knife. And that cast doubt on another of Rosselli’s original suspicions: that the killer was a local thief who robbed Yalies reckless enough to walk home almost three miles in the dark.
The report gave him another piece of information: Werner Hopfgartner had died sometime between ten and midnight.
So the old guy had been stabbed twice with a damn butcher knife, or something the size and heft of a butcher knife. Yet it was rare for knife attacks to involve such a large weapon, unless they were family disputes where someone might grab a weapon out of a kitchen drawer. Professional thugs and other young assholes almost never carried butcher knives. They usually preferred all manner of switchblades, sufficient to do the job and easy to hide on their bodies. A butcher knife would be for the deranged, the familial, the amateurish. So the probable size of the knife undermined the theory that this crime had been a routine mugging gone fatally awry.
Which left the question: Who’d want to stab the old guy?
Rosselli kept coming back to the second wound. If it had been robbery, the bad guy would have taken off as soon as he nailed the old man with the first blow, and removed his wallet. According to the coroner, the professor was in no shape to put up much of a fight after it. So there must’ve been a reason for that second, horrifying stab. Either the attacker had really lost his temper with the professor, or he simply wanted him dead, and that was the point. Of course, the second blow might have been to avoid being fingered by the old man, in case he survived. But Rosselli didn’t think so. Over the last decade of urban crime in New Haven, he had learned that most street criminals weren’t careful or farsighted enough to eliminate their victims just to avoid being caught. If they killed somebody they were robbing, it was because of a flash of psychotic anger, or because they despised the class or race of the victim, or because this wasn’t a mugging in the first place, but a killing, with a convenient opportunity to use a human ATM.
Scratch marks had also been found on the professor’s neck. The wounds from an attack from behind? A lunge for the wallet as the professor resisted? DNA tests were being conducted on the neck, the torso and the clothes of the victim, for any traces from the killer. But unless Rosselli was damn lucky and the killer not only had been arrested before but also had his DNA stored in a databank, this information would lead nowhere. The Good Samaritan jogger had also performed CPR on the old man, so the jogger’s DNA was also in the mix.
Then there was the issue of the wallet. It had been found in a trash can at East Rock Park. To Rosselli, this indicated several things. The perpetrator of the crime had walked (run? driven?) from Whitney Avenue near Blake Road, where the professor was found, to East Rock Park. Probably down Whitney Avenue, crossing left on East Rock Road. So either the bad guy lived in the area near East Rock Park or he simply crossed near Wilbur Cross High School to someplace beyond. Could it have been a high school kid? Rosselli made a note to check reports of recent knifings at the school, to see if anything matched his murder weapon. But what kind of idiot would bring a butcher knife to school? Rosselli asked himself. Also, no prints other than those belonging to the professor had been found on the wallet. The money and credit cards were gone. Only one distinguishable footprint had been found near the body. A footprint in blood. But nothing else pointed to a particular suspect. Maybe the punk would eventually use the credit cards at Home Depot or Wal-Mart and so be identified. But the detective didn’t think that was likely.
Within thirty-six hours of the killing, Rosselli had interviewed, via the international operator, almost everyone who had seen the professor at the faculty meeting. These professors had said much the same thing: It had been a routine meeting to discuss departmental business, and nothing unusual had happened. The professor had left the meeting at about 9:15 p.m. or 9:30 p.m. after a quick drink with his friends in the faculty lounge. The professor had departed alone. Rosselli had also already interviewed Mrs. Hopfgartner. She had said, in a plain and unemotional voice, that yes, her husband had mentioned he was coming home late that night because of a faculty meeting. These meetings, she said, usually meant her husband would miss dinner, arriving home as early as 9:00 p.m. and sometimes as late as midnight.
Rosselli asked only routine questions of Mrs. Hopfgartner, and indeed he received straightforward answers. Mrs. Hopfgartner was obviously upset by her husband’s death, even distraught. But she also seemed cold in a way. Rosselli took that to mean the murder ended a relationship that had probably endured for years without affection. He had seen it before. He had also witnessed the chasm of a lover’s grief.
So with all of this information, what was he left with? Already it was Friday, and next week would be Christmas, finally. Getting in touch with the professors hadn’t been easy. The detective had a stack of other cases also demanding his attention. He was falling behind. Yet he also knew that unless he came up with something soon, the professor’s case would quickly slip into the oblivion of unsolved crimes. The first two days of any case were crucial. Rosselli already didn’t have a good feeling about this one.
The detective was left with these vague possibilities. An opportunistic thief—probably an amateur—had spotted the professor strolling on Whitney Avenue. He waited until the old guy was out of sight of traffic, and then nailed him. The professor did something to provoke his assailant, and ended up dead. The bad guy wanted the money and the credit cards, but not the briefcase, which was left next to the body. The perp had planned to nail someone that night, which was why he grabbed a butcher knife from home when he had begun his safari. No other crimes, not even a burglary, had been reported that night in the neighborhood.
Another scenario was possible, in Rosselli’s mind. It was less probable than the first one. The crime had been not primarily a mugging but a killing. That led to the question of who wanted to kill Werner Hopfgartner. No doubt, it would have been someone the professor knew. Almost anything could incite that kind of rage. An office rivalry. The end of an affair. Rosselli knew the power politics at Yale were vicious. But he couldn’t imagine another Yale professor committing this brutal crime.
He made appointments with two professors who had not attended the Berlin conference and who had also been at the faculty meeting: Michael Rittman and Regina Neumann.
Rosselli hung up the phone after talking to them. He was tired of making phone calls. There was no personal interaction, no reading between the lines, no little hint from a certain glance or inappropriate laugh about where to dig for relevant details. In most cases, almost everybody loved to talk about the victim. There was this strange fascination with being a part of an unresolved story. His job was to filter through the nonsense. But to do that, he needed to look people in the eye.
But Rosselli already had doubts about the second scenario. The professor was about to retire this year; the secretaries had told him that. Why would a professional rival kill him now? No, if this had been a killing, then it would’ve been a crime of passion. It could have been a graduate student angry about his or her ruined career. A jilted lover. Perhaps a secretary or one of the professor’s minions. Maybe a jealous worshipper from the undergraduate ranks.
To Detective Rosselli, those possibilities seemed far-fetched. They did, however, fit better with his idea that the criminal had been an amateur or a demented individual stalking the professor. Hadn’t a physics graduate student walked into the departmental office at Yale two years ago and unloaded a 9mm Glock? A secretary and the student’s dissertation adviser had been killed; an associate professor had been left a vegetable. So even the wildest scenes could unfold behind these walls of ivy.
There was one big problem with pursuing this second, less plausible line of inquiry: politics. Rosselli had no proof. If he was wrong and started to ask questions about the professor’s enemies at Yale, he’d be responsible for encouraging the rumor that someone at Yale University had murdered Hopfgartner. The university possessed real power in New Haven. It was the city’s biggest employer and landowner. Without Yale, New Haven would be another Bridgeport. Half the politicians in Connecticut had a Yale connection. The pressure from the chief of police and even the mayor would be incredible. They would ask him why was he hounding the good and prosperous citizens of Yale. What proof did he have? He definitely needed to be careful.
Rosselli decided to wait for the rest of the coroner’s report. Other leads might trickle in. He’d recommend that the university offer a reward. Beyond that, he wasn’t excited about pressing for a long shot. Rosselli wasn’t stupid. If he were younger and ready to save the world, if his waistline were six inches smaller, if he didn’t know how wild guesses usually turned out … he might go for it. But not now. He’d keep his appointments with these two professors. Maybe he’d go back to the secretaries and chat with them about office politics, quietly, without alarming anyone, just to satisfy his own conscience.