• • •
BY THE TIME Jamie Sinclair’s body was toe-tagged and put in a freezer drawer, BCCI, the fingerprint unit of the department, had found three sets of prints in the apartment not belonging to him. One set belonged to his brother, who had a key and said he’d let himself in to leave some family documents for Sinclair to sign. Another belonged to the building’s landlord, who also had a key and would occasionally let himself in to drop off books and other packages. The third set belonged to Alison Walker, a fifty-eight-year-old woman with a bad heart, hefty trust fund, and Upper West Side brownstone in her name.
Her name shot its way to the top of Silvestri and Russo’s interview list.
“Why’s a rich Manhattan chick hangin’ with a loser from the Bronx?” Russo wondered, dodging Manhattan traffic as he drove crosstown on Park Drive.
“She’s fifty-eight years old,” Mary said, trying to read her notes. “She passed the chick stage when Kennedy beat Nixon.”
“Think she’s the one opened him like a can of soup?”
“And cut his feet off? I doubt it.”
“What, women don’t kill?”
“Women don’t kill brutal. A gun maybe. A knife if they’re really determined. But no, not like that. Not vicious.”
Mary put her notebook in her purse and opened a paper bag resting against her hip. She took out a container of coffee, popped the lid, and poured in three packs of sugar.
“You had to ice somebody,” Russo said, swerving past a yellow cab. “A guy. Husband. Boyfriend. Whoever. We’re just talkin’ now. What would you use, gun or knife?”
“Neither,” Mary said, stirring the sugar in the coffee.
“What then, a bomb?” Russo said. “Put a timer in and crack his car?”
“Strychnine,” Mary said. “Five drops in a clear drink and the muscles hit adenosine triphosphate stage. Guy’d be dead in a few minutes. It’s also hard to trace, unless you hit the scene within three hours, because rigor sets in as soon as the body’s dead, not when the temp is down.”
“You’ve given this some fuckin’ thought, I see,” Russo said, looking away from the traffic and at his partner.
“Here’s your coffee,” Mary said, handing Russo the cup and smiling. “Fixed it the way you like it.”
“You drink it,” Russo said. “I ain’t thirsty.”
“I was hoping that’s what you’d say,” Mary said, taking a long sip.
• • •
ALISON WALKER LED the two detectives into the living room and offered them cups of tea and a platter filled with an assortment of fresh-baked cookies. Alison was short, wiry, and, despite the skin lifted tight around her jaw and neck, quite attractive. She had on a peach-colored blouse, tan skirt cut at the knee, and brown pumps. A double string of white pearls wrapped around her collar, and a set of earrings matching her blouse hung under golden-brown hair that was brushed and curled.
Mary Silvestri sat on a thick cream-colored couch that from feel and texture cost double any piece of furniture in her own home. The room was large and immaculately kept, the many antiques chosen with a sharp sense of style and concern for detail. The window behind the pale gray silk curtains was open, letting in a soft spring breeze.
Silvestri looked at the older woman and smiled.
“It’s a beautiful home you have here,” Mary said. “Really. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to keep up with a place like this.”
“It takes a great deal of time and work,” Alison Walker said in an accent so bland and flat, one would never know she was the only child of a New Jersey fisherman.
“And money too, right?” Mary said.
“That goes without saying,” Walker said, her manner finishing-school calm, her clear blue eyes devoid of emotion. “There isn’t much one can do without money.”
“Mind if I light one up?” Russo asked from the other end of the couch, trying hard not to polish off the entire tray of cookies.
“Yes,” Walker said, eyes never moving from Mary. “I do mind.”
“Thanks for nothin’, then,” Russo muttered, tucking his smokes into a shirt pocket.
“Did you know a man named Jamie Sinclair?” Mary asked.
“What do you mean, did?” Walker asked.
“He’s dead,” Russo said. “Someone used him as a coat hanger a couple of days ago. Other than the cookies, that’s why we’re here.”
A hand went over Walker’s mouth and her eyes did a slow, calculated twitch.
Mary glared at Russo. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Walker. “Did you know him?” she asked again.
Alison Walker stood from her chair and walked toward the front door of her brownstone. She kept her head up as the sounds of her heels echoed on the polished wood floors.
“You both must leave,” Walker said without turning, the door now open to outside sunlight. “Immediately.”
“We’ll only have to come back again,” Russo said, tossing two cookies into his jacket pocket. “Or have somebody bring you down to us.”
Mary took a napkin off a pile next to the teapot, filled it with cookies, and folded it. She handed the napkin to Russo.
“Wait for me in the car, Sweet Tooth,” Mary said to him. “I’ll be there before you polish these off.”
“You sure?”
“What, you want milk too?” Mary said. “Now, go.”
“You gonna be okay here with her?” Russo asked. “Alone, I mean.”
“She whips out a corkscrew, I’ll scream for you to come get me,” Mary whispered. “Until that happens, be a good boy and go eat your cookies.”
“If she made these,” Russo said, “she ain’t that bad a cook.”
“Lizzie Borden liked to bake too,” Mary said, watching as her partner walked out the door and down the front steps of the brownstone, his pockets lined with cookies. Then she turned back to the older woman.
“You knew him,” Mary said, now sitting next to Alison on the couch. “You didn’t kill him, but you did know him.”
The woman nodded her head slowly and took in a deep breath. “Yes,” Walker said, avoiding eye contact, staring instead at a crystal vase in the center of the coffee table, a fresh rose dangling off its edge. “We were friends.”
“And you knew he was dead,” Mary said, her voice soft and warm, two women talking about the demise of a mutual friend and not a cold-blooded murder. “Even before we knocked on your door.”
“How do you know that?” Walker asked, moist eyes now looking over at Mary.
“Most people are surprised when two cops show up at their door,” Mary said. “They go against normal behavior. You almost seemed happy to see us. You let us in without even asking what we wanted.”
“Next time I’ll know better,” Walker said, trying to manage a smile.
“Were you and Sinclair lovers?” Mary asked, leaning closer.
“No,” Walker said. “Jamie wasn’t interested in the physical. At least he wasn’t with me.”
“Sounds like any other husband,” Mary said with a smile.
“I wouldn’t know,” Walker said. “I’ve never married. Jamie was my last chance for that. At my age and in my position, most men are interested in only one thing. And it isn’t sex.”
“How much money were you giving him?”
“I gave what I wanted to give,” Walker said, a hint of defiance to her words.
“And how much was that?” Mary asked, pressing the issue.
“Two, sometimes three thousand dollars,” Walker said.
“A week?”
“He earned it,” Walker said.
“Doing what?” Mary asked, looking around the room. “You’ve got a housekeeper, you do all the cooking, and the place doesn’t look like it needs a paint job.”
“Jamie was very good with numbers,” Walker said. “He helped me with my investments, paid my bills, arranged my taxes. I trusted him. And he never gave me reason to think I shouldn’t.”
“How long was he helping you?
”
“Almost three years.”
“And you were paying him that kind of money all that time?” Mary asked. “Three thousand a week?”
“Yes.”
“How did you pay him?” Mary asked. “Check or cash?”
“Cash,” Walker said. “As organized as Jamie may have been for me, that’s how disorganized he was with his own life. He didn’t even have a checking account.”
“Where’d he keep the money?”
“I never asked,” Walker said. “I just know he never spent much of it, if any. Jamie didn’t seem at all interested in money.”
“Interested enough to charge a few thousand a week to cook your books,” Mary said, standing and folding her notepad.
“Will I have to answer any more questions?” Walker asked, tilting her head toward the detective.
“Just one more for now,” Mary said.
“What?”
“Who else knew about you and Jamie?” Mary asked.
“I never told any of my friends,” Walker said. “People gossip about me as it is. They always have. And I wanted to keep what Jamie and I had special and private.”
“What about him?” Mary asked. “Did he tell anybody?”
“Just his brother,” Walker said. “They were very close.”
“Did he tell his brother about the money too?” Mary asked.
“No,” Walker said. “I don’t think so. It’s not the sort of thing Jamie would talk about. With anyone.”
“You take care of yourself,” Mary said, heading for the front door. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Walker asked, sadness breaking through the solid shield. “For Jamie, I mean.”
“How’d you find out he was dead?” Mary asked. “It barely got a mention in the tabloids. And they don’t seem your kind of reading anyway.”
“His brother, Albert, told me,” Walker said. “He called and told me when and how Jamie died.”
“Did Albert tell you anything else?” Mary asked.
“Not to talk to anyone,” Walker said, head bowed.
When Walker looked up again, she found herself staring at a closed door.
• • •
THE BAR WAS crowded despite the hour and the heavy rain pelting the streets and causing the windows to steam. They sat at a circular table in the back, away from the jukebox. The table was crammed with beer bottles, shot glasses, crumpled napkins, and bowls of salt pretzels. The place was dark, like most cop bars, scattered overhead lights giving off more shadow than glow. The four men and one woman around the table, members of the North Bronx Homicide Unit, were in a festive mood, their work for this day brought to a successful end.
Mrs. Columbo had solved another homicide.
“Took less than a week,” Russo said, washing down a Snickers bar with a slurp of Bud. “Mary spots the bottle of wine, squeezes the spinster, and nabs the brother. We coulda called this one in from home.”
“I like the we part,” Stanley Johnson, senior detective on the squad, said to Russo. “What’d you do? Drive?”
“Brother break easy?” John Rodriguez asked. He was the new badge, working Homicide less than a month, promoted from the pickpocket division in Midtown South.
“He cracked in the car,” Mary said, sipping from a scotch straight. “Cried all the way to the station.”
“You gotta really hate your brother to slice him like that,” Captain Jo Jo Haynes, precinct commander, said. “Corkscrew the throat and then cut his feet off. Christ! And I thought my family was fucked up.”
“If I got a fuckin’ nickel, I’m not lettin’ my brother know about it,” Russo said. “And I like the guy.”
“It wasn’t just the money,” Mary said.
“What else?” Rodriguez asked.
“The brother, Albert, has some sort of muscular disease,” Mary said. “And his insurance doesn’t pick up all the costs. So he’s always behind the financial eight ball.”
“He know this Jamie’s pullin’ in a few thou a week?” Johnson asked.
“No,” Mary said. “Thinks the guy’s on the balls of his ass. In fact, Albeit lends him money. Feels sorry for him.”
“What a prick,” Jo Jo Haynes said.
“Albert’s over at the apartment,” Mary said, finishing her scotch. “Sees a bottle of wine and looks for a corkscrew.”
“He finds it,” Russo said. “In a cabinet drawer next to a folded-up paper bag. Albie, curious as well as thirsty, pops open the bag.”
“And finds the money,” Johnson said.
“He sat on the bed for three hours,” Mary said. “Holding the corkscrew and staring at all that cash.”
“Jamie walks in,” Russo said. “Sees poor little Albie sittin’ next to his stash and starts yellin’ at the guy.”
“Albert snaps,” Mary said. “All those years being suckered by Jamie melt down into a couple of bloody minutes.”
“He sliced and diced the fucker,” Russo said. “Left him hangin’, took the money, and walked out.”
“And he never got to drink the wine,” Johnson said.
“That’s the sad part,” Rodriguez said. “Guy comes in thirsty. Goes out the same way.”
“Except this time with a murder rap,” Russo said. “And Mrs. Columbo here smellin’ his ass out in no time flat.”
“What happens to the old lady?” Haynes asked. “What’s her name? Walker?”
“Who gives a fuck, Cap,” Russo said. “She still got her feet and can swallow anything she chews.”
“She’ll die alone,” Mary said in a low voice. “Jamie was her only real friend. After this, she’ll never let herself get close to anyone. She’ll be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And she’ll die alone.”
“Think Albert cops an insanity?” Johnson said.
“Wouldn’t you?” Russo said. “He comes up Mr. Clean on the sheets. Not even a parking ticket. One of those jaboes goes through life nobody notices.”
“Two lives ruined and one ended,” Mary said. “All for a glass of wine.”
“Let this be a lesson,” Russo said, holding up a bottle of Bud. “Drink beer. You don’t need a fuckin’ weapon to open a bottle, and anybody who drinks it sure as shit don’t have a paper bag filled with cash.”
“I guess this means you’re not buying,” Mary said.
“Not unless one of you got a corkscrew in your pocket,” Russo said, standing up from the table.
“Hey, Cap,” Johnson said with a smile. “Whatta we get if we each put a bullet into Russo right here and now?”
“A raise,” Jo Jo Haynes said.
Mrs. Columbo and the detectives ended their night of victory over death on a loud laugh.
• • •
MARY PARKED HER car four blocks from her Whitestone row house. The rain had stopped and the air was cool and clean, early morning smells wafting down from the trees. Overhead lights cast broken shadows across cars and patches of lawn. It was closing in on three A.M. and the streets were empty as she walked with a slow step, head down, her purse hanging from a strap off her shoulder. Sated with drink, she let her mind ease past the events of the day.
The emptiness of Alison Walker’s life had rubbed a nerve. The woman had money, comfort, and a certain status. But none of those could fill the vacuum of years built around set routines and nights spent alone. Alison wouldn’t die broke, but the odds were strong she would die bitter.
Mary lacked all the luxuries of Alison’s life. Her status came courtesy of the gold shield in her purse. Her money traveled on a biweekly spin cycle and her comfort was a small house with a leaky roof, bad plumbing, and two bedroom windows long painted shut. But Mary knew, as she walked down the cracked sidewalk of Thirty-seventh Avenue, that she had Alison beat by a record mile. She had what the other woman would give everything to attain—a husband in her bed and a son in the next room.
Maybe her marriage wasn’t such an uneasy fallback after all, and watching Frankie grow had given
her plenty of reasons to smile. It was far better than sitting in a room alone, staring at an antique vase filled with a single red rose, knowing no phone would ever ring to a voice that cared and no door would ever open to let in a warm hug.
Mary Silvestri crossed against a flashing red light and picked up the speed of her pace, suddenly eager to get home. She never saw the man with the knife hunkered down in the alley, alongside the shuttered gates of Sergio’s Deli. He stood perched on the balls of his feet, watching as she approached, waiting to time his leap and score the purse dangling against her hip.
When she was directly in front of him, he jumped.
The man, wiry and muscular, wrapped his right arm around Mary’s throat and wedged the blade of a six-inch knife between her shoulders, hard against the soft wool of her camel’s hair J. C. Penney blazer.
“You breathe, you die,” the man said. His breath against her neck reeked of alcohol.
He tightened his grip around Mary’s throat and gave the edge of the knife a rough twist. He took backward steps, dragging Mary with him, pulling her away from the light and into the blind darkness of the alley.
Mary relaxed her body and let the man’s strength do all the work. She kept her hands free, loose, waiting to make her move. The arm around her throat was wrapped in bandages, blood flowing through the white gauze as his fingers gripped thick clumps of her hair. She shifted her face away from him, brushing against the rough skin of his cheek as she moved.
They were in the alley now.
“What you got for me?” the man asked, leaning her face forward against the red brick wall. “How much?”
“Take it all,” Mary said, forcing the words out. “In the purse. Take it.”
He yanked her head back with a forceful grip of her hair and slammed her face against the wall.
“Don’t tell me what to take, bitch. I take what I want. Understand me?”
“Yes,” Mary said, tasting the blood dripping down from her forehead.
He moved his arm from her throat and ripped the purse off her shoulder. He leaned her hard against the wall, the blade of the knife keeping her in place. Mary closed her eyes, took in a few deep breaths, and tried to think with a clear head. She knew she didn’t have much time and was angry at herself for leaving her gun in the office, something she always did when she went out drinking with the squad.
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