“Maybe we should have walked,” said Fitz with dismay as he tried in vain to find a parking space on Newtown Lane. Both sides of the street were lined with cars, and the sidewalks were filled with shoppers and strollers. “Now I know where all the folks from Brooklyn and Queens go in the summer,” he observed drily.
“Manhattan, too, including us,” added Nita. “Though the sidewalks here are just as hot as in the city. I prefer the cottage and the beach. The ocean is a natural air conditioner.”
“I’ll get you back there as soon as I can,” said Fitz. He did a U-turn at the railroad tracks and headed back toward Main Street. Luckily for them a space opened up in front of the hardware store, and he pulled in.
“Come to the police station when you finish shopping,” he told Nita. “If I’m done first I’ll wait there for you.”
Fred Tucker showed Fitz into the office, where the chief thanked him for coming. “I really hate to impose on you like this, Captain Fitzgerald,” he said. “Not much of a vacation for you, is it?”
“Please call me Fitz,” he replied, “and don’t think anything of it. I’m glad to help you out. After all, my men are doing all the legwork. I’m just the messenger boy.”
“That’s mighty decent of you,” said the chief. “I’ll write out instructions for your officers so the families can get in touch with me to follow up. I think it would be advisable to send a female officer, if that’s possible. It’ll be hard enough on Mrs. Kligman to find out that her girl is in the hospital in bad shape, but nothing like as bad as it’ll be for Mrs. Metzger.”
Fitz waited while Steele worked out some wording, adding his own name and number, Southampton Hospital contact information for Mrs. Kligman, and the funeral home for Mrs. Metzger.
“From what you gave me,” he told Fitz, “there’s no Mr. Metzger in the picture, so maybe she’s a widow, or divorced. I hope the brother’s older, so he can take care of the arrangements. Unfortunately we can’t release the body until we figure out who killed her. Carolyn Williams will know how to handle it. She’s aware of the situation, but she’s not one to go blabbing. If she were the gossiping sort, Yardley and Williams would be out of business in a hurry.”
Fitz used the chief’s phone and got through to the Sixth Precinct. “Is Officer Kelly on duty?” he asked Sergeant Murphy. “Good. Ask her to take the Jersey visit first. The Bronx one will be harder. Think she can do them both today? If not, Metzger can wait until tomorrow. No urgency there, I’m afraid.”
“Any more word on Kligman?” asked Fitz after he hung up.
“I called the hospital just before you got here,” Steele told him. “She’s in and out of consciousness, still sedated but apparently out of danger. Fortunately nothing broken, no organ damage, but she’s pretty banged up. Bruises all over her body, and a concussion. Doc Abel is keeping an eye on her. He thinks she’ll be coming around any time now.”
“Nita will be available to question her whenever she’s ready. If we’re at the cottage or on the beach Mr. Bayley can get a message to us, and if we go anywhere else I’ll check in with you first.”
“By the way,” said Steele, “thanks for tipping me about calling from the Sea Spray office phone. There’s no way Millie Dayton wasn’t listening in. If I call you there I won’t let anything slip.”
“Nita and I were kicking around a few ideas,” Fitz told him. “Probably nothing you haven’t already thought of,” he added diplomatically.
“Mind sharing them?”
Fitz summarized their conversation, and the chief listened with interest.
“You’re right, we did check on various places where Pollock and the girls might have been spotted earlier in the evening. Apparently they went straight back to Springs after they left the Brooks place in Montauk. It’s a nineteen-mile drive, and we canvassed all the shops and bars along the way. Nobody saw them. Earlier in the day Dreesen’s delivered groceries to the house, and it looks like they had dinner when they got back.
“After that, any of the three possibilities you and Nita discussed could have happened. Pollock gets liquored up, makes a pass at Metzger, Kligman gets sore and goes for her. That’s the least likely, in my opinion. First of all, I don’t think Kligman’s strong enough to have killed her that way. Plus the only scratches on her face are on the right side, where her face hit the pavement.
“And I’m not partial to the sex thing—not that I have any experience with a case like that. But let’s just say that’s what happened. She’d probably be naked, so they’d have to put something on her to take her to the hospital. But why get her all dressed up in underwear and a party dress? Why not just throw on a coat or a robe to cover her up? And if bondage is part of it, where are the rope marks, and for that matter where’s the rope? On top of that, they were driving toward home, not toward Southampton. No, I just don’t buy it.
“The Ossorio idea, on the other hand, seems much more plausible. That would explain why they were headed north on Fireplace Road. They were taking her home, hoping she’d recover, but she died on the way. Doc Cooper says there’s no way to tell for sure how long she’d been dead before the crash, but she was alive long enough for bruises and petechiae to appear—they don’t come up after death, because there’s no blood circulation. He says with the degree of pressure used on her throat they’d show very quickly. It’s seven miles from The Creeks to the crash site. Even going fifty flat out all the way it would take him nearly ten minutes, plenty of time.
“But however it happened,” he concluded, “Kligman will know. We have to assume she was there.”