Slightly Abridged (11 page)
Authors: Ellen Pall
“Of course I haven't,” she snapped irritably. “I liked Ada. She was a pain in the ass in some ways, but I liked her quite a bit. I'm sad she died. But now that you've reminded meâ”
In a few words, she sketched out her concern about whether she should hire a lawyer.
“Of course you should have a lawyer, Juliet,” Murray told her. “Are you crazy?”
“But if the police are talking to me as just a friendly witnessâ”
Murray looked at her as if in disbelief. “You mean the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-why-would-you-need-a-lawyer thing? You bought that? Jule, that's just standard police bullshit. I wouldn't say this to just any suspect, mind youâofficially, we don't like lawyers down at the station. In fact, we sort of hate 'em. But hell yes, you should talk to one. Don't kid yourself. Jeff Skelton doesn't fuck around.”
“You never answered me about whether you know him.”
“Yes, I know him.”
Except for his own partner, in fact, Skelton was probably the cop Landis knew best at the precinct. They spent a lot of time together after hours, drinking beer at the Irish Harp, sometimes taking in a ball game. Skelton was smart, persistent, methodical, and he'd made detective a couple of years younger than Landis. Much as he admired the guy, that was something Landis held against him. He'd been pissed as hell when Jeff caught the Caffrey case. He tried to get him to hand it back. No dice. Not with Weber, and not with Skelton, either.
“AndâDoes he consider me a suspect, do you know?”
Murray shrugged. As it happened, Skelton was nursing a
theory that Juliet and Daignault had conspired to kill Caffrey. Juliet set the victim up with Daignault, he figured, and Daignault did the actual strangling. Daignault had been lying, that was sure. He had said he never left his place that Friday afternoon. But yesterday, Ernesto Guerro, the doorman at Juliet's building, had reversed himself again, shaking his doubts to identify Daignault positively as the man he'd seen with the victim late Friday afternoon in front of Suzy's place. And a neighbor from the seventh floor of Daignault's building remembered seeing him coming up in the elevator “around five” (granted, the neighbor didn't remember a hat or jacket, but he could have ditched those). Confronted, Daignault said Guerro must be mistaken. But he did “remember” he'd gone down to get his mail.
theory that Juliet and Daignault had conspired to kill Caffrey. Juliet set the victim up with Daignault, he figured, and Daignault did the actual strangling. Daignault had been lying, that was sure. He had said he never left his place that Friday afternoon. But yesterday, Ernesto Guerro, the doorman at Juliet's building, had reversed himself again, shaking his doubts to identify Daignault positively as the man he'd seen with the victim late Friday afternoon in front of Suzy's place. And a neighbor from the seventh floor of Daignault's building remembered seeing him coming up in the elevator “around five” (granted, the neighbor didn't remember a hat or jacket, but he could have ditched those). Confronted, Daignault said Guerro must be mistaken. But he did “remember” he'd gone down to get his mail.
That wasn't all he was lying about. Michael Hertbrooke had said that Daignault had tried to blackmail him into buying the manuscript. Daignault claimed no such thing as blackmail had come into his mind.
Didn't play that way to Skelton.
And the bag Caffrey had been found in was the kind used by Daignault's super. The super said he'd lined half a dozen garbage cans in the building areaway with fresh bags that Friday morning, hauling the old stuff out and tying it up (the garbage hadn't been picked up that day on account of the snow, of course, but he'd needed to make room in the cans). The cans were kept by the side of the building, behind a narrow, cast-iron gate, but anyone could stick their hand between the bars and pull a bag out easy. And, yeah, he had seen one was missing when he checked on Saturday afternoon.
As for physical evidence, forensics had found no prints of value on the garbage bag or the victim's neckâthough the strangling had been manual, that was certain. But they had turned up a couple of blond hairs, two to three inches in length, in the palm of the victim's right hand. Daignault was blond. Naturally, he swore he'd never seen Caffrey after she left his apartment with Fitzjohn. He had
no idea how his hair could have gotten where it had, he saidâif it was his. He'd been questioned again today. When he'd resisted surrendering a DNA sampleâhair or a saliva swabâa judge had provided a warrant. On visual analysis, the hair looked like a pretty good match. A DNA test had been ordered and expedited, but the lab was jammed as usual and it would still be a couple of weeks before the results were back.
no idea how his hair could have gotten where it had, he saidâif it was his. He'd been questioned again today. When he'd resisted surrendering a DNA sampleâhair or a saliva swabâa judge had provided a warrant. On visual analysis, the hair looked like a pretty good match. A DNA test had been ordered and expedited, but the lab was jammed as usual and it would still be a couple of weeks before the results were back.
Of course, Landis wasn't going to tell Juliet any of this.
“Look, any murder, any detective is going to have maybe four or five theories right out of the gate,” he said instead. “In descending order of likelihood, let's say, in this case, we have the last guy with her, that's Fitzjohn. We have Daignault; it was his premises where she was last seen. We have Suzy Eisenman; she reported her missing. Maybe we have you, I don't know; you knew her longest of all.”
“Even if I wanted to kill her, I never went out on Fridayâ”
“Or it could be something we don't know about yet,” Murray went on, over her objection. “She's a gunrunner for the mob; she was scoring cocaine and the buy went bad. Or it could be, it always could be, a random crime. The serial killer just starting out the series.” Murray set down his chopsticks, finished. “And that's what we have,” he said.
“What about Michael Hertbrooke? At least he had a motive. Which is more than you can say about anyone else you've mentioned.”
Landis shrugged. “I'm not sure how great of a motive suppressing a two-hundred-year-old indiscretion is, but don't worry, they'll look into him,” he said. “They'll run with the hottest theory for the first couple of days, but they'll get to him eventually. For what it's worth, during the missing person investigation, Hertbrooke told me he was in his office in Chelsea at the paper on Friday from noon until about eleven o'clock at night. Which about thirty or forty people can confirm.”
“Why does that let him out when my being in my apartment all day doesn't?”
He shrugged again. “I know motive and alibi get a lot of play in Agatha Christie novels,” he said. “But around here, they're more for lawyers to blow about than for police to worry overâat least, not in the early stages. Motive is all very logical, but lots of times things just go wrong. It's not in a person's interest to kill someone, but they lose it and kill them anyway. Legally, there's no requirement to prove a motive when you prove a murder. As for alibi, people can hire a killer. If a guy tells me âI was in Europe,' if I have enough evidence that he was involved, I'm going to charge him anyway. He wants to prove he was somewhere else, he can do it at trial.
“Now on a dump job, the rule of thumb is, you draw a circle with a one-mile radius around where you found the body, the killer is in there. People who kill usually like to stick around; they like to know what's going on. And they're usually just dying to talk about it. Most people who kill, it's their first time. They're walking around with this big secret; they can hardly shut themselves up. If you give them a little window, suggest an outââI know it was an accident, you didn't mean for him to die'; or, âThat guy you killed, I hear he threatened you'âmore times than not, âYeah, that's right,' they'll say, âthat's how it was; I just meant to scare him.' They want to tell you. They want that release.
“As it happens,” he added, standing up to take his plate into the kitchen, “Michael Hertbrooke spent the weekend in D.C. attending a series of parties. He took a train there early Saturday morning and didn't come back till Monday. Can I make you some coffee?”
Juliet shook her head. “What's a dump job?” she asked sullenly.
“Oh, sorry. That's where a body is found someplace away from the crime scene, where the killer dumped it. It's one of the hardest kinds of cases to solve. A lot of times you don't know who the victim
even is for quite a while. Of course, we were lucky here.”
even is for quite a while. Of course, we were lucky here.”
“Oh, very lucky,” Juliet echoed. She could not understand why Murray was thinking about this crime so differently from the way she would. His view seemed to be all about rules of thumb, all about how “people” behave, rather than individuals. She felt disappointed in him; she'd thought he would have a subtler grasp of character, a more compelling sense of narrative than that. Accidents, blurted confessions; this was not her idea of the proper, logical approach to solving a crime. Solving a crime was a matter of noticing details, judging character, applying logic, constructing a story, sorting out puzzle piecesâand, in her opinion, there were probably a few pieces missing here. No, Landis had been wrong about the killing at the Jansch, and he was wrong now.
Deep inside her, Juliet felt that stubborn part of herself that secretly considered her own brain superior to the brain of anyone else come alive. She could practically hear the lid of the coffin in which she had tried to bury it last time creaking open, the swish of robes as the Undead within sat up and looked hungrily around. Intellectual arrogance was one of Juliet's oldest and most persistent failings, one she'd tried to kill off many times. Apart from her own disapproval of the trait, she couldn't help letting others see itâand it was, she had found, the opposite of endearing.
But it was also darned handy when a difficult problem came along.
“Who are Ada's heirs?” she asked Landis now, peremptoriness audible in her voice despite her best efforts. “Did Skelton look into that?”
There was a pause, during which, she presumed, Murray decided how much he should say.
Then, “Yeah, they're checking,” he replied. “Mrs. Giddy, the cat sitterâneighbor lady, she couldn't find a will, and unfortunately, Mrs. Caffrey's lawyer happens to be in the hospital with pneumonia. He's on a respirator, matter of fact.”
“Jeeze. Do they think he'll be okay?”
“They don't know. Apparently he's an old friend of Mrs. Caffrey's. I mean really old, like eighty-nine or ninety. He doesn't have a secretary, either. Works from his home, when he works at all, and evidently keeps his papers there. So no one knows how to put their hand on any will. But the next of kin, the presumable heir, that's Claudia Lunceford. I talked to her on the missing, remember?”
Juliet nodded.
“Skelton sent a picture of the stiffâexcuse me, of Mrs. Caffreyâup to Mrs. Lunceford in Gloversville, so she could ID it. It's only a matter of looking at a Polaroid, of course, but you need a family member for the ID to be official. I think we talked about that. He asked her to come down and do it in personâwe like the opportunity for a little face time with someone closely connected to the victimâbut she wasn't interested. In fact, she's not interested in shipping the body up there for burial, either. If no one claims your Mrs. Caffrey, she'll be buried in Potter's Field, on Hart Island.
“But Skelton will wait awhile, see if Lunceford changes her mind. They can't release the body anyhow until the paperwork is done, and that can take awhile.”
“Well, isn't that suspicious?” Juliet asked. “Her own niece doesn't even want to claim her body?”
Murray came to the doorway of the kitchen, where he had been bumping around, brewing coffee and washing the dinner things.
“I can think of three or four relatives of my own I wouldn't pay to ship home,” he said. “Dead or alive.”
Juliet frowned, but she had to admit he might have a point. Ada had been a pistol, as she had said of her own mother, but she could also be mighty exasperating.
Still, not to bury even your most annoying relative, that was extreme.
“FYI, as a general thing, it's pretty unusual for an heir to kill,”
Murray added. “You see it, but you don't see it very often.”
Murray added. “You see it, but you don't see it very often.”
There it was again. The odds, the rule of thumb. Juliet suppressed her irritation.
“Where does Fitzjohn say he went on Friday afternoon?” she asked.
Murray resumed his seat across from her, setting down a mug of coffee for each of them. “Well, now, that's why I like Fitzjohn so much,” he said, one eyebrow lifting. “He says he went for a walk in the snow. Walked home to Turtle Bay, all the way through Central Park. That's a heck of a walk in a blizzard, and my thought is, a guy like John Fitzjohn, he wants to see snow, he flies to Aspen.”
Juliet looked at him hopefully. This was more like it; this was observing character. As her eyes rested briefly on his dark face, she couldn't help noticing how much more attractive than Dennis he was to her. Murray was tense. He had a chip on his shoulder a lot of the time. But he never posed. His insecurities might make him guarded, but they could not make him obsequious. She supposed Dennis was to be admired for his gentle wish to be loved, the soft throat he willingly turned up to a woman. But admiration was not, alas, desire. She hated to admit it, but an hour alone with Landis had her thinking about sexâabout love, evenâwith a greed that two months of dating Dennis Daignault had never provoked.
Aloud, “There were other people who knew about the Wilson manuscript, too,” she reminded Landis now. “The man whose daughter found it, Matthew McLaurin, isn't that his name?”
“Yeah, don't worry. I take it you saw the newspapers this morning,” he said, with a grim smile.
Juliet had. The
Daily News
had run the single-word headline “BAGGED!” in three-inch-high type on its front page, and reported beneath it the discovery of an eighty-four-year-old lady tourist inside an industrial-strength trash-can liner. The
Post,
having gotten hold of the newspaper photograph of Ada in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
had featured a large reproduction captioned, “VIOLENCE AND OLD
LACE.” Even the
Times
had covered Ada's death at length, in an above-the-fold story on the first page of the Metro section.
Daily News
had run the single-word headline “BAGGED!” in three-inch-high type on its front page, and reported beneath it the discovery of an eighty-four-year-old lady tourist inside an industrial-strength trash-can liner. The
Post,
having gotten hold of the newspaper photograph of Ada in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
had featured a large reproduction captioned, “VIOLENCE AND OLD
LACE.” Even the
Times
had covered Ada's death at length, in an above-the-fold story on the first page of the Metro section.
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