by Blake Banner
Dehan said, “Thursday 6th March.”
He nodded at her, as though he approved of her choice of date. “Exactly correct, yes, Miss Katie O’Connor comes to visit, to collect some things, at about nine o’clock. I am hoping, you know, that she will stay the night and maybe they will make up, because he is nice man, and he is very much in love with her. They don’t fight, but she doesn’t stay. She goes. Friday everything is very quiet, but in the evening a woman comes to see him.”
“A woman? There is no mention of this in the police report.”
“No! I know! Because the detective thinks I am making a mistake. I am hearing the buzzer outside—you know, the intercom—because my apartment is right by the gate. So I am hearing and seeing most people coming and going. And I am pretty sure that I am hearing a woman on Friday night. I am hoping maybe it is Miss Katie come back to see David. So I am going to the door and looking through the peephole. But I can’t see properly. She does not put on the light. But she takes the elevator to the fifth floor. Ten minutes later, not more than fifteen, the elevator comes down again and somebody leaves. Next morning I go up to see about the rent, he is not answering his door, I let myself in and, oh my god! He is dead.”
Dehan held up her hands. “So, hang on a second there, Sammy. Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Did you at any point get a clear look at this visitor on Friday night?”
“No.”
“Not when they arrived and not when they left.”
“No.”
“So what makes you think it was a woman?”
“Oh, the intercom. I think I recognize David’s voice, so I am saying, ‘Oh, goodness, maybe Miss Katie is coming back!’ And I am looking through the window. I can’t see her, but I can hear her voice asking to be let in.”
Dehan pressed him, “And was it clearly a woman’s voice?”
“To me it was clear. To me it was a woman. But she spoke very softly. Too softly to make out what she said, or to be sure who it was.”
I said, “So you can’t in fact be certain that this visitor actually went to David’s apartment.”
He looked apologetic. “I am certain that it was a woman, and I am certain that she did. But that is only my own personal opinion. I did not see it with my own eyes, no.”
I nodded a few times and looked at Dehan. She shook her head. “I’m good.”
I turned to Sammy. “You have been very helpful. Thank you. We won’t keep you any longer.”
He wished us all the very best and begged us please to come again if we were ever passing by in the neighborhood. We thanked him and left.
Outside, the roads were wet and the air was cold and blustery. It wasn’t raining, but the clouds were dark and sagging overhead, and didn’t look as though they were about to move on any time soon. We climbed into the car and I fired up the engine and turned on the warm air. Dehan rubbed her hands together and said, “Did you happen to talk to Miss Katie O’Connor last night as well?”
I smiled and pulled my notebook from my inside pocket. I flipped it open and handed it to her. “No. She’s a realtor working southwest Bronx. I figured you could give her a call and fix up an appointment. That’s her number.” I gave a small shrug and grinned at her. “There is no need for her to know we are cops until we get there.”
She nodded and started dialing. “Less chance of her suddenly remembering a non-existent dentist’s appointment if she thinks she’s going to sell us a house rather than get interrogated about her boyfriend’s murder.”
“That was the way my mind was working.”
She put the phone to her ear and stared out of the window. “So, what? Are we married and looking for a place together, or what?” I gave her my expressionless face but she didn’t look at me. After a moment she said, “Oh, yes, good morning, am I speaking to Katie O’Connor?” She laughed like they were sharing a joke and said, “Hello, Katie! Listen, when would it be convenient for you to see us… What are we looking for? Well, we were hoping you could point us in the right direction!” She laughed uproariously again. “One o’clock? Oh really? Oh that sounds perfect.” She looked at me and blinked several times, “Darling, Katie will see us at one o’clock on Howe Avenue. She is showing a gorgeous three bedroom semi-detached house. Darling, are you listening to me?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Yes, darling.”
“Katie, that sounds perfect. We’ll see you there at one. Let’s see if between us we can get the old dinosaur to make up his mind!”
She hung up and eyed me, suppressing a smile. I took my notebook back and said, “That was unnecessarily elaborate.”
“What can I do? I’m creative. When a girl is creative, she creates, right?”
“I need to dry out, get some hot coffee and a donut.”
She smiled. “All these years married, and you still say the most romantic things, honeykins.”
“Cut it out!”
She snorted, but remained silent the rest of the way to Fteley Avenue.
THREE
The clouds had broken and were hanging, white and wet against a cold blue sky. An icy wind was whipping in gusts off the East River, flapping our clothes and dragging Dehan’s hair across her face, forcing her to claw it back with her fingers so she could see where she was going. We leaned against the gusts and made our way up the drive, past the protruding garage, to the front door. It stood wedged open. I rested my hand on the door jamb and looked in. Dehan rang the bell, then shouldered past me, muttering, “Door’s open. We can go in.” Then she called out, “Katie? Katie O’Connor?”
Katie O’Connor appeared in the kitchen doorway with a bright smile on her face. She had copper-red hair, deep blue eyes, and a cute spray of freckles. She was wearing a handsome tweed suit that made her look expensive. Her smile faded slightly when Dehan showed her her badge.
“Hi, Katie, I am Detective Carmen Dehan and this is my partner, Detective John Stone. We’d like to ask you some questions about your relationship with David Thorndike.”
It was a pretty brutal approach. Her whole demeanor seemed to collapse. She sagged, frowned, and said, “What?” Then, “No! I am working. I have potential clients arriving…”
“We won’t take up much of your time, Katie, but it’s easier if we do it here rather than at the station.”
She picked up on the implied threat and sighed. “Fine, but please, make it quick. This is an open house. People could turn up at any time. What do you want to know?”
Dehan rubbed her hands and stamped her feet. “How about we start with why you two split up?”
A flash of irritation creased Katie’s brow. “That was ten years ago!” She glared at Dehan a moment, then glared at me where I was still propped up against the doorjamb. “Can you come in, please, and close the door?”
I stepped in and closed the door behind me. Katie disappeared into the kitchen and we followed. We found her leaning with her ass against the sink and her arms crossed. Her face was flushed and I couldn’t make out if she was mad or scared. She was probably both.
Dehan rested against the door and I went and sat on a pine chair at a pine breakfast table. I said, quietly, “Why’d you break up, Katie?”
She gave me that look women give you when they are seeing all men as one single, conjoined bastard. “Because he was a son of a bitch! Why are you asking me about this? It was…”
I interrupted her, “I know, ten years ago. We are a specialist cold case unit. David was murdered, so we aim to find out who murdered him. However much of a son of a bitch he was, murder is against the law. I hope you are going to cooperate with us.”
It was like talking to an angry four year-old. She stared at me with defiance in her blue eyes, and two red spots on her cheeks. Then she closed her baby blues and heaved a big, angry sigh.
“Okay, I understand, and yes, you are right, of course.” She unfolded her arms, spread her hands for a moment, and then let them drop by her side. “We had been living together for a couple of months. He w
as a fun guy. He was very alive, dynamic, full of life and energy.” She stopped and for a moment her eyes became abstracted. She looked out the window and into the back garden. “You got the feeling sometimes with Dave that the world wasn’t quite enough for him.” She looked at me. “Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded. “Sure. He had an appetite for life.”
“Oh, he sure had that. He was a good journalist. Tireless. He worked hard, very hard. A lot of women would have said too hard, but I supported him. I admire hard work and commitment in a person. I don’t need some guy fawning over me twenty-four seven. I like to see a guy achieving something in life. So I supported him…”
Dehan narrowed her eyes. “Were you aware of what he was working on?”
Katie gave a lopsided smile. “No… Dave was super careful and secretive about his work. Nobody, and I mean nobody got to see it. Even his editor got the bare minimum of information.”
I said, “Okay, so in what way were you supportive?”
She shrugged. “I made no demands on him—if I worked eight or nine hours a day, he would work sometimes twelve or fifteen—sometimes more. When he did, I would keep him supplied with coffee, food, whatever he needed until he was done.” She shrugged. “We got up together, we went to bed together, and I was there at his side every step of the god-damned way. I believed in him.”
I knew the answer but I asked anyway. “So what happened?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? I discovered the son of a bitch was married.”
Dehan was chewing her lip. She said, “How’d you find out?”
She stared at Dehan for a long moment, then down at the floor. “He told me.”
“He told you?”
She nodded without looking up. “It was about a week or so before… before they found him. I got home from work and he was kind of hyper. He wasn’t making a lot of sense. He said the article was finished, it was going to be mega.” She shook her head, still looking at the floor. “He was talking crazy stuff, about getting the Pulitzer, writing a best seller, making a fortune. At first I was right there with him.” Now she looked up and held Dehan’s eye. “I was as excited as he was. We were going to be rich, famous. It was going to be bigger than Watergate. Then, I remember it like it was yesterday, he took hold of me by the shoulders and told me to sit down. He sat next to me, on the sofa, and told me.”
Dehan shook her head. “Son of a bitch.”
Katie glanced at her. She looked grateful. “Yeah. He’d been married for five years, something like that. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember going cold all over. The betrayal!” She stopped and studied Dehan’s face for a moment, like she was searching for something there. “All the time we had been together I had thought I knew him, but he was a stranger. He’d been lying to me, using me. And what about his wife? If he was capable of doing that to her, what would he do to me in five years?”
Dehan nodded. “Suddenly, he was a stranger.”
“Right. He told me he was going to come clean with her, tell her about us and get a divorce. Then we’d get married…”
She gave a sudden, startling yelp of laughter and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Can you believe it? He had it all worked out. What he had done to his wife would just be swept away! What he was going to do to his wife didn’t count. What he had done to me for the last two months, that wasn’t important. None of that mattered anymore. Because he had decided we were going to get married. So now it was all okay.”
I said, “So what happened?”
She glared at me. “What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. I slapped his face and screamed at him. I told him we were finished, packed my things, and left.”
“You packed your things… Did you have a zip up suitcase…?”
She shook her head. “No. I took most of my stuff, what I could fit, in a couple of hold alls. I left some books and CDs and went back a couple of days later to get them.”
I scratched my chin a second, thinking. “Would that be the Friday?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? You expect me to remember the days of the weeks ten years ago?”
I managed to combine a sigh and a smile. “David’s body was found on the Saturday morning. Your big bust up would have been roughly the previous weekend.”
She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “No. It wasn’t the day before. Probably mid week, Wednesday or Thursday. I was there maybe ten minutes. Got my stuff and left.”
We were quiet for a moment, then Dehan asked her, “He was found on the Saturday morning. Where were you the night before?”
Katie squinted at her. “It’s got to be in the police report. Why are you asking me?”
“Could you please just answer the question?”
She sighed and raised her eyes. “Fine! I went out to dinner with a friend. They checked my alibi.”
I looked out the window at the garden. The trees were nodding and the sky had turned gray again. There were a few drops of rain on the glass.
“Katie, where did David usually work?”
She frowned, not understanding my question. “At home.”
“No, I mean, where in the apartment?”
“Oh, we had a small dining table over by the window. He worked at the table.”
I nodded. “I figure he had all his papers scattered around, taking up all the space, right?”
“I guess so, yeah. Why?”
“When you went to collect your books and your CDs on the Thursday, was his laptop on the table, with all the papers?”
Her face became serious. I could see she was searching her memory. I could tell it was a question she hadn’t asked herself before. She frowned, then her frown deepened and she shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
I nodded. “Yes, you are, Katie. Don’t lie to me.”
Her cheeks colored. “I don’t think there was anything on the table. He’d finished the article. It makes sense.”
“If that is right, where would he have put the article, and his laptop? Neither was found at the scene.”
Her face was like a mask. It was as though she had climbed inside herself and she was now unreachable. She was still frowning, but no longer at my question. I had the feeling she was frowning now at her own thoughts. She said, “I don’t know. I guess his editor…”
“Why would he give his laptop to his editor?”
“I don’t know. You’re asking me questions I can’t answer.”
“Well, what about friends? Did he have a close friend? Somebody other than you that he trusted?”
She thought, and when she answered her voice was almost a whisper. “No…”
“I think you’re lying, Katie.”
Her eyes flashed. “I am not! He didn’t trust anybody! Not even me!”
“You’re telling me he had no friends?”
“He had acquaintances. Some close acquaintances. But no friends. There was Bob, Bob Shaw. That was his editor. He was about as close as anybody ever got to him. And some guy he spoke about sometimes. I never met him. Guy called Lee. But I’m pretty sure the only person he would have trusted with his work, once it was finished, was his editor.”
I thought for a bit, then sighed and put my hands on my knees. “Okay, Katie. I’m going to need an address and a number where we can reach you besides your work number. I’m pretty sure we’ll need to talk to you again.”
She reached in her purse and handed me a card. “Does that mean I’m a suspect? I have an alibi. It was checked.”
I stood, took her card, and put it in my wallet. “Nobody has an alibi, Katie, because nobody knows at what time he was killed. Please, don’t leave town.”
As I opened the front door onto the icy, gray day I heard Katie behind me. “Were you the couple who were due at one?”
I looked at Dehan, who turned to answer. She looked embarrassed, just shrugged, and shook her head.
I climbed into the Jag fe
eling vaguely depressed. Dehan climbed in beside me and we both sat staring at the bleak expanse of the sound, reflecting the cold, gunmetal of the low clouds.
“Sucks,” she said, and I nodded. “We need to eat and review what we have so far.” I nodded again and fired up the old brute.
FOUR
I followed Castle Hill avenue for a mile or so north, listening to the desultory squeak of the wipers, till we came to the Café Havana. In the cold and the rain, it looked like just the job. I pulled up outside, Dehan dumped her Australian hat on her head, and we loped across the sidewalk and pushed inside.
A bell clanked overhead and Julio, the bored-looking owner behind the bar, cheered up when he saw us.
“Hey, parejita! How you doin’, man? You come to brighten up my afternoon?”
“It’s what we live for, Julio, you know that.”
We ordered a couple of beers and some chicken and black beans up at the bar, then found a table by the wood burner he had against one wall, next to a mural of a 1947 Chrysler Windsor with a half-naked Cuban girl leaning against the hood.
Dehan sat back in her chair and stretched out her long legs toward the fire. I took a couple of paper napkins and dried my hair with them. She said, “You like her for it?”
I stared at the flames a moment. “I don’t know. We still have the same problem we had with Samantha. She’s mad enough for it. David seems to have been a guy who knew how to make women mad. But I don’t see the passion in the killing.”
She was staring at her boots, like it was them talking to her. When I finished, she nodded at them and said. “I don’t like her for it.” She chewed her lip for a bit, then said, “There’s something missing.”
Julio brought over our beers and I took a long pull. As I set down the glass, I said, “I agree. And it’s something to do with the laptop and his article. This feels like an execution, not a crime of passion.”