by Julia Derek
“You have a very good memory, don’t you?” Wil suggested, peering closer at him. “Most people don’t remember what they did a specific date that was weeks ago.”
“That’s because October twenty-seventh is my birthday and I was out till late, celebrating with my wife and partner and his wife,” Rudi responded. “I remember watching the murder being reported on the news the following day. My wife commented that while we were out enjoying ourselves, someone else was being stabbed to death. She has a tendency to be a tad morbid, my wife.”
“I see,” Wil said. “Where exactly were you around midnight on your birthday? Do you remember?”
“Yes, we were at a restaurant on the Upper West Side called Tessa.”
“Were you drunk?”
Rudi shrugged. “I suppose we were all pretty intoxicated, yeah. We do like to drink.”
Maybe one of them wasn’t as drunk as the others and snuck out to kill Diego, Wil mused. They hadn’t been far from the crime scene. Tessa was only about four blocks away.
“It says on your website that most antiques sold in your store are unique,” Larry pointed out, “meaning, there is only one of each. Does that apply to this knife as well?”
“Yes, it does,” Rudi said and nodded.
“Who besides you and your partner and your employees have access to the store?” Wil asked. “Anyone else?”
“Well, I guess my wife could get into the store if she wanted to. The keys to it are on my key chain. But”—he glared first at Wil, then at Larry—“my wife, obviously, isn’t the killer. She was with me the entire night at the restaurant where we celebrated my birthday. And so was my business partner and his wife. I already told you that.”
“So if you don’t believe any of your employees could have done this, are you saying then that you believe someone stole the knife?” Wil asked.
Rudi waved a hand. “That seems to be the most plausible explanation, yes.”
“Don’t you have an alarm system?” Larry asked. He made a circular motion with his hand, indicating all the items on the walls. “This stuff must be worth lots of dough.”
“Yes, we do have an alarm system, but maybe the thief managed to disable it.”
Wil raised a brow at the bald man. “Really? Can’t be a very good alarm system then.”
“No, that’s true,” Rudi agreed. “It’s not the best. We have it in our budget to upgrade it this year. Because we have never had any problems with burglars before, it wasn’t a priority.”
“Uh-huh,” Wil said. “What about security cameras? Do you have some of those?”
“Yes, we do have security cameras. But we don’t know when the knife was stolen, so it would be a lot of tape to go through.”
Wil narrowed her eyes at him. “Didn’t you say that you saw the knife recently?”
Rudi twisted the ends of his big mustache. “Yeah, but that was a while ago. I honestly can’t remember if it was one or two months ago I last saw it. Only that I did see it recently.”
“Okay,” Wil said. “We would like to talk to your employees and see what they have to say, as well as your business partner. Maybe one or more of them can be of assistance to our investigation. Can we have a list of their names and contact information?”
Rudi looked unsure for a moment, then said, “Um, sure. Hold on a sec and I’ll go get my laptop. I can email you their names and contact info.”
Rudi turned around and crossed the space between his desk to the wall behind him where he opened a narrow door through which he disappeared. As the door slid almost shut, Wil murmured to Larry out of the corner of her mouth, “What do you make of his story and alibi?”
“Well, as long as October twenty-seventh actually is his birthday and his business partner backs up where they were celebrating it, I’m buying it even if everyone’s senses were dulled from too much alcohol. Given the fact that he’s the owner, I really don’t see him as the killer. No one is so stupid they’d use a unique antique knife that would instantly be traced back to them to kill someone with and leave it at the murder scene.”
“It is possible that the knife was in fact only dropped, not placed near the body,” Wil pointed out. “And while he might not be the killer, maybe one of the others disappeared from the party for a while. Tessa is close to the tunnel in the park and they were all drunk. Maybe they didn’t notice that someone was gone quite a while.”
“That’s a possibility,” Larry acquiesced. “Hopefully the camera caught who took it.”
“Yeah. And let’s hope one of the employees or the partner remember when they last saw the knife, and that it was close to the actual murder date, or we’ll have lots of hours to burn going through surveillance tape.”
Larry sighed. “Yeah, let’s hope. Can’t say I’m looking forward to watching all that tape.”
“Maybe we can get someone else to help us out with that.”
They could hear footsteps approaching from behind the narrow door, so they stopped talking. The door opened and Rudi came out with a slim, silver-colored laptop in his hands.
“Here we go,” Rudi said and opened the laptop after placing it on the counter between them. He switched on the computer and it gave a bright sound as it came to life. “How about I email this to you?” he said when he had found a short list of people.
“Sure,” Wil said and pulled out a business card from her wallet. “You can email it to this address.” She indicated her email address to the station.
Concentrating, Rudi pushed a few buttons and then gazed up at the two cops.
“Done,” he said and smiled. “I sent it as an attachment.”
“Great,” Wil said. “Keep that business card. If you can think of anything else that you think might be helpful to our case, don’t hesitate to contact us. Even if it appears inconsequential to you.”
“Will do,” Rudi said.
They exchanged a few more words, and then Larry and Wil left Nilsen & Nilsen, Wil feeling like she had just wasted a lot of crucial time.
* * *
Chapter 12
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO
“Oh, Pete, oh, Pete,” Mary Lou whimpered against her lanky son’s shoulder as he embraced her. She was crying so hard she could barely speak. Pete himself was too numb to feel all the pain that his mother was in right now. All he was aware of was a cool determination to get even for what had happened to his father.
“Why did they kill him?” his mother murmured after some time, controlling herself a little as she gazed at him with a red-swollen face. “Why? Oh, God, why did they have to kill him? He was a good man. Why couldn’t they just take his money and let him live? What are we gonna do?” She burst into another avalanche of tears, burying her head against his shoulder.
Fourteen-year-old Pete stroked his mother’s blond hair tenderly. “Because they’re scum, Mom. Vermin. Animals. No more than animals. Don’t you worry, they’ll pay for what they did to us. To Dad. An eye for an eye. They’ll get what they deserve.”
His mother kept crying and crying in his arms, and all he could feel was the determination to make the two Mexicans pay for having robbed and stabbed his father, Tom Dalton, to death. The two men had been apprehended by police, but Pete intended to see to it that they would die by his hands, and that they would suffer as much as his mother was doing right now. As much as his father had done when they left him to bleed out in the grass. He would see to it personally. He had already spoken to members of the Aryan Brotherhood in the area, and they would help him kidnap and kill the two filthy animals. It wouldn’t be hard to get them out of the holding cell they were in at the moment. Two of the cops who worked down at the Norman station were members of the AB—short for the Aryan Brotherhood—and they would see to it that Pete and the men who would help him kidnap the Mexicans got what they wanted.
Killing his father’s murderers would not only settle the score for Pete, but it would also make him an official member of the AB, something he had thought about becoming for a long t
ime anyway. Now it would finally happen. Now he could devote his life to stopping any more of these subhumans from infiltrating the lives of white people, hurting them. It wasn’t a day too soon.
His kid sister Kelly Anne, ten years old, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen where Pete and Mary Lou were still embracing, their mother crying inconsolably. As his eyes locked with the big, scared gray ones of his tiny, blond sister, his vow was reaffirmed in his mind.
The two spics would die a gruesome death.
* * *
Chapter 13
Wil and Larry had gone through the short list of employees that Rudi had supplied them with and were about to visit the fourth and final person on it, a Ms. Zucker. None of the first three employees had answered the phone when they called them, and none of them had been at home, so they were praying that Ms. Zucker, Nilsen & Nilsen’s main salesperson, would come through for them at least.
Having tried her phone first and gotten the same disappointing voicemail recording that they’d gotten from the others, they were prepared to turn around and leave the way they had done when standing outside the other employees’ doors. But just as Wil was about to tell Larry that they should go, she heard footsteps approaching them on the other side of the wooden front door. Then there was the sound of someone turning a lock and the door swung open inward. A small woman in her seventies with round glasses perched from a pointy nose and her gray hair assembled in a loose bun on her head was standing before them. She was wearing a baggy striped cotton dress over a purple shirt. She wasn’t the kind of person Wil would expect the store’s main salesperson to look like, but then again, what did she know about the right look to sell antique arms?
“Hello, can I help you?” the woman asked with a kind expression.
Wil flashed her NYPD credentials that she had had at the ready and said, “I’m Detective Cooper with the NYPD and this is my partner, Detective Larry White. We’re investigating a murder and we’re looking to speak to Victoria Zucker in regards to it.”
The woman lit up. “Ah, that’s my daughter. She’s taking a shower at the moment. Would you like to come in and wait for her to finish?”
Larry and Wil glanced at each other. “Sure, that would be great,” Larry said.
The old woman held the door so the detectives could enter. They walked into a short hallway that opened up into a living room with a bright California-style kitchen on one side of it.
“She shouldn’t take long,” the woman said pleasantly. “Why don’t you have a seat? Make yourself at home.”
There was a dining room table with four chairs around it opposite the kitchen. Wil and Larry went over there and had a seat. As they waited for Victoria Zucker to finish showering, her mother provided them with chocolate chip cookies and tea, insisting that they have both. Neither of them had the heart to reject the woman’s offer.
About fifteen minutes later, they could hear a door open. The old woman called out, “Victoria, you have visitors, so make sure you look presentable. It’s the police who want to talk to you about a murder investigation.”
“What?” a jarring female voice called out from somewhere deeper inside the apartment. “The police is here?”
“Yes, that’s what I just told you,” the old woman said and rolled her eyes at Larry and Wil. “Hurry up and put on some clothes, Victoria. They’ve been waiting for a while for you to get ready. It’s not nice to keep people waiting and I’m running out of cookies.”
“I’ll be right out,” the voice called back.
Larry managed to devour two more entire cookies by the time Ms. Zucker showed up in the living room. In her thirties, Victoria Zucker was as petite as her mother, but even dressed in a hurry in jeans and a simple sweater and with her curly, dark hair wet, she looked a lot more put together.
“Hello, I’m Victoria Zucker,” she said in a softer voice and glanced first at Wil, then at Larry. “You’re from the police?”
Wil got to her feet, brandishing her credentials. “Yes. I’m Detective Wilhelmina Cooper and this is my partner, Detective Larry White. Sorry for the unannounced visit. We’re investigating a murder that took place in Central Park a few weeks ago, and the knife used to stab the victim was from the store where you’re employed.”
Looking suddenly shocked, the hands Victoria had been using to smooth out her shoulder-length locks froze. “Someone used a knife from Nilsen & Nilsen to kill someone?”
“Yes,” Wil said and removed the iPad that she kept under her arm. “Not only was it left at the crime scene, but our forensics team has determined that it was in fact the knife used in the killing. Let me show you what knife it was. We want to know if you know who might have bought it, or what’s going on with it.”
“Did you speak to Rudi?” Victoria asked as Wil looked for the images on the iPad. “He should know.”
“Yes, we spoke to him earlier today,” Larry inserted. “He doesn’t know who the knife was sold to. In fact, he doesn’t believe it was ever sold as there is no sales record of it, but that someone stole it instead. Someone who does not work at the store.”
“Here it is,” Wil said and showed Victoria the images of the knife. “What can you tell us about it?”
Victoria leaned her head toward the screen, pushing a few strands of hair behind her ear as she squinted at the image. “Oh, yeah, I know that knife. That’s an expensive piece from Scandinavia. One of a kind. I don’t think we ever sold it, though.”
“No?” Wil said. “When was the last time you saw it?”
Victoria stroked her chin and screwed up her face. “I honestly can’t remember. Maybe a couple of months ago? We have a lot of inventory. But I would have remembered if it was sold. Whoever sold it would make a nice commission, and no one mentioned such a thing to me. The other guys report back to me.”
“This is the man who was stabbed and robbed in Central Park,” Larry said, holding out another iPad next to the one Wil was holding. It displayed a photo of Diego Martinez’s smiling face. “Do you know him?”
Victoria’s eyes moved over to Larry’s iPad and she stared at the image of Diego. “No, I’ve never seen him before.”
“Can I see?” the old woman asked. “Maybe I have seen him.”
Shrugging, Larry showed the woman. She shook her head. “No, but he’s one good-looking fella, though. Someone killed him?”
“Yes,” Larry said. “We’re at a loss in terms of suspects, which is why we’re focusing on the murder weapon. Because it’s one of a kind like you just pointed out and neither you nor your boss believe it was ever sold, we’re thinking it was stolen by the perp. Unless you have reason to believe someone with access to the store took it and killed Diego Martinez. Your boss claims it was his birthday, and that he and his wife were celebrating it at the time of the murder together with his partner and his wife.”
“Yeah, Rudi’s birthday wasn’t that long ago,” Victoria said. “When was the murder?”
“October twenty-seven. A Thursday,” Wil filled in. “What were you doing that night?”
Victoria narrowed her eyes and pushed out her thin lips. “I honestly can’t remember. It was a while ago.” She gave a forced laugh and pressed a hand to her chest. “You don’t think I have anything to do with this murder, do you?”
“We’re exploring all venues for now,” Larry said curtly. “Has Nilsen & Nilsen experienced lots of thieves?”
“I can’t say we have a problem with thieves, no. But our alarm system isn’t great, so it’s possible that someone stole it. That must be the case if the knife was left at the murder scene. If someone at our store had used it to kill this guy, they would hardly leave it behind and make it easier for the cops to find him or her, right?”
“That’s true,” Wil said. “Unless they want to put the blame on someone with access to the inventory at the store.”
Victoria looked confused. “Why would someone do that?”
“Unfortunately, your guess is as good as ours right now,” La
rry replied sadly.
* * *
Chapter 14
“Yes, it’s over between me and Clementina,” Trevor said and looked away for a moment. He and Kate were having dinner at a small Italian restaurant in the West Village, and they were enjoying their dessert right now, a yummy tiramisu. Kate hadn’t dared bringing up the status of his relationship until now, despite that she was fairly sure it simply had to be over between him and the fiancée. Not only because Trevor had been so incredibly supportive since Diego’s murder, but also, Kate couldn’t fathom that Clementina hadn’t noticed what her fiancé was up to. It had been weeks now that he had called her every night, sometimes coming by her apartment to check on her. At the very least, Clementina must have sensed that Trevor wasn’t all there when they were together. She couldn’t still be on a business trip, could she? Kate didn’t think this was all wishful thinking on her part.
“She left me a while ago,” he said, meeting her gaze again. “I lied to you about her being on a business trip. It was too painful for me to admit the truth to you at the time.” He reached for her hand across the dining table, looking ashamed. “I’m sorry for deceiving you, Kate, but I simply couldn’t talk about it at the time. I really appreciate that you were there for me when my father passed away. It meant a lot to me. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have had to go through that night on my own. You’re my best friend.”
“I’m so sorry, Trevor,” Kate said and squeezed his hand, feeling genuinely bad for Trevor; the man seemed like he was in deep agony. She was glad that she could lend him some support for a few minutes the way he had been supporting her lately. “Please don’t feel bad for not telling me the truth. You weren’t ready to share it with me then. Now you are.” She gave him an encouraging smile. “What—what do you think made it end?” It was a bold question, but Kate felt Trevor was okay with her asking it. She felt him wanting her to ask it.