The Caller jl-2

by Alex Barclay

  Joe reached into his jacket pocket for a handkerchief and a small bottle of aftershave. He shook some drops onto the white cotton and held it to his nose, taking in a few deep breaths. He knocked on the door and they walked carefully into the apartment. Ethan Lowry lay on his back, naked, his body pressed up against the baseboard behind the door. His arms were stretched out above him. His head was turned to the right, but there wasn’t much of a face to face that way. Ethan Lowry had been savagely beaten, more blows than were needed to kill someone who had clearly been finished off with a bullet. The damage was entirely to his face. Where the skin wasn’t plumped up and tight, it was pulped. His nostrils were plugged with dried blood.

  ‘What’s in his mouth?’ said Danny.

  ‘His mouth,’ said Joe.

  ‘Aw, Jesus,’ said Danny, leaning in closer. Lowry’s mouth looked like it had been turned inside out. It covered his whole chin and left side of his face like raw meat. Only one tooth was visible. The rest were hidden under the swollen mess, broken or lying alone on the floor beside numbered evidence cards. Joe sucked in a breath. The skin was split at Lowry’s left eye socket where a gun had been fired point-blank.

  ‘Hey,’ said Danny to Kendra, a smiley, bulky crime scene technician, who was squatting on the floor beside him.

  ‘Hey, Joe, Danny. I’m having an MTV Cribs moment. Here is the hallway. And this is where the magic happened. See all this?’ She gestured around the body and in an arc above it. ‘We’ve got expirated mist on the floor, on the wall. We’ve got cast-off blood on the ceiling. We’ve got it all basically. Over there we’ve got high-velocity spatter from the gunshot wound. Small caliber.’ She shook her head.

  ‘And-’

  ‘God bless you, but God slow you down too,’ said Joe. ‘Just give us a moment.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I get so-’

  ‘Cheery,’ said Danny.

  Kendra turned to him. ‘I love my job,’ she said. ‘And if that’s an emotion that for some reason confuses you…’ She shrugged.

  ‘How could you not love this?’ said Danny, pointing to the body. Beside Lowry’s head was a black, blood-streaked cordless phone. Joe put on a glove, picked it up and hit the dialled calls button.

  ‘Someone was alive in here last night at 10.58 p.m.,’ said Joe. He took down all the incoming and outgoing calls.

  ‘Let me call Martinez,’ said Joe. ‘Unless you’d like to.’ He smiled. The year before, on his year out, Aldos Martinez filled in as Danny’s partner. Now, with Martinez’s partner, Fred Rencher, they made up the D team at Manhattan North, the only four-man team.

  ‘Hey, Martinez, it’s Joe. Do me a favour – could you do a victimology on an Ethan Lowry, 1640 West 84th Street, DOB 04/12/71. Thanks. Great. See you in a little while.’ Joe paused and looked over at Danny. ‘Yeah, he’s here. You need to talk to him?’

  Danny shook his head violently.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ said Joe. ‘See you later.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Just to say he misses you.’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Danny. He was crouched down beside Lowry’s wrists, pointing with his pen to a series of holes in the floorboards. ‘His arms must have been restrained by something hammered in here. There are two holes on each side of each wrist.’

  ‘Did you find anything he could have used to do this?’ said Joe to Kendra.

  ‘Unh-unh,’ she said. ‘Perp’s not going to leave them behind – my guess is they’re his special toys.’

  TWO

  There were six doors off the hallway in Lowry’s apartment: into two bedrooms and a bathroom on the left; into the kitchen, living room and office on the right. The kitchen was painted citrus lemon with green glossy cabinets and cream worktops – all tidy and undisturbed. The living room had a deep red sofa, wide-screen TV and a pile of children’s toys in one corner. In the other was a yoga mat and two pink dumbbells.

  ‘I’m not sure any good graphic designer would have been involved in this interior,’ said Joe.

  ‘Maybe he was a bad graphic designer,’ said Danny. ‘Why do you always make victims nicer or more talented than you actually have any proof they are?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘When they’re in a nice house, you do.’

  ‘Yeah, well they’re hardly ever in a nice house, so that’s bullshit,’ said Joe. ‘They’re decomposing on the bare springs of a bed in some skanky crack den or some place that hasn’t seen a bottle of bleach…’

  They walked into Ethan Lowry’s office.

  ‘This is more like it,’ said Joe. ‘See what I mean? Clean lines.’

  ‘People love crime shows. People love interior shows. You mix the two, Joe, you got a job for life. Extreme Make-over: Home Invasion Edition. CSI: Brownstone.’

  Joe smiled. It encouraged Danny. ‘Detective Joe Lucchesi: investigating your death and your taste. What were your last movements? And why did you choose those drapes with that carpet? Find out after the break. This season, green kitchens are all the rage. Speaking of rage, savage beatings are-’

  ‘All right, already,’ said Joe. ‘Let me think.’

  Ethan Lowry’s office was tidy and minimalist. Across one white wall was a long grey desktop, mounted on steel legs. A twenty-inch flat-screen monitor sat at the centre, running the screensaver – a slideshow of Lowry’s family photos. Joe hadn’t set his up on his laptop yet, because he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to be reminded of. He paused in front of this happy montage of a dead man’s life. From the photos and the food deliveries, it was clear that Ethan Lowry had worked hard to slim down. The new, lighter body he had fought for was sad and pointless, lying in a pool of blood by his front door. The camera, a professional digital SLR, was on a low table to the right, beside two tall stacks of clear plastic drawers. Joe pulled a few of them open: receipts, paper clips, rubber bands, stamps.

  ‘Look,’ he said to Danny, ‘he was a good designer.’ The bottom drawer was filled with design awards that were gathering dust. ‘And,’ said Joe, ‘he was obviously modest enough not to display them. Which would lead me to believe he might have been quite a nice guy.’

  Danny rolled his eyes.

  Underneath the desk, the cables that ran from the computer, the printer, the disk drive and the lamp were grouped together neatly with cable ties and ended in plugs with icons. On the floor beside a well-made single bed in the corner was a pair of navy track pants, with a white T-shirt and a pair of white jersey boxer shorts thrown on top. A bunch of letters addressed to Ethan Lowry in girlie script and tied with rubber bands lay beside them. A seventeen-inch PowerBook was on top of the bed, its tiny white light pulsing. Beside it was a remote control vibrator and a short, stiff leather whip. Joe lifted up the screen of the laptop, which quickly flashed up a series of images from soft-porn DVD covers; oiled, topless men in jeans bearing down on tiny, lost blondes. Huge-breasted lesbian liplocks, cheerleaders, repairmen, soldier girls, soldier boys, police officers.

  ‘We’re a few shy of the Village People,’ said Danny, moving up beside him.

  ‘Tame,’ said Joe.

  ‘He’s no Marv.’ Marvin was one of the first dead bodies they had to guard as rookies, a morbidly obese victim of his own eating habits. All he had in his apartment when they found him was a tower of Krispy Kreme boxes, a mountain of crispy Kleenex and the sickest collection of amateur porn that Joe or Danny had ever admitted to seeing.

  They moved into the master bedroom. Another tidy space, with a queen-sized bed and a pale green satin throw folded over the bottom half.

  ‘I wish Gina would let me have a bed this easy to climb into,’ said Danny. ‘Instead of taking a hundred fucking pillows out of the way first. Does that make sense to you ever, why women do that?’

  ‘No.’

  There were books and bottles of water on each nightstand, some headache pills and a bracelet on the wife’s side, a wallet and a watch on the husband’s side. There was a chair in the corner with a pai
r of jeans and a grey sweatshirt on it. Up a step on the left-hand side of the room was a raised dressing area that appeared to be Mrs Lowry’s domain and the most disturbed by the attack. There was makeup, shoes, belts and bags everywhere. In a corner, two linen baskets were stuffed and spilling over with clothes, a suitcase lay half unpacked, the dressing table was covered with hair products and more makeup. A small stool was upturned on the floor. Joe studied the room for several minutes before deciding the perp hadn’t made it in here. It looked more like a case of opposites attract.

  Joe took notes of where he needed photographs to be taken and checked with Kendra when he got back to the hallway. He drew a sketch of the apartment, marking in the smallest of details.

  After three hours, everyone was winding down and heading back to the twentieth precinct.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Danny as they got into the car.

  ‘Well, it’s not a burglary,’ said Joe.

  ‘Yeah, with the wallet just lying around-’

  ‘Two wallets,’ said Joe.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. In the hallway, the little table was knocked over. There’s a kind of bashed-up wallet there. And a new one.’

  ‘Both the vic’s?’ said Danny.

  ‘Both have his cards in it. And money.’

  ‘Yeah and then the expensive watch on the nightstand and shit…’ said Danny.

  ‘With the computer and the sex toys and the naked body, it could be something sexual.’

  Danny nodded. ‘Do you think maybe he had something going on on the side? Blazkow said the wife was in Jersey with her ma for the night.’

  Joe nodded. ‘I’d say yeah.’

  He took out his cell phone. He had eight missed calls. Six were from Anna: one voicemail, four hang-ups and a final voicemail:

  ‘Asshole.’

  With her accent, Joe liked when Anna said asshole. He didn’t like the volume, though, and the crash of the phone as she slammed it down. He looked at his watch. He hadn’t made Shaun’s meeting. And he hadn’t called.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit. I forgot to call Anna.’

  ‘You’re a dead man,’ said Danny, reversing out of the space. ‘Speaking of dead men, did you hear why Rufo lost all that weight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘His brother died, forty-nine years old, heart attack. Bam. No warning.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that.’

  ‘No, but there’s more. Apparently, at the funeral, Rufo had a few too many and one of the guys heard him tell some old aunt that he didn’t want to go down the same road as his brother because

  – wait for it – he’d never been in love. Specifically, he’d never found true love.’

  ‘Rufo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m seeing him in a whole new way now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Danny, ‘in soft focus, running through a cornfield.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Three years ago.’

  ‘And we haven’t seen him with a woman yet.’

  ‘It’s sad. For all of us. He could have kept his fuller figure and we could have been spared the salad, quinoa, couscous talk.’

  ‘You go ahead in,’ said Joe when they got to the twentieth precinct. He walked past the entrance and called Anna. ‘Hey, honey, I’m sorry. I’m not gonna make-’

  ‘I know,’ said Anna. ‘Because I’ve already been to the school and now I’m back home.’

  ‘I caught a homicide. I’ve been tied up, honey. How did it go?’

  ‘Oh, well the principal was there and she started off by-’

  Joe saw Cullen and Blazkow walk from their car into the building. ‘Honey? I’m sorry. I can’t get into the details right now. But did it go OK?’

  ‘That depends,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘I gotta go, look, I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I get back to the office, OK? It’ll probably be late. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ she said, her voice tired.

  Joe made his way up to the second-floor office. Everyone was standing around drinking coffee.

  ‘So what have we got?’ he said.

  ‘Closed homicide, no witnesses? A bag of shit,’ said Blazkow.

  ‘Any video?’ said Joe.

  ‘Not so far,’ said Martinez.

  ‘Not even from across the street?’ said Joe.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not everyone was home in the building,’ said Blazkow. ‘So we’ll see what comes up, but neighbors on either side heard nothing and the doorman didn’t see shit.’

  ‘What about the wife?’

  ‘She’s at her ma’s with their kid,’ said Martinez. ‘She was a mess, tried to hold it together for the daughter, but… fuck. I got what I could from her, which was not a lot. She has no idea why this happened. They don’t socialize a lot, they hang out together most of the time.’

  ‘OK – Rencher, can you pull Lowry’s phone records?’ said Joe. ‘Cullen, could you run the plates of all the cars on the street? Tomorrow, we’ve got the autopsy. When we’ve got an idea of the time of death, we can work out about canvassing the building again.’ He turned to Blazkow. ‘You get anything from BCI or Triple I?’

  Anyone who was arrested in New York got a NYSID number – New York State Identification. The Bureau of Criminal Investigations had the records. If Lowry had a criminal record, a phone call to the BCI would have details and a photo. A Triple I check would show if Lowry had an out-of-state record.

  ‘Nada,’ said Blazkow.

  ‘OK,’ said Joe.

  ‘Grab a desk,’ said Blazkow. ‘You want coffee?’

  ‘Thanks, yeah,’ said Joe. He took off his jacket and sat down. When he looked up, Denis Cullen was standing over him.

  ‘Uh – Joe? Can I put myself forward for going through the financial records, maybe the phone records?’

  Joe laughed. ‘That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever been asked that.’

  ‘Yeah, well… I guess I’ve kind of got an eye for it.’

  By 1 a.m., Joe was slumped in his chair, his fingers stiff from typing. He had crossed the coffee threshold. It was now sending him to sleep. He never realized he was ODing until it was too late.

  ‘I’m outta here,’ he said, standing up, suddenly.

  ‘You OK?’ said Danny.

  ‘I’m tired. I’m going back to the office. You coming?’

  ‘Sure. You not going home?’

  ‘Not tonight. Not with the autopsy first thing.’

  The dorm in Manhattan North was off the locker room and had four metal beds with thin mattresses and covers that nobody risked sleeping under. Working the ‘four and two chart’ meant four days on, two days off. The first two tours were 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., the last two were 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The turnaround tour ended at 1 a.m. and was followed by an 8 a.m. start. Most detectives stayed in the dorm on those nights or at least told their wives they did. Anna didn’t like being alone at night any more, so Joe had been coming home; because they lived in Bay Ridge, he didn’t have far to go. But the first few nights on a major case, she wouldn’t expect to see him. He called her anyway.

  ‘Sweetheart, it’s me again. I’m staying at the office tonight.’

  ‘I know,’ said Anna.

  ‘Well, it’s just I hadn’t said, so I thought-’

  ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Will you be OK? Is Shaun home?’

  ‘No. But he’ll be back.’

  ‘What happened at the school?’

  ‘Well, the principal was very nice. I think she likes Shaun, but understands he’s… changed. She said he’s been rude and uncooperative.’

  ‘That’s the French blood.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Yes. His falling grades they’ve put down to the American.’

  Joe laughed. ‘They said the same thing about his charm and his looks.’

  ‘And low self-esteem…’

  ‘What was the bottom line?’ said Joe.

  ‘Jus
t that they will give him a chance to improve. They think he’s tired in class, staying out too late and-’

  ‘Did they give us a hard time?’

  ‘They didn’t have to say a word.’

  ‘Look, are you sure you’re going to be OK tonight? Would you like me to get Pam to come over and stay?’

  Pam was his father Giulio’s second wife.

  ‘Pam?’ said Anna. She laughed. ‘Yeah, babysitting by a woman the same age as me… who is my mother-in-law.’

  ‘Step.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be babysitting. You could ask her over for a glass of wine and a movie. I’m just trying to help.’

  ‘Just to remind you – it’s after one in the morning. And I’m OK. Sleep well whenever you get there.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll see you-’

  ‘In a few days. I know.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Honey?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I love laughing with you.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘And Joe?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘At least I know you sleep in the dorm.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’

  Anna was right. He did sleep in the dorm. But Gina Markey thought the same thing about Danny.

  THREE

  Stanley Frayte had an hour to kill before he showed up for work. He drove down Holt Avenue in his white Ford Econoline van stamped with the chunky blue lettering of Frayte Electrical Services. He pulled into the parking lot at the south end of Astoria Park. At 8.30 a.m., it was quieter than it would have been an hour before when the dawn walkers, runners and swimmers were making their way back home to take a shower before work.