Three-Ways: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  “Yeah?”

  She was kind of smiling. “He’s a good-looking guy and all, but you wouldn’t believe the sword he was carrying.”

  I smiled, too. “I’ve just been next door.”

  Jessica Allen nodded. “All right, then.”

  “And he knew how to use it?”

  Jessica Allen’s left eyebrow went up, and then she frowned. “Yes and no,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He was real athletic, and he knew where my spots were. But …” She paused. “He didn’t even pretend I was in the room with him. It was more like I was his first waitress, if you know what I mean, although I can’t believe I was. Or his first woman with a kid. His first something. You know, like he kept a checklist?” She shrugged her shoulders.

  I’ve known a lot of guys who do that. No women, though. “So it was just that one time?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We didn’t have anything in common. I couldn’t understand half the things he said. All about old books, you know, which I don’t know anything about.”

  “But no hard feelings?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette as she knit her brows. “No way. He banged me hard, which I appreciated. But I’ll be honest. I’m not looking for a guy.” Her eyes drifted off and she was silent for a moment. A small smile crept onto her face. “But sometimes, when I’m in bed, I can still see that sweet dick.”

  Chapter 3

  Ryan and I met up back outside Austin’s apartment. “I interviewed Jessica Allen,” I said. “She doesn’t really remember May. But she did screw Austin once.”

  “Really?” Ryan said. “See her as a possible?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “She’s an adult. She’s got a kid, no money. She’s fifteen, twenty years older than him. She bangs guys once in a while, but I didn’t see any interest in getting involved with one guy. Especially a guy like that, a college guy who talks about old books. Think she was mostly curious. Said he was a good lay. Technically, I mean.”

  “Technique is important.” Ryan shook his head. “Did she say why she didn’t call it in when the furniture started flying last night?”

  “Apparently, wasn’t the first time furniture hit the wall. Plus, she wants to stay on good terms with everyone. She’s late with the rent sometimes, so she tries to be easy to get along with.”

  “And you buy her story?”

  “Completely,” I said. “What’d you get?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “One of the units was unoccupied. Another one, nobody home. A third one, an old man with hearing aids and an oxygen tube. He wouldn’t have heard someone tossing his own apartment.”

  “I’m gonna ask for a couple of uniforms to do the rest of the canvass. Did you look around behind the apartments?”

  “There’s five numbered parking spots. Beyond that, the parking lot for the bank. Across the street, a vet clinic and an insurance agent.”

  “Nothing with anybody there about midnight, right?”

  “I asked the woman at the vet’s. They’re open seven days, but nobody’s there after six on Sundays.”

  “All right,” I said. “Want to talk to the chief?”

  “See you back there,” Ryan said.

  We got in our separate cars and drove to headquarters. I carded my way into the back door, walked down the hall, and made it to my desk, nose-to-nose with Ryan’s in the middle of the detectives’ bullpen. I glanced at the floor next to his chair. His black leather briefcase, like a professor’s, was already there, so I walked past the break room and the incident room, down the hall to the chief’s office. Ryan was sitting on the couch in the outer office.

  “Morning, Margaret,” I said. Margaret started when the new chief did, about a year ago. She’s always at her desk, always looking intently at her computer screen. Every few seconds there’s a burst of typing. I’ve never seen her standing up, never seen her walking, never run into her in the bathroom. If I had to pick her out of a lineup, they’d have to put five thirty-year-old women at desks, staring at computers. I think I could recognize the top of her head, her chestnut hair straight and sleek, parted neatly a little off the center.

  Her eyes still on the screen, she smiled briefly and nodded. “The chief will see you now.”

  Robert Murtaugh was working at his desk. He got up, hitching his pants. He’s about fifty, fifty-three. I’ve heard he’s in the weight room downstairs at six-thirty am sharp. He’s one of those guys who lives according to a routine, and it shows. His face has the lines you’d expect for a guy his age, and the hair is going salty, but the body is toned and muscular. Must make it easier to be a chief if you look like you could run a hundred yards without doubling over and puking. But he’s not doing it for looks or even as part of the job. It’s more that he’s figured out he has to do it this way. He’s a former drunk, like me, and he’s learned you can’t just do whatever you want or you’ll be dead in a few weeks.

  “What have you got?” the chief said.

  “Austin Sulenka, age twenty-four.” Ryan was looking down at his skinny notebook. “Sometime last night. He’s a graduate student in English at CMSU. He’s lying on the bed, nude, looks like he was strangled.”

  The chief was frowning. I’ve learned it doesn’t mean he’s pissed or unhappy with us. It’s just his expression when he starts to collect the pieces we’re going to have to assemble into a jigsaw puzzle.

  “We did the initial canvass,” I said. “He was a good-looking guy. Apparently liked to screw as many women as he could. Lots of parties.”

  “You thinking this was a sex game? Auto-asphyxiation?”

  “We don’t think so,” Ryan said. “Harold said the broken blood vessels look like strangulation.” Ryan looked at me to continue.

  “Plus, the apartment was trashed,” I said.

  “‘Trashed’ as in everyone was drunk, or as in someone was looking for something?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “If they were looking for something, they wasted a lot of time breaking stuff they didn’t need to break. Robin’s said she’d need the better part of the day just to catalog it all. Right now, we can’t tell if the place was trashed before or after the murder. It could have been a home invasion, or someone killed him and wanted to make it look like one. Or maybe someone was really mad at him.”

  “Hmmm.” The chief looked troubled. “Okay, how do you want to go at it?”

  “Looks like he was killed in his apartment,” I said, “a little five-unit brick building on Liberty, near campus. One unit is empty. We interviewed a couple of his neighbors. One other wasn’t home. We’d like two uniforms, a couple hours, to finish the canvass.”

  “Sure, what else?”

  “We thought we’d follow up with a woman named May Eberlein, who appears to be his main girlfriend. And go over to campus, find out what kind of student he was. See if we can figure out who’d want him dead. Sound good?”

  He nodded. “Keep me in the loop.”

  “Absolutely,” Ryan said as we left his office.

  Back at our desks, I asked Ryan to call the university and get an address on May Eberlein.

  We drove over to the east side of town, a quiet residential area. I was hoping we could get to her before she left her place for the day.

  “You sure this is right?” I said. “2414 Marshall?”

  We were parked under a big old sycamore. This was a nice section of town, two-story colonials and Craftsman bungalows from the thirties and forties. Manicured lawns, sidewalks. The kind of neighborhood that would have a lemonade stand on every block in July.

  “That’s what it says.”

  We walked up to a weathered picket fence and opened the gate, then followed the brick path to the steps leading to the porch. I opened the screen door and used the knocker on the dark green wooden door. A few seconds later, a woman opened it. She was about seventy, wearing a plaid dress, little fake-pearl earrings, a pin of a butterfly up near her neck.

  I had my shield around my neck
. “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Detective Seagate, my partner Detective Miner. Is there a May Eberlein lives here?”

  The woman looked concerned, her brow furrowed behind her metal-rimmed round glasses. “I hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “No, just a few questions for her. Does she live here?”

  “Yes, she does,” the woman said. “She rents the upstairs apartment.” She pointed around to the east side of her house. “Take those metal stairs,” she said.

  Ryan gave her a nice smile and decided to chat her up. “Is May a good tenant?”

  “Oh, my goodness.” The lady folded her hands in front of her chest. “May is such a nice girl. I feel so lucky to have her.”

  “Is that right?” Ryan said.

  “Some of my lady friends have given up taking girls in, you know, with the way they dress, and the smoking. They say they won’t bring men in, but you turn your back … well, I don’t have to spell it out.”

  “But May doesn’t give you any trouble,” Ryan said.

  “To be honest with you, I feel a little safer living in this big house all by myself when I know she’s upstairs. May is a delight. And such a pretty girl. Well, you’ll see.” She smiled my grandmother’s chipmunk-cheeked smile.

  “Thanks very much, ma’am.”

  I riffled the buds on the junipers growing tall around the side of the house as we walked along the path to the black wrought-iron stairs leading up to May’s apartment. “May’s very pretty. You be pretty, too, okay?”

  “You know I can’t not be pretty, Karen.”

  I knocked. The footsteps were rapid, like she was in a hurry. The door opened quickly. May was tall, maybe five-ten, a hundred and ten pounds. She was wearing a dark blue silk blouse, a placket hiding the buttons. She had on pale blue corduroy slacks, no socks or shoes. She held a mascara wand in her hand. She’d been working on her right eye. Hadn’t gotten to the left one yet.

  “Yeah?” she said, like people with detective shields around their necks climb the metal stairs and knock on her door all the time.

  I introduced us.

  “What is it?” she said. “I’m kinda in a hurry.”

  “Are you May Eberlein?” I said.

  “That’s right.” Her face showed the frustration of us taking up her time.

  “We want to ask you some questions about a case we’re working on.”

  “I’m running late.” She glanced at her watch. “I teach in fourteen minutes. Can we do this some other time?”

  “You know, Ms. Eberlein, ordinarily we’d stop back later to accommodate your schedule, but we really need to talk with you now. Is there someone you can call to put a note on the board or whatever that you’ll be a few minutes late? We could talk here. No need to go down to police headquarters.”

  I’ve found that last sentence helps people find the time to talk with us now.

  She frowned big, like she’d been told since she was little that it was adorable. “Stay right there.” She hurried back into her apartment, picked up her cell from an end table, and made the call. I couldn’t make out everything she was saying. I caught “cops” and an annoyed “I don’t know.” The light from a lamp behind her was silhouetting her body. Through her blouse I could see she didn’t have any fat on her. Not anorexia-thin. Talbots-thin. I was her height and weight when I was her age, but she had better boobs than I had then. Much better than I have now.

  “Okay.” She strode back to us. “What do you need?” She just stood there at the door.

  I turned to Ryan, signaling for him to take over. “Ms. Eberlein,” he said, turning on his smile. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes. Do you think we could come in?”

  She scoped him out quickly. She didn’t like the cane, but then she considered the whole package. Her posture relaxed, and her hand came up to brush her long, light brown hair back behind her ear. She had on turquoise and gold earrings, maybe three-hundred bucks.

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” she said, returning his smile. Between the two of them, they must have had a hundred big, beautiful white teeth. “Come in.”

  It was a small apartment, with the living room, maybe ten by fifteen, dominated by a couch and two matching upholstered chairs, sitting on thick cherry legs, suffocating beneath a busy Victorian floral pattern made to look like needlepoint. Definitely a furnished apartment. “Sit down,” she said to the two of us. “How can I help you?”

  “We want to ask you a couple questions about Austin Sulenka,” I said.

  “What questions?” She pursed her lips. She was the kind of girl who displayed every emotion because every one of them looked good on her.

  “Can you tell us what your relationship is with Austin?”

  She nodded her head like she knew where this was going. “What did he say our relationship is?”

  “Well, we’d rather hear it from your perspective,” Ryan said, then flashed his smile.

  “Austin is … how do I say this?” She paused. “Austin has been a rather big disappointment.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “No, let me change that. Knowing Austin has been a positive experience for me, I mean, for me in my life. But yes, I’ll stick with what I said: Austin has been a big disappointment.”

  “Tell us more,” I said.

  She glanced at Ryan, then turned back to me. “You know how, when you meet someone, you’re aware that they might not be what they seem? But,” she extended her palm toward me, “if you’ve had any experience with men, you think your radar will help you understand what they really want, what they’re really like.” She addressed Ryan. “No offense, Detective, but men can be …” She wrinkled her nose, like she was about to say something unpleasant, but something that needed to be said. “Sort of stupid.” This harsh truth out of the way, she turned back to me. “Men think we don’t know they mostly just want to sleep with us.”

  She was playing me, but I was pleasantly surprised to make the category of people men would want to sleep with. It had been a while. I nodded gravely, May’s sister in the struggle.

  “Well, I knew Austin’s reputation. In fact, I’d seen him in action with a number of the other girls. So I thought I was ready, you know, when he got to me. But then, what I learned was that I was not prepared for him. I thought I understood him, that we had a real connection.” Her big, almond-shaped grey eyes got even bigger. “But I found out … I found out,” she said, her palms up in a gesture of sad resignation, “that it was just my turn.” She put her hands back in her lap and looked down. She brushed an invisible speck of something off her slacks and then looked up, first at me and then at Ryan, as if she expected one of us to praise her for having admitted that Austin taught her a painful but necessary lesson.

  “Did you break it off with him?” I said.

  “Yes, I did.” She held her head up high. “As I said, it was a valuable learning experience for me.”

  “When did you break it off, Ms. Eberlein?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “When did you last have any contact with Austin?”

  She looked toward the ceiling. “Last week, Thursday or Friday, around the department. In the mailroom.”

  “So you didn’t see him socially, this weekend?”

  She frowned. “What is he saying about me?”

  I looked at her. “Ms. Eberlein, we need to tell you some bad news.” I put on my serious expression. “Austin is dead.”

  Her body went stiff, then her hands came up to her face. “Oh, my God,” she cried out, almost shrieked. “Oh, my God, that can’t be.” She started to gasp for air, like she was going to pass out. She clutched at her chest. “No, that can’t be,” she said four or five more times, and then she started to cry, out of control.

  Ryan pushed down on his cane, lifting himself out of his overstuffed chair, trying to figure out if she was in some kind of medical trouble. I had my hand on my phone in case I needed to call for help. But after half a minute she got her breathing under control. She
looked kind of ghoulish, a river of black mascara trailing down her right cheek. “What happened to him?”

  “We’re not exactly sure,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We haven’t conducted the autopsy yet, but he appears to have died of asphyxia.” I wanted to see how she responded to that.

  “You mean, like carbon-monoxide poisoning or something?”

  “No, there were marks around his neck, like he was strangled.”

  She looked confused. “Are you saying he was murdered?”

  “That’s our best guess, right now.”

  She was slack-jawed, looking back and forth between me and Ryan. “I can’t believe what you’re telling me.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Eberlein, that’s all we know at the moment. We think he died last night or very early this morning.”

  “This is unbelievable.” She started crying again and looked up at me. “I just can’t process what you’ve told me.”

  Ryan and I sat there a few moments. “Ms. Eberlein,” I said, “we have to ask you this next question. You understand. Can you tell us where you were last night, between eight pm and, say, two?”

  She looked at me, horrified. “I was here. Right here. I was preparing for my classes this morning.”

  “Was there anyone here with you? Anyone who can corroborate that?”

  “You don’t believe me? You think I might have killed Austin?”

  “We don’t think anything, Ms. Eberlein.” I shook my head. “It’s just a standard question we have to ask everyone who knew Austin.”

  “I was alone. Maybe Mrs. Brauchner was downstairs.”

  “The landlady?”

  “If she had her hearing aid in, maybe she heard me.” May started crying again.

  “Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to hurt Austin?”

  Her head was in her hands again. She was crying harder now. She shook her head.

  Ryan and I stood up. “Okay, Ms. Eberlein, sorry to have to give you this news. We’ll be in touch if we need to talk to you some more.” I walked over to her, my card in my hand, but she didn’t look up. I put it on the table next to her chair. “My card’s got all my numbers on it.”