Don’t be silly, she told herself. This is a prime example of wishful thinking. You’re seeing things because you want to see them, not because they’re actually there.
And yet, she was almost certain something had occurred. But what? And what could have caused it? If there had been a reaction, what could have been the trigger? What had she been talking about? Senator Cunningham’s death, that was it. Had Jan responded to the news ever so slightly?
Keeping her gaze locked on her sister’s lackluster eyes, she said, “Jan, I said Senator Cunningham is dead. He died a few days ago, and I think the funeral is tomorrow. Did you hear that, Jan? Senator Cunningham is dead. Isn’t that sad?”
What she saw now was no figment of an overworked imagination. It was real, and to Peggy it was like a miracle.
In the corner of that same right eye, a tear formed. A tiny bit of moisture welled up and then the drop rolled down Jan’s cheek.
Peggy’s jaw dropped. She moved even closer and then she saw a shimmer in Jan’s left eye, as well. She grabbed her sister’s arm. “Jan! Jan—can you hear me?”
As usual, there was no response. Her sister’s features appeared to be as insensible and uncomprehending as they had on all the other days since she’d come here.
But she had responded. Peggy had seen it, had seen the tear with her own eyes.
Jumping to her feet, she ran out into the hall. She had to find Dr. Chenoweth, now.
17
When Tolliver walked into the investigators’ squad room, Jack Mulloy was half-sitting on the desk next to his, talking to another detective. When he caught sight of Ben, he stepped over to greet him, moving as quickly as the bad leg would permit.
“Hey, Ben—I’ve been waiting for you. You heard the latest?”
“What is it?”
“That writer, Silk. The one who was with the senator when he died? She went out the window.”
“When?”
“Sometime earlier today. Jimmy Collins called, from the One-seven. He figured since you were working on the senator’s death, you’d want to know right away. Somebody spotted the body and called it in.”
“Was this at her apartment?”
“He said on Sutton Place.”
“Yeah, that’s it. What else did Collins tell you?”
“So far, they haven’t found a note. They were still looking for one when he called.”
“Then they don’t know why she did it.”
“Who knows?” Mulloy said. “Maybe it was grief … over the senator. Or maybe all the pressure got to her. You want the number? They’re probably still there.”
“Yeah, give it to me.”
They went to Mulloy’s desk and the detective handed him a slip of paper with Jessica Silk’s phone number scrawled on it. Tolliver picked up a phone and called it. When a cop answered, he asked for Collins, a homicide detective he’d known for a long time. A moment later, Collins came onto the line.
“Jimmy, Ben Tolliver.”
“Hey, Ben. The lady did a swan.”
“Mulloy said earlier today?”
“Right. The ME’s looking at her now.”
“And no note?”
“None we could find so far. You know if they leave one, they usually put it in a place where somebody’ll see it.”
“You run across anything else?”
“Nothing that’d tell us why she jumped. Maybe the uproar over her and the senator. You talk to her after he died?”
“Yes. In that apartment. You gonna be there a while?”
“Oh, yeah—we’ll be combing it pretty good. This one’ll get a lot of attention, and I don’t want to give anybody a reason to second-guess us. You want to have a look?”
“Sure. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” He hung up.
“You want me to come along?” Mulloy asked.
“Yeah, come on.” Ben turned and left the room, the other detective pulling on his suit jacket and struggling to keep up.
They took the FDR, Ben pushing the Ford at his customary breakneck pace. He whipped in and out of the lines of traffic, slipping over to the extreme right when they ran into the inevitable jam-up near the UN exit.
“You could make a lot of money,” Mulloy said, “in the south.”
“How do you figure?”
“Stock-car races. Those rednecks got nothing on you.”
Tolliver blew his horn at some asshole in a Mercedes who apparently thought he rated two lanes. A gap developed when the guy finally gave ground, and Ben shot through it.
“Not leaving a note bothers me,” he said.
“Me, too,” Mulloy said. “You think maybe somebody shoved her?”
“It’s possible. Anything’s possible—especially after what those embalmers who worked on Cunningham told me. Even the ME admitted nobody knows for sure what killed the old man. And now this?”
“Sure. But remember the Mulloy rule for survival.”
“Which is?”
“Do not step in shit.”
“I’ll write that down.”
“You should. You didn’t see the brass pick up on it, did you? About the embalmers, or what the ME told you? You said Brennan acted like he wished you hadn’t brought it up.”
“Can’t altogether blame him. Everybody knows that without an autopsy, it’s all just conjecture. The embalmers admitted that. And the ME confirmed it.”
“Yeah, but maybe now with the writer dead, it’ll change a few minds. Might be a good time to push for a post on the senator.”
“Maybe. But I doubt it.”
“Worth a try,” Mulloy said. “Better than our just sniffing around with nothing solid to go on.”
“True enough. You want to talk to the DA about it? Make the suggestion?”
“Not me. But you can bet this suicide won’t just get filed away. The media’ll go apeshit.”
“I’m sure they will.”
This time, cops had blocked off the area. Reporters had already gathered outside the barricades and were complaining about not being admitted. Tolliver showed a uniform his shield and the officer moved one of the blue-painted sawhorses aside for the Ford to pass. A number of police cars and an ambulance were at the curb in front of Silk’s apartment house, and also a CSU van. Ben parked in the street, two doors up from the building, and he and Mulloy walked back.
As the pair of detectives approached the entrance, white-clad ambulance attendants rolled a gurney with a body bag strapped to it out the front doors. The doorman was standing nearby, looking stricken, and farther down the street another barricade held back a handful of gawkers. Ben and Mulloy watched the crew load the body into the ambulance and then they went into the building.
Inside apartment 22B, the scene was more like what you’d see at a homicide. Cops were everywhere, including Lt. Ralph Watts, who headed the Seventeenth Precinct detective squad. The lieutenant was standing around looking important, watching the activity as the CSU detectives continued to go through the apartment. A heavyset man with freckles dotting his pale skin, Watts belonged to the snappy-dresser school of police officer. In his glen plaid and foulard tie, he could have been a bond salesman.
Watts said hello to Tolliver and Mulloy, remarking that everybody was just about to pack up. Pretty much open and shut, he said, nothing complicated about what they’d found.
Jimmy Collins was on the terrace. Ben went out there, Mulloy trailing.
Even under the pewter-colored November sky, the view was breathtaking. To the left, the Queensboro Bridge spanned the river, connecting Manhattan with the grimy industrial sections beyond Vernon Avenue in Queens, and straight ahead was Roosevelt Island and the Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Visible downstream were the water sculpture and the Pepsi bottling plant on the far side, the Williamsburg Bridge arcing over into Brooklyn.
A strong breeze was blowing, kicking up tiny swirls of dust around the few pieces of outdoor furniture that stood forlornly on the tiled floor. Collins was leaning against the railing, writing someth
ing in a small pocket notebook. He turned as the two detectives came out the French doors. The wind had rumpled his short brown hair.
“That was quick,” Collins said.
“He thinks he’s Richard Petty,” Mulloy said.
Tolliver stepped to the railing. “This where she went?”
Collins pointed. “X marks the spot.”
Ben looked down. Far below was a much smaller building with a green roof. In the center of the roof was a red smear.
Mulloy joined him at the railing. “Heights make me dizzy. Every time I see one of these, I’m afraid of falling off myself. She must have been a mess.”
“She was,” Collins said. “That roof is twenty floors down.”
“You said a neighbor spotted her?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, a lady who lives in the building. She’s in Five B, so her apartment faces the same way as this one. She went out on her terrace and looked down, and there it was.”
“When?”
“Two-thirty-six, the call came in.”
“The ME still here?”
“He left a few minutes ago,” Collins said. “Soon as they put her in the bag.”
“He fix the time?”
“From the temperature of the body, he thought maybe an hour before she was discovered.”
Ben nodded. In this instance, he wouldn’t have to wonder what an autopsy might show; New York State law mandated a postmortem in a suicide, just as in a murder case. Whatever secrets the body might hold, the post would reveal them.
“Patrol car here first?” he asked.
“Yeah, they called it in,” Collins said. “Soon as I heard the name, I asked for a crime-scene unit. Then I came right over here. Body was fully clothed, except for her shoes. They came off when she hit.”
“Still no note?”
“Never found one. And we really went through this place. Her purse was on a table in the living room. Nothing in that, either. I did locate her ex-husband, though. His name was on a card in her wallet. I called him at his office. He said he hadn’t talked to her in months but that maybe she’d been depressed over their divorce.”
“You pick up anything else?”
“One thing. The super let the cops in with a passkey. But the dead bolt wasn’t in place.”
“That’s strange,” Mulloy said. “Specially when a woman’s alone.”
“Maybe she just didn’t bother,” Ben said, “because she knew what she planned to do.”
Collins considered that. “Could be. The terrace doors were open, too. But she was alone up here, nobody had come to the apartment. I checked the doorman; he’s been on since eight o’clock this morning.”
Behind them a voice said, “Say, Jimmy?”
The detectives turned, to see Hi Goldstein approaching, the sergeant in charge of the CSU. He was a guy Ben had run into on other cases, thin-faced and intense, respected in the NYPD for his painstaking ways.
Goldstein smiled when he saw Tolliver and Mulloy. “Word gets around, huh?”
“On this one, it does,” Ben said. “How’ve you been, Hi?”
“Keeping busy.”
“What’ve you got?” Collins asked him.
“Nothing unusual,” Goldstein said. “Except there weren’t many prints. Looks as if the place was cleaned recently. But we did get a few, plus some latents. And some fibers. I’ll send you a lab report soon as possible. Probably want a rush on this one, huh?”
“Yeah,” Collins said. “I’d appreciate it.”
“We’ll be out of here in a few more minutes,” the sergeant said. He went back inside and the others followed.
Tolliver glanced around the living room. As he caught sight of the bar with its sleek ebony paneling and the array of bottles resting on the surface, he recalled the last time he’d seen Jessica Silk, how she’d looked standing there—pouring herself a drink, smoke curling from her cigarette.
He wished he could have that instant back, wished he’d tried harder to find out what was going on with her. If he had, maybe she’d be alive now. Hindsight, he thought. There were so many moments in a lifetime you’d like to live over again.
Across the room, Silk’s purse lay on a table, where the detectives had dumped its contents. One of the CSU men was making an inventory of the articles. Ben went over there and watched the process. The only thing of interest was her wallet; it contained a little over two hundred dollars in cash and some small change, along with the usual assortment of credit cards and her driver’s license. The rest of the items were more or less standard.
But there was no address book in the purse, which struck him as odd—contacts were vitally important to somebody like her. Where were the names and phone numbers of people she did business with or used for sources?
His curiosity growing, Ben nosed around in the other rooms but found nothing like what he was looking for. The only list he ran across was one of grocery items, on a wall-mounted pad next to the telephone in the kitchen. That one, Silk apparently had written to herself, a reminder of things she wanted to buy: tuna, lettuce, mushrooms, wine, and so on.
He was about to turn away when he noticed the last entry. Orkis, it said. Orkis? What was an orkis? Had she meant orchids? Seemed unlikely. Whatever, it was an odd word. Or was it somebody’s name?
He continued to poke around, but it wasn’t until he went into her study that he felt he might find what he was looking for; an IBM 30 was sitting on the desk. He asked one of Goldstein’s technicians if the computer keys had been dusted and was assured they had been.
Sitting down at the desk, Tolliver switched on the machine and called up Silk’s files. The data included everything from drafts of articles to notes on a wide variety of subjects. But none of the names and addresses and phone numbers he’d wondered about were listed.
She couldn’t have carried all that information around in her head; there had to be a book someplace. Where was it?
Another thought occurred to him, and he silently cursed himself for not having picked it up sooner. Nowhere had he seen a word of the article Silk supposedly had been writing on Senator Cunningham. He went back into the computer files, checking and rechecking them, but there was not a single entry on the subject.
A box on the desk contained storage diskettes. He looked through those and found that they contained no reference to the senator, either. Nor did the notebooks that were neatly lined up on the shelf of a nearby bookcase. He leafed through the pages, coming across notes and roughs of other pieces she’d been working on, some of them going back a couple of years.
Nowhere was there so much as a mention of former Senator Clayton Cunningham III.
He sat there for a few minutes, thinking. Maybe there’d never been an article in the works; that could have been just a cover for her meetings with the senator.
And maybe Silk’s ex-husband had guessed correctly; she’d been so depressed by their divorce, she’d taken her life. Or maybe Jack Mulloy’s joke had hit the truth: She’d been driven to it by grief over the senator’s death.
And maybe the answer was none of those. He turned off the machine and left the study.
Back in the living room, the CSU detectives were still at it, but Lieutenant Watts had gone, returning to his office in the Seventeenth Precinct. Mulloy was standing near the bar, talking to Jimmy Collins. Tolliver joined them.
“So—how about it?” Collins asked Ben. “You got any other theories why she did it?”
“Not at the moment.”
“She could have had a lot of things bothering her,” Collins said, “besides the divorce. Stuff we wouldn’t know about—health problems, for instance. Or financial, whatever. And then on top of everything else, all that pressure, all the stories about her and the senator.”
“Tell me,” Ben said. “You run across an address book, list of her phone numbers, anything like that?”
“No. I asked Al to look for one, too. There wasn’t any here.”
“Odd, somebody in her business.”
“Yeah, if you would. Thanks.”
Tolliver and Mulloy left the apartment. Down on the street, the crowd had grown larger and the inevitable TV cameras were taping as the detectives went out through the front entrance.
Ben looked up at the building. Simple suicide, nothing out of line. Silk was depressed for a number of good reasons. The pressure had been too much for her. So she’d decided to end it by going over that railing.
The more he thought about it, the less he believed it.
18
“Don’t mess with it,” Brennan said.
Ben stared at their reflections in the back-bar mirror. He and the zone commander were in the Shamrock, a cop’s hangout a few blocks from One Police Plaza. Both men were drinking Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.
“What am I supposed to do,” Ben said, “look the other way?”
“Look any way you want. But this suicide puts an end to it.”
“Puts an end to it? You see the papers, watch TV? The town’s going crazy.”
“That’s just the media, getting as much out of it as they can. The whole thing was a terrible tragedy and now it’s over, see? The senator died. The writer killed herself—partly because of the situation she was in, but also because she was probably a little nuts.”
“Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t. Who knows what was really going on with her?”
“And who cares? What you do is cool it. The suicide’s not yours anyway, belongs to the One-seven. Collins and Watts said there was nothing suspicious, and so did Hi Goldstein. She was alone in her apartment; the door was locked. Nothing missing, nothing out of line. Typical jumper, busted all to pieces when she hit that roof. End of the story.”
“Come on, Cap. You mean it’s the end except for the things that don’t add up. Like what she told me happened that night in the senator’s office. And what Cunningham did or didn’t die from. Now she’s dead, too, and nobody really knows why she killed herself—if that’s what she did.”
Brennan’s tone was mild. “Not much of a mystery, when you think about it. The lady was distraught for a lot of reasons. She had personal problems, and when the senator died, she flipped out. Then the media put out all that garbage about her and she couldn’t stand it. So she jumped. People commit suicide every day, if you haven’t noticed. Only reason this one’s getting so much attention is because of Cunningham and all the publicity about how she was with him when he died.”
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