by John Lutz
The sight of the purse filled Floyd with even more dread.
He made his way across the living room, down the hall, past the kitchen to the bedroom, and looked inside. He noticed immediately that, though the bedroom was dim, the bathroom light was on.
When he went to investigate he found his wife in the alcove between the bedroom and bathroom, where she had her mirrored vanity set up. She was sprawled on the floor, and at first he thought she’d possibly fainted. Prayed she’d fainted.
Then he saw the red letter J smeared on the vanity mirror with what looked like lipstick.
Nothing Bev would do.
He moved nearer, looked closer.
“Ah, Jesus! Bev!”
He leaned toward her to touch her, then realized he shouldn’t. And his right foot was planted in blood. His wife’s blood. He did lean forward slightly so he could see beneath her right arm that was raised so her hand was near her head. He could see darkness on her breasts, see the exit wound.
See into her!
Floyd stood up and staggered backward. He swallowed the bile that rose bitter in his throat, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth and chin. He realized his mouth was slightly open, his lips rigid. He licked his lips with a dry tongue and pressed them together.
Turning away from the horror, he made himself trudge back into the living room.
Must be a dream. Has to be…
He stood at the phone and slowly lifted the receiver.
The voice of the 911 operator from the outside world made it all real.
It wasn’t a dream; it was real. It would stay real.
The buzzer sounded. Beam went to the intercom and called down for confirmation that Corey and Looper were downstairs, then buzzed the two detectives up.
Not knowing quite what to expect, he stood with the apartment door open so they wouldn’t have to knock.
A short, slender woman wearing dark slacks and a rumpled gray blazer emerged from the elevator. She had dishwater blond hair combed back in a convenient rather than flattering hairdo. Her eyes were dark, her chin defiant. Her shoes were black and sensible, with low heels, and she walked with a slouchy kind of determination, as if with a certain slow eagerness she might be heading toward a fight.
She was followed by a tall, sallow man in a suit that didn’t fit his angular body. Beam thought it was a fairly expensive and well cut suit—it was the body that was the problem. Looper was built like a mannequin assembled from spare parts. He looked a little like an awkward Fred Astaire, or maybe that was because Beam knew his first name was Fred.
They did the introductions. Both detectives looked Beam in the eye as they shook hands. He noticed that Nell Corey’s hair had dark roots. Looper was holding the murder files tucked beneath his left arm, thick brown folders, each fastened with cord over a metal clasp.
“Want something to drink while we talk this over?” Beam asked.
Looper declined.
“Bottled water, if you’ve got some,” Nell said.
Beam excused himself, got her a bottle of Zephyr Hills from the refrigerator, then returned to usher the two detectives into his den. One of them smelled strongly of peppermint—Looper, Beam thought. He wondered if the man was covering for a drinking habit.
When they were seated, he saw how Looper, in the leather chair, glanced around to see if there were any ashtrays. Then he noticed the detective’s yellow-stained index and middle finger on his right hand. Not a drinker, a smoker. And if Beam was any judge, badly in need of a cigarette.
Beam, who enjoyed an occasional cigar, started to open a drawer to get out an ashtray, then paused. “Mind if we smoke?” he asked Nell.
“Tell you the truth, I do.”
Looper shot her an annoyed look.
Beam smiled and pushed the drawer closed. “Okay. We can save it for outside.”
Looper leaned forward and laid the murder files on Beam’s desk. “Your copies,” he said. “We each have ours.”
“You’ve studied them?” Beam asked.
Both detectives nodded.
“And?”
Nell spoke up first. “Same gun, same letter J.”
“An anti-Semite killer?” Beam asked.
She surprised him. “I don’t think so. It’s too much of a stretch.”
“I agree,” Beam said.
She swallowed, nervous, as if about to take a plunge. “I was up late working my computer,” she said, “checking into various databases. There’s something stronger linking these victims, something that can’t be coincidental. At one time or other, they all served as jury forepersons in the city of New York.” She glanced at her partner. “I already filled Loop in on this.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any other common denominator among the victims,” Looper said, coming to her defense. “Different parts of town, different occupations, different circles of friends and acquaintances, different sexes.”
“There’s something the juries they presided over had in common, though,” Nell said. “In all the cases, the defendants were almost certainly guilty but got off.”
“Were any of the prosecutors or defense attorneys the same?” Beam asked.
“Nope,” said the blond woman with dark roots, now with a certain confidence. Beam was taking her seriously, buying into her theory.
“Anybody Jewish in all this?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” Nell said. “What you’d expect in New York, a royal mix. And some of the trials were years apart. The most recent was last year, the one longest ago happened…” She leaned forward to pick up one of the files and refresh her memory.
“Six years ago,” Looper said.
Nell sat back and took a swig of Zephyr Hills.
Beam leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So whaddya think?”
“Serial killer, obviously,” Looper said. His hand went to his shirt pocket, then quickly withdrew. Smoker’s arm. “He doesn’t seem to have a hard-on about the defendants, though; it’s the juries that set him off, especially the jury forepersons.”
“The jurors are the ones responsible for the defendants going free,” Nell pointed out. “And if you had to hang it on any one of them, it would be the foreperson.”
“So it’s the system our killer doesn’t like,” Beam said.
“You could say that,” Nell told him, “unless there’s a common thread we haven’t discovered yet.”
“What about a common thread connecting the freed defendants?”
Nell and Looper glanced at each other.
Looper emitted a volley of hoarse coughs, raising a yellowed finger to implore Nell and Beam to be patient. Each time he coughed, the scent of peppermint wafted across the desk.
Finally he stopped coughing, cleared his throat twice, and swallowed phlegm before trusting himself to speak. “The defendants: One wife killer; one gang member making his bones by shooting three people in a diner; one kidnapper-torturer who did a twenty-year-old NYU student.”
“Female student?” Beam asked.
“Yeah. The victims are three females and two males. Females are the dead wife and dead student. And of the three victims in the diner shooting, one was a woman.”
“So by way of defendants who got lucky and walked,” Nell said, “we got a jealous husband killed his wife, a gangbanger trying to impress his peers, and a sex maniac who liked college girls. Not much in common among defendants.”
“Except that they went free,” Beam said.
“Not for the same reasons. The gangbanger had a phony alibi that couldn’t be disproved, the sex maniac hadn’t been sufficiently informed of his rights, the wife killer simply got off even though the evidence against him was overwhelming.”
“So they all should have been convicted,” Beam said.
Nell took another swig of bottled water. “Read the court transcripts and you’d have to say that.”
Beam unlaced his fingers and sat forward, causing his swivel chair to squeak. “What we’re go
nna do,” he said, “is pore over these murder files again—I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. Then we’ll revisit the crime scenes, talk again to witnesses, go over ground already covered, see if anybody’s memory can be jogged.” He looked at Looper. “You say it was the same gun used in all three murders, so what do we know about it?”
“Thirty-two caliber. That’s about all they can tell about it so far, with just the slugs to work from. No ejected cartridges were found.”
“So he cleans up after himself. What about the possibility of him being a professional?”
“Maybe,” Nell said, “except for his choice of victims and that red letter J he always leaves at the scene. That’s not very professional.”
“J for justice?” Beam asked.
“That’s what we both figure. Or maybe Judgment.”
“Most logical thing,” Looper said. “We figure it’s Justice.”
“Our guy hates the justice system,” Nell said, “but loves justice too much.”
“Yet he doesn’t hit the obviously guilty defendants who got off,” Looper said, playing with his shirt pocket again in search of phantom cigarettes.
“That would be the prosecutor’s job,” Beam said. “Retry them if possible. Nail them on a different charge. Don’t let them walk.”
“But they do walk. The cops, the prosecutors have moved on and are too busy worrying about the present and future to be able to reconstruct and repair the past. Crimes keep getting committed. Other assholes are moving through the system.”
“It’s the system that he hates,” Nell reiterated.
“So?” Beam stared at her, smiling, waiting.
She began to squirm, then suddenly sat still and gave him a level, appraising look, appreciative of the fact that he’d gotten there ahead of her. “He’s trying to change the system.”
Nobody spoke for a few moments.
“Could be,” Looper said finally. “Could very well be.”
“We can’t assume it yet,” Beam said, “but—”
He was interrupted by the phone chirping on his desk.
When he lifted the receiver and identified himself, he was surprised to hear da Vinci’s voice:
“Corey and Looper there yet?”
“Yeah. We were just discussing things.”
“You’ve got another one to discuss, Beam. Upper West Side, not far from your place. The letter J is written in lipstick on a mirror this time.”
“Shot to death?”
“That’s the preliminary.
“Got an address?”
Da Vinci gave it to him, in an area of apartment buildings and townhouses about five blocks away. “Uniforms have got the scene frozen. CSI unit is on the way.”
“So are we,” Beam said.
9
“The victim, Beverly Baker, worked as sales manager at Light and Shade Lamp Emporium on the West Side, not far from her apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street. Hubby Floyd returned from a golf outing with his buddies about five thirty—forty-five minutes ago—and found her dead body.”
So said the uniform guarding the Bakers’ apartment door, a young guy named Mansolaro. He had an improbably long chin, would always need a shave, and looked vaguely familiar to Beam. Looper seemed to know him.
“That hubby in the living room?” Beam asked, noticing beyond Mansolaro, in the apartment, a smallish, plump man in plaid slacks and a white golf shirt, seated slumped forward on a maroon sofa.
Mansolaro nodded. “One Floyd Baker.”
As if there were a two Floyd Baker, Beam thought. He’d been away from cop talk long enough that some of it struck his ear wrong.
“Floyd was gone all day,” Mansolaro continued, “out on the links with his fellow hackers.”
“With his alibi,” Looper said.
“And not a bad one,” Mansolaro said. “He came back, found his wife’s body, and called 911. Me and my partner Al caught the complaint and got here almost immediately after the call.”
“You go right in?” Beam asked.
“Floyd Baker met us at the door, looked like he’d been crying, and led us to the body. Swore he never touched anything, just like he learned on Law and Order. I saw the big letter J on the mirror near where the victim must have been sitting, so me and Al froze the scene immediately and called it in as an obvious homicide.”
“Where’s Al?”
“Downstairs manning the lobby. He told the doorman to stick around, we were gonna talk to him.”
“Excellent,” Beam said, and Mansolaro sort of puffed up. It impressed Nell, what some of her fellow cops obviously thought of Beam. Maybe this odd-ends investigative team would work out. Maybe something positive would come of it beyond capturing or killing whoever was murdering these people.
“Crime scene unit’s inside, along with an assistant ME,” Mansolaro said. He glanced at his watch, anticipating Beam’s next question. “They been here about twenty minutes.”
“Get the neighbors’ statements,” Beam said to Nell and Looper. “Somebody probably heard the shot, even if they thought the noise was something else. We might be able to determine time of death.”
He patted Mansolaro gently on the shoulder in passing, a gesture of approval, as he moved into the apartment.
Another uniform was standing near a fake fireplace—the kind that had a red light in it that was supposed to look like glowing embers—with his arms crossed. Beam nodded to him, and nodded to the distraught man on the sofa. The man on the sofa didn’t nod back, merely gave Beam a distracted, agonized glance.
Beam went into the bedroom, where most of the action was taking place. Crime Scene personnel wearing plastic gloves were standing, bending, reaching, down on hands and knees, searching. They were examining, luminoling, placing minute objects in evidence bags as if they’d found rare and extravagantly expensive gems. And what they found could be extravagantly expensive. It could be life and death.
Beam noticed a high-heeled shoe, a woman’s foot and ankle, and beyond it the open door to a tiled bathroom. When he moved forward a few careful steps, he saw that the victim’s body was in an alcove between bedroom and bathroom.
There was a lot of blood on the carpeted floor. Beverly Baker was sprawled awkwardly on her back, and had apparently fallen from a small upholstered chair that had tipped over. The chair was covered with a cheery floral design that was a mismatch with the ugliness of the event, except for the hole in the material that was stretched across the curved back support.
A little man in a black suit was bending over the dead woman with an intensity that suggested he was making love to her. As soon as Beam saw his balding head, with the thatch of gray hair that stood almost straight up in front, he knew who he was. Assistant ME Irv Minskoff, one of the best at his job.
Minskoff sensed his presence and glanced up. His face had a fiercely gnarled look to it, softened somewhat by thick lensed glasses. “Ah, Beam. I heard you were on this one.”
“Good to see you, Irv. What’ve we got so far?”
“Dead since morning, done sometime between seven and ten o’clock. Shot once. Bullet went in the right side of her back, probably angled in and caught her heart. I’ll know a lot more when I get in there.”
“Looks like a thirty-two caliber.”
“Be my guess, too. Can’t say for sure, since the slug they dug out of the wall’s so misshapen. But before it went through the victim, the bullet went through the back of the chair, and the hole in the underlying wood looks like it was made by a thirty-two.”
“Slug must have been misshapen before it hit her,” Beam said, looking at the vast and ugly exit wound. He could imagine the kinetic force of the distorted bullet slamming through the woman’s slender body. His gaze took in her exposed shapely legs, slender waist, strong features. She must have been vital and attractive before the bullet. He noticed her mouth was smeared red in an obscenely crooked grin despite her horrified eyes. The smear wasn’t quite blood red. It was the same color as the letter J scraw
led on the mirror of a small vanity cluttered with cosmetics.
“Nice legs,” Minskoff said.
“Gonna mention that in the post-mortem?”
Minskoff gave him a gnarly look.
“Shot while putting on her lipstick?” Beam asked.
“Or surprised by whoever she must have seen in the mirror. Caused her hand to jerk, then she was shot.”
And almost immediately, Beam thought. It appeared that Beverly Baker hadn’t had time to stand up.
Minskoff must have known what he was thinking. “Entry wound is about where it would have been if she’d been sitting all the way down on her little tush in her little chair, so maybe she did die while applying her lipstick. Could be she was so shocked by seeing her assailant in the mirror, her body gave a little start, then she was paralyzed.”
“As if maybe she saw somebody she trusted standing there with a gun pointed at her,” Beam said. “Somebody like hubby.”
“Hubby’s always enticing in these kinds of cases,” Minskoff agreed. “But then there’s that letter lipsticked on the mirror. My guess is the lipstick tube won’t reveal the fingerprints of the victim—or the killer, though I’m sure the killer wrote with it. This woman died instantly, but even if she had time to leave or begin a dying message, if it meant anything incriminating, the killer would have simply made it illegible or removed it from the mirror.”
“So Detective Minskoff is sure it was the killer who wrote on the mirror.”
Minskoff grinned, embarrassed. “Just trying to help, not play detective. But, yes, I am sure.”
“Always the possibility of a copycat killer.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for hairballs,” Minskoff said.
Beam figured it was time to stop speculating and talk to Floyd Baker.
10
While Nell and Looper made the rounds of neighbors and doorman, Beam sat on the living room sofa with Floyd.
At both ends of the sofa were low tables supporting ornate brass lamps with long, cream-colored fringed shades. While the rest of the furniture was unremarkable, the lamps looked like collectors’ pieces.
