Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  “I was asleep.”

  “Right,” I said. I only had one question left to ask her. “Did the police knock on your door this morning?”

  “I told them everything I told you,” she said. “They asked to come in, and they showed me their badges. So I let them in.”

  “Did you hear anything else after you let them in?”

  “No.”

  “No commotion upstairs or downstairs—someone getting arrested?”

  “Nothing.”

  She started to close the door, and I thought of one last thing. I put my hand on the jamb and stopped the door.

  “Ma’am—did the police ask you how long the elevator’s been out?”

  “No.”

  “I could make some calls for you,” I said. “The health department. The building department.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she hissed. I could see her small, sharp teeth. “If I make trouble, they’ll kick me out. And if I lose this place, where would I go?”

  “All right,” I said, and thanked her again.

  I kept going, and checked the two apartments above her next. They were both dark. I went back to the stairwell and climbed the last flight to the roof. The door that led out should have been locked, but the lock had been punched a long time ago. I put my hand on the metal and felt the fine grit of fingerprint powder. The cops were covering all the bases. I shoved the door open, and then I was out of the stench and into the rain, nothing above me but the sky.

  I walked across the gravel to the waist-high brick balustrade, and stood where Claire would have if she’d gone off the roof and not out a window. The Refugio was five floors higher than any other building in the area. So I was looking down on Turk Street and over the dark roofs of a dozen other apartments and SRO hotels.

  I didn’t know what I’d hoped to find up there. Even if Claire had left a note on the railing, the police would have found it this morning. I wondered if I should go back and pound on the doors to all the corner apartments. It’s what I would do if I were a policeman. But I wouldn’t find anything they hadn’t uncovered already, and I might get myself arrested in the process.

  What I really needed were the police reports, and the work-up from the medical examiner. I looked at my watch. There was plenty of time. I could get the documents delivered by email and read them on the plane.

  8

  If you ever hire a private investigator, before you start complaining about his rates, consider that most of his money goes right out the door to keep up his overhead. Sources only take cash, and an investigator—a good one, anyway—has eyes everywhere. It adds up fast, and when tax time comes, it’s not as though you can take a deduction on a bribe.

  One of my earliest discoveries in cost-cutting was the nightshift. Either nocturnal workers perceive less risk, or they just have less to lose. Whichever it is, their monthly envelopes aren’t as thick as their diurnal counterparts’ payoffs, and they’re usually eager for extra work for extra pay. All of which is to say I had the Hall of Justice, on Bryant Street, pretty well covered after dark.

  My inside track to the Homicide Detail was a janitor who usually got to the sixth floor around three a.m. Elijah moved from office to office, and through the maze of cubicles, wheeling a trash can and a dust mop. When no one was watching, he was uncannily fast with a camera phone. In the medical examiner’s suite, I had Cynthia Green. As the records custodian, she had a space to herself, and access to a scanner.

  I was still up on the Refugio’s roof when I took out my phone and started typing messages. I asked Cynthia for all the files on Claire Gravesend. I asked Elijah for anything on the woman who’d jumped off the Refugio Apartments and into a Rolls Royce Wraith yesterday morning. Both of my sources answered before I reached the ground floor; they’d get me what they could.

  I headed toward Union Square, where you could find something to eat at any hour. I sat at the counter in the Pinecrest Diner, where I took my time with four cups of coffee and a Denver omelet. The man beside me left early on, abandoning his paper. I grabbed it, but set it aside when I saw it was already a day old. I had my phone, though.

  The Chronicle’s website didn’t have anything new on Lorca, which was fine with me. If that story could die in a dark corner, I’d send flowers. But there was a piece about Claire Gravesend, which included a photograph I hadn’t taken: two patrol officers flanking a plainclothes inspector, all three of them exiting the Refugio. They wore latex gloves and had surgical masks pulled down from their mouths. The caption identified the inspector as Frank Chang. The story didn’t contain anything I didn’t already know—a young heiress likely had committed suicide by jumping off a tenement roof and into a parked luxury car. The police had no comment; the medical examiner’s report hadn’t been released at the time of writing.

  I texted Elijah, who was probably almost done with his rounds in Homicide Detail: Check Frank Chang’s desk. It’s his case.

  Compared to Elijah, Cynthia Green in the medical examiner’s office had it easy. She was looking for an alphabetized file in a system that she maintained from the privacy of her own office. Elijah was looking for notes taken by multiple officers in an ongoing investigation. He was rifling through inboxes and inspectors’ desktops. The documents he was looking for wouldn’t be in one place; the investigation was too new. In the first twenty-four hours, documents and notes would be scattered all over the department. They’d be in patrol officers’ notebooks, or sitting on a cruiser’s dashboard, or filed in a cop’s brain, not on paper yet at all. I could only cross my fingers and hope something had trickled up to Inspector Chang, and that Elijah would find it.

  I put my phone away and paid my tab.

  I found a cab and headed to the airport. Halfway there, I began getting one email after another. Elijah and Cynthia were coming through.

  Outside of my boarding gate, I started my fifth cup of coffee and went through Elijah’s photographs a second time. He had snapped an image of every piece of paper in Inspector Chang’s inbox, and Chang was clearly a busy man. There was a ballistics report from an unsolved shooting on Valencia; a witness statement from that same shooting; a subpoena to appear at a deposition in what looked like a civil rights case against one of Chang’s fellow officers; a handwritten letter from a Folsom inmate who claimed to know the triggerman in a 1977 North Beach hit—and buried in that, two pages of notes written by Sergeant Luke Gifford, describing the results of a door-knocking expedition in the Refugio.

  Like me, the police had focused on the corner units on the right side of the building. Unlike me, Sergeant Gifford had gone inside every unit from 201 to 1401. He’d had the building supervisor with him, who unlocked any door that wasn’t opened by a resident. Gifford’s search might not have passed muster under the Fourth Amendment, but that hardly mattered. He hadn’t found anything, so there was no evidence to exclude.

  His notes opened the doors that had been closed to me that morning.

  #201—Estelle Ramirez. Wit. shows ID and invites me in. Tells mgr. to keep out. Makeshift beds on floors. Six children in one bdrm unit. All heard bang, but nbdy checked outside. Assumed car crash. Can’t pinpoint time—no clocks / watches. Never seen vic. in building. Wit. consents to search—nothing of interest.

  #301—Unit vacant since April. Mgr. opens door. Trash from last tenant still inside. Rat nest under kchn sink. No items from vic.

  #401—Simone Anderson opens door. Mgr. says wit. is tenant and she is 19. Bruises on neck, face—not fresh. Mgr. says we need to check unit. She lets us in. One mattress in bdrm. Window blacked out with cardboard boxes. Wit. says: I work nights, need to keep light out. Never seen vic. in building or neighborhood. Out till 8 a.m. No one else lives in / uses unit. Mgr. confirms. Wit. consents to search—nothing.

  Gifford went on, through ten more floors and ten more units. The wheelchair-bound woman in 1201 was named Leola Cummings. If the sergeant noticed she was effectively a prisoner, he didn’t write it down. But I couldn’t say I blamed hi
m. Before reaching Leola, he’d been through eleven other apartments that were just as bad. Gifford had also searched the roof, noting the unlocked door. A forensics technician came up and dusted the entire building for prints.

  Outside, along the balustrade where Claire would have been standing before she jumped, Gifford found an empty bottle of Seagram’s 7. He’d bagged it for the labs. If the bottle had her fingerprints or DNA, then a story might slide into focus. It would neither prove anything nor rule anything out, but it would be suggestive.

  Other than the bottle, Gifford hadn’t taken any evidence from the Refugio. And except for the bottle, he’d found nothing, either in an apartment or on the roof, that might be connected to Claire. I was trying to decide what to make of that, when I turned to the preliminary autopsy report. The first ten pages were photographs. By the time I’d reached the second, I had forgotten all about Sergeant Gifford and his search.

  For five minutes, I just looked at the photographs. When the airline’s agents got on the PA to announce early boarding, I stepped away from the line of passengers and moved to the far side of the gate. This was a conversation I didn’t want my fellow passengers to overhear.

  “Did I wake you?” I asked, when she answered.

  “This is Crowe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have news.”

  “The lead inspector on the case is a man named Frank Chang—”

  “That was in the paper.”

  “And I have the notes his officer took when he went door to door in the Refugio, along with everything else in his inbox,” I said. “I do more than read the paper. And I’m bringing him up for a reason. Expect him to come and see you today. He’s at a dead end. His next logical step is to talk to someone who knew the victim.”

  “I see.”

  “Will you tell him about Claire’s letters?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “They’re the best lead in the case.”

  “Which is why I gave them to you, Crowe.”

  “He’s got resources I don’t,” I said. “Forensics labs, DNA and print databases, document experts—”

  “Whatever he has, you can buy.”

  Jim’s other client, the upstanding citizen otherwise known as Lorca, had also given me carte blanche on my investigative activities. My rent at the Westchester hadn’t amounted to much, but I had found ways to pad the bill. When all this came to an end, I was going to have to get used to normal people again.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “I have a copy of the preliminary report from the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Send it to me.”

  If she was impressed with what I could get in less than five hours, she didn’t let it slip into her voice.

  “It has photographs—graphic photographs,” I said. “Including one of her back.”

  “Undressed, I presume.”

  “What made those scars, Mrs. Gravesend? The photos are very clear.”

  There was a long silence. From the overhead PA speaker, the gate agent announced that she was now boarding all rows and all passengers for Boston.

  “Those are not your problem,” she answered. “As far as Claire was concerned, she’d always had them. They didn’t bother her. They didn’t give her any pain. They didn’t embarrass her. She was a beautiful young woman with everything to live for. I believe in my heart that she knew that.”

  “I can’t do this if you’re not straight with me.”

  “She didn’t jump off that building,” Olivia said. “Don’t start on that path, not for one second. So unless you think somebody threw her out a window because he didn’t like the look of her backside, the scars have nothing to do with it.”

  “What were they—some kind of medical procedure?”

  “They are none of your concern, Crowe,” she said, pausing between each word for emphasis.

  “Was she sick?”

  “She was as healthy as she looked in your goddamned photograph. And congratulations—the magazine you sold it to licensed it to every internet news site that ever hung out a shingle. I hope you get your cut.”

  That contingency was covered in a licensing clause on page three. But for once, I wasn’t focused on the money.

  “If there’s a history of abuse, I need to know now.”

  “Under my roof—never.”

  “She left school and disappeared for six months. What was she looking for?”

  “I already told you,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “When Inspector Chang comes, he’s going to ask about the scars. Don’t sit there in your gun room and pretend he won’t. You’ll want a better answer.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” she said. “Was there anything else?”

  “No.”

  There was another PA announcement, the final call for my flight. I walked across the now empty gate and handed my boarding pass to the agent.

  “I gather you’re at the airport,” Olivia said.

  “I’ll call you again from Boston.”

  “Do that,” she said. “And send me the documents.”

  She hung up.

  I walked down the jetway, onto the plane, and found my seat in first class. I had been using my phone all night and all morning, and now it was dying. There was enough juice left to email the reports to Olivia, and then the screen went dark. That was fine with me. I could buy a charger in Boston, and for this flight, I just needed to think. And sleep.

  I took the glass of orange juice the flight attendant offered me, and I stretched out in my seat. The jetway rolled back. I closed my eyes and saw Claire Gravesend on the crushed car, rain pooling around her. On a stainless-steel autopsy table, stripped of her dress and her jewelry and the dignity that she had somehow held on to until then. In the first of the medical examiner’s photographs, she’d been face-up. In the second, they’d flipped her over. There’d been a deep red gash in the back of her head, and an even bigger one across her buttocks, which must have hit the car first. Those were the only recent injuries, and none of them surprised me.

  What I hadn’t expected were the scars. I had never seen anything like them.

  On either side of her spine, from the bottom of her head to her lower back, where the waistline of her panties would have almost hidden them, there were matched sets of old wounds. One pair for every vertebra. The scars were almost perfectly round. Some were the size of silver dollars, and others no bigger than dimes. There were smaller circles at the crest of each hip. An array of smaller dots had spread like unfolding wings across each of her shoulder blades.

  Every wound had been perfectly placed, enhancing her body’s bilateral symmetry. It might have been some kind of body art, scarification instead of a tattoo, but there had been no particular beauty in the wounds. They were ugly raised welts, wrinkled and pink. It was hard to imagine a scar like that could have come from a single wound. Someone must have cut into her over and over again.

  And according to Olivia Gravesend, Claire had carried them all her life.

  9

  I woke up somewhere over the Midwest. The plane was skirting a thunderstorm, the ride was bumpy, and I was thinking about Agent White. I’d left nothing behind in the Westchester. I was sure of that. But White might have seen me in the neighborhood. He might find residents of the hotel willing to identify me as the man who’d spent five weeks on the sixth floor. If he got far enough to search my former room, there was nothing. If he got a warrant and searched my apartment or my office, there was nothing. I’d dropped every piece of surveillance gear, and every memory stick, into a Tenderloin dumpster.

  By now, they had almost surely braced DeCanza. They might have learned about the phone and the whiskey. The phone was a secondhand piece, paid for in cash. Like buying a gun on the street. They weren’t going to trace its serial number to a store, then catch my face on a security camera. On the other hand, White didn’t strike me as a quitter. You don’
t go after a man like Lorca if you’re the type to shy away from a hard problem.

  I’d boarded the plane hoping for some sleep. By the time we landed, I hadn’t gotten much.

  It was late in the afternoon when I stepped into a cab. I didn’t have a hotel room, a return flight, or any kind of plan. The closest I’d been to Boston was an eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C.

  Buying my ticket last night, I’d looked at a map of Boston, so I had a general idea of where we were headed. It didn’t take long. We went into a tunnel and emerged into a warren of narrow streets, and in fifteen minutes the driver turned onto Beacon. The Common was on our left, and to the right, shoulder-to-shoulder brick and brownstone townhouses. Some of them had flower boxes under the windows, and some had Betsy Ross flags on poles that leaned out above the sidewalk, and I would have bet that every one of them was worth ten times what I would make in a lifetime.

  I saw River Street up ahead. We were within a few hundred yards of Claire’s place.

  “Here’s fine,” I said.

  The driver turned to the curb and stopped. Once I’d paid him, I got out and crossed the street to the park side. I walked the last block and a half to the Gravesends’ Boston foothold, and then I lingered in the shade of a maple tree to take a look at the place. Most of the houses on this stretch of Beacon were redbrick, but the Gravesend place was built of smooth gray stone, the front wall gently curved like the top of a violin. The front door was above sidewalk level, reached by a set of stone steps. The place was five stories, with a pitched slate roof. It could have served as the consulate for some small European principality. A country with money to burn. Monaco, San Marino.

  The windows were uncovered—no shutters and no curtains. There weren’t any lights on inside, but there were polished brass lanterns on either side of the door, and each one softly flickered with a gas flame. I walked back to the intersection and crossed Beacon. Instead of going up the steps to Claire’s door, I went to her next-door neighbor’s. I rang the bell and waited. I didn’t have anything else to do. After two minutes, I rang the bell again. The second time, the door opened, and a young woman stepped out. She was holding a naked baby, wrapped in a towel. The baby’s hair was slicked down with water.