Memory in Death Page 17

  “Thanks. A full hour weekly, and I can call my own shots. I’m going to have a staff. Jesus, I can’t get over it. My own staff, my own show.” Laughing, she patted her heart. “I’m sticking with the crime beat, it’s what I know and what I’m known for. We’re calling it Now, as I’m going to deal with what’s happening up to the minute we air, every week. Dallas, I want you to be my first interview.”

  “Nadine, congrats and blah-blah. Seriously. But you know I hate that crap.”

  “It’ll be great, it’ll be good. You can take us into the mind of the NYPSD’s hottest cop.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “How you work, how you think, the routine. The steps and stages of an investigation. We’ll talk about the Icove case—”

  “Hasn’t that horse been beaten dead yet?”

  “Not as long as people are interested, and they are. I’m going to start working with a writer on the book, and the vid script. I need you to meet with her.”

  Eve lifted a finger, slashed it through the air. “Line drawn.”

  Nadine’s smile was sly. “It’s going to get done with or without you, Dallas. You want to make sure it’s done right, don’t you?”

  “Who’s playing you in the vid?” Peabody wanted to know, and attacked the orange blossom chicken on her plate the minute it was in front of her.

  “Don’t know yet. We’re just getting started.”

  “Am I in it?”

  “Sure. The young, steady detective who hunts murderers alongside her sexy, seasoned partner.”

  “I’m going to boot,” Eve muttered, and was ignored.

  “This is too frosty! Entirely. Wait ‘til I tell McNab.”

  “Nadine, this is good for you. Another round of big congrats and all that.” Eve shook her head. “But it’s not the kind of thing I want to get tangled in. It’s not what I do, what I am.”

  “Be iced if we could do some of the shoot for the show and the vid at your house. Dallas at home.”

  “Not in this lifetime.”

  Nadine grinned. “Figured as much. Think about some of it, anyway, will you? I’m not going to push it on you.”

  Eve sampled pasta, gave Nadine a wary look. “No?”

  “No. I’ll nag a little, finagle where I can, but I won’t push. Here’s why,” she said, tapping her fork in the air. “Remember that time you saved my life? When that psycho Morse had me in the park, ready to slice me to pieces?”

  “I have a vague recollection.”

  “This is bigger.” Nadine signaled the waiter. “Another round here. So I’m not going to push,” she continued. “Much. But if you could catch a juicy case mid-February when we debut, it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Mavis is due then,” Peabody commented.

  “God, that’s right. Mama Mavis,” Nadine added with a laugh. “Still can’t get around it. You and Roarke started your coaching classes yet, Dallas?”

  “Shut up. Never mention it again.”

  “They’re dragging butt over it,” Peabody told her. “Procrastinating.”

  “The word’s ‘avoiding,’” Eve corrected. “People always want you to do stuff that’s not natural.”

  “Childbirth’s natural,” Peabody put in.

  “Not when I’m involved.”

  * * *

  Going to the lab to boot some ass, Eve thought. That was natural. She found Dick Berenski, of the spidery fingers and egg-shaped head, at a work station, slurping coffee through his flabby lips.

  “Gimme data.”

  “It’s always ‘gimme’ with you cops. Always think your shit’s the priority.”

  “Where are my fibers?”

  “In the fiber department.” He snorted, obviously amused with himself as he rolled on his stool to a screen, gave a few taps. “Harvo’s working on it. Go hound her. She did your hair already. Out of the drains, out of both the rooms. Must not clean out the pipes in that shithole but every decade. Got the vic’s, and other unidentified—for now—on crime scene. No Wood traces in the drains of the second room, just the vic’s on crime scene, bathroom sink. ID’d hair from vic, son of vic, daughter-in-law of vic, hotel maid, couple of former tenants already listed on your report. All the blood on crime scene was the vic’s. Surprise, surprise.”

  “In other words you can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”

  “Not my fault. I can only work with what you give me.”

  “Let me know when you’ve compared hair and prints from the hotel scene and the bar.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “Cheery today,” Peabody muttered as they headed through the glass-wall maze of the lab.

  They found Harvo at her station studying the screen. Her red hair was stiff with spikes that contrasted with her pale, almost translucent skin. There were little Santas dangling from her ears.

  “Yo,” she said.

  “That my fiber?”

  “One and the same. Hair’s turned in.”

  “Yeah, I got that from Dickhead. I thought you were the Queen of Hair, not fiber.”

  “Queen of Hair,” Harvo agreed with a snap of her chewing gum. “Goddess of Fiber. Fact of it is, I’m just fucking brilliant.”

  “Good to know. What’ve we got?”

  “Synthetic white poly with traces of elastizine. Same constitution as the particles found in the unfortunate vic’s bone and gray matter. What you’re looking for is either a sock or a tummy tamer. But I’d say not a girdle—not enough elastizine.”

  “Sock,” Eve said.

  “And you’d win the prize. Compared fibers to a lone white sock taken from the scene. You got your match. New sock, never worn, never washed. Still traces of gum on the lone one, from the tag, and I got me a tiny bit of plastic jammed in the toe. You know how they snap the socks together with thelittle plastic string?”

  “Yeah, I hate those.”

  “Everyone does. You got to cut them apart, and who’s got a knife or scissors handy when you want to wear your new socks?” Harvo snapped the gum in her mouth and circled a finger in the air. The nail was painted Christmas red with little green trees. “Freaking nobody. So you—” She fisted her hands together, twisted. “And half the time you snag the socks, or end up with a little bit of plastic inside that stabs you in the foot.”

  “Pisser.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about the tag?”

  “It’s your lucky day—the sweepers were thorough and brought in the contents of the trash can. Came from the bathroom. I took it since I was doing the fibers anyway.”

  She scooted, showed Eve the tag.

  “It was balled up, like you do, and a piece of it torn. Fibers stuck to the gummy side. Anyways, got it straightened out, put together, and you can see our handy bar code, and the type.”

  She tapped the protective shield over the evidence.

  “Women’s athletic socks, size seven to nine. Which is another pisser on my personal bitch list. See I wear a seven myself, and when I buy socks like this, I always got too much length in the foot. Why can’t they just make them fit? We have the technology, we have the skill. We have the feet.”

  “That’s a puzzler,” Eve agreed. “Prints?”

  “Vic’s, tag and sock. Got another on the tag. Ran it.” She bumped back to the screen. “Hitch, Jayne. Employed by Blossom Boutique on Seventh, sales clerk. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I bet Jayne sold the vic a pair of socks recently.”

  “Nice job, Harvo.”

  “Yeah, I awe myself regular.”

  * * *

  It was a simple matter to track down Jayne. She was behind the counter at the boutique ringing up sales with the focused determination of a soldier on the front lines.

  The shop was jammed with customers, drawn, Eve imagined, by the big orange sale signs on every rack, table, and wall. The noise level, punched upward by incessent holiday music, was awesome.

  You could shop online, Eve thought, if you were desperate to shop. Why people insisted on pushing in
to retail outlets with other people who probably wanted the same merchandise, where the lines roped around in endlessly confusing misery and torture, and where the sales clerks were bitter as raw spinach, was beyond her.

  When she said the same to Peabody, her partner’s answer was a chipper “Because it’s fun!”

  To various consumers’ annoyance and objections, Eve cut the line and muscled her way up front.

  “Hey! I’m next.”

  Eve turned to the woman all but buried under piles of clothing, and held up her badge. “This means I go first. Need to talk to you, Jayne.”

  “What? Why? I’m busy.”

  “Gee, me, too. Got a back room?”

  “Man. Sol? Cover register two. Back here.” She thumped her way on two-inch-thick airsoles down a short corridor. “What? Listen, we were having a damn party. Parties get loud. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. My across-the-hall neighbor is a primo bitch.”

  “Next time ask her to the party,” Peabody suggested. “Hard to complain if you’re part of the noise.”

  “I’d rather eat worm shit.”

  The back room was loaded with stock, boxes, bags. Jayne sat down on a stack of underwear. “Anyway, I’m off my feet for a minute. It’s lunacy out there. Christmas makes people insane. And that bit about goodwill toward men? It sure as hell doesn’t apply to retail.”

  “You sold a pair of socks to a woman sometime between Thursday and Saturday,” Eve began.

  Jayne ground her fist into the small of her back. “Honey, I sold a hundred pairs of socks between Thursday and Saturday.”

  “Lieutenant,” Eve said and tapped her badge. “White athletics, size seven to nine.”

  Jayne dug in her pocket. She seemed to have a dozen of them between her black shirt and black pants. She pulled out a piece of hard candy, unwrapped it. Her fingernails, Eve noted, were as long as ice picks and painted like candy canes.

  Yeah, Christmas made people insane.

  “Oh, white athletic socks,” Jayne said sourly. “That’s a real tip-off.”

  “Take a look at a picture, see if you remember.”

  “I can barely remember my own face after a day like this one.” The candy made rattling noises against Jayne’s teeth as she played with it. But she rolled tired eyes and took the photo.

  “Jeez, what are the odds? Yeah, I remember her. Talk about primo bitch. Listen,” she said and sucked air through her nose. “She comes in, grabs a pair of socks. One lousy pair, complains we don’t have enough help after she gets to me, and demands the sale price. Now, it’s clear the socks are on sale in lots of three. Says so right on the display. One pair’s nine-ninety-nine. Buy three for twenty-five-fifty. But she’s squawking that she wants the socks for eight-fifty. She’s done the math, and that’s what she’ll pay. She’s got a line clear to Sixth behind her, and she’s busting on me for, like, chump change.”

  She crunched down hard on the candy. “I’m not authorized to cut a price, and she won’t budge. People are going to riot any minute, so I’ve got to call over the manager. Manager caves because it’s just not worth the aggravation.”

  “When did she come in?”

  “Man, it blurs together.” Jayne rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve been on since Wednesday. Straight seven days from hell. I get two off starting tomorrow and I’m going to sit on my ass for most of it. It was after lunch, I remember, because I thought how this asshole woman was going to make me lurch my gyro. Gyro!”

  She snapped her fingers, shot her index up, leading with the festive ice pick. “Friday. Me and Fawn grabbed gyros on Friday. She had the weekend off, and I remember crabbing about it to her.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Who’d hang with that type? If anybody was with her, they stayed back. She strutted out by herself. I watched her go.” She smiled a little. “Shot her the bird behind her back. Couple of the customers applauded.”

  “Have you got security discs?”

  “Sure. What’s this about? Somebody kick her ass? I’d‘ve held their coat.”

  “Yeah, somebody did. I’d like to view the discs for Friday afternoon. We’ll need to make copies.”

  “Wow. Okay. Gee. I’m not in trouble with this, am I?”

  “No. But we’ll need the discs.”

  Jayne shoved herself to her feet. “I gotta get the manager.”

  * * *

  Back at her office, Eve reviewed the disc again. She drank coffee and watched Trudy walk in through the street doors. Sixteen-twenty-eight on the time stamp. Time enough to stew about the result of her visit to Roarke, Eve decided. Time enough to discuss it with a partner, or just walk around until a plan formed.

  Pissed, Eve noted, when she paused, magnified Trudy’s face. She could almost hear the teeth grinding together. Seething anger, not cold deliberation. Not right now, anyway. Impulse, maybe. I’ll show them.

  Had to look for the socks, elbow people out of her way, skirt around tables. But she found what she wanted… and at a bargain price.

  Eve watched Trudy’s teeth bare in a snarl when she yanked the socks from the display. But she frowned at the price, at the sale display, before marching over to stand in line.

  Tapping her foot, glaring at the customers in line ahead of her.

  Impatient. And alone.

  She continued to watch, through the altercation with the clerk, Trudy looking down her nose, fisting her hands on her hips. Digging in. Turning briefly to snap something at the woman behind her in line.

  Making a scene over pocket change.

  Buying her own murder weapon on the cheap.

  She didn’t wait for a bag, didn’t wait for a receipt. Just stuffed the socks in her purse and stalked out.

  Eve sat back, perused the ceiling. Had to get the credits. Nobody carries enough to fill a sock around with them. And the way she’d slung the purse around didn’t indicate it was weighed down.

  “Computer, find and list all banks from Sixth Avenue to Tenth, between… Thirty-eighth and Forty-eighth.

  Working…

  Pushing up, she checked the time. Banks were closed for the day. But Trudy would have had just enough time to get to one, get herself a sackful of credits.

  Check that out tomorrow. “Print out data,” Eve ordered when the computer began to recite a list of banks. “Copy to file, copy to my home computer.”

  Acknowledged. Working…

  She could see it. She’d have to find the bank, verify, but she could see it. Closest one to the boutique, that’s the one it would be. Stride in, still steaming. Used cash if she was thinking, Eve decided. No point in having a transaction like that popping on a credit or debit report, so you use cash. And you dispose of the bank bag before you go back to the hotel.

  Alone, she thought again.

  Comes to the station alone, then to Roarke’s office. No sign anyone’s waiting for her in the lobby.

  Makes a call maybe, uses her ‘link once she’s outside the building. No way to check that when the ’link’s gone. Smart to take the ‘link from the murder scene.

  She paced, ordered more coffee.

  Scared when she leaves Roarke. Contacts her pal, her cohort. Cries the blues. Could’ve cooked up the next part together.

  She turned to her murder board, studied the photos of Trudy’s face.

  “What does it take to do that to yourself?” Eve muttered. “Plenty of motivation. Plenty of anger. But how the hell did you expect to prove you got tuned up by me or Roarke, or somebody we sicced on you?”

  Back to stupid, she thought with a shake of her head. That was leading with anger, that was impulse and fury. Smarter to have gotten one or both of us out of the house on some pretext, somewhere we wouldn’t be easily alibied. Stupid to assume we wouldn’t have one. Sloppy.

  A memory nudged at her, nearly faded once more. Eve closed her eyes, pressed and focused.

  Dark. Can’t sleep. Too hungry. But the door of her room was locked from the outside. Trudy didn’t like her to wande
r around the house— sneaking around, getting into trouble.

  She was being punished anyway.

  She’d talked to the boy across the street, a couple of his friends. Older boys. Taken a ride on one of their boards. Trudy didn’t like the boy across the street, or his friends.

  Hoodlums. Delinquents. Vandals. And worse. And you, nothing but a slut. Nine years old and already putting out. That’s nothing new for you, is it? Get upstairs, and you can forget about supper. I don’t feed trash in my house.

  Shouldn’t have talked to the boy. But he’d said he’d show her how to use the board, and she’d never ridden one before. They could do tricks on theirs—loops and wheelies and spins. She liked to watch them. The boy had seen her watching, and grinned at her. Motioned her over.

  Shouldn’t have gone—hell to pay. But he’d held that colorful board out, said she could take a breeze. He’d show her how.

  And when she’d shot off on it, he’d whistled through his teeth. His friends had laughed. He’d said she had balls.

  It was—she thought it was—the happiest, most liberating moment of her life at that time. She could remember, even now, the odd way the smile had fit on her face. The way her cheeks had stretched out, and the laugh that had rumbled up in her throat and hurt her chest a little. But a good hurt, like nothing she’d ever experienced.

  He’d said she could go again, that she was a natural.

  But Trudy had come out, came streaming out with that look on her face. That hell-to-pay look. She had yelled, screamed at Eve to get off that damn thing.

  Didn’t I tell you to stay in the yard. Didn’t I say? Who gets the blame if you breaks your fool neck?

  You ever think of that?

  She hadn’t. Had only thought of the thrill of riding the board for the first time.

  Trudy had screamed at the boys, too, told them she’d call the police. She knew what they were up to. Perverts, hoodlums. But they’d just laughed and made rude noises. The one whose board she’d ridden had called Trudy an old bitch, right to her face.

  Eve had thought it was the bravest thing she’d ever seen.

  He’d given Eve a quick grin, a quick wink, and told her she could have another ride whenever she shook the old bitch loose.