by Stone Kiss
“Not with the words ‘Emek Refa’im’ on it,” Gindi said.
Decker perused the printed words. “What does it mean?”
“Emek Refa’im? ‘Emek’ is a valley. I think ‘refa’im’ is from ‘refuah’—”
“To heal,” Decker said.
“Yeah,” Gindi said. “Valley of healing.”
“That would make sense,” Decker said. “This looks like a handout for Jewish drug addicts.”
“Let me see that,” Novack said.
Decker gave him the packet. “Looks to me like the organization has several chapters with their own kind of twelve-step programs. There are addresses in the back.”
Novack thumbed through the pages. “I should pay these guys a visit. Wonder when they meet?”
“Today’s Friday, so it’s a safe bet they’re not meeting tonight,” Decker said.
“That is true,” Novack said.
“How about tomorrow night?” Gindi said. “Motzei Shabbos? Everyone filled with spirituality from the holy day.”
“Or stress,” Decker said. “When you’re an addict and forced to interact with family, I bet you’re pretty tense.”
“Now, that’s a very good point.” Novack placed the magazine in an evidence bag. “I’ll give these jokers a call, see if Ephraim was associated with any of these chapters. If they meet tomorrow night, you want to come with me and pay them a visit?”
“That would be great,” Decker answered.
“Wanna see the X-rated stuff?” Novack called out.
“Twist my arm,” Gindi answered.
Decker’s toolshed was bigger than the bedroom. The trio could barely fit without bodily contact. There was an unmade twin bed crammed against the wall and a single nightstand on which rested a phone, an alarm clock, and one framed picture—a Chasidic man standing next to, but not touching, a young girl of about fourteen. Decker stared at the picture.
“May I?”
Novack shrugged.
Decker picked up the framed picture, studying the faces. The girl was far from beautiful. Her nose was large and drooping, her cheeks still holding some baby fat. But her eyes—dark and round—shone with a mischievous gleam. She wore a long-sleeved pink shirt and a long denim skirt. Her hair was pulled back, probably braided. Her lips were shaped in a small, mysterious smile. The man seemed to be around forty, dressed in typical black-suited Chasidic garb. He was bearded with side locks, his head covered with the ubiquitous black hat. His smile was wide, the folds at the corners of his eyes crinkling with happiness. He showed the picture to Novack. “Is that Shayndie?”
“Hard to tell from such a small image, but I think so.”
“They gave you a bigger image?”
“Yeah, a bat mitzvah photo. I had it photocopied yesterday evening, and this morning we’ve been passing it around the crime-scene area. That’s what I was doing when you called. She was wearing this pink fluffy dress. She looked like a tuft of cotton candy. She also looked way younger than thirteen.”
“She was probably twelve,” Decker said. “Orthodox girls have their bat mitzvah ceremony at twelve, not thirteen.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Novack nodded.
Decker stared at the photo. “She was older than twelve in this picture. Still fresh-faced. God, what a terrible thing! Can I keep this?”
“I’m bending rules.”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Decker pocketed the picture. Again he scanned the room. A fourteen-inch TV sat on several cinder blocks at the foot of the bed. Novack told them that he had found the two boxes underneath the bed—one held dog-eared paperback fiction, the other held standard porno magazines.
Decker bent down and sniffed the sheets.
Novack said, “I didn’t smell any jizz, if that’s what you’re doing. But I don’t need to bag the sheets. If we find the girl and she’s”—he made circles with his hand—“if she’s got stuff in her, I got plenty of tubes of humors from the stiff to do DNA testing.”
Gindi was scanning the adult magazines. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Except that this guy was supposedly a holy roller. But even them having stuff like this isn’t out of the ordinary. You go talk to anyone in the nine-oh. Right as the Chasids cross the bridge from the city into Williamsburg, they’ve got these hookers lined up, waiting to ream out their pipes. Okay, so no one’s perfect. But if that ain’t bad enough, they have a real elitist attitude. If you’re not one of them, you don’t count. That’s why it’s okay to skirt the law, because anything but their laws don’t apply to them.”
Novack held up his hands and dropped them to his sides. “It’s hard to believe that these are my people. Grandpa sacrificed everything just to make it over here, and these yutzes are too blind to notice what real freedom is.”
“Did you find anything to suggest that the vic was molesting the girl?” Decker asked.
“Not so far,” Novack said. “No dirty pictures of the kid, if that’s what you mean.”
Decker nodded. “Any camera equipment or videos?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you have a look in her room yesterday?”
“No, I haven’t been out to the house,” Novack said. “I only talked to the parents at the precinct. Like I told you before, I’m not saying they’re hiding something. Maybe they just find it hard to relate to anyone outside their chevrah.”
Decker knew that chevrah meant their circle of friends. “Could be.”
“That’s why, you being here, it’s a good thing for me if you’re legit. You probably could get insider’s info.”
“I’m probably closer than you are, but I’m far from one of them.” Again Decker regarded the picture. Just an uncle trying to do a good deed for a niece? Or a man obsessed with a young girl? “Do you think he brought her here?”
Gindi broke in. “You gotta know where you are, Lieutenant. This is a very religious neighborhood. People talk. How long before it would get around that a religious man is bringing a girl up to his apartment—let alone a girl child. Besides statutory rape being illegal, it’s not tzneosdik.”
Tzneos meant modesty. Decker said, “Maybe it did get back to the brother.”
“Nah.” Gindi shook his head. “If he was doing something bad to her, it wouldn’t be here in home territory.”
Novack came back from a closet holding a box. “Lookie here.”
“Whaddaya got, Micky?”
“Looks like work-related stuff.” Novack plopped the box on the floor and picked up some random pages. “Lists of items, prices, and bar codes from Lieber’s Electronics.”
Decker said, “Ephraim worked in the family business.”
“That’s what they told me.” Novack shuffled through the pages. “The old man told me Ephraim did whatever they needed him to do. And when he wasn’t doing that, he worked inventory. And from the looks of it, he had a pretty good idea of what was going in and out of the stores.”
Gindi tapped his toe. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they’d put a man with a drug problem in charge of inventory? You know in business, there’s always a certain amount of theft. It’s like dangling a carrot.”
Novack said, “Help yourself as long as you don’t take too much?”
“Exactly.”
Decker broke in. “If they thought he was really a risk, would they have trusted him in any facet of the business? Maybe the old man would, but a brother?” He shook his head. “Betcha Chaim was watching him like a hawk.”
“Well, to me, it’s still an angle,” Gindi said.
“Hey, this is what I do with my people in La-La Land. We throw out ideas and see what sticks.”
“Here too, and you made a good point.” Novack rummaged through the papers. “Just more of the same. I’m gonna bag all this and go through this at my desk, slowly and methodically. Maybe there’re other things that I’m missing.”
“Like what?” Gindi asked.
“Like a bankbook fo
r starters. Guy musta had a checking account.”
Decker said, “It could be that if he was part of one of those twelve-step programs, he didn’t have a checkbook or credit cards. He might have dealt only with cash.”
“Yeah, that’s a point,” Gindi stated. “Lots of addicts have had credit problems and have been caught bouncing or kiting checks.”
“Then that would make our life a little harder,” Novack said. “No paper trail.”
“Maybe he had some credit cards in the past,” Decker said.
Novack folded the ends of the box and began to tape the edges. “I still think we should think about theft within the family business. Maybe Ephraim was paying off old drug debts. Maybe he didn’t pay them off fast enough.”
“And the girl?” Gindi said.
Novack sighed. “She’s a big problem.”
“Poor parents,” Gindi said.
“Poor girl,” Decker said.
6
The crime took place in a dingy cell of a room with a stunning view of a brick wall, although Decker assumed that the killer—or killers—had drawn the faded shade. The chalk marks were still in place, the body positioned next to the bed. But because there wasn’t enough space on the floor, Ephraim’s left arm and leg had settled up on the wall. The tech had extended the white figuration onto the once-white painted surface now ambered to puke yellow. Inside the outline of the head was a deep brown stain—a single amoeba-shaped sticky puddle of dried and tacky blood about six to seven inches in diameter. The rest of the wall was covered with print powder, as were a lone nightstand, the phone, the clock, and almost all the cracked white tiled floor. There was a bathroom with a stained-gray porcelain toilet streaked with dirt lines and an equally stained porcelain sink.
Resisting the urge to rub his temples—his hands were newly gloved—Decker felt an encroaching headache. He hadn’t had a decent meal in sixteen hours and floating particles of fingerprint dust weren’t helping the situation. Plus, there was the odor of waste: a strong stench of urine with a hint of feces. Novack hadn’t bothered with the Vicks; neither did Decker. He had seen and smelled worse.
Novack took out his notepad and an envelope filled with postmortem photographs. “Single shot through the temple area—close range judging by the entrance wound, but it was lacking the usual star-burst pattern.”
“Why’s that?” Decker asked.
Novack shrugged.
Decker flipped through the snapshots. “Exit wound?”
“No exit wound. So whatever it was, it’s still in the skull. Probably a hollow point—something that exploded inside the poor bastard. We’ll know more after Forensics pulls it out. The casing was a thirty-two caliber.”
“A hollow point…” Decker looked up from the pictures and back at the kill site. “That would explain the lack of blood.” He went over and examined the chalk mark. “We’ve got a solid mass of blood here. Which meant that the vic had to have fallen with the wound side down. Any ideas how it played?”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. First off, I considered that he was shot on the bed and fell off. But then there would have been blood on the sheets where he rolled off. Problem is… no blood on the sheets. So next, we figure he was popped while he was cowered in the corner, or standing up in the corner.”
“Splatter?”
“No, no splatter on the walls there. Not that we could find.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Them’s the facts.”
Decker said, “Unless he was lying left side down, and shot through the floor, there has to be some amount of splatter from the entrance wound.”
“So we’re figuring maybe this wasn’t the kill spot.”
“So where was the kill spot?”
“Not in this room.”
Decker said, “But that would mean taking a body up the stairs… what? Ten flights?”
“There’s an elevator. They could have stuffed him in a duffel.”
“We rode up that elevator. It took about twenty minutes. Not to mention that it would have been one heck of a big duffel.”
“It’s been done before,” Novack said.
“Let’s suppose… for a moment… that the guy got here on his own two feet.”
“You mean he took the girl up here?”
Decker thought about that. “You find any evidence that the girl was up here?”
“Nothing. No sperm-stained sheets, no dress, no purse, nothing to suggest any kind of sexual activity whatsoever.”
“Okay, for the moment, let’s assume that the girl wasn’t up here.” Decker raised his eyebrows. “We’ll worry about her later. Anyway, Ephraim was kidnapped and taken up here—maybe in a duffel, maybe by his own two feet… somehow he got up here.”
“That we know. What we don’t know is if he was dead or alive.”
“Assume that he was alive when they took him up here.”
Novack laughed. “You’re from L.A. Write the script, and I’ll play along.”
Decker smiled. “Suppose somebody brought Ephraim here on his own two feet.”
“Probably more than one person,” Novack said.
Decker nodded. “Yeah, probably to get him upstairs without his breaking away, there had to be two people—dragging him upstairs with a gun pointed at his head. Maybe they duct-taped his mouth.”
“Not when we found him.”
“Ask the coroner to check for glue around his mouth.”
Novack nodded, but he didn’t write it down.
Decker went on. “They lead him to this room… pull the shades—”
“By the way, I had some people canvass the next building over for witnesses.”
“The one out the window?”
“Yeah, that one. Nothing.”
“Okay, okay.” Decker’s brain was reeling. “They pull the shades and pop him somewhere up here that’s not going to leave any splatter.” He looked at Novack. “Was his hair wet?”
“Not when I got here,” Novack said. “But I will say this. His hair was short… almost shaved to the scalp. It woulda dried in a few minutes. You can see that in the postmortem pics.”
Decker looked at the photos. Ephraim had had a very close-cropped haircut. “How about his clothes? You don’t have his clothes?”
“No, we found him buck naked. What are you thinking?”
“The toilet,” Decker said. “They dragged him into the bathroom, dunked him into the bowl, and popped him. The water washed away most of the blood. It also probably muffled the sound.”
“Makes one hell of a splash.”
“Was the floor wet?”
Novack checked his notes. He shook his head. “No…I didn’t mention it. I think someone woulda noticed pink water on the floor.”
“Towels in the bathroom?”
Again Novack checked his notes. “No. It’s a crummy hotel.”
“It still might provide towels in the bathroom. Someone should ask.”
Novack was quiet. Then he said, “We should check underneath the toilet-bowl rim for splatter.”
“Yeah. If you don’t find anything, you might want to Luminall it. Also, tell Forensics to check the vic’s lungs. He may have taken some water into his lungs before he died.”
Novack scratched his neck and cleared his throat. “That can be arranged.”
“Do you mind if I look around?”
“Not too long.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Knock yourself out.” But after five minutes, Novack seemed annoyed. “What are you looking for, Decker?”
“Just trying to figure out… how he got here.”
“The room was registered to John Smith,” Novack said. “Paid for in cash. The receipts had already been taken to the bank and deposited, so we couldn’t pull prints off the bills even if we knew what we were looking for.”
Decker gave the place a final scan. “And you found nothing at the scene?”
“Only thing we found of any significance was a single p
ill.”
“A pill?”
“Yeah, like an aspirin pill. But it wasn’t aspirin. No imprint on it. Even generic drugs are imprinted.”
“Ecstasy?”
“Yeah, of course. But even those pills are usually imprinted with something—a ’toon or a heart. The guy had a drug problem; the pill may have come from his pocket. We sent it to Forensics. It’s being tested. If it’s a known drug like ecstasy, results shouldn’t take long.”
“My brother said he used coke,” Decker remarked. “Do they make cocaine in tablets these days?”
Novack shrugged. “I’m not an expert in these things. We don’t even got Vice in our hub, let alone Narc.”
Decker held up the photos. “Can I keep these over the weekend or are these your only copies?”
“Those are copies. Originals are in my file back at the two-eight.”
“So I can keep these?”
“What do you want them for?”
“I just want to… stare at them. See if something jumps out at me. I’ll give them back before I leave.”
Novack ran his tongue over his teeth. “I suppose you look honorable enough. Sure, take them.”
“Thanks, Novack.” Decker pocketed the photos.
Rather than take a chance with the moribund elevator, they elected to walk down the ten flights of steps. The stairwells were dark, lit by a bare bulb on each floor, and rank with odors and bacteria. Decker was happy his hands were gloved. He wished his lungs had equal protection. As they stepped outside onto the sidewalk, a heavy gust of wind nearly knocked them over. Immediately, Decker’s ears were assaulted by the honking of horns and traffic. He took off his latex gloves. “You know, I can catch a cab to my brother’s shul.”
“I can drop you off—”
“Nah, it’s out of the way.”
“It’s no problem for me to take you, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks, Detective, but I’ll be fine.” Decker paused. “So you’re going to check out those twelve-step chapters—”
“Yeah, Decker, I had intentions of doing that.”
Novack was irked. Decker said, “I’m a pain in the ass, and an older one at that. That means I’m not only obsessive, but I keep asking the same questions because I’m forgetful. Be happy you’re not my wife.”
