Dead Certain (29 page)

Elliott stopped on the threshold of my bedroom, which was the last one at the end of the hall. He reholstered the Browning and turned to me with an enormous grin on his face.

“I guess the only thing the burglars did was trash your bedroom,” he said, surveying the tumult of dirty clothes and rumpled linen that was my room’s natural state.

“What pigs,” I said, slipping my arms around Elliott’s waist. “Why don’t you go into the living room and put on some music while I clear a path to the bed. Then I’ll see if I can find us a bottle of wine in the fridge.”

“Why don’t you let me get the wine,” he said. “It looks like you’re going to be in here for a while.”

“You’d better leave that to me. Grown men have fainted when they open up the door to our refrigerator. Claudia has been known to store anatomical specimens there.”

“In that case I hope you weren’t planning on cooking me dinner any time soon,” remarked Elliott as he turned to head back down the hall.

“You’re safe,” I called after him. “I can’t cook a thing.”

As I shoveled my dirty clothes into the laundry hamper I found myself feeling vaguely uneasy. I might not mind leaving my clothes on the floor, but the lawyer in me abhorred loose ends. While I was convinced that there was an innocent explanation for the front door having been left open, the fact that I didn’t know what it was nagged at me.

As I hastily smoothed the sheets on my bed and pulled up the duvet cover, I told myself that Claudia had probably just gotten careless. Lord knows the combination of Mrs. Estrada’s death and the malpractice suit was starting to make her come unglued. I figured I could live with the occasional lapse at home, just so long as she didn’t start getting forgetful in the operating room, too.

After I was finished, I stopped to survey my handiwork. Elliott had put on music in the living room, and I was intrigued by the fact that he’d chosen one of the CDs from Claudia’s collection as opposed to one of mine. It was a digitally remastered recording of Billie Holiday’s. For some reason the sound of her voice made me feel as though the evening was back on track. Our Starsky and Hutch interlude already forgotten.

I made a quick stop in the bathroom to tidy up my hair and brush my teeth before making my way to the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator door and was rewarded by the sight of a congealed piece of pizza wrapped in a paper napkin and a sliver of something in a plastic bag that might have been a lemon at some point in the distant past. However, in the back behind the ketchup bottle I spied a bottle of champagne. One of my clients had given it to me when I’d made partner.

“Perfect,” I said, and headed to the butler’s pantry in search of champagne flutes.

The butler’s pantry, like the crown moldings and enormous dining room, was a holdover from the day when cooks cooked and butlers butled. Even though it was bigger than my first office at Callahan Ross, it was really nothing more than a wide internal passageway between the kitchen and the dining room lined with elaborate glass-fronted cabinets for china, as well as having a sink for washing glassware.

With the bottle of champagne in one hand, I put my shoulder to the swinging door to the pantry and was surprised to find it blocked from the other side. In an apartment that old nothing worked right. The doorstop had probably slipped down on the other side, but rather than walk all the way around, I just gave the door another shove.

I don’t remember screaming, although I know that I must have. It was the only way to account for the speed with which Elliott found me, with his gun drawn and a look of alarm spreading across his face. But by the time he arrived, I was already on the floor, my knees slippery with blood, grabbing for my roommate’s chilly wrist, searching frantically for a pulse.

CHAPTER 21

The outside world went away. If there was any sound, I could not hear it—not Elliott’s voice or the locomotive of my own breathing. Instead, there was a rushing sound like steam that filled my skull, and the terrifying realization that I was no longer capable of telling my body what to do. I just sat on my knees in the puddle of cold blood, holding my dead roommate’s hand in mine, staring at the black-handled kitchen knife protruding from her neck.

Elliott’s strong hands grasped me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. In one swift motion he lifted me a few inches off the ground and swung me clear of both the swinging door and the blood, setting me back down on the other side.

“Are you okay?” he asked, drawing me into an embrace that left his white shirt smeared with Claudia’s blood. I realize now that I should have been less impressed by his concern for me than the fact that even in the shock of the moment his first thought was to get me away from the body and preserve the crime scene.

I shook my head, unable to find my voice, and buried my head in his neck as if in doing so I could blot out the horror of what was happening. Ever so gently, he pushed me away and led me slowly out onto the sunporch.

I found myself taken back to the night that Russell died. Even though his was a death that was expected— even, during those last days of anguish, yearned for—in some ways it was exactly the same. A part of me felt as though my soul had been torn in two, as if some fundamental part of me had been ripped shrieking from the roots.

And then there was the other part, the automaton that just went through the motions. The one who kissed his forehead one last time and straightened the thin sheet of his hospital bed. The one who slipped the wedding ring off his emaciated finger, clasped it in a furious fist, and walked down the somber hallway of the cancer ward, looking for a nurse to tell.

Elliott called 911 and then joined me in the darkened sunporch to wait for the police. Refusing the comfort of his arms, I stood alone, fighting back a tide of rage and grief, willing myself not to cry. There was still a lot to be gotten through and nothing, absolutely nothing, to be gained by falling apart.

I heard the sirens before I saw the lights of the approaching squad cars. As usual it was the University Police who got there first. They were so much a fixture in Hyde Park that the people waiting at the bus stop hardly glanced at them as they pulled up to the curb.

In the early sixties Hyde Park was a neighborhood in jeopardy, in danger of being ripped apart not by the antiwar dissidents who disrupted so many other college communities, but by the Blackstone Rangers, a particularly vicious street gang. In its rational way, the great minds at the University of Chicago discussed whether it would be more cost-effective to move itself lock, stock, and library to Arizona or to hunker down and defend its turf. Thus was the University of Chicago Police Department born. Operating under a special city charter, they were now the largest private police force in the country. My mind clung to these and other irrelevant facts like a shipwrecked sailor clutching at debris.

It helped me hold my other thoughts at bay, the ones where I replayed the warnings of everyone who’d ever expressed concern about the safety of Hyde Park. All my own jokes about burglars seemed to come back and slap me in the face. I tried to will myself into a sense of numbness, to tell myself that this was a tragedy too big to be absorbed, but still the pain seemed to sear itself into my flesh.

Ironically the deliberate calm of the police, who were now arriving by the carload, reminded me of Claudia, of her surreal detachment while she was trying to restart Bill Delius’s heart. It might be life or death, but it was also just a job.

Elliott and I gave our statements to the police. Someone must have turned off the CD player, either that or the disc had played itself through without my noticing. I found that while I could not think, I could at least answer questions, provided that they were simple and the answers clear-cut. Anything involving reasoning or conjecture, like how long Elliott and I had lingered in the vestibule or how long it had taken us to walk through the apartment, was beyond the limits of my cognitive powers.

By the time we’d finished, the place I had once called home had been transformed into a crime scene. I kept hearing the sound of the intercom and the buzzer and the voice of the uniform who’d been charged with the task of letting people into the building.

The neighbors, normally not a gregarious lot, began coming out to investigate the commotion. The graduate students from across the hall stuck their heads out only long enough to gawk, but old Mrs. Leavitt from upstairs, a mathematician’s widow, cried softly when she heard the news. Later she insisted that she be let in to bring me a cup of tea in a rose-patterned China cup. She also brought an ancient cardigan, which she laid across my shoulders as if Claudia’s death had somehow turned me into an invalid. It had holes in it, and like its owner, it smelled of lavender and mothballs.

I sought refuge in the sunporch at the front of the apartment. There, curled up in my wicker chair in the darkness, I could see the morgue wagon pull up to the curb, and watch as the patrolman urged passersby to keep moving, assuring them that there was nothing to see. Joe Blades arrived at about the same time as the TV minicams. I don’t know which I was more surprised to see. He drove up in a Caprice Classic, which he left parked in the bus stop. He stopped for a minute on the sidewalk, straightening his glasses and buttoning his tweed jacket against the wind. Elliott must have called and asked him to come.

Blades was an old friend from the days when they both worked the white-collar crimes unit in the state’s attorneys office. Joe was a Princeton grad who’d turned down the chance to go to law school in order to pursue a career in law enforcement, rapidly rising through the ranks to his natural resting place—homicide. Elliott came out to the front steps to meet him. They shook hands, their heads close together, conferring gravely. I forced myself to get to my feet and walked out to meet them.

“I’m so sorry,” said Joe, taking my hand in both of his and giving it a quick squeeze. Indicating the man standing next to him, he said, “This is my partner, Pete Kowalczyk. He and I have been assigned to investigate your roommate’s death.”

Kowalczyk doled out a syllable in greeting, not enough for me to be able to tell how he felt about being pulled off whatever he was working on to look into a murder on the south side. He was a brick wall of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, with arms as thick as a stevedore’s and a thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair above the wide planes of his Slavic face.

I know this has been a bad night,” continued Blades kindly. “But if you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions.” I nodded as the crime-scene crew brushed past in their dark overalls, lugging their heavy boxes of equipment. “Is there someplace out of the way where we can talk?”

“Why don’t you two go into the living room?” suggested Elliott, separating himself from the official police investigation and letting his friend go about his job.

“I’m going to take a quick canvas of the building,” reported Kowalczyk to Blades. “See if any of the neighbors heard anything.”

Blades nodded, and we went inside. The homicide detective drifted around the room for a bit before he finally settled in Claudia’s favorite armchair across from me on the couch. I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Blades dug into his pocket and produced a clean white handkerchief and passed it to me without a word. In his line of work, I figured, he must buy them in bulk.

With efficient questions he quickly took me through the story of discovering Claudia’s body. After that, the conversation turned to Claudia, with Blades quickly focusing in on the things most likely to lead him to her killer: her boyfriends, her habits, and her vices. I did the best I could to fill him in on the details of Claudia’s life. I told him about her parents, children of the sixties who were both tenured professors at Columbia, and her fellowship in trauma surgery. Then I told him about Carlos.

“Do you know his last name?” asked Blades, taking notes.

“No. But anybody who works in the ER at Prescott Memorial should be able to tell you. Like I said, he’s a paramedic.”

“And how long did you say they were seeing each other?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe two or three months.”

“And you said she broke it off when she found out he was married?”

“Yes. And almost immediately afterward we started getting these hang-up calls.”

“Did he ever follow her, do you know? Ever threaten her?”

I shook my head. “You have to understand about Claudia,” I said. “She wasn’t one of those women who can’t wait to run home and tell her best friend all about it. I know it sounds corny, but she was a person of action, not words. She used to say that’s what made her choose surgery. She could use her hands to actually make patients better, as opposed to playing twenty questions to figure out what was wrong with them and then writing them a prescription. She said it gave her a charge every time she held an instrument in her hand.” I suddenly found myself looking at the world through tears. I got to my feet and started pacing, anything to keep from falling apart.

“So, do you think this guy Carlos is the kind of person who could have done this?” asked Blades. “You said the front door was open. Do you think she would have let him in if he’d come over?”

I thought for a minute before answering. “No,” I said finally. “Like you, she was in a line of work where you get to see just how mean the mean streets really can be. I don’t think she’d have let Carlos in if he’d showed up, not after what happened the other day.”