Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  “Ooh, party pictures!” He tapped some more at random, showing tables circled by drunken young people, dancers, and people clowning. “Looks like rave shit…” He hit one that expanded into an explicit shot of a young couple in suspended motion. A curvy young woman with short chocolate hair stood gripping the posts of a bed, with her near foot braced on the mattress, while a tall young man lined up with her from behind.

  “Ooh, action!” Fat-Fat tapped again, and the photo smoothly became video, with accompanying moans and gasps. “Whoa, Guth! She knows the camera is rolling, but I don’t think he does. I need a copy of that one—”

  “Not a good idea,” the little detective said. “You don’t want your fingers pinched in that trap.”

  “For real?” The big Korean shrugged. “There’s a lot there—maybe something different?”

  “It ain’t worth it. You can get better than that anyway.”

  “You’re kidding, Guth. She’s on fire.”

  Vasquez peered over Fat-Fat’s other shoulder. “She looks to be enjoying it, true enough.”

  “Shit!” The big Korean killed the screen, then looked sheepishly at her. “Sorry.”

  “She ain’t as mean as Wietz,” Guthrie said.

  “Not yet? You haven’t pissed her off yet.” He gave Vasquez a wary look. “Yeah, the vodka’s good.” He unplugged the drive from his system and cleaned his cache. “That good?”

  “That’s something you don’t want coming back up from the sewer.”

  The big Korean raised an eyebrow. He kept erasing, and invited Guthrie to take turns. Rap music blared occasionally when the techs on the other side tested the system in the lowrider. The little detective gave him a handful of fifties and wished him good luck in Venezuela.

  Guthrie and Vasquez drove back to the office on Thirty-fourth Street, and he locked Bowman’s hard drive back in the strongbox. The day passed without any more success than that, despite some efforts in other directions. They were tired. Eventually they were both watching the clock, staying only to avoid sleeping too early.

  Late in the evening, Guthrie checked his watch and pronounced it time. Vasquez pulled her windbreaker from the back of her chair, but he pointed at the phone. “Try Sand Whitten one last time,” he said, “and then call LMA.”

  Vasquez sighed. Whitten’s phone took messages; she’d left a half dozen already that day. Guthrie wanted to show her the pictures Jeannette Overton had studied. The unidentified Grove Street deliveryman had dark hair, and so did Whitten’s persistent admirer from LMA, but the little detective hoped Whitten might pick a face from their stack of pictures. Vasquez delivered another annoyed message to the bartender’s voice mail. Then she called the Long Morning After, and received an angry snarl from the man who answered when she asked for Whitten.

  “I take it she’s not there,” Vasquez retorted.

  “That’s right. I’m filling in again. If she lays out tonight, too, she’s fired. Tell her if you find her—who are you?”

  “Rachel Vasquez.”

  “Ever pour drinks, Rachel?”

  “I got a job.”

  The man growled in frustration. “Tell her to come to work, will you?”

  “I got you, don’t worry.”

  After she hung up, she and Guthrie sat for a minute. Then he shrugged. The day was over. In the morning, they would try again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “We got a problem,” the phone said to Vasquez in an electronic imitation of Guthrie’s voice. She fought the blanket for a moment, then sat up and swung her legs from the bed. Twilight leaked through the bedroom window, barely brighter than streetlights, but enough to reveal the disarray in her tiny bedroom.

  “What time is it?” Vasquez mumbled to the phone.

  “Oh-dark-thirty. I’m on my way. We got to look at something before it’s spoiled, so be ready. I’ll be there in ten or twenty minutes.”

  “What?”

  “A bad robbery on the Upper West.”

  Vasquez switched on her bedside lamp, frowning. “All right,” she said before she cut off the phone and reached for her pants.

  Mamì was at the stove in the kitchen, wearing her old soft slippers and the tan robe Roberto had given her after he graduated from Fordham. She had worn that for half of Vasquez’s life. Cuchifrito in the skillet for Papì’s breakfast warred with the aroma of fresh coffee. Vasquez laid her jacket and gun belt across the back of a chair and poured a cup for herself. Her mother glanced at her, scraped cuchifrito onto a plate, and then cracked two eggs into the skillet.

  “You haven’t been awake this early in a long time,” she said. One of the faucet taps in the bathroom groaned. Papì was awake.

  “I gotta go to work early this morning,” Vasquez said.

  Mamì nodded. “I heard your phone.” She tried unsuccessfully to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. Her long waves could become curls and frustrate her; this one had escaped her loose ponytail. “You should eat something.”

  “Guthrie will have some doughnuts.”

  Her mother snorted in reply. “You remember that time Fatty Espada caught you with the bowl of sugar?”

  Vasquez smiled into her coffee cup. Fatty Espada was one of Papì’s old friends; he’d lived upstairs so long ago that the red-checked wallpaper on the walls of the kitchen hadn’t yet faded to pink from being scrubbed so many times. When Papì ate breakfast, Fatty would come downstairs to sit on their fire escape, drink coffee, and talk through the window. On Saturdays, though, Papì slept late. Vasquez was so little that even kindergarden was just a threat in her future, and she had an idea, since a spoon of sugar helped a bowl of cornflakes, that more could be better. The effort actually resembled a bowlful of sugar sprinkled with cornflakes. Fatty came from the fire escape before she could douse the bowl with milk.

  “I remember,” Vasquez said.

  Outside, the old Ford’s horn honked briefly on the quiet street. Vasquez downed the rest of her coffee, brushed at her mother’s shoulder, then picked up her jacket and gun belt and rushed out.

  * * *

  Guthrie drove up Broadway as the morning brightened. Along the way, he explained the job to Vasquez. Henry Dallen, the investigator who’d worked for James Rondell, had been killed in a push-in robbery at a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Dallen had been night guard on an estate that was working through probate, and probably going to auction. Guthrie and Vasquez came into the picture because Dallen worked, however indirectly, for HP Whitridge. That made him important. George Livingston, Whitridge’s hatchet man, called and explained that the old man wanted Dallen’s killers found, and any stolen items recovered, with emphasis on the killers.

  Guthrie often spent time chasing missing property, especially when the property was more important than unmasking the perpetrator. Sometimes the families didn’t want to see the thieves on the police blotter. The process was mechanical. Stolen goods were sold or exchanged, resurfacing around sewer drains, usually, but sometimes in fancy places. The little detective had an enormous web of contacts and traveled in places the NYPD couldn’t go. Afterward, the property could be backtracked to the thief, and the puzzle was solved.

  A pair of patrol cars waited outside the old brownstone on 102nd Street near West End Avenue. Trees towered over the sidewalks like skyscrapers. A knot of men crowded the sidewalk and steps, drinking from Styrofoam cups of coffee and dropping cigarette butts to decorate the pavement. Uniformed patrolmen from the 24th Precinct brushed elbows with ISU techs from downtown. A knot of plainclothes NYPD detectives surrounded Rondell’s day guard, the man who’d found Dallen’s body. He was smoking hard and staring at the pavement, as if he was reconsidering his line of work. Sgt. Jack Murtaugh was the lead detective. Guthrie called him “Gentleman Jack”; tailored clothes, slicked-back black hair, and a good shave made him stand out from his rumpled colleagues.

  ISU techs entered the brownstone first, leading the way with cameras. The front door hadn’t been forced. The entry seemed like a k
nock-and-push. The lace runner on the sideboard in the foyer was askew, and some small picture frames were overturned and lay broken atop and beside it. The hint of violence didn’t cover the smell of money. Blond woodwork and Abstract Expressionism rose brightly above a blond wooden floor accented with dark South Asian carpets the color of river mud and moss. The other rooms were more drawers in an expensive jewel box. In the back, a coppery smell tainted the air.

  “Your guy gonna make it, Guthrie?” Sergeant Murtaugh asked, then glanced at Vasquez. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the front door, where the day guard was waiting.

  Guthrie shrugged. “Another college boy trying to do real work.” Then he looked at Vasquez and said, “She’s East Side.”

  The little detective’s joke brought a few reflexive chuckles, but the faces of the policemen were all grim. The smell coming through the kitchen door had persuasive powers, a mix of blood and shit making a graveyard cocktail. The kitchen matched the rest of the brownstone—bright and eye-catching. Speckled gray marble floors and countertops reflected from stainless-steel fixtures to magnify the space. A cloud of pans, utensils, and supplies floated above the central island on barely visible hanging racks.

  A pool of blood peered from around the corner of the island, as out of place as a scrap of dirty cloth in a home and garden picture book. Dallen’s body was beyond the island, hanging from the oven door by handcuffed wrists. Drained of blood, the middle-aged investigator was as pale as votive wax. Sergeant Murtaugh circled to peer at the body from the other angle.

  “His face is marked up,” Murtaugh said.

  “Bad?”

  “Just a bit.” He pointed with a fingertip. “That’s it. That’s why the oven—it kept his hands in place near the stove.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “See, burned his fingers with something, probably held it to the stove, scorched him, let him watch it get red, so forth.”

  “Do you see the wound?”

  “Uh-uh. Don’t get that. He don’t look touched.” Sergeant Murtaugh stepped slowly back around the island, scanning the counters. “Okay, let ISU do their thing. We got a torture thing here. Fucking skels.”

  The detective sergeant plowed slowly from the kitchen, trailing a cloud of anger. He crooked a finger at Guthrie as he passed. Everyone followed him to the living room. The creamy fabric on the sofa and chairs and the studied placement of the artwork suddenly belonged to a different building.

  “So how long will it take to catalog and find out what’s missing?” Murtaugh asked.

  Guthrie shrugged. “Rondell had an appraisal scheduled for this week. That’s from the insurance list, but it has to be backtracked for anything recent. I didn’t know the old guy who lived here, or whether he was a big buyer.”

  “They wanted Dallen to answer questions about something; that’s plain. What’s the chance he had some inside knowledge about the choice items here?”

  “Zero,” Guthrie replied. “I talked with Rondell this morning. The old guy was with the firm for eleven years, spotless reputation.”

  Murtaugh led a slow sweep of the brownstone. After a quarter of an hour, he was upset. The rooms all had a feel of precise order, without any disarrangement, as if the inhabitant had been too decrepit to shift anything. “Tell me something, Guthrie,” he barked. “This feel right to you? This is an inside job, right? If something’s gone, they knew exactly what they were after—because it don’t look like they took nothing else.”

  “I don’t get that, either,” the little detective said. “Why do they need to ask the guard if they know what they want?”

  “Maybe they were trying to cover with that,” Murtaugh said. “It still stinks. The skels do murder, then leave the money behind.”

  “Maybe the blood changed their minds, when it started pooling like that,” one of the other detectives offered.

  Sergeant Murtaugh shrugged. “After all the screams and begging they squeezed out with torture didn’t disturb them?” He slapped his notebook against his thigh in disgust. “Something stinks. We start by looking at everyone who knew this old guy who just died. One of them is probably our skel. Williams, you got the canvass.”

  Guthrie and Vasquez left the day guard to oversee the NYPD’s comings and goings at the brownstone. He was capable of watching whether anyone left with an armload of antiques or artwork, and signing a reciept for any evidence. Discovering the body early in the morning, when he’d expected to find a sleepy middle-aged man, had unnerved him, and then he started thinking about how it could have happened to him instead. Guthrie watched the man smoke a cigarette to the filter while he stood looking at the ground, then clapped him roughly on the shoulder and walked away. The man was still thinking about it, because thinking was safer than doing.

  Vasquez was quiet and pale as she drove back downtown. The slow crush of rush hour gave the detectives plenty of time to think. Guthrie watched her stew until they crossed Houston, then said, “Don’t think about it too much. Thinking don’t change nothing.”

  “What d’you mean, viejo?” Vasquez demanded. “I ain’t—”

  “Don’t give me that. You’re chewing your tongue and going around in circles, trying to solve something in your head. Then you get back to where you started, and do it again.”

  She scowled.

  “This’s the real world, Rachel. Reasons and explanations don’t matter too much, for a lot of things. When some blocky bastard with a bad shave and dirt under his fingernails comes along, he ain’t gonna argue with you. He don’t care about reasons. He’s gonna end that argument before it ever starts, by using his fists. Then afterward, he ain’t gonna be thinking about why. He’s gonna be spending what you had in your pocket.”

  “Then what are we gonna do about that?”

  “Drive over to Queens,” Guthrie said. “We’re gonna see Henry Dallen’s widow.”

  * * *

  Dallen’s neat white row house was tucked securely into a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Forest Hills. Inside, a minister was sitting with his widow. Marjorie Dallen was small and slight; her knuckles glowed like white prayer beads while she twisted and folded a handkerchief. Her living room was carpeted and neat, with clusters of books on corner shelves and framed photographs arrayed like soldiers on the painted walls. She accepted Guthrie’s condolences quietly, and answered questions before coming to a sudden stop.

  “You seem to be asking if something Henry did caused the trouble,” she said. “Wasn’t it a robbery? He was sitting for the lawyers.”

  Guthrie nodded. “That’s the way the police are examining the matter,” he replied. “As if your husband’s death is a consequence, which it could be. I was asked to look for the killer, so I wonder if anyone would want to do him harm.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t think so. He wasn’t a drinker or a gambler. He stayed home at night. If someone wanted to hurt him, they would be crazy.”

  “Was anyone calling him recently? Did he have visitors, or change his schedule?”

  “No. He was sitting the house for the lawyers recently, but he didn’t do that often—only a few nights each year. Otherwise, he was always here.”

  “Did he tell you where he was at, when he worked at night?”

  She shook her head. “No. If I wanted to talk with him, I called him on his phone.”

  Guthrie and Vasquez exchanged a glance. Only Rondell’s firm had known where Dallen was overnight. Guthrie gave the widow his card in case she remembered anything after they were gone, and they said polite good-byes. Vasquez drove back to the city through Williamsburg, then went downtown to Wall Street. The big buildings swallowed the sky that had been so wide over Queens and Brooklyn. A few light lines of clouds followed them back to Manhattan; something was moving in from the Atlantic.

  Parking was easy to find on Wall Street; Sunday quieted the business district. The detectives waited outside Reed, Whitaker & Down until James Rondell’s secretary arrived. Miss Helen Walterberg was a stern, no-nonsense
woman with iron gray hair, past middle age but with an aura of competence. She was assigned to chaperone the young Wall Street partner’s ascent to power. She seemed frustrated when she arrived, but not distracted. She had immediate answers for most of the little detective’s questions: The lawyers could have known where Henry Dallen was overnight, along with two other settled, middle-aged investigators employed by the firm, and members of the clerical staff. The hired men they used during the daytime had also been given the address. She ticked off names on her fingers, naming them in their groups, and reached a total of forty-nine.

  “Would all of these people have known specifically that Henry Dallen was there?” he asked.

  Miss Walterberg frowned. “No,” she replied. “Our policy was rotation. Our salaried investigators rotated the nights to prevent the duty from being burdensome. Even the other investigators might not have known more than that they weren’t assigned, but I suppose Ms. Roscoe, the senior administrator, would have known that.”

  “Would you have a way of knowing if someone asked that question?”

  “If the question came from inside the firm, we can ask Ms. Roscoe,” she replied. “If the question came from outside the firm, we will need to be lucky.” Reed, Whitaker & Down used a secretarial and reception pool for the junior partners, associates, and routine work. Miss Walterberg felt that some of them were less than competent; the use of computers was eroding office habits. She watched the phenomenon with James Rondell, who occasionally decided that he could, by computer, prepare a presentation or organize materials more efficiently than a secretary. She then found it necessary to open windows and air out the stink of flaming failure. The firm’s pool had some similarly inclined members. Even education didn’t seem capable of eradicating the belief in a labor-free shortcut. Miss Walterberg led them with the crisp stride of a martinet.

  An old-fashioned memo spike held a sparse handful of messages. Walterberg sighed as she searched the messages, then offered one to Guthrie.