Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 4

by Blake Banner

  She sipped her drink, gazing at the fire. “You were so convinced,” she said after a while, “that Sandy was Cyril. I can see all your reasoning, but even if I had followed it at the time, I would not have been that convinced, that sure, that she was Cyril.”

  I shrugged. “I suspected it, but you’re right. In the end I was certain. And there was a reason for that.”

  “What?”

  I smiled. “Well, we had two murders committed by the same person, but one was committed by a man and the other was committed by a woman. There was only one way that could happen, Cyril had had a sex change operation and come back. The only person that could possibly be Cyril, was Sandy.”

  “You make it sound almost logical.”

  “It’s not logical for us. But to his psychotic mind, at the time, it was logical. One of the problems was that in the intervening years, his psychosis had receded. So we were looking at the actions of a psychotic person, who was, in many ways, no longer psychotic.”

  “So if we had left the case alone…?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. There are signs that her split personality was still active. I think she kept Sue’s house as a place where she could still be Cyril. I think she used to go there to vent Cyril’s fantasies, as a kind of escape vale. The homicidal rage was still there, it was just waiting to be ignited.”

  “Wow…”

  There was a ping from the kitchen. She looked up and smiled. “The chicken is done. Let’s eat, Mr. Stone.”

  I drained my glass and stood, and looked at the table we had set, with a red Christmas candle, holly, and the tree reflecting off the wineglasses.

  Me and Dehan. This was home.

  BOOK 15

  BLOOD INTO WINE

  ONE

  Deputy Inspector John Newman entered the detectives’ room on hesitant feet, looking this way and that with small, jerky movements of his head, like a chicken on a secret mission. He bore a slim, manila file. He saw me watching from my desk, smiled with relief, and approached.

  “John,” he said, “I thought I’d find you here.”

  I wagged my pencil at him. “That’s because it’s the detectives’ room, and I am a detective.”

  He smiled as though he knew it was a joke but wasn’t sure why it was funny. Dehan glanced at me from under her eyebrows, then smiled at the Inspector.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Carmen!” He looked at her in what you could only describe as alarm. “Naturally I was looking for you both! I just happened to see…” He swallowed and changed tack. “I like to get out of my office from time to time, see the troops, haha…”

  I smiled amiably. “Here we are, sir, trooping.”

  “Indeed! And what are you working on?”

  I gestured at the old cartons on the desk. “We were just looking through the cold cases, sir. We were thinking about the Vince Wolowitz case. They found him tied to his bed in his house on St. Lawrence Avenue.”

  Dehan nodded. “Clason Point, near the Catholic church. His dog had eaten his foot.”

  The inspector winced. I contributed. “The neighbors said he had a hundred grand in a box under his bed, but it was never found.”

  Dehan sat back. “August ’97. I always had a theory about his family.”

  I wagged my pencil at her. “I’ve been meaning to look into that angle for some time.”

  The inspector’s smile had turned to a rictus, which is not a good thing to happen to a smile.

  “If you haven’t started on it yet, I wonder if you would have a look at the Jose Robles case?” he said.

  Dehan frowned. “That’s cold? What they do, keep it in the fridge overnight?”

  “I think what Detective Dehan means, sir…”

  “I know what she means, John, and she is quite right.” He pulled a chair over from Mo’s desk and sat heavily. “The case is not even a week old. But it has run into some…” He hesitated, then plunged on, “…well, problems which seem intractable. And frankly, I am under pressure from ‘above’,” he made little inverted commas with his fingers, “to get it solved ‘pronto’.” He did it again, hunching his shoulders a little. “You two,” he said, gazing out the window, “seem to have a way of unearthing clues that don’t appear even to be there.”

  “Why thank you, sir.” I smiled. “I think so too.”

  “So, I know it’s not strictly a cold case, but I’d be grateful if you’d have a look at it.”

  He tossed the file in front of me on the desk and I leaned over and picked it up. “Who had it to start with?”

  “Gutierrez, but he’s glad to let it go because, as far as he’s concerned, it’s closed. And I have to say…”

  He hesitated again. Dehan frowned at him. She said, “You agree…” He shrugged. She pressed him. “So why are we looking at it? What is the intractable problem?”

  He sighed. “ADA Costas Varoufakis.”

  Her eyebrows seemed to levitate. “Assistant District Attorney Costas Varu… The Assistant District Attorney is the intractable problem?”

  “He does not believe it should be closed.”

  Suddenly I was interested. I leaned forward. “On what grounds? And since when does the Assistant District Attorney decide when we close a case?”

  “Since his uncle went to school with the mayor.”

  I grunted. “And his grounds?”

  He made a face of helplessness and spread his hands. “It seems they were friends. They shared an interest in Mediterranean history or something.”

  I made a dubious expression with my eyebrows and offered it to Dehan. She copied it and offered it back. The inspector sighed. “Look, I’m sorry and I am aware it’s an imposition. Just work your magic on it for a day or two and if you are convinced it’s case closed, we close the case and you can get on with…”

  He made little stirring motions with his finger. I said, “Vince Wolowitz.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Of course we will. I shall enter it into my little black book of favors to be called in at a later time, sir.”

  “He’s joking, sir,” said Dehan, in a way that said that I wasn’t.

  He nodded and smiled, and retreated up to the rarefied atmosphere of the upper floor. I took the photos from the file and tossed the rest at Dehan. She read as I looked.

  “Jose Robles, a Spanish national.”

  I spoke looking at a photograph of him. “Spanish from Spain?”

  She stared at me a moment. “Yes, Spanish from Spain. PhD in applied physics from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia. That’s also in Spanish Spain.”

  “I know. I’ve been. Excellent seafood.”

  “He was conducting research and lecturing at University College, New York, in Manhattan. He’d been here a year last September, and had another year to run.”

  The photograph I was looking at was a head and shoulders portrait. I figured he was thirty-something, handsome in that Mediterranean kind of way that women find so appealing: dark, chiseled features, black hair and big, brown eyes that managed to be both sweet and insolent at the same time. His hair was receding slightly and the collar of his pink shirt was on the outside of his turquoise cashmere sweater. He wasn’t smiling.

  Dehan was saying, “He was found December fourth, that’s last Tuesday, at the house of a friend, Agnes Shine, also a lecturer at the university. He had been shot eight times in the thorax with a 9mm Sig Sauer Tacops p226…”

  We both looked up, stared at each other and frowned. She raised her eyebrows and went back to reading. I stared at the naked trees outside, then turned back to the photos and found the one of Dr. Jose Robles lying sprawled and dead in an armchair. I was looking at the blood on his chest.

  “The weapon was recovered at the scene…”

  “Dropped on the floor near the body.”

  “Correct. It was sent for prints and still awaiting results.”

  “What about Agnes Shine?”

  “I’m coming to that,
big guy. She was known to be a close friend of the victim. Dr. Patricia Meigh, Jose’s head of department…”

  “Me?”

  “Meigh, M-E-I-G-H, Meigh, she’s the head of the department that was conducting the research that Jose was involved in. She was concerned when Jose didn’t turn up Monday morning and wouldn’t answer his phone. She tried to locate Agnes Shine, but it turned out she hadn’t shown up either…”

  “What’s her department?”

  “Um…” She scanned several pages. “Professor of Economics and International Finance.”

  “Huh, OK.”

  “She didn’t turn up either. Tuesday they were both missing again, so Dr. Meigh raised the alarm. A patrol car was dispatched to his house with no result. Her house is a few doors down, so they went to have a look. Living room is on the second floor, but there are outside stairs. They saw him through the window.”

  “The drapes were open.”

  “Presumably.”

  “They were.” I waved the photograph at her.

  “Uh-huh. Stephens Avenue, right by Pugsley Creek Park. Officers forced their way in, found the victim deceased at eleven AM, and no trace of Agnes. No driver’s license or any other kind of ID was found at the house. Her purse was also missing, leading Detective Gutierrez to conclude that she had killed Jose in a fit of passion and fled.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Uniforms canvassed the neighbors, but nobody saw or heard anything out of the ordinary. Jose was last seen by a friend at the university Friday evening at eight. So time of death is sometime between Friday at eight P.M. and Tuesday at eleven in the morning.”

  She dropped the file and reached across to pick up the photographs. I sat drumming my fingers on the desk and gazing at the stark, gray sky outside. “It has, as Holmes would say, some interesting features. Was the Sig registered to either of them?”

  She answered while staring at the photograph of Jose Robles, dead in the chair. “Nope. Unregistered.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “You’re mixing your quotes. That’s Alice in Wonderland.”

  I stood and grabbed my coat. “Come, Dehan, I want to have a look at the crime scene. For once it is less than ten years old. It might actually tell us something.”

  “I’m giddy with excitement,” she said with no particular expression and gathered up the papers and photographs into the file.

  She pulled on a thick coat, a brown and white angora wool hat and matching gloves, and we went to collect the keys to the properties. Then we made our way out into the ice-cold street. There was no snow, but what moisture there was on the roads had frozen and they had the brittle look of thin ice. We crossed to my ancient Jaguar—an authentic, right hand drive, burgundy Mark II from 1964, with leather seats and walnut trim—and climbed in. As we slammed the doors, shutting out the icy air, Dehan said, “I can see why Varou… the ADA.”

  “Varoufakis.”

  I fired up the engine and reversed out of the lot. Dehan was still talking.

  “I can see why he’s not satisfied. A Sig Sauer Tacops p226, new, is going to cost you over a grand. It’s a serious pro’s weapon, favored by special ops units like the Seals and Delta Force. You can pick up a Glock 17, which is a damn good gun, for half the price. Or a Taurus, which is OK, for half that again. So what is Dr. Agnes Shine doing with a thousand buck weapon that isn’t registered to her, or anybody else?”

  I turned from Storey onto Soundview and made a, “Hmmm…” noise. “Did you look at the photograph of him?”

  “Which one?”

  “The portrait.” She watched me but didn’t say anything. “He looks to me like the kind of man who might own an expensive gun. Possibly he wouldn’t own a gun, but if he did, he would buy an expensive one.”

  “You can tell that from his portrait photograph?”

  “Sure. You don’t believe me? What is the betting he drove a German car?”

  “What…?”

  “Come on, what do you think he drove?”

  “I have no idea, Stone.”

  “Audi are too common for him, likewise Mercedes, and VW. Porsche is out of his price range. BMW. The three-twenty, in…”

  “Come on!”

  “Wait—in white.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Not at all. He wears a pink shirt with a turquoise, cashmere sweater, and he has the collar on the outside. That kind of thing can tell you a lot about a man and his relationship with his mother: he is vain, showy, has poor judgment, bad taste, and he believes he is entitled to the best because Mommy told him so.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Anyway, OK, so maybe the gun was his. Still, it is odd that it was not registered.”

  “Laws are pretty tight here. Still, I take your point, if he had one, you’d expect it to be legal. By the way, what did you think about the picture of him in the chair, shot?”

  She leafed through them till she’d found it. She was quiet for a moment, examining it.

  “Not a lot. They’d been drinking. He has a glass of wine beside him.” She leafed through them again and looked at another picture. “There is another glass on the table beside the sofa. They were both sent for fingerprinting, and the bottle.”

  “What’s the wine?”

  “The wine?”

  “Yes, what is it? California, Chile, French…?”

  She peered at the picture. “It looks like… Bogle Vineyards, 2016. Is that important?”

  “California. It might be, Little Grasshopper.”

  “Whatever… It was sent for fingerprinting too. What else? Nothing much. Why? Am I missing some cigarette ash or something? Are you going to identify the killer by the texture of the burned paper?”

  “That vitriol which is drooling from your lips, Detective Dehan, will come back to burn you in the ass. We are here.”

  I pulled into Patterson Avenue and, as we crossed into Compton and Stephen, we were suddenly in a country village somewhere in New England. I smiled. “I love these little corners of the Bronx, don’t you, Dehan? You’re in this vast city, with millions of people around you, and yet you could be in rural Maine.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Is this what they call being whimsical, Stone? Are you feeling whimsical today? You haven’t got a craving for tinned peaches and oysters, have you? Tell me you’re not pregnant.”

  I chortled good humouredly and slowed outside a large, clapboard house on three floors plus an attic, with yellow tape across the porch. The house was part of a row of four that were all oddly grotesque, but somehow managed to be attractive. Everywhere about them was a superabundance of foliage from the woodland in the park at the back of the houses.

  “That’s his house, right?”

  “Uh-uh. Hers is the first on the left, after the trees, about two hundred yards down.”

  Agnes’ house was, like all the houses on Stephens Avenue, peculiar. It was set behind a chain link fence and gate, beyond a large lawn that must have been thirty yards long at the very least, and a good fifteen yards across. Like Jose’s house, it was clapboard, but seemed to be put together from bits that were left over from other clapboard houses.

  It had a gable roof and also a flat roof, an arch over a carport, a chimney that ran all the way up the outside of the house, right beside the front door, and a flight of six substantial stone steps up to that door. I was still trying to work out how the fireplace could be next to the front door when I noticed a broad flight of wooden steps going up to the second story, on the outside of the carport. It was like something from the Picasso school of abstract architecture.

  Here, too, there was yellow tape across the chain link fence, and also across the front porch. We climbed out, and the slam of the car doors echoed across the icy morning. A couple of ravens, scared by the reports, flapped darkly away toward Pugsley Creek Park. The lawn was well-tended, the frosty grass was short and was obviously mowed regularly, but there were no flower beds, no trees, no bench for sitting o
ut in the evening.

  We crossed the front yard. Dehan pulled away the tape from the door, unlocked it and we stepped inside. It was dark, and there was a silence in the place that comes with death. It was a quiet saturated with stillness. The door that had mystified me turned out to be the kitchen door. The kitchen, along with the dining area, took up the whole of the ground floor, and the chimney I’d seen from the car was a flue that rose from an old, blue iron range that stood to the right as you went in. It looked like an antique, and it was spotless.

  The floors were hardwood and highly polished. There was a table in the middle of the floor with four chairs placed evenly around it. A doily in the exact centre held a vase of plastic flowers. There was an oak dresser against one wall that also appeared to be an antique. Beside it, a wine rack held twenty-four bottles of wine. I examined them. They were all Spanish, twelve from Rioja and twelve from Ribera del Duero.

  After that, I went methodically through the drawers. They were well ordered and, like everything else in the kitchen, very clean. Dehan was watching me with her hands in her back pockets.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Agnes Shine.”

  “You think she’s hiding in the cutlery drawer?”

  “This house belongs to a highly ordered eccentric who doesn’t like high maintenance relationships.”

  She smiled and pulled off her hat. “You’re something, Stone.”

  “No flowers.” I pointed at the vase. “Plastic.”

  An arch in the left-hand wall gave onto a narrow entrance with a door into the carport, and a flight of stairs that led to the upper floor. These were wood too, and carpeted in an ugly, dark green. They creaked as we climbed.