by Ken Brigham
“Yeah,” Hardy said and after a long pause. “Can you pull me a Sam Adams?”
Marge laughed. “Bud or Bud Lite, hon, that’s all we’ve got and you know it,” she said. “You must’ve been drinking at some upmarket place lately. Need to spend more time among real folks.”
Hardy didn’t answer, just stared off into nowhere. He was still thinking about Bonz, his swift exit from the land of the living. Hardy felt a knot of anger taking root deep in his belly. Violence, especially senseless violence, always angered and confused him. He needed reasons for what people did, explanations. Maybe Shane Hadley would come up with one in this case. Hardy sure hoped so.
Marge Bland leaned over the bar toward Hardy and said, “You’re somewhere else, Hardy,” looking directly into his eyes. “Like to talk about it?”
Chapter 5
Katya Karpov was not having a good day. She didn’t have clinic on Mondays. She spent those days in the lab. They were usually good days once the morning meeting with the Bartalaks was over. Katya really loved the lab. She was thrilled by the process of discovery that went on there, genuinely thrilled to be a part of that. But this day she had trouble concentrating on the work at hand. She kept thinking about Bonz Bagley’s tragic murder and about his experience with Cy’s drug. The more Katya thought about it, the more convinced she became that something was wrong. She really must review those data.
Since Beth Bartalak wasn’t in the lab, Katya decided to see if she could get into Beth’s computer, where she thought the data must be sequestered. It was a long shot since Katya didn’t know the password, but she went to Beth’s cubicle and turned on the machine.
Katya was surprised that, after only a brief pause, the screen lit up with the usual array of icons indicating that she was into Beth’s protected area. Otherwise, she would have been prompted to log in, and that would have required a password. Apparently, Beth had left the machine without logging off.
But Katya still didn’t know where the data from the drug studies was located. She stared at the icons. She clicked on “documents” and read through the titles of the folders that appeared on the screen. There was a long list of folders, and none of the titles gave any hint that they contained the data from the clinical studies with the drug. She would have to open them one-by-one and review the contents to find what she was looking for.
“What the fuck are you doing, Katya!” Cy yelled, leaning over her and peering at the screen.
The sudden interruption startled Katya. Absorbed with what she was doing, she didn’t hear Cy enter the room and walk up behind her. He never came to the lab anymore. Katya was the only one there on that Monday and had no reason to expect any interruptions.
“What are you doing?” Cy repeated. “Don’t you know that breaking into someone’s computer is a felony? Katya, this is serious.”
“I didn’t break into this computer,” Katya answered, trying hard to sound composed. “I just opened it. I guess Beth closed down without logging off.”
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn whether Beth logged off or not. You have breached laboratory ethics, Katya. That is not like you. What were you thinking?”
“Cy,” Katya replied, sounding quite composed now. “I need to review those data on the clinical studies with your drug. Beth has refused to give me access. I had no alternative but to try to find them for myself.”
“No alternative? No alternative?” Cy yelled. “How about following ethical and standard procedures for accessing laboratory data? How about that approach? I told you I would speak with Beth about this. What in the living hell is so urgent about it?”
Katya didn’t respond, and Cy stood up, heaving a deep sigh.
“Turn off the damn computer, Katya,” he said. “Turn it off and do not ever do anything like this again. If I wish you to have access to data, I will make them available to you. Otherwise, they’re off limits! Do you understand that?”
Katya closed the computer without logging off. She stood up to face Cy.
She drew herself up to her full height, towering over the diminutive man.
She looked down directly into Cy’s face and said, measuring her words, “Cy, I am going to review those data, with or without the approval of either you or your difficult wife.”
There was a long pause as the tension arced between them. A purple flush crept across Cy’s face. The arteries bulged from his temples and pulsed violently. He struggled to react to Katya’s blatant challenge to his authority, but all he could muster was a staccato string of uninterpretable guttural rasps from deep in his throat. He turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door emphatically.
Katya sighed and stood there for a moment. She went to the door and locked it. She returned to Beth Bartalak’s cubicle and settled into the chair. She turned on the computer, clicked on “documents,” and started again scanning the titles to the folders.
By late afternoon Beth Bartalak was feeling some better. She returned home from The Club and relaxed a while by the pool, soaking up the sun. She made herself a gin and tonic, and then another one. After a while, she decided that she would go into work for a couple of hours.
Beth went into the house to get dressed and on the way to the bedroom, stopped by her private study and stared for a while at the glass case where the gun collection that she had inherited from her father was displayed. The 1903 Colt hammer model was the centerpiece of the collection. It had been her father’s favorite. She had deliberately chosen it for the deed that she honestly believed her father would have understood. Afterwards, she had cleaned the gun carefully and placed it back in the case. It seemed to her that it shone more brightly than ever there. It was no longer an innocent object to be admired only for its beauty, but a real functioning firearm, christened with real blood. Beth smiled and thought about her father again. She really wished that he was still alive. She hoped that he would, at last, have been proud of her.
Beth dressed and drove to the medical center. In the parking deck, she noticed that Katya Karpov’s white Porsche was in its usual spot. Damn pretentious car, Beth thought, tasteless glam like its owner. There were more important things than looking glamorous. Damn that pretentious bitch!
It was precisely four PM when Shane Hadley greeted Hardy Seltzer from the Printers Alley deck, where Shane sat basking in the afternoon sun, awaiting the detective’s arrival.
“Hi-ho, Hardy, my man,” Shane said. “Come on up.”
“Afternoon, Shane,” Seltzer answered. “Lower the drawbridge and I’ll join you.”
Shane rolled inside and released the door and the elevator, chuckling to himself at the detective’s metaphor.
“Join me in a sherry?” Shane asked, gesturing his guest to a seat in the living room. “It’s a special sherry from my old Oxford college. Decent wine.”
“I’m not much on sherry, Shane,” Hadley responded, aware that he had no idea what sherry tasted like. “Got any beer?”
“Dreadful drink,” Shane mumbled to himself, then said. "Afraid not, Hardy. Sure you won’t try some sherry?”
“I’ll pass,” Seltzer answered, thinking about how little he had in common with Shane Hadley.
Shane wheeled over near to where Seltzer sat.
“So, any surprises at the post mortem?” Shane asked.
“Not really,” Hardy answered. “But the coroner did recover four slugs from inside the skull. The guys are running them through NIBIN. I’m sure they’re identical to the one we retrieved from the dog, but we’ll see. I’m still baffled. Why four shots directly into his head? One well-placed head shot is all you need to do the job. And the shots did appear to be well-placed.”
“That is troubling,” Shane mused. “The killer clearly wasn’t taking any chances on the old boy surviving.”
“Jensen thinks it looks like a vengeance job, settling an old score. That makes some sense to me.”
“Could be, could be,” Shane said, then continued, “Good work. What else have you got?”
“Tell me what you have.”
“So there were two kids hanging out at Fourth and Union when the murderer was running away. From what you told me, the perp should have passed by them. You said he went to the end of the alley and turned left up Union. Fourth is just a half-block up the street.”
“Right, that’s what I saw. Didn’t the kids see anyone?”
“Nope,” Hardy replied. “That’s the problem. They were standing there when he must have passed them, but they swear they didn’t see anybody. We found the blue hoodie in the trash at the end of the alley, so he’d shed that, but the kids didn’t see a single man go past. And they sounded convincing. This guy seems to have just disappeared into thin air.”
“Not a single man?” Shane said. “What if it the murderer wasn’t a man?”
“You mean it might have been a woman?” Hardy’s surprise showed.
“That is the most likely alternative,” Shane said.
It wasn’t that Seltzer thought that women were incapable of murder. He had plenty of experience that contradicted such an idea. But women usually killed someone they knew, crimes of passion, spite or vengeance. And unless there was a story in the Bonz case that no one seemed to know about, this looked like random violence. Women rarely do random violence. The requisite ingredient for random violence is testosterone.
“Maybe, Hardy,” Shane answered. “Let me tell you what I’ve discovered about the funny gait I mentioned earlier.”
“I’m all ears.”
“It looked to me that the fleeing murderer ran with the right foot turning inward, what’s known as a pigeon-toe gait.”
“I remember you said that,” Hardy interjected. “I even wrote it down but couldn’t think how it told us anything.”
“I also puzzled over that,” Shane said. “But it stuck in my mind and so I did some computer searches and found out some potentially interesting facts. One fact is that pigeon-toe is much more common in adult women than in adult men. Then when I thought more about it, I thought that the person I saw running could have been a woman—right size and maybe even a hint of femininity in how the person ran.”
“Okay,” Seltzer said. “So might have been a woman. Anything else?”
“Three other things,” Shane said. “One of them is that apparently a particular knock-off version of a popular woman’s boot can cause pigeon-toe.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” the detective answered. “Why would somebody who could afford a multi-thousand dollar gun buy knock-off boots?”
“Exactly my thinking, Hardy.”
The two men smiled at each other.
“What else?”
“Athletes, especially track athletes, sometimes deliberately develop a pigeon-toed style of running. There is a myth that it makes one run faster,” Shane replied.
“Hmmm,” Seltzer murmured.
“And,” Shane added. “This is the oddest tidbit; apparently, pigeon-toe has recently become inexplicably prevalent in intelligent young women. No explanation that I could find. Just an observation.”
Seltzer got up and walked over by the fireplace, resting an arm on the mantelpiece and rubbing his chin. Shane said nothing. He was giving the detective time to digest the information.
“So,” Hardy finally said, turning toward Shane. “Are you telling me that the murderer was a rich, intelligent young gun-collecting woman athlete? I’m not sure, Shane. Isn’t that a little far-fetched? Do you know something else that you’re not telling me?”
“It does sound a trifle far-fetched, Hardy. I’ll grant you that,” Shane replied. “But perhaps there is something that neither of us knows…yet.”
“Yet?”
“We’ll know sooner or later, Hardy, my man,” Shane said, “whether we’re chasing a wild goose or getting closer to the killer. Truth may be elusive, but sooner or later it reveals itself. Have you dug through Bonz’s life, any connections that might help? Anything there that sounds interesting?”
“Yes, Shane,” Hardy sounded a bit impatient. “Of course we’ve scoured his life private and public. He didn’t seem to have any secrets. The life of Bonz Bagley appears to have been pretty much an open book. Nothing there that looked like a clue.” Then he added, almost as an aside, “Apparently Bonz had been losing his mental faculties of late. He was taking some kind of medication for that.”
Shane was reminded that Bonz was part of a drug trial that Katya was involved in.
“I knew something about that,” Shane said. “Katya said that he was part of a drug trial of some sort being done at the university. I don’t know any details. Do you think there could be a connection between his participation in the drug trial and his murder?”
“No, I don’t,” Hardy answered.
Shane didn’t either, but he thought that he would ask KiKi more about it when he got the chance. Difficult to see how there was any connection. But Shane knew well that the absence of an obvious connection between facts, especially in the early phases of an investigation, did not rule out the possibility that facts were connected.
“Shane,” Seltzer said. “How much are you willing to help with this? So far, I’m pretty much by myself with the investigation. If you and I could work together, you know, stay in touch, meet regularly to review progress, that sort of thing, that would be a great help.”
“What does the front office brass think about that?” Shane asked.
“Don’t know, Shane,” Hardy replied. “Haven’t asked them.”
“And I would strongly advise you to continue that course. I doubt that they’d be enamored of such an arrangement. But count me in, my man, count me in for as much as I can do. I won’t be much good when the physical action starts, which it may. Although I never developed a taste for it, brute force often rears its ugly head as a case nears its climax. But I’ll do what I can in the meantime.”
Seltzer sensed a new energy in Hadley’s voice.
“That’s great,” Hardy replied. “How about if we stay in touch by phone if anything develops and meet every couple of days, or whenever it seems important, to review things. I’m happy to come here for the meetings.”
“Thanks, Hardy,” Shane said, smiling broadly. “That would be great. But I warn you that I may turn you into a sherry drinker if you’re not careful.”
“Not likely,” Seltzer said, smiling. “It’s just not in my genes.”
Hardy Seltzer left Printers Alley thinking that he and Shane Hadley were about as different as two men who shared an interest in crime could possibly be. But Hardy was looking forward to their collaboration. He could learn a lot for one thing. For another thing, he was becoming rather fond of the arrogant paraplegic ex-cop.
As Hardy walked back toward the courthouse square and the police headquarters, he took off his jacket and threw it over his shoulder. He walked down Church Street toward Second Avenue and turned left up the hill toward the square. As he turned, he looked off down Second, the other way where the warehouses that served the river traffic in earlier years had been converted to restaurants, bars, apartments. The Wildhorse Saloon was down there, the Hard Rock Café, and everything else from an Irish pub to a sushi bar. People wandered along the street. Hardy stood for a minute, absorbing the scene. He really did love this city.
Shane refreshed his sherry and went out on the porch, where the late afternoon sun reflected from the bar fronts. He pondered again the conversation with Hardy Seltzer, the discussion of the case, but also the pact they had agreed on. He was excited to be active again, or as active as his condition permitted. The somewhat conspiratorial nature of the pact—don’t tell the brass—enhanced the thrill. It had been a while since Shane had broken any rules. He worried a little that this might get Hardy in trouble. But Hardy was his own man. He could take care of himself. Breaking an occasional rule might do Hardy Seltzer some good.
Sha
ne also reflected on the fact that Bonz had been involved in the drug trial that KiKi had mentioned. He would have to ask her about that.
Neither of them was aware that they were in adjacent elevators moving in opposite directions, passing like ships in the night—Katya descending toward the parking deck and Beth ascending toward the fifth-floor laboratory. Katya had spent several fruitless hours going through the folders in Beth’s computer. After scanning about half of the folders, Katya concluded that the data she was looking for wasn’t there. That made sense. Unlikely that Beth would be so careless with the data. Especially if, as Katya was coming to suspect, there was something to hide. Beth probably had stored the material on a portable hard drive—likely backed up on more than one—that she had secured someplace. Katya’s initial excitement about accessing Beth’s computer had gradually subsided. She left the laboratory disappointed and still angry from the exchange with Cy. They had had disagreements in the past, but Cy generally knew better than to yell at her. Katya Karpov was not the sort of woman who would tolerate being yelled at. Cy should have known that.
Beth Bartalak unlocked the laboratory door and switched on the lights. She went to her cubicle and sat down. The seat felt warm, as though someone had been sitting there recently, although no one was in the lab. Her computer also felt warm and lit up immediately when she switched it on. Someone had been at her desk and on her computer. And it hadn’t been very long. If she wasn’t mistaken, she also got a faint whiff of perfume. Not just any perfume, but the very distinct scent that hovered like a cloud about that pretentious bitch, Katya Karpov.
Chapter 6
Shane Hadley’s mind was unencumbered by Victorian notions about the behavior of women and the taboos that such notions imposed on the creator of the fictional character that so interested him. So, although he knew that most murderers were men, Shane had no difficulty thinking of Bonz’s murderer as a woman. He would go where the facts led. Any preconceptions about how the investigation should go were, as had always been his practice, put aside. Shane did rely on his gut feelings, intuitions, on occasion, but he had a general conviction that when dealing with crime involving human beings, absolutely anything was possible and to rule out a possibility based on prevailing conceptions of how people should behave was foolish. In fact, people shouldn’t kill other people at all, regardless of gender and social class. And since murder was beyond the social norm, one’s attempt at logical explanations must be tempered. An explanation had to be found, but the logic might not be obvious to one whose mind was not inclined to violence. That was especially true in a case, like this one, where there was no apparent pattern to the assembled facts that made any sense. If things didn’t make sense, then maybe a critical piece of information was missing. There was a dead person, the death obviously perpetrated by another person. There was an explanation for the route, however tortuous, that connected those two facts, and if the dots couldn’t be connected yet, that just meant that there were either missing dots or that divining the connections between them required thinking in a different way.