by Blake Banner
After that I drove up to Morris Park, to the ME’s office. I found Lynda poring over the body of somebody who had stopped being anybody and was now a Caucasian male in his mid to late thirties. She glanced at me over her mask and said in a muffled voice, “John. You should have called.”
“I would’ve if I could’ve, but I couldn’t so I didn’t.”
She sighed and came over to where I was standing by the door. She removed her mask and revealed a smile. “You look terrible.”
“Too much steak and beer.”
“What can I do for you?”
I gave her my cell and said, “It’s urgent. In fact, it’s very urgent. Print the last six photographs and check them against Mick Harragan’s dental records. They’ll be in the NYPD database for the 43rd precinct. I know I’m asking a lot, but you need to give this top priority. I have maybe a few hours before I lose control of the case.” I made a face to show that I couldn’t say what I wanted to say, and added, “That would be a bad thing.”
She understood and took my phone over to the printer.
When she handed it back, I called José.
“What?”
“José, can you talk?”
“Yuh.”
“Did your sister have dental insurance?”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “Yeah, we all did. We used to go regular, man, every six months to have our teeth whitened in time for our Christmas and summer holidays in Miami. We kept the papers in the fockin’ oak dresser in the fockin’ library.”
“Shut the fuck up, José. So when you had dental work, how did you pay?”
“When we had it, like never, we paid cash.”
“Thanks.”
I hung up. I sat thinking for a long while. Eventually Lynda came back. She handed me a file and said, “This is an unofficial preliminary report, you understand?”
“Sure. I appreciate it.”
“Speaking off the record, the larger skull is almost certainly Mick’s. The other skull, without dental records I can’t tell you very much at all. From the pictures it seems to be the skull of a small woman.”
“Thanks. It was mainly him I was interested in. But there is something else. It was a case, ten years ago, young man shot to death in the Bronx…”
She raised an eyebrow. “That narrows it down a bit.”
I smiled. “Yeah, his name was Sam Bernstein. He was from Brooklyn.”
She shrugged. “Ten years ago, John… What do you want to know?”
“You examined the body, and I want to know what you found.”
“You must have the ME’s report in the case file.”
“Yeah, but what I want to know wasn’t included.”
She sighed. I gave her the case details, and she found it in her database. As she read it, she said, “Oh, I vaguely remember this case. It was a bit unusual. His mother identified him in the end.”
“Okay, now, it says he died from a gunshot wound to the head. It was a hollow tip and probably a .45 cal. The entry wound was at the back, right?” She was nodding as she looked at the screen. I shrugged and shook my head. “A hollow tip .45 at close range with the entry in the back of the head—Lynda, he had no face!”
She looked at me. “That’s right. His face had been blown off. The exit wound was about the size of a large grapefruit, consistent with a .45 caliber. He had his driver’s license and his ID card.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember details, John. It was ten years ago. But there were things about it that stood out. A middle-class, well-educated Jewish boy from Brooklyn alone in that part of the Bronx in the early hours of the morning. His mother was pretty hysterical, as you can imagine. She couldn’t look at him, but she identified his clothes and his effects. What did you want to know?”
“When you get a case like that, where the face is so badly damaged, do you routinely make a record of the teeth?”
“Not routinely, but almost always.”
“Did you in this case?”
She checked the screen. “We started to. But when the mother identified him, we didn’t go ahead with it. Why?”
“How long would it take you?” She stared at me. “It is really important, Lynda. Somebody’s life could be seriously at risk.”
“Give me half an hour.”
It took her twenty minutes. She came and found me in the corridor, drinking black water that pretended to be coffee. I stood as she approached, and she handed me another thin file. “Is this official or unofficial?”
“For now, unofficial.”
“The dead man is not Sam Bernstein.”
I put my hand on her arm and led her over to a window where we were alone. “Lynda, in a week all of this can go into an official report, and I will hold myself solely responsible. But today, there is somebody at the bureau who cannot learn about this, you understand? And this is about to become a federal investigation. If that person learns about this, Sam Bernstein will die. For real this time.”
She studied my face a moment. “Okay, John. You can count on me. I trust you’ll do the right thing.”
Twenty-Four
I called Jennifer and told her I was taking a week’s holiday. She seemed relieved till I told her I didn’t want to see her there when I got back. Then I called Dehan. She didn’t answer, but I didn’t expect her to. I left her a message saying whatever plans she had for that evening to cancel them and come over to my place for a barbeque. We needed to talk.
Then I went home, showered for twenty minutes, and slept for four hours.
I was awoken by the bell. I didn’t know how long it had been ringing, but it felt persistent. I got up and leaned out of the window in my shorts. Dehan was at the door holding a bottle of wine. She looked up at me and, as usual, her lack of expression was extremely expressive.
“What time is it?”
“Seven thirty. You want me to go away?”
“No.”
I pulled on a pair of jeans and went down to open the door. She gave me a once-over and said, “Gee, Detective Stone. You sure know how to make a girl feel special.”
I pointed at the kitchen and said, “Beer. I’m going to have a shower. Make yourself at home.”
When I finally came down again, it was growing dusk outside. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor going through my record collection. I opened the fridge and grabbed a beer. “I started buying records in 1980, just before CDs came out. I still like them better. I like the way they crackle.”
She was examining an original Led Zeppelin IV. “I bet you like the smell of books too.”
“Yup.”
“And always consult a reference book instead of checking Google.”
“You nailed me.”
She put the record on the turntable, worked out how to use it, and put it on low. I was pulling meat out of the fridge as the rasp of the guitar echoed into silence before the timeless voice bellowed.
“Why be virtual when you can be real, right?”
“Got it in one.”
I built a small tower of paper and kindling and structured the charcoal around it in a pyramid. Then I put a match to the paper and watched the flames and the smoke start to build. We chinked bottles, drank, and sat at the garden table.
“I just know that this was not a social invitation,” she said. “I can tell.”
I frowned. “Not one hundred percent social, Carmen. There are a couple of things I need to talk to you about.”
“About the case?”
“Indirectly.”
“Where did I go wrong?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. You didn’t go wrong, there just turns out to be more to it than was immediately apparent.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Sam Bernstein wasn’t killed that night in the Bronx.”
“Holy shit!”
“…is right.”
She stood and walked out onto the lawn. The first stars were piercing the deep blue of the evening sky. After a moment, she turned
to face me. “When did you find out? Did you know this back in Shamrock? This changes everything.”
“I found out today. No I didn’t, and I am not so sure it does.”
She spread her hands and shook her head. It was like a gesture of helplessness. “How? How did you find out?”
“I took my pictures of Mick’s skull to the ME. I wanted to make sure it was him. While we were talking, it struck me that dental record ID really depended a lot—” I gave a small laugh. “—on your having dental records to begin with.”
“Obviously.”
“A lot of the less privileged people in our society haven’t got dental insurance,” I went on, “and so their dental records are sketchy at best or nonexistent. Sam would have known that.”
“What’s your point?”
I was thoughtful for a bit, watching the flames in the barbeque, feeling their heat reaching my face in the evening air.
“I have never been really comfortable with Sam’s murder. The timing was just too much of a coincidence. A gunshot wound to the head. Probably a .45. A .45 was what Sam took from his father’s trunk. When I looked closer at the details of the wound, the entry was at the back of the skull, the exit through the front.” I shook my head, “Not just an execution, but an execution designed to disfigure.” We stared at each other a moment as she assimilated the implications. “And let’s face it, what mother is going to examine her son’s face in that condition? She’s going to close her eyes and look away. She is going to see his clothes, his personal effects, and she is going to say it’s him. And who is going to question that? We have his ID papers. The cops are going to think, this middle-class schmuck was at Hunts Point at two a.m., probably looking for a whore, and he got mugged. What did he expect?”
“So you’re saying Sam killed some kid?”
I shrugged. “Looks that way to me.”
“So who did Jennifer and Mick talk to?”
I smiled. “Sam.”
“Shit. Why? What was he trying to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you told the Feds?”
“I haven’t told anybody yet except the ME and you. And I asked Lynda to keep quiet about it till I am ready. I’m asking you the same thing.”
“I got to tell you, I am lost.”
I sighed and nodded. “I think that was the idea.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take a few days off. Go away.”
“Where?”
I smiled. “I think I’ll put some flowers in my hair and go to San Francisco. I hear summertime will be a love-in there.”
“You want me to come with you?”
I smiled, my gaze lost in the flames.
“Where I’m going, you can't follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of, Dehan. But we’ll always have Shamrock.”
“Asshole.”
The coals had burned down, and I stood to put the steaks on the grill. I threw on a handful of fresh thyme first and then laid on the oiled steaks as the flames leapt and licked at the meat. The haunting strains of a mandolin trailed out onto the evening air.
Dehan asked me, “Is Maria Garcia dead?”
I poured the rich wine, red like dense blood, into the two glasses. The intense orange of the fire glowed within it like a living thing. “Oh yes.” I handed her a glass. “There can be no doubt about that at all. Maria Garcia is dead.”
“Who killed her?”
I stared into her black eyes. She knew what I was going to say, but she needed to hear me say it.
“Sam Bernstein.”
Twenty-FIVE
I touched down in San Francisco at ten in the morning and picked up my hire car at the Hertz desk. I treated myself to a Mustang Cabrio convertible and took it easy to my hotel on Taylor Street, via the Sierra Point Parkway.
I checked in, had a shower, and changed my clothes, then settled down to do some research. There are a lot of universities in and around San Francisco. It took a lot of old-fashioned, dinosaur-style, tedious looking up lists and making phone calls, and progress was slow. At midday I went for a walk, found some food, and took it back to my room, where I continued making lists, making phone calls, and crossing entries off my lists. It was like a pulse, like the rhythm of life: accumulate, eliminate, accumulate more, eliminate more.
I get deep like that sometimes. Dehan would approve.
By the time I fell into bed that night, I felt I had done about all I could do over the phone. So the next morning, after coffee and croissants, I took my Mustang and drove across the bay, via the Dwight Eisenhower Highway, to Berkeley. I got lost for a bit, enjoying the feeling of being at large in a cool, hip city, and finally wound up at Tolman Hall and the psychology department. I found my way to the student office and finally tracked down Tania Goodman, whom I had spoken to on the phone the day before.
She was sweet, and that always helps.
I took her aside, told her who I was and that I was there in an unofficial capacity on behalf of a friend. She glanced at her watch, said she was about to grab some coffee, and would I like to join her? I said I would. We strolled down to the cafeteria and eventually sat. She smiled at me, and I thought that she was pretty, in a neurotic sort of way. She had short blonde hair and very blue eyes that had a tendency to stare while she grinned.
“I am looking for a woman who would have moved out here about ten years ago, as a student. She lost touch with her mother and her brother, who was only ten at the time. Now the mother is very sick, and the boy feels his sister should know. In case she wants to come back and see her…” I shrugged, allowing the implication to sit there between us.
“That is so sad. You think she came here, to Berkeley?”
“It’s probable. She was keen and very bright, and she very interested in psychology. I’ve tried to access lists of old alumni online, but it isn’t easy.”
She frowned. “Sure. I can tell you if she studied here. But I can’t give you any contact information.” I told her I understood that. “What is her name?”
“Maria Garcia.”
She giggled. “Do you know how many John Smiths we get in a year? Well, we get that many Maria Garcias too. I’ll have a look for you though.”
She took me back to her computer terminal, and I sat next to her while she rattled at the keyboard and entered the filters into the database. After a while she said, “We had four Maria Garcias join the psychology undergraduate program in 2008. One of them was from Mexico City, two were from San Francisco. One of them was from LA.”
She turned and watched me chew my lip. She must have liked me because she was very patient and tried 2009 too, but with no joy. Finally she said, “Look, I have to get back to work. I shouldn’t do this, but one of the students you just viewed wound up doing her PhD here and now works as a lecturer in child psychology. It’s a long shot, but if your Maria was here at that time, they might have known each other.”
I thanked her and she told me where the lecturer had her office. She had since married and was now Maria Chandler.
I got lost again among the corridors but eventually found her door. I knocked and a voice told me to come in. It was a small office with a window and lots of filing cabinets. There was a woman with disorganized dark hair sitting behind the desk, who must have been in her midthirties. There was a bald man in chinos, and a woman with short, sandy hair and large glasses. They were both of a similar age, and they were sitting in armchairs, also drinking coffee. They all looked at me, and I felt like I was interrupting a break. I didn’t really care and said, “Maria Chandler?”
The woman behind the desk said, “That’s me.”
“I wonder if you could spare me five minutes of your time. It is actually quite serious.”
The man and the woman went to rise, but Maria said, “No, hang on.” And to me, “What’s it about?”
“I am a police detective from New York, and I am trying to trace somebody, unofficially, because they may be i
n danger.”
The guy said, “Whoa!” and Maria raised an eyebrow at me. I pulled out my badge and handed it over to her. While she examined it, I looked at the other two and said, “Were you all students here back in 2008?”
The girl said, “Yes.”
“Then you might be able to help.” I looked at Maria again and made a question with my face. She said, “Why don’t you tell us, briefly, what this is about and we’ll take it from there.”
I gave them the bones: that it was a cold case, that Maria Garcia had gone missing, that a couple of the people involved had shown up dead, and that we had reason to believe that Maria’s life might be at risk. The woman behind the desk said, “Maria Garcia? That’s my name.”
I smiled. “That’s why I’m here, talking to you.”
“But I’m not from the Bronx…”
“I know that. There were four Maria Garcias in your year. None of them was from New York. But it’s possible that she changed her name. She was escaping from a very violent past, where she had been exploited and abused, so she may have changed her identity.”
The idea that she had been exploited and abused must have appealed to their sensibilities because their demeanor changed and they all frowned in thought at the same time. The woman with the glasses said, “You know who? That girl. She was shy. She said she was from Michigan.” The guy had started nodding. She went on, “But she had that ‘noo yoik’ kind of accent? She used to say ‘caw-fee’ instead of coffee? I never really believed that she was from Michigan. What was her name?”
The guy said, “Mary. Her name was Mary. Mary…” He sighed and looked at Maria, who was staring back at him. She said, suddenly, “Browne, with an e. Mary Browne. That’s right, she said she was from Michigan. What did this girl look like, Detective?”
I was still standing. They hadn’t invited me to sit down, but I leaned my back against the door and said, “I haven’t got a picture, but by all accounts she was pretty. She was of Mexican origin, short, dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes…”
Maria said, “This girl wasn’t pretty.” The girl with the glasses said, “Hmmmm…” like she didn’t agree. “Could have been. Lovely eyes.” The guy said, “She just didn’t look after herself. She looked drawn and tired all the time, but she was quite cute. Lovely body. She was married. I remember she was married.”