Dead Certain

by Hartzmark, Gini

  CHAPTER 21

  The outside world went away. If there was any sound, I could not hear it—not Elliott’s voice or the locomotive of my own breathing. Instead, there was a rushing sound like steam that filled my skull, and the terrifying realization that I was no longer capable of telling my body what to do. I just sat on my knees in the puddle of cold blood, holding my dead roommate’s hand in mine, staring at the black-handled kitchen knife protruding from her neck.

  Elliott’s strong hands grasped me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. In one swift motion he lifted me a few inches off the ground and swung me clear of both the swinging door and the blood, setting me back down on the other side.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, drawing me into an embrace that left his white shirt smeared with Claudia’s blood. I realize now that I should have been less impressed by his concern for me than the fact that even in the shock of the moment his first thought was to get me away from the body and preserve the crime scene.

  I shook my head, unable to find my voice, and buried my head in his neck as if in doing so I could blot out the horror of what was happening. Ever so gently, he pushed me away and led me slowly out onto the sunporch.

  I found myself taken back to the night that Russell died. Even though his was a death that was expected— even, during those last days of anguish, yearned for—in some ways it was exactly the same. A part of me felt as though my soul had been torn in two, as if some fundamental part of me had been ripped shrieking from the roots.

  And then there was the other part, the automaton that just went through the motions. The one who kissed his forehead one last time and straightened the thin sheet of his hospital bed. The one who slipped the wedding ring off his emaciated finger, clasped it in a furious fist, and walked down the somber hallway of the cancer ward, looking for a nurse to tell.

  Elliott called 911 and then joined me in the darkened sunporch to wait for the police. Refusing the comfort of his arms, I stood alone, fighting back a tide of rage and grief, willing myself not to cry. There was still a lot to be gotten through and nothing, absolutely nothing, to be gained by falling apart.

  I heard the sirens before I saw the lights of the approaching squad cars. As usual it was the University Police who got there first. They were so much a fixture in Hyde Park that the people waiting at the bus stop hardly glanced at them as they pulled up to the curb.

  In the early sixties Hyde Park was a neighborhood in jeopardy, in danger of being ripped apart not by the antiwar dissidents who disrupted so many other college communities, but by the Blackstone Rangers, a particularly vicious street gang. In its rational way, the great minds at the University of Chicago discussed whether it would be more cost-effective to move itself lock, stock, and library to Arizona or to hunker down and defend its turf. Thus was the University of Chicago Police Department born. Operating under a special city charter, they were now the largest private police force in the country. My mind clung to these and other irrelevant facts like a shipwrecked sailor clutching at debris.

  It helped me hold my other thoughts at bay, the ones where I replayed the warnings of everyone who’d ever expressed concern about the safety of Hyde Park. All my own jokes about burglars seemed to come back and slap me in the face. I tried to will myself into a sense of numbness, to tell myself that this was a tragedy too big to be absorbed, but still the pain seemed to sear itself into my flesh.

  Ironically the deliberate calm of the police, who were now arriving by the carload, reminded me of Claudia, of her surreal detachment while she was trying to restart Bill Delius’s heart. It might be life or death, but it was also just a job.

  Elliott and I gave our statements to the police. Someone must have turned off the CD player, either that or the disc had played itself through without my noticing. I found that while I could not think, I could at least answer questions, provided that they were simple and the answers clear-cut. Anything involving reasoning or conjecture, like how long Elliott and I had lingered in the vestibule or how long it had taken us to walk through the apartment, was beyond the limits of my cognitive powers.

  By the time we’d finished, the place I had once called home had been transformed into a crime scene. I kept hearing the sound of the intercom and the buzzer and the voice of the uniform who’d been charged with the task of letting people into the building.

  The neighbors, normally not a gregarious lot, began coming out to investigate the commotion. The graduate students from across the hall stuck their heads out only long enough to gawk, but old Mrs. Leavitt from upstairs, a mathematician’s widow, cried softly when she heard the news. Later she insisted that she be let in to bring me a cup of tea in a rose-patterned China cup. She also brought an ancient cardigan, which she laid across my shoulders as if Claudia’s death had somehow turned me into an invalid. It had holes in it, and like its owner, it smelled of lavender and mothballs.

  I sought refuge in the sunporch at the front of the apartment. There, curled up in my wicker chair in the darkness, I could see the morgue wagon pull up to the curb, and watch as the patrolman urged passersby to keep moving, assuring them that there was nothing to see. Joe Blades arrived at about the same time as the TV minicams. I don’t know which I was more surprised to see. He drove up in a Caprice Classic, which he left parked in the bus stop. He stopped for a minute on the sidewalk, straightening his glasses and buttoning his tweed jacket against the wind. Elliott must have called and asked him to come.

  Blades was an old friend from the days when they both worked the white-collar crimes unit in the state’s attorneys office. Joe was a Princeton grad who’d turned down the chance to go to law school in order to pursue a career in law enforcement, rapidly rising through the ranks to his natural resting place—homicide. Elliott came out to the front steps to meet him. They shook hands, their heads close together, conferring gravely. I forced myself to get to my feet and walked out to meet them.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Joe, taking my hand in both of his and giving it a quick squeeze. Indicating the man standing next to him, he said, “This is my partner, Pete Kowalczyk. He and I have been assigned to investigate your roommate’s death.”

  Kowalczyk doled out a syllable in greeting, not enough for me to be able to tell how he felt about being pulled off whatever he was working on to look into a murder on the south side. He was a brick wall of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, with arms as thick as a stevedore’s and a thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair above the wide planes of his Slavic face.

  I know this has been a bad night,” continued Blades kindly. “But if you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions.” I nodded as the crime-scene crew brushed past in their dark overalls, lugging their heavy boxes of equipment. “Is there someplace out of the way where we can talk?”

  “Why don’t you two go into the living room?” suggested Elliott, separating himself from the official police investigation and letting his friend go about his job.

  “I’m going to take a quick canvas of the building,” reported Kowalczyk to Blades. “See if any of the neighbors heard anything.”

  Blades nodded, and we went inside. The homicide detective drifted around the room for a bit before he finally settled in Claudia’s favorite armchair across from me on the couch. I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Blades dug into his pocket and produced a clean white handkerchief and passed it to me without a word. In his line of work, I figured, he must buy them in bulk.

  With efficient questions he quickly took me through the story of discovering Claudia’s body. After that, the conversation turned to Claudia, with Blades quickly focusing in on the things most likely to lead him to her killer: her boyfriends, her habits, and her vices. I did the best I could to fill him in on the details of Claudia’s life. I told him about her parents, children of the sixties who were both tenured professors at Columbia, and her fellowship in trauma surgery. Then I told him about Carlos.

  “Do you know his last name?” asked Blades, taking note
s.

  “No. But anybody who works in the ER at Prescott Memorial should be able to tell you. Like I said, he’s a paramedic.”

  “And how long did you say they were seeing each other?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe two or three months.”

  “And you said she broke it off when she found out he was married?”

  “Yes. And almost immediately afterward we started getting these hang-up calls.”

  “Did he ever follow her, do you know? Ever threaten her?”

  I shook my head. “You have to understand about Claudia,” I said. “She wasn’t one of those women who can’t wait to run home and tell her best friend all about it. I know it sounds corny, but she was a person of action, not words. She used to say that’s what made her choose surgery. She could use her hands to actually make patients better, as opposed to playing twenty questions to figure out what was wrong with them and then writing them a prescription. She said it gave her a charge every time she held an instrument in her hand.” I suddenly found myself looking at the world through tears. I got to my feet and started pacing, anything to keep from falling apart.

  “So, do you think this guy Carlos is the kind of person who could have done this?” asked Blades. “You said the front door was open. Do you think she would have let him in if he’d come over?”

  I thought for a minute before answering. “No,” I said finally. “Like you, she was in a line of work where you get to see just how mean the mean streets really can be. I don’t think she’d have let Carlos in if he’d showed up, not after what happened the other day.”

  A voice from the other room announced that the crime lab was done with pictures, and Joe Blades got to his feet. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said. “Would you mind hanging around a little while longer in case we have other questions?”

  I nodded numbly. Part of me was hoping that this meant that at least this part of it was over, and part of me was filled with dread at the prospect of what was to come. “Is it okay if I use the phone to make a call?” I asked. “I need to tell her parents what’s happened.”

  I have been the bearer of bad news in my time. I have looked men in the eye and told them that they were bankrupt, I have fired people, and worse. But I would have gladly given up every cent I had, pledged my family’s fortune and sold myself into slavery if it meant that I didn’t have to make that call, if it meant that I could bring their daughter back.

  It was after midnight in Chicago, an hour later in New York. I called directory assistance for the number and took the phone, dragging the cord behind me, into the living room in the hopes of finding a small corner of privacy in my own home. Elliott found me just as the phone was ringing, and sat beside me on the couch.

  A sleepy voice answered, a woman’s.

  “Mrs. Stein?” I said. “This is Kate Millholland.” By the time I got my name out, I think she knew. Just those six words at one o’clock in the morning were enough. Now there was no turning back. “Something terrible has happened. Claudia’s been killed.”

  At that her mother let out a terrifying sob, a plaintive expression of grief, and I felt the words dry up in my mouth. I shot an imploring look at Elliott, who gently took the receiver from my hand. I was out of the room, out of the apartment, on the street in front of the building before I even realized I was moving. If it weren’t for the police line they’d set up in front of the apartment, the barrier of blue sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape, I would have been down the street and halfway to the lake. Instead I just stood there on the pavement, hugging myself against the cold, watching incredulously as life went on along Hyde Park Boulevard.

  Eventually Elliott came and found me. “Her father is going to fly out in the morning. He said he’d call as soon as he booked the flight.” I nodded, grateful. “They want to talk to you inside,” he continued, gently putting his arm around me and leading me back up the steps like a reluctant child.

  “What do they want?” I asked. I was close to the breaking point now.

  “They want you to look at something, and then they’re going to take her away.”

  I nodded, hearing the rushing sound returning. I did not want to go back into the apartment. Not tonight. Not ever. Silently I started bargaining with myself. I will go in now, but it will be the last time. I will do it and then it will be over. I will never spend another night in this apartment. I crossed the threshold and realized that I was breathing fast, almost panting in my panic.

  “What do they want me to look at?” I asked as Elliott led me into the kitchen.

  “The knife,” replied Elliott as my feet involuntarily slowed to a stop in the hall. “They need you to look at the knife.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Somehow it was worse, knowing beforehand exactly what I was going to see, and yet, strangely enough, it was Claudia herself who gave me the strength to do it. I kept thinking of her composure in the emergency room on the night when I brought Bill Delius in, the calmness of her demeanor, the measured “please” that preceded every request even as she struggled to save my client’s life. The least I could do was try to hold myself to the same standard tonight. I owed her that much.

  Claudia’s body still lay on the floor of the butler’s pantry. I could see it just beyond the door, and it held me in a primitive kind of paradoxical fascination. I could hardly bear to look at it, and yet I could hardly force myself to look away.

  Everyone had cleared out except for Blades and Kowalczyk. Now that he’d been here awhile, I could see the questions forming on Kowalczyk’s face. Most cops were ruled by Occam’s razor, the scientific principle that states that the simplest explanation fitting the facts is probably the right one. I could tell the whole thing bothered him— not just the murder, but Claudia, me, the apartment. By now Blades had filled him in on who I was and what I was worth. I could tell he saw me as a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit and that it bothered him.

  They wanted to know if I recognized the knife.

  I took a deep breath, determined not to disgrace myself, and slowly made my way to the butler’s pantry. Blades took me by the elbow and steered me around the blood, which had darkened in the hours since I’d stupidly blundered through it. I crouched down beside my dead friend and tried not to look at anything besides the knife. It was hard. There were little things I hadn’t noticed before—the hemostat clipped to the drawstring of her scrub pants, the piece of rubber tubing that peeked out of the breast pocket. Somehow as they’d gone about their work, the police had managed to knock her glasses askew. My hands itched to straighten them.

  Of the knife all that was visible was the black wooden handle and about a quarter inch of blade. Whoever had killed her had done their best to ram the knife in to the hilt. Judging from the diameter of the handle and the width of the blade, I could tell that it was a paring knife. It had entered the right side of her neck, roughly an inch and a half below the ear. I forced myself to lean over her body and look, but the tip of the blade did not show through on the other side.

  I stood back up and went back to the kitchen counter. All the knives were in their places in the wooden block except for one.

  “It looks like whoever did it just took one of the knives from here,” I said. “I couldn’t tell you for sure without seeing the whole thing, but it looks like the smallest one of the set.”

  “Pretty fancy cooking knives and not much else in this kitchen,” observed Kowalczyk. “Have you had them long?”

  “About a year,” I said. “They were a gift from a patient of Claudia’s when she was still a resident, a German woman who came from a little town called Solingen that’s famous for their knives.”

  “It looks like he must have come in through that window,” said Kowalczyk with a nod toward the shards of broken glass that lay in the bottom of the sink. From his voice it sounded like he’d already made up his mind about what had happened and was relating an established fact. “He must have thought the place was empty, but when he found Dr. St
ein at home, he grabbed the knife from the counter and killed her. Then he took off through the front door without taking anything.”

  “He couldn’t have come in through that window,”

  I said automatically, noticing the broken pane for the first time.

  “Why not?” countered Kowalczyk, obviously taken aback. “All the rest of them have burglar grates across them. He picked that one because it’s the only one that doesn’t.”

  “Don’t you want to know why it doesn’t have a burglar grille?” I asked.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” offered Blades, looking up from his notebook. “Why?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said, happy for the chance to get out of the kitchen, away from the body of the woman who had been my best friend. I opened the back door of the apartment and led the detectives out onto the small, dark landing that held the enclosure where we kept the trash. From the landing, stairs ran up and down connecting all three floors of the building. Elliott and the two homicide detectives followed me down the steps single file like a Boy Scout outing. We stopped at the walkway that led between our building and the one next door.

  “Look,” I said. “None of the buildings on this block were built with the first floor on ground level. They were all designed to sit high up off the street to make them seem more grand. The first floor is actually a full story above street level. Front and back, you have to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the door, and then inside, there are more stairs. And see here where the steps go down to the basement?” I pointed to the concrete stairs that ran beside the exterior wall of the building and led into a deep well like a concrete bunker surrounding the basement door. “Take a look. What’s that directly above them?”