One of Our Own

by Jane Haddam

  “We have had an audience,” the other uniform said. He was both Anglo and pudgy. He looked like he was going to fail his next physical. “Bunch of kids standing around trying to see what we were doing.”

  “Which has been nothing,” the first uniform said.

  At that moment, another car pulled up and a man got out of the passenger’s side, holding an envelope. “Warrant,” he said, handing the envelope to Morabito.

  Morabito took the envelope and opened up. “Did we get everything?”

  “Everything,” the man who’d brought the warrant said. “We went to old Judge Horhsam. If the Supreme Court wasn’t restraining him, he’d hand you the farm.”

  “Good,” Horowitz said.

  Gregor walked around the van one more time. Sister Margaret Mary had been accurate. It was big. Very big. It was black. It was shiny. It looked like it ought to have a logo on it and be hauling equipment.

  Gregor came back to Horowitz and Morabito. “We probably ought to have the forensics boys out here,” he said. “At least the driver’s door and the back doors ought to be fingerprinted.”

  Morabito reached into his pocket and came up with a packet of latex gloves. “Wear these,” he said, handing them over to Gregor. “They’ll do all the basic stuff down at the garage once we haul it in. Right now, I just want to make sure there isn’t a dead body in there.”

  Gregor took the gloves out of the packet and put them on. Then he went to the driver’s door and opened it. The cab smelled nothing like a dead body, but it did smell like smoke. Gregor looked into the ashtray and saw that it was dusted with ash, but there was nothing actually in it. No cigarette butts. No cigar stubs. Certainly, no keys or loose change.

  Gregor stepped back out and closed the door again.

  “Nothing?” Morabito asked him.

  “Nothing immediately visible,” Gregor said. “I was half afraid I’d look in there and there’d be some kid’s soccer gear. Do you remember what I told you when I called you last night?”

  “The guy couldn’t drive through the streets of Philadelphia with his back doors flapping open,” Morabito said. “Yeah, I got that. That was smart.”

  “Thank you,” Gregor said. “My point was that if he couldn’t do that, he didn’t. So either he pulled over somewhere close, got out, and shut the doors. Or he had somewhere close where he could pull in out of sight. My best guess would be the latter. Which leaves us with a new question.”

  The guy who’d brought the warrant was intrigued. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “If the guy’s got somewhere close he can stash this thing,” Gregor said, “what’s it doing here now? Why not just leave it where he put it? Why risk taking it out of wherever he put it, driving it around looking for a parking space, parking the thing, and then getting out in full view of the city?”

  “Maybe he’s one of their own,” Horowitz said. “Maybe he doesn’t expect anybody to turn him in. Or mention it at all.”

  “Neighborhoods aren’t hermetically sealed,” Gregor said. “Most of the people in them may be your people, but chances are good that outside people will be going through on and off. And outside people will talk.”

  “We can send a bunch of uniforms around to ask again,” Morabito said. “We could put out a notice in case there are outside people who want to come forward.”

  “Good idea,” Gregor said. “We have to start with a few assumptions. Marta Warkowski is, from what everybody tells me, a large, heavy woman. She wasn’t in good shape, but she also wasn’t frail or elderly or incapacitated. She couldn’t have been stuffed into those plastic bags unless she was stone-cold out, and she probably couldn’t have been rendered unconscious in the open. So, she was—hit?”

  “Yeah,” Horowitz said. “With a blunt instrument.”

  “She was hit,” Gregor said. “The best scenario for her attacker would have been to hit her when she was already in the back of the van, but I’m not sure how he would have talked her into getting into the back of the van. Whatever. She was hit, already in the back of the van or out of it. She was stuffed into the plastic bags. Again, either already in the back of the van or out of it. I would say it was most likely she was both hit and put in the bags while she was not in the van, and then later pushed in. That would go a long way to explaining the accident. We’re agreed it must have been an accident, her falling out the back?”

  “I don’t see how anybody could do that on purpose.” Horowitz said.

  “Or would want to,” Morabito said.

  “She can’t have been pushed very far into the back,” Gregor said. “She had to be in a position to be leaning against those doors. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have popped them. So he pushes her into the back of the van and closes up. Either he doesn’t know she’s still alive, or he doesn’t care. He figures she’ll be dead soon enough.”

  “I heard you lecture once at the main library,” Horowitz said. “You said over and over again never to assume that the perpetrator was male or female.”

  “And I meant it,” Gregor said. “But in this case, no woman on her own was going to lift Marta Warkowski into this van. A woman might get her into the bags once she was in the van. She’d have to be a particularly strong and athletic woman.”

  Gregor walked to the back doors and looked up at them. “I take it you two tried the doors when you got here,” he told the two uniforms. “This wasn’t left here unlocked.”

  “No,” the young woman said. “Tight as a drum. If it had been open, we could have fudged a little. We could have said we were worried about theft or something and gone in.”

  Gregor nodded. “And there were no signs of the keys?”

  “If the keys had been in that van, it wouldn’t be here,” the young woman said. “That’s how cars get stolen. You wouldn’t believe how many people leave their keys in their cars and then they’re shocked to find out their cars have disappeared.”

  Gregor nodded again. “Well,” he said, “we’d better force it and go in and find what we’re meant to find.”

  “What we’re meant to find?” Morabito asked.

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “Officer?”

  The young Spanish woman retreated to the patrol car and came back carrying a small lever. Gregor expected the male officers to offer to wield it for her, but they didn’t. She marched up to the van’s back doors, wedged the thin end of the lever in the crack between the two thin door handles, and slammed the heel of her left hand against the lever’s thick end.

  The pop the door made coming open was impressive. It sounded like a firecracker, or worse.

  The doors swung outward. They started to swing inward again, but the officer caught them.

  Gregor and Horowitz and Morabito crowded in to see what was there.

  The back of the van was clean and empty, with one exception. The carpet on the floor was pristine. It must have been vacuumed. The walls of the van were as shiny and polished as its outside was. There were no dents.

  What they had been meant to find was right there in the middle of the emptiness.

  It was a three-foot-long tire iron, one half of it clotted with blood and hair, the other half covered with bloody fingerprints.

  FOUR

  1

  Meera Agerwal called in and told the girls in the office she was taking the rest of the day off. The flu had come back to hit her again. Her muscles ached. Her head pounded. Her body temperature was as high as the hot season in Mumbai.

  This was true, although it had nothing to do with why she was going home. The afternoon was beyond insane. She didn’t usually go down to the properties, and especially not to the properties like that one. Her work could be done safely from her desk. Lateness warnings could be sent overnight mail. Eviction notices could be sent registered mail. There were a dozen people who could deliver the more serious legal documents if they had to be delivered. She had been to this particular building only once before.

  The flu symptoms were making everything worse. There
were two kinds of people who came to the United States from India. There were people like her brother, with degrees in tech, who wanted to take up residence in California or Colorado or Boston and just plain stay there. They brought wives and children and later brothers and sisters and parents. The extended families opened businesses. When they got a little ahead, they built temples and founded benevolent societies. Meera had to admit that this seemed to work for a lot of them. Their children did well in school and went to universities whose names were known at home. The second generation became doctors and university professors. Everywhere you looked, somebody was collecting money for a start-up.

  Meera belonged to the second kind, the kind that knew it would never work for them. They came to make money until they had enough to go home and start a life for themselves. They got engaged to another Hindu of good family before they left. They did not get married until they were ready to go back to Mumbai and settle down. They did not Indian themselves up and make a display of their ethnicity. Meera owned two saris. She wore them to weddings and funerals.

  It would be terrible, she thought, to die in this place.

  She’d heard many things about America before she had come. What she had found had been stranger and more alien than she could ever imagine. The whole premise of the place was wrong. All men were not created equal—and what’s more, most Americans knew it. It made them completely crazy. In Mumbai, the truth was openly acknowledged. Karma itself meant that all human beings were born different, some better, some worse. You could tell who belonged to which group just by looking at them, and if they were wearing a proper caste mark you could situate them absolutely. There was one American saying Meera liked: A place for everything and everything in its place. That was exactly right. That was exactly what it was like with people, too.

  In Mumbai, Meera wouldn’t think for a moment that she would have to worry about being involved in the murder of a man like Hernandez. He was a man without caste. She would not have been expected to know him. If she had known him, she would only have known him as an underling or a servant. She would not touch him because he was so obviously unclean.

  She didn’t know what to think about that scene back there. The body lying on the floor. The blood and skin and bone everywhere, on all the closer surfaces. In Mumbai, there were places where the lower castes went to defecate in the open. The river and its beaches were filthy. The air was foul. That had been less disturbing to her than this thing.

  There was a Hindu restaurant about three blocks from her apartment, an actual Hindu restaurant, vegetarian, that followed all the dietary rules. Most of the restaurants that called themselves “Indian” in the United States were actually Muslim, and no Muslim was a real Indian. Muslims were conquerors and collaborators with conquerors. They also ate meat.

  She picked up two containers of chana dal, spiced enough to do a serious assault on her clogged sinuses. Then she walked the rest of the way to her apartment staring straight ahead. There was another thing about Americans. They all wanted to make eye contact with you. They all wanted to make your acquaintance.

  When she got into the apartment, she went into the kitchen and put the two containers and her purse on the counter. Then she went back to the foyer and locked up. Her head was clear enough this time so that she forgot nothing. She did all the locks. She did all the bolts. Then she went back to the kitchen and started tea.

  Here was the problem: Americans documented everything. If you went to the bank and cashed a check. If you went to the ATM and took out money. Your vital statistics and your picture went on your driver’s license, and you had to show it if you wanted to use a credit card or buy a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store. Even an eighty-year-old woman who looked her age had to show her driver’s license to buy alcohol or cigarettes. The pharmacy wanted a driver’s license before they filled your prescription. Every cell phone call you made was logged and could be traced. Every landline call you made was logged and could be traced, too. If you were ever in trouble, the police went into all these systems and found you.

  Meera had taken her money out in the first six months after she arrived. It could be traced, too, but it would have to be traced back years, and she thought that was relatively safe. Nobody could use it to prove that she had taken the money out to buy what she was about to buy today. How would she have known then that she would even need it?

  The water boiled and she poured it. Then she went to the counter next to the sink and took the middle metal canister from the line of them she had against the wall. The canisters all contained necessary foodstuffs. Flour. Sugar. The middle canister held red lentils.

  She put the canister with the red lentils on the table. She got a clean bowl from the cabinet and put that on the table, too. Then she sat down, took the tea leaves out of the teacup, and opened up the canister with the lentils in it.

  The canister was half full. She made red lentils often. They were easy.

  She poured the contents into the bowl. Then she reached down and tugged against the red paper liner with the tip of her fingernail. Her fingernails were very long, meant to look like a Bollywood movie star she had had a crush on when she was in secondary school.

  The liner came off, but the tug was hard. Under the liner was money: three thousand dollars in twenties, tens, and fives.

  This was not the only cash Meera had hidden away. She had some at the bottom of a tin she kept in her desk in the office. That tin also had family pictures in it and a false bottom. She had some in her locker in the gym where she worked out twice a week. The locker was not very secure, but it was hers and lockable as long as she kept up her membership and she had found a way to stash the money in the bottom of it.

  All in all, she had ten thousand dollars stashed away in places she could get to easily if she needed it. Even the gym was open twenty-four hours a day. None of that cash was anywhere she would have to sign for it or would be likely to be seen getting it.

  Now she counted out five hundred dollars and set it aside. Taking actual money with her was always a risk. You could get robbed on the street at any moment. She’d had her purse snatched on a bus once on a perfectly placid Sunday afternoon.

  She folded up the cash and then pulled her necklace up so she could get to the little pouch on the end of it. Necklaces could be snatched, too, but this one wouldn’t be. It was made of steel and not breakable, and the clasp had been welded shut.

  She put the five hundred dollars in the pouch and the pouch back under her blouse. Then she looked back into the canister and smoothed out the rest of the money so that it wouldn’t give itself away by being lumpy.

  She had extra canister liners in a drawer near the cooktop. She took one the right size and pulled the backing off it. Then she put the liner down in the can and tamped the edges down until they were tight. She was careful putting the lentils back in the canister. She didn’t want them to go everywhere. Then she closed up the canister and put it back in the row.

  She took the new backing and the old liner and put them down the garbage disposal. Even the police would not find this. A drug-crazed hoodlum from the street wouldn’t even look.

  She got up and put her purse over her shoulder. Her tea was only half finished. It was the police she had to worry about now. Now that they knew who Marta Warkowski was, they would find somebody to tell them that she had been in the office, or near it, the night she was assaulted. They would ask questions. She had not had that patch of blood cleaned up with any thoroughness. They would find it.

  Meera was really too sick to go out in cold weather. Her head was fuzzy. Her mind was not alert enough so that she could be sure she wouldn’t walk right into a mugging.

  But she couldn’t help it.

  She needed another gun.

  2

  When Bennis Hannaford got to Donna Moradanyan’s house, she had Javier and Tommy in tow, and Tommy was carrying the bags.

  “We should have dropped some of this stuff at my place,” she said, as
Tommy dumped the whole pile on his mother’s kitchen table. “I went a little nuts in Ohanian’s.”

  “Javier likes loukoumia,” Tommy said.

  Javier looked through the bags and came up with a package wrapped in waxed paper. “Loukoumia,” he said.

  Tommy took it away from him. “That’s for here,” he said. “The other package is for your house. Meet my sister, Charlie.”

  Charlie was sitting in a high chair, drinking something out of a sippy cup. She had been playing with a wooden jigsaw puzzle with large pieces when they came in, but she had stopped to watch what was going on. Now she looked at Javier and said, “Hi!”

  Javier said, “Hola.”

  Bennis grabbed a chair and sat down. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “We’ve been pretty much everywhere. And we sat down online and ordered Javier’s backpack. Red, with ‘JHD’ on it. I didn’t know what else to do for initials.”

  “She got it from L.L.Bean,” Tommy said. “I told her she shouldn’t get him anything more expensive than anybody else was going to have. She didn’t think the other stuff was strong enough.”

  “You ought to be glad she didn’t get it from Vineyard Vines,” Donna said dryly.

  “She got everything else from Vineyard Vines,” Tommy said. “The kid’s going to look like he belongs to the British royal family.”

  “Lida came in when we were getting the loukoumia,” Bennis said. “Javier took one look at her and lit up like a Christmas tree. Then he called her ‘Señora Cookies.’ Then Lida lit up like a Christmas tree. I think the shakeout is going to be Lida and Hannah over at my house tomorrow with more boxes of cookies. And old Mrs. Ohanian gave him loukoumia from the case. And Linda Melajian put marshmallows and whipped cream in his hot chocolate. I think one of my principal worries has been put to rest. I think the street is going to adopt him.”

  Tommy lifted Charlie out of her high chair. “I think Javier and I are going to take Charlie into the living room and read her some books,” he said. “You two can do whatever it is that you do.”