The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (39 page)

“No problem, Hoag,” Vic said calmly. “I’ll look after things here.”

“Thank you.” I put Tracy back down and started for the bedroom. Lulu stayed put. She smelled lemon. The smell of lemon often meant fish. I stopped and said, “I forgot, was there something you wanted to talk to me about, Vic?”

Vic hesitated, suddenly very uncomfortable. “Uh, yeah. There was. There is.”

“Is it to do with the house?”

“Not exactly,” he replied, scuffing at the kitchen floor with his size 15 EEE brogan. “It’s, uh, a personal matter. But it can wait.”

I frowned at him. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. But thanks for asking.”

I went in the bedroom and closed the door. I called Very back. “Any news, Lieutenant?”

“A ton, dude. I been ultrabusy. For starters, I tracked down Diane Shavelson’s ex-boyfriend. Turns out
he
dumped
her
—about three months ago. Married another girl and moved to Seattle.”

“Him and everyone else.”

“He’s some kind of consultant.”

“Him and everyone else.”

“Now, dig, I just got off the phone with her sister in Rochester. She knows a lot.”

“If she knew a lot she wouldn’t be living in Rochester.”

“Yo, I meant about Diane. Two of ’em were tight.”

“Oh.”

“The sister says Diane hadn’t been out on a single date since the breakup. Not one. I’m talking zero contact with men.”

“Hmm …”

“What’s that, dude?”

“Nothing, just ‘hmm.’”

“No evidence of a guy being around her place neither. I spent the afternoon there looking through her stuff. Seemed like a real quality person. Good heart. Cared about animals. Her sister’s taking the cats.” He sighed unhappily. “Damn, I never get used to this shit.”

“I wouldn’t like you if you did, Lieutenant.”

“Oh, hey, I hipped your doorman to keep his eyes open.”

“That’ll be quite some change for Mario.”

“I also have a man parked across the street, just in case.”

I parted the curtains next to my desk and looked down at the street. “I don’t see him. Where is he?”

“Look up, dude. See that gee in the tree?”

I could just make him out in the twilight, strapped in about thirty feet up, wearing a green parks department uniform. “Yeah … ?”

“He’s on the job.”

“He’s a cop?”

“What I just said.”

“I hope he knows what he’s doing to that maple.”

“Shit, yeah. Has a degree in forestry. Wanted to be a park ranger out west until he found out they get shot at by the crazies. Likes the odds better here. Dig, he was wondering why most of your windows are blacked out.”

“You don’t want to know. What else have you found out?”

“For starters, our time frame plays. They’re guessing she was strangled sometime late Monday. The body was kept indoors, then dumped in the park shortly before it was found—she wasn’t cold enough to have been out there for long. They didn’t find any rope burns or lacerations on her neck, which means he did her with something smooth.”

“Like a lamp cord?”

“Like a lamp cord. You with me so far, dude?”

“I’m with you, Lieutenant.”

“Good, now dig on this—she was not, repeat
not
sexually assaulted. No seminal fluid in her vaginal vault or in her mouth. Even if he was ultracareful and wore a hat, which some of your career rapists have taken to doing, we’d still find vaginal secretions, bruises, abrasions, something.… We found bupkes. No bites. No scratches. No tissue or blood under her nails. No fingerprints on her skin. They iodine-fumed her head to toe, Magna-brushed her, Kromekoted her, nothing. No evidence of human contact, period. Man didn’t lay a hand on her.”

“Is that typical?”

“No way. When it’s a pretty girl, and it’s violent, it’s almost always sexual. Although, come to think of it, David Berkowitz never laid a finger on ’em.”

“I was really hoping you wouldn’t do that, Lieutenant.”

“Do what, dude?”

“Mention David Berkowitz.” Better known as Son of Sam.

“Just thinking out loud.”

“Next time you feel like thinking out loud, shut up.”

“We did ID the lipstick on her forehead. It’s Revlon Orange Luminesque. Available at any drugstore. Otherwise, we got zero to work with. No hairs, no carpet fibers. This gee’s either a neat freak or a former crime scene technician. I mean, that girl’s body is sanitary.”

“Hmm …”

“What’s that, dude?”

“Nothing. I just said, ‘Hmm …

“What, again?”

“Have you had your hearing checked lately, Lieutenant?”

“Same goes for those pages he sent you. Man must have been wearing latex gloves when he handled ’em. Which leads me to believe he has a record. We could make him in thirty minutes if he was in our database—like, for example, you are.”

“Told you.”

“Those were some big-time black hole days you had yourself, dude. For damned sure. Drag-racing a member of the New York Mets up Second Avenue at three in the morning, doing ninety miles per.”

“That wasn’t such a big deal.”

“Second Avenue runs
downtown,
dude.”

“We felt otherwise.”

“You also threw a barstool through the front window of Pete’s Tavern.”

“So?”

“So there was a person on the stool at the time.”

“It was my stool and he wouldn’t get off.”

“And here all along I thought you were civilized.”

“Well, now you know better.”

“I’m liking you more and more, dude.”

“Down, Lieutenant. I’m taken.”

“The typewriter’s an old Olivetti. Tracked that down at a place called Osners. Old lady there is major pissed at you, by the way.”

I cleared my throat. “She is?”

“Said you used to be one of her best customers. Haven’t been around in ages.”

“I suppose I am overdue for a lube.” Good old Mrs. Adelman.

Very paused a moment. “You’re slipping, dude.”

“Am I?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about the ink?”

“What about the ink, Lieutenant?”

“Came off a ribbon made by General Ribbon Corporation of Chatsworth, California. It’s their universal ribbon, works on every manual typewriter known to man or woman. Their biggest customer is Staples. It’s like their house brand.”

“So we’re talking dead end, in other words.”

“You got that right.”

“How about the envelope? Was that any help?”

“Prints galore on it. Half the fucking postal service touched it. No one who matches anyone in our database, though.”

“Well, that’s comforting to know.”

“Postmark tells us zilch about where he mailed it from. You have it stamped and mailed at the counter of your post office, yes, they put a zip code on it. You stamp it yourself and drop it in a box somewhere like he did, no. All we know is it was mailed somewhere in Manhattan.”

“What about saliva?”

“Saliva?”

“If he licked the envelope shut, wouldn’t there be traces of his saliva on it?”

“What, you think it’ll turn out he just ate some rare kind of salami that’s only sold in one deli on the Lower East Side?”

“Actually, I was thinking more of a DNA test.”

“See? That’s the O.J. thing again. I hate that.”

“The O.J. thing, Lieutenant?”

“Before O.J. you never heard about DNA evidence in normal conversation.”

“Trust me, Lieutenant, this is not my idea of normal conversation.”

“Suddenly everybody’s an expert on blood evidence and how long it takes a cup of ice cream to melt.”

“How long does it take?”

“In answer to your question, dude, our perp sealed the envelope with a moist sponge. And the stamps were self-adhesive. This gee is thorough and he’s careful.”

“Very.”

“What’s that, dude?”

“How about the garment bag?”

“Came from Hold Everything. They got two stores in the city, one out on the Island, two in Jersey, two more in Connecticut. Plus they got a catalog. We’ll be tracking down any credit card sales of that particular item. The only problem is it retails for twenty-eight and change.”

“Meaning he could have paid cash for it.”

“Uh-huh. I also spent some face time with the kid who worked with Diane in the store. Malik Washington, age seventeen. According to Malik, Diane worked late on Monday. Said she had some orders to place. He offered to stick around but she told him to go on home. He left at a few minutes after six. Was home in Brooklyn by seven, according to his grandmother. He don’t remember any gee stopping by just before closing time to buy kibble. Or any particular gee coming in that morning either, although he was down in the basement a lot stacking stuff. As for your next question, why didn’t he report her missing, he claims Diane kept talking for weeks about taking a ski trip with her sister. When she didn’t show for work on Tuesday he figured that’s where she was, and either she forgot to tell him or she
did
tell him and
he
forgot.”

“Any chance Malik’s the answer man?”

“Doubtful. He’s a high school dropout, below average language skills. Plus he doesn’t know how to type. Which is the same shit my computer keeps telling me. Like, I turned up a gee just got paroled in Pennsylvania after pulling seven years for stalking a chick, okay? Under occupation they list ‘dishwasher.’ I’m thinking, okay, maybe he’s worth looking up: Trouble is, he can only read and write at a fourth-grade level. Our man’s way smarter than that. He ain’t no mumbling crackhead lives out of garbage cans. He’s someone you’d go home with.
She
did.”

“This being your so-called information age, I’m assuming that if a similar unsolved crime had taken place somewhere else in the country—”

“We’d be on it in a flash, dude. I didn’t turn up a thing. The answer man is all ours.”

“Lovely.”

“Check this out,” Very went on. “There’s no Greek coffeeshop around the corner from the pet food store. Nearest one’s way over on First and Thirtieth. Man behind the counter don’t remember anybody camped out there drinking coffee with twelve sugars any time recently.”

“How about the Yushie bar?”

“Several in the area, but so far he’s ringing no bells. You ask me, he made a lot of that shit up. Which just makes our job harder.”

“That may have been the whole idea, Lieutenant.”

“You got that right, dude.” He sighed grimly.

“So what now?”

“We canvas the people who ride the numero uno train same time she did every morning. Maybe somebody saw something. We check the welfare hotels for recent arrivals. We check the psychiatric hospitals for recent departures—addicts, sex offenders, gees who write kook letters, gees with a history of violence, gees with mommy hang-ups. We talk to social workers who work with young fathers. We talk to drug counselors. We work the restaurants, ’specially places that routinely take on parolees or mental outpatients. We dog the details, dude, every single goddamned one of ’em, no matter how many man hours that takes. Because, dig, that girl was found in the
park.
And that fucks with the people’s heads. Scares ’em shitless.” Romaine Very sounded serious. More serious than I’d ever heard him. “Now listen up—no one, but no one knows how you hook up to this thing. Just me and my immediate superior, and he’s sworn to secrecy. So the press should not be on to you. They
get
on to you, let me know, okay?”

“Okay, Lieutenant.”

“Everything cool?”

“I think I can safely report that everything is not cool.”

“Are
you
cool?”

“I’m fine.”

“Stay with me, dude,” he said, and then he hung up.

But I wasn’t fine. Merilee knew it as soon as she joined me in bed after supper, which had been late. Rehearsal had run long. Her director, a hot young filmmaker, had never done a play. In fact, Merilee was starting to think he had never
seen
a play.

“You look awfully pale, darling,” she observed fretfully. She had on her red flannel nightshirt. She always wears that when work is going poorly. Comfort food for the limbs, she calls it. “Your feet are positively gelid. And you barely touched your dinner.”

“I’ve never liked lamb shanks. Ask anyone.”

She glanced down at Lulu, who was curled up between us. “Why, even Lulu looks glum.”

“Lulu always looks glum. It’s one of her charms.”

Merilee was silent a moment. We both were. My mind was elsewhere. My mind was on that typewriter, an Olivetti Studio 44.

“They’re always out there, darling,” she said quietly. “The loons and freaks and oddballs. The stalkers with their AK-47s. The mad bombers with their fertilizer and diesel fuel. But we mustn’t give in to them. We mustn’t let them rule our world. That’s how they win.”

“I know that, Merilee.” I reached over and took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

“Of course it is, darling.”

But of course it wasn’t. And I knew it. I knew it as soon as the phone woke me and I picked it up and I heard Romaine Very’s voice on the other end. This was early on Monday morning.

“Put your pants on, dude,” the lieutenant said heavily. “We got us another one.”

D
EAR HOAGY,

I’ve taken the liberty of enclosing the second chapter of my work in progress. I don’t dare call it a novel yet, but it really does seem to be taking shape. More importantly, I think I’m starting to hear my character’s voice. And that is very exciting. But you are the expert, of course, and your opinion means much more than mine does.

It occurs to me you don’t know how to reach me. If you want, you can take out one of those little personal ads at the bottom of the front page of
The New York Times.
Just address it to me. I’ll keep my eyes open, like any good writer should. And I’ll be sure to get back to you. By the way, do you think I’ll need an agent? Can you recommend one? Or will you be my agent? Please advise. Anyway, I hope you like this. And thanks again for your time.

Yours truly,

the answer man

p.s. Did I mention the movie rights? Make sure you hold on to them. We’re talking millions here!

p.p.s. Glad to see you’re a fan of Barney Greengrass. It’s always been one of my favorites. Those people at Zabar’s are so incredibly rude. Who was that short, muscular guy in the leather coat, a fellow author?