Of course, I hadn’t ruled Hermioni out as a suspect yet. Call me jaded, but there was something about the human condition that allowed some folks to believe that if they hired a private dick, it deflected suspicion away from them, no matter how damning the evidence. One of my former clients had learned the hard way that guys like me weren’t wired to look the other way. While I wasn’t a cop anymore, the basic principles that had led me in that direction were still very much intact.
Besides, I knew enough about life to know that you took order where you could find it.
Tom McCurdy finished a phone call, sighed, and then nearly dumped the contents of his coffee cup over the files covering his desk as he reached for a pen.
“Looks like you’ve got your hands full,” I remarked.
“That ain’t the half of it. That goddamn blackout has us backlogged two weeks. We’re investigating every death until we can rule out those that were heat-related.” He fingered through one pile, then began on another, pulling out the file on Abramopoulos. “I thought you might be by for this. Ugly case, this one. Steak knife to the neck. Real mess.”
I’d known Mike had been stabbed. Only I hadn’t known where or with what. “You wouldn’t happen to have handy the list of the vouchered evidence and crime scene photos, would you?”
“Probably. But you know I can’t let you see them.”
I crossed my arms over my brown tie and grinned. “I don’t think I have to remind you that you owe me.”
Tom frowned, plainly remembering the hit on a prominent Greek politician I’d helped him thwart a year ago. “I think you just did.” He squinted at me. “The widow hire you?”
I indicated she had.
He swiveled in his chair and pulled out another file. The evidence itself had been collected by the Crime Scene Unit and was probably at the NYPD lab waiting to be tested. After that, it would be sent to the prosecutor’s office, once a suspect was named. I looked over the list Tom handed me and the photos. One shot was of a steak knife, the blade coated with blood. Another showed a short-sleeved blue shirt stained with blood in a pattern I guessed was consistent with a neck wound. I squinted at the third shot.
“The knife was still in the side of his neck.” Tom tapped a spot near his left carotid artery.
“Any idea if the attacker approached from the front or the back?”
“Nah. Still waiting on the M.E. for that. But this guy was a fighter. Scooted at least ten feet toward the telephone on the wall before he blacked out. Hit the left carotid head on. There ain’t no bigger bleeder in the body.”
I nodded, my gaze catching on a small, blood-caked item featured in the third shot. A dime had been placed next to it to indicate scale.
“Don’t know what in the hell that is yet,” Tom said. “Maybe after the guys scrape the blood off we’ll get a better clue.”
I already had a good idea what it was.
“What’s your take on who did it?” I asked.
“Cash register emptied, hour late. Robbery gone bad, is my best guess.”
“That’s what I figured you’d say.”
I again looked through the photos that had been printed out on regular paper. Not very good detail. But with digital cameras and computers nowadays, there was very little need for hard photos, unless you wanted to make a point with a jury. Needed to know something? You used a computer to zoom in on it.
While originally I had been reluctant to add the new technology to my inventory, in the past few years I’d become quite proficient, updating my software every year and a half or so to make sure I had the latest.
I held up a photo. “Prints on the knife?”
“Only those of the victim. Probably he tried to take it out. Made a real mess of things. Which is why he bled out.”
“How about footprints in the blood?”
“Only those of the victim.”
“Was the knife clean or dirty?”
Tom grimaced. “Do you mean, did someone use it to cut a steak or something before burying it in Abramopoulos’s neck?” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I eyed a shot of the entire diner and then handed him back the photos. “Thanks.”
“That’s it?”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said over my shoulder, heading for the door.
I sat back in my office chair, staring at the notes I’d made. Was Tom right? The killing the product of a robbery gone bad? Mike was the kind to resist.
Hermioni had provided me with a list of the staff — names and Social Security numbers; I’d checked them out. Nothing but minor traffic violations. Hermioni had also told me about a customer Mike had argued with the morning before he was killed, but she didn’t have a name, so I’d have to ask around if I was to pursue that lead.
I personally knew of other strange regulars who kept to themselves. But to spotlight them was like shining an unflattering light on myself.
Was Mike the victim of some psycho agitated by soaring temperatures and the blackout? No, I didn’t think so. The problem with that as the scenario was that while Astoria — the entire city of New York, for that matter — hadn’t always been safe, now it was a nice place to raise a family, the Manhattan skyline near enough to appreciate across the East River, but far enough away to escape the problems of too many people crammed into small spaces.
Yet the real reason I rejected all the theories was because I was pretty sure I knew what had gone down that night in the Acropolis Diner.
I grabbed my notepad, purposely leaving my pen behind, and decided it was time for dinner.
Mayor Bloomberg and I didn’t agree on much, but our take on Greek diners was in sync. He’d said in a recent interview in the Times that if he had to eat at only one New York restaurant for the rest of his life, it would be a Greek diner, because the variety of food was impressive and the ingredients fresh.
I concurred. And it wasn’t just because I was Greek. Having been single for the better part of my life, I’d come to appreciate the range my compatriots offered up. While tonight I’d ordered only yemista — rice-stuffed tomatoes — that could rival my own mother’s, since I ate at diners every day I often mixed it up with meatloaf and fried chicken. While none of the meals would win any awards, they were pretty close to what Mom would make, if, indeed, Mom made these dishes.
My mother had been living with my younger brother Pericles and his wife Thalia ever since the old man had cashed in his lottery ticket for a big exclusive condo in the sky. She still cooked, but rare were the times when I got to enjoy it. Call me a coward, but I didn’t like the way she looked at me across the table even as she told me about some distant cousin or other from the Old Country who she could fix me up with.
Of course, my life probably would have been a whole hell of a lot simpler had I just taken her advice from the beginning. Instead, I’d married two American women who had thought me exciting and exotic in the beginning, plodding and boring at the end.
The topic of marriage brought my brother Pericles’s oldest daughter, Sofie, to mind. She’d just announced her engagement to a good Greek boy, much to the family’s delight. She’d done some odd jobs for me on and off over the years whenever she got fed up with working in my brother’s restaurant or her maternal grandfather’s café, both on Broadway. I remember thinking she would make a good P.I. That is, if wedding cakes, color swatches, booking good bouzouki bands, and trying to be a good Greek girl weren’t what currently populated her list of priorities.