by David DeLee
A long silence fell between them until Levy said, “You never cleared the case?”
“Oh, sure,” Flynn said. “A homeless guy living in the park did it. Former Army vet. He was panhandling as Zari was walking home from work. She gave him a few bucks, but he decided for some deranged reason it wasn’t enough, or to teach her a lesson. He could never lucidly articulate why he did it. But he brutally raped and killed her.”
“The papers, Goodall, they never retracted their claims?”
“The papers did. Printed a half-column story about it, buried somewhere in the back. As for TV, I can quote the coverage. ‘Richard Wesley Vance was arrested this evening for the murder of Zari Cooke, a case which captured the nation’s attention sixteen months ago. Yankees win in twelve against the Red Sox. Here’s Lenny with the details.’”
“And Goodall?”
“If it’s ever brought up, he deflects it. When pushed, he swears that Vance was a patsy, a fall guy arrested at the order of the white elite to protect their golden boys.”
“And the boys?”
Flynn shrugged. “Gone. Left town. Never heard from again. My hope is they changed their names and had a chance to start over again. One reckless, powerful voice spouting careless accusations and reputations were ruined, lives were destroyed.”
They walked on in silence, only getting about half a block when Levy stopped. “You hear that?”
Flynn frowned, looking around and listening. “I don’t hear any—”
“Shush!” Levy held up a hand to silence him though she couldn’t silence the pulse of the city. Still she stepped closer to the line of cars parked along the curb facing south. “I thought I heard…”
She got down on her hands and knees and looked under the closest car. The wet pavement soaked through the knees of her slacks. There was nothing there. She got back on her feet and took a couple of steps back. Two pedestrians passed them carrying umbrellas. They gave the two detectives a wide berth and scornful New York looks. Translation: weirdos.
When they were gone, Levy cocked her head, listening. “There it is again.”
This time Flynn heard it, too.
He dropped to his hands and knees and looked under the next car along the curb. He saw a dark shadow under the engine block that looked out of place. “There’s something under here.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell.” He crawled closer to the car, a green Audi, and reached under it. With his arm stretched out to its limit, his shoulder pressed against the wet metal of the car, he still couldn’t reach it. “It’s near the back of the front tire.”
Levy stepped off the curb and around the car. She leaned down. “I see it. I think I can reach it.” She squatted and stretched her arm under the carriage. Her fingers touched it but she couldn’t get a hold of it. She tried again, stretched a little further, and this time hooked a loop or a strap. She dragged their finding forward but when it began to move, she dropped it and stumbled back.
Flynn came around to join her at the street side of the car. “What’s wrong?”
“It moved.”
“What do you mean it moved?”
She had her back against the car door, staring down to see for the first time it was a backpack on the ground between them. She stared at him with her perfectly plucked dark eyebrows furrowed. “What the hell do you think I mean when I say it moved. It moved!”
Flynn squatted down and hooked the blue and black backpack by the strap. He picked it up, holding it outstretched from his body as he carried it, still squirming, to the sidewalk.
“Careful,” she warned. “It could be an IED of some kind.”
“Bombs don’t squirm,” he said, setting the backpack on the trunk of the Audi. He pinched the zipper tab, noticing that it hadn’t been zippered all the way to begin with. As he pulled the zipper back, the bag shook violently and started to hiss.
“Shit.” Flynn had to push the bag back so it didn’t fall off the car. Despite his assurances to the contrary, images of the bag hitting the pavement and going bomb filled his imagination.
He eased the zipper open and carefully reached into the dark interior of the backpack.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?”
But Flynn smiled as he extracted the living thing from inside the backpack. Draped over his hand was a cat. To be more precise, it was a kitten; orange with a white fuzzy chest and soaked to the bone. It blinked at them with big, sad, adorable eyes.
He patted the tiny, frightened thing’s head and the kitten twitched its ears and shook its head. Flynn laughed. He extended the kitten with its black, saucer-like eyes toward Levy. “Tell me you’re not afraid of cats?”
“Of course not,” Levy said, embarrassed and a bit defensively. “It’s unknown squirmy things in strange dark backpacks that scare me.”
“Hold him,” Flynn said, hefting the little ball of fur in her direction. “I want to check out what else is in here.”
Levy took the kitten and held it in two arms close to her body, leaning over it to keep it out of the rain as best she could.
From the backpack, Flynn pulled out a spiral bound notebook and a school text book. The book was old with tattered and bent corners. The condition of the text book was what one might expect from a book reissued and reused year after year, probably for more than a decade.
Inside the spiral bound notebook, Flynn found several pages of notes written in blue pen by hand, notes taken from English and science class. Of special interest to Flynn was the name written in neat print at the top of each page and on the inside overs of the notebook: DeShawn Beach.
He showed the pages to Levy. “Confirms that part of Stokes’ story.”
Flynn searched the rest of the bag.
He found nothing incriminating inside. Frustrated at the lack of clues, he shoved the book and notebook back into the pack. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why ditch the pack if there’s no stolen property inside?”
“And who takes a kitten on a burglary job?” Levy asked.
Flynn didn’t have any answers.
He pulled out his cell and put in a call to Kate Gilbert. He told her what they’d found. Less than a minute later, a member of her evidence collection team and a crime scene photographer met them by the car. Flynn described in detail how they’d found what they found and where.
About to leave them to it, Levy asked, “What about the cat?”
She held the kitten out, who furrowed its brow at the drops of rain hitting it.
The CSU team exchanged befuddled expressions. No one made a move to take the kitten from her.
“What do you expect us to do with it?” one of them asked.
She pulled the kitten back to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. “How should I know? Its evidence, isn’t it?” Levy countered.
The other tech said, “It’s a cat.”
“It’s still evidence,” Flynn insisted.
“We don’t collect live animals. Evidence or not,” the first tech said. “Call Animal Control.”
Levy looked horrified. “No.” She stroked the kitten. To Flynn, she said, “What do you want to do?”
After a moment’s thought, he came to a decision. “We’ll put it—”
“Her,” Levy corrected. She indicted where her hand was holding the nuzzling kitten between its back legs. “It’s a her.”
“Fine. We’ll take her with us for now. Deal with it—her—later.”
Levy kissed the top of the cat’s head. “I wonder what her name is.”
Vladeck Housing Project
450-464 Cherry Street
Lower East Side, Manhattan
Monday, November 27th 12:10 p.m.
THE SEARCH FOR THE burgled apartment proved easier than Flynn had anticipated. With little trouble they found the broken ground-floor window. Glass sparkled where it had fallen in the wet grass and dirt under a window boarded up with plywood. It appeared that an attempt had been made to clean up the glass, but the effort
had been pathetic at best. Many of the shards remained.
They went to the front of the building. Levy petted and cooed at the kitten cuddled in her arms. The main entrance was buzzer controlled. Flynn tried the doorbell for the unit marked “super” but got no response.
He buzzed apartment after apartment at random until the door finally clicked—without anyone inquiring through the intercom to find out who they were letting into the building. Levy cradled the kitten in one arm and pulled the door open.
Grateful to be out of the cold and rain, they stepped into a lobby that had a mosaic tile floor. Many of tiles were chipped, cracked, and broken. A row of small, brass mailbox slots were embedded into the walls on either side. Hot dry air blasted from an overhead vent.
The broken window was on ground level, so they went down the stairwell to the left. Downstairs the walls were painted flat brown, the color of mud. The lights overhead cast a sickly yellow illumination and buzzed insistently. The carpet was dark brown as well, with small black diamond patterns in it, and damp. The air smelled musty and thick.
Flynn went to where the corridor hooked to the right. The corner unit would be the one with the broken window. He stood to one side of the door. Levy took up a position behind him because there wasn’t room for her on the other side without being directly in front of the door. Even in a low risk situation, no cop did that anymore.
Flynn pounded the flat of his fist against the door. “Police.”
A minute passed without any sound.
Flynn knocked a second time and called out, “NYPD.”
A feeble voice answered from the other side of the door. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”
He and Levy exchanged glances and each visibly relaxed.
“There’s no one out there. I’m looking through the peephole and no one’s there.”
Flynn wondered if the woman was talking to him or someone else inside the apartment. He stepped in front of the door and held up his badge to the spyhole. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Oh, there he is,” she said from the other side of the door, followed by the rattle of a security chain before the door swung open a crack. A wrinkled, scarecrow of a woman with skin the color of black licorice stood before them.
Dressed in a baggy, flower-print housedress with no sleeves, white ankle socks trimmed with frilly lace that had sunk around her ankles, and clunky, beige orthopedic shoes, the woman’s hair was the color of steel wool. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.
“Careful! Don’t let Cuddles out.”
Flynn followed her downward stare and saw a big black and white cat try to slink his way between the woman’s legs and the door. Flynn bent down and scooped the cat up. He started to introduce himself and Levy when the woman threw her hands up in the air and with a big smile and yelled, “Mr. Pumpkin-White!”
Both cops looked down at the kitten.
“This kitten is yours?” Levy asked.
The woman came out in the hall with her thin, wrinkled hands outstretched. “Of course. You found him.”
Levy looked at Flynn, who shrugged. She handed Mr. Pumpkin-White to the woman.
“Mrs…” Flynn said.
“Porter, young man, Ellie May Porter, but you can just call me Miss Ellie. That’s what most folks around here do.” She leaned her cheek against the kitten snuggled in her arms. Both of them with their eyes closed and smiles on their faces. The kitten purred.
“Don’t just stand out there,” she said. “Come in. Come in.”
She stepped back to give Flynn and Levy room to enter into a small hallway as she herded what had to be a dozen more cats swarming around her ankles.
“Get back. Get on back,” she commanded to the cats. “Hurry, ’fore I lose another one of these little rascals.” She waved Flynn and Levy inside.
Levy shut the door behind them and Flynn released Cuddles to join the rest of the furry swarm at their feet. Flynn wrinkled his nose, trying not to be obvious about it. The apartment reeked of cat urine and litter box smells.
Miss Ellie led them to a small but cozy living room, patting Mr. Pumpkin-White on the head as she shuffled deeper into the apartment.
In the dimly lit room, a floral print loveseat faced a flat screen TV set on an oak and marble top stand with an oak coffee table on a stone base in between. Two velvet-padded, straight back chairs that looked straight out of the antebellum years sat next to the TV under a window. Every inch of wall space was taken up with heavy framed paintings and what appeared to be old family photographs.
And there were cats everywhere.
Curled up on the loveseat cushions and draped over the back. Cats played with a ball of yarn on the floor. Another one tiptoed through the wires at the back of the TV. Several snaked in and around the old woman’s legs.
All of them meowing.
“Now, then, officers,” Miss Ellie said, seemingly deaf to the constant feline cries for attention or the eye-watering smells in the house. “How on earth did you know to bring Mr. Pumpkin-White back here?”
“We’re detectives, ma’am,” Flynn said. “It’s what we do.”
Miss Ellie held up a withered hand crippled into a claw by arthritis. “Stop with that ma’am nonsense, son. You’ll make me feel old. What’s your name again?”
“Frank, ma’am.” He smiled. “Miss Ellie. We were hoping to talk to you about the break-in here last night.”
Miss Ellie blinked her eyes. Confused. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Frank. No one broke in here last night or any other night. I’d of known. I live here, don’t I?”
She cackled at her own joke.
“But a window leading into this apartment was broken. It’s been boarded up with plywood,” Levy said. “We saw it from outside.”
“Oh, that.” Miss Ellie made a pish-pish sound with her mouth and waved her clawed hand. “That wasn’t no break-in. That was just the storm last night. Something blowing around in the yard smashed out the glass in the window in the spare bedroom. I closed the door so the cats wouldn’t cut their little paws on the glass or get out. I guess I wasn’t quick enough.” She scolded Mr. Pumpkin-White. “You managed to sneak out without me seeing, didn’t you, you naughty, naughty boy you.”
She looked at Flynn and Levy. “Ronald came round early this morning and fixed it. That’s the plywood you saw.”
“Ronald?” Flynn asked.
“Ronald Derek. He’s the super. He’s a nice man.”
“Miss Ellie, ma’am,” Levy said. “Would it be any trouble if we took a look?”
“At the window? No, ’course not. This way.” She waved for them to follow her as she again shuffled across the room, the cluster of cats following her like Pig Pen’s dust cloud from the old Peanuts cartoons.
She led them down a narrow hallway.
Flynn stepped on the long tail of a white Persian. It howled and scooted through the cluster of cats crowding the hall. It hooked a hard left before disappearing through a doorway into another room.
“Good job,” Levy chided him good-naturedly.
Miss Ellie didn’t seem to mind. Ahead of them she called out with a wave over her head. “No worries. Happens all the time.”
She stood by the door to the bedroom on the right, across from where the Persian cat had run. Flynn stepped past her into a room chock full of…things. Bureaus and tables. Stained glass covered lamps. A table with newspapers stacked on it and under it. Costume jewelry from, well, pick a decade ago.
The room was dark with the single casement window boarded up.
Miss Elle flipped up a wall switch and a single bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling flared on. “See,” she said proudly. “Nothing missing.”
How could you tell, Flynn wanted to know but kept the inquiry to himself.
He gingerly made his way to the broken window. The stuff on the bureau had been cleared away—but that might have been done by the super to nail in the board. The doilies on the bureau surface were sti
ll damp.
“Miss Ellie,” Flynn said, examining the window and the area around it. “We have it from a pretty reliable source that a young man was seen crawling out of this window last night at about three-thirty in the morning. You’re sure nothing’s been stolen?”
“A young man?” She clutched her throat with her hand. “It was the middle of the night when I heard the crash. I can’t rightly say what the exact time was. The cats, they were a nervous fright as you might expect.”
“When you heard the crash, you came in here?” Levy asked.
“Of course.” She looked at Levy. “I shooed the cats away and closed the door. I counted them all up, but Mr. Pumpkin-White’s one of our family’s newest members. I’m afraid I must have forgotten about him when counting.”
She kissed the top of the kitten’s head. “I am so sorry. I’ll never forget you again. I promise.”
Flynn cleared his throat. “So other than the…Mr. Pumpkin-White, nothing else is missing. You’re sure?”
“As sure as I’m standing here, I am, Frank.”
The old woman’s assurances didn’t fill Flynn with much confidence, but other than the cat-napped kitten, they’d found nothing else in DeShawn’s backpack, so perhaps she was right after all. Had the kid come here to steal a cat?
“In that case, we’ll get out of your way.” Flynn handed her a business card and asked her to call them if she did discover anything missing.
At the door of her apartment, she assured them she would.
“Oh,” Levy said, as she stepped out into the hall. “Mr. Pumpkin-White. He’s a girl.” She smiled. “Thought you should know.”
Miss Ellie felt around under the kitten and cackled. “Well, I’ll be darned. You’re right. How’d I ever miss that?”
How indeed, Flynn wondered as they left, grateful to be out of the apartment. Back outside, he took in a deep lungful of fresh, clean air.
