The hospital had been unable to obtain any blood from beneath Beth’s fingernails, though she’d said she’d scratched her attacker, so this blood could be valuable evidence if it was the same type as the suspect’s.
If they had a suspect.
Westerley recalled the words of a former Missouri politician about a wordy but ineffective bill that had passed the legislature. Now if we had some bread and we had some mustard, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some ham.
23
New York, the present
On Quinn’s instructions, Vitali and Mishkin revisited the apartments of both Millie Graff and Nora Noon. Something might have been overlooked. Something that linked one or both women to the New York underworld of seamy sex, or to each other.
The two detectives were in Nora’s apartment. It was bright and warm from sunlight beaming through the windows.
Vitali was sorting through the stifling second bedroom, stuffed with hangered garments and bolts of fabric. Mishkin, in the other bedroom, was carefully removing, then replacing, intimate wear in the dresser drawers. He handled the dead woman’s silk and lacy items with his fingertips, a faintly disturbed and embarrassed look above his bushy gray mustache. Sal, glancing in now and then from the room across the hall, reflected as he had many times that his partner shouldn’t have become a cop. The tedious and often repugnant part of the job too often got to Mishkin.
The results were in from the NYPD nerds who’d explored the victims’ computers. Millie Graff’s hard drive was mostly full of dancing and dancers. Restaurant hostess though she might have been, her dream of professional dancing was still strong. There was a site about “the art” of pole dancing, but it actually did seem to concentrate more on the techniques of dancing with a pole than on eroticism. Her e-mail account was mostly about business matters, and discussions of dancers’ progress or lack of same. Her personal account suggested she didn’t have a lot of friends in the city, and at the time of her death no romantic involvement. While online, Millie visited the Drudge Report almost daily and read the digital version of the New York Times. Fair and balanced.
Nora Noon also had visited the Times online. In fact, it was her home page. Illustrations from several fashion magazines were on her computer, along with a downloaded book by Susan Isaacs. She had visited an online dating service a few times but hadn’t signed up. Like Millie, she had a business e-mail address as well as a personal account. The business account was completely about business. The personal account revealed nothing helpful. Nora had also been on Facebook, but most of her input was a thinly disguised ploy to establish business contacts.
“These women,” Mishkin said loudly so Vitali would hear in the other room, “seem to have been normal human beings, but very, very busy.”
“It’s a wonder they found the time to get killed,” Vitali rasped. Lint or something in the air of the crowded little room kept making him almost sneeze.
“They were career women,” Mishkin said. “A dancer and a designer.”
“Wannabe dancer.”
“Same thing. Just a matter of timing.” Harold the optimist.
“Everybody’s got a career, Harold. Even if they just call them jobs.”
“I mean more than a job, Sal. More like a calling. That’s why both victims led such busy lives.”
Sal shoved his way out of Nora N.’s storage room. Or oversized closet. He wasn’t sure what to call it. Whatever, it was sure full of lint. He sneezed as he entered the other bedroom, where Mishkin toiled.
“God bless,” Mishkin said. He was holding up a black thong. “This isn’t part of a swimming suit, Sal. It’s too fragile.”
“Those thong things are popular as underwear, too, Harold. Which is what that one is. Probably most women under seventy have got at least one in their wardrobe.”
“How do you know that, Sal?”
“I just do. Like I know red buttons often turn things on.”
Mishkin found something else interesting in Nora’s dresser drawer. “What are these things that look like halves of hollowed-out cantaloupes with foam in them.”
“That’s a bra, Harold. It’s used when women wear a gown that doesn’t have straps.”
Mishkin held the attached shallow foam cups out at arm’s length and studied them. “They don’t look as if they’d support anything.”
“They do, though, Harold. And they make it possible to have bare chest, back, and shoulders above the dress without a brassiere strap showing.”
“Got it,” Mishkin said. “They work on the principle of the cantilever. Like those houses on the hills in California, where half the place hangs out over a long drop to the valley below.”
“Harold.”
“Yeah?”
“Put the damned thing back in the drawer and let’s get out of here.”
Mishkin did that, and was shutting the drawer when he noticed something on the floor. A slip of lined paper that looked as if it had been torn from a small spiral notebook. He picked it up and looked at it.
“Here’s something, Sal. It must have dropped on the floor when I was pulling stuff from the drawers. There’s writing on it. A man’s name and a phone number.” He beamed at Vitali. “I think it was in the same drawer as the thong and cantilever bra. Maybe we got something big here, Sal.”
“If he isn’t an insurance salesman or plumber,” Vitali said.
He liked to keep Mishkin’s expectations low. Harold could be crushed and depressed for days when something this promising didn’t pan out. A real pain in the ass, given to brooding.
Vitali slipped the folded piece of paper into his shirt pocket so Mishkin wouldn’t think too much about it.
24
Things had changed. Candice Culligan could afford to take a cab home from the office now. She’d recently been made a managing partner in Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte, a law firm specializing in corporate research and litigation.
Candice (never Candy) might look like a showgirl, with her tall frame and hourglass figure, not to mention generous lips that looked like but weren’t the product of collagen. Her long hair was lush and red, her eyes large and blue. And there was something in those eyes that kept people at bay, especially all but the most adventurous men on the make. Like there was a certain pride in her chin-up, long-strided walk. But Candice wasn’t only for show, despite the fact that she was a show wherever she went. Candice was smart.
It hadn’t taken Marty Deloitte long to figure out how smart, because Marty was no dummy himself. Soon after Candice joined the firm four years ago, Marty had made her his protege. Both of them ignored the snickers. Marty, sixtyish and too bowlegged even to look good in his four-thousand-dollar suits, was happily married and had four teenage sons who were constantly in trouble because he ignored them so he could work long hours. Margie, his wife, didn’t question or complain about his dedication to his work. Not even after she’d met Candice. It wasn’t so much that Margie was trusting (though she was). Their rambunctious sons kept her busy visiting neighbors, schools, and sometimes police precinct houses and courtrooms, setting things in order to shrink the fines and prevent incarcerations. She didn’t have time to worry about whether Marty was screwing somebody else. If he was, she’d eventually find out, and then she’d castrate him.
Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte was one of the most successful and wealthy firms in the city. They could afford to pay well, and they did. They could also be slave drivers, mercilessly pushing their employees for more and more billable hours. Within a month at the firm, Candice had gotten sick of the term billable hours.
As a managing partner, Candice was now beyond all that. She’d gotten the commensurate big raise and bonus. And the caseload. She’d usually worked her cases with Marty Deloitte at her side, sometimes proffering his advice. And the right cases, like that well-publicized child-abuse custody battle, had come her way. Everything had broken just right for her.