by Lisa Black
Keep working, she told herself. Just keep working.
EIGHT
Lily Simpson must not have waited for the dog to dry before presenting herself to receive the booty of her inheritance, because she appeared in front of Frank the next morning as he stepped off the elevator.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘I was just coming to find you.’
‘Yeah?’ He juggled a Styrofoam cup of coffee without a lid and a lengthy list of felons to re-interview regarding the depth of their dislike for Marty Davis. Angela had gone to get the car and he needed to get out to the Ontario Street sidewalk before she had to double-park and create a traffic hazard. RTA bus drivers cut no slack for official cars.
‘I went to that lawyer like you said, and he said yeah I’m the beneficiary, but I can’t go get Marty’s stuff yet. It has to go to the probate court first or something like that.’
‘Well, that’s for lawyers to determine. It’s really got nothing to do with me.’ He sipped the coffee and tried to sidestep, but she moved more quickly and planted herself in front of him, bouncing her weight from toe to toe. She had put on jeans for her trip out of doors, with a thin sweatshirt and a zippered hoodie.
‘But it belongs to me now, so why do I have to wait for it? I’ve got a daughter in jail who needs a lawyer now. Marty would want me to have it,’ she added with solemn piety. ‘Can’t you hurry them up? You were his friend.’
‘I never met him.’
‘But you came to my house—’
‘I’m investigating his death. I was not part of his life. I’m sorry, Miss Simpson, but I have to go.’ He stepped around her and made for the revolving glass doors.
She stayed on his heels, even gaining ground during the trip. ‘So you need to talk to me, if you’re investigating. I know more about Marty than anyone.’
‘You hadn’t seen him for over a year.’
‘I know what matters.’ She plunged through the glass doors ahead of him. Angela waited on the other side of the row of marked and unmarked police vehicles at the curb, causing a minor backup. He circled through the doors and prepared to run the gauntlet of Lily Simpson, hoping to do so without spilling coffee on his semi-good pants.
‘I’m just saying,’ she said as soon as he broke out of the pocket of glass, ‘that maybe whoever killed him came from way back, too, like me.’
‘Because of an old grudge? You got someone in mind?’
‘No,’ she admitted, drawing out the o.
He studied her eyes, blue and jumpy. ‘Are you on something?’
‘No.’ This time with more firmness but less conviction.
Frank would have bet his paycheck that Lily had seen a windfall coming and celebrated, the only way she knew how – not with champagne but with another kind of crystal. He could haul her back inside, do a DRE exam by making her follow his pen with her gaze to check her pupils, and then arrest her if she failed. But Lily would be out smoking more of it before nightfall and he needed the time to investigate a murder. ‘I really can’t help you with his estate, Lily. As far as I know, those things take time and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He only died on Monday,’ he added, wishing he could use the impolitic but blunt phrase his body’s barely cold. He dumped the coffee cup – nothing without a lid could enter the pristine Crown Vic – and dove into the sanctuary of the passenger seat.
‘Horns are blaring,’ his partner informed him.
‘They’ll get over it.’
Somewhere in the middle of this statement the rear door opened and Lily Simpson jumped into the back seat, just as the vehicle began to move.
‘Um—’ Angela said.
‘Ma’am.’ Frank still knew how to say the word with that voice of absolute authority, perfected during his patrol days, and he used it now. ‘Ma’am. You can’t do that.’
‘We don’t usually have people jumping into a cop car,’ Angela remarked. ‘They try to get out, yes, but not in.’
Lily seemed quite at ease there, her face slightly screened by the metal mesh divider. She hugged herself with both arms and said, ‘I need a ride. My car died again, and I figure you guys are probably going to Marty’s place anyway, right? I need to talk to his landlord.’
Frank said, ‘Lily, I can’t help you with the legal process, and we are not a taxi service. You’re going to get out at the next light.’
‘I can’t get out. This is a cop car, right? Handles don’t work in the back seat?’
‘You would know,’ Frank said.
‘What?’
Perhaps he could annoy her out of the vehicle. ‘I ran your stats. They’re pretty impressive for the beneficiary of a cop. Four warnings and eight arrests in the past fifteen years, five for drug possession and three for soliciting.’
This only made Lily settle deeper into the upholstery and stare out the window with a sullen cast to her face.
Frank spoke to his partner instead. ‘Convicted of three of these eight offenses, serving a total of two years in two different sentences.’
Angela said, ‘That’s our justice system. Eight arrests and she serves two years.’
‘And now she gets herself revved up and hops in a cop car. Maybe the judge will be stricter this time.’
Lily couldn’t maintain the pout, and leaned closer to protest: ‘The drug stuff was misdemeanors.’
‘Not the last one,’ Frank said. ‘You were carting around a little too much for personal use.’
‘I wasn’t selling it.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You can’t get together enough money to make your own business. You were delivering it for someone who could.’
‘I got kids to feed.’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Frank said, though he didn’t.
‘Spare me the attitude. Half my customers were cops.’
‘Really.’ Frank made sure to speak in a tone of complete disbelief, but he wondered. Marty could have been one of those customers … though all his friends and co-workers had seemed positive that his only drug of choice came in a glass bottle with a twist-off cap.
‘You think you knew Marty? You think you know all about your little fallen angel, but you don’t. I knew him.’
‘I keep telling you, I never met Marty. You got something to tell me about Marty, then tell it, because we’re not your chauffeurs. Pull up to the federal building, Ang. We’ll dump her on their laps.’
Lily leaned forward, twining her fingers through the mesh divider. ‘You think I’m some drug dealer? Who do you think I learned it from?’
‘If I assure you that I don’t think you’re a drug dealer, only a dealer’s crack whore mule, will you get out of my car?’
The insult didn’t seem to register. ‘Who do you think I learned it from? Marty, that’s who.’
She flopped back against the upholstery, face flushed, secure in her fait accompli.
‘Pull over,’ Frank said when Angela kept driving.
‘We are investigating his death,’ his partner pointed out, playing the good cop with a subtlety worthy of Hollywood. ‘Marty dealt drugs?’
‘Yeah,’ Lily confirmed, nodding for emphasis. ‘Yes.’
‘When? Back in college?’ Frank guessed.
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he sell? Pot? Crack?’
‘Meth,’ she said. ‘And we didn’t just sell it. We made it.’
Frank tried to picture Lily peering into a glass flask over a Bunsen burner. The mesh barrier diffused the look of her face just enough to suggest the college student she had once been, but only just. ‘You cooked meth.’
The disbelief in his tone apparently stung her. ‘Yes. No – I mean, I didn’t cook it. Neither did Marty.’
‘Make up your mind, Lily, are you going to tell us or not? The statute of limitations on a few crystals of meth ran out long ago.’
‘How about murder? What’s the time limit on that?’
The word hung there for a moment while Frank considered how much more of his day he wanted to spend on Lily�
�s history, which, he suspected, gave the term revisionist a new dimension. ‘Is meth what you smoked before walking into the Justice Center, which, by the way, is full of the people who are supposed to arrest people like you?’
‘Why are you harassing me?’
‘Lily, your pupils are dancing around like dust motes in a breeze. Besides, you jumped into my car, remember?’
She scowled for a moment, but the drugs wouldn’t let her stop talking. ‘We didn’t do the actual cooking. That was two other guys. You had to be, like, a chemist to do that. It was complicated. It stunk, too.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Frank had spent a short stint in Vice and knew the rudiments of meth labs. The process usually began with cold relief tablets and from there took a variety of routes, which all used solvents like acetone, methanol, benzene or ether. These flammable compounds would be heated, cooled, filtered and heated again, making for an extremely combustible atmosphere. And they did stink. Frank loathed meth labs.
‘But we were sort of a team. We all had a job. How do you think we could afford to be there at all, Mummy and Daddy? I don’t think so. Mine helped me a little but Marty had been on his own since he was, like, twelve.’
‘And what was your role in this operation?’
Lily rubbed her lips, pulling them out of shape, obviously wondering if she should shut up now. ‘I made deliveries.’
‘You were a mule. So not much has changed?’ He expected her to snap at that but she didn’t have an answer, merely bounced on the upholstery so that her foot slipped and she kicked the back of his seat. Apparently not much had changed. ‘What was Marty’s job?’
‘We were kids, you know? So we’d sell to our friends and let them owe us the money. Only if they didn’t pay, well, we couldn’t let that go on.’
They drove past the Plain Dealer building. ‘So Marty enforced your business relationship?’
‘Yeah. He never hurt anyone, really. Not bad. He’d threaten them and they’d pay up. He had more muscle than fat, then.’
‘Where did you do all this cooking?’ Angela asked.
‘I told you, I didn’t do it.’
‘Where?’
‘In the – place we rented.’
‘And who else worked for this little company of yours?’
Lily rubbed her arms, though even her threadbare sweatshirt should have kept her warm enough inside the car. ‘You don’t need to know that.’
Frank gave his partner an exasperated look as they crossed East Ninth. ‘Fine. But at least tell me this: how is a sideline from Marty’s college days going to help us figure out who killed him this past Monday?’
‘The sins of the past,’ Lily intoned.
‘What’s that, the title of a book you read? You got any other information about Marty, maybe something more current? Because I have a hard time believing someone would kill him over a twenty-year-old drug deal. How about that murder you mentioned?’
Now Lily clamped her arms around her and pushed herself into the seat back as if trying to disappear. ‘Never mind about that.’
‘You brought it up.’
‘Yeah, I shouldn’t have. Let me out.’
‘We’re cops, Lily. If you mention a murder, we’re obligated to investigate same.’
‘It’s nothing, forget it. I made it up.’
‘Make up your mind. It’s nothing, or you made it up?’
‘I was just trying to get a ride.’
‘And now you don’t want one?’
‘No!’ She set on the door handle with both hands, pushing and pulling, shading from hyperactive into manic. ‘Let me out.’
Frank couldn’t resist the urge to screw with her. ‘If you have knowledge of a crime, we’re obligated to hang on to you.’
‘Forget it, OK? There was no murder! I made it up. Now let me out.’
Without discussion Angela pulled to the curb, in front of the silver dome of the Cleveland State planetarium. Frank got out, still feeling each abrasion on his legs and arms, and opened the back door. ‘And here we are back at the scene of your college days, Lily. Maybe you can raise the ghosts of your old customers and ask them if they killed Marty.’
She burst from the car nearly as fast as a champagne cork but without the happy pop. ‘Asshole,’ she told him, before stomping down the sidewalk, moving east, retracing their route. She did not look back.
He shut the rear door and slipped back into the passenger seat, feeling suddenly weary. ‘At least it got her out of the car,’ he said to Angela.
She shifted into drive. ‘Finally.’
NINE
Theresa settled down with the samples she had removed from Nairit Kadam – actually the slivers of samples she had retained before turning the larger remaining amounts over to the nicely dressed federal agents – after setting up the scanning electron microscope to analyze the week’s gunshot residue cases and completing the fiber comparison in a rape case. She had also written up the clothing descriptions for all the explosion victims, such as they were, since the clothing of those people closer to the epicenter, like Nairit, had either burned or melted off. This limited her descriptive abilities.
Now she opened an envelope she had labeled with a Sharpie, noting Nairit Kadam’s case number and ‘left shin’, ‘shin’ sounding more pleasant than ‘stump’. She tried to keep her notes PC and somewhat gentle, for fear of finding herself on the witness stand trying to explain the use of the phrase ‘cat-puke yellow’ to describe a piece of evidence. Attorneys leapt on any sign of humanness as a sign of incompetence.
Under the stereomicroscope, which functioned as a large, high-powered magnifying glass, she examined the paper-thin piece of fabric. Its fibers were unusually thin as well, and coated in black tar from the explosion. Even this tiny scrap brought a faint whiff of iodine to her nose. She pulled off a few fibers and washed them, first in soapy water and then in xylene, almost losing them entirely when the liquid made them hard to see. Then she let the xylene evaporate. She did all this while breathing shallowly, lest an errant breath shoot her fibers into the wild blue yonder to be lost forever along the lab’s worn linoleum.
Finally they were ready to analyze. Now the real fun began, as she tried to hold down one end of the fiber with tweezers and roll up and down the length of it, from the loose end, with a small metal roller. The fiber stuck to the roller at will, then let go of it again, so that even once nicely flattened it would get bunched up under the roller and wind up a wadded-up mess. Then she had to transfer it to a round, clear disk of potassium bromide about one centimeter in diameter and repeat the rolling motion, trying to get the fiber flat against the ‘window’ without scratching the soft salt disk with the metal roller – or, heaven forbid, breaking it. They cost well over a hundred dollars apiece and Leo would have a mild conniption if she ordered another one before the end of the quarter. So she worked with the fiber until it gave up and lay flat, and carefully picked up the window and dropped it into its slot on the infrared spectrometer’s stage. All the while breathing very, very lightly. Only when she told the computer what to do and it sent a beam of light through the fiber did she take a deep breath, but still held it until the spectra appeared on the monitor.
Fibers could be a painfully annoying analysis, but they were not her least favorite task – they still had more variety and color than hairs.
The fiber’s spectra turned out to be quite ordinary, a type of polyethylene.
‘What’s up?’ Don hitched himself up on her workbench, his long legs dangling over her cabinets.
‘Don’t move, and don’t breathe too much.’
‘That’s why I love coming to visit you. I always get such a friendly welcome.’
‘You’re breathing.’
‘Duly noted.’ Determining someone’s DNA markers from bodily samples involved periods of waiting, during which Don would inevitably seek her out. He had made this even more of a habit in the past few days. Unlike Leo, Don did care about her emotional health.
Unfortunately she did not have such a free period at the same time. ‘These are samples from the explosion suspect. Possible suspect.’
‘I thought the Feds took the samples.’
‘They did.’
‘You naughty girl. So what is it?’
‘Nothing exciting, just olefin.’
‘And that is?’
‘It makes excellent carpet – really stain resistant. I don’t think it’s used in clothing too often.’
‘So it’s carpet. Place blows up, the fiber sticks to him.’
‘Who carpets a storage room, especially in white carpet? And it’s awfully thin.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t in the storage room at the time. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with this explosion at all and we’re all rushing to the profile a little too fast.’ Don, half black and half Hispanic, knew all about profiling.
‘Could be.’
‘Or he set the charges and thought he’d get out of the building a lot faster than he did. Or the carpeting fell on him from another floor in the midst of the fireball. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m glad the Feds have this one.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and no.’
Excavations continued at the Bingham building. In the next twenty-four hours they expected to reach sublevel two. Once that occurred Theresa would put in hours non-stop until all the M.E. office’s warehoused evidence could be accounted for. The Feds expected this to be tomorrow, so Theresa figured to spend one more evening at leisure and then get a good night’s sleep before she gave up both for an indefinite period. Her exciting evening plans consisted of a meeting of the alumni board of her Alma Mater, Cleveland State. Normally she would have claimed emotional trauma to get out of it, but tonight’s meeting would be held at the Lambert edifice and feature a tour, not to mention wine and appetizers, which made it the most appealing invitation she’d had all month. Her social life, she told herself while parking the car in the sprawling lot, left something to be desired.
But it couldn’t be helped. She had joined the alumni’s Futures Committee while in a funk of Empty Nest combined with a touch of Dead Fiancé, when her mother kept nagging her to get out of the house and even the dog had taken to gazing at her reproachfully. The Futures Committee had been formed to investigate ways to make the university more energy efficient. Simply trying to heat and cool the sprawling complex of buildings in any sort of logical, centralized way presented a challenge. Classrooms could not always be matched to the expected class size, so that rooms were under-or over-utilized. The rising costs of natural gas had not helped. But questions of efficiency always appealed to Theresa’s orderly soul, and at least it got her out of the house.
