Deadly Interest (9 page)

The one out-of-place thing on his desk was
his blotter. Evidently, Detective Lulinski was a scribbler and the
entire white face of the calendar that covered the center of the
blotter was awash in drawings and notes. He seemed particularly
interested in drawing eyes—there must have been fifteen of them
staring back at him, female eyes, male eyes, most of which had been
rendered in black ink, a few in blue. I had to admit, he was pretty
good.

No emotion in any of the eyes, however, and
I wondered what that said about the man.

As soon as he sat, he pulled up a file from
his computer, and concentrated on it, leaving me to my
lonesome.

“
Why . . .” I cleared my
throat. “Why did a funeral home van come to take Mrs. Vicks away? I
thought that this would be something for the coroner to
do.”

His eyebrows, dark with bits of gray hairs
that went their springy different ways, raised up—not pleased. But
he didn’t make eye contact. He simply kept clicking at the form on
the screen, even as he answered me.

“
First of all, here in
Cook County, we say ‘medical examiner’—not ‘coroner.’ The
difference is mainly semantics, but due to the overwhelming number
of incidents every year, we’re sending funeral homes to shuttle the
bodies to the morgue.”

That surprised me. I’d been about to follow
up with another question regarding Mrs. Vicks’ autopsy, when he
interrupted my thoughts.

“
You believe you last saw
the victim at about six-twenty-five, correct?”

“
Yes,” I answered. The
time reference reminded me about the meeting I still had to get to
this afternoon. I sneaked a surreptitious glance at my
watch.

Detective Lulinski caught me checking. One
wiry eyebrow raised and his lips pursed.

“
Okay, tell me again about
the night of the murder. I’m going to transcribe it into this
report and then you’ll read it, sign it and you can be on your
way.”

Well wasn’t he warm and fuzzy?

“
I don’t mind being here,”
I said. “I mean, I want to do whatever I can to help find out who
did this.”

He glanced at my wristwatch. “Uh-huh,” he
said in a flat voice. “Now, let’s start at the beginning.”

Within a few minutes he’d taken down every
detail of my interaction with Mrs. Vicks, moment by moment. He had
me repeat some of it several times and despite the fact that I knew
I wasn’t a suspect, I felt odd about it. As though I was holding
back information. I knew better, of course, but I still felt
guilty—like not having all the answers to who killed her was my
fault. Like somehow I held the key to it all.

Lulinski clicked the controls and sent the
file to a nearby laser printer. He got up, snatched it from the
printer and perused it as he walked back to the desk.

“
Okay,” he said keeping
his attention on the report before him. Without making eye contact,
he handed me the document. “Here, read it over, sign it if you
agree with everything. I’ll be right back.”

Before he’d made it out the door, he pulled
out a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and a lighter from
his pants. I watched him leave, then began verifying everything he
recorded.

The guy was meticulous, I had to give him
that. Both with recording details and with drawing eyes, and I
wondered if that’s why he came across as taciturn as he did. Hard
to connect those attributes with friendliness, I supposed.

Just as I finished reading, he was back.
Perfect timing. My guess is that it wasn’t coincidence.

“
Looks fine,” I said. I
reached for a pen in the holder across his desk.

He beat me to it, held it for a moment
before handing it over, finally making eye contact. “You’re
sure?”

I felt the gears in my mind start to churn.
“Yeah,” I said, slowly. “I think this is pretty much word for word
what I said.”

He sat. “Then go ahead and sign.”

I did.

Detective Lulinski watched me till I
finished my name with my customary flourish. “You do know that this
becomes part of the permanent record.”

“
I assumed as
much.”

“
You’re not going to be
able to deny any of this.”

“
Why would I want
to?”

“
Well,” he said, pulling a
cigarette out from the pack and fingering it for a moment before
tucking it over his ear, “I know sometimes you media types think
that you can say one thing and mean another.”

“
What?”

“
The night of the murder,
you came traipsing over to let me know you’d been with the decedent
earlier in the day.”

“
That’s right.”

“
You were pretty
forthcoming.” He shrugged, staring at me with those dark eyes. “But
not so forthcoming to let me know you worked for a television news
station.”

“
What would that have to
do with anything?”

He looked at me as though I were stupid.
“You just happened to have been in contact with the victim hours
before she was murdered. Murdered in a neighborhood known for being
quiet and gang-free. Sweet innocent lady gets killed, it’s big
news. And guess what? You were there.”

“
You’re not thinking that
I had anything to do with it?” Stunned, I could hear the
indignation and disgust in my voice.

“
No,” he said, slowly.
“But I do find it interesting that you barged in, yet never said a
word about what you did for a living.”

“
Why would that have
mattered? It has nothing to do with the fact that she was murdered,
and it can’t possibly help you catch the guy.”

“
But it can help you get
ratings, can’t it?” His face tightened—not an attractive look. As
if furious with me, his cheeks sucked in, giving added shadow to
the burgeoning beard at his jawline. The long creases that
bracketed his mouth, deepened.

“
What are you talking
about?”

The background buzz in the office had
quieted enough for me to realize that the otherwise unoccupied
detectives nearby were listening in.

“
You come in here,
purportedly to provide a statement.”

It was a prompt, and I nodded.

“
What’s the first thing
out of your mouth? You start questioning why a funeral home picked
up the body instead of the medical examiner.”

“
I was curious,” I said,
feeling defensive.

“
Curious.” His voice
dripped sarcasm. “That’s what you people call it nowadays, huh?
Come on, Ms. St. James, we both know you media guys have a
reputation for taking small incidents and turning them into
heart-breaking feature stories with the requisite inept police
investigators.” He smirked. “By ‘guys’ I mean reporters, you
understand. Non-gender specific.”

This character was getting to me. I told
myself to keep calm.

“
I don’t understand the
basis for your anger, Detective.”

“
Nevermind.”

A swell of resentment gathered in my chest,
and even as my voice rose, I wrestled with tamping down my
frustration. “I will not ‘nevermind.’ You obviously have something
you want me to know. So, consider this your big chance.” I sat
back, folded my arms, and stared at him.

Despite the fact that I felt like a rotten
little kid pitching a fit in the grocery store, I held tight for an
excruciatingly long thirty seconds. He stared me down.

“
I think we’re about
finished here,” he said. Just as he propped his hands on the arms
of his chair to stand, I stopped him.

“
Listen,” I said, my voice
softer now, quiet enough to keep out of the reach of curious ears,
“I don’t know why, but we’ve gotten off to a bad start. If my
occupation was important to your investigation, then I apologize
for not mentioning it sooner. I didn’t think it would make a
difference.” I cringed a bit inside. I’d held back on that tidbit
of information for just that very reason. We in the media often
were regarded with suspicion and I’d wanted to avoid
that.

Fingers splayed on the
desk before him, he took a breath. Whatever was bugging this guy,
it was more than just my job at
Midwest
Focus
. “Where can I reach you for
follow-up, if I have any further questions?” he asked.

I pulled a business card from my purse.
“Here,” I said, standing.

He took one look at the card, then stood,
stepping sideways to block my departure. “Wait.”

Left without much choice, I waited.

“
Midwest Focus
Newsmagazine
?” he asked, sounding
surprised.

“
Yeah,” I said, the same
way people say, “Duh!”

For the first time all
afternoon, the detective appeared nonplussed. “I thought that you
worked for
Up Close
Issues
.”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“
So you don’t work with
Dan Starck?”

I offered a thin-lipped smile. “Not if I can
help it.”

He opened his middle drawer and pulled out a
clipping from the newspaper. Sandra Stanek’s article. “What about
this?”

Fed up, I rolled my eyes. “Don’t believe
everything you read, Detective.”

“
Hmm,” he said. He stepped
aside, allowing me passage. “I’ll call you if I need anything
further, is that all right?” His voice had softened enough to sound
almost conversational. As though we’d just met and he hadn’t
decided to hate me, yet.

“
Sure,” I said.

I left, wondering what that had all been
about.

“
Alex!”

Lucy ran at me, all arms and smiles, and
threw herself into a bear hug.

As I pulled her close, I thought again about
how I felt so much like her older sister, not three years her
junior. She had bright blond curly hair, cut about shoulder length,
and as I ran my hand across the back of her head, I felt a rough
patch of knots. Lucy always twisted the back of her hair when she
was nervous.

She was only five-foot-two; I was a good
four inches taller. They say Williams Syndrome gives its victims a
pixie look, and for Lucy, at least, it was true. She had bright
blue eyes that tilted just enough to give her that “different”
appearance, and her chin was narrow, coming almost to a point. The
fact that she was tiny, both in stature, and in bone structure,
made the pixie-illusion even stronger. She liked to wear dresses,
as did I, but where I’d relax at home in a pair of worn blue jeans
and a sweatshirt, she’d grab a cotton dress to pull over her head,
and feel just as comfortable. It stemmed, I believed, from the fact
that throwing a dress over her head and slipping on loafers took a
lot less concentration than dealing with the zippers, buttons, and
shoelaces.

She had a tendency to spill on herself,
however, and my mom, in an effort to keep cleaning bills and
replacement clothing costs down, started providing some of those
elderly women house-dresses for Lucy. I hated them. She was wearing
one of them now, a blue checkered gingham.

She clung to me for a long time.

“
What’s wrong?” I asked,
as we finally pulled away.

“
Nothing,” she said,
smoothing the back of her head with her left hand. “I was just
waiting and waiting for you to come.”

“
I told Mr. Raymond I’d be
here by ten,” I said, with a glance at my watch. “It’s not even
nine-thirty, yet.”

Giggling, she bounced up on the balls of her
feet. “I know. I just was so excited to see you.”

I took another look at the housedress. As
long as she was staying with me, I’d see that she had some slightly
more stylish clothes to wear. “It’s cold outside,” I said. “Don’t
you have anything heavier?”

“
I’m hot.”

“
It’s cold in the car.
Let’s go see what else you’ve got.”

Lucy was better than anyone I knew at
reading people and pinpointing when someone was unhappy, or
troubled. She herself was in a perennially cheerful mood, and in
addition to her favorite activity—socializing—she loved to read,
listen to music, and play the piano.

It hadn’t been till she was eleven and I was
eight that I started to notice the differences between us. I’d
memorized my multiplication tables over the course of an evening,
and I asked her to test me on them while we were grocery shopping
with Mom.

Within a couple of minutes it was apparent
to me that she had no idea what I was doing. It was then that I
began to notice our mother taking her aside and explaining how much
the bill should be, how much cash she should offer and how much she
should expect back in return.

I was wearing my favorite pink top that
day—the one with three puppies in hula skirts that were sewn on
special so they moved in the wind, and a pair of matching pink
shorts. “Here,” I said, trying to inject some lightness into the
conversation. I pointed to my shirt. “Think of it like this. How
many puppies do I have here?”

I waited.

Mom waited.

Lucy bit her lip and looked down at her
feet. She held her fingers out, low, and snuck a glance back up at
my shirt, trying to match the number of fingers to the number of
puppies.

I felt my heart break. Reality rushed at me,
making me feel like I should have been more aware, should have been
more sensitive, and at the same time knowing that I’d never look at
her the same again.

“
Don’t worry about it,
honey,” Mom said. She turned to the closest grocery shelf and I
watched her eyes scan over the boxes and cans, with frantic
eagerness. “Here!” she said, in discovery, moving halfway down the
aisle to reach. “You two love fruit cocktail.” She held the
bright-colored can up for both of us to see. Lucy’s face rose
enough to catch a glimpse. “We haven’t had fruit cocktail for
dessert in a long time, have we?”