Aphrodite (8 page)
“Do you want someone to drive you home?” Justin asked.
“I can walk. It’s just a few blocks.”
“Do you want someone to walk you home?”
She smiled again and nodded. Chief Leggett opened the door to his office and called out, “Brian, I want you to walk Ms. Harper home.”
Brian sauntered over and stood in the doorway.
Justin saw Deena Harper look over at the young cop, then back over at him. She smiled at him one more time and walked over to her escort. Justin wondered if he was reading too much into her expression. He also wondered at the feeling of pleasure it gave him.
When she realized that Brian would be the one walking her home, Justin was certain she looked disappointed.
After Deena Harper left the police station, Westwood and Leggett huddled behind closed doors for almost half an hour. The first thing the chief asked was, “Do you believe her?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Why’d she wait so long to say anything?”
“She was terrified, Jimmy, that’s why.”
“Pretty weird, being up on that roof and all.”
Westwood chewed on the inside of his lower lip. “That girl wasn’t lying.”
“What about the roof thing? Maybe she’s the killer.”
The briefest of smiles crossed Westwood’s face. “She’s about thirty pounds too light to be a viable suspect. If that girl killed Susanna Morgan up close, which is how Susanna was killed, there would have to have been a struggle. She’d be scratched, a couple of nails would be broken, there’d be some physical sign.”
“How do you know there isn’t?”
“Because when I saw her up on the roof she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, no shoes. Not a scratch on her. And I made sure to take both her hands in mine when we were climbing down the fire escape. Nothing there either.”
Jimmy Leggett bent his head forward and shook it. His back was stooped, as if the weight of what was happening had already aged him. “Jesus, you actually checked her hands? I
never
woulda thought of that.” He kept quiet for a few moments, fidgeting, his fingers tapping nervously. “Should we do an autopsy?” he finally asked. “You know, on this Susanna Morgan?”
Justin tilted his head as if to say
Good question
, but then he shrugged and said, “Too late. Unless we want to dig her body up.”
“She’s buried already?”
“Yesterday morning. Turns out she was Jewish. They bury quickly.” Leggett puffed out his cheek with his tongue and looked embarrassed about something. Finally, he said, lowering his voice, “I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation. To be perfectly honest, I don’t have a fucking clue where to even begin.”
“I know.”
“What about you?”
“I know where to begin.”
“That’s not my question,” Leggett said.
“I know that, too.”
“Maybe we should call in the Southampton boys.”
“Good idea,” Westwood said. “I’m sure they have a crack homicide department.”
“Goddammit, Jay! I’ve been covering your ass for six years! You haven’t had to do anything harder than run down some high-school shitheads making obscene phone calls. Now, what, you wanna play macho cop again, all of a sudden?”
“I don’t want to play anything, Jimmy.”
“Then what
do
you want?”
“You ever have a homicide in East End?” Westwood asked.
“Not since I been here. We had one vehicular manslaughter.”
“I know how to get started. I know what questions to ask. So let me ask them. Hopefully, it won’t be that complicated. Most homicides aren’t. There’ll be a boyfriend or someone she fired or a crazy ex-husband. I can handle that.”
“And if it
is
complicated?”
When Westwood didn’t answer, Leggett said, “If it is? Can you handle
that
?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue.” Westwood let loose with a quick laugh. It didn’t have a hell of a lot of humor to it. “If you want a guess, however, I’d say the answer is no, I can’t.”
Leggett didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “Is there anything anyone else can do?”
Westwood snorted. “Like who? Gary and What’s-his-name?”
“It’s Brian, for chrissake.”
“No, Jimmy. There’s nothing Gary or Brian can do.”
“We have other people.”
“We have three other people. And they make Gary look like Serpico.”
“They’re gonna ask questions, you know. They’re gonna want to know why you’re all of a sudden turning into Supercop.”
“Let ’em ask.”
“What do I tell them?”
“The same thing you tell anybody who ever asks about a homicide investigation: not a damn thing.”
The first thing he did after leaving the chief’s office was go to the computer on his desk in the station. He opened up a file, labeled it susanna morgan, and began typing in information. His brain was working logically and objectively. It all felt surprisingly natural.
He typed:
Roof—Blond guy—pale skin.
Well dressed. Casual.
Victim (Susanna) shocked to see man on roof.
He wanted info—she gave it to him. Name of person? Place? Thing? Code?
Info wanted: “Afro” or “Amfer”????
“Walrus”????
Broken glass, staged accident. He’s clever. But not as clever as he thinks.
Dark-color car. Probably stolen or rented.
He saved his notes on a disk, stuck the disk in his desk drawer, told Gary to check and see if there were any reports of a dark, non–sports car stolen over the previous two days within forty miles of town. When Gary looked blankly at him, Justin said, “You’re a cop. Use some cop stuff to figure it out.”
And the next thing he knew, he was headed over to the
East End Journal
office because that was the logical starting point. You could start with family, boyfriend, or office. Susanna’s family was back in Ohio, which was where the body had been shipped for burial. She didn’t seem to have a current boyfriend. The office was four blocks from the police station. It was an easy call.
The atmosphere in the
Journal
office was solemn and subdued. Not surprising, Westwood decided, since everyone who worked there was in mourning.
“What was she working on?” Harlan Corning repeated Westwood’s question. He leaned back in his chair doing, Justin thought, his best Perry White impersonation. “She was in the middle of a lot of things, as always.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“I just don’t see the relevance, that’s all. I don’t think Susanna was killed—
if
she was really killed—because she panned Steven Spielberg’s new movie.”
“Is that the last thing she wrote?”
“Is Spielberg a suspect now?” When Westwood didn’t answer, the newspaper editor just said, “No. The last thing she wrote was an obituary. A horrible coincidence, isn’t it.”
“What was the obit?”
“One of the local old-timers passed away. Bill Miller, used to be an actor. Susanna was quite attached to him. She did volunteer work at the Home.”
“The old-age home on the bay?”
“Yup. The old boy died on Tuesday or Wednesday and she did the obit.”
“Anything special about it?”
“Yeah. She screwed up.” Westwood raised an eyebrow and the editor said, “She was too close to Miller and it turns out he was a gasbag. He exaggerated about his career and she printed it as if it were the gospel. It happens. We ain’t the
New York Times
, you know what I mean? But we got a crazy phone call from some guy, a movie nut, who caught the mistakes. Demanded a retraction. I sent Susie back to do some fact checking. That’s what she was doing, I think, when she got sick the other day.”
“Sick?”
“Yeah. She went out to lunch, didn’t come back. She called in sick. That was the day she …you know …”
“Do you know where she called from?”
“No. It wasn’t her apartment, though. Probably somewhere in town. I could hear street noise. Cars. She must’ve been on her cell phone.”
“How crazy was the phone call, Mr. Corning? The one about the mistakes in the obit.”
“From the movie nut? You don’t think—”
“I can’t imagine killing someone because she got her facts wrong in an obituary. But I’d like to talk to him anyway, if you have his number.”
“I gave it to Sue, but I’ve still got it somewhere. That was her punishment—she had to call the guy when she found out what was what.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know if she found out, and I don’t know if she called him. I never got the opportunity to ask her,” he said sadly.
Harlan Corning rooted around in his desk, shuffled through a stack of yellow Post-its. While he was looking, Justin said, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t put anything in the paper about this.”
The editor looked up, surprised. “About what?”
“The fact that we think Ms. Morgan’s death might not have been an accident.”
“I have a responsibility—” Corning began.
“I know you do. But so do I. If I’m right.”
“So if you
are
right, you want whoever did it to keep thinking he’s home free.”
Justin nodded. Corning went back to rooting through his desk until he found what he was looking for. “Here it is. Wally Crabbe.” He held up a scrap of yellow paper with a name, address, and phone number on it. “He lives mid-Island, about an hour from here. The town’s called Middleview.” The editor wrote down the information for Westwood. “You know,” Corning said slowly, “I also have a responsibility to report the facts. You don’t know if your theory is fact, do you, Detective?”
“No I don’t,” Justin said.
“And Susanna was a good friend. I have a responsibility to her, too—don’t you think?”
“Yes I do.” “Then it would be irresponsible of me to say anything. At least for now.”
“Thank you,” Justin said.
“But you will let me know one way or the other, won’t you? When you have the facts, I mean.”
“You’ll be the first, Mr. Corning. I promise.”
Harlan Corning handed Justin the piece of paper with the scribbled information. As they shook hands, he said, “Good luck with this guy, Detective. You’re in for quite a treat.”
Wallace P. Crabbe was irate.
This was nothing unusual, because Wallace P. Crabbe was almost always irate. But he always kept his anger deep inside him. Always. On the surface—at work dealing with incompetent co-workers, on dinner dates with women whom he found unattractive and uninteresting, at meetings with authors whose manuscripts he copyedited, catching the most minute grammatical and factual errors—he was civil and polite, hardworking and trouble free. He was never the life of the party. About that he had no illusions. On the other hand, he was always invited to the party because he was appreciative of good food, could talk about the latest novel, was a very good listener, and almost always had a benign smile on his soft and pleasant-looking face.
That was the surface.
Inside, he hated smiling while he was bombarded with a constant stream of drivel. He hated all the novels he read and all the food he forced himself to eat at obnoxiously trendy restaurants. He hated almost everything and everyone. Inside, Wallace P. Crabbe was a roiling storm. Had been since he was twelve years old and Tony DeMarco knocked his schoolbooks out of his hands into a big patch of mud, then shoved him into the same mud patch and left, laughing, with his arm around the beautiful and bewitching eleven-year-old Abigail Winters. Wallace had been just about to ask Abigail, who had the most appealing ponytail, to go out to the movies with him. Instead, she went to the movies with Tony DeMarco, and that was when Wallace decided that life was basically unfair and that he was one of the unlucky majority who were going to get screwed over and over again by that very unfairness. But he saw no advantage to griping about it. The more he complained, the greater the chance, he figured, of being shoved into ever deeper and ever dirtier patches of mud.
By the age of forty-nine, Wallace P. Crabbe had managed to do everything he could to quietly prove his theory to himself and to show that he had zero chance of achieving the slightest bit of happiness. And with each additional proof, Wallace got angrier and angrier.
Inside.
He’d been married once, some years ago, and it had lasted six years, until his wife came home and told him she’d been seeing his best friend on the side. Wallace was not happy about losing his wife—she was fairly quiet and easy to be with—but he had to admit he was even unhappier about losing his friend, since he didn’t have all that many to spare. On the outside, he was understanding and rather gracious during the entire divorce process. Inside, he began having fantasies of his ex-wife and ex-friend in combination with such things as meat grinders and crossbows and hunting rifles. At age fifty-two, after his publishing company was absorbed by a huge German conglomerate, he was offered—and told to accept—early retirement. He accepted it gratefully and unhesitatingly and was well paid off. But ever since, he had had dreams about the human resources director who gave him the bad news in which his own hands were wrapped around her pale, too-thick neck and he choked the life out of her.
Since he’d been laid off, he’d sold his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, making a tidy profit, as it was nearly mortgage free, and moved out to Long Island. Not one of the chic places, one of the suburban areas half an hour from the chic places. He got a small ranch-style house with a patch of a backyard and set himself up. Why not? What was in the city for him now? That was an easy one to answer: not much. The move didn’t affect whatever work came his way. He could still get his occasional freelance copyediting assignments, that was no problem. There was less noise, less hassle, less pretension in suburbia. His social life had suffered, no question about that; it was a lot harder to meet people, especially women, but even in the city his social life had been moderately successful at best. Currently, he was seeing a woman who worked at a magazine geared for home gardeners. He found her too angular to be attractive and too obsessed with various subspecies of daylilies to be interesting, but he saw her two or three times a week. Either she cooked a bland meal that he didn’t like or they went to a restaurant where the maître d’ kept them waiting too long before seating them. Through it all, Wallace P. Crabbe kept smiling. But slowly, he began retreating into the world within his 1950s two-bedroom ranch house.