The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  "Help you?" she asked in a disinterested New York tone that belied the Jamaican melody in the vowels.

  "I was wondering what happened to the doll hospital."

  "Closed." She hadn't even looked up yet.

  "When?"

  "Ah, March. The last day was the freak snowstorm on the third. I remember because they were setting toys out in the snow."

  "Is there anyone I can talk to connected with the hospital?"

  She pulled open a drawer in the table, and using those long fingernails like pincers, removed a cream-colored business card. "Don't blame me if she doesn't get back to you," the woman said. "She's the only one now, and she's working out of her home."

  I took the card. Apparently this boutique got a lot of inquiries about the doll hospital. She hadn't even asked for my ID.

  "Do you have any idea why it closed?"

  She raised her eyes to mine. They were magnificent, the stunning centerpiece to what I just realized was a remarkable face. "Why, the murder, of course."

  "The murder?"

  "Of the wiz boy. The one who could repair anything. They say the dolls surprised him in the middle of the night, but I don't believe it."

  "You don't?" I asked in a tone that I hoped didn't sound patronizing.

  "No. If they killed him, why were they found trying to save him, now? They were found all around him, like little doctors. But they couldn't do anything."

  "So, they didn't find out who did it?"

  She shrugged. "I don't think they ever will. The police have too much to do to look into the death of one pimply-faced guy with a fascination for teddy bears."

  Ouch. That one hit too close to home. I took a step away from the table, as if I were getting ready to leave. "Aren't you afraid to work here, after someone got murdered upstairs?"

  She laughed. "Mister, I live in New York. If I was afraid of everything that happened, I'd move to somewhere where nothing happened."

  I smiled in response. "Good point," I said, and thanked her for her time. Then I left the store and stepped back into the oven that was the street.

  Halfway down the block, I paused and looked at the card. It had a name— Lena O'Dell; an occupation— toy repair; and a contact phone number with a Manhattan exchange but no address. I walked back to the House and used the number to trace the address. She lived in the Village. I thought of calling before I went to see if she was home, but then I changed my mind.

  She was the only lead I had, and I didn't want to scare her away.

  * * *

  Evelyn was just arriving as I was leaving. She had changed out of her power suit and into her usual jeans and blouse. She was whistling as she came up the stairs.

  "What're you smiling about?" I asked as we passed.

  "Found the other shoe," she said.

  "Really?" I stopped on the way down.

  "Yep. Recovered from a dumpster on Fiftieth, same area. Forms a triangle with the first shoe and the car. And, get this, there's a bloody handprint on the back. That's why the station kept it."

  "Lucky break."

  She grinned over her shoulder at me. "You don't know the half of it."

  She was close. She had to be or she wouldn't be in such a good mood. "Give."

  She shook her head. Then she turned and jogged up the stairs before I could ask the next question.

  She did that on purpose, of course. I sighed, and walked down the rest of the way, wishing my luck were running the same as hers.

  * * *

  I took my company car to the Village because I didn't want to hassle with getting a cab. Parking was hell, even on days like this, but I squeezed into a spot on a side street without denting any bumpers. Then I walked around the corner to the address I had.

  It was a dilapidated building with a recessed steel door with a 1970s security system. Someone had propped the inner door open with a brick and I suspected it was often left that way. I glanced at the names penned beside the row of doorbells and saw O'Dell in Number 3. I slipped through the door into the hallway and started up the stairs.

  The place felt like a sauna. A window on the landing was painted shut and caked with dirt. Not that it mattered. It provided a view of the building across the back alley and nothing more. I doubted that opening it would provide a breeze.

  The second floor smelled of garlic and feta cheese. There was a narrow hallway that ran the length of the floor, and the stairs continued up one side. Apartment 3 was just beyond the railing, the door firmly closed.

  I knocked.

  I heard a small scraping against the wood as someone peered through the peephole. Then a woman's voice said, "What?"

  I held up my badge. "Miss O'Dell. I'm Detective Spencer Gray. I'm handling the murder of Joel Dudich."

  "God," she said. "And here I thought you were gonna wait until the Second Coming before you continued your investigation."

  I heard several locks click and then the door opened, sending frigid air into the hallway. A window air-conditioning unit hummed in the background.

  O'Dell leaned against the door frame. She was slender and barefoot, wearing jeans and a ratty T-shirt that was covered with bits of thread. Her hair was red and curly, her skin nearly as dark as the boutique owner's.

  I didn't remember seeing her before, but that had been months ago, in a case I normally would have forgotten.

  "Gray," she said. "You were there asking questions when they took Joel's body away."

  I nodded. I guess I had seen her.

  "You wanna come in, or you gonna interrogate me in the hall?"

  "It's not an interrogation, Miss O'Dell. I just need information."

  She stepped away from the door. I went inside, glad for the icy air. Her apartment was a clutter of books and spider plants, with plush toys on every available surface. A coffinlike box stood against one wall. It was filled with broken toys like the ones I had initially seen in the hospital. A thick wooden door was braced on cinder blocks and on top of it were several stuffed dogs, all missing the right leg. A series of half-finished legs sat in a row beside them.

  She took a doll off a caftan-covered armchair and asked me to sit. I did and nearly sank to the floor. The chair had no springs. I tried not to show my surprise.

  "What happened to the hospital?" I asked.

  She glared at me, then sat on the blanket-covered couch, next to a group of limbless dolls. "It didn't go without Joel."

  "One employee couldn't be that important."

  "He had a talent, he did, and everyone came for him. When he died—" She held out her hands and didn't finish the sentence.

  "What kept him at the hospital? I heard he could have worked for Sotheby's or any of the antique stores at a much higher rate."

  Her face softened. She had been a beautiful woman once, several years of stress ago. "The kids," she said.

  "You had children in the doll hospital?"

  She nodded. "They came with their parents, mothers usually. It took some work to get men to come into a place devoted to dolls." And then she looked at me like that was the reason I hadn't finished the investigation. "Joel liked watching their faces when he gave them the fixed toy. Said it made his entire week."

  "Know anyone who would want to kill him?"

  "Just about everyone," she said, and her answer surprised me. Then she looked down at her hands. "Except the customers, of course."

  "Of course," I said.

  "Look," she said. "He wasn't the nicest guy. I think he hung out with dolls because he didn't much like people. There was something in his past, in his childhood, he never talked about, and he said he could get the sweetness he was denied then when he looked at kids' faces. That's the part of Joel I like to remember."

  "And what's the part you want to forget?"

  She flinched, then smoothed the faded denim on her jeans. "He had a temper," she whispered, as if, even now, he could hear her.

  "He ever inflict it on you?"

  "On anyone who wasn't as good as he was.
Or as quick." She glanced up, her dark eyes haunted. "I didn't like him much, and at first, I was glad he was dead."

  I waited again. She would say more if I just gave her enough time.

  "Then I learned how much I had come to depend on him. Closing the hospital was the toughest thing I've ever done."

  I nodded. "Where were you the night he died?"

  "You asked me that the first time," she said.

  "Tell me again."

  "Here." She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her couch. "Unfortunately, I was here. Alone."

  "And your other employees?"

  "You'll have to ask them."

  "Do you have a list of names?"

  She nodded, seemingly grateful to get off that couch and be busy. I took the moment to scan the apartment more carefully. There were no photographs behind the spider plants, no signs that anyone except O'Dell had ever been in this apartment. After a moment, she handed me a carefully lettered piece of paper with six names on it.

  "All but one are still in the city," she said.

  "And where's the one?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "She disappeared the day after Joel was killed."

  * * *

  News of the disappearance should have excited me, but it didn't. Not really. It was too easy, for one, and for another, it was too convenient. Not that murders ever go the way you want them to. But when I heard about the employee that got away, I didn't feel those stomach butterflies that usually told me things were going well. I felt a shiver travel down my spine, so strong that I wondered if O'Dell had seen me shake.

  The disappeared was named Melanie Glisando, and she had been Dudich's on-again off-again lover, something none of the employees had bothered to tell me in the first investigation. I didn't yell at O'Dell for that. I also didn't yell at her for failing to tell me that Glisando hadn't shown up for work on the day of my investigation. I would save the rougher emotions for later, in case I needed them.

  Instead, I had her tell me more about Glisando, and from what I heard, she was Dudich's perfect match— a woman who was interested in toys, a woman who could repair even the most stubborn of tears, a woman who didn't mind spending her days on a pursuit most considered frivolous. She had kept an apartment two buildings down from O'Dell, although she rarely used it. I stopped at the apartment after I left O'Dell's, and the super mentioned that he had thrown Glisando's things away just the week before.

  "Hard to tell whether she was really gone or not. She had this lover, see, and she spent time there, and you know how it is. This place gets to be where she stores her stuff. Not that she had a lot of stuff."

  "Did she take anything with her when she left?"

  The super shrugged. "How'm I supposed to know? I don't case my people's places, you know? I don't compare before and after."

  "Anything unusual in her apartment?"

  The super wrinkled his nose. I braced myself. "Naw," he said. "Not unless you count all them toys."

  "Toys?"

  "Yeah." His grimace grew. "They was posed all over the place. Little scenes, like you'd find in store windows."

  Scenes. I should have felt the butterflies then, but I didn't. Something was off with this case, something intangible.

  "What did you do with the toys?" I asked.

  "I was gonna toss 'em, but the missus, she said no, kids would want them. I gotta listen to her, you know how it is, so I take 'em to one of them specialty shops and they was glad to have 'em. Made a few bucks off 'em and put that against the rent."

  He told me this last as if it would shock me. It didn't.

  "What shop?" I asked.

  He told me, and I made a note, although I wasn't sure I would go.

  "How'd you know Glisando was gone?" I asked.

  "No rent in the mail," he said. "That's the one thing she was good at, paying her rent."

  "When did the payments stop?"

  "Last month," he said.

  * * *

  I blamed my growing depression on the heat. The pieces of information I got were the kind a detective wanted to have, the bits of another person's life, the fragmented details that constituted part of a puzzle and led me to believe I could solve this. The House was even hotter than the street, and as I came in our sarge informed me that the air conditioning was out, and they already had someone upstairs working on the problem.

  I wiped the sweat off the back of my neck with a handkerchief that had seen better days, and then I went up the stairs, expecting to be the only detective in that steamy place. Instead the entire crew had gathered, bottles of water in a bucket on the floor, like someone was holding a party without the booze.

  Everyone looked as down as I felt.

  I picked up one of the water bottles and held it to my forehead. It felt like a blast of frigid air. "Who do I have to thank for this?"

  "Hawkins," Evelyn said.

  I opened my eyes. Hawkins didn't even bring in donuts on his assigned day. The man was cheaper than any skate I'd ever seen.

  He met my gaze, then looked away, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  "What's the occasion?" I asked, thinking this was almost as strange as the damn Silence.

  "No occasion," he said.

  "He found one of the arms that matched that torso," Weisburg said.

  "Got an ID?" I asked.

  Hawkins took a swig of his water, making me think of booze yet again. Only in a heat wave could a man approach water like it was wine.

  "That's the problem," he said. "I been wanting to talk to you guys. Any of you think that maybe we shouldn't solve these cases?"

  I rolled my eyes. Evelyn sat down behind her desk so hard that the wheels on her chair moved and she spun. Bob shook his head ever so slightly. Only Weisburg didn't move.

  "All right," I said. "I give. Why shouldn't we solve these cases?"

  "Because," Hawkins said. "Maybe they're what's causing The Silence."

  "So, lemme get this straight," Evelyn said. "If we solve these cases, The Silence ends and we got a new crime wave on our hands."

  "Hell," I said. "That means we're directly responsible for all future homicides."

  "You know," Bob said, "I knew you liked slacking off, Hawkins, but I didn't think you'd go to these lengths."

  "I'm serious," he said. "These're all strange cases, and what if they're the key?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Sure. It'd be our cases, not the ones at the hundred-and-sixth or the ones in Brooklyn or somewhere else. And out of all the unsolved we got, we just happened to pick the five that were the cause of The Silence, and if we solve them, then well, sorry New York, it's business as usual?"

  Hawkins flushed. "Put that way, it sounds kinda funny."

  "Yeah, it does," Bob said.

  "So you think I should solve the jumper?"

  "Isn't that what we're here for?" I asked. "Or are we really the waste of funds the tabloids been saying we are?"

  "I was just thinking maybe—"

  "That's the problem," Evelyn said. "You were thinking." She grabbed a water bottle. "Thanks for the refreshment," she said, and left the floor.

  Bob closed his file and left too. After a moment, Hawkins shuffled off in the direction of the men's room. That left just me and Weisburg. Strangely, he had said nothing.

  "You don't buy that argument, do you?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "It's as good as any. I mean, we ain't never seen nothing like this. Anything could be causing it. I think maybe if Hawkins believes it's our unsolveds, then maybe he's right. If the tabloids think it's the heat, maybe they're right. If I believe maybe the city's hit its personal limit, maybe I'm right. You know, in unusual situations, you can't close your mind."

  "It's not logical—"

  "It's not logical for a man to choke to death on a woman's finger outside Port Authority in the presence of his very expensive dogs and not have identification on him or the animals."

  "Unless it was a smuggling operation," I said.

  "Shit," he sa
id and sat up straight. I couldn't believe he hadn't thought of that.

  "You see?" I said. "There's got to be a logical explanation for anything."