by Leslie Glass
“April Woo?” A male voice.
“Yes, this is Detective Woo.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
“Uh, this is George Dong.”
She almost said, “What’s your problem, Mr. Dong,” as if she were at her desk in the squad room, where no one called her who didn’t have a problem. Then she realized she was the problem. Her mother had done the feng sui, had fixed the tilting table and exorcised the bad spirit from her apartment. And still, no good daughter resisted the chance at happiness offered by smiling God.
Even though Sai Woo expressly warned her that George Dong “may be last chance,” April had forgotten to anticipate her shining future. She had completely forgotten about him.
“Yes,” she said, chastened. “Hello.”
Turned out George Dong had his practice in Chinatown. He was an eye doctor. Thirty-five years old. Always the suspicious detective, April asked herself what was wrong with him. Why not married? Then realized he could say the same about her.
“I’m a cop,” she told Dong right away as if it were a communicable disease that must be disclosed immediately.
“I know. Dangerous, long hours, uncertain schedule, uncertain future. I’ve seen it on TV. You wear a uniform?”
“No. Do you?”
“I wear a white coat.”
“So,” April murmured. Where did that get them?
“It reassures my patients,” Dong added.
“Uh-huh.” She had to hang up and study for her exam, reminded herself that she wanted to make Sergeant. “So,” she said again.
“You have to eat sometime.”
“Yes.” She couldn’t argue with that. They made a date for lunch in Chinatown on Sunday.
The file Sanchez had brought her was the report on Block’s blood. April had the thickening Wheeler file on her desk. She pulled the autopsy report and checked the blood type of the fetus in Maggie’s womb. Maggie’s blood type was A. The baby’s was O. She pulled Block’s lab file. Block’s blood type was B.
Sanchez leaned over April’s shoulder to get a look. The sudden closeness and aroma of heated cinnamon, citrus, and cinnabar made her dizzy. She could feel his breath on her neck. Shit, the man was hot. She rolled her chair back and looked up at him fiercely. “Don’t do that.”
“What?” He straightened up, looking like the surprised innocent. “What?” He turned around and asked the room. “What?”
Nobody answered.
Why was he breathing on her damn neck? April wondered if he knew about Dr. George. How could Mike know about George? She hadn’t even met him yet. But Sanchez was very smart, had some Indian blood—Mayan or Aztec or Native American. He claimed it accounted for his sixth sense.
April frowned, remembering Mike’s shoving her behind him while her gun was raised, risking getting shot in the back. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. He’d fallen right on top of her, a dead weight on her ankle so she couldn’t walk right for weeks. The doctor who treated it said she was lucky the bones hadn’t been reduced to mush. And now he was the hotshot of the squad. Cool and hot at the same time. He was smiling at her now, the old, old soul who knew everything except what Lieutenant Braun was doing at his desk.
“So, Block couldn’t have been the father of Maggie’s baby. Where does that get us?” She added the lab report to the file, telling herself to get a grip.
He shook his head, already knew it.
“Doesn’t help us one way or the other. Anything from Ducci?” she asked.
“Yesterday he said he was working on it. Any luck with her address book?”
“Lot of surprised people. The last guy I called turned out to be a piano tuner she went to kindergarten with, hadn’t seen her since, and didn’t have a clue why he was in her book. Lives in New Jersey. On the night in question he was with his wife and two children on Long Beach Island.… Couple of numbers no one answers any time of day. The boyfriend must be one of them.”
Mike shifted from one foot to the other, his back to his desk, ignoring what was going on behind him. He just wasn’t about to confront the guy at his desk. “Anything new with Manganaro?”
“She was going to go over the store inventory, see if anything is missing.”
“She said that two days ago.”
“Well, Maggie did all that for her. Mrs. Manganaro says she doesn’t know the stock all that well. She’ll have to match orders and sales. It’s going to take her some time.”
Earlier, Elsbeth Manganaro told them Maggie had had a lot of ideas. She didn’t tell them about the guest book that Maggie had bought for the store last spring. She was surprised when it turned up in a routine search of garbage cans shared by a number of stores behind the building. She had forgotten about it. That meant she might have forgotten about a lot of other things, too. It was possible Mrs. Manganaro wouldn’t even know if anything else was missing from the store.
The book was covered in green and black marbleized paper. After being asked about it, the boutique owner recalled it had been one of Maggie’s ideas. She always asked customers to sign it. The book had been dusted for prints. Whoever threw it in the garbage must have wiped it first. There was only one partial on it, down at the very bottom of the second page. A thumb, not Maggie’s and not Mrs. Manganaro’s. But Mrs. Manganaro swore she never touched it.
There were only thirty-eight names in the book, all dated since June seventh, when Maggie put the book out. Sergeant Joyce had a detective checking each one out.
“Look at this. Wilma Masters. John Dodge Road, Jackson, Wyoming. August twentieth.”
“Yeah, she was here visiting her sister. Bought a belt.”
“Linda Green, 860 Fifth Avenue. August twenty-first.”
“She’s in Maine, bought a sweater.”
“Margret Smart, Sarasota, Florida. August eighteenth.”
“She’s in Europe.”
“Camille Honiger-Stanton, 1055 Second Avenue. August fifth.”
“Second Ave? That’s right across the street from Bill Hadgens, the addict she knew from high school.”
Sanchez shifted feet again. “Any connection?”
“I don’t know. No one’s spoken to her yet. The number for that address is some kind of antiques shop. The person who answered the phone said he’d have the owner give us a call.”
Sanchez tossed the book back into the file. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere. They’re all women. A woman didn’t do her. Let’s go see what the Duke has for us.”
April picked up her bag, nodding. Good idea.
32
Come.”
Ducci was sitting at his desk, sorting a box of slides when April obeyed his command to enter. He looked up suspiciously and frowned as the door cracked open, then grinned when he saw who it was.
“Hey, pretty one, come on in. What’s happening?”
April shook her head. “Nothing good. What about you?”
Mike followed her into the lab and closed the door after them. “You locking yourself in now?”
“And Mike,” Ducci added less genially.
“Not ‘and Mike,’ Duke. Just Mike. Mike stands alone.” Sanchez slouched over to the bookcase and leaned against it to demonstrate standing alone. He was in a bad mood about the unknown Lieutenant and Sergeant Joyce, who was too busy with her own sulks to tell him what was going on.
“Oh, God, man, I’m sorry.” Ducci crossed himself. “May she rest in peace. When did it happen?”
April turned to Mike. “What’s he talking about?”
Mike scowled. “Damned if I know.”
“Huh? She don’t know?” Ducci wagged a finger at Mike. “You didn’t tell her?”
“What’s going on?” April looked from one to the other. She thought the problem was Lieutenant Braun sitting at his desk. That’s what Mike had been grumbling about in the car on the way over.
Mike shook his head at Ducci, his eyes closed in disgust.
Ducci cocked his bushy eyebrows at April. �
�If he doesn’t want to tell you, it’s not my place to.”
“Damn right.”
April leaned against the corner of the desk because Ducci’s other chair was occupied by a lot of files, books, and a skull with crooked teeth and a hole in its cranium. She chewed her lip. What was this all about?
Ducci shrugged apologetically. “Hey, sorry. I thought you two talked.”
Mike’s face faded to gray under his tan. “We talk. We talk plenty. We came here to talk about the Maggie Wheeler case, okay?”
April had never seen him angry like this. She turned to him questioningly. “Uh, Mike. You want me to leave?”
He shook his head, scowling. “Stay where you are.”
“Yeah, stay. Here, have a candy bar.” Ducci dipped into his stash in the middle drawer, came out with a Mars bar, and offered it to her, stretching his trademark, the impeccable blue-shirted arm with its starched white cuff, across his desk.
“No thanks, not for me,” April murmured.
“What about you?” He turned to Mike.
“In yours.”
“Hey, man, you should tell her. Women are good at this kind of thing.” Ducci gave up on the candy bar, dropped it back in the drawer. “What can I do for you?”
“Other than throwing yourself off a bridge—?”
“We came about the Maggie Wheeler case,” April interrupted. “You want to tell us about that?”
“Yeah, yeah. I know what you came for. I put a lot of work into it. Overtime.”
“Good. What’ve you got?”
Ducci pulled his case file. Across his desk he laid out two series of glossy color photos on Maggie Wheeler: the first from the crime scene, of her hanging from the chandelier in the storeroom, with and without the tape measure showing the distances from the ceiling to the floor. The second were twelve angles of Maggie naked on the metal autopsy table—with and without the ruler placed beside the ugly marks on her shoulders, on her neck, on her arms. Glossies of her hands showed short fingernails and no signs of a fight. One of her feet showed the ID tag attached to a big toe. In the photos with the makeup cleaned off, she looked pretty bad. He put the autopsy report to one side.
“Okay, this is what I can tell you. See these bruises?” He pointed with the tip of a pencil to the marks on the arms.
Mike pushed off the wall for a closer look. “Yeah?”
“Old.”
“Old?” Mike repeated.
“Yeah, like antique. See, they’re already healing. They don’t mean nothing.”
He moved his pencil to the smudges on the victim’s neck. “See these bruises?”
“Yeah?” Mike leaned closer.
“New.”
“Shit.” Mike slammed the desk with the palm of his hand.
April pressed her lips together in annoyance. Duke was playing with them, and Sanchez was seething. What was it with these two? She thought they were friends.
“Come on, Duke. Don’t jerk us around. We haven’t got all year,” Mike shot out.
“All right, all right. Just trying to cheer you guys up. You look worse than she does.”
“If you tell us something we don’t know, we’ll cheer up, okay?” April said.
“Okay, okay. Here, take that stuff off the chair. Just put it on the floor. Sit. Go on, sit down so I can look at you. I don’t like to talk up, know what I mean? You”—Ducci lifted his chin at Mike—”pull up Bryan’s chair. He won’t mind. He’s on vacation.”
April moved the books, the files, and the skull with the hole in the cranium to the floor. She shifted the chair over so Mike had room to sit beside her. There was so much tension in his body, she could feel him vibrating. She shot him a questioning look. What’s going on with you? He shook his head.
“All right, so the straight line across the neck indicates the victim was murdered. The bruising would curve up under her ears if she had hung herself. And the rope she was hanging from was not the one that killed her. Too thick to match the bruises. Look how the bruises are below the rope. Also, we can see from the pictures that there was nothing for her to jump off. No ladder, no chair. There’s a stepladder in the corner, but she sure wasn’t the one to put it back.
“Now, these marks on the shoulders indicate the guy took hold of her like this, face-to-face, and maybe shook her.” Duke put his hands out and mimed the shaking. “Maybe the person was real mad and kinda lost it. I’m just speculating here.” He looked like he didn’t think he was speculating. He lifted his shoulders modestly as if waiting for applause, then let them drop. Nothing he told them so far was within his area of expertise. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit.
“Perp was someone quite a bit taller than her. Stand up, April. I’ll show you.” Ducci shoved back his chair noisily and made his way through the clutter to the other side of his desk. “What are you—five four, five five?”
“Five five.” April faced him in the crowded space. Ducci’s paunch stood between them like a ship’s prow.
“I’m five eight.” He grinned. “You smell good. What’re you wearing?”
“Hell you are,” Mike protested. “I’m five nine and you’re at least three inches shorter than me. And I thought you were a hair and fiber man.”
“Shut up.” Ducci raised his hands to April’s shoulders. “I’m working.”
“Yeah, well, don’t work too close.”
“Pay attention. Here’s five five and five eight. The guy held her like this, the thumbs in front, the rest of the fingers over the top. Got it?”
“So?”
“So, I’m off balance like this, not tall enough. If I want to shake April, I’m going to grab her here, with my hands on her arms, or the sides of her shoulders. I’m not going to reach over the top of her shoulders.”
“You can take your hands off her now and tell us something we don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Ducci dropped his arms and headed back to his chair.
“Maggie was barely five feet,” April muttered, thinking of Block.
“Yeah, you’re looking for a guy between five nine and six foot with hands—glove size about eight and a half, maybe nine.”
“But what about the damn fibers?”
“Well, these neck ligatures were made by a thin braided cord with a fiber fill of some sort. What kind I don’t know. We don’t have any references to match, but half a dozen fibers from the fill were embedded in the neck wound. Could be the kind of cord that’s in the hood of a wind-breaker. Anything like that in the store?”
“We’ll check it out.”
“What it looks like is he shook her up and then grabbed her from behind.”
“Why behind?” April asked.
“See how the marks are thicker here. The cord was crossed over double here and pulled the other way back around her neck. Looks like the guy had some trouble. There’s bruising from the hand at the back of the neck, and the victim’s hyoid bone was fractured and so was the thyroid cartilage. That suggests the victim struggled, the perp couldn’t hold on that way, and had to resort to manual strangulation.”
“Hmm.”
“Now, the fibers taken from her ring look like a tuft of wool, but it’s not wool. And, A—There’s no clothing in the store that matches it. B—We found some fibers that match it from the taping of the storeroom and just the other side of the archway into the showroom. No similar fibers were found out by the front door. C—The M.E. found some in her nose. What does all that suggest to you?”
“Hah.” April had seen the tuft in the ring. “What?”
“Take a guess.”
“We’re not guessing. Don’t play with us, Duke.”
“You guys are no fun.”
“We’re not paid to be fun.” Mike smiled at April. She smiled back, relieved that his mood had lifted.
“So, do you want to know?”
“Yeah, and you’re paid to tell us.”
“Dog,” Duke said proudly.
“No shit. A dog killed her.” Still smiling, Mike
glanced at April. “A dog between five nine and six feet.”
“Remember the Tawana Brawley case?” Ducci asked.
April nodded. “Dog hairs in the feces.” The police had analyzed the feces that Tawana claimed her kidnappers had used to defile her. The feces contained dog hairs, not surprisingly, since dogs lick themselves. A check of the dogs in the building where Tawana had hidden for several days showed that the hairs in the feces came from dogs in her own backyard. The dog hairs helped disprove her story.
“Now you’re talking,” Mike said. Then, more seriously, “What does this do for us?”
“It tells us a dog was present at the scene either at the time of Wheeler’s death or very shortly before. You may well be looking for a murderer with a dog.”
“What makes you think the dog wasn’t in the store hours before?” April asked.
“Because the dog hairs in the victim’s nose would have been blown out after a minute or two. They wouldn’t have stayed in there very long if she had remained alive.”
“Dog,” April murmured. “Block doesn’t have a dog.”
“Forget Block. He didn’t do it,” Sanchez said.
“He was at the scene though. That bothers me. How did he get there if she was already dead?” April muttered.
“Hey, he appeared to have been at the scene. There’s no evidence he was at the scene. He described the dress she was wearing but didn’t say anything about the makeup. Maybe he wasn’t ever there,” Mike said.
“It doesn’t play. Maybe the killer left the door open and Block goes in, sees his beloved hanging there, gets scared, and splits.” April turned back to Ducci. “We’ve been over this a dozen times. The guy comes in four days after she dies and confesses. But he has no idea what happened. Face it—Block doesn’t make sense. We could get a shrink evaluation of him to prove he’s a nut. But we already know he’s a nut.”
Ducci coughed delicately, slicking back his already carefully combed black hair. He glanced down at the dots on his tie, looking offended.
“What’s the matter now?” Mike shook his head at April. What a piece of work.
“Don’t you want to know what kind?” Ducci demanded.
“Okay. What kind of what?”
