The Weeping Buddha
Page 28
“Tom Hurley wrote it,” Alex told him. “Devon was complaining about him yesterday at brunch. He could have tailed her.”
Or the murderer could have called him and let him know about the body after finding Devon in Gabe’s building. Loch considered the possibilities.
“I knew Devon was up to something when we left her in Chinatown,” Alex was saying, as they followed her through her modest but comfortable home. “I should have stuck around. It would have been more interesting than the jitney ride home.” Then, without prompting, she pulled out a white stub. “Here’s my ticket. So you know I was on the bus when Edilio was murdered.”
He took her ticket and made a mental note that she seemed unaware that Ferraro had died a week earlier. At least the article did not have all the details; maybe the leak had not come from NYPD. Maybe Tom Hurley was receiving phone calls about the crimes from an anonymous source. If he was, that source could very well be the murderer. He motioned for Gary to come closer and whispered in his ear that he wanted him to contact Hurley now. Gary excused himself and went outside.
“Okay then,” Alex began. “Let’s see, New Year’s Eve I was at Nick Toni’s for dinner and drinks with a few of my colleagues. I’ll write down their names and numbers for you; I have plenty of alibis at the restaurant. I’m well-known there.” She stopped.
“Where were you last Tuesday? We’ll need an accounting for most of the day,” Lochwood said.
“Whew, let’s see. Tuesday …” She opened her palm pilot and began to punch in something on the tiny keypad. “I had an appointment in the city at Widow Productions on Fifty-ninth Street. It was a budget meeting, all day. We ate at Café des Artistes, a two-hour business lunch, and wrapped it up about four. I took the five o’clock jitney back, got caught in traffic, and home around eight. She pulled out another ticket stub and handed it to Loch—the date and time corresponded with the ticket, and she had paid with a credit card so it was more than likely she had been on the bus.
She smiled at Loch and flopped back into a wingback chair. The entire room was decorated in black or white—there were no neutral tones anywhere. He looked up at a pair of astonishingly large oil paintings, one over the couch and one over the fireplace. There were several sculptures and a few smaller paintings.
“No one saw me after I got home,” she confessed. “I watched some TV—I don’t know what—then I watched Law and Order on AE. I love that show. Does that work for an alibi?”
“Are these Montebellos?”
She looked at the walls and nodded. “I’m a collector.”
Gary stepped back into the room and handed Loch a slip of paper that read, “Hurley got an anonymous tip. Marders already talked to him.”
Loch was more than a little steamed that Marders had not kept him in the loop, especially when it involved the press, and could not recall what he had just asked Alexandra Parnel.
“I’m developing a new show. A cop show.” She leaned back and looked at both of them. “Devon inspired it, but it would be great to put you and her together.”
“Just what we need—another cop show that doesn’t know crap about police work.” Loch did not approve.
“Facts don’t matter as much as story,” she informed him.
“Facts make the story.”
“Want to be a consultant? I could pay you three times what you’re making now.”
“But I wouldn’t have the joy of busting criminals.”
“Is that why you do it? I’ve always wondered.” She motioned for them to sit while punching something else into her palm pilot.
Lochwood wondered if he’d just helped her develop her character and felt even more uneasy.
“So, you like being one of the good guys?” Loch did not answer. She made herself comfortable in an oversized couch, put her palm pilot down, and held up her hands in mock surrender. “Okay, enough banter. Ask your questions.”
“You’ve answered most of them, except why do you think someone would want to kill Beka, Gabe, and Edilio?”
“I assume from your question that Beka is no longer the primary suspect?”
“We’re reserving our judgment.” Lochwood wasn’t about to share any information with her.
“Ah, well … Offhand, I can’t think of any reason someone would want to kill them. Beka was in the middle of a lawsuit with the Pilates people, but I don’t know that that was a reason for murder. And I don’t know why Gabe would have been a victim in any crime.”
“This is the first we’ve heard of a lawsuit.”
“Yeah, the exercise technique was named after the guy who created it but the name was never copyrighted. A few years ago somebody bought the copyright to the name and has been trying to get studios that were already in business to pay him a fee for using the name. Beka headed up a countersuit to retain rights to use the Pilates name, stating that it was synonymous with the type of exercise. Sort of like how Cuisinart can’t be separated from the food processor, Pilates can’t be separated from the technique.”
“Interesting, but we’re looking for someone who had access to Beka and Gabe’s building, as well as a motive for murder.”
She stood up, walked across the room, and reached her hand into a pot. “You’d better check the lot of us, then.” She tossed the key through the air. Gary reached out and caught it before it could land on the coffee table.
“Good catch, detective! Beka gave those to me a few years ago in case I ever needed a place to crash in the city. Maddie has one, Sam may. She never gave one to Katiti—they didn’t like each other—but Josh probably has one from before he married Katiti.”
“What about Godwyn?”
“He used to live there, and Gabe never changed locks.”
“Edilio?
“Definitely. They rehearsed upstairs all the time.”
Could Edilio have brought someone who did not have keys into the building? Loch briefly wondered. But the door to the building was locked when Devon arrived, and there had been keys in Edilio’s pocket when they found the body. That meant their murderer must have keys.
Alex looked at her watch and announced, “My break is over, guys. I have to get back to work.” She pressed play on the remote control in her hand. The big-screen TV across the room suddenly filled with the video version of “The Weeping Buddha.” Beka, always ageless, was almost soaring through the air with the help of ropes woven above her head that created the set Gabe had designed. Her long black hair trailed after her, sweeping around her shoulders and waist as her legs once more took flight.
“A little grainy—processing and tape quality has improved so much since then,” Alex reflected. “We’re going to digitize it. I’ve been on the phone all morning with PBS; they’re going to run a retrospective on her work. I just made the deal to edit the program. It’s my epitaph to her.”
Loch watched as Beka’s body seemed to hang in the air. Gary leaned forward to watch the dancer.
“How could anyone hurt such light?” she murmured. Tears streamed down her face. “Catch who ever did this. Please, get them—she wasn’t just Gabe’s muse. She was mine.”
“One last question.” Loch interrupted her reverie. Alex pressed pause again. “How much money do you think your art collection is worth now?”
“Enough to finance a small film.” She pressed play and turned her attention back to the screen. The music swelled as Beka became airborne above the stage. Loch watched for a moment, then left the house without Alex bothering to show them the door.
Lochwood began fuming as soon as he and Gary stepped outside. “Fucking Marders!” He slammed his fist onto the roof of the car.
“Hey, it’s not like we’re being open and honest with him.”
Loch glared at his partner, then laughed. “We’ll beat him at his own game.” He dialed Marders’s office. “So, what you got on Hurley?”
“He used to go to school with your girlfriend. She leak this news to him?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Did you trace the call?”
“A payphone on Canal Street, a block from Montebello’s building.”
“Any prints?”
“Lots of them, but no one who uses a voice box to disguise her voice is going to be stupid enough to forget gloves.”
“You sure it’s a woman?”
“No, the bitch had a box. But your girlfriend is the only one who knew about his body.”
“Except for the murderer.”
“The murderer is dead,” Marders snarled.
Lochwood hung up the phone.
Devon held her breath as the fax came out of the machine.
“What’s it say?” Frank asked impatiently from over her shoulder.
“I don’t know yet.” It seemed to be taking forever. Finally, the second page came out. Isshu wrote that he could not be sure if he had rendered the ideograms correctly, but it was a line from a poem attached to a koan that had been written by Setcho Juken in the year 1000—“Will the clear pool reflect, cold?”
Isshu had sent the entire verse to Devon and she read it out loud for Frank to hear:
When the frosty heaven’s moon has set
And midnight nears
Whose shadow with mine
Will the clear pool reflect, cold?
Isshu had gone on to say this came from the nanto koans, or the very difficult koans. And the verse was written in response to the koan, “When men of today look at this flower, it seems to them like a dream.”
It certainly seemed like a dream, the deaths of yesteryear and the deaths of yesterday. She was about to call Loch to give him the good news, then paused; was a serial killer ever good news?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The dragon-hum in the dead tree, the eyeball in the dry skull.
—ZEN PHRASE
Josh and Katiti Shapiro’s house was not one of the great East Hampton homes. In fact, it wasn’t even one of the old refurbished barns that were so popular now—theirs was a brand-spanking-new domicile that smelled of new money and even newer carpeting. From first glance, Loch guessed they’d lived in it for one summer season. They received the detectives at the door, a little less gracefully than Lochwood would have expected from a respected physician and his wife. Loch and Gary introduced themselves and were semi-cordially shown into the living room. “I don’t know how we can help you detectives, but we’re willing to try,” Josh assured them.
For Lochwood, that statement alone had come to be a cliché suggesting guilt.
“You’re here about Beka and Gabe, no doubt.” Josh gestured to a leather divan that was the color of honey butter and remarkably close to his wife’s skin tone. In fact, the whole house seemed colorcoordinated.
“Did you know Edilio Ferraro?” Gary began the questioning while Loch took notes.
Josh was studying Lochwood. “Are you Devon’s friend? I think she mentioned you yesterday.”
“I work with Detective Halsey,” Loch affirmed without further comment; he did not appreciate the doctor’s lack of discretion in a professional situation and doubted whether Devon had said anything about him. “Now, about Edilio?”
“We haven’t seen each other much in the past ten years—even though we all live out here.”
“You’ve been out here for ten years?” Loch asked, surprised.
“Well, we rented first. Not everyone is as lucky as Devon to inherit property in Sag Harbor,” Katiti informed them. “She’s not south of the highway, of course, but when her parents die she’ll get the proverbial farm and a house in Sag Harbor. It’s enough to hate her, but we don’t! We love Devon. Of course, you know, we never saw Beka much. We moved in different social circles.”
Loch wondered which circle was the snootier and decided they must be tied. Katiti fidgeted in her chair and crossed her leg up under her body. Loch recalled that she was a dancer, like Beka, and wondered where she exercised when they weren’t in the city. “How about you, Mrs. Shapiro? You were a dancer. Did you know Edilio?”
“Ms. French—I kept my professional name. And no, I did not know Edilio professionally. I know who he is, of course.”
“Of course.” Loch didn’t know why she said of course but he wanted to make her feel at ease. Dancers always thought everyone knew who they were. “And you knew Beka professionally?”
“I knew her through Josh, but she’s older than me and was fairly established in her career by the time we met.”
“My wife and Beka had a healthy rivalry,” Josh added. Katiti’s eyes flashed angrily at him.
“Too many divas spoil the party?” Gary asked. Neither Katiti nor Josh laughed.
“Why are you asking about Edilio, detective? Has something happened?” Josh asked.
So clever, Lochwood thought to himself, as if we wouldn’t notice his attempt to take the attention from Katiti. He hated the clever ones and ignored Josh’s question by asking his own. “How tall are you, Dr. Shapiro?”
Loch had caught him in mid-slouch and Josh sat upright before answering. “Five foot nine and a half,” he said a little too emphatically, and from the bemused look on his wife’s face, Lochwood knew he had exaggerated, probably by a whole inch. Josh pushed his fingers through a mass of curls atop his head at the same moment as Katiti did the same, and Loch wondered who had moved first. They were almost like puppets, and from their interaction, it was pretty clear who was the puppeteer.
“So, you two came back here last night?” Loch handled the redirect as he and Gary volleyed their questions at the couple, almost more interested in who answered and how than in what was said.
“Actually, we stayed in the city last night and came home this afternoon,” Katiti answered. “Josh took the week off so we could just relax in the country.”
“In the winter?” Loch wondered aloud.
“Is where we were last night important, detective?”
“Could be. Did you see anybody while you were in the city?”
“Not after we left Chinatown. Alex came back out here on the jitney with Sam, and Maddie and Godwyn went off together …”
“Like they used to,” Katiti added cattily.
It was interesting how they took turns tag-teaming the answers; Lochwood made a scribble on his notepad to see which one of them would notice and take the defensive. Josh did.
“Sweetheart, the detectives don’t need to know all the dirt from our collective pasts.”
“Isn’t that why they’re here? Beka loved to dredge it all up and throw it in our faces. You should have heard her last week! She blamed Josh for Todd’s disappearance. Said he didn’t look hard enough because—because he was tired.” Katiti began to massage her right foot.
“Beka called you last week?” Gary asked.
“She called everybody to make sure we were all coming to New Year’s brunch.”
“She didn’t mention going to Hawaii?”
“No, but that would be just like Beka to arrange a reunion brunch and then not show up. And I know it sounds rude, but that’s exactly what she did!”
Lochwood wanted to slap her, and except for the fact that she was so pretty, he could barely comprehend why Josh put up with her prima donna act. Prima donnas were a dime a dozen out on the East End; Josh could dump his wife and have another just like her in minutes. He watched her fidget with her toes and toss her curls from the right to the left shoulder, then said, “It sounds like you had a grudge against her.”
“She was jealous that I married Josh. She liked to think she had a special hold on all the boys from the loft.” Yeah right, thought Loch, as Katiti squeezed her husband’s knee.
“Is that true, Dr. Shapiro?” Gary chose to use Josh’s formal name. “Did Beka think she had a hold on you?”
“Only one woman has anything over me, detective, and you’re looking at her.” He smiled adoringly at his wife.
Loch thought he was going to be sic
k. What was this, Bad Acting 101? “For your information,” he began, “Beka, Gabe, and Edilio Ferraro are dead.”
“Edilio’s dead?” Katiti screeched.
Loch continued, “We’ll need to know your whereabouts on New Year’s Eve and last Tuesday.” He directed his next statement to Josh: “And I for one would like to know why you avoided telling the Missing Persons detectives about the second entrance you used into the loft back in 1984.”
“Excuse me?” Josh looked stupidly innocent.
“Detective Halsey’s been going over the transcription of Todd’s case and tells me you were less than forthright about the second loft entrance.”
“First of all, it wasn’t a legitimate loft entrance.” Aha, a doctor who can play the lawyer. “So I don’t see that I was actually lying to anyone about it then or now.”
“Nevertheless, it was a secret. Why?” Lochwood pushed him for an answer.
“We were at 75 Main for their New Year’s Eve celebration,” Katiti butted in. “A number of people there could identify us.”
“Excuse me?” Lochwood was not going to let her sidetrack his investigation.
“You asked where we were New Year’s Eve,” Katiti replied.
Loch chose to ignore her. “Doctor? I’m waiting.”
“It’s no big deal. Beka used to get followed home sometimes from performances and liked to use that entrance to get away from the weirdos. She’d sneak in the wrong way and then they wouldn’t know where she lived.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Is this off the record?”
“That depends.”
“Honey, don’t.” Katiti fidgeted. Her movements were like a barometer for Lochwood’s questions; the more uncomfortable she seemed, the closer he knew he was getting to some kind of truth.