The Art of Violence

by S. J. Rozan

  The place smelled of toast and sizzling grease and the coffee was delivered on a tray, not a skateboard, by a young Latino guy who took my order for eggs and bacon and had just come by to refill my cup when my phone finally rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize and a voice I did.

  “You fuckin’ called me, Smith? What the hell is your problem?”

  “Jesus. Is that your version of ‘good morning’?”

  “Only to assholes,” Cavanaugh said. “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you. In person.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “So am I.”

  “Whoop-de-doop. Is this where you tell me I’ll be happy if I hear what you have to say?”

  “No. It’s where I tell you you’ll be unhappy if you don’t.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “None, to me. I can call Grimaldi. She’ll talk to me. And she’ll listen.”

  “Oh, fuck her. And you.”

  “And the horse I rode in on, but I think you should come talk to me, Cavanaugh. I’m at a greasy spoon called All Day Coffee.” I gave him the street corner. “I’m about to have breakfast. I’ll be here until I’m done.” I hung up. Then, because I hadn’t actually said I wouldn’t, I called Grimaldi.

  “Where are you?” I asked when she picked up.

  “Fine, where are you?”

  “I’m in a diner around the corner from Oakhurst’s studio and I’m about to have some interesting company. Come join the party.”

  “I’m not there anymore, I’m back at the precinct. I went oh for two looking for your wacko and his next-door friend across the street.”

  That must have been while I was at Monroe’s, Sam was snoozing at Cromley’s, and Cromley was having her life.

  “Plus,” Grimaldi said, “some plaster-covered Rastafarian told me to put a sock in it.”

  “I’m buying him earplugs. I have something you might want.”

  “You say that to all the girls.”

  “Last time I said it to you, it was true.”

  “Jesus, Smith. I’m supposed to go all the way the hell back down there because you’re being cute with me? Just tell me what you have.”

  “A couple of fascinating facts, and a gun.”

  “Whose?”

  “Come on, Detective, put on the siren and do some aggressive driving. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “If I get there and nothing you have is useful, I guarantee I’ll feel better than you will.”

  “You say that to all the boys.”

  I hung up, called Lydia, told her voice mail where I was, and settled into my eggs. Lydia walked in not five minutes later.

  “Hat trick,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” She kissed my cheek and pulled out a chair across the table.

  “Never mind. How are you?”

  “Used to this hour of the day. You?”

  “Beginning to see its glories. You want some tea?”

  “Are we staying?”

  “We’re having company.”

  “Then, yes.” I waved the waiter over. Lydia ordered tea and an English muffin. “Who’s coming?” she asked.

  “Ike Cavanaugh. And Angela Grimaldi.”

  “Sounds like a party. Or an explosion.”

  “Tell me about it. The description you got—you’re pretty sure it’s Cavanaugh?”

  She nodded. “An actual professional dog walker. She noticed this chubby guy in a car—a blue Regal, not in great shape—”

  “The guy or the car?”

  “Both. He was parked two blocks down, just sitting there the way people do when they’re waiting for the parking to get to be legal, but it was already legal. When she came back the other way with the dogs, she saw the guy get out of the car and head down the street.”

  “In the direction of Sam’s place?”

  “Yes. He even crossed to Sam’s side when he got near there.”

  “She noticed that?”

  “She’s a writer. He intrigued her.”

  “I thought she was a professional dog walker.”

  “It’s her day job. Who makes a living as a writer?”

  “Good point. Did she see anything else?”

  Lydia shook her head. “She went the other way. Had to drop off the dogs.” Lydia’s tea and English muffin arrived. “Tell me about Tony Oakhurst,” she said, squeezing lemon into her tea. “I called Sam. He did answer, and he’s a mess. He’s afraid he did it. Any chance of that?”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “I asked him to promise to stay in the studio, too.”

  “Good. I may want to stash him somewhere later. Oakhurst, someone shot him about one A.M. And they took an earring.”

  “Wow. A serial killer who swings both ways. That’s new.”

  “And that’s not the most interesting thing I found this morning.” While we ate, I filled her in: Oakhurst’s death, his empty and presumably erased hidden photo folder, the raw photo he’d sent to Monroe, which I showed her. Cromley’s gun and Sam’s tie.

  “See how productive mornings can be?” she said, putting down her cup. “But, Bill, there’s no way Cromley’s is the gun that killed Oakhurst, is there?”

  “No. It’s a .25 and he was shot with a .38. They’re pretty sure it was the one they found, his own. Still, it’s interesting that hers has been fired.”

  “It’s also interesting about the tie.” She stared at the tabletop. “I don’t think Sam had his tie when we found him. Or even when the riot started.”

  “He didn’t. I asked him. Leslie threw it in the trash can by the elevator.”

  “So someone took it out again.”

  That promising line of inquiry was brought to a temporary halt by the entry of the bull into the coffee shop. Ike Cavanaugh stopped just inside the door.

  I gave him a genial wave. He saw my sarcasm for what it was, scowled, and marched over.

  “What the fuck?” was his greeting when he reached the table.

  “Have a seat, Detective.”

  “Who’s she?”

  I resisted the urge to say, Your doom. “My partner, Lydia Chin. Lydia, Detective Ike Cavanaugh.”

  “Yeah, great,” said Cavanaugh. “Talk fast. I’m not staying.”

  “Sure you are. Sit down.” I waved for the waiter again. “Coffee?” I asked Cavanaugh. “I’m buying. Go on, sit down. You came all this way to hear what we have to say. You won’t hear it standing.”

  Cavanaugh’s jaw tightened. “Coffee,” he told the waiter. “And a goddamn jelly doughnut.” I caught Lydia suppressing a smile: cops and doughnuts. Cavanaugh dropped his bulk onto a chair between Lydia and me. “Okay,” he said. “This better be good.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” came another voice. All three of us looked up, and there was Grimaldi.

  37

  At our table in the diner, Cavanaugh seared me with a murderous glare. “You son of—”

  “Yeah, I know. Sit down, Detectives.” That was for both of them; she was still standing, and he was standing again.

  “This,” Grimaldi said as she pulled a chair out, “is something I never thought I’d see. I’m not even sure what I’m seeing. Hi, Lydia. Ike, sit your ass down. I don’t know what this is about, but I came all the way down here for it, so let’s get it done. Coffee,” she told the waiter, who was back with Cavanaugh’s order. “And one of those.” She pointed to the powdered-sugar-covered, jelly-oozing pastry on the plate.

  “Oh, hell,” I said to the waiter. “I’ll have one, too.”

  “Señorita?” the waiter said to Lydia, but she shook her head. He left and I joined Grimaldi and Lydia in staring up at Cavanaugh until he slammed himself back onto his chair.

  “So,” I said, “it’s been a hell of a morning. First.” I took the paper-wrapped pistol from my pocket and put it on the table by Grimaldi. “It’s Ellissa Cromley’s.” I said. “It’s empty. But it’s been fired recently.”

  Grimaldi lifted a corner of the paper. The w
aiter, returning with the doughnuts and the coffeepot, stopped, eyes wide, a foot away from our table.

  “It’s okay,” Grimaldi said, baring the shield clipped to her waistband. “We’re cops.” If that “we” implied more than the absolute truth, what harm? She slipped Cromley’s wrapped gun into her own jacket pocket. The waiter slid the doughnuts onto the table, splashed coffee into cups, and beat it.

  Grimaldi bit into her doughnut, napkined her mouth, and said, “All right, give. Who fired it, Smith? At who? How did you get it? Where’s Cromley now?”

  “The only one of those questions I know the answer to is how I got it. She pointed it at me so I took it away.”

  “Where?”

  “In Sam’s studio.”

  “She there now?”

  “She wasn’t when I left, or in her own, either. Your other questions, I don’t know. She said she fired it at target practice, for what that’s worth. But that’s not the main reason I called.”

  Grimaldi looked at Cavanaugh and Lydia over her coffee. “The guy has a recently fired gun in the middle of a homicide investigation and he has a better reason for calling?”

  “I think it’s this,” Lydia said. “I’ve been out in Greenpoint trying to see what I could find out about the break-in at Sam’s apartment.”

  Grimaldi narrowed her eyes, but I was more interested in watching Cavanaugh. His doughnut stopped halfway to his mouth, then continued into the savage clamp of his jaws.

  Lydia looked at me to see how I wanted to play it. I decided not to beat around the bush. “It was you, Cavanaugh,” I said. “We have a witness. A dog walker saw you stroll up the street and end up at Sam’s door. He was surprised, he said, because the only person he’d ever seen going in or out from there was a little skinny guy, and now there was you.”

  The “he,” of course, was just a little insurance to protect the professional-dog-walker-writer, in case Cavanaugh had noticed her. I met Lydia’s gaze, gave the tiniest nod. Without missing a beat, she took the story up.

  “He saw you go in,” she said. “He gave a pretty complete description.”

  Just to be uncalled for, I added, “Of you and your car both.”

  The guy on my left shoulder slapped my back for the brazenness of the lie, then flew over and slapped Lydia’s. Lydia took a bite of her English muffin.

  Grimaldi’s glare bayonetted Cavanaugh to his seat. “Ike, you stupid son of a bitch, what the—”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” Cavanaugh said. “Somebody needed to be looking for evidence. You were in and out of there in five minutes. You think that creep is just some poor mistreated genius—yeah, like you—so you don’t fucking even try! Someone had to at least look.”

  Grimaldi was scarlet. “I’ll have your ass in a sling, Ike. A fucking illegal search? What the hell were you going to do with anything you found?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He wasn’t planning to find anything, not like you mean. That’s not why he went.” I looked at Cavanaugh and said, “You went into the medicine cabinet. Sam said someone had put the toothbrush back the wrong way.”

  “What the hell does that mean, toothbrush the wrong way?” Cavanaugh looked around the table. I don’t know what we looked like to him, but to me he looked like cornered prey. “You’re gonna listen to a damn crazy madman about which way his toothbrush was?”

  “You went into the medicine cabinet,” I said, “found his comb, took hairs from it—”

  “Jesus Christ in a cathouse, Ike,” Grimaldi breathed, “tell me that’s not true. Tell me you did not plant evidence.”

  Grimaldi stared waves of fury at Cavanaugh. He glared back, but behind his belligerence was a wall of defensive anger. If we weren’t in public, I thought, there’d be a fistfight right now.

  Or maybe there was going to be one anyway: Grimaldi jumped to her feet. I grabbed her arm, but she shook me off with a snarl and stalked out the door. I watched through the window while she took out her phone and made a call. No one at the table spoke until she came back in.

  She sat again. “You signed out the evidence box,” she said to Cavanaugh. “In the Pike killing. You goddamn signed out the box.”

  Cavanaugh’s thick hands gripped the edge of the table. “I just wanted to look. See if I could find anything you—”

  “Horseshit,” said Grimaldi. “You put the hairs in. On her sweater. You stupid—”

  “He killed her!” Cavanaugh’s gaze swept around the table, pleading for us to understand. “And those other girls. Don’t you get it? I didn’t want him to kill anyone else.”

  In my head I heard Sam, sitting in my living room the night this started. Smith? I don’t want to kill anyone else.

  “Shit.” Grimaldi held Cavanaugh’s eyes until he finally looked away. Then she turned to me. “And you. Why the hell did you feel like you had to do it this way? Why not just tell me what you had? Let me take him up without all this drama?”

  “Because there’s something else. Another piece of evidence that was planted. And then unplanted.” I took out my phone. “This is a photo Tony Oakhurst sent to one of his private collectors.”

  Cavanaugh said, “Oakhurst? That asshole who was taking pictures at that swanky museum party?”

  Grimaldi looked at him sharply. “The Whitney? How do you know who was doing what at that party?”

  I said, “Didn’t he tell you he was there?”

  “I don’t need sarcasm from you, Smith. Ike?”

  “Yeah, I was there. Because I knew you wouldn’t be.”

  The look on Grimaldi’s face made me think about fistfights again.

  “Cavanaugh,” I said, “Oakhurst’s dead. Someone shot him last night.”

  “The fuck?”

  “And I think this photo might have had something to do with it.” I turned the phone to face them all.

  All three of them leaned forward to look at it, though Lydia had seen it already.

  It took Cavanaugh a moment. “Oakhurst was in the truck? With the dead girl?”

  “Yeah, Ike, and we already knew that, so maybe you better just shut up,” said Grimaldi. “Smith, we’ve seen these, what’s the big deal?”

  “Not this one. Look closer. I think this is one of the erased ones. See that blue blob by her shoulder? It’s the tie Sam was wearing that night.”

  Grimaldi grabbed my phone, spread the photo, and peered at it. “Where the hell did you get this?”

  “I was following a hunch.” More than a hunch, but Grimaldi’s pissed-off needle was up in the red zone already. “I thought Oakhurst might have sent it to a guy named Franklin Monroe, so I went up to see him. I can give you his info.”

  “You goddamn better give me his info. And send me that.” She handed me back the phone and watched me do it, then sat back in her chair and stared into space. When she spoke, it was quietly, deliberately. “The tie wasn’t in the truck when we found her.”

  “Oakhurst has photos with and without. He must have taken it. But here’s the thing. Sam didn’t have it when we left the Whitney. Leslie—his sister-in-law—had thrown it away.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “He was making a scene with it.”

  “I see.” She bit her lip. “And you think Ike here took the tie out of the garbage to the truck and planted it. Like he did with the other goddamn evidence. Meaning, he at least knew the girl was dead and maybe even saw the killer, and never said anything.” She regarded me. “Now, normally, I would say you can take a bullshit theory like that about a cop and shove it, but as it happens, Ike”—she turned to Cavanaugh—“you were at the party and you have planted evidence.” She slapped her hands on the table and stood. “So give me one good reason I shouldn’t arrest your sorry ass right now!”

  The waiter and the other two tables of diners looked over in alarm. It occurred to me I was going to have to leave a really big tip.

  Cavanaugh stared up at Grimaldi, and she down at him. Again I wondered if I’d have to stop a fight. Then C
avanaugh started to laugh. “Oh, my fucking God!” he hooted. “Oh, my fucking Aunt Fanny! The tie? The goddamn tie?” He wiped his eyes.

  “If you think any of this is funny, Ike, I’d sure as hell like to know why,” Grimaldi said.

  Cavanaugh’s hilarity abruptly cleared. He pushed back his chair and stood, too. “No, it’s not funny, Girl Genius.” His voice was harsh. “Maybe some cop planted hairs because they thought that little creep deserved to have his ass handed to him on a platter and you weren’t doing it. Maybe some cop’s going to put in his papers soon because if the way this shit is going down is police work now, the hell with it. But if you think there’s any way I found that girl’s body and didn’t call it in, if you think there’s any way I stuck that tie under her in a fucking freezing meat truck and left her there… Fuck your mother, Grimaldi.”

  Lydia had said this meeting sounded like a party or an explosion. The party was clearly over. I stood, too, wondering if between Lydia and myself we would be able to find a way to stop the explosion.

  Still seated, Lydia glanced at me. She said, “Detective Cavanaugh? What about the tie?”

  Everyone looked at her. “The tie made you laugh,” she said. “Why?” She took a sip of tea and waited.

  A tight grin strained Cavanaugh’s lips. “The fucking tie,” he said. “The fucking tie Girl Genius here was ready to bust my ass over. I never touched the goddamn thing. I didn’t take it out of the trash.”

  “And that’s funny?”

  “No. This is. I saw who did.”

  “The hell you say,” Grimaldi snapped. “Who? Oakhurst?”

  “Oh. Oh, now it’s useful that I went to that party, missy? Now you want me as a witness?”

  “That’s it. Ike Cavanaugh, I’m arresting you for tampering with evidence and—”

  “Oh, shut it, Grimaldi. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Oakhurst. It was that stone bitch who threw it out. It was the sister-in-law.”

  38

  Good work, partner, I thought. Party canceled, but explosion averted.

  With an obvious effort to stay under control, Grimaldi said to Cavanaugh, “The sister-in-law—Leslie Tabor? She came back for the tie?”