I glanced backward. Penny was still on our tails. I quickened my pace. “Juice?”
“I’m headed home.”
“I’ll give you a lift then.”
He shrugged. “I take the train.”
“Great, I’ll walk you to the subway.” Penny had no chance of keeping up with us in that super-tight pencil skirt. I was wearing one too, but I’d had my tailor cut an extra few inches into the back slit. It made it easier to speed walk—or run—if need be.
Once we’d rounded the corner on to Lexington, I dove into my first question. “What did the cops say?”
“They wanted to know the last time I saw Olivia.”
“And when was that?”
“Friday night. Around ten.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Wait a second, were you the last person to see her alive?”
He took a drag of his cigarette. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Olivia was my best friend. I need to know what you know. I need to know who did this to her.” I looked him squarely in the eye until he shifted his gaze to the cracked sidewalk at his toes.
“Are you asking me as her friend or as one of those news people,” he said.
“Her friend.”
His shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“If you want, we can do this on background,” I said.
“What’s that?”
I explained to him that background meant I could use whatever information he gave me, but I couldn’t attribute it to him. We stepped to the side to make way for one of those massive double strollers. “Please, Andrew. You know me. You’ve seen me with Olivia. You can trust me.”
Kaminski shrugged. “You won’t use my name?”
I nodded, fishing my pen and a spiral notebook out of my carryall as we started walking again. “So you were just coming off your shift when I saw you?”
“I’d already gone home. I was just about to hit the sack when I got a call from the super telling me I had to come back in.”
“Your shift is eleven to seven a.m., right?” Most Upper East Side buildings followed the same schedules: seven to three, three to eleven, eleven to seven.
“The guy before me needed to get off earlier and the super couldn’t cover him. I got to the Haverford at nine. Miss Kravis came in about an hour later.”
“Ten o’clock? You sure?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“Anyone with her?”
“Her friend. The one with the nice—” I could tell he was going to say rack, because I caught him looking at mine, but he paused, reconsidered, and chose a smarter approach. “Nice body.”
I nodded as my stomach did a series of flips. Things had just gotten about a thousand times more complicated. “Anyone else come up for a visit?”
He shook his head, blew out some more smoke.
Damn. “Are you sure?”
He nodded again.
I sighed, forcing myself to focus on what I knew for sure. Bludgeoning wasn’t for the weak of heart—or body. Olivia was my height—five-foot-nine—and whippet thin. But she was stronger than she looked. She jogged the reservoir whenever she could, practiced yoga a couple of times a week, and last year she’d traveled to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I knew that the woman Kaminski was referring to was Rachel Rockwell, and although we’d never met in person, I had seen pictures of her. She had warm brown eyes, exotic features, and long dark hair. Her small stature made it hard for me to imagine her overpowering Olivia, but neither could I rule her out. Anger was a powerful thing; it turned the meek into the mighty, the humane into the beastly. I’d seen it happen.
“Anything else you remember? Were Olivia and her friend in good spirits or did they look like they’d been arguing?”
“Well, her friend was wearing a fur coat. Sort of a purple color.”
Generally speaking, purple fur is not what one wears to a slaying. If Rachel had killed Olivia, it must have been done in the heat of the moment, in other words, a crime of passion. But purple fur? Our viewers were going to devour that detail. I hated that this even occurred to me, but I could already see the line on the ticker tape: SUSPECT IN KRAVIS MURDER CASE WORE PURPLE FUR, SAYS EYEWITNESS. As a producer, I lived for moments like these. As a friend, I was horrified.
“When did Olivia’s guest leave?”
“She didn’t.” Andrew stopped at the entrance to the Hunter College subway stop. A bunch of kids streamed past us in their backpacks and jeans, talking loudly, jumping around. We let them go past. “I’m on until seven. Then the day guy comes in. If she left through the front door, she didn’t do it while I was there.”
“C’mon, I’m sure you take breaks. Go to the bathroom? Make a call?”
“That’s true.”
“And what about the service entrance?” Buildings like the Haverford kept security cameras on all their points of entry and egress, plus the elevators. The latest systems recorded on digital hard drives—not VHS tapes—and could store up to two weeks of video.
He threw his cigarette to the ground, grinding it out with his heel. “I don’t know about that stuff. You have to ask the police. Or the super.”
It occurred to me that Rachel could have been slain alongside Olivia, but I didn’t think we were dealing with a double homicide—the PD would have released that information from the get-go. My guess was that she had managed to sneak out of the building unseen. But was she running from the killer or from the scene of a crime she’d committed?
Andrew gestured toward the flight of stairs leading down to the subway platform. “We’re done?”
“For now. How about you go home, get some sleep, take a shower and then let’s talk to set up another interview? This time on camera,” I ventured.
He gave me a look.
“Don’t judge. We all got a job to do.” I stuffed my pad and pen back in my bag. “You ever hear of Georgia Jacobs?”
“Sure I’ve heard of her.” He scratched the back of his neck, giving me another glimpse of green scales decorating his forearm. “But my boss says if I go on camera again, he’ll can my ass.”
“He can’t do that. The union won’t allow it.”
“Sorry, but that’s not how it works. If the people who live in that building want me gone, they’ll find another reason. They can write me up for anything.”
“As long as you didn’t sign a confidentiality agreement, they can’t fire you for talking to the media.”
He shook his head. “It’s not worth it.”
It’s not worth it. Something about his choice of words rubbed me the wrong way. “Olivia’s dead, Andrew. She may be just another spoiled rich chick to you, but she had family who loved her and friends who will miss her.” I put my hand out to shake his. “Thanks for the interview.”
“Wait a second. I didn’t mean any disrespect. You know that.”
“Sure I do,” I said dryly. “My friend’s dead and you’re worried about your job.”
He looked appropriately chastened. “Let me take you to dinner.”
I coughed. I hadn’t seen that coming. “I don’t think so.”
“Can I have your number?”
“No.”
“Not for a date.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “In case I find out something about what happened, how am I going to get in touch?”
I was being baited, but there was a chance Andrew would have access to information I could use, and I couldn’t afford to dismiss him out of hand. I fished out my business card and handed it to him. “If it’s urgent, you can reach me on my cell. I’m hardly ever at my desk.”
I was on my way back to the Haverford when I remembered to turn my phone off of vibrate. I’d missed five calls, all from Jen. She picked up on the first ring. “Where are you?” Her voice was panicked.
“Not far. I was talking to the doorman.”
“You better get back here.”
“Hoestick scooped us,” Jen announced as soo
n as I was back at the van.
While I was talking to the doorman, she’d gotten hold of someone who knew about Olivia’s female visitor. Worse than that, this person knew about the purple fur. The first big scoop should have been mine, and Penny Harlich had stolen it right from under me.
Alex didn’t share my opinion on the matter. He was in the truck, which now reeked of the greasy sandwiches Aaron must have brought the crew for lunch. He pointed to Harlich on one of the monitors. “She’s pretty so you assume she’s not smart, but she is smart, and not only that, she’s ambitious. You underestimate her, and that’s why she’s a threat to us.”
“She got lucky.” I grumbled.
Alex snorted. “She’s gonna hand us our asses if we don’t up our game.”
“Agreed. But I’m not the only one on this team. Penny’s on-air talent and she lands scoops. Where are yours?”
“Working on it,” he muttered.
“And so am I.” I stepped out of the van and made a beeline for the building. Penny Harlich had a source on the PD. There was no other way to explain it. No one else could have possibly known about the visitor except for a police officer. She had a leak, now it was time for me to find mine. I started to dial his number on my phone, but then I saw him. Standing ten feet from the awning—practically right in front of me—was Detective Neal Pandowski, aka Panda.
Panda and I had met five years earlier. I was covering the rape and murder of a New York University co-ed and Panda was one of the detectives assigned the case. The victim, a beautiful Indian girl, had gone missing several days before her body turned up stuffed under a mattress in a vacant room in her dorm. Because the police and university hadn’t shut off access to the building as soon as they’d discovered Anjali was missing, some had argued that vital crime-scene evidence had potentially been tampered with or lost. Panda was singled out for making the call not to close the building, but I convinced Georgia to argue that he’d made the right decision, given the facts available at the time. A month later, when Panda cracked the case and the killer admitted to sexually assaulting and strangling the girl, Panda’s error in judgment was swiftly forgotten. Still, he remained grateful to me for coming to his defense, and had repaid the favor several times over by acting as my best source on the NYPD.
Since Panda was on the street, shooting the breeze with a bunch of patrolmen, and not upstairs studying the crime scene, I could surmise two things: First, that his partner, John Ehlers, had been teamed up with the detective from North Homicide; and second, that Panda was miffed about not catching the case himself. At sixty years old, he was nearing retirement and wouldn’t have too many more shots at solving a blockbuster case like this one. Selfishly, I was glad Panda hadn’t. This meant he’d have access to all the case information and plenty of time to share it with me.
I got his attention. He shook his head once. I knew what that meant: Not now. Five minutes later, my phone rang. “You eat yet?” he asked when I picked up.
I hadn’t. I suggested our usual spot.
“Meet you there in 10,” he replied.
Pastrami Queen was a little hole-in-the-wall near Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side. There was a counter displaying all manner of pickles and cole slaw, knishes, brisket, corned beef, pastrami, and the like. The floors were covered in white tiles and there was a mounted flat-screen television tuned into ESPN. Panda had introduced me to Pastrami Queen’s corned beef on rye, extra juicy, and most of the times we met up, we did it there, over root beers, half-sours, and massive, artery-assaulting sandwiches. By the time I arrived, he was already there. Two root beers sat unopened on the plastic-covered table in front of him.
I plopped down and popped open one of the drinks, taking a sip straight from the can. Slipping my arms out of my trench, I glanced around the small room. No cops. No media. We could talk. “I need to know everything.”
“Holy smokes, Clyde, I thought you’d at least comment on my tie before pumping me for information.”
Panda was a good twenty pounds overweight, with a goofy grin and balding pate, and although he could probably afford better, he favored off-the-rack suits to the designer ones some of the detectives on the force wore. He also had a soft spot for kitschy ties, like the one featuring cigarette-smoking bass he was wearing that day.
“Smoked fish,” he said.
“Funny,” I acknowledged.
“What’s wrong? I thought I’d at least get a smile.”
“I knew the victim. She was my—” I couldn’t finish.
“I know, kid.” He patted me on the back of the hand. Panda had lost friends on the force, a child to leukemia. I knew he understood what I was going through. “You sure you’re up for this?”
I nodded, shaking off the tears that were threatening to break loose. “They’ve paired me with a new guy.”
“You’re not covering the case for Georgia?”
“Not per se. I’m working with one of our new correspondents. We were both the first ones on the scene.”
He leaned back in his chair as our sandwiches arrived in a pair of parchment-lined red plastic baskets. “This gotta be a tricky one for FirstNews.”
“You can say that again.” I didn’t touch my sandwich. My appetite was still gone and showed no signs of returning.
Panda bit into his pastrami and rye and chewed in silence for a good minute as I nursed my root beer. Wiping the mustard from the side of his mouth, he pushed my basket an inch closer to me. “You not eating?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s a first.”
I shrugged.
“Eat, Shaw. You need your strength.”
Reluctantly, I took a bite, chewed. Took another bite, chewed some more. Auto-eat, I called it.
Panda looked to the back of the restaurant. “Forgot I wanted to wash my hands.” He laid a brown paper evidence bag face down on the table and got out of his seat. “Back in a flash.”
I flipped over the envelope. It was marked KRAVIS with a Sharpie. Was he taking it back to the lab for Ehlers? There was a protocol with how evidence was dealt with—the technicians took everything themselves straight to the lab to be dusted for fingerprints, analyzed, searched for clothing fibers, skin cells, or hairs. Ehlers must have found something after they left and asked Panda to take it in for him. I glanced over by the bathroom door. I had time to peek inside, and if there was ever an assignment worth bending the rules for, this was it. But I couldn’t do that to Panda. He trusted me. If I needed to know what was in there, he would tell me.
I took another bite of my sandwich. Panda returned to the table. Laid the bag back in his lap with a smile. “Your bosses, they worried about what we found on the scene?”
“What did you find?” My leg bounced under the table. “I’m told there was no evidence of drugs or sex play?”
He tipped his root beer into his glass. “Toxicology reports won’t be back for weeks. But we didn’t find any drugs on the scene and the victim didn’t have any bruises we’d associate with a sex crime. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, though.”
I gave him an exasperated look. “That’s the fashion. Plenty of girls go commando.”
“I may be an old codger, but you can’t tell me that’s sanitary.”
I laughed despite myself. Then I got serious. “What else did you find?”
“You mean this?” He lifted the bag back out of his lap, opened it up, and picked out a bunch of mustard packets.
“Are you kidding me?” I slumped against the back of the chair, tipped my head back to look at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry, kid. But this case isn’t like the others. Olivia was your friend and she’s the daughter of your network’s founder. If I’m gonna trust you on this one, I gotta know I can.”
I peeled my body off the back of my chair. “She wasn’t just a friend, Neal. She was my best friend. And this isn’t about protecting the network or doing my job. This is about figuring out what happened to her.”
“OK,” he said simply. He understood.
“Any sign of a break-in? Burglary? Olivia had a safe, did you find that?”
“No sign of break-in. No sign of burglary. The safe in the master bedroom doesn’t look like it’s been broken into. Forensics will have to check the fingerprints.”
“And she was bludgeoned, correct?”
“She was hit on the head repeatedly with a crystal vase.”
“Did you recover it?”
“Shattered,” he said. “Blows were mostly on the back of the head, but the killer got in some bad ones to the face, too. Looks like cause of death is trauma to the brain, but we’ll see what comes back in the autopsy. There was a lot of blood. She might a’ bled out.”
The little hairs on my neck stood up. A slow death was the worst kind. It gave you time to think about all the mistakes you’d made, all the regrets you had. But Olivia and I were different. Her mistakes were few and far between. Maybe those last minutes had been peaceful for her; maybe—hopefully—she’d died with some knowledge of all the good she’d brought to the world.
“You OK?” Panda asked.
I held my breath, let the moment pass. “Yes.”
He eyed my sandwich again. I took another half-hearted bite, put it down again. “Any sign of struggle?” I asked.
“Bruises around the arms.”
That meant Olivia hadn’t been caught off-guard, at least not completely. She’d tried to defend herself. But given that there were no signs of a break-in, my guess was she knew her attacker. That could have included Rachel. I went over the new facts in my head: Crystal vase murder weapon, signs of struggle, not a home-invasion burglary. “What kind of building security was in place?” I asked.
“The usual. Cameras in the lobby and elevator, service entrance, and service elevator. But everything was shut off.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“The system is located in the super’s office. He says he found it switched off when he checked on it on Saturday morning. He figured there was a malfunction or something. Apparently that happened frequently.”
“You’re telling me you’ve got no video of who came in and out of that building on Friday night? Do you even know the name of Olivia’s visitor on the night of her murder?”
Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery Page 4