Tim Fox took barely a minute to skim McGuire’s flat. No telephone, no TV, not even a refrigerator. The bathroom was barely bigger than a phone booth with just a toilet and a plastic shower enclosure. The books on the shelf above the bed were paperback biographies and histories, the food in the cupboard consisted of instant coffee and crackers, and even the clothing hanging on the back of the door was minimal: thick sweater, lightweight jacket, denim shirt, gray wool trousers, two blue button-down shirts.
Tim Fox dropped his card next to the hotplate on the chipped enamelled table and left, closing the door behind him.
What happened to the poor son of a bitch? he wondered, descending the fire escape while the old Oriental woman watched him from across the landing.
He wandered through what remained of the city’s Combat Zone for almost an hour, peering through the windows of video shops, bookstores, Vietnamese restaurants and Chinese grocery stores where Peking ducks hung in the windows, their skin mahogany red and their smiling beaks encrusted with baked sugar.
When he returned to the Berkeley Street headquarters, Stu Cauley, on duty at the downstairs desk, called him over. “You’re supposed to go downstairs,” Cauley said. “Donovan’s down there, him and a couple a uniforms. They brought him in, maybe half an hour ago, they’re workin’ through it down there.”
“Through what?” Fox said.
“That case, broad got beat to death on Newbury Street. Yours, right? Everybody knows about it. Hell of a thing. Anyway they found him. Brought him in on it and he’s down in the hole.”
Fox swore and turned toward the stairs.
“Christ, does he look bad, Timmy,” Cauley said sadly. “Looks like a barrel of yesterday’s shit.”
“Okay, maybe you’re not drunk but you sure as hell look hungover.”
Phil Donovan sat on a metal folding chair turned backwards, his tie askew, collar button undone. One of the uniformed cops, a young guy just two years out of the academy, watched from the far corner, his chair tilted back, a plastic cup of coffee in his hand.
Between them, a middle-aged man sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, bent from the waist, his elbows on his knees, his fingertips stroking his temples, looking like another street bum waiting on a bench in the Public Garden, hoping for a handout. Which was where two cops found him, staring blankly across Charles Street. The uniformed police officers didn’t recognize him at first sight but one of them thought, What the hell, it could be him.
He admitted his name and right away one of the cops, the older one, started acting almost polite, practically invited him to get in the cruiser and come back with them to Berkeley Street. And he got in, not wondering why, just asking if he could have a couple of aspirin and a coffee when they got there.
“Still got your headache?” Donovan asked, grinning like he thought it was funny.
“I’m not a drunk,” the man said.
“Naw, you’re not a drunk. You just like to marinate your fuckin’ liver,” Donovan said. He glanced over at the young whistle in the corner who was smiling at the detective’s humor. “Christ, look at yourself. You’re a bum, you’re worse than a bum. The bums in the Garden, most of them never had much of a break, never amounted to a hell of a lot in their lives. But you . . .”
The door behind Donovan burst open and Tim Fox stood there, his hand gripping the knob, breathing hard not from the effort of trotting downstairs but from anger. “I want to talk to you, Donovan,” Fox said, the words escaping from his lips like steam from a pressure valve. “Out here. Now.”
Donovan twisted in the chair and grinned over his shoulder at his partner. “Sure thing, Timmy,” he said, standing up. “Don’t go away now,” he smiled at the middle-aged man, who lifted his head at the sight of Fox.
“Hello, Timmy,” the man said to Fox.
“How you doing, McGuire?” Fox asked, and the other man smiled tightly and nodded.
Tim Fox strode past Donovan and down the basement corridor taking long quick steps like he was a whistle working Washington Avenue again, hustling to break up a street fight, ready to wade in with a billy club, cutting the air with it like Yastrzemski chasing a high and outside fast ball. Donovan tagged behind, his hands in his pockets, a smirk on his face.
“The fuck you think you’re doin’?” Fox said, pulling up near the coffee machine and swinging around to face the younger detective, pointing his finger at him like it was a Smith & Wesson.
Donovan held his hands up, palms facing Fox. “Easy, buddy . . .” he said.
“Don’t buddy me, asshole.” Fox shook with anger and Donovan’s grin grew wider at the sight of spittle forming at the corners of the black detective’s lips. “You don’t bring somebody like McGuire in and drop him in the I.R. like he’s a piece of shit you picked up on the street.”
“But, Timmy,” Donovan said, “he is a piece of shit we picked up on the street. In the Public Garden, sitting on a bench, for Christ’s sake, dressed like that.”
“He’s the best goddamn cop who ever walked into this dump,” Fox replied. “Him and Ollie Schantz . . .”
“So what is he now?” Donovan spat back, the smile erased. He showed Fox a hand, the fingers folded down, and he popped them up one at a time as he spoke. “He’s a has-been, he’s a drunk, he’s a bum and he’s a suspect in a murder one. You seen the preliminary on that Lorenzo broad, Doitch’s report?” He waved the question away before Fox could reply. “Deep penetrating wound through her gut. Plus severe concussion, cracked vertebrae, three broken ribs, broken jaw, two fingers snapped when she put her hand up to defend herself from that old favourite we’ve all come to know and love, a blunt fucking instrument.” He arched his eyebrows. “She was one tough cookie to survive an ass-kicking like that as long as she did.”
“Where’s the weapon?” Fox demanded. “Where’s the motive, the opportunity, the eyewitness, the forensics, to make McGuire an A-number-one?”
“I didn’t say—”
“I was in his room, Donovan . . .”
Over Donovan’s shoulder Fox saw two uniforms watching them from the far end of the hall, eavesdropping on a face-to-face between a couple of hot-shot detectives, picking up some trash to spread through the cruiser network later in the day. “Should’ve seen Fox and Donovan going at it in Berkeley,” they’d be saying. “Hammer and tongs, like street scum, two suits, two detectives.” Rumour would feed rumour until, by the end of the day, the story would have Fox and Donovan rolling on the floor, squeezing each other’s jugulars.
“You guys wanta find some traffic tickets to hand out or something?” Fox shouted down the hall to them, and the whistles muttered to each other and wandered around the corner toward the elevator.
“I was in his room,” Fox began again, this time in a hoarse whisper, poking Donovan in the chest with a finger, “and there’s nothing. No blood on the clothes, no sign of a weapon, not even a telephone.”
“He was pissed enough to do it or to get somebody else to,” Donovan said, his hands in his trouser pockets again. “Point is—”
“The fucking point is,” Tim Fox said, raising his voice, “I’m the senior louie and if I say I’ll deal with a suspect first, you keep your—”
“Fat Eddie gave me the go-ahead,” Donovan said. The smirk was back.
Tim Fox froze his expression, except for his eyes which shifted sideways. “Who?”
“Vance.” Donovan adjusted his tie, fastened his collar button. “Gave him a rundown, told him you were out lookin’ for McGuire and Eddie said put some muscle on it, back you up. They bring him in, I take him downstairs, give the poor bastard some coffee, help him get over the shakes, read him his Miranda and be his buddy.” He raised his hands again, palms open. “See? No rubber hose.” Turning to leave, he said, “Now, you want to bitch to somebody, you go bitch to Fat Eddie. Otherwise, while we’re runnin’ up each other’s tails here, we got a murder one gettin’ cold.”
“What do you need, Joe?”
Tim Fox sat on the same metal chair Donovan had occupied, facing McGuire. Donovan had retreated to the far corner of the interrogation room where the young whistle had been slouching until Fox entered and told him to get the hell out and stay out of the observation room too, he and Donovan would handle this on their own.
McGuire lifted his head to smile back at Fox. “I, uh . . .” he began in that low voice of his, the sound textured like a wet gravel road. “Nothing, Timmy,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m okay.”
He wore a faded cotton sweater, once white but now the colour of dishwater, the frayed collar and cuffs of a blue oxford-cloth shirt visible beneath it. His denim jeans were oversized, the bottoms rolled above a tattered pair of Reeboks worn with no socks. A three-day growth of beard grew among the folds of a face as shrunken and bony as the rest of his body.
McGuire looked perhaps twenty pounds lighter and twenty years older than the last time Fox had seen him, less than a year and a half earlier.
“Donovan tell you about the woman on Newbury Street?” Fox asked.
McGuire nodded.
“We’ve got your voice on her answering machine tape, Joe,” Timmy said. “Threatening the murder victim.”
“So I hear.”
“What got you so pissed at her?”
“Not sure.”
“You on a drunk?”
McGuire thought about it for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Not yesterday.”
“Where were you last night?”
“Beats the heck out of me.”
“Where’d you wake up this morning?”
“My place.”
“The room over the Flamingo.”
“Home sweet home.”
“I was there.” Fox smiled. “You should lock your door.”
“Nothing to steal. Besides,” McGuire grinned, “it’s never locked. Gets used when I’m not in.”
“Girls from the club taking johns up there?”
McGuire ran a hand through his hair, longish, growing gray, the curls tighter than ever. “Pays the rent. Keeps the kids off the streets.”
“Jesus Christ,” Donovan muttered from the corner. McGuire looked at him without expression.
“You don’t remember calling this Lorenzo woman?” Fox said.
McGuire turned back to Fox, shook his head.
“Can you remember why you were so angry with her?”
Another shake.
“How’d you know her?” Donovan called from the corner. “You bang her a few times maybe? Or were you just pimping for her?”
Tim Fox glared across at Donovan.
McGuire smiled and moved his lips.
“What’s that?” Tim Fox asked, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes.
“Used to be related,” McGuire said, loud enough this time for Fox to hear. He rubbed the back of his neck. “My ex-wife’s sister.”
Fox straightened up. Donovan pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and began scribbling in it. “When was the last time you saw her?” Fox asked.
McGuire shrugged. “Not for years. Until . . .” He frowned, staring down at his feet. “Until a week, maybe two weeks ago. I was, uh . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose, stared up at the ceiling for a moment and nodded as though agreeing with himself. “I was over in the Esplanade one day. Just waiting, looking . . . looking for somebody. There were these women in fur coats and a photographer and a bunch of other people near the band shell and one of them kept looking at me, and then she came over and started talking to me. And I recognized her, I saw it was Heather. The photographer, he was one of her clients or whatever she called them, fashion photographers.”
He sat back in the chair, raised his chin, spoke to the ceiling. “She, uh, she laughed at the way I looked, what I was doing. Said she knew who I was going to meet, what I wanted to see him for. Heard about me doing doing what I was doing. Thought it was funny . . .”
“Who were you going to meet?” Fox asked.
McGuire pondered the answer. “A friend. Just a friend.”
“He got a name?” Donovan asked.
“Django,” McGuire said. “Just Django. And, uh, she asked where I lived and I told her over the Flamingo, and she thought that was even funnier, and I was, uh . . . if I’d felt better I might have hit her then and there . . .” McGuire grinned at Fox. “Jesus, Timmy, I just handed you an incriminating statement then, didn’t I?”
“Sure as shit did,” Donovan said from the corner. “Keep talkin’ like that, we’ll have your whole history nailed down.”
McGuire shrugged. “My life is an open pamphlet.”
“You didn’t hit her?” Tim Fox asked.
“No. But I wanted to.”
“What stopped you?”
“Guess I’m out of shape.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Got up and walked away and she went back to the photographer and the models.”
“Eddie Vance could use that statement to build a charge against you.”
“Let him.”
“You don’t seem worried about it.”
“I’m not. Nothing Eddie can do’ll worry me.”
Fox grinned. “Yeah, well, Fat Eddie’s his own worst enemy.”
McGuire arched his eyebrows and smiled. “Not while I’m around.”
There was a knock at the door and a uniformed sergeant leaned into the room. “Got a message for you guys,” he said, speaking to Fox and Donovan but unable to keep his eyes from the shrunken figure of McGuire.
Tim Fox looked at Donovan and angled his head. Donovan sighed and followed the sergeant out of the room and into the hall. When the door closed Fox stood up, took a step closer to McGuire, leaned from the waist and asked, “So what happened to you, Joe?”
McGuire sighed and allowed himself a smile. “I screwed up.”
Fox shook his head sadly. “Last I heard you were down in the Bahamas mixing Martinis, living the good life. When we got the word about you, bunch of us up here, we figured you scored a big one, you lucked out.”
“For awhile.” McGuire leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, avoiding the other man’s eyes. “For a while I did.”
“And then?”
“Told you. I screwed up.”
“Lot of guys screw up, but they manage to land on their feet.”
The door swung open abruptly and Donovan was standing there, a sheet of paper in his hand.
“He’s charged,” Donovan said.
Fox scowled at him. “What the fuck you talking about?”
Donovan waved the paper back and forth as though taunting a bull. “Higgins got a briefing from Fat Eddie, says there’s enough to book him. All in here.”
“Higgins still P.A.?” McGuire asked calmly, and Fox nodded.
“It’s a bullshit decision,” Fox said, half to Donovan and half to McGuire.
“Need your shoelaces and your belt,” Donovan said to McGuire as he entered the room, the sergeant and two whistles behind him.
McGuire bent over and began untying his shoes, Tim Fox watching sadly, McGuire fumbling with the laces.
McGuire was held on suspicion of the murder of Heather Arlene Lorenzo, age 38, resident of 206A Newbury Street, occupation: photographer’s agent. He was ordered held in custody pending further investigation. He endured a strip search, a fitting for a pair of oversized blue coveralls and being locked into handcuffs and shackles. The young driver of the police van that transported him and two sullen black men in their twenties to holding cells in the jail on Nashua Street called him Pops, and McGuire smiled and ducked his head without responding.
Inside the brick walls of the jail reception area, McGuire emerged from the van and leaned unsteadily against the vehicle before retching violently while the black men watched blankly and the van driver made a joke about prison food.
He was photographed, fingerprinted and led down a narrow corridor to his cell, where he collapsed on the cot and listened to the slam of the cell door echo and decay.
In the cell facing him were two men, a large red-headed man whose oft-broken nose drifted at an angle across his face and who spoke with a strangely sibilant lisp, and a smaller older man who constantly moved a cigarette butt from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both stared at McGuire for several moments, the larger man blankly, the other with suspicion, until the red-haired man said simply, “Cop,” and turned away to lie on his bunk.
“Watch your ass, buddy,” the smaller one said to McGuire, who lay back with hands clasped behind his head. “’Cause it ain’t worth shit in here. Me, I’d be proud as hell to do a few months in seg, just to say I offed a fuckin’ cop. Wouldn’t I, Red?”
The big man said, “Gimme a cigarette.”
When McGuire’s food was brought to his cell he could eat none of it.
“Good move, cop,” the small man in the opposite cell said. “They know you’re a cop, the trusties piss on your food. You know that? Ain’t that right, Red?”
When McGuire finally fell asleep he began to dream of drifting in boats through pastureland where grazing cows would lift their heads in surprise as he passed by, and of his father, dead twenty years, watching him from behind a wooden fence, the bleached unpainted boards covered in writing McGuire could not read. He woke and lay rising and falling through clouds of pain and perspiration before closing his eyes.
Almost immediately he began to dream again, visions of ice water flowing down his parched throat, tasting its freshness and cold salvation, and of walking woodenly along a city street toward a corner where flatbed trucks were passing slowly by in a convoy of sorts. The cargo shifted back and forth and side to side as the trucks passed, their movement propelled not by the motion of the vehicles but by some inner agony. At the intersection McGuire looked into the trucks and saw flayed bodies with amputated limbs, the skin and stubs of arms and legs cross-textured in blue and white, and as one truck passed another arrived to take its place and others stretched down the avenue of the city, their passage unending, their cargoes identical and agonizing and horrific.
Someone began choking him, thrusting a weapon into his mouth to block his breathing. McGuire cried out at the sight of the trucks and their cargo and at the attack on him by someone unseen. There were cries in his ears, the cries of the mutilated men in the trucks and the cries of others, and McGuire woke to find his own hand in his mouth and a guard poking him with a broom handle. In the opposite cell the small dark man called out, “You don’t shut the fuck up, somebody’ll shove your dick in your ear,” while the big man with the red hair grinned across at McGuire and muttered something, and the small man laughed and lit a cigarette.
In the morning McGuire lay on his bunk with his forearm across his eyes. The two men in the opposite cell were escorted away, and as they passed McGuire’s cell the small man hissed, “You’re gonna get it, cop,” and the other man said in his strange lisp, “Can’t stop it happening, buddy. Can’t stop what’s gonna happen to you.”
Half an hour later, McGuire was still motionless when he heard footsteps tread the corridor toward his cell and halt just beyond the bars. He raised his arm from his eyes and looked across the few feet separating him from an olive-skinned compact man in a brown suede windbreaker, faded jeans and white sneakers who stood watching him with concern. “Mother of God, I didn’t believe it,” the man said.
McGuire stared back at the man’s dark eyes and curly black hair, the body slim and taut.
“Jesus, Joe, it’s me, Scrignoli.” The black-haired man shook his head and a nervous grin revealed white and shiny teeth in a handsome Italian face. “It’s been a while, but hell . . .”
McGuire nodded and closed his eyes. “How you doin’?” he said. He remembered Scrignoli, an undercover cop, once Bernie Lipson’s partner before Bernie joined forces with McGuire to replace Ollie Schantz. Bernie’s retired and Ollie’s paralyzed, McGuire reminded himself. A generation gone and I’m in jail. McGuire pieced it together. Bernie retired. Kavander dead. Ollie crippled. Me in jail. On the whole, I’d rather be in Worcester. . . .
What the hell was Scrignoli’s first name? The pain like a knife . . .
“Bunch of us back on Berkeley, Stu Cauley and the others, we heard about it and couldn’t believe it.” Scrignoli spoke in the broad accents of North Boston, a scrod-and-spaghetti accent Ollie Schantz used to call it. “This is horseshit, Joe. This is Fat Eddie at his worst.”
McGuire nodded his head again. What’s his name? Dave? Dominic? Something like that.
“So I got elected to come over and make sure you’re okay, let you know we’re with you, we’re not gonna let nothin’ happen to you. I mean, even some of the guys here, some of the guards, the older ones, they’re wonderin’ what you’re doin’ in here. So I came just to let you know you’re gonna be all right, okay?”
“Sure.” McGuire lay his forearm across his eyes again. Dell? Daryl? No, not Daryl. Maybe Darren . . .
“Anything you need? Anything we can get you?”
“Out,” McGuire said.
“We’re workin’ on it. I mean, one of the guys’s been talking to Higgins and you know what? Even Higgins, even he’s not behind it a hundred percent, okay? He told the guy right up front, he said it’s not gonna stick, the charge. You’re outta here and you and me, the day you’re out, the two of us’ll go over to Hanover Street and suck up some clams, maybe pick up some broads.” Scrignoli’s voice dropped in volume and acquired a weight, a sense of everyone’s daily sadness. “My wife and I, we split last year. Don’t know if you heard.”
Scrignoli’s wife, McGuire recalled. Her name was Sue, plump, blond hair . . . the hell’s his name . . . ?
A long pause, then, “Anyhow, you got problems, I can see that. But you got friends too, Joe, and we all know this is a chickenshit thing of Fat Eddie’s, so hang in there, okay? Okay?”
Danny. Yes. “Thanks, Danny.”
“You’re all right,” Danny Scrignoli said, and his voice almost choked with emotion. “You’re gonna be all right,” and he slapped the bars with his hand, in anger or frustration, and walked quickly, almost silently, away.
Listening to the details of McGuire’s transfer to Nashua Street from one of the cops who accompanied the prisoner, Tim Fox absorbed it all with sadness. McGuire was more than an ex-cop not only to Fox but to an entire generation of police officers who had managed to rise from street duty to detective status.
Joe McGuire and Ollie Schantz had shown the way for a decade, working like guerrillas within an often incompetent system. Bending the rules to achieve success, they earned citations from the police commissioner in the morning and bought rounds of drinks for the duty cops that same afternoon, laughing at the pretentiousness of the award ceremony, knowing they had earned and deserved it but mocking it anyway, mocking everything except the reason they pinned on a badge each day: without daily encounters with the scum of life, without the silent trust handed to them to protect citizens who thanked them by sneering at their very existence, they would lack both identity and purpose.
For Joe McGuire, it all ended the day Ollie Schantz became eligible for his pension and decided that his identity and purpose now lay along the banks of a salmon pond. He retired leaving McGuire alone and bitter to manage without him.
Two weeks later, in one of those ironies of life that prompt some people to discover salvation in the Bible and others to seek it in a shotgun, the muzzle in their mouth, Ollie Schantz returned from his first fishing expedition almost totally paralyzed from the neck down. And soon after, McGuire escaped the complex politics and machinations of Fat Eddie Vance by retreating to the Bahamas for two years.
What brought him back? Fox wondered. What screwed him up so badly? What happened to the old McGuire, the tough son of a bitch who carried his anger like a junkyard dog with a toothache?
Fox didn’t know. But he knew something had to be done about Fat Eddie.
He strode down the corridor to Vance’s office and burst in on the captain who quickly closed the top drawer of his desk and looked back at Fox, startled.
“You’re interfering, Eddie,” Fox said, drawing deep breaths and glaring at the round pink face of the man who had once been his partner and was now his superior.
Vance blinked and raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t like the way I’m handling a case, okay, tell me,” Fox said. “But no more getting between me and Donovan, all right? Telling him to send out a P.Q. order while I’m still out there looking for the man. No more of that, okay?”
Fat Eddie smiled, closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“What’s the deal?” Fox demanded. “I’m pissed and you think it’s funny?”
“A little,” Vance said when he opened his eyes. “You know who you just reminded me of? When you came in right now, so self-righteous and angry? McGuire, that’s who. When he was still a cop, he’d be in here complaining all the time, to me, to Kavander, to everybody. McGuire acted like he carried all the rules and regulations around in his hip pocket and it was his duty to educate people about them. You sounded a lot like him just now.”
“Thanks,” Tim Fox said, turning for the door. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Eddie.”
“A compliment?” Vance called after him. “Are you nuts? Look where McGuire is now, Fox. You think being told you’re acting like him is a compliment?”
Ten minutes later Fox told himself Fat Eddie wasn’t worth the spit it took to say his name and swung around in his chair to snatch Mel Doitch’s autopsy report from Donovan’s desk and scan the contents.
Heather Arlene Lorenzo had been in excellent physical condition with no visible scars except for the two crescent-shaped surgery marks beneath her breasts, marking silicone implants. Her injuries had been inflicted by a cylindrical wooden weapon, swung with substantial strength. Small samples of the wood had been removed from body tissues that had absorbed the blows and they were currently being subjected to laboratory analysis. . . .
The phone jangled at his elbow. He snatched the receiver from its cradle and barked his name into it.
The voice on the other end was deep and modulated. “Are you the gentleman who is investigating Ms. Lorenzo’s death?”
“That’s me,” Fox said.
“My name is Gregory Weiner,” the man said. “I own the building here. Heather was my tenant. I apologize for being absent this morning but I left early to do an appraisal of some watercolours in Cambridge—”
“We’ll send somebody out to interview you,” Fox interrupted.
The cultured voice faltered somewhat. “Uh, you are the detective heading the investigation, are you not?”
Fox assured the man he was.
“Then I would prefer to speak directly with you, if I may.”
Fox frowned. “Look, we got maybe a dozen officers working on this—”
“Heather Lorenzo feared for her life,” the voice interrupted. “She told me, just yesterday, when she asked me if I might be working late downstairs.”
“We can take a statement . . .”
“That might be a good idea,” Gregory Weiner said. “Heather told me a man might be trying to kill her. Somebody well-known and powerful. The gentleman apparently frightened her because he could get out of control. She had seen him that way.”
“I’ll be over,” Tim Fox said.
When he hung up he thought about telling Donovan, then wondered what the younger detective could really offer. “Probably nothing,” Fox muttered. “I’ll tell him later.”
It was there on his tray next to the powdered eggs, a small white envelope not much bigger than a postage stamp. The trustee slid his breakfast through the opening of the bars while McGuire watched from the corner of the cell where he lay on the floor, his stomach about to heave from the aroma of food, the pain in his head like a deep cleft through his skull.
He turned away and covered his face with his hand, a barrier against the smell of hot grease. His hand trembled like a captured bird and he remained motionless for several minutes before rising unsteadily and walking to the bars, planning to fling the tray out into the corridor until he saw the envelope.
He palmed it quickly and returned to the corner of the cell. Inside were four tiny white pills and he swallowed two before replacing the remainder in the envelope and settling back on the floor, his eyes closed, his brow less furrowed.
When the trustee returned for the tray, McGuire rose, walked to the bars, reached through to touch the man’s arm. “Who gave you that?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Gave me what?” The guy, skinny and gray-haired, his skin the colour of old newspapers, avoided McGuire’s eyes.
“The stuff on my tray, in the envelope,” McGuire hissed.
“Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” the trustee muttered.
A different trustee brought him lunch and he never saw the pasty-faced man again.
Stana Tomasevich sat nervously at her kitchen table, a cup of tea growing cold in front of her. There had not been a man of any kind in her apartment since her husband, Frank, departed with two plastic bags of clothing nearly ten years earlier, never to return.
And now there were three men here, the young red-haired one with blue eyes and a nose like a hawk’s beak, smiling at her from across the kitchen table, and two policemen in uniform in the other room, searching through her belongings. She could hear the officers talking among themselves, quietly. She pictured them inspecting her room, touching, lifting, moving her possessions. She would have to clean everything when they finally left, wipe it all down.
The red-haired man was writing on the pad of paper he carried with him. “You ever meet anybody in her apartment?” he asked.
“Who?” Stana said. “Who would I meet there? Men? You think I meet men there?”
The red-haired man, Donovan, laughed aloud. “No, I meant friends of Miss Lorenzo. Anybody.”
Stana shook her head. “Sometimes men are there, for business. I don’t talk, I don’t see. I scrub floors, I do dishes, I wash windows, then I go.”
“So you wouldn’t recognize anybody you met there if you saw them again.”
Another shake of the head.
“Any men stay overnight with Miss Lorenzo?”
Stana blushed and lowered her head. “Sometimes.”
“Recently?”
A nod. “Two, three weeks ago, Miss Lorenzo does not come downstairs when I finish kitchen, so I go upstairs, knock on door, say I am here. She comes, unlocks door. She is wearing blanket, no, sheet from bed around her body and she is laughing. She says, ‘Don’t do bedroom today,’ and she runs back in room, closes door. And all time I am cleaning, I hear her in there with man.”
“What were they doing?” Donovan sat back watching her, a wide smile on his face, tapping his teeth with a pencil.
She turned away again. “They laugh. And they make Ricky Chow.”
The pencil stopped. “Ricky what?”
“Ricky Chow.” Stana held her hands side by side in front of her, palms facing the floor, and moved them up and down. “You know, bedsprings go Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow . . .”
Donovan erupted in laughter, embarrassing Stana even more. His next few questions were interrupted by snickers and he mimicked her, muttering, “Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow,” over and over. “What’d she keep up in her bedroom, among the pottery?”
Stana blinked. “Pottery?”
“The vases in her bedroom, up on the shelf near the ceiling. Something was screwed into the shelf on the corner and it looks like something else was fastened along the wall near it. Whatever it was, somebody pulled it out recently. Might’ve been the guy who killed her.”
She shook her head. “I don’t dust pottery, I don’t dust ceiling. Too high.”
Donovan rose from his chair. “Thanks for your help Mrs., uh . . .”
Stana pronounced her last name for him, rising from her chair too. The police officers were waiting in the short hall near the apartment door.
“Anything else you want to tell us?” Donovan asked her, shrugging into his topcoat.
Stana held her hands together in front of her ample stomach and shook her head. Then, almost without thinking, she blurted, “She was not nice woman.”
Donovan looked back at her, waiting for her to continue.
“Not nice,” Stana repeated.
“That’s no reason for somebody to kill her,” Donovan said. “Just because she wasn’t the nicest person in the world, right?”
“Bad,” Stana tried to explain. She looked away, searching for the words a man once used to describe Heather Lorenzo as he stormed from Heather’s apartment, his words shouted in anger. “Wicked and vicious,” Stana blurted. Those were the words she had heard the man use. And they were true, Stana remembered. Heather had been wicked and vicious. When she had caught Stana on a ladder admiring the collection of pottery and the thing behind the pottery, black and shiny, she had shouted at Stana, telling her never to touch them again, the vases. “Wicked and vicious,” Stana repeated, turning to enter her kitchen again, leaving the men to find their own way out. She would make a fresh cup of tea and drink it, and then she would clean her apartment, ridding it of evidence of those men, the cruel-mouthed red-haired one and the two police officers who touched everything with their hands.
Gregory Weiner was perhaps forty years old. He wore his chestnut hair in a heavily sprayed, perfectly coiffed pompadour at the front and trimmed square across the back of the neck. His mustache looked as though it were shaped with a scalpel. His front teeth were oversized and his cheeks were round and full, giving him the appearance of a somewhat effeminate chipmunk, but his eyes were wary and conniving. He greeted Tim Fox by rising from the chair behind the oversized parson’s table that served as a desk and extending a hand toward the black detective while his eyes scanned Fox’s suit, shirt and tie in silent approval.
“This is terrible,” Weiner said, turning his fingertips under and rubbing them against the palms of his hands. “Perhaps if I had listened to Heather . . .”
“Listened to her?” Tim Fox sat in the ladder-back chair facing Weiner’s desk. Behind the desk loomed a bleached oak armoire with carved pediment, the doors open, the shelves crowded with small ceramic figures, silk scarves, embroidered pillows and antique photographs in pewter frames.
“She was frightened,” Weiner said. “And yet she was laughing it off, as if it were a joke.” He shook his head. “I realize now, of course, that it wasn’t. She really was quite terrified of this man the other day.”
“She didn’t mention names?”
“Only that he was well-known.”
“For what?”
Weiner looked confused. “I don’t understand . . .”
“Was he an athlete? Ball player maybe? Somebody on television? A politician?”
“She never said. Just that he was well-known, well-connected.” Weiner turned away. “She often bragged about her men friends that way but this time I could tell she was nervous and I asked what was wrong. She said she couldn’t tell me but she asked if I might be working last evening or if Jonathan, that’s the young man who comes in for restorations, if he might be here. I said no and asked why and she laughed in that nervous way she had and said she had been threatened, her life had been threatened. And I said, ‘For goodness sakes, go to the police, Heather.’”
“And that’s it?”
Weiner nodded.
“What did she say about your warning?”
“That she couldn’t. She said the police couldn’t help her.”
“She have many men visitors?”
Weiner seemed amused by the question. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Heather never seemed to lack for male company. Heather was . . .” Weiner shifted his weight in his chair. “. . . unconventional. And a free spirit, I should think.”
Fox looked around the room at the paisley patterned wallpaper, the fancy cornices, the baroque brass ceiling fixture. “What’s upstairs?” he asked.
“A small showroom, storage area. A restoration section. I have a refinisher who comes in when needed to perform simple repairs.”
“There’s no access to Heather’s apartment from your quarters?”
Weiner shook his head.
“What was she like?”
“Heather?” Weiner smiled; his cheeks grew round and his eyes narrowed into slits. “Like no one I have ever known. I don’t expect to meet anyone quite like her again.”
“Did you like her?”
“Like her?” Weiner was surprised by the question. “Oh, I don’t believe I liked her. She was, uh, a difficult person to like. Attractive in a, um, I suppose, carnal fashion, but . . .” He shook his head as though the gesture was enough to finish the sentence.
“Did you ever criticize her about her lifestyle?”
“Her what?”
“All the men she brought up to her apartment. You said she brought lots of them home.”
“Well, I never saw them you understand, not all of them . . .”
“She ever talk about your lifestyle?”
Weiner took a deep breath and smiled coldly. “How could my lifestyle have any bearing on your investigation, Lieutenant?”
“Just trying to get a handle on the victim, that’s all.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Heather could be very caustic at times. A great many people found that difficult to take.”
“Including you?”
“Sometimes.” Weiner picked a gold-plated letter opener from his desk, holding it by the handle as though it were a knife.
“She call you names?”
Another cold smile. “Lieutenant, I’ve heard all the names. She didn’t invent any new ones.”
Fox placed his card on the desk. “Call me if you think of anything else.”
He left Weiner toying with the letter opener and staring at Fox’s card as though wondering if it were safe to touch.