by Blake Banner
Dehan was shaking her head. “Wait a minute. Hunting for a guy? What does that mean?”
He shrugged and made a face. “You know! Girls like Celeste, they have no money, but they want a good time, so they hang around clubs where guys with money go and they hunt. Sometimes they hunt in packs, sometimes they go solo. They find a guy who looks like he has money and they close in. Maybe it’s a one night stand, maybe it develops into a long term solution for their lives.
“So she was cute, she was kind of wild, we had fun and I told her, in the morning, I don’t do this. I am not a party guy. I am focused on my career and nothing is going to get in the way of that.” He laughed. “Well, it had the opposite effect from what I had intended. It was like music to her ears, man. I kept telling her, look, we are just friends with benefits. I am not going to marry you. When I marry, it will be the daughter of some CEO, and there will be a prenup that ensures if we ever divorce, I will come out of it a rich man. Sorry!” He hunched his shoulders in a way that said he really wasn’t. “You wanted truth. That’s truth. I think at first she didn’t believe it, but after a bit, things were not so good between us…”
Dehan asked, “What does that mean?”
“She was becoming a bit suffocating.” He appealed to me. “You know how chicks can get. She was, like, always around. I was like, ‘Don’t you have a fucking home to go to?’ I mean…” He flopped back in the chair and sighed. “I didn’t want to kick her out because of the sex, right? But it was becoming a case of diminishing returns. You know? She was becoming boring, and the sex just wasn’t so good anymore. So, things were getting a little tense.”
I asked, “Were you having rows?”
He shook his head. “Celeste didn’t row. If you got mad at Celeste, she just screamed at you a couple of times and walked away.”
“Where’d she go?”
He shrugged and made a face of absolute ignorance. “I have no idea, man. She would just leave the house, but before long, she’d be right back again.”
Dehan said: “So what happened that weekend?”
He sat forward, elbows on knees, rubbed his face and sighed. “She came over in the morning on Friday and stayed the night. You have to understand, Saturday to me is just like any other day. I can’t go to the examining board and say, ‘Hey, my examination is not up to scratch because I spent the damned weekend with a chick who wanted me to pay attention to her.’ ‘Oh, OK, Mr. Norris, don’t worry, we’ll give you an A anyway!’ It doesn’t happen that way.”
“So what happened?”
“I went upstairs to get away from her and Nigel…” He froze. His face flushed with anger. “Did he leave yet? Did you hear him leave?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Stay focused, Chad. What happened?”
He took a deep breath and bit his lip. “OK! So I went upstairs to get away from Celeste and Nigel, in my own house, I went upstairs to get away from their incessant yammering! And the damned TV! I guess she spent the day here and in the evening I came down, they had opened a bottle of wine and I had a glass. She goes up to the john and while she’s up there, Nigel starts telling me I should know when I am onto a good thing. I am not likely to find a girl as good and loyal as Celeste. She really loves me, I should take more care of her, yadda yadda yadda. Bottom line, if I am not careful, she will find somebody else.”
“Was he saying that he was interested in her?”
He burst out laughing. “Nigel? Nah! Nigel is gay. He likes sailors with striped shirts and big mustaches. Isn’t that right, Nigel?” There was a little gasp from the door, the stamping of feet and the front door slammed. “Son of a bitch was at the door all along.”
I sighed. “So what did he mean, she would find somebody else?”
He nodded several times. “I know, right? She’s eating here, she’s sleeping here, she’s watching my TV, using my utilities, and all the while she’s fucking some other guy. So I took her phone and I started looking through the messages. And I see there is this guy…” He thought for a moment. “Rod? Rod, yeah, and he is sending her all these messages about how hot she is and how he wants to do this to her and that to her…”
Dehan said, “And how was she responding to these messages?”
He stared hard at her, with eyes that were almost calculating. “That was the smart thing, right? She didn’t respond in kind. Her replies were all short. But, each one of them had something to encourage him. She was enticing him to believe that there could be something between them, if…”
“If what?”
“I told you at the start. Chicks like Celeste are predators. They’re out hunting for a guy who will solve their problems. If she was going to sleep with him, she wanted something in return. She wasn’t a hooker, but she was a whore.”
“Did you confront her with the messages?”
“You bet your sweet ass I did!”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Watch your mouth there, Chad. What happened when you told her you’d looked at her phone?”
“At first, she was mad and started screaming at me that I had no right to check her phone. But then when I started reading the stuff this guy had written to her, she started crying and apologizing. I asked her how many other guys she was screwing around with. She said she wasn’t screwing around with anybody. It was just this guy, it was a game, she was going to tell him to get lost…”
I scratched my head. “Chad. You need to explain this to me. You say she was not your girlfriend. You were just friends with benefits. Yet you got mad when you discovered she’d been cheating on you. You have a big bust up and I’m guessing you kicked her out…”
He gave a small laugh and looked down at the carpet. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “The bust up was kind of hot, and you know… Make up sex is the best. She spent the night again, we chilled in the morning and then she went home around midday.”
I scratched my Adam’s apple for a bit, trying to visualize the scene. It wasn’t all that hard. “Did she contact you again during the afternoon?”
“Yeah, she sent me a couple of messages.” He shrugged. “You know, the usual stuff, she loved me, that kind of shit.”
Dehan said, “What about Rod?”
He shrugged. “What about him?”
“Did she say she was going to dump him? How did you leave that? You were pretty mad at her because of him.”
He stared at a couple of walls for a bit, like he was embarrassed. “Yeah, she said she was going to tell him to lay off. She wasn’t into him anyway. She’d been kind of stringing him along for a laugh.”
“So do you know him? Do you know who he is?”
He shook his head. “Nah, she said he was some guy she knew. I never met him. Anyway, she said she was going to tell him to leave her alone.”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “It never occurred to you that this guy might have been the one who killed her?”
His face went a pasty, yellow color. “No…”
Dehan stared at me. “Can you believe this guy? Ivy League.” She looked back at him. “You seriously expect me to believe that you saw those sexually explicit messages, you saw that she was teasing him and giving him the come on, and the night after you force her to break it off, she disappears, and you didn’t connect the dots? You did not see that there was a possible, probable, connection between her disappearance and breaking off with this guy!”
He shook his head. “No… She stopped coming around. I thought maybe, even though we’d had the make up, she’d had enough. Maybe it was just over and that was like the grand finale. Plus, I thought maybe she’d hooked up with this guy after all. That can happen. You meet to break up and you end up getting together. I didn’t find out she’d been killed for a few weeks. By that time, I’d moved on, man. I didn’t really think about it.”
“You’re a piece of work, Chad. You’re a real piece of work. So did she tell you she was coming over Su
nday night or not?”
He shook his head. “No, she just sent me a couple of messages in the afternoon saying she loved me. And that was the last I heard from her.”
I asked, “Did you answer those messages?”
“Yeah.” He looked embarrassed again. “I told her I loved her too.”
Dehan gave him a look that might have withered a sequoia. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with us. Nobody will ever know you pretended to be a human being once.”
She made a question with her face and showed it to me. Had I any more questions? I shook my head and stood.
“Your father was right, Chad. Focus and commitment are two sides of the same coin. But they aren’t the answer to life’s problems. The real secret is knowing what to focus on. If you focus on being a cheap shit all your life, then cheap shit is what life is going to give you. Enjoy your evening.”
FOUR
We spent the evening reading and digesting what little there was of the original report, and next morning, on the way to the station house, we took a detour to the corner of Colgate Avenue and Lafayette. It had rained heavily during the night and the roads were wet. The semi-wild riverbanks in Soundview Park were saturated and muddy, so we pulled on our rubber boots in the car and headed down the cycle path.
I didn’t know what I was hoping to learn from the exercise except, on some intuitive level, I guess I hoped to get a feel for her last few days. To a lot of cops, especially the later generations reared on IT, that might sound like horse manure. Maybe it was. I don’t know how the human mind works, but I do know that, with me at least, the whole process of working out who done it, and how, happens in some dark place in my unconscious. And right then, my dark unconscious wanted to have a look at the place where she washed up. So that’s what we did.
Dehan had brought the file with her, and some plastic envelopes for the photographs. We stood on the foot path, where it bends and then forks, located the spot on the bank and counted out sixty paces, going west and slightly north. There, the grass and undergrowth gave way to a small section of stony beach with a boulder at one end, maybe five feet by three. It was up against that boulder that her body had been found. I stood there, ankle deep in water, with the slight drizzle speckling my face, and looked around. Dehan was watching me, like she was wondering what I was doing. I might have told her, if she’d asked, that I had no idea.
She came a bit closer, looking at the file. “The ME said she was strangled. Bruising to her neck was extensive, so her killer probably had very strong hands. There was no water in her lungs, so she was put in the river post-mortem. She was definitely in the water for several days, possibly a week or more. She was probably thrown in upstream some place.”
I nodded at her. “Oh, I am quite sure she wasn’t killed here.” I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked upstream, toward the construction site and the cold, black ribbon of water that ran beside it. Where had she come from? I said:
“There aren’t that many places you can get access to the river up there. At the moment, I can’t think of any.” I shrugged one-shouldered. The drizzle trickled in through my hair and down my neck. “A corpse, hundred and ten, hundred and twenty pounds, is very hard to move around, even in dry conditions. What have we got up there? Industrial lots, fenced off from the road on one side and from the river on the other. It was raining. Assuming our killer could somehow manage the almost impossible feat of getting the body over those two fences, he now has to maneuver it through wet, slippery, overgrown undergrowth to be able to drop it into the river…”
Dehan was watching me and nodding slowly. She added, “Not only that, he must have weighted her down, too. Corpses float for a long time before they finally sink. If she was in the water for a week, that means she was weighted down until the current finally broke her free and dragged her here.”
I grunted. “That’s quite an achievement. All that without getting noticed, picked up on CCTV or without setting off any alarms.” I took a deep breath and sucked my teeth. “What else have we got up there, Dehan?”
“Westchester Avenue bridge. But that’s fenced off too, and there would be a lot of traffic. The risk of being seen and reported would be very high.”
“After that, it’s the railway and Starlight Park, by the depot on East 177th. But by then, the river is narrow and shallow.” I shook my head. He had to dump her at, or south of, Starlight Park. And I can’t, for the life of me, think of a place between there and here where he might have done that without having to get through chain-link fences and dense undergrowth while carrying or dragging a hundred weight of dead body.” I looked at her, wiped the drizzle from my eyes and said, “If I was looking for a place to dump a body, within a short driving distance from the Watson Gleason Playground, I’d come here. What is it, less than a mile and a half?” I gestured up river. “Why go to all the trouble, and difficulty, of struggling with the body over fences and/or railway lines if he could have brought her here? If he dumps her here, within the week, instead of showing up here, she would be out in the East River and nobody would have any idea where it had come from.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. I began to squelch through the mud back toward the footpath. Dehan fell into step beside me. “That tells us something,” she said. “Actually, it tells us a couple of things: the killer is not experienced. He most likely panicked and went for what he saw, for some reason, as the simplest solution. It also tells us it wasn’t premeditated. He had not planned out beforehand how he was going to dispose of the body. So the killing was, possibly, an unpremeditated act of rage. Finally, and this is real important, the killer probably has access to the river through his place of work, somewhere between here and Starlight Park, and that was what made him go there, instead of the simpler option of coming here.”
We had come to the car and I stood, stamping my boots and nodding. “That makes a lot of sense, Dehan, though it raises the question, how did he get her from the playground to his presumed place of work? We need to get onto that right away, but before we do, I want to talk to Lenny about Celeste’s phone records. I would have expected them to be in the file.” I opened the car and we sat with the doors open, changing out of our rubber boots. I spoke over my shoulder as I laced up my shoes. “It seems pretty obvious to me that she called somebody, or somebody called her, Saturday night. And that somebody was the person who met her at the playground. That’s why she was standing, waiting at the corner: she had arranged to meet somebody, or somebody had arranged to meet her. So our first port of call is to see who she spoke to that night on the phone.”
We dumped our boots in the trunk. I climbed in behind the wheel and she got in the passenger seat and slammed the door. As I fired up the engine, she said, “Shouldn’t that be whom? ‘…see whom she spoke to that night on the phone.’”
I pulled away up Colgate Avenue. “Nobody likes a wiseass, Dehan.”
“I do,” she said. “I like you, and you’re a wiseass.”
“That’s different. Tell me, do you like Chad for this?”
She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “Yes and no.”
“OK. Explain.”
“On the ‘yes’ side, you have the fact that he was clearly much more attached to her than he wanted to admit. Maybe because he’s trying to play the ruthless New York attorney, maybe because he is trying to please his father, or maybe because he’s smart enough to realize that having feelings for her gives him a motive. Whatever his reasons, he had feelings for her.”
“It wasn’t all an act. He really is like that.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I agree. Don’t interrupt. Having said that he has feelings for her, I am willing to believe that those feelings run more to possessiveness, dependency and sexual ownership than tenderness, love and caring. So their relationship may well have had that toxicity that can make infidelity a very explosive, violent business. He has a lack of compassion, lack of empathy, his nerves are on edge all the time. Add to that his temper, the f
act that he becomes violent and abusive at the flip of a switch, and it is not hard to imagine a situation where he could lose control and kill her. Plus, her phone is missing and we have no phone records, so we only have his word for the fact that she didn’t call him, or he didn’t call her.”
She paused, holding her lower lip between her teeth. “On the other hand,” she said. “I believed him. I didn’t get the impression at any point that he was lying.”
I grunted. “Is that because he was telling the truth, or because he wasn’t lying?”
She raised an eyebrow at me and said, “What? Who’s being a wiseass now? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I laughed. “OK, let’s suppose that Sunday night I went out, scored a couple of grams of coke, got off my head and then went and shot up a club full of coke heads and dealers.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Now let’s suppose you are investigating that crime and you want to know everything that happened on Saturday, the day before, and you question me about Saturday. You don’t ask me any questions I need to lie about and so your radar doesn’t pick up any dishonest vibes from me. I wasn’t lying, per se, but I wasn’t telling the whole truth either.”
“So what are you saying, that if we had questioned him about Sunday night in more detail, he might have started lying?”
I made a face and shrugged. “I’m just saying that you may have had the feeling he wasn’t lying because he had nothing to lie about at that stage.”
She was quiet for a while. “Do you like him for it?”
“I don’t know yet.” And after a moment’s silence, I added, “I agree with you, it is easy to imagine the situation arising.”
We pulled into the parking lot at the 43rd and ducked in out of the rain. While Dehan started the laborious task of finding out what properties and businesses lay along the banks of the Bronx River between Starlight Park and Soundview Park, I went to look for Lenny. I found him at the coffee dispenser.
“Hey, Stone. What’s happening? I never got to congratulate you. Carmen Dehan, huh? I don’t think anybody saw that coming.”