Ahcia gasped and threw her purse and coat on the floor as she ran to the couch.
“Michael?” she whispered in a shaky voice, afraid that he wouldn’t answer her.
His good eye opened. “Alicia,” he said thickly.
“Oh, my God, what happened to you?” she said, wanting to touch him but leery of doing more damage.
“Got jumped. Get Charlie Chandler on the phone,” he said, trying to sit up.
Alicia pushed him back down again. “You’re going to the hospital,” she said.
“No hospital,” he said in as strong a voice as he could muster. “Listen to me. This is a good sign.”
“A good sign?” she repeated, horrified.
He closed his eyes and nodded. “Means I’m getting close, and whoever is railroading you is getting scared.”
“Michael, let me call Dr. Spaulding. He is Hannah’s personal physician and he will come right over here...”
“Be fine. My sister can come over later, she’s patched me up before.”
“Your sister is not a doctor!”
He closed his eyes and clenched his fists. When he opened them again his expression was grim. “Are you going to flip out over this after everything else you’ve been through?” he demanded, pushing her hands away when she tried to hold him down. “I’m okay, I’ve had worse done to me by a junkie on angel dust. Now are you going to call Charlie or do I have to do it?”
Alicia stared at him for a few seconds and then got up to get the groceries from the hall and shut the door.
“What’s the number?” she asked quietly when she returned, picking up the cell phone from his coffee table.
He recited it for her, and when she heard the ringing begin she handed him the phone.
He propped it under his chin, wincing when the top of it brushed the cut on his face. He listened impatiently and then said, “Hi, Annie, it’s Mike Lafferty. Charlie there?” There was another pause and then Lafferty said, “Charlie, I need you to get over to my place right now, and bring all your notes on the Walker case.”
He closed his eyes, and Alicia could hear the buzz of Charlie’s annoyed reply.
Lafferty inhaled sharply and then grimaced “Now get this, Charlie. I am reaching out to you here, do you understand me? I just got jumped by several upstanding citizens who did a tap dance on my face, and I have a strong feeling they were in the employ of whoever wants Alicia to take the fall for her husband’s murder. The last thing one of them said to me before landing a final kick was, “Stay out of the Walker case.” Now why would anybody care about keeping me out of the case if the real killer was already heading for indictment? Hmm? Can you answer me that? I don’t want to hear any lectures. You get over here, pronto, and bring those files. You owe me, partner, and I am cashing in right now.” Lafferty threw the phone down in anger and put his head back against the sofa. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his lips were pale. The angry speech had all but exhausted him.
“Do you think Chandler will do as you asked?” Alicia inquired in a small voice.
“He will.” Lafferty looked at her as if he had forgotten she was there. “Come here,” he said.
She went to him and sat on the edge of the couch. He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry I barked at you,” he said. “I just need you to help me now because I am finally getting somewhere and that’s when you have to be really careful, when you are closing in at the end.”
“Can I at least clean you up?” Alicia asked.
He smiled, licking his split lip. “Not a pretty picture, eh?”
“No.”
“Help me stand.”
Alicia helped to get him on his feet and walked him into the bathroom. She switched on the overhead light, and they both looked at him in the mirror.
“Not too bad,” he said, turning his head from side to side. “Still got all my teeth.”
“Those ribs could be cracked,” Alicia said, pulling his jacket and shirt off and throwing them in the tub.
“Don’t think so. I can breathe okay, no stabbing pain when I inhale.”
“I see you’ve been here before,” Alicia said dryly, running water into the basin and soaking a washcloth.
“A few times.”
“Sit on the edge of the tub,” she said.
He sat.
He let her minister to him for several minutes, until the blood was washed away and the damage could be assessed.
“How do I look?” he asked, grinning lopsidedly when she was done.
“Grotesque,” she said crisply, breaking out the iodine she found in the medicine chest.
“I guess it’s all over then,” he said sadly. “I always knew you just wanted me for my beauty.”
She palmed the bottle and took his battered face between her hands.
“Idiot,” she said tenderly.
He pulled her onto his lap, grunting when her weight fell against his chest.
“I’ll bet I can make you drop that bottle,” he muttered, nuzzling her breasts and pulling her skirt up her thighs.
Alicia was leaning into him, her eyes closing, when she glimpsed his ruptured lip. It slammed her back to reality. She levered herself off him and unscrewed the cap on the iodine.
His eyes opened. “Hey, where’d you go?”
“One of us has to remain sane,” Alicia said acidly. “You’re two steps out of the emergency room and I am not going to—” She stopped short.
“Going to what?” he inquired, his eyebrows raised, enjoying her discomfiture. “What aren’t you going to do?”
“Oh, shut up,” she muttered, shooting him a sidelong glance. “You’re in a hilarious mood for a near stretcher case.”
“That’s because I have something wonderful to tell you. At least I hope you think it is wonderful. It’s probably the solution to the mystery of who killed your husband.” He gingerly pushed himself up from the tub and stood towering over her in the close quarters of the bathroom. His bruised face and torso were lurid in the ghostly lighting, his expression serious now.
“What did Kirkland say?” Alicia asked warily.
“Among other things, he said that you have a twin sister. An identical twin sister.”
Alicia absorbed that in stunned silence. Then she said, softly, “Two babies?”
“Yes.”
“My parents got one and the Lassiters kept the other?”
Lafferty nodded.
Alicia’s breath escaped slowly as she thought about what he had said.
“And you think the person who shot Joe was my... sister?”
“Identical twins often can’t be told apart. If she was prepared to look like you and was wearing your clothes, even people like Smithson, and that guard, Moresby—all of the witnesses who swear you were there when Joe was killed—could be fooled.”
“But why? Why?”
“That’s what we have to find out. First we have to prove to the DA’s office that this person exists, and then we have to prove that she had motive, means and opportunity to kill Joe. I’ve got a P.I. friend tracking the Lassiter name in central Jersey and checking the post office box and bank records. Your sister had to be picking up the checks and cashing them somewhere. We’ll find her.”
“My sister,” Alicia murmured softly. “How strange that sounds after spending an entire life as an only child.” As she thought about it, all the emotions connected with her hidden past welled up in her and she started to cry.
“I always wanted a sister,” she whispered.
Mike embraced her and stood holding her while she sobbed. They both heard the loud knocking on the apartment door a couple of minutes later.
“That will be Charlie,” Lafferty said.
“Should I go?” Alicia asked, pulling a tissue from a box on his bathroom shelf. “I don’t want to leave you, but I know how your partner feels about me.”
“How does Charlie feel about you?” Lafferty asked as they walked into the living room.
&n
bsp; “He thinks that I’m a spoiled rich tart who finally got fed up with my husband’s philandering and plugged him,” Alicia replied, sniffling loudly.
Lafferty chuckled, grimacing when the activity hurt his ribs. “You stay, Alicia. You are more than capable of handling Charlie, and you can help with this.”
“With what?”
“Piecing together where and how your husband might have met your sister.”
“You think that they knew each other?” Alicia asked him, shocked.
“People are rarely murdered by strangers, Alicia. Outside of the occasional bank robbery, mugging and random acts of violence, the victims usually get it from somebody they know.”
She looked at him skeptically.
“It’s the truth. The overwhelming proportion of murders are committed by the friends, relatives, business partners of the deceased. So if you don’t know otherwise from the start, the assumption is that the victim and the perpetrator knew each other.”
Lafferty pulled open the door of his apartment.
“Hi, Charlie,” he said.
Chandler, who was dressed in gray sweats and carried a large briefcase, looked at his partner appraisingly.
“You don’t look too bad, kid,” he said. “I’ve seen you take it on the chin a lot worse.”
He glanced nervously at Alicia’s tear-stained face.
She nodded at him.
“Alicia, would you get me a shirt from the bedroom?” Lafferty asked. “There are some clean ones stacked on the lower shelf in the closet.”
Alicia left and Chandler said in a low tone, “You didn’t tell me she would be here.”
“It’s her skin we’re trying to save, Charlie, so would you give me a break here? She might just be able to help us.”
“You’re trying to save her, boyo, I’m not,” Chandler replied darkly.
“So who beat me up then, Charlie? Huh? The local Brownie troop? Somebody wants Alicia to go to prison, and from their point of view I guess I’m the only thing standing in the way of that happening.”
Alicia returned with a shirt, and Lafferty tensed as he bent to ease himself into it.
“I’ll get you some aspirin and make coffee. Would you like something to eat, too?” she asked, and Lafferty nodded.
The two men watched her leave the room.
“Let me see what you brought,” Lafferty said.
“You’ve still got Lise’s furniture,” Chandler said, nodding at the couch.
“I’m waiting until the millennium to redecorate,” Lafferty said shortly. He dumped the compendium of files, notebooks and computer disks on the cushions and began to sort through it.
“Cramer will string me up if he finds out I took all this,” Chandler said.
“He’ll be a lot more unhappy if we help to convict the wrong perp,” Lafferty said. “I went to see Ambrose Kirkland today.”
“Kirkland? That old fixer from Doyle’s stable? I thought he was dead.”
“He’s alive. He told me some interesting things about Alicia’s family background that you should hear before we delve into the rest of this.”
Alicia listened to the men’s voices going back and forth in the living room as she worked in the kitchen, crying in fits and starts. She didn’t know why the discovery of a sibling should affect her so deeply; she supposed it was the enduring loneliness of being an only child. She had missed out on all those years of having a companion, a compatriot, a friend. She resented it and at the same time felt compassion for the baby who had been turned over to the venal Lassiters. What a mess it all was. She felt like a stranger in her own skin. Very little about her past was what she’d thought it was, and she felt disconnected, isolated. Why hadn’t her sister made her existence known to Alicia? What possible motive could she have for killing Joe? In what context would she even have met him?
She heard Lafferty bark something at Chandler, and Chandler’s querulous reply. She wondered how on earth these two men, a diffident, lonely detective, with whom she had fallen suddenly and desperately into a sensual affair, and a sixtyish world-weary cop, who thought she was guilty, had wound up in charge of her fate. It was only Chandler’s loyalty to his partner that had brought him there, but she was grateful he had come.
She could use all the help she could get.
Three hours later the two men were surrounded by piles of notes, plates, cups and trays of Chandler’s cigarette butts. Lafferty’s sister had come and then left after examining her brother, leaving a bottle of pills for him and favoring Alicia with a few knowing glances. Alicia entered with the latest pot of coffee and found them going over the list of telephone calls Joe had made in the last months of his life for the tenth time.
“And what’s this one again, Charlie? It appears here over and over, several times a week.”
“It’s a Chinese takeout place on the Upper East Side. That aide, Smithson, said it was Walker’s favorite. Ramirez and I checked it out together.”
Lafferty’s brow wrinkled as he studied the handwritten sheet of paper. His black eye was already turning colors and promised to blossom into a tequila sunrise in a couple of days.
“I don’t know, Charlie, this is an awful lot of shrimp lo mein. Did you and Jose go there yourselves?”
Chandler stared at him indignantly. “Of course we went there. It’s a Chinese restaurant, Mike, the Howloon Dragon. Chinese people running it, Chinese signs in the window, Chinese noodles on the plates. Chopsticks, fringed lamp shades, red menus with tassels. Get the picture?”
“And this Smithson said Walker ordered from there all the time?”
Chandler nodded.
Lafferty looked at Alicia. “You know anything about this?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I didn’t know about a lot in Joe’s life.”
Lafferty tapped the paper with tip of his pencil. “I want to see Smithson again. Call him.”
Chandler stared at him. “The investigation is officially closed, Mike.”
“Tell him we’re just tying up a few loose ends.”
Chandler rubbed his forehead with nicotine stained fingertips. “Don’t do this to me, kid.”
“I can’t call him, Charlie, you know that. I’m on an official leave of absence.”
“Mike, I can’t bring him into the station, Cramer will have a stroke.”
“Then tell Smithson to meet me at the coffee shop downstairs in an hour.”
“You’re dreaming. He’s got to come in from the suburbs somewhere, and he doesn’t even have to talk to you!”
Lafferty glanced at Alicia and then back at Chandler. “Didn’t you get the feeling all along that this guy Smithson was hiding something? Something we nosed around but never nailed and that he didn’t volunteer?”
Chandler was silent.
“He always seemed bewildered to me, like he couldn’t believe Alicia had done it but he’d seen her do it so what else could he believe?” Lafferty went on.
Chandler sighed and looked away, shaking his head.
“Charlie, he knows something, and I think I can get him to spill it. Get him on the phone.”
Chandler snatched the scrap of paper from Lafferty’s overloaded coffee table and stalked into the bedroom. They could hear him punching the buttons on the cell phone.
“He does everything you tell him. Did you save his life once or something?” Alicia asked.
“Yes.”
Alicia was nonplussed. “I was kidding.”
Lafferty shrugged. “I’m his partner. When we were working narcotics together, some crack dealer up in Spanish Harlem was drawing a bead on him and I took the sleazeball out with one shot to the temple. Charlie’s been my slave ever since.”
Alicia narrowed her eyes. “Are you making that up?”
Lafferty smiled, his handsome face distorted by the half-closed eye and the split lip.
“You’re making it up,” she repeated.
He winked. “Coming down the home stretch, darlin’. I can feel it. I’ll have Cha
rlie take the information about your sister to Captain Cramer just as soon as I see what Smithson has to say. That should be enough to throw a monkey wrench into the Woodpecker’s immediate plans to indict you, and then we’ll work on finding your twin.”
“Oh, Mike, if only it could be as easy as that,” Alicia said, afraid to hope.
“I’m on a lucky streak,” he said.
She burst out laughing. “Yes, I can tell that just by looking at you.”
He touched his mangled mouth lightly. “Occupational hazard,” he said, shrugging.
Chandler came back into the room and announced, “Smithson will be downstairs at the coffee shop at 10:00 p.m. I told him you were taking over for me as a favor because I had a funeral to go to in the morning, and that was not a lie because the funeral will be my own. I also told him you would be looking a little raggedy and that did not seem to surprise him at all.”
Lafferty smiled at Alicia.
“I am not so sure Drew will help you, Mike,” Alicia said. “He was very intimidated by Joe and might still cover for him. The party still exists, he still needs to make a living.”
“You let me worry about him,” Lafferty said.
Chandler started shoveling some of the records he had brought with him back into the bag and said, “I am going home to tell my wife that I will be out of work soon and might need to ask her brother, the used-tire king, for a job. I didn’t plan on spending my golden years capping retreads for my brother-in-law but it’s shaping up that way. Do not call me, Mike. Repeat, do not call me.” He tossed the last of the computer disks into the bag, zipped it shut and stalked out of the apartment.
Lafferty grinned. “I told you he loves me,” he said to Alicia. “Now come over here and help me get presentable enough to be seen in public.”
“Do you want me to go to meet Drew with you?” Alicia asked him.
He nodded. “If he is feeling the slightest bit guilty about the way you’ve been railroaded, seeing you again tonight just might do the trick.”
An Officer and a Gentle Woman Page 17