The Sniper's Wife

by Archer Mayor

  “That,” he added, straightening up and rubbing his eyes, “suggests to me that he left the building dressed differently but still carrying the stuff he entered with, so I had Jim go up and down the block to see if any stores or buildings had surveillance cameras overlooking the street, maybe aimed through the display window beyond the cash register or something. The best one he found was an ATM video that took a shot of every customer. That still ain’t much, though—leaves a lot of gaps. He’s still checking it, but nothing yet.”

  “What about Mary’s phone records?” Sammie asked.

  Ogden nodded agreeably. “Yup. Just getting there. We got a subpoena for them. That’s some of what Jim’s doing right now, running reverse checks on the numbers she called. We found Willy’s brother right off, of course, it being long-distance—she called him a few times. I tried contacting you about that, but your pager’s on the blink. Not that it mattered, since you found him anyway. It should all make interesting reading once Jim’s done.

  “Until then,” he went on, extracting a sheet of paper from the file and laying it face up between them, “we have this, which may be nothing at all.”

  It was a subway map of the five boroughs, with several of the stations circled in red, accompanied by red numbers running anywhere from one to fifteen.

  “Her Metro cards?” Gunther asked.

  “Yeah. As Willy figured, our technical people had fun with them. When you run one of these cards through the entrance gate, it marks the date and the station. Course, we have no idea where each trip ended, but it still sets up a pattern of sorts.”

  Sammie pointed at the one station with a fifteen written next to it. “This the one closest to her home?”

  “Right.”

  Joe saw one that immediately caught his eye. “Look. Four times at 135th Street, not all that far from where Bob goes to see his mother every week.”

  “It gets better,” Ogden commented. “I ran that bag of heroin by the narcotics folks here. It’s called Diablo, and 135th is near where it’s circulated most. It’s supposedly the trademark of some guy calling himself La Culebra, which means The Snake.”

  “Cute,” Joe muttered. “I don’t guess Mr. Snake would be too interested in a chat.”

  “I doubt it,” Ogden agreed wryly, “but it’s a big coincidence to overlook. On the other hand, that same subway stop also services a City College campus up there. It may be a stretch, but I’ve asked one of the local detectives to check the enrollment files, just for what-the-hell.”

  “You talk with her co-workers and friends?” Sammie asked.

  Ogden laughed. “Several of them, and found that Willy had been there already. He goes right after it, doesn’t he?”

  Neither one of them could argue the point, but Gunther asked, “Did he say anything to them that might tell us what he’s up to?”

  “Mary’s old boss thought he was having a hard time accepting the accidental overdose scenario, but she didn’t think he had any evidence proving otherwise. The other one—a friend and colleague of Mary’s—was almost too pissed off at him to even talk about it. Apparently he didn’t fess up to being the infamous ex, and she didn’t find that out till she talked with her boss later.

  “But,” he added, holding a finger up in the air, “there were a couple of things that came out of that conversation we should look into. And if they pan out, I want the NYPD to get full credit for having trained your guy to be as good as he is.”

  “You want the credit,” Gunther replied, laughing, “we might give you the guy, too, if my bosses get sick enough of him. What were the couple of things?”

  “First, he asked about boyfriends, specifically mentioned someone named Andy, which is why I lit up just then when you mentioned Liptak. Mary’s girlfriend, Louisa Obregon, drew a blank there, but she did say Mary had been a bit of a party girl and that Obregon even met a couple of her dates. She couldn’t remember their names, but they were ordinary-sounding like Bill or Dave.”

  “Or Bob,” Joe said quietly.

  Ogden smiled. “Thought you’d find this part interesting. I couldn’t get any worthwhile descriptions, but flying a mug shot of Bob Kunkle under her nose couldn’t hurt. The other two things she told me were just as interesting: One, she swore Mary was a speedball shooter when she last used. She’d shot heroin in the old days, but had moved to speedballs exclusively and wouldn’t have touched straight heroin with a pole, supposedly. Two, she said that Willy really got after her about the Re-Coop— asking who owned it, how was it financed, what was its real story—stuff like that.”

  “Interesting,” Gunther said. “You look into any of that yet?”

  Ogden shook his head. “Nope. We’ve already jammed a lot into a short time. I just haven’t gotten to it.”

  “Maybe we can help. Some of this just requires breaking down data—noncomputer stuff—matching Metro stops to phone call addresses or credit card and sales receipts to various dates we have on hand, or even chasing down the incorporation records on the Re-Coop. Couldn’t Sam and I do that while you and your partner do the street cop and computer work?”

  Ogden didn’t take two seconds to react. “Sure. I’ll tuck you away somewhere upstairs. More than one case has been made that way. After losing so much time, we should be that lucky.”

  He stood up and began collecting his paperwork. Smiling at them as he did so, he added, “But I’m an optimist at heart. Ask anybody.”

  There was a knock on the door and one of Odgen’s colleagues poked his head into the room. “Call for you, Ward. Guy named Willy Kunkle.”

  “Thanks, Freddy.” Ogden waggled his eyebrows at the two Vermonters. “See?”

  Chapter 17

  The subway dropped Willy Kunkle off at the Essex Street station, just shy of where Delancey begins ramping up to meet the Williamsburg Bridge on its leap across the East River. It’s an impressive view and a true monument to engineering, especially superimposed over the Lower East Side backdrop. It’s also a visual testament to the cars-over-people mentality born in the twentieth century’s first half, when the already downtrodden, roughand-tumble neighborhood was furrowed up to make room for what, even at the time, was deemed a remarkably ugly bridge. It made of the whole area a fractious orchestra of brick and steel, poverty and history, mixed in with the bridge’s contradictory, even incongruous promise of a way out. It had forever been a picture Willy could appreciate.

  He continued walking toward the river on the northern sidewalk, intending to cut under the bridge at Ridge Street to the precinct house below. But the route had an extra benefit, offering up yet another telling symbol of the neighborhood—one reflecting the locals’ ability to rally against the sheer weight of the city around them. It was an enclosed chicken ranch, complete with wire racks jammed with hundreds of red hens strutting around and pecking out of feed trays, all tucked behind the broad plate-glass windows of an otherwise conventional store. Willy pondered an ad that might accompany such counterintuitive offerings: “Manhatten Free-Range Chickens.” This was definitely a town for the innovative.

  It was dark by now, and Willy paused in the shadows under the bridge to look at the redbrick station house and consider his actions one last time. He and Riley Cox had wasted hours fruitlessly chasing down a match for the name Carlos Barzún had given him: Ron Cashman. They’d even tried calling every Cashman in the phone book. But in a town of so many millions, a good many of whom were less than eager to be located, they hadn’t held out much hope. And along those lines, they hadn’t been disappointed.

  Willy’s working out in the cold had just hit its first distinct disadvantage. He didn’t have the resources, the equipment, or the manpower to conduct a search like the one he needed done.

  The challenge, therefore, was to locate Ron Cashman using police help without losing control of the case, something his recent incarceration and attending mistrust was going to make that much more difficult.

  Which is why he’d phoned Ogden a half hour ago.

>   He broke cover and headed for the Seventh, vowing to make it up as he went along, and hoping to get lucky.

  As soon as he entered the detective bureau upstairs, he knew this might be more difficult then he’d thought— certainly more complicated. Both Joe Gunther and Sammie Martens were clustered around Ward Ogden’s desk, drinking cups of sacrosanct coffee.

  “Hey, Willy,” Gunther said affably enough.

  “Hey, yourself,” he answered, watching Sammie.

  Sammie merely looked at him, her expression closed.

  “Pull up a chair, Mr. Kunkle,” Ogden suggested, “and let’s compare notes.”

  Willy instead parked one hip on the edge of an adjacent desk, so he was sitting with a slight height advantage over them all. “I doubt I have much to offer,” he said, “seeing that I’ve spent most of my time in town behind bars.” He suddenly gave his two colleagues closer scrutiny. “Why are you two still here, anyway?”

  “I called the boss,” Gunther explained. “Sam had vacation time coming, and I told him I was taking emergency grief leave—death in the family with complications. Not too far off.”

  “And he bought that?”

  “I told him the death was the result of a murder.”

  In the sudden stillness, Willy heard the background clatter of a couple of old-fashioned typewriters and the ceaseless ringing of the phones slowly yield to a buzzing in his ears.

  “Is that true?” he asked, his own words sounding distant.

  “You surprised?” Gunther inquired doubtfully.

  Willy felt a numbness spread throughout his body. Despite his dogged efforts of the past few days and his own nagging doubts verging on conviction, he suddenly realized that he’d still been holding out hope that Mary had perhaps died simply of the despair for which he so pointedly took responsibility. To think that she’d also been murdered compounded his loss, and, as unreasonable as he knew it to be, made him feel somehow doubly responsible for her death.

  “I suspected as much,” he said quietly, settling into the chair beside him. “I just wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”

  “What made you suspicious?” Ogden asked, obviously keen to know anything he might have missed.

  “I don’t know,” Willy answered vaguely. “It felt wrong. She’d been happy, planning ahead—looking to go back to school. And there were things at her apartment— a missing date book, no address book. She always had those, and they weren’t in your file.”

  He was finding it helpful to talk. “You also have three letters. That may be all there was, but she used to be a pack rat with those, and the birth control pills and her girlfriend both told me she had men in her life. I got the feeling someone had sanitized things, probably one of them.”

  “Was the girlfriend Louisa Obregon?”

  “Yeah. The Re-Coop director gave me her name.”

  “And she told you about Mary wanting to go to school?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Ogden chose his words carefully, still unsure of Willy’s trustworthiness. “We heard she might’ve visited the CCNY campus in Harlem.”

  Willy shrugged. “Maybe. Obregon didn’t say.” The proximity of that campus to La Culebra’s neighborhood wasn’t lost on him. But he, like Ogden, was keeping his own counsel for the moment.

  A couple of detectives entered the squad room, laughing. Ogden rose without fanfare and quietly suggested the four of them retreat to their familiar, more private lair.

  Once the door was closed behind them, and they’d settled into new seats, Joe Gunther commented to Willy, “Obregon mentioned you’d asked her about the ReCoop—how it’s run, funded, who’s behind it. What made you so curious? You smell something there?”

  Willy answered truthfully. “Not particularly. It just seemed pretty ritzy to me, given where it is, and I was surprised Mary could just walk in off the street and get in. Most of these places have waiting lists a mile long. Made me wonder, is all. I never checked it out.”

  He was by now fully recovered from his earlier shock, and returned to the topic that had stimulated it, asking the New York detective, “Since we’re playing twenty questions, why’re you so convinced she was murdered, ’specially after you almost shelved the case?”

  It hadn’t been diplomatically worded, but Ogden apparently had Joe Gunther’s talent for forbearance. “Thank your fearless leader. He saw what we missed.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Ogden and Gunther briefed Willy on their theories, with Gunther going beyond the dinosaur’s reluctance and telling Willy exactly what they were investigating. Gunther knew as Ogden didn’t the extent of his renegade colleague’s abilities and dedication, but he was also fully aware that had it not been for Ogden’s status and the fact that they’d hit it off, none of the Vermont team would have stayed in this building, much less become an integral part of the investigation.

  Willy, for his part, didn’t press for details. In fact, he was more interested in extracting information they wouldn’t know anything about.

  “So basically,” he said once he’d been brought up to date, “you’re crunching numbers and pounding the pavement, hoping to get lucky.”

  “You know how it goes,” Gunther agreed, having noticed that Sammie Martens hadn’t said a word so far.

  “Sure,” Willy conceded, and played the card he’d arrived with. “Then maybe you should add the name Ron Cashman to the list. I heard he might know something, and I can’t get a location on him.”

  Both old-timers studied him carefully. “What’s his story?” Gunther asked.

  Willy looked nonchalant, willing to share information, within limits. “I was chasing down the drug angle—Diablo?”

  Ogden nodded. “Right, the uptown stuff. What’d you find out?”

  “Nothing. My options were to poke around generally or ask the manufacturer directly if he knew Mary. The last approach seemed a little suicidal.”

  “That’s what we were thinking earlier,” Ogden admitted. “Did you find out who makes it?”

  Willy feigned surprise. “You don’t know that? I only heard the street name, La Culebra. Cashman’s name came up as someone who’d done business with him from this part of the city. I thought it was both unusual and an interesting coincidence.”

  Ogden nodded and wrote the name down in his notepad.

  Willy was suddenly struck by a thought. “Add Nathan Lee to that list, too, would you?”

  “Why?”

  Here he felt freer to be honest. “He’s a friend of mine. Been helping me out—in fact, he was the one I was with in that bar—but he disappeared. I’ve been looking all over for him. I’m worried he got into a jam. I checked his apartment, his friends. He’s vanished. Black guy, midsixties—maybe older—small and wiry.”

  Ogden watched him carefully. “What kind of business is he in?”

  “Hustling. Nothing big time. He makes ends meet. I met him when I was on the beat and cut him some slack. He never forgot it.”

  Ogden got to his feet. “Let me add these to Jim’s list. He’s already staring at a computer. I’ll be right back.”

  He left the room. There was an uncomfortable silence before Gunther rose, too, and said, “I gotta go to the bathroom,” and followed Ogden’s example.

  After he’d left, the silence remained. Willy stared at his shoes. Sammie stared at him.

  “How’ve you been?” she finally asked.

  He spoke to his toes. “Okay.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “I’m not asking about your health.”

  His jaw clenched. He’d been dreading this ever since Gunther told him she’d come along. “I’m trying to set things right,” he said.

  “I know that. How’s it going?”

  Something in her voice made him look up. It was the strength he heard—familiar, natural, welcome. In his own emotional gyrations, he’d begun to blend his memories of Mary with those of Sammie, making the latter weaker and less reliable than she was. Sammie was high-strung, and he knew that he’d occas
ionally put her through the wringer, but she wasn’t Mary. She’d be someone who would throw him out when the time came, not run to get away from him. And she certainly wouldn’t seek out male companionship for security or drugs for escape. Sammie was a fighter—passionate and emotional, definitely, but tough as nails when it counted.

  The way she’d just voiced that short sentence reminded him of that, and helped reestablish one of the few tethers he had to a world he felt he was only orbiting at the moment.

  “Pretty shitty right now,” he admitted.

  “Nathan Lee?” she asked.

  His face registered his surprise.

  She smiled, which came as a relief. “The sphinx you’re not—not with me, anyhow.”

  He sighed in concession. “I hadn’t thought about him in years. Only did now because I needed his help. I saw it as calling in a marker, but he treated me like a friend. And now I think maybe I got him killed, like I’ve been doing all my life.”

  Sammie cupped her cheek in her hand and studied him. “Your whole adult life you’ve been either a soldier or a cop, same as me… except you’re a whole lot older.”

  “Hey,” he said, smiling despite himself.

  “And you’ve been in combat,” she continued. “What did you expect? That your friends wouldn’t get banged up or killed? It’s a dangerous life.”

  He frowned at the seeming banality of the comment until she added, “You should ask yourself why you chose those lines of work.”

  That stopped him. He actually never had, and only now wondered why not. He shared a contempt for selfanalysis that many did who needed it most, using those who overindulged in it as the reason why. Except that now, in a virtual flash, he saw that his might have been like an anorexic’s view of a glutton, with no acknowledgment that the majority of humans inhabit neither extreme.