Split Images (1981) (11 page)

"Come on--"

"It's what he told me. Then he holds a pillow over her face until she's dead."

"They murdered her?"

"They murdered her. Wait. Then they tie her to the bed, arms and legs outstretched. They ransack the house to make it look like it's been robbed.

Then they set the house on fire, tie each other up quick and start yelling for help. Their story's gonna be a bunch of bikers broke in, robbed them, raped and murdered Margo. But Donnie gets trapped in his own fire. In fact he probably would've died if a cop hadn't come in through a window and saved him. The cop got a citation. We investigate--right away we don't like the looks of it. The way drawers have been pulled out evenly, left open. The sofa's ripped all to hell with a knife--for what? Who hides anything in a sofa? Nobody in the neighborhood heard any motorcycles that night . . . Well, Lorie confessed first, then Donnie, and both were convicted on first degree. But here's the thing. Donnie writes to me about twice a year. He's worried about what I think of him, my opinion. In the last letter he says--"

The phone rang in the living room.

"He says, 'I know there are a lot of ill feelings toward me--' "The phone rang.

" 'So all there is left to say is, God help us fools.' " As the phone rang again he said, "Would you get that?"

Angela said, "It's gonna be for you, isn't it?"

Bryan said, "I don't have any clothes on."

Angela went into the living room in her navy coat. Bryan came out a few moments later with a bath towel around his waist. She handed him the phone and he said into it, "I'm on furlough." He listened for almost a minute, sitting down on the sofa, his tone subdued when he said, "What time did it happen? . . . You sure? . . . Who's on it, Annie? . . . See if you can get Malik, he's probably out on his boat. Doug'll be home in bed, Quentin, he'll be in bed too, somewhere . . . Good, Annie, I'll see you later." He hung up.

Angela was standing, hands in pockets holding the coat closed.

Bryan said, "So Donnie's in Jackson doing mandatory life and worried about what I think of him, all because he loved Lorie more than words can say. I finally wrote to him, I said, Donnie, why didn't you just give her some flowers and candy?"

Angela said, "Your compassion spills over, doesn't it?" She came to the sofa, sat down close to him and put her hand on his knee, moving the towel to touch his bare skin.

Bryan said, "So the moral is, when you lovesomebody you better be able to say how much, in words, or you could get your ass in some deep trouble."

Angela said, "I'm not sure I'd kill for you, Bryan, but I'll buy breakfast."

"Is that what you want more than anything?"

"I guess at the moment. It's not however the big thing I want more than anything."

Bryan looked at her and moved his eyebrows up and down, twice.

"Macho man," Angela said. "Guys kill me." She slapped his thigh, then leaned on it to get up. "Let's go get some breakfast."

"I'd like to," Bryan said, "but I can't. Curtis Moore was shot and killed about an hour ago."

HE TOLD ANGELA Police Headquarters was referred to simply as "1300" because it was at 1300

Beaubien and there the numbers were, in gold, above the entrance. Nine stories of Italian Renaissance gone to grime and without a vantage as the old Wayne County jail closed in from one side and a new jail facility rose in cement forms on the other.

He asked her if she was hungry yet, nodding to the Coney Island across the street where the fry chef in the window was grilling hot dogs. Angela said no, thanks. She could still see the blood smears on cement and chrome; all that blood from one person. They had stopped at a Koney with a K in the Renaissance Center and she smoked cigarettes, sipped black coffee, while Bryan had two with everything. Brunch. He told her outside Police Headquarters it was almost two-thirty. She said she still wasn't hungry.

Construction dust hung in the air, the sound of high-steel riveting and transit mixers grinding outcement for the new county jail addition going up behind 1300. Bryan said they wouldn't have to advertise, the new building would have full occupancy within a week of completion.

In the lobby past the snack bar were the names of police officers killed in the line of duty, memorialized in marble wall sections on both sides of the elevators. They had to wait, Bryan holding the grocery sack with the red tag. Police personnel came and stood by them. They moved into the elevator and Angela was aware of the size of the men; they reminded her of professional athletes.

Fifth floor. Directly off the elevator was Room 500. Bryan told her they had moved recently because they needed more space and got maybe an additional ten square feet. He kept talking to her.

There was a hole in the laminated door panel that looked as though someone had tried to kick it in.

Angela wondered about it. Why anyone would want to break into a Homicide Section squad room? Unless, on the other hand, the person had been brought in kicking.

There were sounds in the empty room. A phone ringing. A portable radio tuned softly to classical music. A walkie-talkie reciting code numbers, getting no response.

Bryan picked up a phone. Angela looked around, neither disappointed nor surprised, not expecting much in a sixty-year-old building that be-longed to the city. Metal desks and file cabinets and a coffee maker against municipal green walls.

About four hundred Polaroid mug shots mounted on a sheet of wallboard. A map of the city. Two windows that looked down on Beaubien and the Coney Island place. But an adjoining room the size of a walk-in closet that held a table with a typewriter and three chairs was painted pink. Bryan hung up the phone. He told her it was their interrogation room and the color was to relax suspects, make them more receptive to questions. Angela wasn't sure if he was kidding or not. She had questions of her own but saw they would have to wait.

Jim Malik came in. Back from the morgue.

Bryan seemed surprised. "They do a post on Curtis already?"

Just starting. But Malik had been there for someone else. A little girl, from what Angela could gather. Perhaps a previous murder. She realized they didn't finish one and pick up another, like piecework; the murders came in unscheduled. Malik seemed frustrated; a muscular forty-year-old with sandy hair and a Guard's mustache. Cordial, smiling as he was introduced to her, but on the hunt; a man who appraised women openly, making plans on glimpses of fantasy. Then it was time for Angela to listen and observe these people whose business was murder:

Malik saying, "The M. E. went all through her,twice. Peeled her throat, no sign of ligature. Laid open the lungs, nothing. No sign of hemorrhage, no indication of restraints on wrists or ankles. I mean he didn't find shit outside of some maggots ready to pop."

Bryan said, "Toxicology doesn't show anything?"

Malik said, "We don't have it yet. But no sign of trauma and they think she's too young to've O. D.'d. So they're making it indeterminate pending toxicology. If nothing shows up in the blood, they'll call it exposure."

Bryan said, "Her panties were rolled down."

Malik said, "I know they were."

The phone rang and Malik answered it. He said, "Squad Five, Sergeant Malik . . . Yes, ma'am . . .

No, he's on the street right now." He hung up and said, "You know what I think?" The phone rang again. He picked it up and began talking to someone about a shooting.

Angela listened.

Bryan took off his sport coat. Gray tweed with cord pants that almost matched. She wanted to ask him about the rubber bands on the grip of his gun, but she wanted to listen to Jim Malik.

"The one in the bar? . . . Yeah, the thing is, Terry, usually that kind of a situation you ask who saw it and thirty people were out in the can at the same time taking a piss . . . Right, all at once. Butthis time they all go, yeah, they saw it. Was the big dude come at the little dude . . ."

Bryan asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee.

Still listening, Angela said yes and watched him cross to the coffee maker that was next to a strange-looking box that held walkie-talkies in slots with small indicator lights on. She had the feeling Malik was aware of her listening to him.

The soft strains of classical music were still coming from the portable radio sitting on a file cabinet.

"That's the way every one of 'em tells it. They go, yeah, the big dude--guy weighs about two fifty, two sixty--he comes at the little dude with a knife and the little dude gets this pistol from somewhere and pops the big dude through the left eye, that's it . . . Yeah. Terry? The evidence techs're through, the morgue guys, they have to get help the son of a bitch's so big. They lift him up to get him in the body bag, there's the knife. Pearl handle . . ."

Bryan was coming back with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. He said, "Tell him to forget it."

Malik was saying, "Well, that's up to you. Maybe manslaughter. But nothing you say is gonna stick with thirty eyeball witnesses looking at you . . . Seventeen, whatever. All you need's one . . . Terry, if you're hot for the guy try and stick him with the gun . . . Yeah, okay. Let me know." Malik hung up.

"Prosecutor's office."

Bryan said, "They'll dismiss it at the exam andthe gun'll never come up. Somebody shoved it at him. All of a sudden he looks down, there's a gun in his hand and this giant asshole's coming at him."

They spoke quietly while Angela felt excitement.

Malik said, "That's what I told him." He paused a moment. "Anyway, I think she pushed her panties down and put her hands in there to keep warm. I'm serious. Lividity shows she was lying on her left side on the back seat and she died that way, man, without any sign of a struggle, in that position."

Bryan said, "Her panties were rolled down, not pushed down." He began to tell Angela about the little girl, eleven years old, who had been dead two months when they found her in the back seat of an abandoned car inside an unused garage with Somebody Please written in the dust on a window.

Angela, nodding, trying to picture the little girl, said, "What did you mean about her panties?"

But the door opened and he was looking away.

Doug Parrish and Annie Maguire came in, both holding manila envelopes.

Bryan said, "Doug, Annie . . . Angela Nolan."

Brief, but without trying to appear anxious.

A courteous pause. Nods. Glad to meet you. Annie Maguire somewhat shy about it, but a beautiful smile. That was done and Parrish was opening his envelope, dumping small shell casings and several bits of misshapen lead onto Bryan's desk. Parrish said, "Curtis was done with a twentytwo. Guy hits him at least four times. Cracks a windshield, two slugs still in it. Ruins the finish on five cars. But, I would say professionally done."

The old gray wolf speaking, adjusting metal-frame glasses that matched his full head of hair.

"But he wasn't close," Bryan said. "He didn't stick it in Curtis's ear, did he?"

"Look at the rounds," Parrish said, offering evidence. "What do you see?"

Bryan picked up a flattened chunk of lead.

"Stingers."

"Stingers and yellowjackets," Parrish said.

"Hyper-velocity, hollow-nose expanders. The guy knew what he was doing."

Malik said, "Kanluen, he took one look inside Curtis--they're just starting to do a post on him.

He says it looks like Curtis was hit with forty-fives.

The head, the face, in the chest, they tore around in there like in a pinball machine. The one in the head very much like that Reagan's secretary, what's his name."

"But he didn't get close," Bryan said. "What was he afraid of?"

"Well, nobody heard it," Parrish said. "What does that tell you? The guy used a silencer. And you don't get a silencer down at the corner."

"You have car noises in there," Bryan said."He fired ten rounds we know of," Parrish said.

"He had a good suppressor it wouldn't been any louder'n a B-B gun."

Malik said, "I understand Annie isn't watching the autopsy 'cause Curtis didn't get hit in the privates. They still strip the guy down, Annie."

Angela watched Annie's reaction. A nice smile, not a trace of malice or resentment; probably used to Malik, something that went on between them.

Annie said, taking a handful of claim checks from the manila envelope, "I was busy learning the valet-parking business."

Bryan said, "Oh shit." Tired. He appeared to be dealing with several different thoughts at once, looking into the future as Angela watched him and smoked cigarettes. He asked when the parking guys were coming in.

Annie said around five-thirty.

Parrish said, "We're gonna have to run after one or two of 'em. I know goddamn well."

Malik said, "Or they walk in and start copping.

Say homicide, they'll cop to whatever they think of first. Things we don't even know about."

Annie laid the claim checks on Bryan's desk and was taking out more as Bryan said, "Okay, we talk to everybody who parked there around ten o'clock.

Hotel guests, visitors . . ." He picked up one of the claim checks. "It's on here. Time in, time out." Andthen said, "Shit, we have to find anybody who left about that time."