Maybe, Quinn thought, he’d also stolen a throw rug and a wooden chair.
A phone call to a local antique dealer shed some light. The dealer said on the phone he’d have to see the rug in order to give an estimate of its worth. The missing wooden chair, he said, after hearing Quinn’s description, if genuine and in good condition, might be worth several thousand dollars.
So the killer had taken the victim’s computer and then come back later to move what was valuable and more noticeable. Quinn assumed the killer would have dressed like some sort of workman and simply walked out of the building and to his car or truck with the chair and rolled rug.
But what amazed and angered the detectives was the strong possibility that he had returned and taken away what was valuable in the apartment while they were eating lunch.
After work at Coaxly and Simms, writing ad copy, Rose Darling entered her apartment, closed the door behind her, and fastened all her locks. Since finding that girl the way she was in Central Park, Rose hadn’t felt safe. She read everything she could find on the murder. Watched the news.
How could something have happened so close to her? She had passed right by where and when that poor woman was murdered. The fear had pushed her into a run.
She recalled the curious sense of dread she’d felt while jogging there. Some part of her mind must have realized something. Her anxiety had been so real!
She decided she wasn’t going to run this evening in the unrelenting heat. And certainly not in the park. She wasn’t sure when she’d feel comfortable again while jogging. The thing to do, she decided, was wait until the sicko killer was caught. And killed. (She hoped.) Then she could run again, but on the sidewalks, where people were walking. Then she realized that might be unwise, being the fastest one and drawing everyone’s stares.
Everyone’s.
She cranked up the air-conditioning, sat down on the sofa, and, using one foot, then the other, worked off her high heels. She could recall her father’s cautioning voice from her youth: Don’t stick your neck out. Don’t make it easier for the bastards.
Never had she believed more in her father’s simple wisdom.
She let herself sink back into fatherly philosophy and the welcoming embrace of the sofa cushions.
7
“Lennon was shot there,” Sal Vitali said to Harold Mishkin, as they walked along Central Park West toward where they’d parked the unmarked car.
Before them loomed the ornate stone building that occupied an entire block.
“The Russian or the singer?” Harold asked.
Not sure whether Harold was playing dumb, Sal growled simply, “The singer.”
Harold’s expression of detached mildness didn’t change as he made a slight sound that might have meant anything.
They’d finished interviewing Lois Graham’s pertinent neighbors, catching some of them after work hours but before dinner. People didn’t like to have their meals delayed or interrupted.
The two detectives thought it might be worth talking to the victim’s upstairs neighbor again, a guy named Masterson, who had seemed more than a little nervous the first time. But maybe that was because his apartment smelled strongly of weed. He and a busty twenty-three-year-old girl named Mitzy, who’d spent the night with him, swore they’d been in bed all evening the night of the murder. They’d been listening to CDs of Harry Connick Jr. songs. Harold thought that was unlikely, though he himself liked Connick Jr.
Tonight when Masterson (“call me Bat—everyone does”) opened his door to them, Mitzy was nowhere to be found.
Bat motioned for Sal and Harold to sit on the sofa, and sat down across from them in a ratty old recliner that creaked beneath his weight. Harold noted that Masterson was a larger man than he’d first thought. Broad and muscular.
“Where’s Mitzy this evening?” Sal asked.
Masterson shrugged. Not easy to do in a recliner, but he managed. “At her quilting bee. She belongs to this gang of women who sit around and gossip and make quilts. Give them to people they like or love. I’ve got so many I don’t know what to do with the damned things.” He shrugged again, exactly like the first time. “I’d be happy to see a Christmas tie this year.”
“You mean between two of the women in the quilting bee?” Harold said.
Masterson looked at Harold the way Sal had. Harold seemed not to notice.
Sal thought Masterson was going to shrug a third time, but he just sat there, as if the brief conversation and two sitting shrugs had been enough to exhaust him. Harold could do that to people.
“Would you like to amend your account of last night in any way?” Harold asked.
Masterson raised his eyebrows in a practiced way, as if he’d had enough of shrugs. “You mean have I thought of anything else?”
Sal and Harold sat still, waiting.
“I remember riding down in the elevator with Lois Graham. She had a bag of popcorn with her. She is—was—an attractive lady. The sort anybody would remember.”
“She and you were alone in the elevator?” Sal asked.
“Yes, just the two of us. We both got out at lobby level. I went to pick up my mail at the boxes. She started walking off as soon as she stepped on the sidewalk.”
“Did she know Mitzy?” Sal asked, not knowing quite why.
Masterson wasn’t thrown by the question. “The two never met that I can remember. I mean, Lois Graham and I didn’t really know each other. We were what you’d call nodding acquaintances.”
“Then the two of you never dated?”
“Never anything like that. I mean, you saw Mitzy.”
“She has a certain glint in her eye,” Harold said.
“Well,” Sal said, closing his notepad, “we won’t arrest her just now as a suspect, but she should see a doctor about that glint.”
Bat Masterson and Harold both looked momentarily startled, then relaxed, realizing Sal was joking. Fedderman wandered in from his interview in another unit, saw the smiles and joined in.
The detectives thanked Masterson for his cooperation, then left the building and walked toward their unmarked car, finished after a long day.
As they passed where John Lennon had been shot, two young girls were standing and gawking. One kept snapping photos with her cell phone. The other stared at the sidewalk approximately where Lennon had fallen and seemed about to cry.
“Where the Russian was shot,” Sal said dryly.
Harold said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
A ragged figure stepped out from the narrow dark space between two buildings and limped toward them. Fedderman moved his unbuttoned white shirt cuff and rested the heel of his hand on his gun in its belt holster.
The man was one of the homeless, in a stained and ripped ancient gray sport coat and incredibly wrinkled baggy jeans. He had a lean face with a long, oft-broken nose, and a deep scar on the side of his jaw. He might have been forty or ninety. The street did that to people. Once they gave up, the street was in charge of time.
He stopped a yard in front of Sal and Harold, so that they had to stop.
“I seen what happened,” he said in a voice almost as gravel pan as Sal’s. “All of it. Whole thing started with the popcorn.”
The two detectives looked at each other.
“What’s your name?” Harold asked.
Sal rolled his eyes. He was tired and his feet hurt. He didn’t feel like dealing with a nutcase.