by Blake Banner
I nodded. “It’s very good, Dehan. It’ll work, but before we get started, let me ask you a couple of questions.”
“Sure, what?”
“One, why are you convinced it wasn’t Cyril?”
She flopped back in her chair and took a deep breath. “I guess,” she said after a moment, “his behavior. He had the whole plan set out, to move, leave his job, go to Europe… And then when Sue was killed, he just freaked and took his own life. That to me isn’t consistent with a man who has killed her, however crazy he is.” She paused, thinking. “You know? If he’d killed her in a fit of rage, I could understand the remorse and then suicide. But the careful planning followed by his chaotic behavior, culminating in his suicide. It doesn’t wash.” She shrugged again. “Also, Stone, his impotence. He couldn’t have raped her.”
I frowned. “But he could have consensual sex with her?”
“I think so. After the visits to Xara, if she was nice to him, I think so.” For a moment she looked exasperated. “But even if it was him, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, how would you ever prove it? Unless you go and tear down the East 2nd Casino Hotel and dig up the foundations, you will never have any forensic evidence.”
“OK, fair point. Now, last question, what if we prove everything we suspect Fernando and Giorgio of, but we can’t make Sue’s murder stick?”
“It’ll stick.”
“What if they didn’t do it?”
She was shaking her head. “They did and it will stick. If they didn’t, then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
I nodded. “OK.”
She watched me a moment. “We onboard? You with me?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s go for it.”
Half an hour with the files from the Texas, New Mexico and Arizona cases showed us that they were, indeed, in some respects, linked. They were linked in that they showed a pattern of behavior, and in that they suggested strongly that Fernando Martinez was involved in the drugs trade. How deeply he was involved was not clear, but each case involved the consumption of cocaine in a brothel where he later went on to beat up a prostitute. What was perhaps more important, however, was that all the prostitutes fit the same general description as Sue Benedict and Melanie. After forty-five minutes, Dehan closed the Texas file and looked at me.
“I’m ready to go. How do you want to do it? You go get Giorgio and I get Fernando? Or we go get one and then get the other?”
I was thinking about it when the internal phone rang. Dehan picked up the receiver, saying to me, “I say we bring Giorgio in first…” then, into the phone, “Yeah, Dehan…” Her face went rigid. “OK. We’re on our way.” She hung up and stood.
“What is it?”
When she answered, it was almost a growl. “Fernando. The son of a bitch just got himself murdered.”
I swore quietly under my breath and followed her out, pulling on my coat.
The heavy sky had started to snow thick, slow flakes that were beginning to settle and drift. We made our way across the slippery blacktop to the car at a half-run and climbed in. I reversed out carefully and pulled onto Storey Avenue, headed west, with the wipers going, spreading the snow across the windshield in a thick sludge. It was not yet five o’clock, but it was already growing dark and the lights of the slow-moving traffic were a haze through the smeared flakes. I turned onto Soundview and Dehan started to talk.
“It was called in by his downstairs neighbor when he noticed a stain on the ceiling that had started to drip. A patrol car turned up and the uniforms broke into the apartment, found him dead on the living room floor. That’s all we have for now.”
It was less than half a mile’s drive and we got there in a couple of minutes. There were two patrol cars parked outside and the uniforms were putting up tape. I did a U-turn, got some honks from cold, angry drivers and parked behind one of the patrols. Gunter was at the door.
“Sergeant?”
“Hi, Detective. He’s on the top floor. ME and Crime Scene ain’t got here yet but they’re on the way. It’s not nice up there.”
“OK, thanks. Canvas the neighbors, will you? Get statements. Who was watching the house?”
“Detectives Warren and Groves.” He pointed to a burgundy Corolla a couple of cars down. “They’s parked just down there, in the Toyota.”
I followed the direction he was pointing and saw Groves hauling his bulk out of the driver’s seat and Warren’s head bobbing over the roof on the passenger’s side. We crunched through the snow to meet them. Groves was already shaking his bald head and spreading his hands. “I’m sorry, Stone, we was told to watch for him comin’ out, not who was goin in. Either way…” He looked back at Warren, tall in a coat that looked too small for him, stamping his feet and billowing clouds of condensation as flakes of snow settled on his mass of curly hair. He said, “Just to pass the time, we made a list of everybody who went in and out. You gotta do somethin’ on a night like this, right? And we got tired of playing eye-spy.”
Dehan said, “You guys are the best. You got the list?”
Groves’ mouth sagged. “Who are you? And what did you do with Carmen Dehan?” He turned his gape on his partner. “You hear that, Warren? We’re the best! Where’s the list?”
“Yeah, see, then we got to making paper airplanes…”
They both laughed raucously, then Warren handed over a crumpled piece of paper. Dehan took it. Her shoulders were hunched and her cheeks looked very pink. Warren was saying, “You got quite a bit of coming and going, especially in the last hour. Some people I deduced lived in the block. You know? You see them come in, then a minute later a light comes on, or a drape gets closed, you figure, OK, fat guy with the baseball cap lives on the first floor.” He pointed at the list with a gloved finger. “So I made a note, see? Entered 3:15, drapes closed, yadda yadda. Then the babe comes in at 4:03, 4:20 she goes out and comes back at 4:40 with groceries. She lives here. What apartment? I don’t know. So yous can work through the list like that. Can we go home now?”
I nodded. “Nice work. Above and beyond. Thanks.”
They both shook their heads and walked away, talking in stage whispers. “They done something to Stone, and Dehan. It’s gotta be body-snatchers, or clones…”
Dehan followed them with a baleful glare. “See? That’s why I don’t talk to them. Let’s go look at the scene.”
I climbed the stairs with Dehan just behind me and cold, damp air clinging to my ankles. We reached the top landing and found the door ajar, with yellow tape strung across it. I ducked under the tape and nudged the door open. It was, as Sergeant Gunter had said, not nice.
He was on the floor, lying on his back. His hands were clenched into fists at shoulder height. His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, and his mouth was contracted into an horrific grin. He didn’t have a lot to grin about. He’d been gutted like a fish, from his pubic bone to his solar plexus, and the wound was sagging open.
Dehan stood beside me and swore softly. Then she said, “His guts. They are all on the inside.”
I nodded, “And there isn’t much bleeding. Remember the neighbor called it in because there was blood leaking through the ceiling? That’s not the wound that killed him. The wound that killed him’s in his back. This wound was inflicted once he was lying down. But notice the position of his arms?”
“Yeah, it’s like his back went into spasm.”
“I’m betting Frank’s going to find a stab wound in his back, probably to the heart.”
I turned back to the door and examined the lock. There were no scratches, no signs of tampering. Dehan said, “Anything?”
“No.”
“So he lets his killer in and turns his back on him. He knew him, and he wasn’t scared of him.”
I returned to the room and took a moment to assimilate the scene. Outside a siren wailed. “The drapes are open, so it was probably still daylight. He’s facing the door. What is he? Four, five paces from it? He has one chair over by the window and
the sofa on his left, and they are both behind him. He’s kind of level with this nearest chair, right?” She nodded. I pointed at a collection of bottles and glasses on a small sideboard on the left, beside the TV. “The drinks are over there. The kitchen is through that door over there.” I pointed to a door on the far right. “I guess the bathroom and the bedroom are down there too. So, what’s left?” I looked at her. “What’s over here? What was he doing? Where was he going? He’s standing in the middle of the floor, facing the door. There is nothing over here and his killer is behind him. What’s he doing?”
Dehan studied him a while, visualizing the scene. “Huh,” she said at last. “He doesn’t look like he was fleeing: he wasn’t running.” She gave her head a little jerk. “There were two people? He was talking to one of them while the other stabbed him? Or somebody rang at the bell? Pizza?”
“Maybe. That position of his hands, though. It’s weird. If he was walking to the door…” I made a short walk to demonstrate. “Your hands hang down by your side, don’t they? You get stabbed in the back, your shoulder blades contract, but your hands are down. His are up, like a begging dog.”
“Two men. He was warding off an attack from the front, and got stuck from behind…”
“Hmm… Maybe.”
The tramp of feet on the stairs told us that Frank had arrived with the Crime Scene team. We turned to greet them. Frank nodded at us as they bustled through the door with their equipment, the CS guys in their weird, white, plastic suits. There were a couple of subdued, “Detectives,” but mostly they just got to work. Frank hunkered down beside Fernando’s body and pulled on his latex gloves. A camera started to click and flash. I took a couple of steps nearer, with Dehan beside me. Frank spoke without looking up.
“Don’t come any closer. What do you want?”
“His right hand.”
“You want his right hand? Carmen, what is wrong with your husband?”
“No.” I pointed. “Look at it, the index finger, there is a smear of blood.”
He examined it with care for a moment. “There doesn’t seem to be a cut. I’ll have a closer look back at the lab.”
“Could be the killer’s DNA.”
“You are not only stating the obvious, John, you’re interfering with my work. Haven’t you got something useful to do? Somewhere else? Come and see me at the lab later and I can give you answers.”
I ignored him and stood a moment with my hands imitating Fernando’s, pulling in my shoulder blades as though my back had gone into spasm. Then I relaxed my back and watched where my hands went. Dehan was watching me curiously. I turned to her and maneuvered her around so she was standing between me and the door. Then I cupped her cheeks in my hands, like I was about to kiss her.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Not that this isn’t nice, Stone, but a little inappropriate, don’t you think?”
“As I kiss you, you stab me in the back.”
I heard Frank snort behind me. “The cry of men down the ages.”
I leaned in and felt Dehan’s fist thump my back, right over my heart. I contracted my shoulder blades and watched my hands wind up in the same position as Fernando’s.
Dehan said, “Holy cow.”
I turned to look down at him. “He was kissing whoever killed him, and the blood on his hand is from his killer’s face.”
Frank had stood and was staring at me. “Very ingenious, Stone, but you’ll understand that we are not going to turn him over here to inspect his back; not in his present condition. I’ll check him when I get him to my lab, and that’s where I’ll determine cause of death. Though I do tend to agree with you, he was already dead when he was gutted. Let’s get him into a body bag.” This last was directed at the guys from the meat wagon.
Dehan and I went through the apartment, examined his bedroom, the kitchen and the bathroom, but found nothing of any interest, and after fifteen minutes, we went back down to the street, where snow was beginning to fall heavily and a slow, steady stream of headlamps was moving along the avenue: people going home. I shoved my hands deep in my pockets. Dehan stood next to me and leaned on my arm, slapping her hands, stamping her feet and billowing condensation.
“Stone,” she said, and looked up into my face, “I think Fernando was kissing Giorgio when he was killed…”
Fifteen
We sat in the car with the world slowly disappearing behind the wall of snow accumulating on the windshield, looking at Warren’s list. It didn’t tell us much. Most of the people coming and going were people who lived in the apartments. There were a few women, and two or three men described as possibly Latino, middle aged and of medium build, who could have been Giorgio. But with the cold and the snow, everybody was dressed up in coats, hoods and scarves, which made precise identification almost impossible.
I switched on the wipers. They churned away the snow and diffuse lights bathed the cab and gave Dehan’s face a strange, ghostly luminosity. She was still studying the list, but after a moment sighed and dropped it on her lap.
I said, “Santos and Clay were sitting on Giorgio. If he had left the house, they would have seen it and followed.”
“If they had seen it. In this weather, it’s not so hard to get away unseen over a back yard fence in the dark.”
“Don’t forget, it was still light when he was killed.” I hit the ignition. “Let’s go talk to them anyway.”
I did a slow U-turn and we started moving south toward Patterson Avenue. Dehan shrugged and narrowed her eyes in exasperation. “Who else has a motive?”
“What exactly would Giorgio’s motive be?”
“You’d just got through telling him you knew about Fernando’s taste for beating up women while Giorgio watched. He knows if we start looking into that, Fernando becomes a suspect in Sue’s murder, and with the testimony of the hookers he’s beaten up, Giorgio becomes an accomplice. He’s looking at a potential life sentence if we make Fernando confess.”
“Except that we have the apparently insurmountable problem of the DNA. And whatever our theory might be, A, Giorgio doesn’t know about it and B, we have zilch evidence to back it up.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You looked and sounded convincing. You rattled his cage and he panicked. I’m telling you, Stone, they were lovers and they were involved in some weird-ass sexual relationship where they got their kicks seducing and beating up women. Sue frustrated them because she flirted but would not submit. Her getting close to Cyril was the last straw and Fernando lost it. Cyril’s semen, whether it was planted or the result of having sex, was a godsend to them because it let them off the hook. But it made Cyril panic and ultimately take his own life.”
I was quiet for a while. We turned into Patterson. It was dark and still, with the dim light from the streetlamps barely filtering through the bare, black branches of the trees that fringed the road. What light there was reflected a sickly yellow off the drifting snow and the wet strips of blacktop. I sighed as we crawled toward Taylor Avenue.
“Well, whoever killed Fernando seems to have killed any chance we had of getting a confession out of Giorgio, I’ll grant you that much. Playing them against each other was the last move we had, unless we get a hit from the blood on Fernando’s hand.”
I pulled up at the corner, killed the engine and frowned at her. “It could have been Tony. It could have been a supplier. It could have been a jealous husband—or wife!”
She held my eye. “It could have been Santa Claus with an early delivery, but it wasn’t. It was Giorgio.”
I smiled. “You know the nicest thing about being absolutely certain of something.”
“I’m absolutely certain you’re going to tell me.”
“You are that much more likely to get surprises.”
“Tee hee. Can we talk to Santos and Clay now?”
We climbed out and heard the whine of a window sliding down across the road. We crunched through the snow and saw Clay looking out at us. “Wa’s happenin’ Stone, Dehan? Heard
your other bird got iced.”
Dehan answered. “Do you study that kind of dialogue at hard-ass school?” She turned to me. “His dad’s a senator and he graduated from Harvard, you know that, right?” He did some high-pitched wheezing and she asked, “Has there been any movement here? Has he left the house?”
“No, man. We would’a followed him, right? We got visual on the front door and on the back yard. There ain’t no way he can git out without bein’ seen.” He scowled then. “He in there with a nice fire an’ a bottle of wine, ain’t it? Only a dumb-ass gonna be out on a night like this.”
I smiled. “What does that make us?”
“Four dumb-asses. The Dumb-Ass Club.”
“I guess you’re right. Thanks, Clay.”
I was about to walk away when he called me back. “Hey, Stone, he had a woman in there since about five. She come out of the house opposite, couple of doors down.” He leered. “She be a better witness than us, I reckon.”
“Happen you’re right, Clay. Let’s find out.”
“Yeah, now git outta my window, man. You makin’ me cold.”
We crunched back across the road to Giorgio’s house. The drapes were closed but I could see light filtering around the edges. We climbed the steps to his porch and I began to hear music. It sounded like jazz. It could have been Miles. Dehan rang on the bell, then knocked on the wood.
The door opened and Giorgio stood looking at us with a glass of wine in his hand. He had something on his face that wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a smile, and one eyebrow arched.
“Detectives. I am wondering, is it against the law to tell a detective he’s a pain in the ass?”
“Have you left your house this afternoon, Mr. Gonzalez?”
“In this weather? What for?”
Dehan snapped, “Can you just answer the question, Mr. Gonzalez?”
“No! I have not left the house.”
“Is there anybody that can confirm that?”
He laughed. “Sure.” He turned his head to look back into the house. “Sandy, honey, have I left the house this afternoon?”