The Ashes of an Oak (3 page)

‘It’s the territory.’

‘I know that. You think I don’t know that? The point is, I think I’ve had enough. I’m not human anymore.  Me and Steve and Mike and everyone, we just go out, every day, and start again with the same old crap. Then seeing that guy’s face today…well, it made me realise I want to be human again and enjoy the sensation. I want me and Mary to go and find a place upstate away from all this and see it out like people.’

‘How old are you now? Fifty?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, God knows, you earned it. You got some put aside?’

Frank knew what Diehl alluded to. ‘Not as much as some,’ he said tartly.

‘Well, you’d do okay anyway after thirty years.’ Diehl rested his chin in his hands and smiled. ‘I can’t stop you and wouldn’t even if I could. All I ask is think about it. Don’t let a shitty day put your nose out of joint. You could still end up with your own precinct.’

‘What? And end up like you? No thanks.’

‘Okay. Okay. Get out of here. Think about it for a couple of days. If you still want it by say, Friday, then I’ll start the paperwork. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds swell. Thanks.’

‘You sure you’re okay dealing with Mrs Dybek?’

Frank put his cigarette out in the Captain’s ashtray. It too had a picture of a Chihuahua on it. Frank thought they were ugly, snappy little bastards. ‘Yeah. It’s the least I can do for her. You know, what Steve said? He was just bullshitting.’

‘I know,’ said Diehl. ‘I was watching him this morning when she came in. Soon as he saw her he was up and at her and offering her drinks left, right and centre. When she went to the bathroom, he asked one of the girls to check she was okay.’

‘He’s a good guy.’

‘Well, don’t go encouraging him to retire. I can’t afford to lose both of you.’ He picked up the phone and started dialling. ‘Now, go away, Frank. I have a call to make and in about a minute and a half this room will reek of politics. With your sense of smell you’re likely to throw up all over.’

Chapter 3

The apartment building rose six storeys and stood as a monument to mankind’s limitations – the limits of finance, the limits of imagination, the limits of vision and the limits of humanity. It was a box with holes. At night, myriad creatures returned from the safety of daylight to the cramped, oppressive security of bolted doors, whispered fears and frightened isolation. People only half-slept, with closed eyes and open ears, attuned to the creaks and groans, the screams and moans, as alert to the sounds as any jungle dweller would be. Dawn must have come as a relief, as a divine intervention, to those who lived here. Everything here was taken to the very edge, to the limits of existence, where to live simply meant to not die and to not die was not really living at all.

Frank side-stepped the turd in the doorway and stepped into the lobby. He was greeted by a silence that could only happen in the midst of tragedy. There should have been noise, chatter, the scuffing of feet and the rustle of paper. Instead, it was as if someone had turned down the sound and all that was left was your own subtitles, to be added to the drama laid out before you.

Frank and Steve broke through the ring of people that lined the scene. Steve held back and talked to one of the uniforms, while Frank carried on towards the twisted, spidery body of Violet Dybek.

Her face was gone. She had landed facing down and the front of her head had taken the full impact. There was no longer a nose, the lips were mashed and fretted with dislodged splinters of teeth and bone. Her eyes were in there somewhere, maybe pushed back into her skull or maybe they popped with the impact and had become no more than an ingredient in the human soup that gelled stickily across the floor.

Jim Baker, the uniform from the Pitkin Avenue death that morning, had ended up here too. They acknowledged each other with a ‘what the hell did we do to deserve today?’ roll of the eyes. Frank saw Mike Patton and headed for him.

‘You on this now?’ asked Mike.

‘Yeah,’ said Frank, unable to take his eyes away from Mrs Dybek. ‘You okay with that?’

‘Sure I am, Frank. Me and Bob thought you’d take it.’

Frank looked up. ‘She lived on the fourth floor. I take it she didn’t fall down the stairs?’ He wasn’t smiling.

‘I would guess not. We’ve been into her apartment and seen what we can see. Forensics are up there as well as down here.’

‘Signs of a struggle?’

Mike shook his head. ‘No. Dirty glass upon a table. A plate needed washing. That’s about it.’

Frank took his hat off and fanned himself. ‘It stinks in here.’

‘It’s the heat,’ said Mike. ‘Always worse in the heat. I don’t notice it much anymore myself.’

‘You and Bob take off. Me and Steve’ll take it from here.’

‘Okay. I’ll type up some notes for you. Complete the picture.’

‘Thanks.’

Mike called Bob Simmons over and the two men left. Frank noticed Bob take out the turd on the way out. He limped away like he’d been shot in the foot. Any other time…

Frank caught Steve’s eye and indicated that he was going up to Mrs Dybek’s apartment.

There was an elevator, but Frank took the stairs. He didn’t like elevators. He didn’t like the fact that they were confined spaces or the fact that he was suspended by a wire that was made by human hands, which was attached to the elevator by human hands, which was maintained by human hands and judged by the imperfections of the human eye. He was strange that way. He would quite happily walk into a crime scene, face off with a PCP crazy, but things like fairground rides, where the guy who checked it had only to have tied one on the night before and now missed the loose bolt or the broken shaft…That scared him. Human fallibility scared him.

By the time he reached the fourth floor, his lungs had almost failed him. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then leaned against the railings outside Mrs Dybek’s apartment.

Below, in the lobby, upon the black and white tiled floor, he could see the milling crowd, looking like pieces on a checkers board and, in the middle of them, the insignificant doppelganger of the lady once known as Mrs Dybek, the cause of the commotion, the irrelevant, still centre of a self-powered whirlwind.

Frank tried to remember how tall she was. She came to his shoulder. He was six feet one, which made her about five five. She was round too. When she walked she rolled along, propelled, it seemed, by the momentum that built up, like a perpetual motion machine. She wore a dress, always, and shoes with heels that were never more than an inch, usually flat. They were sensible shoes.

Frank studied the railing. It was perhaps three and half feet high. No, closer to four. To get over this, Mrs Dybek would have to have hitched up her dress, lifted her leg high enough to get over the railing or, failing that, pulled herself high enough to topple over the railing, in order to fall. She could have climbed onto a table, or something, but whatever that was would have still been there. He didn’t see it. If Mrs Dybek was going to kill herself, this wasn’t the way she would have chosen. In fact, she wasn’t the kind to kill herself, period.

He walked into the apartment. 4B. It always seemed to be 4B. It smelled of cabbage and lavender. There was another smell too, familiar but distant, lost like a forgotten word that balanced on the edge of your tongue.

There was the glass. It looked like the remnants of milk at the bottom of it. He picked it up and smelled it. Milk. Not that skimmed crap either. Next to it was a plate with some biscuit crumbs upon it. He picked it up and smelled that too. There was no smell strong enough to yield anything. The rest of the room was as expected. An aged sofa, a threadbare chair, a thinning carpet that had little left of its original colour. The TV was a Zenith.

There were two sash windows. Only one of them was above the fire escape. Frank opened that one up and stepped out. The metal was hot to the touch. He searched for signs that someone may have been there, but it looked as if even the birds didn’t perch there. He went down to the next level. His footsteps echoed though the steps and made the whole structure shake a little. He wondered when it was last checked.

There was nothing to be seen, so he wandered back up and climbed back through the window. Could someone have come in? Absolutely, though that was not the real question. The question was why they came in. Nothing was stolen. Mrs Dybek had nothing to steal; maybe the TV, the radio, her purse, but there were better targets a hundred feet down. This place was slim pickings. So what they were left with was some sort of pervert who liked to watch old ladies sleep? Anything was possible. He’d arrested a guy once for running a brothel. It wasn’t so much that he was running a brothel as the fact that the whores were sheep and goats and pigs. All they could charge him with was animal cruelty.

The things people did were never a surprise.

All this was assuming that Mrs Dybek hadn’t carried forward a nightmare or that she wasn’t creating a story for the attention.

On the other hand, the fact that she took a flight over a rail four floors up did seem awfully coincidental.

‘Hey, Frank.’

A thin-faced man, five inches taller than Frank, with ten years to spare on him, came out of the bedroom. ‘Milt?’ The Chief Medical Examiner held out his hand. Frank shook it warmly. ‘Who let you out of the cage?’

‘Emmet contacted me. Asked me to take it. Said this one mattered.’

‘Yeah. It does. I appreciate that.’

‘Doesn’t do any harm to get into the field once in a while either.’

‘I guess not,’ said Frank. ‘Did you find anything?’

Milt shook his head. ‘Not at first glance, but we’ve scraped the place. Give us a couple of days, see what we can come up with. You knew her?’

‘Kind of. She came to the precinct house a few times a week.’

‘Lonely?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Suicidal?’

Frank shook his head emphatically. ‘Not in a million years.’

‘Family?’

Frank hesitated and quickly thought through all the conversations they’d had. ‘Her husband died fifteen years ago. Heart attack. They’d had a child, but it had died young. Polio or something. I’m not sure.’

Milt picked up his bag and rearranged things so that he could close it. ‘The ashes of an oak in the chimney,’ he muttered.

Frank turned from gazing absent-mindedly out of the window.  ‘Say what?’

‘Nothing. Just a poem I remember from school.’ Milt snapped his bag shut. ‘Okay. I’m done here. Feel free to look around.’ Frank nodded his thanks. ‘It’s not often we get to like these people, is it? All we ever see is the worst of it. I’m sorry for the old girl, Frank.’

Frank wandered into the kitchen ‘Okay, Milt,’ he called back. ‘Thanks. You have a good day.’

‘You too.’

As Milt put a foot out the door Frank called out. ‘Can you smell anything?’

Milt sniffed. ‘Not any more. You talking about anything in particular?’

Frank put his head around the door and leaned against the jamb. ‘When I walked in, I could smell cabbage and lavender. I’m willing to bet she has several bottles of lavender spray in her bedroom.’

‘Yes, she has.’

‘So what’s that other smell? I can get something underneath it but can’t quite place it, you know?’

Milt sniffed again, more deeply. ‘It’s all sort of mingled together now, Frank. Can’t say I noticed as I came in. I didn’t even notice the lavender.’

Frank frowned. ‘Okay.’ He went back into the kitchen. ‘I’ll see you.’

The kitchen, like the living room, was what Frank expected. Some cupboards, a sink, a fridge, small table. It was tidy though. The living room hadn’t had a speck of dust in it, even the back of the TV. The kitchen was the same. She was a very ordered lady.

Frank went through the cupboards. There was very little. It looked like she shopped daily for food. Something to do, he supposed. Something to fill the time. If you have no food, you’re forced to go out and get some air.

Crockery-wise, she had two of everything, some of them chipped. One for her and one in case a she had a visitor.

Steve came in. ‘Anything, Frank?’

‘No. You?’

‘Not really,’ sighed Steve. ‘People come and go as they please. There’s no call system, no security. I’ve had three different descriptions of postal workers who did the same delivery. According to the witnesses, he was black going on white and a heavy set midget of five feet eleven. One of them even said that he was a she.’

Frank looked in the final cupboard. It was empty.

‘We’re lucky, you and me,’ he said. ‘I have Mary, you have Val.  You ever wonder how far away we are from becoming a Dybek?’ He leaned against the wall and scanned the kitchen. ‘It’s no wonder she came to see us all the time.’

‘You start thinking like that, Frank, you’re on the way out.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘How so?’

‘I’m thinking of retiring. That’s what I was talking to Emmet about.’

Steve went to the cupboards and started going through them. He reached the crockery cupboard and took out a cup. He ran a finger around the inside and sniffed at it. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did, Frank. I’d miss you like a limb, but I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘What’s with the cup?’ asked Frank.

Steve handed it to him. ‘Take a look at it.’ He took out the crockery and laid it on the side in the same way that it had been laid out in the cupboard, on top of the saucers that had been at the back.

‘Okay,’ said Frank. ‘I’ve looked at it. I can confirm its cupness. It is a cup.’

Steve took a step back and pointed at the crockery. ‘Okay, look at all these, from back to front.’ He took the cup from Frank and put it in the same place that it would have been in the cupboard. ‘How many times have we been into an apartment or a house where someone lives on their own?’

Frank shrugged. ‘Hundreds. Thousands probably.’

‘And what we see is they nearly always use the same plate, the same cup, the same saucer, the same knife and fork. They use them, wash them, and leave them out for next time. I do the same when Val goes to her mother’s. It’s easier.’ He picked a plate from the back of the pile. It had a layer of dust and dirt. ‘This is dirty. She didn’t use it. She didn’t have guests that used it. Same with the cup. They just sit there and catch the dirt. Someone comes round, you sluice it out under the tap and it’s usable. The ones at the front are hers, because they are clean. She used…’ He began to pick pieces up. ‘…this cup, this saucer, and…’

‘And?’

Steve pointed at the sink. ‘And that knife, that spoon.’ He paused and smiled. ‘And the plate. The plate is hers. Why is there another one next to the empty glass?’

Frank’s jaw fell. He walked to the sink. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘So who used the other plate?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You couldn’t have just said that in the first place?’

‘Hey, you didn’t even notice it. Call yourself a fucking detective?’

Frank waved a dismissive hand. ‘That means nothing. She probably dragged that poor deformed mailman in here, she was so lonely. Come on, Steve...’

Steve held up a hand. ‘Hold on, Frank. Granted, it ain’t science but, she had a guest, welcome or unwelcome, and she didn’t have time to wash up and put the spare plate back in its place. And she would’ve done. You know it. You’ve seen how tidy she kept this place.’