And – the big surprise – it wasn’t a laundry.
A frail-looking, elderly Chinese man sporting bifocals and a starched, white collarless shirt looked up and rose from one of the fours desks when the door opened. He spoke good if accented English. ‘I am Mr Lee. How may we help you?’
Hardy handed him a business card. ‘I am helping to investigate the death of a police officer and I wonder if I could have few minutes of your time.’
Mr Lee checked the card again. ‘Are you with the police?’
‘No.’ At the man’s frown, Hardy pressed ahead. ‘But I believe the officer may have come here and spoken to someone about a woman’s death.’
The man did the math in his head. ‘Two deaths now?’
‘Actually, three or more.’ He paused to let the fact sink in. ‘I’m working with the police.’ This wasn’t precisely true, and Hardy was about to tell Mr Lee he could call Abe to smooth things over, but saw that he was nodding, accepting. ‘The inspector was Carl Griffin.’
Again, a frown. Deeper this time. ‘A big gentleman, wasn’t he? Not too clean? He’s dead?’
Hardy felt a spark of hope. ‘Yes. He was killed a few weeks ago. I was hoping to find out what he questioned you about.’
The nodding continued, then Mr Lee motioned for Hardy to follow, and led him over to the desk he’d lately abandoned. The old man worked with the keyboard, nodded, and pointed at the screen. ‘Twelve oh six Broadway,’ he said. ‘Our customers.’
‘Do you clean the whole building?’
‘No. There are, I believe twenty-three or four units, all individually owned. We contract through the superintendent for the public areas, and many residents are happy with our service.’
‘And Bree Beaumont was one of them?’
‘Yes.’ Mr Lee shot a glance at Hardy, and ventured a personal comment. ‘It was very sad about her.’
‘Yes it was,’ he said. Sadness was all over this case. He gave the sentiment a moment. ‘So what is your schedule there, for cleaning? I gather you go on Tuesday and Thursday – is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you do each place twice a week?’
‘No. Generally, we clean once. Half the units on one day, the other half on the other.’
‘And which was Bree?’
‘Thursday. Every Thursday.’
Hardy saw the reason for Griffin’s earlier visit. If Heritage had come on Tuesday, possibly within an hour or two of Bree’s death and before the crime scene unit had arrived, then trace evidence might be found among the cleaning supplies, in the vacuum cleaner bags and so on. But evidently this had not happened.
Still, he wanted to be certain. ‘So you didn’t go to her apartment on the day of her death?’
‘No. That’s what Sergeant Griffin asked us.’
‘Did he ask if any of your staff saw anybody unusual in the hallways? Anything strange that they noticed?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Mr Lee was still seated, and now sat back, folding his arms patiently. ‘But – have you been there? Yes? – then you know. It’s really not that type of apartment building. There’s only two units on each floor, except for the penthouse, where there is one.’
Hardy remembered. At Bree’s twelfth floor, there was simply a landing with a window and a door. Residents weren’t exactly out wandering in the halls, loitering about in the locked lobby. ‘So there was really nothing to be found in any of your supplies. The crime scene had already been there by the time you came on Thursday?’
Mr Lee shook his head. ‘I don’t know that. But Inspector Griffin… just one minute.’ Pulling open the drawer again, Lee pushed junk around for a minute, found that he wanted, extracted it, and handed it up to Hardy.
It was a crinkled piece of paper. Hardy’s pulse quickened as he realized what it probably was – a sheet torn from Griffin’s notebook. In the by now familiar scrawl, Hardy read: ‘10 01. Received from Heritage Cleaners. One Gold and Platinum Movado Men’s watch, serial number 81-4-9880/8367685. Evid/case: 981113248. C. Griffin, SFPD Badge 1123.’
‘Where did you get this?’ Hardy asked. ‘Where is the watch?’
Mr Lee shrugged eloquently. ‘When the inspector came here, he said he still needed the watch. I should hold the receipt. If no one claimed it, eventually it might come to us.’
‘But how did you get the receipt in the first place?’
‘The inspector gave it to my supervisor in the building. They found the watch when cleaning.’
‘And this was when your people found the watch? On the Thursday?’
Lee considered a moment. ‘Yes. The date on the receipt is October first, see. A Thursday.’
‘And no one has claimed it since? Reported it missing?’
‘No,’ Lee said. ‘Not to my people.’
Hardy wasn’t surprised to hear this. If the watch inadvertently got left behind, say snapping off during a struggle at the crime scene, it would be the height of folly to go back and try to get it. But stranger things had happened.
Of course, Hardy realized, it might also be Ron’s watch. With the upheaval in his life since Bree’s death, he simply might not have missed it. But Griffin would have just asked Ron about that. Wouldn’t he?
Instead, he’d taken it as evidence, logged to the Beaumont case number. The problem was that by this time, Hardy knew the file backwards and forwards, and there wasn’t any watch in the evidence lockup or anywhere else.
Hardy asked if he might have a copy of the receipt. When Mr Lee returned from making one, he handed Hardy the copy, then clucked sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help more, but I haven’t even heard about Sergeant Griffin’s death until just now.’ Mr Lee wasn’t rushing him, but clearly he felt this investigation had little to do with him or his staff. It had taken enough of his time on a work day.
Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more here. There had to be. He’d referred again to the notes before coming and Griffin had included his maddening exclamation points.
But now they were moving toward the exit. The words ‘fabric wash’ came to him, so he stopped at the door. ‘Mr Lee, one last question. Do you do any clothes cleaning at all? Laundry work? Say one of your clients leaves a pile of clothes by a washing machine – would you dump it in for them? Or dry them?’
The proprietor considered this, then shook his head. ‘We remove window drapery occasionally, or upholstery fabric, but no. Generally, we don’t clean clothes.’
‘And what about Bree’s drapes or furniture? Did you remove either of those for dry cleaning? Were there any stains you needed to remove?’
‘No. That would have been a special order, and I checked into that with Sergeant Griffin when he came here. And again, I am so sorry to hear about him.’
Scott Randall heard the rumor from one of the other assistant DAs, who in turn had heard it from one of the forensic guys who’d worked with Sergeant Leon Timms, unhappily cleaning and cataloguing through the night under the back seat of Griffin’s car.
Although Glitsky had cautioned Timms and his staff not to discuss any possible relationship between the murders of Bree Beaumont, Carl Griffin, and Phil Canetta, by some inexplicable mystery of nature the word had leaked out.
Now Randall was at a hastily called late lunchtime strategy session with his boss and his investigator, Peter Struler. They had just taken their seats at Boulevard, an incredibly fine restaurant that was well off the beaten track of the rank and file of workers at the Hall of Justice.
Pratt, still smarting from her dressing down by the mayor, was inclined to dismiss the rumor, but Randall needed her support to move ahead, and he wasn’t going to let it go. ‘I think we have to assume it’s true, Sharron. It sounds right. It feels true, doesn’t it?’
Peter Struler was a fifteen-year, no-nonsense investigator and he spoke with a veteran’s confidence. ‘It’s true,’ he volunteered. ‘Everybody assumed Griffin got hit on some dope sting, but he was doing Beaumont. Ballistics confirms the same gun whacked Canetta.’