Cuts Through Bone (5 page)

Rondell's office featured a window looking directly down onto Wall Street. Even without a partnership, he had arrived. Leather chairs, old wood, and molded plasterwork made the office smell like a gun club. Books marched along the walls, but the desk was bare of paper. The lawyer was an electronic worker. A desktop computer shared the blotter with an open laptop. James Rondell was neat and dark-haired, about midway into his thirties. He had a cleft chin and square jaw, unremarkable features, and a lean build wrapped in a charcoal suit.

Without preamble, he said, “George Livingston recommended you.” He struck quickly at the keyboard of his laptop. “I have to admit I have some qualms about using an outsider, but Henry Dallen is mostly good for watching old apartments and driving people back and forth. I need a sharp knife for this one.” He frowned at Vasquez.

Guthrie sat down and gestured for her to join him. The lawyer wasn't going to waste breath on an invitation.

“You spoke with Olsen,” Rondell said. “Did he give you an angle?”

“He's stunned, Mr. Rondell,” Guthrie said. “He might not be any use until after he settles down. Right now, though, I'm looking for an eyewitness it seems the NYPD missed on canvass.”

The lawyer's attention focused on him. “You're kidding?”

“Not so fast,” Guthrie said. “I had part of an interview before he spooked. That was enough to establish his bona fides—the number of shots, small heavy-caliber pistol, and he robbed the body—but he bolted without describing the shooter. The witness is a vagrant—street type. I have to run him down.”

The lawyer eased back in his chair. “So how long will you need to find him?”

Guthrie shrugged. The lawyer was disappointed, but a glance out the window seemed to encourage him. Like anyone else, he wanted things to be easy, but it didn't get to him. He could look
down
on Wall Street. Rondell typed on his computer for a minute, nodded, and announced that a witness might not matter. For the moment, Olsen was charged only with Camille Bowman's murder, but the media had their hearts set on an alignment with the other murders. If Olsen lacked alibis, he would probably be charged. Even without more charges, Rondell thought Olsen's best chance at the moment was to angle for a deal. The lawyer didn't see a bright outcome for Olsen on a plea of not guilty. If an eyewitness changed matters on the Bowman murder, they would still need to deal with the others afterward.

Guthrie asked for details on Olsen's alibi, despite the fact that the NYPD had arrested him anyway. The lawyer tapped on his computer, then outlined his notes. Olsen was sitting with a drunk veteran named Philip Linney on the night of the murder. Linney was his alibi for several nights, but the NYPD tripped the vet up during an interview. The cell phones showed calls spanning days before and after the murder, but Linney admitted he'd been stinking drunk a lot of the time. The alibi was good until the NYPD zeroed in on the .44, and then it sank.

“Maybe it's an angle,” Guthrie said after jotting in his notebook. “Along that same line, I want to see who gets Bowman's trust fund. That's motive, and maybe another suspect.”

Rondell's mouth hardened into a grim line. “Camille was an only child,” he said. “Without checking, I'll venture that her trust reverts to her parents, or someone higher up.” His fingers rapped out something on his laptop keyboard while he spoke.

The lawyer fell silent, but Guthrie outwaited the younger man without betraying impatience. Rondell's annoyed glance didn't deter him.

“I'll put a number on it,” Rondell said finally. “I'm afraid the Bowmans left the city after the funeral. Dealing with the police was quite enough for them.” Unspoken, but implied by the lawyer's tone, was a suggestion that someone owned a piece of the street they were on—including the buildings and everything in them.

“I got reasons,” Guthrie said.

“I'll make the calls. It'll be your business what you can do with it.”

After they were downstairs and had passed from the tomblike quiet of the marble lobby back into the city's noise, Guthrie seemed to walk a bit taller. Some burden was gone. Around them, businesspeople rushed along on the sidewalk. Vasquez and the rumpled little detective didn't match the surroundings. If they'd been raindrops, they wouldn't have lasted long on Wall Street. They would've gone quickly to the darkness of the storm drains. Vasquez drove the old Ford back to the office.

*   *   *

They stopped working early that evening, and Guthrie drove Vasquez home. Henry Street was hot and crowded. Young people were in the street and on the sidewalks, listening to music that blared from parked cars, drinking, and throwing insults back and forth good-naturedly. The old people were on the fire escapes, and peeping from windows. Rachel's middle brothers, Indio and Miguel, called the old ones “sky boxers,” like they were at Yankee Stadium, sitting above everyone and watching. The old people sat still, and the young people hustled back and forth below them in the street.

For Vasquez, that was the natural order of the universe, and so being still and quiet was the closest thing to being dead. Old people were still and quiet. That gave her trouble with the hours of watching, reading, and writing reports she did, working for Guthrie. Working on the new case made it seem not so pointless, suddenly, and Henry Street looked different. The young muchachos stared at her, like always, but didn't say anything like always. She was singled out for silence, and that was because of her brothers. They were loco; nobody messed with them.

Vasquez paused on the stoop to enjoy the heat for a minute before she went inside. Papì had already swept the steps. He liked to come out and sit when the afternoon was nearly over. Inside, Mamì was cooking and talking on the phone in a hushed stream of Spanish. Some music was playing in the big bedroom; that was Papì.

When she came inside, the phone conversation paused in mid-phrase. That was an unmistakable signal. For good or ill, Mamì was talking about her. She set her palmtop down in the living room, atop the overloaded coffee table, then went into the kitchen. Mamì signaled her furiously when she came into sight, indicating the phone.

“Roberto has some good news,” she hissed, covering the mouthpiece with one small brown hand. “This is perfect, at just this time. You have to talk to him.”

Vasquez's stomach churned. Her appetite disappeared, and she wished she was back at work. Even so, she took the phone. “
Sí?
” she said, unable to disguise her weariness.

“
¿Cómo estás
, Rachel?” Roberto asked. Her eldest brother always spoke Spanish to the family. Language was one of the few things he ever argued about with Papì.

“Ay, nothing. I just came home,” she replied.

“From work?”

“Yes.”

A pause stretched before snapping. Roberto was measuring his next sentence to see if it would come up short. He was the perfect one, Mamì's white boy. He could spit English like a professor, but not to the family. Probably he needed a reminder that he was Puerto Rican, because he looked so much like Papì. He had golden-brown hair and eyes flecked with green and gold, just like Papì, and he shined even next to Rachel, who was next lightest, a splash of coffee in a cup of cream.

“I know you still haven't signed up for school yet,” he said, “but I know from a friend at Fordham that they could waive preregistration. You could still get in for the fall semester.”

Vasquez turned so that she wouldn't be facing her mother. She didn't want to show how angry she was about needing to repeat what she had said since school ended. She was not going to college. The conversation had layers of stupid repetition, like an archaeological excavation. “I got a job, Roberto,” she said. “I'm not sitting at home being bad, you know.”

“I didn't say that,” he insisted. “No one is saying that.”

Insinuations don't count, Vasquez thought bitterly. Her family meant her to do what was expected, exactly the opposite of her other two brothers. Some jokes they made about that. Years before, they had dressed her up with a crown and called her “Princess,” and she was fine with that until she realized the crown was a ratty old pair of rolled-up underwear.

“Fordham has a satellite campus right in the city,” Roberto said. “You don't have to ride up to the Bronx. You don't even need to choose a major right away—mostly, freshman year is for mandatory courses.”

Vasquez wanted to scream. She had been hearing all of this from Papì since the beginning. He'd pushed her to take the tests. That was where she should have said no. Once she got the scores that would earn her a scholarship, a golden ticket that she didn't want, her life started breaking apart under the jabs of insistence. “I have a
job
!” She darted a glance over her shoulder at Mamì, and repeated more softly, “I have a job.”

“Forget medicine, okay?” Roberto said soothingly. “I wouldn't want to be a doctor, either. But that job, come on, Rachel, that's not a job. What are you doing, typing? You're wasting yourself. Being lazy is one thing, but hurting Mamì like this—”

“You don't hear what I'm saying, Roberto. You don't get it.” Vasquez was furious; she wanted to say ugly things, but she was neatly trapped. Roberto could provoke her however he wanted, because Mamì couldn't hear him. She wasn't so lucky. Angrily, she fired a bullet she had saved from the beginning. “You don't even know what I'm getting paid, Roberto, for this job where maybe I do nothing.”

“It's not worth your future,” he said, but more weakly, because she had hit him solidly. He turned it around quickly. “So? How much? How much is your life worth?”

She shrugged, biting back insults. How good would it feel to ask him what his dignity was worth? “Twelve hundred a week,” she said. “I'm not doing nothing, Roberto. It's serious stuff, even if I don't have it all figured out yet.”

“Twelve hundred? You could get that in an
hour,
Rachel.”

After twenty years of school, she thought, and laughed. “What hour you ever make twelve hundred, Roberto?”

“When did we start talking about me?” A barrio edge chilled his voice; the resemblance to Papì was uncanny. “What are you doing, then, that's so important? That's pushing you to the top of your profession? Typing? Polishing shoes?”

Vasquez flushed. “It's confidential,” she said. She wasn't allowed to talk about the cases, especially now that they had a case to talk about. Guthrie had made sure to drive that point home while he was driving her home.

The mess at the ISU lab that morning was fresh in her mind. They had a client to think about. Part of the pay was for confidentiality, especially for this client.

“You're dropping down to lies now?” Roberto asked. “That's where you're at? A half-grown girl living at home, pretending she's doing something—”

Vasquez handed the phone to her mother. “Tell him to shut up, Mamì,” she said. In her mother's dark eyes she could see doubts warring with doubts.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

A hazy sky covered Manhattan in the morning. Thick, humid air promised a scorching, sweaty day. Guthrie drove uptown after he picked up Vasquez. He passed Thirty-fourth Street while she was still drinking her coffee, and she decided that they must be going back to the crime scene.

“We gonna catch that drunk asleep?” she asked.

The little man shook his head. “Never try something like that until you're desperate, or you know your man real well. You spook a vagrant, he might go up to Boston, or down to Philly. You'll never see 'im again.”

“He's an old drunk,” Vasquez said.

“A drunk, sure, but his head ain't gone. He said something that made me think he was a vet, or been running around with vets.”

“That guy sounded old, Guthrie. Too old for the war.”

Guthrie laughed. “Iraq ain't the only war this country's ever fought. Ever heard of Vietnam?”

She frowned. “You're kidding. All those old guys are dead. Except for John McCain, and he's, like, a hundred.”

“Not hardly.” He pulled a disc from his pocket and dropped it on the console. “Load that behind the kill switch on your palmtop, okay? That could get you into trouble. It's the police reports.”

The vagrant was a priority because he wasn't mentioned in the canvassing reports. Guthrie had spent hours combing the material. The NYPD had turned up one witness Guthrie did want to interview, but they'd missed the vagrant at the scene of the shooting. The investigation by Major Case had focused on Olsen almost immediately, because detectives usually follow the path of least resistance on a homicide. Murderers are usually obvious. Husband shoots wife or wife shoots husband, robbery, rape—these motives are obvious. Suspects leap into the net. Drug or gang shootings are tougher, because more suspects share the same motives. So the NYPD had no hesitation about Pin the Crime on the Fiancé. They had a registered gun with matching ballistics. The assistant DA would close the case by selling it to a jury. Mere suspicion to the contrary wouldn't derail a conviction. Guthrie and Vasquez needed something beyond solid, since they believed Olsen didn't murder Bowman. By the time they cruised into Washington Heights, Vasquez had glimpsed from Guthrie's explanations the enormity of the task before them.

The little detective parked his Ford in a gravel parking lot shaded by a long redbrick house. Dormers peered out at them from the high peaked roof. Below the eaves, it wore a sign that read:
SALVATION SHELTER
. On one side a hurricane fence edged the lot, clogged by isolated runners of ivy where the building's shade fell. The Harlem River was nearby, and the morning was still cool.

Some dirty, ragged kids tossed a bottle back and forth in one corner of the lot. Most of the windows above them were open, laundry flying out like flags to dry. The other loiterers in the lot wore a long-time-without-a-job look of scruffy and mismatched. They watched suspiciously as Guthrie and Vasquez climbed from the Ford. The kids poised for a long handful of moments before deciding they weren't cops. The nearby fence had well-worn marks of passage. The ritual of running was so practiced that it had scarred the landscape.