by Leslie Glass
“Don’t touch,” Igor said irritably.
“I didn’t touch,” April said.
“Well, you’re hanging around, bothering me. Don’t you know you’re supposed to get lost?”
“I don’t get lost,” April said. “Maybe you won’t think of the questions I want to ask. What about the sand?”
“It’s my job to think of every question. I’ve already thought about the sand. I’m doing it last with a different bag.” Igor crawled into a corner and vacuumed the same stretch of woodwork for the second time, which meant he was desperate. It was almost unheard of to get anything of great value from vacuuming.
“Not much here,” he muttered. “Not even a stray spiderweb.”
“That’s what’s wrong with this picture. It’s all too clean,” April said.
No blood splattered in revealing patterns. No open window in the basement with muddy footprints leading up the stairs. No shards of glass to speak of violent confrontation. No tool marks on the door. There was probably nothing in the sand either. The sand was in the display window. Anybody going out there would be seen from the street.
Igor had bagged the contents of the wastebasket. Just bits and pieces of paper. It was odd there were no leftovers from lunch in it, nothing to indicate two girls had been working and snacking there all day on Saturday. There wasn’t even an empty coffee cup anywhere. Didn’t she eat anything, April wondered. Did she go out for lunch, and what about the other girl? What was the murder weapon? There were some bruises on the dead girl’s arm, but April didn’t see a gunshot wound on the body, a bump on the head, or anything else. Of course there could be something she didn’t see under the dress. There was some bruising on her neck. It did seem fairly clear the rope that hung the girl up there was not what killed her. The noose was not in the same place as the marks on her neck.
“Stop that,” Igor said crossly from across the room as April moved toward the counter.
“You did this already,” she murmured, peering into the open money drawer.
There was a fair amount of money in it. Apparently robbery had not been the motive. Sometime during the day one or more customers had bought something with a hundred-dollar bill. There were several of them stacked in the drawer, along with a thin pile of tens and twenties and a number of credit card receipts. At least there were names on those. April would have to find everyone who came in throughout the day on Saturday, and for weeks before that. The receipts for items bought were dated Saturday, two days before. Mrs. Manganaro had told April the store was closed on Sunday. The girl must have died on Saturday. It looked like the time of death should be later than that. The body was in very good condition for the middle of summer. But it was very cold in the storeroom. Maybe she’d been refrigerated.
April checked the girl’s handbag. Her wallet was in it, some pieces of paper, an address book, a five-dollar bill zipped into a small pocket. A pink lipstick, not the plum that was on her face, no other makeup. A medium-size Swiss Army knife. An inhaler. Ventolin—prescription medicine for asthma. Maybe Maggie died of an asthma attack. Sure.
Igor bagged the purse. He had laid out all his kits for fluid samples but hadn’t had any use for them. There was no blood or other fluids to collect. The dead girl had her underwear on. It seemed unlikely that she’d been raped. Rapists didn’t usually dress their victims up afterward.
“Igor, was she dressed like that before or after she was killed?” April asked.
“No spots on the floor. You tell me.”
No spots on the floor under the body indicated someone had taken the time to clean up. In death, the bladder and lower bowel evacuated. There was a toilet in the storeroom. The murderer could have cleaned up with the paper towels in there, and gotten rid of them down the toilet. Murderers didn’t often do that. What kind of killer was this? Cleaned the floor, put oversize clothes on the corpse, and messed up her face. April had the strange feeling she was trapped in the shop with a crazy person who wouldn’t speak. What had happened here? What was the message?
Until they had started going over it and dusting the place with gray powder, the tiny boutique had looked incredibly tidy. It looked as if someone had wiped it clean and carefully vacuumed up after the murder. But there wasn’t a vacuum cleaner in the place. April shook her head. She had forgotten to ask the owner who cleaned, and when.
“How do you kill somebody, change their clothes, put makeup all over the face, and get out without leaving any traces? Whose makeup and where is it?” she muttered.
“I just collect,” Igor said.
“And where are her own clothes?”
Igor didn’t bother to answer. If her clothes weren’t there, whoever killed her took them away.
April crossed to the front door and looked at it again. No signs of forced entry.
“Did you find anything here?”
Igor carefully pulled some fibers out of the rug and put them in a plastic bag that he neatly labeled with the location the sample came from as well as its source. He moved across the floor to do the same in front of the door.
“Not on the outside. There’s a partial on the inside, and of course a ton of prints in here. Lot of them probably hers.”
He spoke with a trace of an accent from one of the Slavic countries that didn’t exist anymore. April liked him more than the other crime-scene people she had met uptown. Igor was a small person with a large head covered by a rarely mowed field of wheaty hair. He had big jaw, wide set, arresting blue eyes, and a slight list to one side from an injury he had received several years before in the line of duty.
“Don’t touch,” he said again as he got to his feet. He picked up a hemplike piece of fiber with his tweezers and studied it.
“I’m not touching,” April said. He was almost finished anyway.
There was a thin film of sticky powder all over the place.
“Did you see the fluff on the ring?” she asked.
“I saw it.”
“What about the fingernails?”
Igor bagged the girl’s hands with brown paper bags. His partner had already photographed everything, both with and without measuring tapes to show distances and heights. They never knew what they were going to need in court when they got the guy who did it. As well as photographing, he also sketched everything, including views of the building, the sidewalk, and the trees in front.
“You know I don’t touch the body,” Igor told her.
“You took a look, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I looked, but that doesn’t mean I can tell you anything. That’s for the M.E., you know that.”
“Can I sit here?”
She indicated the stool by the money drawer. Polished wood. It had already been dusted and still had a fine layer of gray grit on it. Lots of prints, as Igor had said.
Igor glanced up. “Yeah.”
April sat on the stool. This was where the girl must have spent her free time, where she wrote up the sales slips. A stool with no back. From her first encounter with Mrs. Manganaro, April gathered Elsbeth was the kind of boss who wouldn’t want her salesgirls comfortable. There was no way anyone could catnap on this stool without falling off. Nice.
Two ambulance people wheeled in the gurney. It was an awkward maneuver in the small shop. Five or six people were crowded in the back room, including someone from the M.E.’s office who had arrived to pronounce the body dead. April could hear a discussion going while the girl was finally taken down from the chandelier.
April had asked Mrs. Manganaro if the door was kept locked during the day. She told April there had been some trouble a few years before with high school kids. Now the door had an automatic latch. It appeared the girl had let in her own killer. April looked out at the street.
With the ambulance, a number of unmarked cars, and the crime-scene tapes all over the place, it was hard to imagine what it must have been like for the girl looking out from this stool on Saturday. Who had seemed safe to Maggie Wheeler? Most likely it was someone she knew.
&nb
sp; April thought of her own Saturday. The past week had been unlucky for her. Saturday was her day off. She had wanted to study all day. But Sai Woo, her skinny dragon mother, had bullied her into attending her cousin Annie Chen’s wedding. Annie Chen was five years younger than April, a bank teller, and not even her real cousin. So April hadn’t exactly been dying to see her celebrated and feasted. And her mother didn’t make it any easier.
“No mistake Annie’s Chinese name Rucky Girr,” Sai Woo had remarked. “Sometimes gods smile and sometimes don’t,” she added grimly.
“Very profound,” April muttered. So chubby Annie, who still had a number of zits on her face, married a postal worker from Brooklyn. What was so lucky about that?
Her mother poked her in the ribs with the toothpick she was still using to clean spare-rib gristle out of her teeth.
“Nice boy, good steady job, that’s what’s so rucky. But not so good food.” She frowned at the spare-rib gristle clinging to the toothpick before depositing it on her plate.
April agreed. All that luck, and the food still wasn’t good.
Maggie Wheeler had a worse Saturday. She was murdered and hung up in the storeroom sometime on Saturday. Now it was Monday morning. April looked out at the street.
Columbus Avenue was two parking and three traffic lanes across. The shops were so far apart, you couldn’t really see what was happening in them. How well did people in these shops know each other? Out in Astoria, where April lived, everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone. Same in parts of Chinatown. But it was a different story up here. Affluent. Indifferent.
Mike walked out of the back room with Sergeant Joyce, supervisor of their detective squad. April had a feeling Sergeant Joyce didn’t like her and would rather not have her around. Sergeant Joyce was thirty-eight years old, the mother of two young children, and had already passed her test for lieutenant. She was waiting for a big enough group to accumulate to warrant the ceremony. She was already commander of a squad but was not yet getting commander’s pay. Sergeant Joyce was frowning now, probably worrying about how not solving this case, if they didn’t solve it, would affect her salary. Getting the raise was a political and production thing. And April knew Sergeant Joyce needed the money. April also knew how ambitious she was. Sergeant Joyce wanted to rise in the department, maybe to captain and command a precinct of her own.
Sergeant Joyce was a big deal now. She had been on television, taking the credit for solving April’s last case while April and Sanchez were in the hospital getting their burns treated. Still, Sergeant Joyce was kind of a hero to April. Joyce had been married to an Irish cop who threatened to divorce her if she became a cop. He’d proved as good as his word. She’d been in Sex Crimes before she became a supervisor. Where she’d go next was anybody’s guess. Taking credit for other people’s work was sly, but good manipulation of the system. April could not fault her for it.
Sergeant Joyce was shorter and plumper than April. She had a round face, thin lips, a pug nose, blue eyes, and a special affinity for plaids with green in them. April knew men found the sergeant cute and sexy. Today she was wearing a green and pink plaid suit that was both too short and too tight around the butt. A deep frown creased her forehead and the corners of her mouth. She dragged her fingers through her badly cut, badly bleached hair and cocked her head at April.
“Ready?” she demanded.
April nodded. “You think it’s some kind of sex crime?”
“How the fuck should I know? Let’s get out of here.”
April stole a glance at Mike, wondering if he found Sergeant Joyce cute and sexy. But he raised an eyebrow only when the three of them left the store as the body was being bagged.
7
At the precinct the press invasion had already begun. Cars and vans with NYPD plates and the names of news agencies painted on their sides, as well as a great deal of rubbernecking from civilian cars, had created near gridlock on a street already crammed with police vehicles. Half a dozen blue uniforms were trying to clear the street.
Swearing, Sanchez finally pulled the unmarked red Chevy Sergeant Joyce had brought to the scene back into the NYPD lot next to the precinct. Sergeant Joyce got out of the front seat. “Should have walked,” she muttered.
Yes, she should have, April agreed, getting out of the back.
As they headed inside, April could see a number of reporters clamoring at the desk for information about the homicide around the corner. As if there were a whole lot to give at this point.
Across the street at The Last Mango, the video-cam crews were probably just now finishing taping removal of the corpse in its earth-colored body bag to an ambulance from Roosevelt Hospital, which would take it to the M.E. to await autopsy.
Before they reached the door, Joyce turned around abruptly. “Better go over her place. See what you can turn up, and get a name to notify.” She cocked her head at the reporters, clumped around Chummley, the large and balding Desk Sergeant who looked a lot like a bulldog. It was clear she wanted to handle them herself.
April stared after her. It wasn’t a hard one to figure. Once again she and Sanchez were being sent out of the press’s way, just as they had been after they had solved their last big case. Oh, well, for five minutes Sergeant Joyce would have the scene. Then, after that, a spokesman for the case would be assigned by the department. It would be a Lieutenant from downtown. That cheered April up.
Mike looked at her and smiled. “You really care, don’t you?”
April shook her head, figuring a headshake wasn’t a lie. Thing was, as long as she had worked in Chinatown, she had mostly been interested in being a good cop. It was the principle of the thing. Now that she was on the Upper West Side and knew better how the system worked, she wanted to be a good cop with a high rank. Rank had something to do with being a good cop. It was still the principle of the thing, but she didn’t think Mike would see it that way.
If she had been willing to talk about it, she would have said, See, up here it wasn’t always so much a question of the case, but the public relations aspect of the case. How visible it was, how prominent the victim, how great the threat appeared to the public. Meaning important public, not little-people public. But she wasn’t willing to talk about it, so she shook her head.
“Then let it go,” Mike advised. “You’ll live longer, have a better digestion.”
April made one of her sounds, “hah,” thinking of Sanchez and the kind of digestion he must have, considering the heavy Mexican food smothered with chilis and cheese he liked to eat. Asians didn’t eat cheese. Even ABAs like herself, who could handle pizza, didn’t go for melted or grated cheese all over things. She didn’t say it, but she was glad Mike was back for this one.
She stood at the door, watching Sergeant Joyce talk to reporters who had their notebooks out and were hanging on her every word.
Mike touched her arm to get her attention.
Yeah, he was right. The clamor was only beginning. It would heat up all day and continue heating up, until they had some facts. Right now they couldn’t even release the victim’s name until her family had been notified, and they couldn’t notify the family till the family could be located. First things first.
“You want to go down and get the warrant or find the landlord and say we’re going in?”
April gave him a brief smile. “It’s your first day. I’ll give you a present. I’ll go down and get the search warrant.”
It was one of those unavoidable waste-of-time things. If they didn’t go to the courts downtown and get a search warrant to go into the girl’s apartment and find her telephone book, a lot of really uncomfortable things could happen, including their being charged with theft if anything was missing later. They went upstairs so April could type up the warrant request.
Maggie Wheeler had lived in a brownstone, a walkup. There were six apartments in the building. An hour and a half later, April and Sanchez stood in the airless vestibule, studying the list of names on the intercom. There was only
one name by 3. Wheeler.
Sanchez tried the buzzer just in case Mrs. Manganaro had been wrong about Maggie’s living alone, or someone had turned up since they tried the phone number.
No response.
The place smelled of mold and wet plaster. There was a wet patch in the ceiling plaster that looked as if it were ready to come down on someone’s head any second. Maggie’s keys, along with the rest of her belongings, had been paper-bagged and tagged. The landlord said he couldn’t get there, but if they had the warrant, it was okay with him if they just went in. They went in.
Once a really nice brownstone, the building was now all chopped up into small apartments. The doors to apartments 1 and 2 were on the first floor to the right and back of the stairs.
“Three must be on the second floor,” April murmured.
They turned to the wide staircase. April ran her finger over the thick, gracious mahogany handrail that capped the sturdy banister, then started up. The tan paint on the walls was smudged, and worn carpeting covered the sagging treads of the stairs. Maggie lived on the second floor in what must have been the brownstone’s former living room. Double doors flanked the entrance. The building was silent. No one was around to see the two detectives enter the apartment.
Inside, the lights were off; shades covered the bay windows that fronted on the street. April reached for the light switch, and the personality of Maggie Wheeler was revealed.
Mike whistled. “Wow.”
The room was no more than sixteen feet square. It had clearly been cut in half in the middle. The back wall rose up to chop off half of an elegant decorative molding in the ceiling that must once have surrounded the centered chandelier. Now a cheap fixture hung there. Along the wall and at least a dozen years old, a tiny stove, refrigerator, and sink had been tacked on. Four small cabinets were centered above them. No dishes, dirty or otherwise, were visible.
A small, neatly made double bed covered with an old red quilt was pushed against one wall. Three matching pillows had been carefully arranged at the head. There were no clothes on the floor or the one armchair in the room and no decorations. No TV, just a clock-radio. No photographs. No art. No lists of things to do or groceries to buy. The place was empty, really empty, as if Maggie had just arrived or didn’t plan to stay long.
