Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  Vasquez’s face twisted with a scowl. “I know?” she asked. Papì was right, she thought. This blanco is crazy. Everyone in her family had a different answer to that question—but they all had one. Who hires a Puerto Rican girl fresh out of high school and gives her a pistol? Papì didn’t care about the job. He wanted her to go to school, school, and more school, so she could be a doctor. His eldest son had an education and a white-collar job in New Haven. His daughter could have that, too. Forget his two useless middle sons, Indio and Miguel. They had darker things to say. Indio suggested, maybe joking, that the little detective wanted a pretty young Puerto Rican girlfriend. A few weeks of watching damped that suspicion. Guthrie didn’t seem to notice her. The question kept her wound up, fueled by Papì’s continual suspicion and disappointment.

  “I don’t know,” Vasquez said, leaning against the outer door of the office. CLAYTON GUTHRIE, DETECTIVE AGENCY showed faintly through the frosted glass, reversed in gold lettering.

  Guthrie grinned. “You’re a smart girl,” he said. “You’ll figure it out.” That was his favorite reply to any question he wouldn’t answer straight. “Come on, we gotta go downtown to the Manhattan House. That’s where they’re holding Greg Olsen.”

  * * *

  Vasquez drove south on Broadway. The sky reappeared after they left the shadows of the big buildings in midtown, but it was soon blotted out again when they reached the downtown tip of Manhattan. Traffic was light. Bright afternoon sunshine at the end of July left the gray marble buildings looking dreary and grim. They parked on Canal and walked to the Criminal Courts Building, moving against the crowds that were flowing out of the area in the afternoon.

  The lawyer’s investigator, Henry Dallen, was waiting for them outside the bull pens. He was a heavyset white man with a mustache, wearing a dark gray suit. While they waited for Olsen to come out, he outlined the facts in the case. Major Case had served a search warrant the previous day for a registered .44, and left officers to baby-sit Olsen in case he tried to run. Two hours after they had the pistol, they made the arrest. Olsen was the dead woman’s fiancé; they were attending Columbia together. Once the police started making accusations, he had lawyered up, but in an initial interrogation, he had admitted ownership of the pistol and claimed innocence. Major Case wasn’t suggesting motive. The arrest sprang from the pistol.

  Olsen shuffled into the interview room, escorted by two guards. The big blond man seemed stunned. Being arrested had turned his world upside down and he was suddenly unsure of what he was seeing. The guards watched him cautiously; he was shaped like a lumberjack, broad in the shoulders and narrow-waisted. Even with an unsteady gait, his size was menacing. He slid down into a chair and sat forward, cupping his chin with one hand, but the other one stayed below the steel table.

  “I didn’t do this,” he whispered. He glanced at each of them, his eyes full of questions. “I didn’t kill Cammie. I couldn’t.”

  “What’d the detectives say to you?” Guthrie asked. “They said things meaning to rattle you. What were they?”

  Olsen frowned. “They showed me pictures,” he said softly. “They asked how I could bring myself to mess her up like that. Someone beat her.” He had a slow, measured way of speaking, taking care to make himself understood. Everything about the big man was handsome, without being pretty. Even his frown and his pauses were handsome, and the way he rubbed at his chin while he thought earnestly. He didn’t seem calculating. He just wasn’t moving at the speed of the city. Olsen was slow, from someplace slower than the city, where clear was more important than quick.

  Guthrie nodded as if he were hearing it all for the first time, but pictures were a standard police tactic. The police often flashed pictures of bloody messes, trying to dig up a reaction. Olsen was wound tight, but he wasn’t frightened.

  “So they kept asking why I killed her, even though I told them I hadn’t. They said a reason would help me, like if she’d been sleeping around and I was jealous. They could see that, as if I had had a fit then.” His big hand rubbed at the tabletop slowly, or at his chin during pauses, and sometimes it seemed that he was applying tremendous force to wipe something away.

  “They said my gun killed her, that little gun I bought her in case of a burglar, and they could prove it was fired. And they said they had a bullet to match it, but those were lies. She was the only one who fired the gun after I zeroed for her. I didn’t need to practice like she did, and the other was a lie, because I didn’t kill her.”

  “Easy, Mr. Olsen, easy,” Guthrie said. The big man was tense in his seat, red-faced as he spoke about the pistol. He looked down at the tabletop while he recounted the detective’s accusations, then up at Guthrie as he explained.

  “You do own a forty-four?” the little detective asked.

  Olsen nodded mutely and looked down.

  “Do you know who Camille Bowman was, Mr. Olsen?”

  “I know she was rich.” He stopped, reddening again. His hand crushed slowly on the tabletop. “That never bothered me, that she had money, though. I had enough to do for all that I needed. She didn’t make much of it.”

  “Who would kill Camille?”

  “Nobody! Everyone liked her!”

  Guthrie nodded grimly. He handed Olsen his card before the guards knocked and came to take the big man out. The way Olsen tensed when they drew near made the guards hesitate about touching him. He tucked a hand in his waistband as he walked out. Henry Dallen shrugged once Olsen was gone. The lawyer’s man had heard the same story twice, and he had no opinion.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “You can’t talk about a case with nobody,” Guthrie said after he closed the passenger door on his old blue Ford. “You can’t talk about a case in front of nobody, neither.”

  Vasquez started the car and frowned.

  “Especially if it’s got anything to do with Whitridge.”

  She turned south off Canal onto Broadway. Most of the traffic poured north. The city was emptying. The big buildings loomed like mountains around them, with the hot summer sky burning through in the creases. The rushing crowds and blurring cars around them resembled slowly settling confetti—a whirl of movement with a visibly approaching end. Vasquez cruised straight down Broadway to Battery Park.

  “Or in this case, his niece,” she said.

  “Yeah?” The old man glanced at her before turning back to watch Broadway glide past.

  Vasquez smirked. “That was the first thing I thought when I saw him. She’s got a reason for wanting him out of jail.… Wait. What if she—”

  “Yeah,” Guthrie said. “That makes her the first person we have to cross from our list. Dead woman, and she shines on the fiancé, right?”

  “But what if she is—”

  “Is what?” Guthrie demanded without meeting her gaze. “We ain’t the police. We work for Whitridge.”

  Vasquez frowned and drove silently into the park. She found a space and tucked the old Ford in tight. “You’re saying we might be covering up?”

  “Welcome to the rest of the world. Maybe refusing to uncover ain’t the same thing as covering up. Then what if she didn’t? Don’t go wringing your hands until then.”

  Vasquez cut a glance at the detective. “You done that before?”

  “Not for murder.” His mouth set grimly. He looked old.

  “Less than murder, then,” she murmured.

  They walked into Mako’s, a working-class pub on the edge of the park. Inside was dark except for the televisions showing baseball games, and empty except for a few middle-aged men tipping mugs. They took an empty booth in the back. Guthrie ordered steak fries and a pitcher of draft. The dark-haired waitress brought two mugs. Vasquez grinned, and Guthrie shrugged. They weren’t leaving for a while. Slow conversations and the occasional clink of silverware washed over them.

  Vasquez watched him eat potatoes for a minute, then asked, “You think he did it? And don’t say it don’t matter.”

  He grunted. “He’s a soldier—t
hat’s a tough read.” He shrugged at her surprised look. “He’s carrying the stamp of it. But I say no, or at least he didn’t plan it. He talked about their relationship like it still is, not was. He wasn’t rattled by the pictures, and he remembered what went on at the interview. He’s been in some hot spots before. To me, that says clean on the rest of it.”

  “You cover your ass like a council candidate,” she said.

  “Nobody wants to be wrong.”

  “But everyone wants to get paid,” Vasquez said. She poured herself a beer. “So what am I missing?”

  “Nothing. You caught me there, so here’s a real answer. He didn’t do it. I don’t know how he didn’t do it, but he didn’t do it. Is that better?” Guthrie grinned.

  “No, because I still don’t know why,” she said.

  “Well, this’s what we can do—we trade,” the little detective said. “You tell me what was wrong with Olsen, and I’ll tell you why he didn’t do it.”

  She laughed. Guthrie eased the plate of fries toward her, then glanced at the beer she was drinking. She waved the food away. “Viejo, there is nothing wrong with Olsen. That’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen in my life—maybe not enough to kill for, but I can see why the muchacha is hot to prove him innocent. Wrong with him? Are you crazy?”

  “Then you didn’t notice he was crippled?”

  She ate some steak fries. He let her wait for a while before he let her off the hook. “Olsen’s left arm is crippled,” he said. “He never used it, not even once. He’s been practicing that for a long time. Maybe it’s disfigured, or maybe it’s dysfunctional. That’s something he brought back from overseas, I reckon.”

  Vasquez put it together suddenly, why she’d been looking at pointless surveillance videos. She’d been practicing looking for things that she wasn’t looking for. The little detective was willing to waste her time, and his money, seeing if she would learn something that she didn’t even know he was teaching. She was glad Mako’s was dark; maybe he wouldn’t be able to see the look on her face. Three months, and it wasn’t the first time she’d wished she was back in school, where everything was safe and expectations were carefully spelled out. She realized that Guthrie was waiting on her again.

  “So he got wounded in the war,” she said thickly. “He was a soldier.” She paused. “He took it hard that somebody hit her. Maybe he’s got some kind of history with that.”

  “Sure,” Guthrie said. “And you’re saying you believe he’s clean.”

  “I better believe it,” she muttered.

  The little man laughed. “You like him.”

  Vasquez shrugged. “You said you know why he didn’t do it.”

  He scanned the thickening crowd and frowned at the door. “I could be wrong.” They were waiting on someone, and the wait was stretching. “Anyway, he didn’t try to blame anyone. He’s been sitting in a cell for hours, knowing the police say he did it. If he shot her, he would have spent that time thinking up a lie. For him, she was Little Miss Perfect. Nobody could want to kill her—and that’s that.”

  A stream of people slowly filled the bar. Guthrie kept scanning the crowd. At the bar, men shouted indiscriminately at the televisions and one another in an incoherent roar that even music wouldn’t have covered. Three waitresses rushed back and forth with pitchers and platters. Two men emerged from the crowd, snooping among the booths, and Guthrie relaxed. One was older, with a full belly and a haphazard stride, as if he couldn’t decide which part of a sore foot to settle his weight on. Maybe he had walked too far in bad shoes. His hair was ginger and gray; his wire-frame glasses were taped together. An angry younger man trailed him, tall and imposing, with a Dodgers cap set square on his head like a battle flag. The older man spotted Guthrie in the booth and lumbered back to sit down.

  “Evening, Guthrie,” he said. He gave Vasquez a puzzled glance. “Where’s Wietz?”

  “She moved on,” the little detective answered. “This’s Rachel Vasquez.” He shrugged, then waved at one of the waitresses, pointing at the pitcher. “This’s Mike Inglewood. He—”

  “Don’t listen to him, little girl,” Inglewood said. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I known this one since I was in MTS. He’s no good. He’ll lie to you every time.”

  The younger man sat down and scowled generally at the table. Inglewood raised an eyebrow at him. “I told you she was pretty, and this ain’t even the one I was talking about. But you gotta do better than that—” He turned back to Guthrie. “I told the boy to grow a mustache, and maybe it’d do something to cover that ugly-ass smile.”

  The waitress brought a fresh pitcher and some more fries. Inglewood broke a few more rough jokes to settle himself. His partner, Eric Landry, was new to Major Case, the downtown squad of detectives that worked high-profile crimes in the city. Guthrie and Inglewood had known each other for several years. He and his partner weren’t working the Bowman murder directly, but the older detective collected squad room gossip like a bathroom drain. A bit of everything stuck on him on its way down.

  Inglewood knew Guthrie had called him wanting information. His trade-off was a pitcher and a burger, and finding out why a private D was interested. He quieted when the little man told him he was hired, not curious. He tore up fries and a burger while Landry sipped a beer and tried to avoid looking at Vasquez. Inglewood’s shrewdness showed in how he listened without interrupting, and left off the banter when the conversation turned serious.

  “So you don’t mind if I give a heads-up to Barber?” Inglewood asked. “He caught the squeal, or got it pushed in his lap on account of being prettier than anybody but Landry here. Then he’s our new prima donna, with gold in record time, and like that. So?”

  “I don’t see that it’ll hurt,” the little old man said. “I signed in and out of the Tombs today. He’s such a good D, he might catch on to that anyway.”

  Inglewood grinned and pushed his glasses up his nose. He finished his mug and clapped it down on the tabletop like a punctuation mark. “You trust your new girl, Guthrie?” He studied Vasquez.

  “I think that’s a compliment—he can see you,” Guthrie said. “But yeah, I trust her. She’s a straight shot. She hangs in there.”

  “Just like Wietz,” he said, and chuckled. “You remember the time she got hauled in for bombing that pimp on Lexington with her cannon? That’s a mean woman.” He stared at Vasquez again, his face serious. “All right. This gets out, the rest of your short life is a nightmare. Got it?”

  “Sí, for sure,” she said.

  The detective nodded. “Listen, Guthrie. You’ve talked to your guy. I ain’t. I don’t know what else is going on here. Maybe you do. I do got this much, in this particular case. Your pretty boy had a pretty girl. She was shot with a forty-four. What d’you know, pretty boy owns a forty-four.

  “Barber, my prima donna, talks his way into a warrant, and goes and gets pretty boy’s forty-four. The pistol is right where he says he keeps it, locked away safe and sound. The pistol smells like fresh powder. Barber carries it downtown and IRD runs a bullet.

  “Guthrie, you know it’s the gun, the same damn forty-four, under your pretty boy’s lock and key. So you talked to him, and he don’t sound guilty. Maybe he’s got two, three more personalities, and one’s the good talker you spent time with. Maybe one of the other ones is GI Ken. Get it? See, Ken and Barbie, and this guy is some military guy. GI Ken, I just made that up.… You don’t like the ring it’s got? Don’t matter. This is him”—the ginger-haired detective’s hand floated above the table, then dropped suddenly—“going down hard.”

  * * *

  Guthrie drove on the ride back to the office. Inglewood’s information was a challenge. The little detective trusted his judgment of Olsen, but that wouldn’t be enough to convince the NYPD. The switch caught Vasquez off guard. Guthrie was always relaxed. Even when they had scuffled with the Italians in SoHo over the camera, he didn’t flare up. Now an edge of determination and purpose showed.

&nb
sp; Once they were back in the office, with the building as quiet as a grave around them, Guthrie opened a bag of dirty tricks he had kept hidden. Vasquez thought it was fitting that they were doing it after hours. He had brand-new laptops and phones—not expensive, but good enough for digging. He turned the phones on with names from a Hemingway novel. Then he brought out electronic keys that opened database doors in some unlikely places. He called friends and set up appointments for the next day. She dredged in computer files. After he finished with the phone, he joined her.

  Guthrie wanted background. His process resembled picking apart a résumé and looking for what had been deliberately omitted. This time, though, they had to supply everything. They had only names. The real information had to be pulled from the air with only a few starting points. In a few short hours, Vasquez saw a dirtier side of what he did.

  “Some of this shit ain’t legal, is it?” she asked while she scrolled through a list of ATM withdrawals.

  The little man shrugged. “It’s fast. I want to know where they were at, when, all that. Copy anything with one of the names on it. That dumps to a disc and holds in a file. That file gets searched for what leads elsewhere, like SSNs.”

  While they gathered data, they quietly announced back and forth when they found something. Guthrie was beginning at the beginning. The victim was Camille Bowman. The suspect in her murder was Greg Olsen. Michelle Tompkins was the only other person they knew with a possible motive. All three attended Columbia University. That was the beginning.

  Bowman was simplest, partly because she was the youngest. Young people haven’t had years to leave fingerprints on the world around them. She’d been a sophomore without a declared major, had gotten mediocre grades, and came from a society background. The world mostly noticed her after she was dead, and then she provided a sensational arc of pictures and thoroughly chewed information. Death was her moment in the spotlight, as if twenty years was the exact time required to groom her to be a victim.

  Tompkins was older—easier—and in a social register far higher. Who’s Who listed her birth. Her grades at Columbia were impressive, even as a graduate student. She had studied overseas. Both of the young women had unblemished records, but Guthrie was quick to point out that no amount of superficial scanning would reveal anything that had been deliberately hidden. Some things became obvious only after thinking and back-checking.