“I don’t think this is going to take very long,” she said.
Famous last words.
I found myself following Christine’s minivan across the Bronx and into Mount Vernon to meet Detective Andre Minor, a guy who looked so much like a young Sidney Poitier—the Sidney Poitier from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—that I wondered why it hadn’t hit me before when I had seen him at Chick’s funeral.
Maybe I am middle-aged.
He was waiting on the steps of the decrepit tenement, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a beautifully tailored trench coat. His sartorial sense put Crawford’s colleagues to shame; most of them wore ties that were too short and shirts that had seen better days.
“Mrs. Morin?” he asked, looking at me.
I pointed at Christine. “That would be her.”
He looked at me, waiting for an explanation of whom I was and why I had accompanied Christine. I left it at “friend of the family.”
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” he said to Christine. He motioned toward the front door of the building. “Shall we?”
Sexy with manners, too. That was a winning combination. We followed him inside, and I took mental inventory of all of my single friends, noticing that Detective Minor was not wearing a wedding ring and wondering which frustrated colleague I could set him up with and how. I knew Joanne Larkin was single, but she just wasn’t deserving enough. Anyway, Minor looked like he wouldn’t appreciate the witty insouciance of Joanne’s cat sweater collection. As we made the trek up to Chick’s apartment, my mind was on fix-ups rather than what possibly awaited us behind his dented door.
Chick’s apartment looked pretty much as we had left it a few weeks earlier. The bed that had contained the big stash had been slashed open, the springs visible. The dirty comforter that had once been laid across it was on the floor; I picked it up, folded it, and placed it at the end of the bed. Water dripped in the sink, but that was a problem we weren’t going to solve in this neglected building. The three of us stood, listening to the dripping of the faucet and the wind rattling against the single thin pane of glass in the solitary window at the end of the apartment, right next to where Chick had taken his last breath. The blood had been wiped away, unsurprisingly; if the Mount Vernon police hadn’t done that, Crawford probably had, making sure Christine never saw the collateral damage from her brother’s suicide, the blood that had leaked from his brain while his organs shut down after ingesting so many opioids.
Detective Minor stripped away the remaining crime scene tape and then handed Christine the keys to the place. “Here you go,” he said. “They’re all yours.”
I could tell she was trying not to cry. This was the first time she had been in the apartment, and although I had tried to warn her earlier what it looked like, nothing prepared her for the dark, depressing space where her brother had spent his last weeks. I wondered if she still thought that everything about Chick’s reappearance was completely normal. His living situation—with that much money in his possession—certainly didn’t speak to someone who was “normal” on any spectrum.
Detective Minor made a discreet exit, leaving Christine and me to figure out what was in the apartment and what she might possibly want. I looked in the one closet and found that it held a suitcase and a few clothing items. The bright red pants that Chick had worn to my house for the birthday party were hanging neatly on a trouser hanger, a sharp crease evident in the legs. A quick review of the kitchen cupboards revealed only one plate and a water glass. There was no silverware, aside from a bent fork. The bathroom had few toiletries, the bare minimum of supplies one would need: deodorant, shaving items, a bottle of shampoo.
Christine had come prepared with a few large black plastic bags; she handed me one and asked that I throw everything from the bathroom into it, a task that took me all of thirty seconds. I went back out into the one room that served as living room, dining room, office, and bedroom and helped her put the clothes that didn’t fit in the suitcase into the rest of the bags she had brought. She was taking her time, shaking everything out and gazing at it longingly: a checkered shirt that had metal snap buttons, a cardigan sweater that had seen better days. I pulled the red pants off the hanger and handed them to her; she seemed to want to handle every garment, as if searching for the solution to the mystery that was Chick.
She took the pants from me. “He was wearing these at the party.”
I nodded, careful not to make a judgment about the vivid hue of the pants and how ridiculous they had looked on a stocky man. She shook them out, just as she had every other piece of clothing, and then laid them on the bed to fold them neatly. I didn’t understand why she was taking such care; the items were ending up in plastic garbage bags, but it was some kind of ritual that she needed to perform, and I certainly wasn’t going to get in the way of that.
I turned and looked out the window to see what the view might be from a fifth-floor walk-up in a bad part of town. Just as I expected, it was a view that was even more depressing than the interior of the apartment in which I was standing. I turned back around and looked at Christine, still standing by the bed but now holding a slim envelope. She looked at me, her eyes wide.
“What is it?” I asked. Something told me that the plot, as they say, was about to thicken.
She held it out toward me, but with the distance between us, I couldn’t see what was written on the front even though it was scrawled in thick, dark marker.
“Now do you believe he committed suicide?” she asked.
I came closer, the words coming into sharp focus.
Open this in the event of my death.
Twenty-Seven
Ladies and gentlemen, we had ourselves a crime scene.
Although I didn’t think that finding an envelope that implored its finder to open it in the event of the writer’s death was an indication of murder, Christine seemed to think it was. I tried to gently say that perhaps this was suicide note #1 or suicide note #2, depending on how you viewed the original suicide note in the chain of events. For all I knew, it was a xeroxed copy of the original suicide note, the first one so damaged by vomit splatter and stain that nobody could really decipher what Chick had been thinking when he wrote it.
Christine was furious at me for not immediately jumping on the bandwagon, so I decided that staying silent until I could make a hasty getaway would be my best course of action.
Detective Minor smelled as good as he looked, I had come to discover. He was comforting a distraught Christine, wailing in a corner of the kitchen, the note having been removed from her hands and now in a Ziploc bag in Minor’s trench coat pocket. Turns out he had been waiting for us to exit the building, not sure how safe it was to leave two unarmed women to roam the streets of the neighborhood with dusk approaching, and had come back to tell us that he was still in the vicinity just after we had discovered the note, not giving us enough time to read it or form any opinion on the fact that written on its yellowed pages was an indictment of one Sassy Du Pris, someone Chick felt sure was going to take his life someday. Minor told us this after extracting the note carefully from its worn envelope.
All I could think was oh, jeez, over and over, when I wasn’t thinking about what Crawford would have to say about this once he arrived. Minor had called him, since he was involved with both me and Christine in some way and the only person Minor would trust to get us out of there without touching anything further.
Christine’s sobs turned into sniffles about five minutes before Crawford joined us.
When he walked through the door, I looked at him and said, “Fancy meeting you here.”
He stiffened a little, and I could tell he didn’t think it was a time to joke. Maybe it wasn’t, but this situation was getting more surreal by the day, and all I had left in my coping arsenal was a good dose of black humor. Really—was there anything left to say that hadn’t been said on the subject of Chick Stepkowski, supposed suicide and now possible murder victim, if his sister’s conviction was any
indication of that fact? I guess so, and we were going to have to figure out what that was. In the back of my mind, I thought of how devastated Mac McVeigh was going to be if he found out that he might have been wrong a second time in as many years. Poor guy would leave town and no forwarding address.
Crawford got a rundown from Minor on what was happening. The detective was suitably circumspect, which made me love him even more, good taste and fabulous cologne notwithstanding. “Could be nothing. Could be something.”
Crawford nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. “I hear you.”
God knows what that meant.
Christine was sitting on the bed, clearly exhausted by our discovery. “She killed him. She killed him when he wouldn’t tell her where the money was or how to find it. She killed him just like she tried to that time she burned the house down.”
“This Sassy person?” Minor asked.
Crawford blanched at the utterance of her name. “Yes.”
“So the relationship ended on bad terms?” Minor asked.
“You could say that,” Crawford answered.
“So how do I find this Sassy person?”
Crawford crossed over to the kitchen and looked out the window; I wasn’t sure what he was looking for unless it was Sassy and her whirlwind of terror. “Nobody knows. I ran her through DMV and came up short.”
He did? He was more worried than I thought.
“I checked a few other databases, and there’s no record of her anywhere beyond her stint in a minimum-security prison in Virginia about ten years back.”
Right around the time Chick left. I wondered if there was a connection there and voiced it aloud.
“They were already divorced,” Christine said.
“What was she in for?” I asked, wondering why no one else was curious about the timing.
“B&E,” Crawford said, a little dismissively. I pressed him for some more information. “Her own family had her arrested for breaking and entering a Sans-a-Flush facility near Roanoke.”
“Any idea what she was looking for?” Minor asked. At least someone was interested besides me.
Crawford shrugged. “No idea. Maybe money? Sassy never did seem to have enough money to satisfy her. She always thought she deserved more.” He looked at Christine. “Does that seem to cover it?”
“That’s putting it nicely,” she said.
That put a different spin on things. That lump sum of money had always been baffling, so to know that Sassy was looking for it and hell-bent on finding it did lend a little credence to Christine’s assertion that Chick had been murdered. She said aloud what I and anyone else with half a brain cell had to be thinking. “She killed Chick for the money. When he wouldn’t tell her where it was or what he had done with it, she killed him.”
I repeated what I told Crawford about the woman I saw at the funeral, standing apart from the rest of the mourners at the cemetery. “Big, blond, slutty looking,” I said.
Crawford and Christine answered in unison. “That’s her.”
Minor’s mind was elsewhere. “Where did the quarter mil come from?”
I waited to see how Christine explained this one. She was always protesting how successful Chick had been, King of the Porta-Potties and all, but obviously, there was more to this story. She stayed true to form, though, and carried on with her story about Chick’s success in a business no one else wanted to touch.
Minor arched an eyebrow. “With all due respect, Mrs. Morin—”
She held up a hand. “I know. It’s a lot of money. My brother wasn’t the most traditional character in the world, but he wasn’t bad. He wasn’t dishonest.”
I looked over at Crawford, who was dutifully studying the ground.
Christine caught the look and protested further. “Alison, he wasn’t. Chick was a good man, he just … he just,” she said, searching for the right words, “lost his way.” She looked at me, satisfied with that explanation.
Whatever she wanted to tell herself was fine with me. “Lost his way?” I asked incredulously. “More like beat it out of town.”
“That’s not true!” she said. “He just needed to find himself. He needed to get away from Sassy. He suffered after losing his job. Losing his wife. He needed a fresh start.”
Whatever. She could delude herself all she wanted, but the guy was a crackpot, and the fact that he had that much cash was suspicious. There was no way around it. I changed the subject, addressing my question to Minor. “Does anyone think it’s weird that you’ve been all over this apartment and yet we,” I said, pointing to myself and Christine, “find a note that indicts the crazy ex-wife of the deceased?”
Minor wore the same expression that Crawford usually did when I pointed out the obvious, bored disinterest. “Perhaps.”
“I mean, you seem pretty sharp, Detective Minor,” I said. “I can’t imagine that someone in your department, under your tutelage, would miss something so obvious.”
He could do nothing but agree.
The doubt cast, I looked at Minor. “Can I leave?” I asked. “I drove my own car.”
He thought about that. “I guess you can,” he said. “Where can I reach you if I have any further questions about this … situation?”
I gave him my extension at St. Thomas, my cell phone number, and our home number. Satisfied that he could reach me either day or night, I bid Christine good-bye, but I could see that our relationship had chilled slightly since the questioning about Chick and my obvious suspicion about his largesse. She wouldn’t look at me as I took my leave.
Crawford walked me to the stairwell. “You were a little hard on her in there.”
I arched an eyebrow in response.
“We all know that he was nuts, and that the origin of that money is suspicious, but she’s really grieving,” he said. “I don’t want to press her too hard right now.”
“So we’re supposed to lie to her and pretend everything is hunky-dory?”
His silence told me that we should even if his expression was ambivalent.
“Well, count me out, then,” I said. “I’m going to the hospital to see Max’s dad. I’m way overdue for a visit.”
He leaned down and gave me a kiss. “I’ll walk you out. It’s getting dark.”
I held up a hand. “I’m fine. My car is right in front. Stay with her,” I said, hooking a thumb in the direction of the apartment.
I made my way down the culinary minefield that was the stairwell in the building, the smell of curry still as strong as it was the first time I had been here. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I realized that while I had been waiting for Crawford to follow me, he had stayed behind; knowing that the suggestion had come from me didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
I got to the hospital a few minutes before visiting hours were to end, but it didn’t matter anyway. Marty Rayfield had died an hour before, and I never had a chance to say good-bye.
Twenty-Eight
I took my anger out on Crawford, which wasn’t fair, but I wasn’t thinking straight.
He walked in about an hour after I got home from the hospital. By the time I arrived, Max’s family was gone, and I wasn’t able to reach her on her cell. I had finally gotten through to Fred just a few minutes before Crawford came home, and he filled me in on what had happened. Seems that Marty had decided that he was well enough to go home and, despite Max’s best efforts at getting him back into bed, commenced putting his things together. Whether it was the disagreement with his daughter or something entirely unrelated, nobody knew, but he had suffered a massive stroke that had killed him instantly, all in front of Max. Fred said she was taking it about as well as could be expected, in that she was in bed and not wanting to talk to anyone. I couldn’t help feeling that if I hadn’t been so involved with Christine and the mystery involving her brother and a big wad of cash, I could have been there to help Max as she went through the most painful thing she had ever experienced.
I also couldn’t help feeling that
Max felt exactly the same way.
Different emotions kept coming to the fore, but my anger definitely made its presence known. Crawford could practically feel it in the air when he walked into the house, calling my name with a question in his tone that let me know that he knew I hadn’t been happy when we had last been together.
“I know,” he said before I could utter a word.
“You know what?”
“I know about Max’s father. I know that you didn’t get to see him. I know that if you hadn’t gone with Christine to Chick’s apartment, you would have been there for Max,” he said, taking off his jacket and draping it on the back of a kitchen chair. “I know about how annoying this whole situation is and how you didn’t plan on being so immersed in the life of my ex-wife and her family. I know that my kids can be a pain in the ass. I know that my shoes are giant and sometimes you trip over them. And I know that I’m messy and that sometimes I don’t replace the toilet paper,” he said, gravely even though that last admission was designed to lessen the blows of the other ones. “I know it all.”
I couldn’t stay mad at him after that litany of admissions, so I stood and let him take me in his arms, where I let out the sadness and anger that I had been holding in not only this night but since Christine had reappeared, bringing her wacky brothers along for the ride.
“Hey, did you like how Minor kept referring to Chick’s ex as ‘this Sassy person’?” he asked, doing a passable imitation of Minor’s deep voice. “I didn’t think it was a good time to tell him, and you, that her full name is Sassafras.”
I pulled back. “You’re making that up.”
“I wish I was,” he said. “Sassafras Tiffany Du Pris.”
“So it’s not a stage name?” I asked. “Sounds made up what with the French pronunciation and all. Du Pree,” I said, affecting my best French accent. “Yep. Made up.”
“Not a stage name, not made up,” he said. “Makes it easy to keep track of her movements in and out of the penal system.”
“Should I care that she’s on the loose and looking for Chick’s money? Maybe she’s the one who poisoned Trixie. Whoever broke in was pretty good—like someone who’s already done time for breaking and entering.”
Extra Credit Page 16