Murder in Alphabet City (3 page)

“Maybe it's a lead.”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows, took a last drag on the butt, stepped on it, and started down the stairs to the Lex.

“You two don't look like you just had tea on Park Avenue,” MacHovec said cheerfully as they walked into the office.

“We didn't.” Defino took his coat off and hung it on a hook.

“Well I've been busy. Made some calls about this Stratton guy. He spent some time in a loony bin.”

“You would too if you had Constantine for a sister.”

“Why'd they let him out?” Jane asked, sifting through her messages.

“He wanted out and they felt he wouldn't be a danger to himself.”

“He supposed to see a shrink while he was out?”

“Yeah.” MacHovec pulled out a sheet of paper and tapped it with his pencil. “But Stratton didn't keep appointments.”

“What about meds?”

“He was on 'em but who knows if he took 'em.”

“He didn't,” Jane said. “The autopsy said there weren't any in his system.”

“So he didn't see his shrink, didn't take his pills, didn't call out for food. What does his sister want you to dig up?”

“Somebody wearing love beads,” Defino growled.

“Wasn't that the sixties down in the Village?”

“Who fucking knows?”

“Well, kiddies, you're both in such a good mood I'll leave you to entertain each other. You coming in tomorrow before you see the PI?”

They both said yes. MacHovec got his coat and left.

“He's in rare form,” Defino said.

“So are you. Why don't you take off? If Graves wants a report, I'll give it to him.”

“You don't have to ask me twice.”

When she was alone, she called her father, made sure he was OK, and walked out to where she could see Graves's office. No one was at the desk. She took the hint.

3

H
OME WAS THE
apartment Jane had moved into a few months ago, a building in the West Village where the familiar grid of Manhattan streets dissolves into chaos. Here you almost needed a compass to determine directions. For tourists it was confusing; for Jane it was charm. The building was solid, prewar, and her apartment had a fireplace. She dropped the case file on the sofa, hung up her coat, secured her weapon, and checked the answering machine. Not a single message. Good. She could do justice to the file tonight in preparation for the morning meeting with Wally Shreiber.

Then she started a fire. She had become accustomed to sitting in front of the fire while she ate dinner, a pleasure she had not anticipated until after her fortieth birthday. Home was now where the fire was.

In jeans and a sweatshirt she ate stew she had cooked over the weekend, drinking a beer with it, feeling the warmth of the fire. It didn't get much better than this.

Except for the case. Defino was acting out the way she felt too, annoyance at having been chosen to hold a hand, waste time, get nowhere. MacHovec didn't much care. He sat at his desk five days a week and dug up information without regard to its usefulness. As long as they paid him, he would go along with it.

Jane pushed the dish and glass aside and pulled over the file. A color photo of a healthy-looking Anderson Stratton was in the envelope along with pictures taken after his death. It required a good imagination to find a resemblance. Emaciated was an understatement. Why does a guy stop eating and drinking? In one photo the telephone was clearly visible on the table beside his chair. If he had lost the strength to hold it in his hand, to push the buttons, why had he allowed himself to wait so long? Had the demons of his disease so clouded his mind that he was unable to recognize hunger and thirst and to respond to them?

He had been a good-looking guy. Something about his face reminded Jane of Flavia Constantine's face, but the features went better on a man. She was a plain woman even with all the makeup and hairstyling.

Assuming Constantine was on the right track for a killer, even she could come up with only a weak motive, that Constantine and her bucks would show up at some point, the money ripe for the taking. Weak was an understatement.

Andy Stratton had survived thirty-six years of life without having broken any bones or requiring any surgery. Nothing affected his digestive system adversely and there were no drugs, good or bad, in his system. Some old burns scarred his hands and a small cut on his left hand had nearly healed, most likely from trying to cut something with his right. A rotten apple core in the garbage was a possible explanation. So at some point he had eaten an apple.

Jane got up and added two logs to the fire, waiting in front of the screen till they caught. The file, open, lay on the coffee table. She found the sketch of the apartment, then the larger sketch of the room where the body was found. Stratton was facing a wall with two windows. To the left of the window on the left, a tall bookcase covered the wall to the corner of the room. On the adjoining wall was a desk. It was in that corner, where the left-hand side of the bookcase ended, and against that wall that Mrs. C. had found the beads. It was truly a find, Jane acknowledged. The crime scene people had not moved the bookcase. In the photos it was nearly full, thus too heavy to move easily unless the books were removed.

One photo, taken from behind the chair, showed the windows and bookcase. If Stratton were sitting in the chair wearing a necklace that broke, the beads might easily roll to that corner if they hit the floor. Jane estimated he would have to be leaning forward for that to happen. Otherwise the beads might well have settled in the chair itself, finding their way under the cushion, perhaps even into the innards. She wondered if the chair still existed.

What was more likely was that he was standing when the string broke—or another person wearing the necklace was standing. The beads were tiny. They seemed better suited to a woman, even to a girl, than to a tall man in his thirties.

She kept reading till ten, the interviews on the Fives blurring in monotony. “I saw him sometimes in the street but I didn't know him.” “He's dead? What happened? I haven't seen him for a long time.” “He was a quiet neighbor. Most of the time. I don't even know his name.” “Andy? Yeah. He had a real gift. He wrote great poetry. I wondered what happened to him. I haven't seen him in a month or more.”

They went on and on. The pizza deliverer knew more about him than most of his neighbors. “Nice guy, real nice. When I delivered, I never saw him, you understand. He left an envelope outside the door with money in it. I pushed the bell, left the pizza, took the envelope, and went downstairs. He was real generous. Once I went halfway down to the next floor and I waited to see him open the door, just to make sure, you know? He didn't come for a long time, like five minutes. Then I heard the door open. I tried to get a look but I couldn't see his face. It was crazy. But he was a nice guy.”

Find a killer in those interviews. She returned everything to the file, rubber-banded it, and put it near her handbag. The facts and opinions of the case, the dialogue of the interviews, would interfere with her sleep tonight. It was unavoidable. Even believing that this was not a homicide, even smarting from having been asked to undertake a lost cause, she couldn't help internalizing what she had read and seen in the file.

In her bedroom, she stopped in front of the dresser and smiled at the snapshots stuck in the mirror frame and the framed photo on the dresser. Lisa Angelino smiled back at her, the baby she had given up twenty years ago and whom she had seen for the first time just before Christmas. That smile was the biggest bonus in her life.

Lisa had contacted her in the fall, and in December, when Jane had recovered sufficiently from the beating at the end of the last case, she had flown to Kansas for a few days to meet her daughter and her parents. The Angelinos had greeted her at the airport as though she were a visiting celebrity and had gradually warmed to her as they realized she was not competing for the love of their daughter.

They had walked and talked, inspected the tiny town the Angelinos lived in, driven to visit their relatives and friends, and stayed up late every night talking and talking; there seemed no end to what they could tell each other. Before leaving, Jane promised to fly Lisa to New York in the summer, where she would meet Jane's father, who suddenly saw himself as a grandfather, a miracle he had never expected.

The smile in the snapshots told her the bonus went both ways.

They met at Centre Street on Tuesday morning. Annie came by to say that Captain Graves wanted to see them right away. Coffee in hand, they trooped into his office.

“Mrs. Constantine is very impressed with you two,” he began. “She made a phone call after you left and it filtered down to me. She add anything new?”

Jane told him about the beads. Although Shreiber, the private investigator, had known about them, the police hadn't and they weren't mentioned in the file. They would generate a few more questions to ask in the new round of interviews.

“See what you can do with it,” Graves said, not exhibiting any enthusiasm. At least he was a realist. “What's on for today?”

“The PI,” MacHovec said. “Ten o'clock.”

Graves looked at his watch. “Better get going.”

They were a few minutes late but Wally Shreiber didn't mind. He had an office with a shared secretary who stayed out of the way. They all shook hands, introduced themselves, and sat down with coffee.

“You're working on the Stratton case,” Wally Shreiber said. A file lay in front of him on his desk. “She still at it?”

“She'll be at it forever,” Defino said.

“You're right there. She's not letting go. I thought maybe she had something when she hired me, but I gave it my best and I came up with zilch.”

“We're two weeks away from that.”

“We've read most of the file,” Jane said. “What did you do that the police didn't?”

“I talked to every drunk, every whacked-out guy, every petty thief in Tompkins Square Park. A lot of them knew Stratton. Stratton would go over there when he was feeling good, talk to the guys, maybe even give them money. Most of them didn't know where he lived, but it's not impossible that someone followed him home. His building's right on Tenth Street, across from the north end of the park. Still, most of those guys were too out of it to have the motivation to follow someone home and kill him.”

“And he might be seen,” Jane said.

“Right. There were old-timers in that building, people who'd lived there since the big war. They see a filthy homeless guy come into their building, they take a look, maybe they call the police.”

“What about a girl who's wearing a necklace of little beads?”

“OK, you got me there. You really think a girl went in and kept Andy from eating or drinking for a couple of weeks? Those beads could've been dropped a year before Andy died. You think of that?”

Jane had. “You're right. We don't know how long they were there, whether they were coated with dust when Mrs. C. found them.”

“Exactly.”

“You said something in a note about seeing the super.”

“Yeah, you should talk to him. He's a white guy, young, or he was eight years ago, and I think he's a writer or musician. The super job gives him a free apartment and some walking around money. He knows what's going on in the building and the neighborhood. He didn't like me very much, didn't like the cops either, but maybe you can sweet-talk him. It's happened before.”

“What shape is the building in?” Defino asked.

“I forgot to tell you. They renovated it about a year after Stratton died, gutted it completely. Gentrification. It's happening all over the area. So the apartments are gone and so are the people. You may still find some of them; the super might know where they went. Some of the older tenants moved into other old buildings just to keep their rent down.”

“But the super's still there?”

“Yeah. He liked the lifestyle, although he bitched a lot about the kind of people that were moving in. Their jeans were Lauren, not Levi's. Makes a difference.” Shreiber grinned.

“What impression did you get about Stratton's mental condition?” Jane asked.

“It depended. If he took his medication, he could be OK. I gather he was very bright. I talked to people who had discussed pretty highbrow stuff with him, politics, world affairs, philosophy. He read a lot. He didn't make it through college because he broke down and had to leave, but he educated himself.”

“Any record of suicide attempts?”

“None I could find. I talked to his psychiatrist. He hadn't seen Stratton for a long time, at least a year, because Stratton wouldn't go, even when Constantine sent a car to take him. But he had access to the records in the institution and Stratton never tried to hurt himself. I have to tell you, he had to be encouraged to eat sometimes. Eating wasn't high on his list of priorities.”

“So he may have just sat down in his chair and read books and not bothered eating,” Jane said, feeling discouraged.

“This could be one of those cases that looks like what it is, an accidental death.”

“What's your impression of Mrs. Constantine?” Defino asked.

“She's an interesting woman. She's as rich as God. You see that apartment? I saw that Picasso, I couldn't catch my breath. She was still married to Constantine when I worked for her, but I only saw him once for a minute. Not the communicative type. I don't know why she bothered to get divorced. She could've stayed married to him and not known he was around. Maybe she wanted the money in her bank account, not his.

“I think she grew up protecting this brother from the world. It was like a personal affront when she couldn't save him. She comes across as a tough broad, but I don't think she has a nasty bone in her body except where Constantine was concerned. She also hired me to look into that, whether he had something on the side.”

Defino raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“What do you think? A guy with that much money has what he wants. Probably didn't mean much to him, just a little diversion like horse racing or baccarat. Although he married a cute little piece of ass after the divorce. It was in the papers. I was out of it by then.”

“So Mrs. C. kept the art and the apartment and Mr. C. moved on.”

“There was enough there, no one got cheated. Believe me.”

“What you're telling us is that you believe Stratton died of natural causes, probably brought on by his mental condition,” Jane said. They weren't getting anywhere. They might as well wrap this up.

“You expect me to say anything else?”

That seemed to do it. They both stood at the same moment. Wally helped Jane on with her coat.

“You have any specific questions, give me a ring. I know why you're doing this. The pressure comes from high up. Maybe you can put it to rest this time.”

Wally had a warm, firm handshake. He walked them to the door and said it had been nice meeting them.

“The apartment's not there, the tenants have moved, and we have to put in two weeks trying to make like it's the old neighborhood.”

“You have a way with words, Gordon.”

“Yeah, like Stratton. Ready to visit the crime scene?”

“The nonexistent scene of the nonexistent crime. Why not? But let's have lunch first. I could use something hot.”

The day was blustery. Hot sounded like a good idea. They found a place that had soup on the menu for Jane and some kind of pasta for Defino. After they ordered, Defino called in for both of them. Graves was big on making rings.