To Kill Upon A Kiss: Dead Cold Mystery 10

by Blake Banner

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “So she went to Teddy’s to party with this guy.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Did she come back?”

  She sat up straight, wide-eyed. “Yes! Of course!”

  Dehan spoke to the pad as she was writing. “But you two were kind of tense, right?”

  Pam shrugged and sighed. “She came back at two AM, smelling of booze, giggling and making a noise, bumping into things… I guess it could have been funny, but it made me mad.”

  I knew where Dehan was going, because I was headed to the same place. I said, “So in the morning you were not on really good terms.”

  She shook her head.

  “You dropped her at the bus station but you didn’t have coffee and you didn’t see her on to the bus.”

  She went very still. After a moment she said, “She told me she didn’t want me to stay. I was already mad that she had wanted to hang out with that dork instead of with me, her friend, and when she said that, I just dumped her bag on the sidewalk, turned around and went home.”

  We were quiet for a long moment. Finally I said, “When she disappeared, you felt guilty. You felt people would blame you for letting her go alone to the bar, and above all for not staying with her until she got on the bus. So you lied.”

  She took a handkerchief from her pocket, blew her nose and dabbed her eyes. It was the only indication that she was crying. “I felt so ashamed. She was my best friend, and a fit of stupid jealousy… Who could have imagined that a small argument…” She trailed off, then looked at me. “How could I face her mother, look her in the eye?”

  Dehan laid down her pen and clasped her hands in front of her, as though she were praying. “Pam, do you appreciate how important this is?”

  Pam frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Has it occurred to you that Rosario, after meeting this guy at the bar, arranged to meet him again the next day? That she didn’t want you to stay at the bus station because she was not going to get on the bus, she was going to go and spend the day with the guy from the bar?”

  Pam’s pale skin turned even whiter. Her eyes stared and flooded with tears. She shook her head. “No. No, she wouldn’t do something like that. No, you’re wrong…”

  I sighed. “Pam, it’s not your fault. Nobody could possibly hold you responsible. She was an adult and she knew what she was doing. You were her friend, not her nanny. But we have reason to believe that this man may well be responsible for the deaths of three women. So it is really important that you try to remember everything you can about him; anything, the tiniest detail could prove crucial.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. Her voice came muffled, “Oh God, Rosario…” and she began to cry. It wasn’t now the restrained tears she had shown before, but the full, grotesque realization of what had happened to her friend. Dehan took her hand and held it in both of hers.

  “He’s right, Pam. Grieve for your friend, but you cannot blame yourself. If somebody hurt her, then the person who is responsible is the guy who did it. Help us to find him. Try to remember.”

  But she wept disconsolately for a full two minutes, and every time she tried to talk she dissolved in tears again. Eventually we had a car drive her home and she promised, among sobs, that she would think about it and see if anything came back to her. I didn’t hold out much hope.

  Downstairs I dropped into my chair and sat staring at the ceiling. Dehan rested her ass against the desk and looked down at me, chewing her lip. She said, “How did you know Rosario went to the bar alone on Friday?”

  “I didn’t, but it seemed a likely possibility. Pam was cramping her style and she wanted to know this guy.” I shrugged. “And let’s face it, somehow she wound up alone with the killer.”

  She tilted her head and made a face. “Good call.” Then she added, “It’s ten.”

  I nodded. “We’ll go and see Frank, give him the tooth and the hair.”

  “What do you think?”

  I rubbed my face with my hands. “If it’s him, if he’s our guy, our magnetic, charismatic Don Juan didn’t make much of an impact on Pam.”

  “She described him as average: just a guy.”

  I sighed. “Caucasian, average height, non-descript dark hair, jeans or similar, perhaps a pale shirt.” I snapped my fingers. “I just know I have seen that guy, somewhere. It was either in the States or in Europe.”

  “Could it be Wayne? Caucasian.” She gave her head a shake. “Dark hair…”

  “Wayne Harris is anything but nondescript. He’s six four if he’s an inch. He’s built like a barn door and he has presence. You know he’s there.”

  She nodded. “That’s true enough.”

  I frowned at her. “Is he attractive?”

  She looked surprised, then raised an eyebrow at me. “You getting jealous in your old age, Stone?”

  “No, I’m serious. Is he an attractive man? We are speculating that our guy has a kind of magnetic charisma, right?” I shrugged. “You’re a woman. Has Wayne got that kind of magnetism?”

  She thought about it as though I had asked her to contemplate vivisection. After a moment she shook her head. “You’re asking the wrong person. I detest guys like Wayne. He reminds me of Mick Harragan[1]. But I guess some women find that kind of dangerous, uncompromising guy exciting. He might lead them to take a risk, yeah.” She shook her head again. “But, Stone, much as I would love to pin this on Wayne, like you said yourself, he is hard to ignore, he is not nondescript, he has fair hair, and once again, why would he implicate himself by putting himself at the scene?”

  I nodded, sighed and shrugged. She was right, and I had no answer to her questions.

  She smiled without humor. “C’mon Sensei, let’s go talk to Frank. Then we can swing by Teddy’s, then my internal clock tells me it will be time for a burger and a beer—and a think.”

  I stood and grabbed my jacket. “Rittoo Glasshopper, you are growing wise beyond your years.”

  And we made our way out into the bright morning.

  SIX

  “My hands are full with the recently dead.”

  Frank made this statement without looking up as he lifted the liver out of a cadaver that lay folded open like a book, from sternum to groin.

  “Literally, not figuratively,” I said, frowning from the doorway into his chamber of horrors.

  “What do you want, John?”

  “Just for you to notice me once in a while, Frank. Is that too much to ask?”

  He nodded, squinting at the scales and made a note. “What does he want, Carmen? Please make him go away. I am overworked.”

  “DNA.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It gets worse,” I said, pulled one of the chairs from the bench and sat. “I think we have a serial killer. If we are right, his MO means he could have been operating for years without anybody noticing, and he could still be at large. It’s urgent. Very urgent.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then went and pulled the lungs out of the cadaver and weighed them too. Dehan placed the hairbrush and the tin with the tooth in it on his bench. “We need the DNA from these two samples, and then we need you to run them and see if they match any victims pulled from the river since May 2016.”

  He made a note of the weight of the lungs. “Is that all? You don’t need the name and address of the second shooter on the grassy knoll?”

  I shook my head. “Didn’t you hear? That wasn’t Kennedy in the car. It was his double. Kennedy was abducted by aliens from the twenty-third century.”

  He put the lungs and the liver back where they belonged and sighed heavily. “Do you know what my wife said to me last night when I got home? She said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ My kids had grown up and left home. I never knew.”

  He peeled off his gloves. I said, “He’s preying on young women, Frank. He rapes them and strangles them, then dumps them in the river.”

  “Everyone who gets murdered gets murdered, John. It’s alw
ays a bad thing. Where are the samples?” Dehan showed them to him. He nodded. “OK, label them for me. I’ll get to them just as soon as I can.” We stared at him without moving. He stared back, first at me, then at Dehan. “I’ll get to them just as soon as I can, today! I won’t have lunch. Happy?”

  I smiled. “You’re a good man, Frank. You deserve a better wife. One that hasn’t got Alzheimer’s.”

  Dehan shook her head and bent to label the samples. “That is so inappropriate, Stone.”

  Frank ignored me. “Don’t expect a report. I’ll run the results on my own time and give you a call if I get a match from the Jane Does. The official report will follow.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Now beat it and let me get on with my work.”

  We left him weighing organs and strolled out to where the Jag was sitting in a pool of dappled shade beneath a cluster of trees. There, I sat on the hood and phoned Rikers to make an appointment to see Wayne again. We fixed it for two o’clock that afternoon and took a slow drive down toward Zerega Avenue.

  Teddy’s Late Night Bar was on the corner of Zerega and Lafayette. It was a broad, one story building with an open parking lot on the Lafayette side. The door was open but the lights were off in the windows and the sign said closed, so I put the car in the lot and we climbed out and made our way around to the entrance. Dehan poked her head in the door while I had a look at the outside. It didn’t look like a clip joint or a dive. It looked like a respectable establishment.

  I heard Dehan shout, “Yo! You the owner?” I didn’t hear the reply, but after a moment she pulled out her badge and said, “NYPD, Detective Dehan,” and disappeared inside. I followed.

  It was a big, broad space with giant TV screens on the wall at one end and comfortable chairs and alcoves at the other, with a big, square bar in the middle. Right now it was dark and quiet with just one guy polishing glasses behind the bar. He was young, in his early twenties, tanned and blond. He was either from California or Australia. When he smiled and spoke I knew he was Australian, because he made everything sound like a question.

  “Hi, guys. Teddy’s not here right now? We don’t open for another four hours?”

  I smiled back. “Detective Stone. How long have you been working here?”

  “Oh, just like, six months.”

  “Anybody here who was around a couple of years ago?”

  He nodded. “Well, Teddy, obviously. And I think Crista? She cooks? You’d really have to ask them.”

  Dehan said, “You open at two?”

  “Yep.”

  “What time do you close?”

  He glanced from Dehan to me and back again, opened his mouth and just said, “Ahhh…”

  “We’re not vice. We’re not interested in Teddy’s license. We’re homicide detectives.”

  “Homicide?”

  “What time does he close?”

  He shrugged. “Well, it depends on the night? Monday to Wednesday we might close at two, or there abouts. Thursday is generally a bit later? But Friday and Saturday, between you, me and the fencepost, we sometimes don’t close till like four or five. This isn’t going to get me into trouble with Teddy, is it? I really need this job, guys.”

  I nodded. “Don’t worry about it. You’re fine.”

  We stepped back outside and I stood looking up and down the sidewalk. We were five hundred yards from where Angela had been raped and strangled. I had a man who claimed he could tell me who had done it, but I felt I was going in circles, beating my head against a brick wall with no openings in it, anywhere. I felt a small knot of frustration in my gut. Dehan came up beside me and put her hand on my shoulder. “What now?”

  “He’s playing us.”

  “Wayne?”

  I nodded.

  “Like rats in a maze, we go this way and that, but in the end we have to go the way he says.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.” She said it emphatically. “C’mon! We’ve seen him once! He told us nothing. How’s that playing us?”

  I nodded again, more, and more slowly. “And now we’re going to see him again, and he’ll tell us something: what he wants to tell us.”

  She slapped my shoulder. “Come on, big guy. We’ll go, grab an early lunch and talk to him. Between us we can outsmart this bozo.”

  * * *

  That bozo entered the interrogation room looking very smug and pleased with himself. He sat and smiled at Dehan while they cuffed him to the table. I showed the guard the coffee I had brought for him and said, “Can you leave his left hand free?”

  The guard shrugged. “Your call.”

  Wayne leered at Dehan and as the guards stepped out he said, “Couldn’t keep away, huh?”

  I pushed a large cappuccino across the table to him. “Start with your bullshit and Detective Dehan waits for me in the car.” I leaned forward, still holding the paper cup. “You feel me, dude?”

  He looked at me with dead eyes. I felt in that moment that I was seeing him for the first time. I knew he would kill me without hesitation and enjoy it. He leaned forward. “I feel you, dude.” He picked up the coffee and sipped. He smiled. “Good coffee. A man needs his pleasures, am I right?”

  “OK, you got your coffee. The cigar and the fresh air will cost you more than just proving to me that you were there. For a start, how do I know you didn’t kill Angela yourself? I have to tell you that right now you are our prime suspect.”

  He looked at Dehan and smiled. “Oh, c’mon, baby. Me? You should know I am a tender and thoughtful lover. I would never hurt a sweet young woman with big, black eyes.”

  Dehan got up and went to stand behind me again, leaning on the wall. Wayne sighed, closed his eyes and flopped back in his chair.

  I said, “I’m waiting.”

  He gestured at Dehan with his hand. “She didn’t need to do that, man.”

  “Stay on task, Wayne, we are both getting bored. Just forget Detective Dehan. Who killed Angela?”

  “Yeah, man, get right in there. Bam! Who killed the little Angel? Well, you know what? You are not being very nice to me, you feel me, dude? And that affects my neurons. I don’t remember so good when people are not nice to me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want that cute Detective Dehan to sit here and talk to me.”

  “No.”

  “Shit, man…”

  “Is that it? Are we done?” I reached across the table and took his coffee. I stood and handed it to Dehan. “Detective, will you take this, please? Throw it in the trash and wait for me in the car. I shouldn’t be more than a minute or two at the most.”

  The door clanged open. Dehan left and it closed behind her. I sat and looked Wayne in the eye. It was not a pleasant sight. There was real hatred there. I leaned toward him. “Get this clear in your head, Wayne: You have needs, you feel me, dude? You have needs. Me? I have a job. If Angela’s killer is never caught, I will not lose one minute’s sleep. You? You will still have to serve out your sentence, and believe me, it will go on your record that you were not cooperative with the police in this investigation. Now, if you have something more than ten minutes of bullshit to offer me, start talking. But if I have to listen to another five seconds of your crap, you will have squandered the one and only chance you will ever get of a deal. I suggest you think hard about what you say next before you open your mouth.”

  He took his time about answering. When he did, he took a deep breath and said, “I want a deal. I can give you who killed Angela, but in exchange I want my sentence reduced to time served. Angela’s killer is a dangerous son of a bitch, man. I ain’t kidding. Me? I snort coke, I walk the line, I play around a little, but I ain’t dangerous the way this guy is dangerous. This guy is sick, man, really sick. You fee…” He sighed. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “I speak English, Wayne. I know what you’re saying. Now, if you want me to even start thinking about talking to the DA about a deal, you ne
ed to give me something I can take to the bank. I’m not going to turn up and say, ‘Hay, Darcel, I have a real strong feeling that that son of a bitch Wayne Harris is telling me the truth. Why don’t you offer him a deal?’ Do you understand that, Wayne?”

  He stared at the wall for a while. “Yeah, I understand that, Detective Stone.” He sighed. “OK, how about you take me for a ride to the creek, and I show you where that boy hid her purse. You get her ID, you know who she is, you can give her family some peace and closure, and that will be proof positive that I was there and saw what happened. Will that be enough for you to take to the DA?”

  “You saw that? I thought you said he ran.”

  “He did. He ran. He ran and hid in the bushes. So did I, man. That coast guard boat never saw the body, but if he hadn’t a run and hid, it would have seen him. Maybe me, too. But once it was gone he come back, he took her things, like her purse and shit, and hid them. And I can show you where.”

  I studied his face for a while and he studied me back. Finally I said, “You want to give me one good reason why I should not arrest you right now for the murder of Angela?”

  He made a face like I’d asked him if he believed in fairies. “C’mon, man! That is the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life! I’m in for five years. I might be out in two or three. Why would I deliberately implicate myself in a murder that would put me away for the rest of my life? That is just plain stupid, man.” He stared hard at me. “I will tell you who done it, but I need that deal, otherwise I will not tell you shit.”

  I thought about it for a moment. On the basis of what he had told me alone I could have the whole area searched and find her purse myself. But the moment he told me her purse and ID were there, what had become of supreme importance was what he had not told me: what he had kept back. And he knew that as well as I did. I was still the rat and I was still in his damned maze.