“I feel like we know what happened,” Nancy said, “but not why. It was supposed to be a robbery, with a gun.”
“Why isn’t our problem,” Lenhardt said. “Forget about it.”
She couldn’t. “According to the inside kid they were going to wear masks, put the manager and their accomplice in the freezer to throw detectives off. The gun was supposed to be for show, to get the money.”
The inside kid, the coworker, had been almost grateful to be found. After all, he knew better than anyone the potential vindictiveness of his buddies, all former employees at New York Fried Chicken. The inside kid had pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter, but his main crime in Nancy’s opinion was being dumb enough to think that if you unlock the door at a Route 40 chicken shack and admit three unmasked guys with a gun, they’re going to be content to take the money and depart, doffing their caps as they go. Doffing their caps was another Lenhardtism, of course: “Tally-ho, good day, thank you for these tens and twenties, and may I have some of the Cajun extra-crispy to go? It ain’t Cary Grant on the Riviera, Nancy. If it were, robbery would be working it. People don’t kill people sometimes, we’re out of work.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nancy said. She suspected that Lenhardt wanted to let it go, put the day behind him, but she couldn’t. She had to learn. It had been so easy to catch them, so hard to break them down. They had an insolence that left her breathless. Her Polish grandfather had escaped from Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back, survived the sinking of an ocean liner, and refused the easy names pressed on him when he arrived at the Port of Baltimore in 1916. Josef Potrcurzski had carried his own knife, and later a gun, guarding his block like a sheriff in the Old West. Yet even he would have been terrified by this trio.
“The killing was the point,” Lenhardt said. “More than the money, which would have lasted maybe forty-eight hours, and that’s if they got some financial planner from Merrill Lynch to help them invest it. They didn’t kill someone in a robbery. They had a robbery so they could kill someone.”
“So why bring a gun,” Nancy said, “and use one of the kitchen knives?”
Lenhardt pressed his palms into his eyes and rubbed, hard, the way the redheaded barmaid had twisted Nancy ’s limed-up margarita glass when Nancy asked for extra salt.
“I don’t know, Miss Nancy. I just don’t know. You found the casing in the parking lot. Maybe the kid with the gun fired it and was scared by the noise. Maybe they shot and missed, what with the vic swinging that knife around, assuming they were telling the truth about that. Poor bastard died defending the honor of New York Fried Chicken.”
“Okay, so they wanted to kill someone. But why someone they’d be connected to so easily?”
“They’re not thinking this through, Nancy. They don’t know from standard probability.”
“Seriously.”
“Maybe they killed him because he was their boss once. Because he told them to clean out the fryer, and put those napkins out, and make sure the tables are wiped down. Because he enforced the hair net rule. They killed him-” Lenhardt paused. He knew how to tell a story, how to get his audience hanging on his every word. “Because he cared, because he thought it mattered that the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 had clean bathrooms and fresh oil and low absenteeism. The fast-food true believer met the West Side Existentialist Club, and the existentialists won.”
Lenhardt rolled his eyes-Did I say that?-and Infante laughed, repeating existentialist in a slightly drunken slur, as if it were funny, maybe even a little dirty.
“You know, five miles east, and it’s not even a county case,” Infante said. “I don’t think it’s where the crime occurs that should establish jurisdiction. I think it’s where the mope lives. Their bum, their tax dollars, their detectives.”
“Shit, you play by those rules, the only thing we’re catching is domestics in Dundalk. Besides, we represent the victims, remember? We work for the citizens of Baltimore County.”
Lenhardt’s mood had been rising and falling since they arrived at Wagner’s. He always plunged after the initial high of getting the work done. “Homicide hypoglycemia,” he called it. Nancy experienced the same thing, if to a lesser degree. It felt good to get the clearance, but the process exacted a price. She found that she listened to the confessions the way she watched a scary movie, basically wishing it all undone, urging the actors to do the things that would make the movie end in five uneventful minutes. Don’t open that door. Don’t confide in that man. Don’t pick up that phone.
“Cheer up, Sarge,” Infante said. “We won this round.”
“ Campbell died last week,” Lenhardt said.
“ Campbell?” Nancy asked, even as Infante nodded.
“H. Grayson Campbell. H. Grayson Campbell the Third, or maybe it was the Fourth. Died in a nursing home. Last time I stopped to talk to him, he thought I was his stepson. Guy’s got no control of his bowels or his bladder or his brain, he’s facing down death-and he still won’t tell me where she is.”
“Do I know Campbell?” Nancy asked. The name was familiar. Maybe she had seen the file on Lenhardt’s desk. He pulled old files all the time. The sergeant never stopped learning, never stopped studying. And she never stopped watching him.
“Just a rich guy who had a habit of bouncing his wife off the walls every now and then, even after they split up. One night, she doesn’t bounce back.”
“You allege,” Infante said, aping a defense lawyer’s prissy voice.
“Yeah, I allege. Her kids from her first marriage allege. Her family alleges. We’re all alligators, heaping our suspicions on this poor, misunderstood citizen because his ex-wife happened to go over there to talk about her Visa bill, and she’s never seen again, dead or alive. Now that the bastard is dead, I can say it out loud, say it to the world, and it doesn’t do a damn thing. It was her husband. And he left this planet without telling me where he left her.”
“Where do you think he put the body?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know. Where do county guys go to dump their bodies? If he was a city mutt, I’d check Leakin Park. But he ain’t no city mutt, and even after ten years out here, I never have figured out where county guys dump their bodies. Too much acreage.”
Nancy looked down at her plate, an assortment of deep-fried things-mushrooms, zucchini, the cheese-filled poppers. She needed to go back on her diet. She hadn’t tried, not with a case working, which meant life was all carryout. She calculated calories and carbs, pondered buying a stationary bike. She thought about anything and everything to block out the memories that surged whenever anyone said “ Leakin Park.”