Victims (9 page)

He glanced at Miranda, raised his eyebrows, shrugged. She didn’t react.

“They were a pair of nasty bastards. They took the money, some drugs, but they weren’t happy. Not enough loot. So one of them hit me in the mouth with the butt of his gun.”

He rubbed the front of his mouth, then lifted his lip to show them. “Cost me a fortune, not to mention the agony to get fixed up. Okay, so I report it to the precinct, and what do they tell me? Same thing all my neighbors up and down the street tell me: Lucky the bum didn’t shoot you. You see, you gotta find something to be grateful for, so that’s what I was supposed to feel. Gratitude that he didn’t shoot me.

“Okay, so a couple of days later, I’m having some soup in the deli across the street, and there is the bum who held me up and knocked out my teeth. He’s having a frank and a knish, nice as you please. So I grab him. I’m a big man, right? Someone calls the police and they come and arrest him and we go to the precinct and then we go to court. The whole long miserable day—it was when we had those sleet storms last February, a year ago, so the whole day I spend in court waiting. And what happens? They set a date for pleading and they let him walk out. No bail; nothing. On his own recognizance. He’s such an upstanding citizen.”

As he got closer to the worst part, the pharmacist’s voice went softer and lower. He was asserting a great deal of self-control, but his hands were trembling now. There was a dry clacking sound from his mouth.

“He had a long record, this man. The judge looked it over, pushed it aside and lets this bastard out. So we ride in the same subway car, this bum and me. He sits himself across from me and he keeps staring and smiling. So I get up and I say, listen, you garbage, you stay away from me. You’re a little punk and you belong in a sewer somewhere. And while I’m talking, my words hardly make sense.” He pointed to his front teeth. “So he thinks it’s funny, that I can’t talk right. He’s laughing and I’m dying and we’re both out free to ride the subways.

“The next day,
the next day,
this bastard comes back into my store. No steel gates at the time: just open-door, come-on-in policy. He doesn’t say one single word to me—nothing.
He just points a gun at my head and shoots me.”

Somehow, the bullet skidded across the pharmacist’s skull. The gunman turned and walked away. In the hospital, Farmer told the police he knew who his assailant was. The police arrested him. The man provided four witnesses, including a counselor on duty at the time in a city drug-rehab program. They all swore he had spent the entire day with them, never out of their sight.

“He walked. He walked again.
He shot me in the head and walked. I was laid up for four months; had to learn things all over again, from the shock and... what the hell. So you know what the police told me? I mean, they were very sympathetic and they told me in a very nice way, like some friendly advice. Two choices, they said. One, I should get a gun and shoot first, or, two, I should sell my shop—who’d buy it?—and find a safer location. Except, of course, no one has any information as to where the safer location might be.”

He ran out of words and breath at the same time. He began to choke and cough, but held up his hand. He disappeared behind the half-wood, half-glass barrier to the section where he made up his prescriptions. A moment later, he was back with a Dixie cup of water.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.”

Mike waited. Miranda, her face a mask, her voice steady and calm, said, “It
is
terrible, Mr. Farmer. What happened to you.”

“Hey, look,” he said, “if I offended you, what I said about this guy...”

Miranda’s chin went up an inch. “You didn’t offend me. It was a terrible experience.
Now.
Tell us what you observed from your window last night on Barclay Street.”

“I saw whatever I saw, who can tell from the fourth floor up? Identify the man? Describe him? He wore a light-colored suit and he was dark, that’s it, that’s all.”

He answered each question. He offered no opinion as to what the relationship, if any, of the victim and the assailant might have been. He had no further information. He could be of no help.

Miranda Torres tapped her pen on her notebook, then flipped the pages and made a check against the name of Edward Farmer.

Mike Stein asked him, “Mr. Farmer, why didn’t you call 911? Why didn’t you at least call
after
the man left?”

The pharmacist spread his arms, shrugged his shoulders. “For what, Mr. Stein? What good would it have done?”

“You
understand the situation, Mr. Farmer. You’re a trained professional, don’t
you
understand? The girl died.
She bled to death because no one cared enough to make a phone call.
Her life was in your hands. In the hands of all of you people on Barclay Street, and none of you helped her.”

“Look. I didn’t call the police because maybe they would catch him and then they would let him go. And maybe he would come after me. Why not? They do whatever they want.
We’re
the
prisoners;
locked in our shops, our apartments.
They
roam the streets,
they
own the streets, not us.”

“That doesn’t answer the question, Mr. Farmer. What happened to you was one thing. That girl, lying on the street,
bleeding to death,
that’s another matter. What
did
you do, after the man left the girl alone?”

Edward Farmer traced the path of the bullet wound with a fingertip, from the front of his head to the back. He exhaled a deep, heavy sigh.

“I went back to bed. I went to sleep. I treated it as though it was a nightmare.”

M
IRANDA WAS UNEASY AND
uncomfortable with her immediate assignment. She was doing this at the request of Mike Stein. To background a suspect or even a victim was one thing. To background the mother of a murder victim for the exploitative purposes of a journalist was something entirely different. Miranda Torres presented her credentials to a suspicious, tight-lipped assistant supervisor of personnel at the Forest Hills branch of the New York Telephone Company.

“Yes, we heard the terrible news about Mrs. Hynes’s daughter, but I’m afraid, Detective...er...Torres? that I don’t understand what it is you want.”

The nameplate on the desk identified the tall, thin woman as Mrs. Celia Simpson. She had a pale, dry, bitter face. Her frown lines and downturned mouth were more a matter of expression than of years. This was not a very happy lady and she squinted hard at Miranda Torres. An intruder, uninvited.

“It is a very sad thing, what happened.” For some reason Miranda never understood, in the presence of a certain kind of person or in a particularly stressful situation her speech patterns shifted: became Spanish. “What we try to do, what we must do, no matter how farfetched or foolish it might seem, is to find out as much as we can about the victim. In hopes that it will lead us to the perpetrator.”

“But Mary Hynes wasn’t the victim,” Mrs. Simpson pointed out shrewdly. There was no fooling this woman.

“Other investigators are doing background work on Mrs. Hynes’s daughter, and her husband, and her relatives. It is very unlikely, but we must make no assumptions. There are so many crazies out there.”

This Mrs. Simpson knew. “Oh yes. I could tell you about that. I ride the subways every day. Enough said, right?”

“Since Mrs. Grace, the victim, was killed right outside her mother’s apartment building, it is natural that we do a background on her mother. Was there anyone who might have been angry at Mrs. Hynes? Angry, crazy, whatever, so that he would try to hurt her by hurting her daughter?” Again, the shrug that said, These days, anything can happen, yes? “And since Mrs. Hynes is a supervisor here—she is your superior here? Yes—well, we have to eliminate the possibility that perhaps some employee who might have had some difficulty with Mrs. Hynes...Unlikely, but this is my job. To eliminate all possibilities.”

Mrs. Simpson nodded. She glanced around her own small glassed-in compartment and confided to Miranda, because Miranda was so sympathetic and understanding.

“Years ago, what you’re saying, my God, you wouldn’t even say it, right? But nowadays. Well. In my time, when I started with the phone company, it was, oh, it was wonderful. Right from high school. Like belonging to a club. All
parochial
-school graduates. That way, they knew what kind of girls they were hiring. There was a real status connected to the job. Mrs. Hynes and I, we’re old-timers. I guess I shouldn’t complain. If they hadn’t opened up, I suppose neither of us ever would have been promoted to positions of authority. Only men had these jobs in the old days.”

“In the good old days?” Miranda prompted quietly.

Mrs. Simpson frowned. “Maybe we didn’t have the kind of opportunities we have today, but we had other compensations. But nowadays, of course, the phone company had to open up and...”

“Ah. Yes. I do understand. A similar thing happened in the Police Department. All sorts of people began to enter the ranks.”

Mrs. Simpson took a deep breath, and in a soft and confidential voice she told Miranda, “I can see that you are an intelligent girl, not one of these
equal-opportunity
appointments. It must be very hard on someone like you to have to be included with...oh, you know what I mean.”

Miranda’s large black eyes froze and she raised her eyebrows and spoke quietly. “No, please. I’m not sure what it is you mean.”

Mrs. Simpson locked her jaws and pulled her arms close around her body. Those eyes focused on hers were burning holes right through her. Mrs. Simpson’s short eyelashes batted up and down like frantic bugs trying to get out of a trap.

“I suppose you will want to talk to Alice Peterson. She’s Mrs. Hynes’s secretary. You’ll get on fine with her.”

“Is she an equal-opportunity person, too, like myself?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Mrs. Simpson said coldly, “she is. She’s part of the ‘new look’ the Telephone Company is obligated by law to adopt. Along with male telephone operators. Along with a lot of other things. Which I’m sure I don’t have to tell
you.
”

Miranda impaled her for one more split second and then dismissed Mrs. Simpson as surely as though the woman had been incinerated.

Alice Peterson was thirty-five years old; heavyset; slow-talking; suspicious; upset. And black.

“Mary Hynes is one of the sweetest, dearest, kindest ladies you will ever meet in your lifetime.”

Miranda sipped at her iced tea and glanced around the cafeteria at employees on coffee breaks. A few of them stopped by their table and asked about Mary Hynes.

“She’ll be okay, Mary’s a fighter, God bless her,” Alice Peterson informed them. It sounded more like a prayer than a promise.

“I don’t know why you’re interested in Mary’s background, Detective Torres. What you’ve told me doesn’t make sense, but I guess you’ve got your job.”

Miranda did not respond.

“You want to know about Mary Hynes, about what kind of lady she is. Well, look at me. They think they did us a big favor around here, ‘letting’ us in. In. That’s a laugh. Most of those bitches upstairs are still proud of being the first in their family to be high-school graduates. I have a degree from Hunter and the only reason I’m here and not teaching is that the only assignment I could get was in Harlem, and that’s where I’m from, not where I’m going. Understand? Sure you do. I was in the typing pool and I did some work for Mary Hynes, and four years ago, when she got promoted to supervisor of personnel, the first thing she did, her first official act, was to assign me as her secretary. I’m going to tell you, I was cruel. Here was another ‘high-school graduate,’ you know, going to have a Hunter College girl working for her.”

Miranda smiled. She knew the scene. Alice Peterson smiled, too.

“Sometimes you can make some pretty dumb mistakes, right? Well I asked her right out, ‘Am I to be the phone company’s poster black girl? Will this cover you? Are about ten little black girls not going to be hired as operators because you can point at me?’”

Alice Peterson shook her head. “Oh boy. If you could see the look in Mary’s eyes, like I had hit her in the face. She sat looking at me like she never saw me before in her whole life, and do you know what? That lady was crying, tears just running down her face. Which of course made me feel just terrific, to know I’d hurt her so badly. Just that fact alone says it all, doesn’t it? Finally she said, ‘Alice, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I asked for you because I think you’re the best and I always had the feeling I could rely on you. And,’ she said, ‘I thought maybe you’d be able to
help
me in a lot of ways.’”

Alice Peterson bit on her lower lip; her eyes were brimming with tears. “Mary is a genuine lady. We have worked together—
for
each other, she says, and it’s true—for four years now. Mary Hynes has made the difference for me in this job. And I can’t think of one single person in the world who could say an unkind word about her or even be angry at her for anything at all.”

The two women had several things in common: both were widows, each had raised a child alone.

“I married a second time when my boy was just a child. Mary didn’t make that mistake. She just lived for her girl and it’s only recently that...” Alice Peterson stopped speaking abruptly. She took off her glasses and began to clean them with a paper napkin.

“Is that why she had the surgery? The plastic surgery? Has she recently met a man?” Miranda asked.

Mrs. Peterson went hostile; her face locked; she jerked her chin up. “I wouldn’t know about that. Now you tell me, Detective. Why are you really interested in all of this about Mary Hynes? What has any of it got to do with what happened to Annie?”

“I don’t know,” Miranda said.

The dark heavy face stiffened and the head shook once in resolve. Miranda would get nothing further from her. She tried anyway.

“Who is Mrs. Hynes’s friend? Is he the reason why she had the plastic surgery?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“No. Not really. Not personally,” Miranda admitted quickly. Then, slower, more official, “However, I am conducting an investigation into a murder. I have to ask questions that may not seem to connect to anything. Sometimes the most vague, far-out things begin to form a pattern.” She shrugged. “Sometimes not. Often, I’m left with a lot of information that doesn’t mean anything at all. But it is my job to try to form a picture. You see that, yes?”