Cuts Through Bone (2 page)

“You're a private detective, right?” the young woman demanded.

“Sort of,” Guthrie replied.

Michelle frowned, thinking about it. Her face came to life and she suddenly became more than ordinary, while deciding that “sort of” was good enough. “I need you to find out who killed my cousin,” she said. “The police think they know who did it, but they're wrong.”

The videotape on Vasquez's monitor continued running, but she paid no attention. She was listening hard. The job she had taken that spring started with her expecting something serious. Clayton Guthrie was a private detective, and somewhere he found enough power to break laws—enough to buy a teenager a gun and supply her with a carry permit. The first month, she spent six hours a day at an indoor pistol range. The little detective drank coffee, loaded bullets into clips, and timed her with a stopwatch as he flipped targets and shouted “Draw!” Vasquez fired the Smith & Wesson Chief's Special until both of her wrists ached, because he made her switch hands. The practice suggested something serious in the future, with the same kind of unspoken language as the revolver Guthrie kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk.

Then more months passed watching surveillance videos, or sitting in a park or on the street watching passersby do nothing. They ran background checks, which meant finding people and asking them what they thought of someone else, investigating references on résumés to see if they were real people and real companies, and determining whether people paid taxes or had criminal records. Vasquez supposed that was detective work. Maybe people could earn a living doing that. But that wasn't the job she'd expected when Guthrie had handed her the pistol and said, “Hitting what you fire at should be as easy as drawing breath.” Now two office visitors and one asked-aloud question were enough to erase Vasquez's boredom and awaken her expectation.

Guthrie gave the young brunette a surprised look. He glanced at Whitridge, then asked, “You mean the Bowman murder?”

“That's right! No
way
did Greg kill her, but they arrested him last night.…” She trailed to a stop, puzzled.

Before she could ask another question, Guthrie said, “It's a society murder—you're society.” The detective threw another incredulous glance at Whitridge.

“Oh. I asked Uncle Harry for help, and you're the help. I suppose you'd better be good.” She gave Guthrie the once-over, measuring the small man against his advance billing. “Well?”

Guthrie nodded. “I hear you, miss,” he said, “but I wonder if you're reading the papers. This guy, they took him in on the Bowman murder, but I shouldn't need to say they're looking at him for all of it.”

“But he
didn't
!” she insisted.

Camille Bowman's murder had been the lead headline in every city paper for a week, the latest in a dead cast of characters. She was eye-catchingly blond and beautiful, another young woman murdered and dumped, without an obvious suspect. The newshounds called them “Barbie doll murders,” because the victims had been beautiful. For the media, the killings were a carnival, complete with lurking villain, the smell of sex, and a paper chase. New developments were impossible to miss.

“I have sent the young man a lawyer,” Whitridge volunteered.

“The lawyer doesn't have a guy? What about him?”

Whitridge smiled. “The law firm doesn't specialize in criminal matters, I'm afraid. That isn't ordinarily useful to me. Then the police found a gun.”

“A gun?” Guthrie asked, settling back into his chair.

“See, you think he's guilty,” the young woman said. “The police are wrong, too! Greg didn't do it! He loved her!” She dropped back onto the furry brown couch when Whitridge patted her shoulder a few times.

The silver-haired man's face was grim, his thoughts unvoiced. “Can you take care of this?” he asked.

Guthrie nodded. “I'll be all over it.”

“Thank you,” Whitridge said.

Vasquez went to the office window and looked down at Thirty-fourth Street in time to see Whitridge and his niece climb into a chauffeured Town Car. For once, the street hadn't been blocked by kids trucking racks of clothes. The horns stopped blaring when the Town Car pulled away. “Who the hell is he?” she asked.

“HP Whitridge,” Guthrie said. “Harry Payne Edward Whitridge.”

*   *   *

While Guthrie made phone calls to the lawyer and some police detectives, Vasquez paced the office impatiently. She didn't know what to do, but she wanted to be doing something. Camille Bowman's murder was the leading item on the television news, in a city already burdened with a string of similar killings. For seven days video clips of a filthy shoreline ran together with sequences of an ambulance, a gurney, and head shots of a beautiful blond Columbia coed. Like the other murders, there had been no witnesses to Bowman's murder. An army of reporters with no facts at hand manufactured a story from Bowman's shiny would-be future and screamed about tragedy.

Between his phone calls, Guthrie explained that a recovered gun, followed by an arrest by the NYPD, might mean a finished case. HP Whitridge wanted him to backtrack the police detectives' trail to reassure his niece, but he hadn't seemed to possess her faith in the suspect.

“We're smoothing over hurt feelings?” Vasquez demanded.

Guthrie shrugged. “Maybe. The Ds at Major Case aren't idiots, but they can make a mistake. I reckon they were careful with this one, and they want a slam dunk with the lawyers watching. So we walk up to it carefully. This time, it's about the client.”

“HP Whitridge?”

“That's right. He manages a fair-size piece of the Whitney fortune. Some of it's even his. He's the family fixer, and he don't like anything less than he likes pictures in the paper, unless they're in the style or society columns, right?”

“Screw that,” Vasquez muttered. “My first case is a loser.”

“Don't worry about it,” Guthrie said. “You're gonna see how this is done. Before, that's all been playing. This time will be for real.”

She gave Guthrie an ugly look. “Playing?”

“Why do you think I hired you?” he countered.

“To do detective work, right?”

“No, not
what.
Why
you
?”

Vasquez's face twisted with a scowl. “
I
know?” she asked. Papì was right, she thought. This blanco is crazy. Everyone in her family had a different answer to that question—but they all had one. Who hires a Puerto Rican girl fresh out of high school and gives her a pistol? Papì didn't care about the job. He wanted her to go to school, school, and more school, so she could be a doctor. His eldest son had an education and a white-collar job in New Haven. His daughter could have that, too. Forget his two useless middle sons, Indio and Miguel. They had darker things to say. Indio suggested, maybe joking, that the little detective wanted a pretty young Puerto Rican girlfriend. A few weeks of watching damped that suspicion. Guthrie didn't seem to notice her. The question kept her wound up, fueled by Papì's continual suspicion and disappointment.

“I don't know,” Vasquez said, leaning against the outer door of the office.
CLAYTON GUTHRIE, DETECTIVE AGENCY
showed faintly through the frosted glass, reversed in gold lettering.

Guthrie grinned. “You're a smart girl,” he said. “You'll figure it out.” That was his favorite reply to any question he wouldn't answer straight. “Come on, we gotta go downtown to the Manhattan House. That's where they're holding Greg Olsen.”

*   *   *

Vasquez drove south on Broadway. The sky reappeared after they left the shadows of the big buildings in midtown, but it was soon blotted out again when they reached the downtown tip of Manhattan. Traffic was light. Bright afternoon sunshine at the end of July left the gray marble buildings looking dreary and grim. They parked on Canal and walked to the Criminal Courts Building, moving against the crowds that were flowing out of the area in the afternoon.

The lawyer's investigator, Henry Dallen, was waiting for them outside the bull pens. He was a heavyset white man with a mustache, wearing a dark gray suit. While they waited for Olsen to come out, he outlined the facts in the case. Major Case had served a search warrant the previous day for a registered .44, and left officers to baby-sit Olsen in case he tried to run. Two hours after they had the pistol, they made the arrest. Olsen was the dead woman's fiancé; they were attending Columbia together. Once the police started making accusations, he had lawyered up, but in an initial interrogation, he had admitted ownership of the pistol and claimed innocence. Major Case wasn't suggesting motive. The arrest sprang from the pistol.

Olsen shuffled into the interview room, escorted by two guards. The big blond man seemed stunned. Being arrested had turned his world upside down and he was suddenly unsure of what he was seeing. The guards watched him cautiously; he was shaped like a lumberjack, broad in the shoulders and narrow-waisted. Even with an unsteady gait, his size was menacing. He slid down into a chair and sat forward, cupping his chin with one hand, but the other one stayed below the steel table.

“I didn't do this,” he whispered. He glanced at each of them, his eyes full of questions. “I didn't kill Cammie. I
couldn't.
”

“What'd the detectives say to you?” Guthrie asked. “They said things meaning to rattle you. What were they?”

Olsen frowned. “They showed me pictures,” he said softly. “They asked how I could bring myself to mess her up like that. Someone beat her.” He had a slow, measured way of speaking, taking care to make himself understood. Everything about the big man was handsome, without being pretty. Even his frown and his pauses were handsome, and the way he rubbed at his chin while he thought earnestly. He didn't seem calculating. He just wasn't moving at the speed of the city. Olsen was slow, from someplace slower than the city, where clear was more important than quick.

Guthrie nodded as if he were hearing it all for the first time, but pictures were a standard police tactic. The police often flashed pictures of bloody messes, trying to dig up a reaction. Olsen was wound tight, but he wasn't frightened.

“So they kept asking why I killed her, even though I told them I hadn't. They said a reason would help me, like if she'd been sleeping around and I was jealous. They could see that, as if I had had a fit then.” His big hand rubbed at the tabletop slowly, or at his chin during pauses, and sometimes it seemed that he was applying tremendous force to wipe something away.

“They said my gun killed her, that little gun I bought her in case of a burglar, and they could prove it was fired. And they said they had a bullet to match it, but those were lies. She was the only one who fired the gun after I zeroed for her. I didn't need to practice like she did, and the other was a lie, because
I didn't kill her.
”

“Easy, Mr. Olsen, easy,” Guthrie said. The big man was tense in his seat, red-faced as he spoke about the pistol. He looked down at the tabletop while he recounted the detective's accusations, then up at Guthrie as he explained.

“You do own a forty-four?” the little detective asked.

Olsen nodded mutely and looked down.

“Do you know who Camille Bowman was, Mr. Olsen?”

“I know she was rich.” He stopped, reddening again. His hand crushed slowly on the tabletop. “That never bothered me, that she had money, though. I had enough to do for all that I needed. She didn't make much of it.”

“Who would kill Camille?”

“Nobody! Everyone liked her!”

Guthrie nodded grimly. He handed Olsen his card before the guards knocked and came to take the big man out. The way Olsen tensed when they drew near made the guards hesitate about touching him. He tucked a hand in his waistband as he walked out. Henry Dallen shrugged once Olsen was gone. The lawyer's man had heard the same story twice, and he had no opinion.

 

CHAPTER TWO

“You can't talk about a case with nobody,” Guthrie said after he closed the passenger door on his old blue Ford. “You can't talk about a case in front of nobody, neither.”

Vasquez started the car and frowned.

“
Especially
if it's got anything to do with Whitridge.”

She turned south off Canal onto Broadway. Most of the traffic poured north. The city was emptying. The big buildings loomed like mountains around them, with the hot summer sky burning through in the creases. The rushing crowds and blurring cars around them resembled slowly settling confetti—a whirl of movement with a visibly approaching end. Vasquez cruised straight down Broadway to Battery Park.

“Or in this case, his niece,” she said.

“Yeah?” The old man glanced at her before turning back to watch Broadway glide past.

Vasquez smirked. “That was the first thing I thought when I saw him. She's got a reason for wanting him out of jail.…
Wait.
What if she—”

“Yeah,” Guthrie said. “That makes her the first person we have to cross from our list. Dead woman, and she shines on the fiancé, right?”

“But what if she is—”

“Is what?” Guthrie demanded without meeting her gaze. “We ain't the police. We work for Whitridge.”

Vasquez frowned and drove silently into the park. She found a space and tucked the old Ford in tight. “You're saying we might be covering up?”

“Welcome to the rest of the world. Maybe refusing to uncover ain't the same thing as covering up. Then what if she didn't? Don't go wringing your hands until then.”

Vasquez cut a glance at the detective. “You done that before?”

“Not for murder.” His mouth set grimly. He looked old.

“Less than murder, then,” she murmured.