by Blake Banner
“What are you looking for?”
“Agnes Shine.”
“You think she’s hiding in the cutlery drawer?”
“This house belongs to a highly ordered eccentric who doesn’t like high maintenance relationships.”
She smiled and pulled off her hat. “You’re something, Stone.”
“No flowers.” I pointed at the vase. “Plastic.”
An arch in the left-hand wall gave onto a narrow entrance with a door into the carport, and a flight of stairs that led to the upper floor. These were wood too, and carpeted in an ugly, dark green. They creaked as we climbed.
On the upper floor, there was a landing. At the back, there were two bedrooms and a bathroom. The front of the house was taken up by a large living room. Here there was an open fireplace with a white marble surround. Another antique. Two tall windows overlooked the long lawn and the street. There were low, heavy, wooden bookcases along all the walls, holding books on just about everything, but there was no fiction. Nor were there ornaments, nor pictures on the walls. There were four large, attractive lamps, evenly spaced, and a single overhead bulb with a green shade.
An old television was positioned in the corner, near the fireplace. Opposite, there was a brown sofa upholstered in suede. On either side, at an angle, there were two matching armchairs. One of them was caked with dry blood and peppered with small, black holes.
The silence was total.
Dehan pointed at the windows. “Triple glazing. Probably why the neighbors didn’t hear anything.”
I nodded and took my pen from my inside pocket. I crouched down beside the chair and slipped my pen into three of the bullet holes. Dehan said, “What?”
I shook my head and made a ‘nothing’ face, then stood. “The sofa and the chairs, they are based on the design of Coco Chanel’s sofa at the Ritz. They are very good imitations. That’s buffalo hide. You’re looking at sixty thousand bucks’ worth of furniture right there, Dehan.”
“Sixty grand?”
I nodded. “So he’s sitting in that chair. He’s got a glass of wine on that table, beside him. According to the photograph, she’s probably sitting on that chair on the other side of the sofa, because that’s where the other glass was, and the bottle. Does that seem odd to you?”
“A little.” She shrugged. “But she’s mad at him, remember? Usually they’d probably both be snuggled up on the sofa, watching a movie or something. But today she’s mad at him. So they’re a bit uptight, formal, they’re sitting on chairs having what he thinks is going to be an adult conversation to sort out their problems. Instead, she’s got this Sig.”
I nodded. “She’s got it here, concealed somewhere, ready to shoot him, or maybe she’s left it in her room. She’s thinking if he comes through, she’ll forgive him. But he doesn’t, he just makes her mad, so she gets up, goes to her room, collects the weapon, comes back and lets rip.”
“Eight shots, that’s a pretty mad woman.”
“Yeah. From the photograph, I’d say she was standing here, in the middle of the floor.”
I positioned myself halfway between the two chairs, about seven or eight feet from where Jose had been sitting. Dehan frowned. “So that looks like she went and got the gun, right? Because if she was sitting in the other chair, where her glass was, why would she get up and go over there to shoot him? And, if she had, he would have got up, tried to run or take the gun. So like you said, she’s left the room, got the weapon, and come back to where you are, and shot him.”
I nodded slowly, looked around the room, and stared at Dehan. “There are several things troubling me, Dehan, but you know what’s troubling me the most?”
She smiled. “No, but two gets you twenty it’ll be something that annoys me.”
“I can’t even smell a motive.”
TWO
She pulled off her coat, walked away and stood staring out at the street. Her silhouette against the cold, gray light was long and slim. After a moment, she turned and sat on the windowsill.
“They were close. They were probably having an affair. He was going to ditch her, or there was another woman; story as old as hormones. We don’t know anything about them yet.”
“I know…” I looked around the room. “But does this look to you like a place where there was a crime of passion? Even the wine glasses have coasters.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I don’t know. The wine glasses have coasters, everything is neat and tidy, and yet she has blown eight holes in her twenty thousand dollar suede chair. And she has used a silencer.”
“How the hell do you know that? There’s triple glazing…”
“A fact which she would have known. But the penetration, from a 9mm Sig, there would have been deeper penetration into the chair, I think. The silencer reduces the velocity of the bullet.”
I crossed the landing to the bedroom. The drapes were closed. They too were a dark green, and thin cracks of green light glowed down their sides from the park woodland outside. The bed was made and uncreased. I went into the en suite bathroom. There was a shower cubicle, but no bath. The towels were all folded and clean. There was a shower gel scented with lime and lavender, and an anti-frizz shampoo for extra body. And there were a lot of other things I had started to find in my own bathroom since I had married Dehan.
I stepped out of the bathroom and saw Dehan with her arms crossed, leaning against the doorjamb, looking down at the bed.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “There is no disorder.”
“The only disorder is the killing.” I thought a moment. “The killing, and the fact that she is missing. We may find she’s a little OCD when we talk to her workmates.”
“Mm-hm. I think you’re right.”
“This place has nothing to tell me, Dehan. Which, in itself, says something, but I’m not sure what yet. Let’s take a walk and see what his house has to say.”
We stepped out into the cold, still air and walked, hunched into our coats, the two hundred yards back up the road to Jose Robles’ house. This house was, again, peculiar. The first floor was made of raw stone, like big rocks cemented together, then filed down so they were flat. It was indescribably ugly. A flight of steps, which looked like something out of a medieval castle, rose to the front door, not directly, but across the façade of the house; and that front door was not at ground level, but on the second floor. The third floor and the attic were all clapboard, like the back of the house.
As we approached, breathing great clouds of condensation, Dehan, whose nose and cheeks had turned red under her hat, said, “Do you think these houses were designed in the ’60s, and the architects were all high on acid?”
“It would explain a lot.”
We turned in off the sidewalk and headed for the stairs. Just to the left of them was a double garage. I stopped, took hold of Dehan’s elbow and pointed. She stared, then looked me in the face and emitted a high-pitched laugh, which she kept going all the way up the steps to the front door. The reason for her laughter was the white BMW 320 which was parked outside the garage.
She opened the door and we went in. The front door gave directly onto the living room. It was a style that in the late ’60s and early ’70s would have been considered modern. The walls were paneled in tongue and groove, the fireplace was stone and the furniture was all low and leather, though none of it was of the class or quality of Agnes’ stuff.
There were many lamps, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, mostly pretentious and all of it expensive. There was a large coffee table in the middle of the floor that seemed to be made out of hunks of driftwood, and there were books, lots of them, stuffed into every available nook and cranny. Most of them were in Spanish, but a good number of professional reference books were in English. Open on the table was the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. I picked it up and had a look at what he was reading: The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries, by George E. Blomgren. It didn’t mean much to me. I put it back do
wn and continued looking around. He had a well stocked bar, and there was a lot of soot in the fire.
I pointed at the alcoves on either side of the fire, where cabinets and shelves had been put in. “Unlike her, he has photographs.”
She moved over and started looking at them, muttering, “Yeah, Agnes didn’t have any. That was odd.”
I went and hunkered down by the fire. I took the poker from the stand and started poking around in the soot. There were still a few hunks of blackened wood that had not burned completely. I stood and looked at his collection of bottles. He had Tio Pepe dry sherry, Martini, Gordon’s Gin, Beefeater, Glenfiddich Scotch whiskey and Johnny Walker Red Label.
Dehan spoke suddenly, still looking at the photographs. “Looks like his family. That looks like his mother and his father and a bunch of friends. They’re cooking paella out in the country. That guy has to be his brother.”
I stood and looked over her shoulder. “Why?”
“Looks like him, and he’s in these pictures too. The Spanish are Mediterranean, they are very family oriented. Look, see that pretty girl there? She looks like me. That’s his sister.”
I ruffled her head and told her she was cute, and made my way across the large room into the kitchen. There was no door separating the two rooms, it was just another space, sectioned off.
A heavy crystal tumbler stood beside the sink. I picked it up and smelled it. It smelled of whiskey. I opened the dishwasher. There was nothing inside it. He had a big, silver fridge and beside it a wine rack. Like Agnes’, it held two dozen bottles in it, mainly red, all from Rioja or Ribera del Duero in Spain.
I leaned my ass against the work surface and crossed my arms. Dehan walked in. I scratched my Adam’s apple.
“It was cold. He had a fire burning, yet her drapes were open. He was drinking whiskey and reading his journal. Somebody or something disturbed him. He set down his journal and brought his empty glass to the kitchen, then, presumably, made his way to Agnes’ house. There they drank wine and she shot him, with a suppressed Sig, while the drapes were open.”
“It is odd. I see where the ADA is coming from. We need Robles’ phone records, and hers, see if she called him. If we can establish that she called him over the weekend, that will help narrow down time of death. I’ll get on that.” As an afterthought, she added, “The lab has his cell.”
She walked away dialing and I made my way up to the next floor, to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. There was a landing that ran from front to back. At the far end, the passage made a dogleg and a further flight rose to the attic.
There were three bedrooms. Two were clearly guest rooms and had signs of having been used occasionally, perhaps by his Mediterranean family-oriented family. His room, the master bedroom, had red satin sheets on the bed, a Spanish translation of a Stephen King novel on the bedside table and an electronic clock with an alarm set for six AM. In a laundry basket he had some dirty linen, including more sheets. These were in black satin.
I checked his wardrobe and found a handful of good, off the peg suits, several pairs of Levis, several cashmere sweaters in dubious colors, and lots of expensive shirts. His shoes were real leather and hand made. There was nothing else.
I explored both bathrooms. There was nothing of interest there, either. I sat on the stairs and thought about that, and decided that, like Agnes’ house, the absence of anything interesting was interesting in itself. Downstairs I could hear Dehan talking. When she had finished, I rose and made my way down. She met me at the foot of the stairs. There we stood, staring at each other as I sucked my teeth.
“If they were lovers, Dehan, and I am not saying they weren’t, they had a very sterile, clinical relationship. There is no sign of his presence in her house, and no sign of her presence in his house. Where the hell did they have sex? Unless they had a third dwelling somewhere, where they used to meet up and get all their primal urges out of their system, these kids were not involved with each other. Not in any meaningful sense of the word.”
She was staring at me with narrowed eyes. “I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing. But if they weren’t involved, why the hell did she kill him?”
I shrugged. “There is always the other Big Motive.”
“Money?”
“What else? Or, it may not have been her. Gutierrez assumes it was her because she has vanished, but we haven’t got the prints back yet. We don’t know if her prints are on the gun or not.”
“That’s true. She may have vanished because she’s dead.”
I sighed and shook my head. “But that does present us with a different problem. When people kill for money, or power, it tends to be premeditated and more or less carefully planned. When people pump other people full of lead, drop the weapon and run, that tends to be a killing motivated by rage, jealousy, vengeance—sex. Something that makes you temporarily lose control.”
She slapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go talk to Frank, drop in on the lab while we’re there.” She opened the door and we stepped out into the icy morning again. “Did you look at the lock at Agnes’ place?”
“Yup.” I thrust my hands in my pockets, we made our way down the castle steps and started walking back toward the car. “It wasn’t forced. And as Jose was not actually at his own house, that means either, A, the killer was a third party and Agnes let him in, or B, it was Agnes.”
“Him or her.” She said it after a long silence as she walked around the car with her hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched and her collar up, then sniffed. We climbed in and slammed the doors. I turned the key and the big old engine roared into life.
“We should also remember,” I said, “that they are both academics. And academics are all more or less crazy.”
She was nodding as I pulled away and headed toward White Plains Road. “This is a guy who sits down in front of the fire, with a glass of single malt, and reads about batteries.”
We took it easy and, twenty minutes later, we found Frank in his office, behind a steel desk, going through papers. He looked up as we came in, frowned and said, “What?”
Dehan sat without being invited. She still had her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. I stayed in his doorway and smiled at him.
“Good morning, Frank. Jose Robles, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, Stephens Avenue…”
“I know who Jose Robles is, John. I thought Gutierrez had that case. Surely it hasn’t gone cold already! I haven’t even sent him my results yet!”
“It’s the weather, Frank. It’s making everything cold. We got handed the case. What can I tell you? Or, more to the point, what can you tell us?”
He shook his head at Dehan across the desk. “It’s his wit that makes him so endearing.”
He finished shuffling papers and stood, went to an ‘out’ tray on top of a filing cabinet, took a manila envelope and handed it to Dehan.
“We haven’t got a sample of Agnes Shine’s fingerprints, but from samples taken from her office and her house, we have isolated some prints that offer an extremely high probability of being hers. They are, however, suggestive and not admissible as evidence.”
Dehan nodded and reluctantly extracted a hand from her pocket to take the envelope. “Obviously,” she said.
“What can I tell you?” He sighed. “The gun, a Sig Sauer Tacops p226, an unusual choice for a crime of passion. Based on the prints, it was fired by the person we assume to be Agnes Shine. We can say with absolute certainty that the person who fired the gun was a frequent visitor to Agnes’ office and her home, almost certainly her. She also handled the bottle and one of the glasses found at the scene.”
He dropped back into his chair. “What else? There is very little else. He was shot eight times at close range. He could have died from any one of the wounds, which perforated his liver, his stomach, his lungs and his heart…”
I leaned my shoulder on the doorjamb. “But the one that killed him was the one to the heart.”
“Indeed.”
“So I guess you haven’t examined the contents of his stomach.”
He managed to scowl and raise an eyebrow at the same time. “Can you think of a reason why I would have?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to know what he had for his last supper.”
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“Anything else you’d like me to waste the taxpayers’ dollars on?”
“No… I’d be curious to know if he’d had sex before getting shot, but my other questions are for Joe.”
He frowned. “Really? I don’t know what you’re looking for, John, but I have seen many crimes of passion in my time and this murder is entirely consistent.”
“Almost. Have a look in his belly for me, will you?”
“What do you mean, ‘almost’?”
I smiled. “Well, there’s the gun, and then there’s the sequence of the shots.”
Dehan turned in her chair to stare at me. The expression on her face was an echo of the one of Frank’s. He said, “Sequence? What sequence?”
Dehan shrugged. “What sequence, Stone?”
“The shot to the heart, the one that killed him, was also the first shot.”
“Excuse me?”
“None of the other wounds bled anywhere near as profusely. The first shot stopped his heart pumping. So the first shot, delivered with a suppressed Sig Sauer p226—the pro’s choice—hit him in the heart and killed him.”
Dehan blinked a lot. Frank sighed. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me? The person who pulled the trigger on that gun has a ninety-nine point nine percent chance of being Dr. Agnes Shine. Now go away, please.”
I smiled and looked at my watch. “We’d better leave before I upset him. We need to go and see Dr. Meigh, and on the way I need to call Joe.”
Frank shrugged. “Joe’ll tell you the same thing.” To Dehan he said, “I only work with him. You married him.”
On the way out, I tossed Dehan the keys. “Let’s go see Dr. Meigh.”
She climbed behind the wheel and I got in the passenger seat and called Joe at the lab as she pulled out of the lot and onto Morris Park Avenue.
