by Andy Straka
“But you start killing people’s pets, that sends a very personal message.”
“Bodies of other pets have been found?” I asked.
“No. None.”
“Seems to me if you want to send a message, you make sure the bodies are found.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Our shuttle had arrived at the lot where rows of shiny new cars sat parked in the sun, somewhere among them our new ride.
“Hey,” I said to Darla. “You never did get that coffee you wanted.”
“Don’t matter,” she said, rising to depart as the van pulled to a stop and the driver swished open the doors. “I’m awake enough now.”
5
The ride in from the airport to Manhattan with Darla and Nicole was a silent affair, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
Through the rental van window I watched a teenager jog along Frederick Douglas Avenue. His spotless Air Nikes contradicted the rest of his outfit—greasy blue jean cutoffs, cheap yellow T-shirt, and a red and blue mesh baseball cap advertising some sort of lobster house over on Broadway. His hollow cheekbones and purposeful eyes made him look much older than he probably was. A couple of blocks from Morningside Park, he turned into an alleyway between 115th and 116th Streets, disappearing from view. Just another kid on a city street.
By now, the sun had risen high overhead. In the heat the city moved with an urgent cadence. Air conditioners roared, tempers flared, and cab drivers swerved across lanes. Darla calmly steered the van through traffic, as if she barely noticed. We had to leave the van in a garage a few blocks from Doctor Lonigan’s building. Except for the Porsche Darla had mentioned earlier, apparently working for Dr. Lonigan as an investigator didn’t come with parking privileges.
Grayland Tower blended snugly into the star-studded array of apartment buildings running along Central Park West. These places are the jewels in the crown, architecturally speaking, of Manhattan’s upper West side. Unless there is real trouble or they’re moonlighting as security guards, cops rarely, if ever, make it inside.
Dominick Watisi, whatever his predilection to intimidation, petnapping, and other threats might be, had built a first-class, swank-looking edifice to the good life. Having hoofed it with our bags, however, the ambiance was lost. The collared shirt I wore under my sport coat was ringed with sweat.
At least inside the air was cool and dry. Behind the security desk the aforementioned guards, one a Latino male and the other an African-American female, were decked out in expensive dark suits and sported little black ear buds. If things ever failed to be challenging enough at Grayland Tower, they looked capable of securing whole nations. They probably made three times what I did. I bet none of them drove old Ford pickups either.
“Morning, folks,” Darla said.
They nodded, nearly in unison.
“These are two private investigators from Virginia who are going to be working with me. We have an appointment with Dr. Lonigan.”
“Yes, she called and gave us the word,” The female guard said. “May we see ID please?”
Barnes showed hers, and Nicole and I produced our Virginia PI cards. The guard, whose name badge read simply MILLER, took our identification and examined it and us carefully. “Okay,” she finally said.
“Jayani,” Barnes said to her. “Mr. Pavlicek and his daughter, in addition to being private investigators, are also licensed falconers.”
“Is that right?” Jayani Miller, whose light brown eyes and sculpted hair served to accent her chiseled face, gave little indication of interest.
“Frank, Jayani is one of the witnesses I was telling you about who saw the person with the owl.”
I nodded.
“Maybe later, when you’re done with your shift, you could sit down and go over what you saw again with Frank in more detail,” she said to the guard.
“No problem,” Jayani said. “You turn up anything on the missing pets yet? Mrs. Halverson, the lady missing the puppy she thinks was stolen too, came by on her way out a little earlier. She was asking if we knew anything.”
Barnes’s eyes turned toward me for a second then back to the guard. “Let’s just say we’ve had, uh, an interesting morning.”
“Sure.”
“Are you on all day?” I asked.
She glanced at her partner. “I’m off at five.”
“Perfect. I’ll meet you down here then.”
The high speed elevator rose efficiently and with a minimum of sound. Obviously, a lot of money had been spent to renovate this grand structure. The mahogany wainscoting and other decorative touches had been skillfully preserved and blended in with the new.
“You want me to go with you to meet the guard, Dad?” Nicole asked.
“Let’s see how our meeting goes with the client and if we make any progress with Watisi. There might be other things to do.”
“Okay.” She turned to Darla. “Who’s the puppy lady?”
Darla twisted her mouth. “Name is Veronica Halverson. She’s the ex-wife of some big oil company executive. She has two grown poodles too, but they’re both fine. She’s watching her grandchildren for part of the summer and the puppy was for them.”
“She find feathers or fur too?”
“Uh-uh. Nothing. She’s fully on board with the owl theory though. The people I’ve talked to in the building so far all seem to be, now that it’s been in the paper and everything.”
“Who is the other person who found a feather?”
“Gwen Farley, Apartment 12D. Lost her cat too. But I haven’t had a chance to talk with her yet. I’ll go over the list with you guys later. Besides Watisi, there’s enough to keep you busy.”
“What about neighboring buildings? There may be more witnesses who saw the guy with the owl.”
“Why don’t we take it one step at a time,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of apartments out there.”
At the seventeenth floor, the elevator doors opened on a carpeted hallway. Only two sets of doors were visible on either side of the hall, with another pair of doors at each end, meaning the apartments must all have been quite large. Sparkling crystal fixtures overhead lit the way.
“How many apartments per floor?” I asked.
“Most have four or five, not including the penthouse, which was supposedly bought by some Russian tycoon who hasn’t even moved in yet.”
The soft thud of a door bouncing against a wall came from the other end of the hall.
“There you are.”
The voice belonged to a tall woman wearing blue jeans, a sweatshirt and running shoes. Strikingly thin, her long dark hair was tucked attractively beneath a baseball cap. She stood propping the door open with her hip while she balanced a paint can and roller in her hands.
“Dr. Lonigan,” Darla said under her breath.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just doing some base work on a canvas in the living room and thought I’d open the door for some air.”
Darla made a beeline in her direction. I followed with Nicole. Lonigan smiled and set the paint brush down in a tray on the floor just inside the door.
She was younger than I’d expected. I guessed mid-thirties. Her eyes were nearly as dark as her hair and although she was thin, her bare arms were ribboned with muscle. I’d been imagining some grim-looking academic type who took everything in life so seriously that her face had begun to contract into a severe scowl. Instead, her grin radiated a hint of mischief. I guessed her young patients loved this about her.
“You must be Frank,” she said, extending her slender fingers to shake my hand. “And this must be your daughter Nicole, right?”
“Yes,” Nicole said as they too shook hands.
“Well, come on in. The place is a little turned upside down right now with some of my projects, but I’m sure we can find a spot for us all to sit.”
She led us into the foyer, where an oblong table coated in black lacquer supported a large glass vase of orange and yellow daylilies. To the right, a doorway offered en
trance to the kitchen where a cool tile floor and granite countertops predominated. The air in the apartment was permeated by that faint new house smell you get with extensive renovations.
The significance of Lonigan’s cat in her life became obvious from the two large framed black and white photos in the entryway. There was also a snapshot of the cat in a frame on the end of the kitchen counter that I could see through the door.
Lonigan’s taste in décor tended toward the eclectic, some modern mixed with old. It said, but didn’t scream expensive. Her projects apparently included not only her painting but refinishing what looked like a valuable antique sideboard stationed in another side hallway between the kitchen and the dining room.
But all that paled in comparison to what we encountered as we entered the heart of the apartment, a high-ceilinged great room with huge plate glass windows looking out on the city and the park below.
Three large easels stood in front of the windows. Canvases were scattered in a semi-organized fashion throughout the room. Watercolors. Oils. Portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes.
“Dr. Lonigan’s an artist too,” Darla said. “I guess I should have mentioned that.”
“Rank amateur,” Lonigan said. “But I do love it. Keeps me sane when I’m not at the hospital.”
“This is very good,” Nicole said, stepping right up to the work in progress on the largest of the easels. It was an impressionistic rendering of the view from the windows.
“Are you interested in art?” Dr. Lonigan moved to stand alongside her.
“Some. I’m into computers mostly. But I took an art history class my sophomore year at UVA, and I really liked it.”
“Surrealism and Magic Realism and all that.”
“Twentieth century, yes. But we also spent a lot of time on ancient art and older forms.”
“Wonderful. Good for you.”
“Nicole’s also a licensed investigator,” I said, not wanting to interrupt a discussion about art but figuring we had higher priorities at the moment.
“Of course.” Dr. Lonigan turned to Darla. “So you had some difficulty getting together at the airport?”
“Not quite,” Darla said. “A lot worse than that, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?”
An air conditioner rumbled on somewhere and a blanket of cool air floated down on us from vents in the high ceiling above.
“Should we get down to business then?” Darla asked.
“Absolutely,” our hostess said. The long white sectional in the center of the room seemed like the most obvious place to sit. We took seats on the leather sofa with the exception of Dr. Lonigan, who perched comfortably on an artist’s stool before us. She wore open-toed sandals, and her toenails were painted gold. “Please. Tell me what happened.”
Darla laid it out for her. She told her all about the van and the knife and the threat with the note. The doctor seemed frozen to her stool. She drank in every word without moving a muscle until Darla was finished.
“I’m almost too stunned to respond. First they kill our pets, now more threats. What’s going on here?”
“Somebody obviously doesn’t want us poking into this situation,” Darla said.
“What did the police say?”
“We haven’t told them about the threat yet. They’re treating the incident at the airport as a robbery with a pissed-off thief.”
Lonigan turned to me. “I hope this isn’t more than you bargained for, Mr. Pavlicek.”
“It’s got my attention, that’s for sure.”
“What do you think about the situation?”
“I haven’t seen enough yet to form an opinion one way or another,” I said.
She searched my face for a moment. “Of course.”
“Last night’s surveillance in the park came up empty,” Darla added.
“Question,” I said. “What does the building security video show about the nights the pets disappeared?”
“That’s easy,” Darla said. “I asked to see the saved feeds and checked all of the dates when the pets were taken and when the witnesses reported seeing the guy with the owl. The tapes show nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing? Where’s the video kept?”
“There’s a computer network housed in the basement that helps monitor all the systems in the building. One of the servers is designated to hold the video. It gets archived to external storage once a week. The room is locked up tight. Only the building super and the guards have access.”
“Okay,” I said. “We can check that out later. I’m on board that something major is happening here, especially after seeing the knife. But from everything you folks have told me so far, I don’t think we can come to any firm conclusions yet about what may or may not have happened to Groucho.”
“Really.” Lonigan said. “Why is that?”
“We don’t even really know for certain your cat is dead yet.”
“But he’s gone, isn’t he?” She seemed to take offense at my contradicting her basic assumption. “He didn’t just hop on the elevator, walk out the front door, and catch a cab cross town. And I found the fur and the feather. Someone must have taken him.”
“Tell us more about that, about how Groucho went missing and how you found the remains.”
She smoothed out a wrinkle in her jeans. “All right. He went missing last Friday night. I’d been working late at the hospital. I had a meeting, then a couple of difficult in-patient cases to follow up on.”
“What time did you get home?”
“It was after eleven.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Sure. The guards downstairs.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, I rode the elevator up as usual. There was no one else around since it was so late. I unlocked my door and came into the foyer, expecting …” She paused for a moment and raised her hand to her mouth, then put it back down. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Take your time.”
She sniffled and drew in a deep breath before going on. “Expecting … expecting to see Groucho greet me at the door like always. He always did. I’d usually scoop him up and rub his belly, and we’d go into the kitchen. I’d let him sit up on the counter while I read the mail.”
“But not that night,” I said.
“No,” she said. “He wasn’t there at the door.”
“Had that ever happened before?”
“A few times. I’d usually find him curled up on my bed or in the den. But when I checked through the apartment … “ Her hand shot to her mouth again for a moment. “He was gone.”
“Any sign of a forced entry, broken lock, anything like that?”
She shook her head. “That’s why I thought of Watisi. He would have access to all the apartments in the building. He still owns the overall property and his company hires the security.”
“Okay. Had your cat, Groucho I mean, been outdoors much before?”
She thought for a moment. “Not really,” she said. “Not here in the city anyway. I took him with me once or twice on a picnic in the park, but that didn’t work out because he liked to run off. A couple times a year, for the holidays, mostly, Groucho and I would head up to Vermont where my parents have a place. We always let him outside there and he was fine. I think he quickly got used to it.”
“Cats are natural hunters,” I said.
“Just like owls,” she said.
“Tell me about the remains you found.”
“I was coming back in from jogging the night after Groucho disappeared. I was walking up the sidewalk in front of the building when I thought I noticed something strange in the gutter by the curb.”
“Was it hard to spot?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it really obvious? Were you looking for something like that?”
“No, I wasn’t looking for something like that at all. And yes, it was right out there in plain view. The feather was sticking up at an angle. It was wedged into a grate.”
“What time of day was this?”
“It was late again, but not that late. It wasn’t quite dark yet. I’d say about 8:45 pm.”
“But you didn’t notice the feather or the fur when you left the building to go jogging?”
“No, I didn’t, but I was in a hurry to get my run in. They could’ve been there. Even though they were right out in the open, most people would’ve probably passed them by. Later, when the streetlights had come on, the color of the fur caught my eye.”
“Have you or anyone else found any more substantial remains from your cat or from any of the other missing pets?”
“Well … no.”
“I understand you sent some material off to a lab. Do still have any of the evidence you discovered?”
“I do. I have it locked up in my study.”
“May we see it?”
“Of course.”
She stood abruptly and disappeared down a back hall. She returned carrying a couple of sealed clear plastic bags.
“Here,” she said, handing them both to me. “Have a look for yourself.”
Inside one bag was a moderate-sized feather. I could readily believe, even at first glance, that it might have come from an owl. Inside the other was something far less definite. An amorphous tuft of fur, basically.
“And you feel certain this fur came from your cat?” I said.
“Yes. You see the swirling streaks of white running through the brown? That fur came from Groucho, I’m sure of it.”
I said nothing. I noticed the pattern she had described but wasn’t convinced that the fur might not have come from any number of similarly colored animals.
As if reading my mind, Darla added, “Like I told you, it’ll be at least a couple of months before we get back any kind of DNA analysis.”
“A couple more questions, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Of course,” Lonigan said.
“Did you see any other evidence, such as splattered blood, where you found the remains?”
“No. But I do have this.” Dr. Lonigan reached behind her produced another baggie that had been sitting on a bookshelf. There was no mistaking what it contained. A cat’s collar, gold leather with a chrome buckle.