Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  “What if she knew Rachel and Andrey were sleeping together but wanted proof?” After spending more than a decade covering crime, I’d learned two things: One, proof is everything; and two, trust your gut.

  “Rachel was just ten weeks, not even showing. How could Olivia test her lover’s unborn child?”

  “You can test the fetus. Obviously it’s more complicated than a cheek swab, but it’s possible. Does Ehlers know the father is Andrey?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Panda had trusted me with knowledge far more sensitive than this for years. “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Because you’re wanted for questioning.”

  “Me?”

  “You broke into a murder victim’s home.”

  I could have tried denying it—it would have been Andrey’s word against mine— but my fingerprints, which the PD had on file, were all over that key box, Olivia’s apartment, and the bottle of vodka I’d left behind. Long story short, ten years ago, long before I’d gotten my shit together, I’d been thrown in the slammer for disorderly conduct and public nudity. It hadn’t been my finest hour, and neither was last night.

  “Why didn’t you guys find this envelope when you searched the apartment?” I asked.

  “Despite what you see on TV, the crime-scene investigators don’t have enough time to put every piece of trash under a microscope.”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “This isn’t trash. How can you not see DNA testing as significant?”

  Panda relented. “OK, kid, let’s talk this through. You’re the detective, right? You’ve got the body; you’ve got the fetus. What do you do next?”

  “I’d see if the DNA from the semen found in Rachel’s autopsy matches any other DNA picked up from the crime scene. Then I’d see if there was a match with the fetus. And then I’d run it through CODIS.” CODIS was the national database of DNA profiles from convicted felons and missing persons.

  “Good.”

  “What did Ehlers find?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said wearily. “And you’re gonna have to hand that envelope to Ehlers. Don’t even think about plastering it on TV.”

  “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I’m off the story.”

  “Then what are you doing asking me questions about what my partner knows?” Panda growled. “Christ, Shaw! Give Ehlers the envelope. Don’t put it on air. And I’ll see what I can do to make this go away.”

  I’d never heard him lose his temper before, and it left me feeling off-balance. “Anything else?” I asked.

  “A thank you would be nice,” he grumbled, softening finally.

  “Thank you.”

  “When Ehlers comes by, offer him something to drink this time. That fancy network of yours can spare a can of soda.”

  “Wait, he’s coming here? No!” If Ehlers came to the offices to see me, Diskin would be notified and demand that Hiro Itzushi be present for my questioning. Then everyone would find out I’d almost slept with a source and broken into Olivia’s apartment. Both were clear violations of our ethics code. Best case, I’d get written up. Worst case, I’d get fired without severance. My second line beeped. I recognized the extension: Human Resources. This wasn’t good. “I gotta go,” I told Panda.

  “Listen kid, I’ll talk to Ehlers. But make sure you check in with him in the next hour, and don’t run. You know enough about how this stuff works to make that mistake.”

  I said goodbye; Panda wished me good luck.

  The way I saw it, I had two choices: Give Ehlers the envelope and avoid getting arrested and further drawing the ire of the police, or give it to Diskin to put it on air, and have a shot at keeping my job. Audiences loved anything related to DNA, and this envelope was proof that Olivia was on to Rachel and Andrey’s affair. Hand over the envelope, maybe keep my freedom. Give it to Diskin, maybe keep my job. Either way, I lost something.

  I needed time to think, which meant I needed to disappear—just for a few hours, until I could figure out what to do. I grabbed my trench off the back of my chair, slid the envelope from Orchid Cellmark in my pocket, my computer in my handbag, and my Rolodex under my arm. Then I made a run for the elevator.

  I didn’t get very far. “Come on,” I muttered, jabbing the elevator’s down button again. The door finally pinged open and I lunged inside.

  “Hey, where are you going?” I spun around. Alex was leaning against the elevator door so it couldn’t close.

  “Can you move?”

  He stepped inside with me. “Aren’t we supposed to be going to the Haverford?” The door closed. We were alone. He pulled my trench coat open with the crook of his index finger and saw the Rolodex. His playful expression turned serious. “What’s going on?”

  I watched the floor numbers descending. If I could just get out of the front doors, I’d be home free for the time being. “Oberlink is your new producer,” I said.

  Alex’s frown deepened. “Back up. What’s happening? All I heard was that I was supposed to be in the truck. Does this have anything to do with me taking Sabine to the benefit last night?”

  I had to laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself. Believe it or not I have bigger problems than your proclivity for public sex.”

  He looked at me, confused.

  I arched an eyebrow. “Next time make sure the door is shut all the way when you’re screwing my assistant on a conference table.”

  He ran his fingers down his face. “You saw us?”

  The elevator door slid open. We were in the lobby. I walked at a normal pace, my eyes focused on the door, my heart thudding in my chest. Alex followed me onto the sidewalk. “Can you just wait a second?”

  “No.” I flagged down a cab. It pulled up, idling.

  I yanked open the door.

  Alex wedged himself between the door and me.

  “You getting in?” yelled the cabbie.

  “Give us a second, man,” Alex said.

  “Move,” I hissed.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  The cabbie yelled at us again. “In or out?”

  “In,” Alex and I screamed back in unison. I dove into the backseat, Alex climbed in after me. I gave the driver my home address and put my Rolodex on the seat between us.

  Alex turned to me, expectant.

  “You’re better off not knowing.”

  “Try me.”

  I looked out the window. It was an unseasonably warm day for early November—probably the city’s last taste of temperate weather before the cold set in for good. I fished my phone out of my bag. And took a moment to gather my courage before dialing Restivo. A few seconds later, his gravelly baritone was in my ear. “What a coincidence. We were gonna come pay you a visit. I’ve always wanted to see what the Sixth Circle looks like.” He was referencing Dante Alighieri’s Circles of Hell, where heretics spent eternity in fiery graves.

  “It’s nice of you to make the trip, but I’m not at work,” I said.

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “I have something to give you.”

  Alex elbowed me. “What?” he wrote on his pad, holding it up in my face.

  I snatched the pen and pad from him and threw them on the floor of the taxi.

  “You unlawfully entered a crime scene,” Restivo continued in my ear. “You tampered with crucial evidence related to an ongoing criminal investigation.” He was wrong about calling Olivia’s apartment a crime scene. There hadn’t been any police tape over the door, meaning the cops no longer considered it active. Still, I wasn’t in a position to squabble over details. I was guilty of unlawful entry, crime scene or not, and they could book me on that charge alone if they wanted. “I’m no Tom Brokaw but I’m guessing that breaking the law is a fireable offense.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Truth was, this sort of thing was tacitly encouraged; it was getting caught that could land you in trouble. “Like I said, I have something for you. Would you like to meet this afternoon?”

  “Sure, Red. That would b
e swell,” Restivo said dryly, and we made a plan to meet at the precinct in a few hours.

  The cab let Alex and me out in front of my apartment building. Alex paid the fare while I rummaged in my bag for my keys.

  “This where you live?” Alex said, looking down on me. “There’s no doorman.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not safe for a single woman to live alone in a building without round-the-clock security.”

  “Doormen are overrated,” I muttered, jamming my key in the front door. We entered the small vestibule, walking past two rows of brass mailboxes. “How do you know I don’t have a roommate?” I unlocked the second door and pushed it open.

  “Because you would be impossible to live with.”

  “That’s nice to hear.” We climbed up three flights of creaky stairs, Alex behind me, pestering me to tell him what I had that the police wanted, why I’d left the office in such a hurry. “Here we are,” I said once we arrived on my floor. Right away, I noticed my door was ajar, a wedge of sunlight spilling onto the hall’s mottled red carpeting. What the hell? No one had a key to my apartment. Not even the super. I hadn’t had a chance to give it to him since I’d had the locks changed.

  Alex put his arm out in front of me protectively as he crept forward and pushed the door open wider. The door jam was splintered near the lock. “Stay there,” he whispered.

  I ignored him, stepping around him and putting one foot past the door jam, where I halted. The place was trashed. Someone had ripped down my curtains and tipped over my lamps. My bedding, including the quilt that had once belonged to my mother, was slashed to pieces; an old can of paint from my closet had been dumped all over my beloved Persian rugs. Smashed glass littered the floor. It looked like my computer had escaped unscathed, but aside from it and the pearls fastened around my neck, nearly every material thing I valued in the world had been destroyed.

  Alex grabbed my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. It’s a crime scene now.”

  I shook him loose and walked into the wreckage. Everything was upended. It would take me days to clean and sort out the mess.

  “They were looking for something,” he remarked.

  I dove for my desk drawer. I had some papers from the case, printouts and other interview notes I’d taken. Everything was still there. Leaning against my desk, my hand accidentally hit the mouse to my computer. The screen lit up.

  JIFFY was written in big, bold letters.

  A string of images crowded my brain. I was sixteen again, a sophomore, a social outcast. Jiffy was my nickname. Maybe I’d done some bad things, but nothing as bad as what the other girls did to me. The name-calling, the prank phone calls to my home, the day they locked me in the janitor’s closet in the basement. It was two hours before the art teacher heard my screams. I took a breath and forced myself to focus on what was going on here and now, and what any of that had to do with this. And that’s when I put it together, that the person who had killed Olivia and Rachel, drugged me and trashed my apartment had either known me as a teenager or knew someone who had.

  I put my finger on the delete button.

  “What in the hell are you doing? Don’t touch anything!” I backed away from the computer, retracing my steps out of the apartment, my eyes glued to the floor. In the hall, Alex dialed 911. In the stairwell, he reached out for me. I let him hold me, his arms wrapped tightly around my shoulders. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket.

  I stepped away. “Get it.” We both knew it was the assignment desk trying to locate him. “Get it,” I repeated. “Let’s not both get fired on the same day.”

  “You got fired?”

  “Take the call.”

  He answered, giving whoever was on the other end of it some false coordinates before clicking off. Then he took my hand, led me down the rest of the stairs and regarded me in the afternoon sunshine.

  “I’m not leaving you. Not until you tell me what’s going on. The police want something you have, you’re getting canned and someone just broke into your apartment. If this has something to do with the Kravis case, you have to tell me.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Jesus, Shaw. Do you have to be so fucking stubborn all the time?”

  “Yes. Now go. I’ll be fine here.”

  Alex threw his head back, exasperated. “Where will you go afterward? You can’t stay here.”

  I shrugged.

  “Clyde, you’re not just in trouble. You’re in danger. What did you see on your computer screen?”

  Jiffy, because I spread so easily. I’d hooked up with the wrong guy. He’d gone down on me in his parents’ bed while they were skiing in Aspen, come once in my mouth and twice in the ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms he’d had at the ready. How was I supposed to know he’d tell his girlfriend about us the next day? How was I supposed to know he was dating Missy, my old tormenter from the swim team? She forgave her Yale-bound boyfriend, but spent the rest of her senior year making sure everyone knew what a whore I was.

  Alex grabbed me by the shoulders. “What did you see?”

  “It was something from my childhood.”

  “You know what this means. This person, the murderer—“

  “Is connected to my past.”

  “They want to kill you. They’re targeting you now.”

  “If that were true, I would be dead by now. The purpose of all of this is to scare me.”

  He squinted into the sun. “Even if you’re right, you can’t honestly be thinking of staying here tonight. What’s one night in a hotel?”

  “I am about to lose my job. I don’t have $400 to piss away on a hotel.” A pair of uniformed patrol officers in a squad car pulled up in front of my building. “They’re here. You can go,” I told him.

  “Juan’s the doorman. I’ll let him know you’re coming.” Alex dug into his pocket, tossed me his keys and rattled off an address on the East Side before breaking into a sprint.

  “What?” I yelled after him.

  “You’re staying with me tonight!” I would have argued with him, but he was already halfway down the block.

  The cops killed the engine and stepped out of their car. The woman, a tough-looking brunette, asked me questions, while her partner, a tall, dark-skinned cop with a shaved head, took notes. When I was done, the female cop asked me to let her into the building while her partner returned to their car to radio the information into the precinct.

  Thirty minutes later, I was waiting on the front stoop when a blue Crown Vic pulled up behind the cop car. Detective Restivo got out wearing rumpled chinos, one of those knit ties I hadn’t seen on anyone since my high-school math teacher, and a face that looked like it hadn’t seen a pillow in days. He greeted me with a curt nod.

  “I thought we were meeting later,” I said.

  “So did I.” He sounded even more pissed than before. “When were you last home?”

  “Yesterday morning, around eight-thirty.”

  He removed his sunglasses. “And you came back when?”

  “Maybe an hour ago.” My watch said it was a quarter past noon.

  He muttered some curse words and looked up at my building. “Wait here with Officer Rivera.” It wasn’t a question.

  I returned to the stoop and waited for Restivo to come back downstairs. When he did, the hostility I’d gotten accustomed to receiving from him had been replaced with concern. “Do you have any enemies, anyone you think might want to hurt you?”

  “I’ve been in this business seventeen years. Yes I’ve got enemies.”

  “Anyone stand out in your mind?”

  “On this case? Michael Rockwell. Andrey Kaminski,” I volunteered.

  “I meant people not involved in this case.”

  “Jack Slane. He’s a lawyer at Rockwell’s firm. I dated him a few years ago and I saw him again for the first time last week. He tried to get security to throw me out of their offices.”

  “That’s it? Rockwell, Kaminski, and this Slane guy? No one else has been hound
ing you, sending you notes? No phone calls or threats?”

  “Other than my drugging, no. But—”

  “What is it?”

  I told him about the message on the computer screen.

  Restivo opened the building’s front door. “I think you should come upstairs. Let’s go over this all again up there.”

  Seeing my apartment was worse the second time. Now I noticed all the little things that had been destroyed and could never be replaced. I crouched over a pile of broken shards, remnants of my mother’s collection of Herend porcelain.

  “Don’t touch it,” the female cop barked from behind me.

  I wiped away a tear and stood up. Restivo called to me from the galley kitchen. “What’d you eat yesterday for breakfast?”

  I walked over to him. “Nothing, why?” He gestured at the empty packet of crackers on the kitchen counter. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Perp was here for a while and got hungry. My guess is that they were waiting for you to come home.”

  “That’s what I thought the killer did—wait for Olivia and Rachel to come home. Am I right?”

  “We need more than a few cracker crumbs to link these cases.” He looked around the room. “Did the perp target any specific kinds of items? Is anything gone?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s assume the perp picked the lock sometime last night. They trashed everything except for the computer, which they used to leave you a message connected to your past. We need to talk about why you were at the Haverford last night and not here.” He sighed and I heard his stomach rumble. “It’s been a busy morning. Is there a place I can grab a bite to eat around here?”

  “Pizza OK?”

  He nodded once.

  I pointed westward. “There’s a place on the corner.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Restivo had me pack up a few of my things in an overnight bag. We walked down the street to By the Slice, a neighborhood place that served thin-crust pizza with gourmet toppings, a few dozen wines by the glass, and five or six beers on tap. It got popular at happy hour. Rest of the day it was mostly empty.

  Restivo and I got our pick of tables. He chose the rickety two-seater at the front window, tucking one paper napkin into his collar and patting another on the top of his slice. I wanted to do the same to his forehead and nose. If he ever went on camera for us, the makeup artists would have to powder the hell out of him.