“I know it’s kitsch,” she said as she paid for a small cuckoo clock. “But it’s adorable kitsch. Besides, in a hundred years it will be an antique. I’m just ahead of my time.”
I’m never sure when Alice is kidding.
When we finally got to Greenwich Village, it took me a half hour to carry her loot up to her apartment. By mutual consent we decided that I should go home.
“We both need the rest,” Alice said, handing me an apple rhubarb pie she had bought at one roadside stand.
I drove back to Staten Island, stopping for a turkey sandwich at Dick’s Deli. It went well with the pie. Both slices. And then to bed, feeling as if I had hit a trifecta.
CHAPTER 19 – WORKING GIRL
I was in my office Monday when Cormac called in late morning.
“Bingo,” he said.
“The prints panned out.”
“We got a hit on both fingers and palm. Same woman. She’s in the system. And it’s not Elizabeth Olsen. That’s the good news.”
I waited.
“I hate it when you do that, Alton. Go all quiet. It ruins all my fun. Anyway, the bad news is that the prints are from a hooker, one Laura Lee Litton.”
“Why is that bad news? The fact that Denton used hookers won’t surprise anyone. And putting one in that chair near the time of his murder gives me a viable suspect.”
“Cause there’s even worse news.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mac, spill it.”
“Laura Lee apparently doesn’t exist. At least around here. I checked with IAFIS and our vice boys. No working girl by that name has popped up on the radar locally in years. Vice has no record of any arrests going back at least a decade. I can’t even find any record of a Laura Lee Litton anywhere in the tri-state area. Address, phone, driver’s license, anything. I know illegal aliens with more paper.”
“Then why are the prints on record?”
“She was arrested as a prostitute in Georgia 16 years ago, when she had just turned 17. Only reason her prints hit IAFIS was that she did some of her best work servicing soldiers on the Fort Stewart army base and the Feds got involved. But then cooler heads prevailed and they kicked her loose.”
“She must have had an address.”
“You want a hooker’s address from 16 years ago?”
“It’s a start.”
“What, you think Denton flew her up here for a quick screw? She probably doesn’t live there anymore. Came up to the Big Apple to pursue her hooking career and changed her name. Without any recent arrests, you’ll never find her. Hell, maybe she’s not even a pro anymore. What are you going to do, get fingerprints from every broad who’s been in Denton’s house? There’s fewer people at Yankee Stadium on opening day. I know you found someone in witness protection but that was easy compared to this.”
“Oh, ye of little faith. Give me the address. What are Sullivan’s boys going to do with it?”
I knew Mac would have spoken to them. He was my friend but didn’t need a pissing war with the D.A.’s squad by going behind their backs.
“I spoke to that kid, Smith. He says Sullivan’s crew thinks it’s a non-starter. They were sure the Olsen woman aced Denton and her suicide saved them a lot of work. Denton was a big deal and they aren’t anxious to smear him posthumously with talk about a hooker. Sullivan told them to drop it. I got the impression Smith isn’t happy, but he’s too junior to make waves. I told him making waves was your reason for living and he said if you come up with something to keep him in the loop. He’s a sharp cookie.”
Laura Lee Litton’s last known address was in Statesboro, GA, which as Mac noted, was “a hop, skip and a hump” from Fort Stewart.
“Anything unusual turn up in the autopsy?”
“Not really. Death was consistent with suicide by hanging. Broken neck. It would have been quick. Better than strangling. She knew what she was doing or she caught a break, no pun intended.”
“Where did she get the rope?”
“Her old man is in the construction business. There were coils of the stuff in the garage. Manila hemp. Forensics matched a section that was cut from one of the coils with the rope around her neck. Coroner’s report says suicide. It’s not what you and the old man want to hear, but it is what it is.”
“Still doesn’t mean she killed Denton.”
“I see another Southern road trip in your future.”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah. Well, while you’re at it, see if you can a get a line on Amelia Earhart. That’s right up your alley.”
I called the security desk in the lobby, where Abby was at her regular job. The line was busy so I went down. She was just hanging her phone up. I asked her if she knew anyone in the Provost Marshall’s office at Fort Stewart.
“I never was based there but I can make some calls to my old MP buds and get you a name. What’s this about?”
I told her.
“Man, this gets nuttier and nuttier. Denton must have been a piece of work. Liked his taste in women though.” She held up a copy of the Richmond Register. There was a follow-up story to Elizabeth Olsen’s death, with a photo of her on the front page, apparently taken at some society gala. “She was a pretty thing. But I guess she didn’t look that way when you found her. She must have looked terrible. I saw a couple of suicides in my time. Strangulation is never pretty.”
“Actually, she looked quite peaceful. It was quick. Broke her neck.”
“What did she hang herself from?”
“Banister on the second-floor landing.”
“Jesus. You’re lucky at that. Coulda been a lot worse. A drop like that and her head might have snapped clear off, like those Iraqi dudes they show on YouTube.”
“She didn’t drop very far. Only a few feet.”
Abby looked at me.
“You sure? How much she weigh?”
“I don’t know. She was small, maybe 100 or 110 pounds at the most. Why?”
“Then you must have gotten the distance wrong. A 120-pound person would have to drop at least eight feet to break the neck.” She mimicked a person hanging by holding a hand over her head and lolling her head to her side with her tongue out and gurgling.
“Her mouth was closed,” I said.
“Doing this just for effect.”
It apparently worked. Two visitors had walked up to the security desk and were now looking at both of us strangely. Abby straightened her head.
“Can I help you folks?”
After she directed them to the correct floor we watched them move quickly to the elevators, glancing back at us nervously.
“Now, what did you say about an eight-foot drop?”
“As part of my training I took a course on the history of the Military Police,” Abby said. “It included a section on Fort Leavenworth. That’s where the Army executes people, although they don’t do that much anymore. Anyway, the old method was hanging. It’s been replaced by lethal injection. But they actually had a table, or chart, that calculates how far a body has to drop to ensure a clean neck break. Morbid. Always stuck in my head. Has something to do with dividing the weight into something in foot pounds. The Brits came up with it. Figures. They hung a shitload of people. What can you expect from such a stiff-necked bunch.” She liked that. I smiled politely. “Hell, you can look up the chart on the Internet.”
I tried to reconstruct the death scene in my mind.
“I don’t think she dropped that far, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying that much attention. Maybe the fact that she’s a woman made a difference.”
“There was no sex difference on the chart. A neck is a neck.”
A few more visitors came up to the desk.
“I’ll get a name for you at Fort Stewart and call you,” she said, turning to them.
Back in my office I opened my laptop and found a British website devoted to capital punishment. Sure enough, there was a sophisticated explanation of “Execution by Hanging” drop distances, complete with a chart t
hat, according to a footnote, was last updated in 1913. The chart conveniently listed all the weights by stones, kilograms and pounds, and lengths into both feet and centimeters, which I’m sure made the condemned very happy. It detailed the optimal neck-breaking drops for people weighing from 110 to 200 pounds, given in 10-pound increments. Given the explosion of fast food over the last 100 years, I suspected that the chart was due for a revision, weight-wise. Of course, the British banned capital punishment years ago.
But Abby was right. A woman weighing less than 120 pounds would have to plunge eight feet or more to ensure a clean broken neck. Much shorter than that, strangulation was likely. Longer, decapitation. I called Cormac.
“How long was the rope Elizabeth Olsen used?”
“Long enough, apparently.”
“I’m serious. Can you find out?”
“What are you thinking?”
I told him. He didn’t laugh. He’d fielded a lot crazier ideas from me. Besides, Mac was a good detective.
“I’ll get back to you.”
My phone buzzed. It was Abby, with a contact number at Fort Stewart.
“I don’t know him. So, don’t get your hopes up.”
I didn’t, and thus wasn’t disappointed. The Army officer I spoke to pointed out that Fort Stewart was the home of the 3rd Infantry Division and one of the largest military facilities in the eastern half of the country.
“We have absolutely no idea who any teen-aged hooker arrested 16 years ago was, or is. And we don’t particularly care. We have other priorities. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
I wanted to remind him that there always seems to be a war on, but let it go.
Next I called the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Department, which is responsible for Statesboro and surrounding towns. The sheriff was out of town at a conference in Savannah until Wednesday, but a female deputy tried to be helpful. But she drew a blank. There were no Littons currently living in town, let alone at the address on Porcupine Road I gave her.
“Houses there, shacks really, were torn down years ago when they ran the 301 Bypass through that section of town, or so they tell me. I’m only here a few years.”
“What happened to the people who lived there?”
“Don’t know. Most of them were apparently poor. Must have thought they hit the lottery when the state bought them out. You could probably check the old real estate records to see who they were, although I’m told some of them were just renters, maybe even squatters, who worked some of the farms around here. We’ve got some big peanut farms, you know. But you might have more luck checking the high school. The girl you’re lookin’ for would have been of an age where she might have gone to Statesboro High. I can give you the number. Course, school’s closed for the summer.”
I took the number, thanked her for her troubles and hung up. Then I found the Statesboro High website on my laptop. It was comprehensive and sophisticated, which undoubtedly meant it was created by the students. The site listed the names of all the teachers and counselors. No phone numbers and home addresses, of course, but plenty of email addresses.
Mac called me back. He was angry.
“They threw away the fucking rope.”
“Jesus Christ. Why would they do that?”
“No one thinks it was anything but suicide. Case closed. Next corpse.”
“Did you ask them how long they thought it was?”
“Yeah. Got a couple of guesstimates, between four and eight feet. But they said it was difficult to remember because she was cut down by an E.M.S. guy on a ladder. So there were two pieces of rope, neither of which made an impression on anyone. They were more interested in the type of rope than the length.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Hey, listen, she probably did kill herself.” He paused. “But you’re right. Son of a bitch.”
I spent the rest of the day with the high school website tracking down phone numbers and both calling and emailing everyone from the principal on down. Abby made a lunch run to the Red Lantern and brought me up a sandwich. By the time I went home I had spoken to, or had emails from, enough people from Laura Lee’s era to know that she had attended the school but didn’t graduate, leaving halfway through her senior year.
One teacher, now nearing retirement, remembered her as “hot” but obviously not from “the best class of people.”
“What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t say this, but are you familiar with the term ‘white trash’?”
“You just did, and I am.”
“Well, I’m just calling a spade a spade.”
“I’m sure you do that, too,” I said, hanging up.
No one I spoke to knew what happened to Laura Lee after high school. And the one person I really wanted to speak to, the school guidance counselor, a Mrs. Faulkner, was out of town. One of the other teachers had mentioned that she had been the guidance counselor at Statesboro High for almost 20 years, and thus must have interacted with Laura Lee.
“My mom went to a writers’ conference,” her son told me when I called the Faulkner home. “Then she stopped off to see my gram on the way back. She’ll be here tomorrow.”
The kid wouldn’t give me his grandma’s phone number or his mother’s cell. Good for him. I wasn’t about to try to frighten the numbers out of him by mentioning my flimsy murder theory.
I was frustrated. It seemed I had nowhere to go in Statesboro. But one of my investigative rules, which rarely pays dividends, is that when I have nowhere to go, I go there. Rarely is not the same as never.
CHAPTER 20 - MEASURING
The next morning I went to Elizabeth Olsen’s funeral. The service, at Trinity Lutheran Church on St. Paul’s Avenue in Stapleton Heights, was packed and parking was a problem. Luckily, there was a large police presence and a cop I knew directed me to a spot under a “No Parking” sign.
Once in the church I grabbed a seat in a rear pew and looked around. No one had a sign on their chest saying, “I Did It!” I sensed that many of those in attendance were just drawn by the notoriety of the situation, but I did recognize a few faces from the local Staten Island real estate and construction community. I assumed there were plenty of similar types from elsewhere in the tri-state area where Konrad Olsen did business. Sitting in a pew ahead of me across the aisle was a tall, striking woman who, in profile, looked familiar.
At the end of the service, the funeral director announced that since Elizabeth Olsen was to be cremated family and friends were invited to the Richmond County Country Club for a repast that would follow immediately. The choice of venue didn’t surprise me. It would have been tough to host a crowd in a house where your daughter had hung from a banister.
Then it hit me. Cremation. I hadn’t counted on that. Any evidence I found contradicting the assumption that Elizabeth killed herself would probably need an exhumation for confirmation. And that was now an impossibility. I couldn’t stop a cremation on a hunch based on a 100-year-old British hangman’s chart. No rope. And now no body.
The service was mercifully brief. The woman who seemed so familiar to me in profile got up to leave. It was Sharon Sullivan, the D.A.’s wife. I caught up with her as we left the church.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Sharon. Did you know Elizabeth?”
She looked startled, but only for a second.
“Oh, Alton. I’m sorry. I almost didn’t recognize you. Yes, I knew Elizabeth. Same clubs and charities, you know. We weren’t close, but it’s such a tragedy.”
The last time I’d seen Sharon, she was tipsy and had trouble with a few words. Now, she spoke with a precise diction and seemed almost ethereally composed. She really was quite beautiful.
“It’s a lovely gesture, Sharon, given the circumstances.”
She smiled.
“How is Alice?”
“Fine.”
“Please give her my love.”
With that, she walked to her car, and I to mine.
I’m not a big fan of
post-funeral parties, which is what a repast is. But I wanted to talk to Konrad Olsen. Back at the country club I found him sitting at a table with a bunch of friends. He introduced me to them. I had been right. They were rough-hewn New Jersey construction guys, looking uncomfortable in their suits. But Konrad was comfortable with them. Occasionally someone wandered over to offer a condolence, but the table wasn’t getting as much business as the buffet, which was undoubtedly fine with him. There had been a two-day wake for Elizabeth. He was probably sick of condolences and watching people peering into the casket surreptitiously looking for rope marks on his daughter’s neck. I asked him if we could speak privately. He motioned to a waiter.
“Bring me a double Johnny Walker Black on the rocks.”
He looked at me. I nodded.
“Make it two,” he said and took me by the arm and walked me over to the window overlooking the pool. We stood looking down at children frolicking in the water. “It goes so fast. I can remember standing right here looking at Elizabeth on the high board as a child. She was fearless.” His voice wavered. “So fast.”
I told him about the fingerprints. But I didn’t have the heart to mention the mechanics of hanging death or the inconvenient cremation, which for all I knew was going on as we spoke.
“It may mean nothing,” I said. “I’ve made phone calls but if there’s anything I’d probably only find it out face-to-face. I want to go to Georgia.”
Our drinks came. I thought it was a little early for a double scotch, until I started drinking it. Death does that.
“Alton, you don’t need my permission to do anything. But I appreciate the heads up. And I appreciate that you came to the funeral.”
“Mr. Olsen, is there anyone at your house right now?”
“Just Robert.”
“Your butler?”
“Yes, a few of the boys will come back to the house after this.” He indicated with a wave of his hand that he was talking about his cronies. “Old friends, you know?”
“Sure.”
“Robert is setting things up. In addition to his other talents, he’s a hell of a bartender. I expect we’ll keep him pretty busy. He’s an old friend, too, when you think about it. Why do you ask?”
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