The Greeks of Beaubien Street (2 page)

“She’s been ID’d. Gretchen Parker,” she said, “from Dearborn. Twenty-six years old. Wonder what she was doing in the city?”

“Hang around for a minute, will you Jill?” Dr. Wasserman asked. Jill replied that she would be in the cafeteria getting coffee. The two often spent time talking about a homicide right after the autopsy; it solidified the facts in their minds.

It was still early in the morning; she would need a lot of coffee to get through the day. Jill walked to the elevator and pushed the up button. She never started obsessing about a homicide until after the autopsy. The scene investigators’ report would make the murder come alive for her, even if the murder itself took place at a different location. She would imagine the scene as it was upon discovery. A group of young boys found this victim. She closed her eyes for a second, visualizing them as they found the naked body of a beautiful, young girl. Were they shocked? Titillated? It would be her responsibility to question the boys. Remembering her dad, she got her phone out again as she stepped off the elevator.

“Papa?” she said when Gus Zannos answered the phone. “I’m going to be late for breakfast this morning.” She listened to him speaking, his voice raised, excited. “Yes, it’s mine alright,” she answered. “I’ll tell you about it when I get there.” Her father had heard about the discovered body on the morning news. She said goodbye and hung up. She had breakfast with her dad every morning at the family grocery store in Greektown, just five minutes from the precinct. But right now, she would get coffee from the hospital cafeteria, find a secluded place to wait for Sam Wasserman, and look over her notes from the autopsy.

A strange jittery feeling was beginning in Jill’s body, starting in her abdomen and spreading through her chest and neck. When she tried to talk, her lips would quiver. It was her standard reaction at the beginning of a new case. Someone had met the end of their life at the brutal hand of another. It was her job to find out who committed the murder and, just as importantly as far as she was concerned, why. She’d make sure the prosecutors had all the evidence they needed to put the guilty away as long as possible. Michigan had abolished the death penalty in 1846, and Jill was happy that killing defendants was not the part of the equation she had to work with.

Standing on the coffee line, she did isometric exercises so she wouldn’t explode with anticipation. She’d tighten her ass muscles alternately with her thighs and if she wasn’t careful, she’d look like she was jogging in place while waiting for her turn at the cash register. If she were outside she could do a cartwheel if she wanted, but here she exercised self-control. Around the hospital, they referred to her as
the strange one
. Employees saw the dark haired detective walking from the morgue, often talking to herself or worse, paused in the middle of the hallway with her eyes closed. Best not give them any more ammo. Her hands were shaking as she tried to stuff her notebook into her shoulder bag; she steadied them by holding her elbows in close to her body. The cardboard coffee cups were stacked precariously next to the pot and one wrong move would send them scattering all over the place. It had happened before. Fortunately, she was able to get her coffee and sit down before anything catastrophic took place

Excitement about a case grew gradually for Jill. When the first call came, her curiosity was merely piqued. The dispatcher said
a body
was waiting for her. Nothing more was offered. Not the race, sex, or location. There were early facts about a case that qualified it as a homicide. If a missing person report was filed with the police department and a dead body fitting the description was found, it was deemed something for the homicide detectives until proven otherwise. If there were obvious indicators of a murder, such as visible bullet or knife wounds or signs of a beating, strangulation, or dismemberment, the homicide division got involved. It was an assumption made without repercussions.

It wasn’t until the scene was visited that the events surrounding the murder would come totally alive for her. She sometimes visualized the crime taking place, the murderer standing over the body, either with his hands around the throat of the victim or wielding a knife, stabbing repeatedly. She often saw the make of the gun if it was a shooting. If the victim was raped, the man in her vision would begin to unzip, but she would shake it away before he could reach into his pants. There was a period of anxiety Jill would fight with meditation and exercise, or succumb to with nausea and insomnia.

Despite the anxiety they produced, her visualizations often guided her toward solving her assigned homicide cases. Her boss asked confidingly that if she had any
ideas
about other cases, to please speak up. She used caution however, looking at her ability to visualize the details of a murder as a gift and not exploiting it; she’d pretend when he asked that she didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t like admitting that she consulted her psychic intuition to solve cases. Despite her discretion however, some of her colleagues viewed her with suspicion. One let it be known that he thought she must have an in with organized crime in order to have successfully closed all the cases she had. Her partner said they were secretly in awe of her and jealous of him for having landed a partner who had such amazing crime solving skills.

The department recently acquired a panoramic 3-D camera that would give the team a detailed record of the area. Rather than relying on memory or notes, all an officer had to do was pull a video tape out of the file and get a renewed sense of the crime scene. Although Jill would memorize the video, there was nothing like being the first on the scene. Unfortunately, she was not with the team who first saw this body and investigated the area. Their department was too busy to allow the luxury of a start to finish investigation; they often overlapped cases so the few detectives available could sleep occasionally. She had to settle for the scan and the report, which she would view as soon as she got back to the precinct. And, although it wasn’t necessary, she would go to the location where the body was found later in the morning.

Finally, Sam Wasserman arrived with a tray holding two large coffees and a plate of chocolate covered donuts. Alex would finish the autopsy.

“Thanks for waiting, Jill.” Sam sat down and offered her a donut. She took one without hesitating. “She’d had intercourse,” he began. “Or maybe I should reword that. She’d had something shoved into her vagina. There wasn’t any semen as far as I could tell; the microscopic report may show differently. But she had a large tear in the posterior introitus.” He crammed half a donut into his mouth. “Something bothers me about her besides the obvious. I can’t put my finger on it. She didn’t have one scratch on her, not one mark, outside of the bullet hole. And then this enormous laceration of her vagina. There was no blood present; she, or someone else, cleaned it up. It appeared like a recent injury, maybe yesterday, but it definitely happened several hours before her death. The edges of the wound were already beginning to granulate.” He looked thoughtful, finishing his donut and taking a drink of coffee.

“So, she
wasn’t
dead when it was done to her.” Jill’s anger rose to the surface, increasing at the notion that someone would torture this young woman in such a brutal way. It deepened her determination to find Gretchen Parker’s killer. Wasserman could see the transformation and stifled the impulse to comment. Jill’s eyes narrowed, her jaw set. He proceeded gently.

“No. And that isn’t all. She was a virgin; remnants of her hymen were present. So, she wasn’t a career girl, unless it was her first day. She also had someone else’s pubic hair on her back and the back of her legs, like she’d been on a dirty bathroom floor; washed off carefully, but placed on the dirty ground. It makes no sense. We’ll get a profile from it, but I don’t know about this.” Wasserman looked at her intently, concerned. “Are you getting anything yet?” They’d worked together for so many years that he was one of the few people who knew she often got a
feeling
about a case that would later result in an arrest.

“Nothing yet, outside of the disgust you’d expect. Maybe after I see the scan,” Jill said softly. Wasserman looked out into the cafeteria, pushing his chair back and standing up.

“I better get back. I’ve got a backlog. The report should be dictated by this afternoon,” he said.

“Thanks, Sam.” Jill got up, too.

“It’s such a waste,” he said, putting his tray on a shelf and taking his second cup of coffee with him.

“Twenty-six years old,” Jill said. They got to the elevator and Jill said goodbye to Wasserman. The fact that someone would brutalize Gretchen Parker, but then take the time to comb her hair and bathe her would fester in the recesses of her mind.

She’d go see her father before she went to the precinct. It would make things better for a few minutes. They would sit in the back of the grocery and drink the strong coffee he made for her. It took her less than five minutes to get there from the hospital. Greektown was in the middle of everything. When she pulled into the alley behind the store, he was waiting for her at the back door. He watched her get out of her unmarked cruiser and she could see the smile slowly spread across his face. She’d been an officer for almost fifteen years, a detective for ten, yet he reacted as though he had just found out whenever he saw her in that car. He was so proud of her. Anyone who would listen heard the story of his cop daughter. But she worried for her dad. It wasn’t always a popular thing to have someone so close to you in the police force.

Jill grew up in Greektown. Other Greeks moved to the suburbs of Grosse Pointe and Saint Clair Shores , but not Jill’s family and the Nickopoloses. The Nickopolos family owned a gun store next door to Gus’s Greek Grocery. Frank and Estelle Nickopolos, their son little Frank, and Frank Senior’s mother, Dido lived above the shop, just like the Zannos family did. Dido was blind and looked like a gnome. She stood about four feet six inches tall and was just as wide, wore black shirtwaist dresses that strained across her ample bosom, with a black babushka on her head, a caricature of Greek womanhood. Frank placed a stool for her outside of the main door and Dido sat on the stool all day, spitting at people as she sensed them passing by her, shaking her cane in their direction. Only serious gun shoppers dared to cross the threshold of the store because it meant an attack by Dido. Once inside, they then had to tolerate the screaming voice of the family’s parrot who spoke only Greek. He was actually reciting Scriptures, but it sounded like the worst vileness. In spite of, or maybe because of, Dido’s presence and that of the bird made life more difficult for Jill when she was small girl. Those people and their damn bird were also Greeks and therefore clumped together.

She never felt accepted, even by her own people. Going to school in Corktown didn’t help. Originally populated by the Irish who fled their homeland during the potato famine, now it was a mixed community of Germans, Arabs, and Mexicans. In late summer, Jill and her mother would walk the few blocks to the Woodward Avenue J.L. Hudson store to buy clothes for the new school year. Her classmates wore clothes from Sears and other discount stores, but her mother wanted something better for her daughter. Jill could still see the pretty dresses, patent leather shoes, frilly slips, and underpants her mother bought her. She’d have everything delivered. Jill remembered the confused look of the deliveryman when he pulled up in front of the grocery store, their apartment right above it. She saw him thinking,
how did these gypsies afford all this merchandise from Hudsons?
She might be the best-dressed little girl in her elementary school class, but she was still a Greek. Her parents spoke a foreign language, their food was different, and she looked different from the children she went to school with in Corktown.

The adult Jill continued to feel like an outsider. Alex argued that this was because she was a snob who thought most people weren’t smart enough for her to waste her time with. She was keeping her distance from them, not the other way around.

“Oh, go to hell,” she said. “If I were a snob, why would I be with you?” He laughed at her, their teasing and bickering often a prelude to lovemaking.

“Good point,” he agreed, wrapping his arms around her.

~ ~ ~

Gus Zannos had the coffee made and a slice of fresh, crusty bread with olive oil and tomato waiting, Jill’s standard breakfast. The period of time she would spend here with her father was a good segue from the autopsy to seeing the crime scene video.

“So tell your father about this new murder.” Gus got to the point. He lived vicariously through his daughter. He often had good advice for her, too. “Already they have the details on the news. So quick!”

“Yeah, it’s typical to broadcast a few facts, like the body being found after her parents filed a missing persons report over the weekend.” She took a bite of bread, the thin crust snapping to expose the fluffy white interior, without regrets. She was thin and a few extra carbs would be okay. “She was from Dearborn. Did they say that?”

“Yes, they did. Why would a beautiful girl from Dearborn end up in an alley downtown? Stay home with your family where you belong!” He tapped the table with his finger for emphasis. Jill laughed. She lived six blocks from her father. “Do you have any ideas yet who could have done such a thing?” She shook her head
no
, her mouth full of bread.

“Not yet Papa, not yet. I haven’t even seen the crime scene video.” He was fascinated by her work, and their brief visit energized him. She pushed her plate away.

“Okay, I’m stuffed. And I need to get to work before I fall asleep. Can I take your cup?” She asked the same question every morning, standing up and holding out the white china mug to him. She took one to work daily, filled with coffee her father ground and brewed especially for her.

“Of course,” he said, going behind the deli counter to pack her lunch. He put fresh romaine lettuce, feta cheese, kalamata olives, a hard-boiled egg, fresh tomato, and two anchovies into a plastic container. He stuck the container into a brown paper bag and added a slice of the same bread she had for breakfast and a small container of his homemade, fragrant salad dressing, garlic-free for a workday. At the end of the week, she would return the five white china mugs, and the following Monday the scenario would repeat itself. He walked her to the cruiser and held her coffee cup while she got in with her lunch bag.