“Mr. Delacruz?” he repeated.
“Yes?”
Faint Spanish accent detectable even in that single word. “Detective Kling, Eighty-seventh Squad,” Kling said, and showed him his shield.
“Are you a cop?” the woman screamed.
Teddy was having trouble reading her lips. Ten-year-old April, who could have heard the woman from a block away, so loud were the decibels, looked up at her mother and signed She wants to know i f you’re a cop.
They had run over to the Gen just as the woman got out of the Buick to examine its rear end. Teddy couldn’t imagine why the woman was looking for damage to her car when she was the one who’d just hacked into Teddy’s car.
No, I am not a cop, she signed.
“No, she is not a cop,” April said.
“Then what’s this?” the woman shouted, wildly flapping her hands at the DEA sticker plastered to the windshield on the passenger side. In this case, DEA stood not fur Drug Enforcement Agency but rather for Detectives Endowment Association. If Carella had been Irish, there would have been an Emerald Society sticker on the windshield as well. And if he didn’t devoutly believe that anyone born in America was simply an American and not an Italian-American or an Anything-American, there might have been a Columbia Society sticker there, too. As it was, the DEA sticker was on the windshield to indicate to any interested police officer that the car belonged either to a cop or a member of a cop’s family.
April started to sign She wants to know, but Teddy had already caught the gist. She signed to her daughter to tell the woman that her daddy was a cop, yes, a detective, in fact, but what did that have to do with the fact that the woman had just backed into her car, smashing the headlight..
“Slow down, Mom,” April said.
… and the grille and crumpling the hood?
“My father’s a detective,” April said calmly. “You smashed our headlight and grille and you wrinkled the hood, so what difference does it make what he is?“
Teddy was watching her daughter’s lips. She nodded emphatically and began reaching into her handbag for her wallet with her driver’s license in it. It occurred to her that her registration and insurance card were locked inside the car, in the glove compartment. She was unlocking the door on the passenger side when the woman yelled,“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Teddy didn’t hear her.
The woman grabbed her shoulder and spun her around, almost knocking her over.
“You hear me?” the woman shouted.
This time Teddy was reading her lips. She was also reading the spittle that spewed from the woman’s angry mouth in a fine spray reeking of onions.
“You think you can get away with murder just cause your husband’s a cop?”
The woman had both Teddy’s shoulders now, and was shaking her violently.
“Is that what you think? Well, you got another think…”
Teddy kicked her in the left shin.
April ran to a phone booth.
Kling thought the apartment looked like a stage set for a play about a French king. But Joey Delacruz promptly informed him that he himself had designed and decorated the apartment “in an eclectic mix of Queen Anne, Regency, Windsor, and William and Mary,” none of which sounded even remotely French to Kling, so much for that. Delacruz went on to say that he hoped his creation-the apartment, Kling guessed-would outlive his relationship with Kendall, which he sometimes felt was somewhat tenuous. Carella hadn’t mentioned that Delacruz was gay. Nor Kendall, for that matter. Perhaps he hadn’t felt it was important. Kling didn’t think it was too terribly important now, either, unless one or the other of them — or both of them — had murdered Michelle Cassidy.
“Tell me about the night of April seventh,” he said. “Oh, my, but we do sound like a television cop, don’t we?”
Kling didn’t think he sounded like a television cop. He found the comparison annoying.
“Where were you that night, for example?” he asked. “Right here,” Delacruz said. “Excuse me, hut am I sup-posed to know what this is all about?”
“Have you spoken to Ashley Kendall recently?”
“Not since this morning, when he kissed me goodbye and left for work.”
Kling wondered if Delacruz meant that to be annoying, too. The image of a man kissing another man goodbye when he left for work. He thought about it for a second or two and decided it was less annoying than being told he sounded like a television cop.
Trying not to sound like anyone on Hill Street Blues, he said, “Do you remember where you were on the night Michelle Cassidy was murdered?”
“Am I supposed to know this woman?”
“Your friend says no.”
“Ashley?”
“Mr. Kendall, yes.”
“Does it bother you that we’re gay?”
“Mr. Delacruz, I don’t care what you are, or what you do, so long as you don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”
“Bravo! Queen Victoria+”
“You’re supposed to know other, however.”
“Queen Victoria?”
“Sure. Queen Victoria.”
“I never met Michelle Cassidy, but I do know what happened to her, yes. I would have to he deaf, dumb and blind not to know. ”
“Good. So where were you on the night she got kilted?”
“Right here.”
“Anyone with you?”
“Are you corroborating something Ashley told you?”
“You said you hadn’t spoken to him since…”
“That’s right.”
“Then what makes you think I’m trying to corroborate anything he said?”
“Oh, just a hunch, Detective Kling. Just a hunch.”
“Where were you all day?”
“Today?”
“Yes. I’ve been waiting downstairs since…”
“Why didn’t you simply ask Ashley where I was? He’d have told you in a…”
“I didn’t talk to him.”
“Well, someone must have. ”
“Yes, my partner did.”
“Couldn’t he have asked? Or did you want to make sure Ashley wouldn’t call ahead to warn me?”
“Warn you about what?”
“About what to say. In case you asked where l was on the night Michelle got killed.”
“You’ve already told me you were here. And you’ve already told me you haven’t spoken to Kendall since early this morning.”
“How do you know it was early?”
“Because rehearsal started at nine.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson.”
“So what do you think, Mr. Delacruz?”
“Did Ashley tell your partner he was here with me on the night Michelle got killed?”
“Why don’t you just tell me where he was?”
“He was here.”
“All night long?”
“All night long.”
“Anyone who can confirm that?”
“Oh dear,” Delacruz said.
Kling waited.
“Don’t you think I already know you know, Detective Kling?”
“Know what?”
“That Ashley had a meeting here with the man playing the Director in that idiotic play he’s directing.”
“From what time to what time?”
“Cooper Haynes got here at seven and left at ten,” Delacruz said. “I know because that’s way past my usual bed-time.”
“Either of them leave the apartment at any time that night?”
“Not until ten o’clock. Mr. Haynes left at ten. Ashley stayed. Ashley does live here, you know.”