Body Of Truth

by Deirdre Savoy

  As they talked they walked the short distance toward where the body lay uncovered on the concrete. Mari had already squatted alongside the body, next to Bill Horgan, one of the guys out of the coroner’s office.

  If the girl in the can had ever been a pretty woman there was no evidence of it now. Three quarters of her face had been smashed in, leaving only her chin and a portion of her right cheek untouched. A row of purplish bruises ringed her neck, as well as several deep scratches, probably wounds she’d inflicted herself trying to fend off her attacker. Whoever she was, she probably hadn’t been in that can for long, as the stench usually associated with decaying bodies in hot enclosed spaces was thankfully absent.

  Whoever had left the secret surprise had probably hoped it would find its way to the dump before anyone discovered its contents. But garbage pick-up in this neighborhood was less of a scheduled affair than a game of what if. Or maybe he hadn’t cared. Whoever had left her had robbed her of whatever dignity or identity she possessed by dumping her here like so much trash in an alley.

  That fact galled him, as whoever she had been, she’d been someone’s daughter or sister or mother. Whatever else she might have been in life, he understood his obligation to her in death. He owed her that, even if no one else did.

  He pulled the Polaroid from his pocket, opened it and snapped a picture of the corpse. He lowered the camera and picked off the picture. There would be plenty of official photographs to sift through later, but the pictures he took now were just for him. His own reminder, his own incentive.

  “What’s your guess?” Jeff nodded toward the body. “A working girl?”

  Jonathan’s gaze slid to the man. His eyes were over-bright, his movements jerky. Either he was on something or he was an adult victim of hyperactivity disorder.

  Jonathan shrugged. The fact that she’d been found nude might hint at a sexual motive for the crime, but Jonathan doubted it. That had nothing to do with the scene before him, but his own cop’s intuition that he’d learned to rely on. Right now, that intuition told him this wouldn’t be some simple open and shut case. Maybe it was just the way his luck was going right then.

  Mari looked up. “She’s no pro. Not on the street anyway.”

  “You can tell that just by looking?” Jeff scoffed. “You turn psychic and nobody told us?”

  Mari speared him with one of her dark-eyed looks. “Aside from what this creep did to her, there isn’t a mark on her, no tracks. How many hookers do you know with a dye job that probably cost more than you make in a week?”

  Jeff laughed as if the answer didn’t matter much. “Speaking of which,” he nodded to a spot lower on her body. “I guess more than her hairdresser knows for sure now.”

  Jonathan shot the other man a look that made him take a step backward.

  “Let’s see if the owner’s shown up yet,” Patterson said, and the two of them walked off down the alley.

  He caught Mari giving him a patient look. “Ease up, Stone. That’s probably the closest that jerk’s gotten to a naked woman in ten years.”

  Jonathan snorted. All the more reason not to put up with an idiot who’d use a corpse to make a lame joke. Jonathan focused on Horgan, a short stocky man with a stock of gray hair reminiscent of Spencer Tracy. “What have you got?”

  “White female, or possibly Hispanic, thirty to forty years old. Signs of strangulation here.” He gestured along the breadth of her throat with his index finger. “Someone gave her face a good going over, but as to which killed her, the bludgeoning or the asphyxiation, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Was she raped?”

  Morgan shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s no sign of penetration, no evidence of fluids. I don’t think I’d find any, anyway. Someone cleaned this girl up before dumping her here, clipped her fingernails. Whoever did this knew how to cover his tracks.”

  Jonathan frowned, which meant her killer could be someone in law enforcement, a medical practitioner or any of the millions of CSI devotees. Great to narrow down the field a little.

  “Time of death?”

  “Hard to say. Roasting in that can probably threw off the body temp. Rigor has set in, and judging from the posterior lividity, she lay on her back for a few hours before finding her way here. I’d say no more than twenty-four hours, but that’s the best I can say now.”

  He nodded. “Thanks.” Though he didn’t really know much more than he’d started with, except that whoever killed this woman had gone to a great deal of trouble to conceal both her identity and his.

  Jonathan looked up at the building across the street, which provided a perfect view into the alley. Maybe someone had seen something, and more importantly, might be willing to tell what they saw. In this neighborhood, the most likely response to police inquiries was a not-so-polite litany of what cops could do with themselves and how often.

  Ironically, residents of this neighborhood, when asked what the police can do for the community, cite increased police protection as the most pressing issue. Good thing nobody ever said life had to make sense.

  Jonathan sighed. Time to get down to the real work: getting a canvass started, rounding up witnesses. By the time this was over, he’d probably know this woman in the alley better than her own mother did.

  He folded the camera and slid it into his pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Coming back to consciousness, Dana opened her eyes slowly. Her head ached and her shoulder throbbed. Groggily, she took in her surroundings: a dingy white room, clunky, industrial furniture, and above, the tracks for a privacy curtain. Images of the shooting flooded her consciousness—the car, the gun pointed at her, firing, Wesley’s cold, dead eyes. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Please, God, don’t let me be in Washington Hospital.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

  Dana turned her head to the right to see Joanna sitting in a high-backed chair beside her bed. Dana licked her dry lips. “Where am I?”

  “Montefiore Hospital. How do you feel?”

  “Grateful to be alive. What about Wesley?”

  “The kid who was with you? He didn’t make it.”

  Dana squeezed her eyes shut. She’d known. She’d known from the moment she’d seen his eyes that he was gone, but hearing it flat out brought tears to her eyes and a sweeping sense of sadness rushing through her.

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna said.

  Dana wiped her eyes with her hand. “I know.” She was sorry, too, that a young man with such potential was gone before he’d really had a chance to do anything with his life. As sure as she knew her own name, she knew she’d been getting to him. Maybe with a little more guidance . . . Her speculations didn’t matter anymore. Wesley was gone and she couldn’t change that either.

  “There’s a detective outside waiting to talk to you. Do you feel up to it?”

  She nodded. If she could, she wanted to help find Wesley’s killer, though she doubted she’d be much help. “Send him in.”

  With a little effort, Joanna rose from her seat and went to the door. Through the opening she could see a uniformed officer outside her door. He nodded as Joanna spoke to him. Dana supposed such protection wasn’t out of line considering she was a material witness to a murder.

  After a few moments Joanna waddled back to her. “He’ll be right here. Are you sure you’re up to this? Maybe I should get your doctor.”

  “I’m fine.” Dana smiled wickedly and appealed to her friend’s nurse’s pride. “Do you think a doctor would know my condition better than you would?”

  “Of course not. But he is a man. You know how they tend to pay more attention to each other than they do to us.” Joanna grinned. “Besides, he’s single.”

  Dana rolled her eyes. That was Joanna, the perpetual matchmaker. “One of these days I’m going to convince you to give up on me.”

  “Never.”

  As Joanna spoke, the door pushed open and a tall, Caucasian man walked in. He wore his dark hair long and shaggy, as ha
phazardly arranged as his clothes, a dark brown suit with an askew tie. His gaze went immediately to Joanna. “I’d like to speak to Miss Molloy alone.”

  Dana’s eyebrows lifted, not because of his request, but because of his wide-legged, hostile stance at the foot of her bed. THE LAW had arrived, and he wasn’t taking any prisoners. Clearly, he expected a confrontation with her, though she wondered why. Maybe he was simply impatient to find out what she knew, but she doubted it.

  Joanna rolled her eyes comically, breaking the tension in the room. “I’ll be right outside.”

  After Joanna left, she focused on the man standing at the foot of her bed. “What can I do for you, um . . .”

  “Detective Moretti, 16th squad. I’d like to ask you some questions about the shooting.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How well did you know Wesley Evans?”

  “Not well. I was his grandmother’s nurse. I work for At-Home Healthcare.”

  “That’s why you were at 4093 Highland Avenue this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you recall about the shooting?”

  Dana inhaled and let it out slowly. “I came out of the building after seeing Mrs. Evans. Wesley was outside. We talked for a few minutes when this black car came careening down the street. The next thing I knew they were shooting at us.”

  “They? How many were there?”

  “At least two. One driving and the one with the gun.”

  “Did you get a look at either of them?”

  Dana shook her head, sending pain dancing along her scalp. She shut her eyes for a moment until it passed. “No. The windows were tinted black and I was too busy staring at the gun to see anything else.”

  “Did you get a license plate?”

  “No.” As a nurse she was trained to be observant and it galled her that she couldn’t remember any information that would help in finding Wesley’s killer. Looking at Detective Moretti, whose posture hadn’t changed since he’d staked his claim on her room, she wondered why he hadn’t taken down any of her information. “Shouldn’t you be writing any of this down?”

  He gave her a look that said if she’d provided him with anything worthwhile he’d have done so.

  She huffed out a breath, her frustration mounting. “There were other people on the street. Didn’t anyone else see something?”

  “I wouldn’t count on getting much from witnesses.”

  “Why not?”

  “Evans was a small time drug dealer. Not everyone is sorry to see him gone.”

  She supposed that included this cop who went through the motions of investigating his death, but with little enthusiasm and no conviction. “What do you plan to do next?”

  “That’s police business.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and extended it toward her. “If you can think of anything else, you can call me at that number. Thanks for your time.”

  Dana took the card and surveyed it. Det. Thomas Moretti. He was halfway out the door by the time she looked up. “You might try letting those reluctant bystanders know that he tried to save me. He tried to get me to go back inside and then he tried to shield me with his own body.” That’s why he’d been facing her when he’d fallen. He’d turned to protect her.

  “Right,” Moretti said, and continued on his way to the door.

  He either didn’t believe her or didn’t care. She doubted what she’d told him changed his estimation of Wesley or improved his interest in solving the case. He hadn’t said so, but he probably believed she’d stopped to talk to Wesley in order to score some of his product for herself.

  Dana closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with her hand. If she didn’t watch it she’d be in for a serious migraine, the kind that hurt so much it nauseated her.

  “How’d it go?”

  As if Joanna hadn’t listened at the door as if 00E.F. Hutton had been talking. Dana dropped her hand to the bed and laughed without mirth. “God, I hate cops.”

  After a long, mostly unproductive day, Jonathan parked his car at the corner of 161st and Grand Concourse and cut the engine. Darkness had already fallen, but as he got out of the car, he looked up at the building that loomed in front of him. Cut out of the far corner of the building stood a new restaurant that replaced the deli that had stood there for years. A lifetime ago, that deli had been a bar frequented by cops and c.o.’s from the Bronx House of Detention down on 149th Street.

  The surrounding building had been the Concourse Arms, the hotel visiting teams had stayed at while taking on the home team at nearby Yankee Stadium. Now it was a broken-down Old Folks Home. In the Bronx, when the mighty fell, they fell hard.

  Walking the block and a half to his building, he appreciated the cool breeze that wafted to him from the East River. Nights like these, he’d sit out on his fire escape cum terrace, nursing a beer and listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. Or on a game night, like tonight, he’d bring out his portable TV and when the cheering started he’d turn on the set in time to catch the instant replay.

  He knew his family and most of the cops he worked with thought he was crazy for living in the neighborhood. Hell, half the building thought he was nuts. Even on a cop’s salary he could afford to live somewhere where the morning wake-up call wasn’t a siren from a squad car chasing down some low-life in the street. If he had a wife or kids to worry about, he wouldn’t consider it, but for himself alone, it did just fine.

  If he was lucky, April might have called, signaling she’d gotten over being angry with him. April wasn’t very demanding of his time, but he’d stood her up on her birthday to run down a lead on the case he’d been working on. Not even a low maintenance woman like April would tolerate that without complaint. Maybe he should call her and try to apologize again.

  As soon as that thought entered his mind he knew he wouldn’t do it. For as accommodating as April was, he knew she was better off without him. His job as a homicide detective working out of the 48 provided all the complications he needed in his life; he’d never allowed any woman to be more than a distraction. He didn’t intend to change now.

  He stripped out of his clothes and showered off the grime of his day. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he padded barefoot to the kitchen at the front of his apartment. The refrigerator yielded nothing more appetizing than some three-day-old chicken and a couple of beers. He’d have to settle for that as he wasn’t in the mood to cook, nor did any of the places that delivered offer any fare worth the price of indigestion later.

  He ate the chicken in the kitchen but took the beer out onto the fire escape outside his living room window. The night was warm, sultry in a way you only found in New York. The breeze off the river, heavy with humidity, brought the scent of other dinners cooking on other people’s stoves. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed, but closer to home, Usher’s voice blared “Yeah,” accompanied by the laughter and shouted conversation of teenagers.

  Once upon a time, this had been a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, populated by some of the city’s largest ethnic groups: Jews, Poles, Irish and Italians. In the 1970s, a combination of white flight and financial incentives to move to the kinder, gentler North East Bronx decimated the population of the neighborhood. Unlike Harlem that had burned, paving the way for today’s renewal and gentrification, the South Bronx had been abandoned to the new ethnic groups that moved in: Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Jamaicans and other groups struggling to eke out a decent living amid crime infested streets.

  Every now and then, some politician would make noises about taking back the South Bronx, the Grand Concourse in particular. The only strides he’d seen in this regard were the opening of the Concourse Plaza shopping mall over a decade ago. At least the locals now had a few decent stores in which to shop.

  He took a long pull on his beer before retrieving the photograph he’d tucked in his back pocket. He scanned the image of the woman’s battered face. “Who are you, sweetheart?” he whispered. As of yet, fingerprints hadn’t come back yet, t
he bum in the alleyway couldn’t tell them anything and so far the neighborhood canvass had yielded the usual chorus of “I didn’t see nothing.” The coroner’s office wouldn’t be getting to the body until some time tomorrow. He’d have to wait until then to discover if the corpse held any secrets to her identity or her attacker’s. Meanwhile, they’d faxed the information they had to missing persons. Maybe they’d come up with something, but he doubted it. The only distinguishing sign on her body was a small birthmark on her left shoulder. Not much to go on considering her facial features were unrecognizable.

  Jonathan rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. Investigating the first case they’d caught that morning hadn’t proved fruitful either. Two men had gotten into a knife fight over a woman. The loser had expired on the spot. The winner, one Freddie Jackson, had been wounded, too, with a strike to the belly. But he hadn’t turned up at any of the local hospitals seeking treatment, returned to any of his usual haunts. No one had heard from him, not even his mother. Jonathan suspected the only way they’d find this man was when his body, wherever he’d holed himself up, started to stink.

  So, for today he was batting 0 for 2. From the sudden racket issuing from the Stadium, someone was doing better than him. He could find out who if he got the TV, but lacked the will to bother. The cell phone clipped to his waistband rumbled. He unclipped it and looked at the display. Mari’s number, plus he’d missed another call.

  “What’s up?”

  “I tried calling you before. Where were you?”

  “In the shower, probably.” He heard the excitement in her voice and the chastisement for keeping her waiting in her words. “What did you hear?”

  “Well, to quote Samuel L. Jackson, hold on to your butt. The Jane Doe in the alley was none other than Amanda Pierce.”

  If Mari expected him to know who that was she was going to be disappointed. “Who?”