by Archer Mayor
And a birth control dispenser, its dated slots empty up to the day she died.
He held the plastic clamshell in his hand, reading the prescription on its cover. These were sometimes taken medicinally, he thought, not just for practical purposes. Other times, they were merely wishful thinking in pill form, and didn’t actually indicate any active sexuality. Given the lack of romantic evidence elsewhere in the apartment, Willy was left to wonder.
Finally, ignoring the stench, he returned to the living room and tried imagining the life it had once contained. Here, books were read, conversations held on the phone by the couch, the TV was watched. Sometimes, the walls were studied during daydreams or in thought—or in despair. Frugality spoke for itself. Everything was threadbare, worn, or cheaply made. But there was pride as well. The place was clean, the colorful accents he’d noticed earlier had been strategically placed to either please the eye or cover a defect, or both.
He approached the pine-board-and-brick bookshelves next to the window and studied their contents. Romantic novels, a few standard reference works, carefully piledup fashion and travel magazines. Gaps between volumes were filled with plastic figurines or a cheerful piece of inexpensive pottery. He recognized an odd-looking rock she’d collected when they’d been walking together near the river back in Brattleboro, and which he’d told her was a stupid thing to lug around. There were other familiar odds and ends he saw from their time together.
A few pictures stood among the books, either framed and free-standing on a pop-out cardboard leg or simply propped up and slightly curling. He recognized the mother who would have nothing to do with her—a hardbitten woman with cold, judgmental eyes. There was a sunset photograph of some Vermont mountain, probably Jay Peak. And a group shot of Mary surrounded by five others, all laughing at the camera, their arms interlaced. Willy brought this last off the shelf and held it under the light, studying the faces before him, his eyes lingering over Mary’s. She looked absolutely, totally happy. In the background was a sign mounted against a gritty, urban brick wall, which he assumed belonged in this city. It read, “The Re-Coop.” There was nothing written on the back of the photograph, but tucked into the corner of the actual image was a burned-in date. The picture has been taken only two months before. Willy slipped it into his breast pocket.
He continued his search, carefully riffling through the books, checking the magazines for earmarks or stray pages or notes. He looked under the small rug, checked under the pillows of the couch and armchair. Other than some change, a couple of paper clips, and a petrified pretzel, he found nothing.
Finished at last, he was left standing beside the coffee table, almost absentmindedly staring at the one utterly discordant note in the whole place: the clotted, fetid remains of what Mary’s body had left behind, and the reemboldened army of cockroaches that had taken his ignoring them as encouragement to resume their meal.
After a pause, Willy moved to the kitchen, retrieved what he needed, and set to work cleaning up the mess, double bagging what he could collect using a sponge, and scrubbing the remaining stains with disinfectant and cleaning fluid. It took him over an hour, and when he was done, the damp spots he’d created looked worse than what had been there before. But he knew they would dry and disappear, and already the air smelled better. It wasn’t as good as Mary could have done, but it returned the apartment to being a more suitable monument. As for the scene’s integrity, Willy didn’t even want to think what the cops would say of his handiwork. Assuming it mattered. He knew this police department. He knew this city. He even knew how he would have dealt with this situation had he caught the case. This wasn’t a crime scene, as far as the NYPD was concerned. It was just an apartment caught in the limbo of a ponderous bureaucracy which would take six months or more to decide that nothing unusual had happened here.
And maybe they were right, although Willy now had some questions.
He gathered his refuse together, added to it the increasingly odorous garbage from under the kitchen sink, and dumped it all down the chute he found partway down the third-floor corridor.
Afterward, he neatened the disarray the cops had created in their search, killed most of the lights, lifted the window shade, settled into the dry corner of the couch, and watched the play of lights and shadows in the windows across the alleyway.
Eventually, without intending to, he finally yielded to the anxiety and adrenaline that had fueled him most of the day and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 4
NYPD precinct houses generally come in two basic models: old, dating back to before Teddy Roosevelt and awkwardly retrofitted for almost everything, including electricity; and modern, meaning circa 1970, implying some up-to-date conveniences, but only in exchange for an architectural style as lacking in taste as the clothing of the same era. When Willy Kunkle had worked for the department, he’d been stationed at one of the old-timers, which, despite its many drawbacks, had appealed to him for its sheer sense of place. The huge, elaborately carved golden oak sergeant’s desk in the entrance lobby, the wrought-iron and brass details throughout the building, and its solid stone appearance had all reminded him of the history and traditions that helped see the department through its rough times—and occasionally led it straight into them.
The Seventh Precinct house, however, had none of that. Of the modern era, made of red brick, and sharing its roof with a fire department ladder company, it was blandness personified, as creatively and sensitively designed as a security-minded high school or a low-profile prison. It was spacious, though, or a least bigger than many of its ancient brethren, and so had more room for its occupants to complain about.
One detail all these buildings shared, however, came back to Willy’s memory before he was a half block from the front door: The parking was lousy. For some reason, none of the precincts were equipped with more than a minuscule number of designated spots, which meant anyone who wasn’t in management double-parked on the street, pulled up onto the sidewalks, or otherwise caused enough of a problem that the precinct commander was constantly in meetings with irate neighborhood representatives.
Willy walked past car after haphazardly parked car with special plates thrown onto their dashboards before finally passing through the Seventh Precinct’s front door. He was greeted with a familiar chorus of sights, sounds, and smells he doubted was much different from any one of the other seventy-five houses sprinkled across the city’s five boroughs. The ringing phones, general milling population, and the institutional decor consisting of framed portraits of department leaders and motivational posters all brought him back to the very first day he’d entered this world, feeling awkward in his bulky new uniform. It was early enough in the day, in fact, that the morning patrol shift was still in the muster room across from the long, battered, pressed-wood sergeant’s desk. Willy could see, through its broad doors, the uniformed assemblage facing the duty sergeant at his podium, taking notes as he read from a binder and pointed from time to time at a collection of glassed-in wall maps covered with variously colored pins—crime maps indicating current trends in the precinct.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked him from her school-style desk.
He looked down at her as if she’d interrupted him in mid-dream. “I’m here to see Detective Ogden. My name’s Kunkle.”
She glanced at his left arm, its hand as usual stuffed into his trousers pocket. “Upstairs, second floor, third door on the right.”
He glanced over her head at the activity at the long front desk, manned by an oversized, avuncular sergeant and his frazzled-looking aide. These were the precinct’s air traffic controllers. They knew which prisoners were in holding, who was out on patrol and where, what weapons had been logged in for safekeeping, and a multitude of other details that helped keep the place running. They took messages, handled phone calls, assigned tasks throughout the building, and acted as human bulletin boards, all amid a din of colliding human voices. They were the keepers of the Patrol Guide, the
bible of the uniformed cop, and knew its contents the way they knew their own family members, dispensing advice whenever called upon. The flow of officers and civilians alike in front of this desk, picking up or dropping off paperwork or just chatting briefly, was nonstop.
Upstairs, the noise was less of a commingled babble, being segregated into a series of offices extending off to both sides of the landing. He counted three doors on his right, walked past several stacks of old boxed case files, and stepped into an office with a cardboard sign labeled, “Detectives.”
There he stopped, observing the scene before him. The room was moderately large, with a mismatched scattering of dented and scarred desks. The lighting was fluorescent, accompanied by some daylight through a row of high, smudged windows. The floors were damaged and worn linoleum, the painted cinderblock walls plastered with charts, rows of clipboards, more framed photographs and posters, and multiple bulletin boards, all attempting to hide a paint job of queasy industrial green. The air was filled with ringing phones, general conversation, and, in an almost incongruous throwback to a previous era, the sound of typewriters. As in the hallway outside, there were boxes piled everywhere: along the walls, under the windows, between doors. The place looked like a moving company on a lunch break, except he knew from past experience that few of these boxes had been moved in years.
There were five men sitting at the odd assortment of desks in the middle of the floor, none of whom paid him any attention.
“Help you?” a voice asked from his right.
He turned and saw a civilian employee sitting at a workstation equipped with the room’s most modern computer.
“Yeah. I’m looking for Detective Ogden.”
The computer operator called out to a man working near one of the windows—tall, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped gray hair, looking comfortable enough that the entire precinct house might have been built around him. Ogden was speaking quietly on the phone, reading from an open file before him. He glanced up, saw the assistant point to Willy with raised eyebrows, and waved Willy over, gesturing to the wooden chair beside his desk. One of its slats was missing.
“Thanks,” Willy muttered, and crossed the room, noticing as he did so the flickered glances of the men he passed, taking inventory.
A tiny glimmer of gold from Ogden’s sport coat caught Willy’s eye as he sat down: a small lapel pin in the shape of a brontosaurus. Willy studied the other officer more carefully, thinking back to Joe Gunther in Vermont.
That pin identified Ward Ogden as a “dinosaur,” one of an elite few, the NYPD version of a Knight of the Round Table—skilled, battle-scarred, savvy, with an elephantine memory and enviable contacts. Dinosaurs were career detectives, classified First Grade and thus pulling down a lieutenant’s salary, but preferring to stay on the streets, catching cases, and given those rare pins by their respectful peers. For the most part, they were older, nearing retirement, had often gone to the academy with people who were now chiefs and sometimes even the commissioner, and were the most seasoned of what the detective bureau could offer. But they were more than that. It wasn’t just age that made a dinosaur. There was a mystique behind the lapel pin. These people had true bearing within the department. They’d successfully closed headline cases, sometimes several of them, with dignity and grace, paying homage to all who’d helped them, and avoiding the publicity that their more politically minded, upwardly mobile brethren so eagerly courted. Dinosaurs, like the brontosauruses chosen to symbolize them, were quiet giants.
More cynically, Willy also knew, a helpful dinosaur was worth money in the bank, while the pissed-off version would make staying in New York a waste of time.
Ogden hung up the phone and stuck out his hand to shake Willy’s. “Detective Kunkle?”
Willy was surprised. “How’d you know?”
Ogden laughed. “Lucky guess. I’m Ward Ogden. Thanks for coming by. I’m sorry for your loss. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
Willy shook his head. “No, thanks. Had one already.”
Ogden pointed his chin at the mug on his desk. “Smart man. I drink way too much of the stuff. My wife, Maria, says it’ll be the end of me in the long run. Probably right, too, although I tell her she hangs around doctors too much. She’s a nurse. When did you get in?”
Willy proceeded carefully. “Last night. I didn’t want to waste time.”
Ogden understood. “So, you’ve been by Bellevue already?”
Willy watched the other man’s eyes, looking for what he might be after. In this kind of conversation, a man with Ogden’s experience didn’t ask questions he didn’t have the answers to, especially when they were already part of the record somewhere. No more than he had to rely on any “lucky guess” to know who Willy was. Willy decided to call him on it and establish a bit of his own credibility.
“Just like it says in their report.”
Ogden smiled slightly. “What’s it like being a cop in Vermont?”
“Not so intense. We get to spend more time on our cases. The press covers each and every one, though, the money’s lousy, and turf’s still a big deal.”
Ogden nodded. “Yeah. I guess every homicide is front page news—everybody wants a piece of it.”
“Every homicide, every robbery, damn near every fender bender.” Willy had questions, too, and he dearly wanted the answers, but for once in his life, he was going to let the other party lead the dance.
Ogden sat back in his chair. “Well, more to the point, I was sorry to be the one to break the news of your ex-wife’s death. That must have been a shock.”
Willy kept it short and honest. “Yes, it was.”
“Had you two kept in touch at all?”
“No. It wasn’t the friendliest of breakups.” He wondered why he’d volunteered that bit. It was none of Ogden’s business.
“That’s too bad. Marriage and cops are a tough mix.”
“You been divorced?”
The older man looked at him before responding, and Willy realized he’d broken an unstated ground rule. This was not a level playing field, despite the professional courtesy.
“How long ago was that?” Ogden asked.
Willy felt himself bristling on the inside, and felt doubly angry. Ever so gently, Ogden was pushing him around. Successfully.
He tried the same approach of a minute ago. “Like it says in the divorce papers you have: twelve years.”
Ogden looked solicitous. “I apologize, Detective Kunkle. Is this a sore subject?”
Normally, Willy would have called the man an asshole and walked out of the room. But that was partly the point of the question. Ogden was taking his measure.
Willy took a deep breath and admitted, “I was a drunk back then. I hit her once. And that was the end of it. She was right to leave. I was a loser.”
Ogden shook his head gently. “You’ve quit drinking, you were wounded on duty, and now you’re on a topnotch squad. Could be you’re being a little tough on yourself.”
It was meant as a compliment, even though it confirmed that Ogden had checked him out. But there was more to Willy’s past than what was available through a computer check and some phone calls. And that gap made Willy think resentfully of Joe Gunther again, the man who’d had more to do with Willy’s upward mobility than he believed he had himself.
“Could be Vermont’s like a cop version of kindergarten,” he blurted out resentfully. “Doesn’t take a wizard to get ahead. Even a gimpy drunk can do it.”
Ogden’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes stayed on Willy’s, and Willy felt all the more foolish for his outburst. He wished he could go back outside and at least take a walk around the block to clear his head. Back home, he routinely took people apart during interrogations, while never laying a hand on them. He’d humiliate them, cajole them, embarrass them, almost pummel them with language. And here he was, rising to every bait Ogden put before him, including the ones Ogden wasn’t aware of.
“What d’you have on Mary’s de
ath?” Willy finally asked, as much to move on as to get an answer.
Ogden’s face softened. “The ME left a message for me. I got it this morning. They did the autopsy right after you ID’d the body. There’s a detailed final protocol and a tox report that won’t come through for weeks, but absent any signs of criminality there, they’re confirming what we’ve thought all along: apparent heroin overdose.”
Willy’s jaw tightened. That wasn’t enough for him—a couple of cops poking around, a late-night off-the-cuff one-liner from a medical examiner. It didn’t fit what he’d found at the apartment, or, more importantly, what he’d felt spending the night there. But that wasn’t anything he could admit, nor did he want anyone to know of his misgivings, for fear of being thrown out.
Still, if he didn’t show at least part of his hand, he’d never get Ogden to do the same with what they’d collected. And that was something Willy really wanted to see.
“I saw her track marks,” he said, trying to sound purely professional. “Except for the one that killed her, they all looked pretty old.”
Ogden’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “That’s not too surprising, is it? A lot of addicts overdose because they shoot the same load they did when they were regulars. Only their systems aren’t used to it anymore.”
That ran against Willy’s professional instinct to always “think dirty.” Even knowing what this man’s workload must be, he found the comment conveniently pat. “I suppose.”
Ogden sighed slightly. “The door was locked from the inside, the window, too. There was no sign of violence and nothing obvious missing. I know this is hard to face, but I think what we see here is what we got.”
After a pause, still studying Willy’s face, he added, “What’re your plans?”
Willy didn’t want to lie outright, but he hedged his bets with his phrasing. “I want to find out more about her life down here—what led her to it.”
Ogden hesitated before asking, “There anything going on I should know about?”