by D. J. Herda
"It seems that someone who used to be a lieutenant in this precinct decided to place a stake on the woman's house because the woman has had some tenants move out, owing her money. Can you imagine that, Cartel? Can you imagine anyone being so dumb as to waste official department manpower and money that way? Can you imagine anyone in his right mind doing such a thing with police resources being as low as they are in these tough times? Can you just imagine? All because of a couple of skips that that very same lieutenant has been unable to locate!"
"Sir, I, uhh ... it was me. Sir."
Lombardi cranked his head to one side. He learned his ear so close to the cop that Cartel thought for an instant he was going to kiss him. The captain rolled his eyes slowly around to look straight into Cartel's face. "What ... was ... you? Sir?"
Cartel paused. "Sir?"
"I said, what was you, Cartel?"
"It was me who ordered the stake on the Rasci place. Sir!"
Lombardi shifted slowly away from his officer, turned his back, and took two trembling steps toward his desk. "It ... was ... I," he said softly.
Cartel looked at the back of the man's head, at the bald spot forming there. "Sir?"
"It was I, you fucking moron!" He whirled around so suddenly that Cartel nearly tipped over backward. "Subjective complement of the verb 'to be' is I, not me! And if it were you, then you disobeyed a direct order about not wasting precinct time on a fuckin' hunch you had about some old lady and her skips. If you hadn't, then you wouldn't have wasted precinct time, and you wouldn't have wasted precinct money. Not only did you have a stake sitting out there for the past three days, but by not telling me, I had to send two of my best men out after him, which means that, at least for a couple of hours today, I was without three of the eight men in my entire fucking department!"
"Yessir. I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen again, sir. I just ... wasn't thinking. I ... I had a hunch ..."
“You had a what?”
“A hunch, sir.”
He shook his head in disbelief. "Listen, here. You don't have hunches, Cartel. Do you hear me? You don't have hunches. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. You don’t have hunches, and that's an order!"
"Yessir."
"You don't have hunches, period! You have evidence. You have proof. You have some poor fucking bastard nailed to the wall before you ever even think about wasting my manpower on a stakeout because of your fuckin' hunch. Do you understand? We don't do things around here because of hunches."
Cartel nodded.
"Do ... you ... understand?"
"Yessir."
"Good. Now get your ass back to your office, get on that fuckin' phone, and call Barducci in. Fast! And don't ever—ever—place a stakeout in the field without clearing it with me first, is that understood?"
Cartel nodded. "Yessir. Perfectly, sir."
Lombardi slipped back into his chair and snapped his head toward the door. "Now you can close it," he said as Cartel walked out of the room. When the lieutenant reached Meyers' desk, he motioned for the uniform to follow Cartel to his office.
"Jesus," Meyers said, closing the office door behind them. "What the hell got up the old man's ass?"
"How do I know? Maybe he's on the rag."
"You want me to call Barducci in?"
Cartel paused.
"I say, do you want me to ..."
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Later. First, I want you to run a check on someone for me. Velchenka Rasci."
Meyers craned his neck to one side and squinted. "Huh? What about Barducci? Shouldn't we at least ..."
"Just do it. I want a full check, from the time she left Hungary until twenty minutes ago, understand? And check up on her husband, too. He's supposed to have been dead for ten years now. Run a full report on him, too. You'll have to dig around for his first name. Got it?"
Meyers shrugged. "You're the boss."
Damn straight I'm the boss. And I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna let some bubble-eyed weasel too afraid of his own shadow throw me off this one. She did it, and she knows she did it. She knows she did it, and she knows I know she did it. She just doesn't know that I know how she did it.
"Oh, and while you're at it, call over to legal and have them work up a warrant for Rasci's arrest."
"A warrant? What? For what?"
Cartel thought for a moment. "What the hell, might as well go for broke. Let’s make it for murder one."
"Mr. Cartel, darlink, what a surprise! I didn't expect to see you again so soon. I was just talking with Mrs. Fougherty, you know she lives on the second ..."
"Mrs. Rasci, I wish this were a routine visit so that we could chat. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under arrest for suspicion of the murder of your four tenants. Sergeant Meyers, here, has the warrant. He also has a warrant to search the building. Sergeant," he said, turning to his aide, "you and Rossi start with the third floor, Mrs. Rasci's apartment, and work your way down."
"I ... I don't understand what is happening. Is this some little joke, or what, darlink? Tell Velchenka ... what it is you want?"
"It was really very clever, Mrs. Rasci. Very clever. But the sofas gave you away."
"The sofas?"
"No one grows up an orphan in Europe, lives through two World Wars and a major depression, and comes to America and buys a new sofa every three months. It's just not in character, you know what I mean?"
"I don't understand, Mr. Cartel, darlink. Could you say it so an old dumbhead like me could understand?"
"You really don't like the men who rent your basement apartment, do you, Mrs. Rasci? I mean, you really hate what they stand for."
"I don't like dumbheads. I don't like the sex and the drinking and ..."
"So you set out on your own little crusade to get rid of them ... or at least as many of them as you could without drawing too much attention to your activities."
She shook her head, her eyes for the first time displaying a hint of fear, a look of confusion. It was an expression Cartel imagined she had worn back in Europe, in Hungary, after her mother's death and before her grandmother had taken her in.
"You killed your tenants one by one in cold blood, Mrs. Rasci, didn't you? You killed all four of them."
She shook her head again. "I kill no one, Mr. Cartel. Velchenka Rasci is a woman of life and of love, not a killer of people. She is God-fearing woman of peace and love."
Cartel nodded absently. "At first, I couldn't figure out how you disposed of the bodies. That's always the hardest part. I had my men sift your trash for any signs of human remains or blood. I had a stake watching your every move. But you were too smart for that. Then I got the bright idea that you were stuffing your victims' corpses inside the sofas. That would explain why you bought a new sofa after each tenant disappeared. So I called the Salvation Army and asked a few questions. Naturally, the sofas would have been quite a bit heavier than usual with a man's body inside. But when I asked the pickup guys about the last sofa, they told me just the opposite. Oh, they said it was big and bulky but that it was actually lighter than you'd expect for a sofa of that size. That really stumped me. Maybe she's not guilty of murder after all, I thought. Maybe I'm barkin' up the wrong tree."
She smiled. "Mr. Cartel, darlink. You know I could not do such a thing like that. I am a poor old lady with nothing to live for but my tenants. My two girls, and Mrs. Fougherty. They rely on me. I help them, I cook for them, I visit with them. I am not some criminal. I am not some murderer. You know that now, yes? And so I will go upstairs and tell your Sergeant there is no need for ..."
"Wait. Hold on a minute. I'm not done, yet, Mrs. Rasci. Do you see what I'm getting at? Just about the time I was thinking I had it figured all wrong, that's when I decided to run a background check."
"And what is that, darlink?" She shifted on two stumpy legs. "What is background check?"
"That's when I look into your life’s history, going all the way back to Hungary."
"My life’s history?"
Cartel
nodded. "And that of your husband. Poor guy. Seems he died more than ten years ago. A lot more. In fact, it seems as if he died closer to ... oh, thirty-five years ago or longer."
She smiled. "I am an old woman, Mr. Cartel. For an old woman, time passes quickly, or time stands still. Time races ahead, or time dies. But time is never on your side."
"It seems that, in your case, it was, Mrs. Rasci. It appears that your husband died just a year or so after the two of you were married. He died of, what was it again? Oh, yes. Asphyxiation. Gas poisoning, wasn't it?"
"Yes." Her mouth turned down at the corners, and her eyes seemed suddenly sullen. "Yes, that is right." Cartel could see even after all these years that she had once been very beautiful. Stunning. The kind of woman that any man might have fallen in love with. Especially an older man, a jeweler, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly more. "It was ... an accident. It was very sad. I cried. Just a little girl, such a small, innocent little girl. I cried so much ..."
"I'm sure you did, because you loved your grandmother dearly."
She nodded. "Yes, I did. She was so good to me. She taught me everything. She taught Velchenka how to read and how to write and how to be a lady, and she taught me ...”
"How to kill?"
Her eyes rolled suddenly in her head, her pupils swelling to twice their normal size. "Mr. Cartel, I ..."
"She did do it, didn't she? Your grandmother. The courts found her guilty. The Hungarian justice system. And they sent her away to prison, where she died the same year you came to America, the year after your husband died. And left you his fortune."
She shook her head, lightly at first, then harder. "No, she could not have done such a thing. My husband was a good man. She would not have harmed ..."
"Didn't she call him something at the trial in Budapest? Didn't she say, in her own defense, that she killed him because your husband had been a drunkard and a liar and a ... dumbhead?"
"No. No, he was not a drunkard. He was not a dumbhead. He loved me. And I loved him. I mean ..." she looked down, the wheels of her memory spinning freely, grinding out the traces from the past—"as much as any young girl of 18 or 19 could love someone."
"At first, they couldn't find his body, isn't that so? And because of that, your grandmother very nearly went free."
"Yes. Yes, they could not find him ..."
"But then, when the authorities began snooping around the cellar of your grandmother's home, they discovered something."
She looked up at him blankly, and he thought he noticed a small damp spot growing in the corner of one eye.
"Lieutenant Cartel? Lieutenant!"
Cartel turned toward the stairway.
"Lieutenant," Meyers said, skipping down the steps leading to the foyer. "We're not quite through with the third floor, but I thought you’d want to see this." He held out a clear plastic bag. Cartel took hold of it and lifted it toward the light. Slowly he lowered it to his side where Mrs. Rasci's gaze remained fixed.
"Thanks, Meyers. I think you can stop searching now. And call for a van. Mrs. Rasci is going for a ride."
"Got it," he said, reaching for the door.
"In fact," Cartel added. "Make that call to Captain Lombardi, personally. Tell him I hereby request that he get his skinny ass out here, and tell him to make it fast."
Meyers grinned before ducking through the doorway and disappearing down the steps.
Cartel turned back toward the old woman standing before him, looking for all the world like a helpless child, like an orphan of war, like a small doll that some equally small child would someday cherish for her very own and then abandon.
"You know what this is, don't you, Mrs. Rasci?" He jiggled the bag.
She shook her head, paused, and nodded.
"It's your embalming kit, isn't it? Your needles, your scalpels, some kind of fluid ... formaldehyde, is it?"
She looked up into his eyes and nodded again.
"That's why those sofas were lighter than they should have been, isn't it? Because you opened them up, removed some of the padding, and placed a sealed body bag with your victim's remains inside before closing the sofa up again. Isn't that right? A few pounds of bones, a few pounds of desiccated organs, and some human tissue shrunk down to practically nothing. The padding you removed weighed more than the victims’ remains you sewed inside, didn't it, Mrs. Rasci?"
She thought for several moments. "They are nothing. They are not worth bothering with, Mr. Cartel, darlink. You know that. These ... these ... dumbheads and drinkers and dope smokers and these ... these ... things that crave the sex. These things ... like animals. You can see that. You are a smart man, Mr. Cartel. Very smart. Like me, you don't like these people, these crazy people who got no job and who don't work and just drink and have the sex and steal and lie and ... you don't like these people. I don't like these people. These are not people, Mr. Cartel, darlink. You and Velchenka, we are people. We are alive. We know the value of life. We know how to work hard and how to keep away from these others. We are not like them, we are not some ... bums. It doesn't matter what happens to them. They are not worth worrying about. The world is better place without them. All they cause is pain for others. The world is better place without them."
Cartel heard the crunch of the tires in the street. Meyers came up the steps, peeked in, and motioned over his shoulder. Cartel pulled the cuffs from behind his back and slipped them over the old lady's wrists.
"Mr. Cartel ..." she said, "I like you. You are not like the others. I like talking to you. You are so smart, and such a gentleman. But tell me, nobody could find my husband. Nobody knew that my grandmother had told a confession to protect me. So, she did, and now she is gone. How did you find this out?"
"Well, you had me stumped for a while, I admit. And I was just about to give up on the case. Except for two things."
"What two things, Mr. Cartel, darlink. Tell Velchenka. Tell an old dumb lady, so that she know." A sparkle had suddenly come back into her eyes.
"Well, the last time I was here, I took a look around your basement."
"It's so dirty there, Mr. Cartel, darlink, you should not have ..."
"I found the men's clothing, and I thought that was the smoking gun I needed to tie you to the murders. But when I looked more closely, I noticed the sizes were all large or extra large, and the descriptions you gave us of your tenants were all of smaller men."
She smiled. "Such little fellows."
"Then I noticed the gas pipe ... with the shut-off valve? I wasn't sure at first where it led, until the second thing came along. And then I knew the pipe led to the basement flat where your tenants were all murdered."
"But, all old buildings have gas pipes in them, darlink. What is so unusual about that?"
"Yes, but this gas pipe had a shutoff valve that was clean of dust and dirt as if it had been handled recently ... maybe several times. Or, more precisely ... four?
She looked suddenly childlike—caught with her hand in the cookie jar, an impish grin crossing her face.
"So smart. And such a good-looking man, too.” She shook her head. “If Velchenka was thirty years younger!"
He smiled. "Then I remembered that you said you had disconnected the stove in your tenants' apartment, so you had no reason to fiddle with that valve handle ... ever."
"You are so smart, darlink. I am proud to know a person so smart like you."
He sighed. "So, putting two and two together, I figured that's how you killed them, because that's how your grandmother killed your husband in Hungary—by turning the gas on in the house as he slept. That was in the confession she gave to the police just before you were to be arrested for the murder. From that and the information I got from the Salvation Army, I was able to figure out the rest."
"Look out. Step aside!" The captain’s burly voice rang from the steps leading to the front entry. "Where is he? Cartel! Cartel! Where the ... oh, here you are!"
Cartel turned, glancing over his shoulder as th
e captain snaked his way past several uniforms to reach them.
"There you are! Just what the hell do you mean, draggin' my ass—what did you call it again? My 'skinny ass'?—out of a warm fuckin' office out here in the cold? You've got some explaining to do. And you'd better make it Goddam fuckin' good!" Lombardi pushed his way into the foyer, caught sight of the woman, and froze. "Oh. Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, his tone suddenly softening. "I didn't realize anyone else was..."
Cartel turned back to the old lady, who had curled her lips in disgust. He continued: "You see, Mrs. Rasci, when that background check came in on you, it had your entire family history on it. I doubt that so detailed an account would ever have existed except for the fact that your grandmother had confessed to the murder of your husband in court, and the court stenographer's job was to take down what your grandmother said ... everything she said ... right on down to the revelation that your grandmother had a couple of occupations that you had never thought to mention to me. You neglected to tell me that she had been a pretty fair upholsterer in her day ... as well as one of Budapest's most respected embalmers. She helped her husband, your grandfather, run a mortuary there for years, didn't she?"
The old lady smiled. "She run a little mortuary there, yes ... until my grandfather die."
"Of natural causes, I assume."
Another twinkle lit her eye.
Lombardi wormed his way around Cartel's heft and spied the cuffs on the old woman. "What's going on here? Why is this woman in cuffs? What’s this all about?” he asked his lieutenant.
"I sent the coroner out to the Salvation Army warehouse. The four missing stiffs are at County now, thanks to Mrs. Rasci. Or, three of them, anyway. We're still running down the fourth sofa."
"Sofa? What the... what are you talking about, sofa?"
"It'll all be in my report closing the case."
Lombardi looked from Cartel to Mrs. Rasci and back again before drawing closer to the cop. "You'd better be right, Cartel." He turned to the old lady. "All right, Mrs. Rasci," he said finally. "You’d better come along with me. Looks like you've got a date with destiny." He motioned toward the door and signaled one of the uniforms to take her out to the van.
