by Barbara Paul
As if murder was ever simple.
Marian stood up tiredly. “We don’t even know if Knowles had any family. I sent O’Toole to the apartment on Central Park South, but no one was there. That’s the first order of business tomorrow. But right now, I’m going home.”
“Larch.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t forget your coffee.”
In the car on the way home, Marian couldn’t stop yawning. She thought about stopping for something to eat but decided to make do with whatever was in her refrigerator. She parked in her favorite place, the loading zone of a printing company that didn’t open for business until after she’d left in the mornings. Upstairs in her apartment, the message light on her answering machine was blinking.
It was Kelly Ingram, who had no need to identify herself. “Hey, Marian, how about having a late supper with me? Puh-leeze? I’m so tired of hanging with these theayter types I could scream! Come on by after the performance.”
Marian’s closest friend, Kelly was a former television actor now starring in her first Broadway play. In the beginning it had been exciting, challenging, glamorous—all the things starring on Broadway was supposed to be. But gradually the sameness of what Kelly was doing began to pall … the same words every night, the same gestures, the same costumes. The same people. Kelly Ingram had a bad case of the fidgets.
Marian tapped out a number from memory. In a dressing room at the Broadhurst Theatre on Forty-fourth Street, a light on a telephone would start flashing in lieu of a ringing bell. Kelly’s answering machine said: “Right now I’m out on the stage acting up a storm. Leave me a loving message, whoever you are.”
After the beep, Marian said, “Hi, it’s me. Forgive me, Kel, but I can’t make it. I’m really bushed. It’s ten-thirty and I just now got home from work.” Six and a half hours late. “I’m going to take a long hot shower and make myself a sandwich and go to bed. You’ll just have to put up with those theayter types a while longer, I suppose. Sorry, toots.”
The shower felt good. Marian let the needle spray work on her neck and shoulders until the tension began to drain away. Looking at old men with bullet holes tended to wipe out whatever sense of well-being one might have built up during the day. No matter how many homicides Manhattan racked up, the newest one was always just as draining as the last.
She’d just stepped out of the shower when the door buzzer sounded. Marian slipped on a robe and padded over to the intercom. “Who is it?”
“Alberto’s Gourmet Deli,” said a static-laden voice.
“You have the wrong apartment. I didn’t order anything.”
“Marian Larch?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m supposed to deliver a message. Kelly says don’t start without her.”
Marian sighed and buzzed him in.
5
“I don’t know why they do that.” Kelly Ingram poked a fork at her plate in annoyance. “There’s chicken, and sesame seed, and that little weed looks like thyme. But all you can taste is cayenne! Why do they do that?”
“I really don’t know,” Marian answered soberly. “Here, try some of this. It’s good.”
Kelly peered suspiciously into the deli carton. “What is it?”
“No idea.” Marian laughed. “Hey, you ordered the stuff!”
“I asked for an assortment.” Kelly adventurously spooned out some of the mystery mixture and tried it. “Hm, that is good. Shrimp something, I think. Maybe.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go out.”
“Ho, this is better,” Kelly said. “No fans to gawk at you while you’re trying to eat. Especially one fan. Ugh.”
“One in particular? Kelly … are you being stalked?”
“God, no—nothing like that! There’s just this one girl who seems to be everywhere I go. I know she comes to the theater every night, and every night when I leave she tells me she’s my number-one fan. But she’s no stalker. She’s too wimpy for that.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay, then,” Marian said. “So, how’d it go tonight?”
“Terrific. They loved us. Same as always.”
“How teddibly boring for you.”
“Well, it is,” Kelly said earnestly. “Oh, I know it’s great the play’s still going strong … eighteenth week! But if something different would only happen once in a while! If we could change the blocking, or if Ian would forget his lines, or … something!”
“You don’t really want Ian to forget his lines.” Ian Cavanaugh was Kelly’s leading man, a long-established star who’d probably never forgotten his lines once in his entire professional life.
“It’d serve him right. He’s been grumpy as a bear lately.”
“Why?”
“I think he misses Abby.”
Abigail James had written The Apostrophe Thief, the play that Kelly Ingram and Ian Cavanaugh were starring in. It wasn’t the first role she’d written expressly for Ian, nor would it be the last; the two of them shared a brownstone and a life as well as a profession. At the moment Abby was attending script conferences in California, preparing for the movie version of the play. After playing hard-to-get for an acceptable period of time, both Kelly and Ian had signed contracts to repeat their roles on film.
“Are you excited about the movie?” Marian asked.
“Not yet. But I will be when the time comes.” Kelly opened a square bakery box and lifted out a cheesecake. “Ta-taa!”
Marian groaned. “Oh god, no.”
“What do you mean oh-god-no? You love cheesecake.”
“Kelly, I can’t eat everything I see and never put on an ounce, the way you do. Why, I gained five pounds the minute you opened that box!”
“Make up for it tomorrow. Steamed vegetables.” Kelly cut a wedge of the cheesecake, put it on a plate, and pushed it over toward Marian. “Treat yourself for putting in such a long day. Why did you put in such a long day?”
“New homicide,” Marian said shortly.
Kelly slowly lowered her fork. “Oh. You looked at a dead person today.” She was silent a moment. Then: “You looked at a dead person, and I come in here kvetching about too much cayenne in the chicken. God, Marian, I’m sorry.”
Marian waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t be. You can’t ask me if I’ve just looked at a body every time you see me before you know how to talk to me. It’s just that this one … well, a man in his seventies was shot on a bus this afternoon. On a crowded public bus, Kelly. And nobody saw or heard a thing.”
She understood immediately. “A contract killing.”
“Has to be. And get this. The victim was being followed by a private operative, who also saw and heard nothing.”
“Wow. You mean a private detective was right there on the bus at the time of the murder?”
“Yep, except operatives aren’t licensed detectives. They do the leg work for detectives—tracking stuff down in the Municipal Archives, tailing people, like that.”
“And he didn’t see anything?”
“Not a thing. And it’s a she, by the way.”
“A woman operative, huh. Is that usual?”
“Not very. But this one has the right look for a good operative. Nondescript, the sort of person you never notice. Just what you want for tail jobs.”
“How old is she?”
“Oh, late forties, early fifties.”
Kelly nodded. “The age women become invisible.”
Marian shot her friend an appreciative look. “I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder if that’s why her boss hired her in the first place—oh hell!”
“What?”
“O’Toole forgot to tell me the name of the agency that employs her … and I forgot to ask.”
“Big deal, so you find out tomorrow. Who’s O’Toole? A police detective?”
Marian said yes. “A young one, and a new one. He’s been a detective only about a week longer than I’ve been a lieutenant. We’re the two green
horns in the precinct.”
Kelly hooted. “Oh yeah, you’re real green, Lieutenant Larch!”
“I’m green at lieutenant-ing. And this is my first big-case homicide since I moved up in rank. So I’ve got to nail this one.”
“Any reason to think you won’t?”
“Too early to say.”
They both concentrated on their cheesecake for a minute or two. “Why,” Kelly finally asked, “is an old man on a bus such a threat that someone would be driven to hiring a killer?”
“That’s what I start working on tomorrow,” Marian said.
6
Detectives O’Toole and Perlmutter sat facing Marian in her office. Two more unalike police detectives she couldn’t imagine. O’Toole was young and fresh-faced, looking as if he were about to burst into song at any minute. The very cliché of the eager new detective. Perlmutter, on the other hand, could easily be mistaken for the editor of an avant-garde intellectual journal that only ten people in the entire country ever read. Thin, bushy-haired, wearing wire-rim glasses, Perlmutter had something professorial about his manner. He should be a good partner for O’Toole.
“The first thing we do,” Marian said, “is find out if Oliver Knowles had any family. Captain Murtaugh didn’t release Knowles’s name to the news media pending notification of next of kin, so let’s do some notifying.” She dropped the victim’s set of keys on the desk. “The lab just sent these over. There’s bound to be something in his apartment. Finish this up fast.”
Perlmutter nodded and scooped the keys up off the desk. “You want to talk to him or her or them, whatever?”
Marian nodded. “Say I’ll be around this afternoon. See what you can find out about what the victim had been up to lately … but don’t push too hard, give them time to recover if they need it. Use your own judgement. They’ll want to know about the body—Dr. Whittaker says they can have it tomorrow.”
“Credit cards?” Perlmutter asked.
“He didn’t have any.” Both men looked surprised. “What can I tell you?” Marian said. “Knowles was a cash man. But see if you can find a checkbook.”
O’Toole spoke up. “What about fingerprints?”
“Not in our system. I’ve put in a request to the FBI, but don’t count on anything there. Knowles seems to have lived his seventy years or so without any contact with the police at all. We’ve got nothing on him.”
“Bullet?” Perlmutter asked. “Flattened, I suppose.”
“Unfortunately. It did enter at an angle that suggests the shooter held the gun in his left hand.”
“Well, that’s something!” O’Toole said. “At least we know the killer’s left-handed.”
“No, we don’t,” Perlmutter told him. “Most professional hitters are ambidextrous when it comes to handling their weapons.”
O’Toole looked a question at Marian; she nodded. “Also, no fingerprints on the magazine that was propped up in the victim’s lap, not even the victim’s. The shooter brought the mag with him.”
Perlmutter said, “After we talk to next of kin, what?”
“Depends on what I find out this morning. Call in. That’s all for now.” The two detectives stood up. “O’Toole, stay a moment. Ask Sergeant Campos to step in here, will you, Perlmutter?”
“He’s in court this morning. The Hysinger case.”
“I thought that was supposed to finish yesterday afternoon?”
Perlmutter shrugged I-don’t-know and left. Marian turned her attention to O’Toole. “This is your first homicide, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Rarin’ to go.
“I want you to listen carefully to Perlmutter. He has good instincts, O’Toole. Even when he’s just thinking out loud, listen to him. Especially when he’s thinking out loud.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Getting more antsy by the second.
“Don’t go off on your own. Any line of investigation that occurs to you, you check with Perlmutter first. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am!” O’Toole was practically dancing, he was so eager to get going.
Marian sighed. “Oh, go.” He went. She’d save the full lecture for later.
A head peered around the doorjamb. “You got time for me?”
“Sure, Buchanan. Come in.”
The next half hour was spent listening to Sergeant Buchanan bring her up to date on the cases his squad was investigating. She asked a few questions, made a suggestion or two; but on the whole she was content to leave it all in Buchanan’s hands. Next to Captain Murtaugh, he was the most experienced cop at Midtown South.
“That’s all,” Sergeant Buchanan said. “Except for one that ain’t ours—I sent it to Missing Persons. Female graduate student at NYU, Robin Muller, age twenty-two … just dropped out of sight. I got a bad feeling about this one.”
“Why?”
“Boyfriend reported her missing. He says the last few months, she’s had more money than she used to have, and she wouldn’t tell him where it came from. Not a whole lot of more money, but enough to make things easier. Like, when it’s her turn to spring for a meal, it’s dinner in a restaurant instead of hot dogs on the corner. And she’d run up a big phone bill and then pay it.” He held up a meaty hand, as if to stop Marian from interrupting. “Boyfriend’s sure she ain’t hookin’ because she’s with him every night. And she’s kind of a health nut—no drugs. But she just didn’t come back to their place one afternoon. It don’t look good.”
“No,” Marian agreed. “You called the morgue? Has anyone fitting her description—”
“Naw, I checked. But she was into somethin’ she shouldna been. I’m gonna keep an eye out. If it’s okay with you, Lieutenant.”
Marian said it was, well aware that he would have done so whether she okayed it or not. “Where do they live? Near NYU?”
“Lafayette Street. Ninth Precinct, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Why’d he come to us?”
“Spur of the moment. Walkin’ down Thirty-fifth, saw the station, decided to come in.”
Marian nodded. “Let me know if she turns up.”
Buchanan left and Marian quickly shifted gears back to the Oliver Knowles killing. Knowles’s billfold had contained four-hundred-fifty dollars, a driver’s license, and a photograph of a white Persian cat. At least there was a cat in his life, Marian thought. It was unusual to find a billfold that told so little of the owner’s personal life. It was almost as if Knowles didn’t want to give away anything about himself.
A crumpled drugstore receipt had been in his pocket. It showed that he’d bought a carton of cigarettes six days earlier … before Zoe Esterhaus had started following him. Marian was sure there was nothing more to learn from Esterhaus; the woman had told them everything she knew, which was precious little. Marian hoped her boss would—
Esterhaus’s boss. He was coming in this morning.
She left her office and stepped over to the nearest desk in the squadroom, where a detective was typing up a report. “Dowd, I’m expecting a private investigator. I don’t know his name, but he’s Zoe Esterhaus’s employer.”
“Esterhaus, gotcha. Uh, that’s the private op who was on the bus?”
“That’s the one. Let me know the minute her boss gets here.”
“Right.”
“I’ll be at the holding cell.” She made her way to where one corner of a room crowded with file cabinets was boxed off with hurricane fencing. Inside the cage the druggie scarecrow they’d taken off the bus the day before had come down from his high; he was sitting on a cot with his head in his hands, moaning out loud.
Two bluesuits lounged casually outside the cell, watching him and laughing. One of them, named McAndrew, said to the other, “You know how to say ‘Hi’ to an addict? You flick his nose gently with your finger and watch him scream.” Both men guffawed.
“Cute, McAndrew, real cute,” Marian said. The laughter stopped. “Do you have the key to this thing? Open up.”
McAndrew unlocked the holding cell and Marian stepped inside. The scarecrow looked up at her and said, “I need something, man.”
“Uh-huh. Answer a question or two and you’ll be out of here.”
“’Bout what?”
“About the man who was shot on the bus yesterday.”
He squinted his eyes. “What man?”
“You don’t know a man was shot?”
But he was still thinking about her original question. “What bus?”
“You don’t remember being on the crosstown bus, about four-thirty, quarter to five, yesterday afternoon?”
He just shook his head. “I tell you, I need something.”
Marian sighed; start at the beginning. “What’s your name?”
“Nolan Baker.”
“Where do you live, Nolan?”
“I’m staying with a friend.” He gave her a name and address. “I was on a bus yesterday?”
“That’s right. You don’t remember?”
“I never ride the bus. I always take the subway or walk. What was I doing on a bus?”
“Going from one place to another, I presume. Come on, Nolan, think. Where had you been? Where’s the last place you remember?”
Suddenly he got cagey. “What do you want to know that for?”
Marian looked at the wreck of a human being sitting before her and knew what he was afraid of. “Nolan, listen carefully. I’m not trying to find your supplier. That’s not what this is about. But a man was murdered on the same bus you were riding, and I want to know if you saw anything. Try to remember.”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember no bus.”
Reluctantly, Marian decided she believed him. She motioned to McAndrew to let her out. “Kick him loose,” she instructed.
Back in the squadroom she said “Not here yet?” to Detective Dowd as she passed his desk.
“Not yet.”
At her own desk, she wrote down Nolan Baker’s name and address before she forgot them, for the record. Then she started making a list of things to check. The two stores Knowles had visited yesterday, for starters. See if he had bought anything to be delivered later. Did he pay cash? Did he have private accounts, since he carried no credit cards? If Knowles was a long-time customer at Lionel Madison Trains, possibly the clerks would know something about him. He’d left his gloves either there or in one of the cabs he’d taken, but so what? There really was nothing to go on yet, not until Perlmutter and O’Toole had finished searching his apartment.