“I’ve got things set up in a conference room down the hall. Follow me, please.”
We traipsed behind him to the small, stark room with a big glass mirror on one of the walls. Conference room my ass. It was an interrogation room. But I doubted anyone was behind the two-way mirror on that morning.
Baldwin indicated that we should sit, and he took his own seat at the head of the table. He reached behind him and grabbed a clear plastic bag, which he plopped onto the top of the ugly gray steel-and-Formica table. “These are the clothes your wife was wearing when she was murdered.”
I studied the jumbled mass of cloth in the bag. “I have to touch them to get anything. Would that be okay?”
“They’re considered a biohazard.”
“I’m not worried about it.”
“Then, be my guest,” Baldwin said and sat back in his chair. He looked at me as though I was just some asshole con man who’d walked in off the street. I had no street cred with him, despite what Detectives Hayden and Wilder had told him. Well, who could blame him? And if I got nothing from the clothes then Richard and I would just go home and I’d have to live with the fact that I might never get the closure I sorely craved.
I opened the bag, pulling out a blood-stained blouse. As soon as I touched it, my breaths came fast and ragged, and I sensed the vast, torrential nothingness of death. I rubbed the fabric between my left thumb and forefinger and experienced a tidal wave of fear. I closed my eyes and suddenly I was Shelley, and scared shitless. My mind seemed to be caught in a loop: terrified and gone, terrified and gone, terrified and gone.
My eyes welled with tears, but they weren’t Shelley’s—they were mine. My beautiful Shelley—just a husk of who she had been—had been petrified in the seconds before her life was snuffed out like a cheap candle. Luckily she’d died before the pain could register and then there was the total oblivion of death.
I dropped the cloth as though I’d been burned.
“What are you feeling?” Richard asked dispassionately.
“Just her death. Not who or what was behind it,” I said, still fighting tears.
“Well, that’s not helpful,” Baldwin said dully.
I turned a murderous glare in his direction.
“Calm down,” Richard told me. “Take out another piece of clothing. See if you get anything else.”
It took all my courage to do just that. The next thing I pulled out of the bag was a pair of pink nylon panties Shelley had worn the day she’d died. A terrible wave of recollection passed through me. Shelley had let the bastard who’d killed her essentially rape her. She expected a powerful, euphoric fix from the guy. She had fallen so far from the woman I had known and loved, thinking so little of herself. Why hadn’t she let me help her redefine her sense of self? Yet, somehow I knew that she hadn’t wanted her life to spiral out of control, but once she was hooked on smack, she had to endure whatever it took to get a fix. The thing was, the guy had worn a condom. I got the idea that he figured a stinking little junkie like Shelley was likely to give him an STD and he wasn’t willing to take the chance.
I tossed the panties aside, my eyes again welling with tears and suddenly Richard was standing over me. He put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay.”
Yeah. The moment Shelley’s underwear had left my grasp things were better.
I took a shuddering breath before speaking. “Shelley had sex with the guy who killed her.”
“There was no DNA evidence to prove that.”
“He flushed the spent condom. This guy was smart and had probably planned his every move in advance.”
“Do you get a sense of who it was who killed Shelley?” Richard asked.
Unfortunately, I didn’t. I shook my head.
“Do you need to touch any more of the clothes?” he asked.
Again I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m going to get anything else of worth from them.” I turned to look at Detective Baldwin. “What else have you got in the way of evidence?”
“Some spent shells.”
“Can I touch one of them?”
“It’s okay by me. We found no fingerprints or DNA on them.” He handed me a plastic bag.
I opened it and touched one of the shell casings. Immediately a Russian—Ukrainian, and Polish—phrase came to mind. Nastrovia. It was spelled differently, depending on which language it was spoken in, but essentially it meant the same thing: To your health. Yeah, not funny, considering the bullets had delivered death. Nastrovia. Half my family was Polish. I’d heard that phrase many times when I’d been far too young to know what it meant. The person who’d thought the phrase as he’d loaded the gun was definitely Russian.
“The guy who killed my wife was Russian, or at least of Russian descent.”
Baldwin’s expression darkened. “That’s what we think, too. How did you know?”
I shrugged. “I just do. But I don’t have anything concrete … like a name or a face. Just a word.”
“But … how?” he asked again in disbelief.
“I don’t know how I know stuff. I just do. You’ve obviously got an idea of where to look for this guy. You mentioned a jailhouse confession.”
“Not a confession; jailhouse testimony for leniency.”
“And is the guy Russian?”
“No,” Baldwin said. “But the man he implicated is.”
“Any chance I can talk to your source?”
“I can arrange for it to happen tomorrow.”
“Let’s do that,” I said.
He nodded.
“In the meantime, I’d like to see the surveillance video you’ve got.”
“Can do,” Baldwin said. “I should have brought it with me. It’s back on my desk. I’ll be right back.” He left us.
Richard turned to me. “You’re doing really well.”
That was a matter of opinion.
“We’re going to have hours to kill this afternoon while Baldwin makes arrangements for us to see the witness. How would you like to spend it?”
“I need to go where Shelley died; Grand Central Terminal.”
“Are you sure?” Richard asked, sounding doubtful.
I nodded. “But I don’t need an NYPD guided tour. After we watch the video, I’ll know where I need to go and what I need to look for.”
Richard nodded. “Whatever you say.”
Though I can’t read Richard at all, I guessed he had something else on his mind. “Is there somewhere you’d like to go while we’re here?”
He looked sheepish. “A toy store. I’d like to bring home something special for Betsy.”
“Don’t do it,” I told him flatly.
“What? You don’t think I should bring my daughter a present from my trip?”
“Rich, Betsy’s a baby. The only thing she cares about right now is chomping on a teething ring. You’ve got years and years ahead of you to spoil her. Wait until it will count.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, but I also guessed what else he was thinking. He’d left his wife and baby girl alone and he felt guilty about it—which made me feel guilty about it, too.
“What about Brenda? Am I allowed to buy her a present?” he asked.
Somehow, I managed a smile. “Well, at least she can appreciate it.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He smiled, and I wondered if a little blue box from Tiffany’s might come home with him.
“What else should we do this afternoon?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to walk around my old neighborhood. Maybe visit my old watering hole.”
“Is that a good idea?” Richard asked, again sounding worried.
“Why not? I left the city with my whole life in flux. I’d kind of like to put that behind me, too.”
Richard’s gaze dropped to focus on the crummy table in front of us. “Are you ever sorry I dragged you back to Buffalo?”
I thought about the question before answering. “Sometimes, in the early days … yeah. But then we
finally got to be friends, and I met Maggie, and now with Betsy’s arrival—I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.”
Richard let out a breath and seemed to deflate a little. “I’m glad you feel that way.”
“I’m not saying Buffalo is paradise, but it’s where I need to be right now.” And probably for the rest of my life. That said, I hate winter. I hate the snow, the cold, and the relentless wind. But as long as Richard, Brenda, Betsy, and Maggie were there, it was the only place on Earth I wanted to be.
We both looked up as Baldwin approached, came into the room, and settled a disc into the player under a TV that sat on a rolling cart.
“You don’t want to watch an hour of raw video. This has been condensed to show the highlights.”
Shelley’s murder was considered a highlight?
“Your wife showed up in the grand concourse at about one in the morning, moving to stand under the clock.”
I knew that location very well. The antique four-sided clock was the multi-million dollar jewel of the cavernous commuter train station. Lots of people met there. Hell, I’d met a bunch of women there when on blind dates before and after my time with Shelley, but things had never worked out.
I’d been honest with Maggie when I’d told her that Shelley was my first love. I’d worked two jobs during my high school years and nobody had been interested in dating a nerd like me. The truth was, my first sexual experience was with a hooker in a parking lot in San Francisco on my first leave from the Army. I found the experience empty and disappointing, and it was pure luck I didn’t get an STD. After that, I dated a lot of women, but never had a satisfying relationship until I’d met Shelley. And while I’d loved her with all my heart, it wasn’t as good—or meaningful—as my best times with Maggie.
I was a stupid kid of fifteen when Richard had told me—in a moment when he’d first offered me, and I’d rejected, his hand in friendship—that we were both emotional cripples. That neither of us knew how to love or be loved. His assessment had been right on the money. Oh, if only I could have gone back to that day and listened to his words, and changed my reaction … maybe we’d both have lived different lives. But we were where we were, and after way too many unhappy years we were both now pretty much content. That had to be worth something.
I had to shake myself to tune back into the present and concentrate on what Baldwin had said. “Hit play,” I told him.
He did, and the screen came to life. The camera must have been mounted somewhere on the ceiling. A figure walked across the empty concourse and stood under the big clock. Seconds ticked by. Long, long seconds. You could see by the hair and clothes that the figure was a woman, but real identification wasn’t actually possible. I had to take Baldwin’s word that the woman on the screen had been Shelley.
Eventually, another figure in a long dark coat approached. The man and woman spoke for thirty or forty seconds and then the man grabbed the woman’s arm and steered her off screen. The video had obviously been edited and the camera angle changed, again showing the man, grasping the woman’s arm, and steering her off to one side. I knew where they’d gone. The men’s room. There were no cameras there. The video played for two or three minutes with no sign of either of them, then the man came back out, hunched inside his long dark coat, his head down, his features undiscernible.
The video continued to play for another few minutes before another figure showed up, heading for the men’s room. Too soon, the figure darted out into the main concourse, obviously agitated, with cell phone in hand—no doubt reporting Shelley’s lifeless body in one of the stalls.
The video ended.
Baldwin turned off the machine and retrieved the disk. He sat back down. “Well?”
I shook my head. The worst was yet to come. “Can I see the crime scene photos?”
“Aw, Jeff, are you sure you want to do that?” Richard asked, his distress obvious.
I steeled myself. “I was an insurance investigator for a lot of years,” I told Baldwin—no doubt a fact he was well aware of. “Crime scenes were once my specialty.”
Yeah, they were … until Shelley had been killed, and then I’d asked for a transfer to the fraud unit. My new supervisor and I hadn’t hit it off, and eighteen months later I’d been let go. I wasn’t enough of a team player for him. The prick.
“They’re pretty grim,” Baldwin said.
“I never saw a crime scene that wasn’t,” I commented, my voice sounding a lot calmer than I felt.
Again Baldwin reached behind him and produced a fat file folder. He handed it to me.
The photos were all in vivid color. Shelley—my wife—had been reduced to just a crime victim. She lay face down on the tile floor beside a gleaming porcelain toilet. The back of her skull was a dark gooey brown mass. Her blood had already oxidized by the time the photos had been taken, hours after her death. Again and again, I swallowed hard as I paged through the photos.
Most of the shots were taken from overhead, or from a distance of a couple of feet. Only a few of them were sidelong shots of her face, some rigid and some lax in death. They weren’t pretty. The person in the pictures bore only a slight resemblance to the woman I’d known and loved, but I feared that I’d see those pictures again and again in my dreams for a long time to come.
I looked away, covered my mouth with my hand, and let out a long, shuddering breath. Again, Richard was suddenly standing over me. “You don’t have to do this.”
Unfortunately … I did.
I shuffled though the photos once again, trying not to look at the body as someone I’d been intimately acquainted with and loved. This time I looked at the blood splatter pattern. Yeah, she’d been killed execution style. And then things got clearer.
“It wasn’t vaginal sex. The guy who killed her was a back-door man. And at the height of his excitement—” the bastard had ridden poor Shelley like a bucking bronco, “he pulled out the gun and shot her.”
But that wasn’t all. “She’d paid him for the drugs with cash—and God only knows where she got it. Probably stole it—but he demanded more. To get what she needed, she’d acquiesced. The bastard had taken her money, raped her, and then killed her.”
My fingers curled so tight around the photos I began to crush them.
Richard eased around me and snatched them from my grasp. “That’s enough.”
He was right. I’d seen more than enough for one day.
I swallowed—again and again—and the details played and replayed through my mind. The blood splatters on the tile. The remnants of brain and bone. The sad shot of Shelley’s curled fingers, the nails clad in chipped red polish. Yet, on her left ring finger was the gold band I’d placed there on our wedding day. It had been returned to me, but I’d given it back to the undertaker and Shelley had been buried wearing it.
Despite all her lows—all the drugs she’d needed to buy—she hadn’t hocked the ring.
Until that moment, that fact hadn’t registered in my grief-stricken brain.
Maybe she had actually loved me after all.
#
We didn’t take a cab to my old neighborhood. Instead, we walked. And walked. And walked. I needed the time to recover from the things I’d seen and felt and was grateful Richard didn’t push for conversation. Everything looked so achingly familiar, and yet totally alien to me. The neighborhood had once been home, but now it wasn’t. We stopped in front of my former apartment building. I looked up at windows I’d so often looked out. Someone else had lived there for the past two years. I hoped they were happier than I’d been between those walls.
“I never saw the apartment after it was ransacked,” I said to Richard.
“I’m glad of that. It wasn’t pretty,” he admitted. “Do you want to go inside?”
I shook my head. “No reason to. It’s almost lunchtime. Let’s go to O’Shea’s. Maybe somebody there will still remember me.”
So we headed south down the sidewalk, which was crowded with people. No matter th
e time of day or night, there never seemed to be a sidewalk in New York that wasn’t filled with people. I hadn’t noticed before, but despite the mass of humanity, the bustle of the city left me feeling terribly empty—probably because I had no connection with any of them. In all the years I’d lived in that teeming metropolis, I’d only ever really connected with one other person: Shelley.
“Where is this bar?” Richard asked.
“Just a couple of blocks away.”
We bucked the oncoming pedestrian traffic when all of a sudden I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. The guy behind me crashed into me and swore, then darted around me. Richard kept walking. He hadn’t noticed I’d lagged behind.
I had to swallow a few times and backed up to stand against the plate glass window of a deli. The last time I’d seen the place, it was shrouded in darkness with a locked cage keeping it safe from robbers and vandals. Across the way was a bakery. An OPEN sign flashed in green-and-white neon. It, too, had been dark the last time I’d seen it. The night of the mugging. The night I’d nearly died.
Richard had finally noticed I’d stalled in neutral and backtracked to join me. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “This is the spot.”
“Spot?”
“This is where I had my head caved in.”
Richard’s expression darkened. He looked all around, then back at me. “Are you okay?” he asked again.
I took a deep breath and seemed to shrink within my new heavy winter coat. “Yeah.” The truth was, the flashbacks of that terrible night had pretty much faded since October, when I’d been forced to face my fears. That was when a young black man had come to stay as Richard’s houseguest just before Betsy had been born. I’d been mugged by a couple of young black guys. Da-Marr and I hadn’t hit it off. In fact, the kid’s presence had freaked me out. But we’d kind of bonded when we’d nearly died out on the Niagara River. A few days later, he’d returned to Philadelphia. Now, we were Facebook friends and traded jokes, likes, and shares.
“They never found the guys who hurt you,” Richard reminded me.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty much done with dwelling on it.” I gave myself a shake. “I’m more interested in visiting O’Shea’s. Come on.”
A Jeff Resnick Six Pack Page 13