“My mom’s bleeding,” said the little boy’s voice on the phone. The 911 operator was a skilled listener to people in trouble and caught the note of barely controlled panic in the high voice. She quickly extracted the child’s name and address and dispatched a patrol car to the address given, while encouraging the boy to remain on the line. Obviously something awful had happened in his home and she wanted to keep in contact should whoever did it return.
Patrolman Martin Dienst, working the four to twelve shift out of the Ninth Precinct, caught the 911 call and was at the door of 217 Avenue A within ten minutes. He left his partner in the blue-and-white and climbed the three flights to apartment 3F North. Dienst had eleven years on the job and a year in Danang with the Marines before that, but what he saw when he reached the top of the landing was rich even for his system.
A woman lay on her side in the hallway, with her feet in the open doorway of apartment 3FN. Her blond hair was matted and dark with blood, and the blue robe she wore was slashed and stained almost black with it. There were thick ropes of congealed blood on the floor, and Dienst stepped carefully to avoid these as he approached the body. It was certainly a body. The throat had been slashed so deeply as to almost entirely sever the head.
Swallowing hard, Dienst stepped over the woman’s corpse and entered the living room of the apartment. The place was a shambles, in the literal sense, being as thickly sprayed with blood as the floor of a slaughterhouse. Furniture had been overturned and the remains of glassware crunched under the patrolman’s shoes. A child’s stuffed toy in the shape of a small white goat lay beside an overturned chair. It too was stained with blood, and seemed to Dienst to be the most pathetic object in the entire dreadful scene.
Nearby lay the crumpled shape of the goat’s probable owner, a boy of about seven, blond like his mother, dressed in shorty pajamas with little clowns on them. He was lying on his back, his limbs spraddled like those of an abandoned doll. His chest had been split nearly in two by a tremendous blow from some great blade. Blood was splashed high up the wall near where he lay. Dienst hurried by this door to the next room, which was the kitchen-dinette.
There at the kitchen table sat a dark-haired boy of about nine holding a telephone receiver to his ear. Dienst quickly checked the apartment’s two bedrooms and, finding them empty, returned to the kitchen, where he gently took the telephone from the boy and identified himself to the 911 operator. Then he hung up the phone and knelt to face the boy.
“What’s your name, sonny?” he asked.
“Josh Mullen. Is my mom OK?”
“We’ll have to see. We have to call an ambulance. But first we both have to get out of here. I’m going to carry you, OK?”
“I can walk.”
“Sure, but the police rules say I have to carry you. And also you have to keep your eyes closed.”
“Why?”
“Regulations,” said Dienst, and, scooping the child up and holding his head tight against his broad chest, he ran out of the apartment.
“You can’t possibly want more after last night,” said Marlene Ciampi sleepily, as she felt the suggestive probing of Karp’s big hands. The morning sun was just blasting through the grime of the two large windows that stood behind Marlene’s little white bed. This was why she had no curtains: any prospective peeper in the building opposite would be dazzled by the glare on the glass, and besides, that particular building was used as a warehouse and its windows were covered with thick green paint.
“Just a quickie to wake up on,” said Karp. He lay on his back and lifted her easily so that she dropped on top of him in the right position, with many a squishing noise.
“No, wait,” said Marlene, not with much conviction. “I have to tell you what I did.”
“Can’t it wait for ten minutes?” groaned Karp.
“How do you make it last ten minutes, as the schoolgirl said to the nun. No, really, I need to tell you.” And with that Marlene spun out the whole story of the second trash-bin victim, and the transfer of the case to Queens, and what had transpired with Mrs. Dean at St. Michael’s.
To Karp’s credit, he did not make soothing noises and continue in the direction his body had until lately been leading him. Instead he put his hands behind his head, knotted his brow and scrooched up his chin, as was his habit when thinking hard about unpleasant things.
“You think I fucked up?” said Marlene.
“Yeah, I do. I’m trying to figure out what came over you. What did you expect to gain by it? A spontaneous confession?”
Marlene rolled away from him onto her stomach and propped her chin up on her hands and elbows. “No, of course not,” she replied with heat. “I guess I thought if we told her about the bogeyman, she might—I don’t know—do something. I just couldn’t sit there while they took the case away from me.”
“Well, you’re sure as shit not going to get it back now. Bloom’ll skin you. And as much as I hate to say it, with justification.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘justification!’”
“I mean that on the basis of no fucking evidence whatever you’ve seized on this woman as being some kind of sexual monster, who may be connected with a couple of nasty homicides. And you’ve been harassing her in a way that compromises you, the Office, and maybe even the case, if there ever is one.”
Marlene’s jaw dropped. “No … what? No evidence! You don’t call the doll evidence?”
“It’s crap, Marlene.”
“Yeah? Raney thought it was pretty good,” she said angrily.
“Who gives a shit what Raney thinks! Raney’s not going to the Grand Jury with this garbage, you are. God damn, Marlene! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Since when do D.A.’s get involved in this level of an investigation? If Raney wants to go over to St. Michael’s and blow smoke, let him! Cops do shit like that all the time. But it’s not your job.”
“Yessir, boss,” she snapped, turning away on the bed. He sat up quickly then and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him.
“Marlene, listen to me,” he said, his face serious. “I love you. But this is really aberrant behavior and it worries me. I want to make some sense out of this, and I can’t if you snarl at me. OK?” She nodded glumly. He was going to lecture her and it made her stomach churn with resentment.
“Now let’s look at this like lawyers,” he resumed. “One. You got an accusation that is not only hearsay, but attributed to a child of six. Have you interviewed the child? No. Have you determined by a medical examination that the child has been sexually abused? No. Have you obtained a formal complaint from the mother? No. Did you interview any of the other kids at the center or their parents? No. No hits, no runs, the side is retired. That’s the sexual-abuse-of-a-minor part.
“On the murder part—forgetting for a minute that you knew it was a Queens D.A. case, and that you might have fucked up their investigation by dicking around like you did—we have, again the unsupported testimony of a child, plus a police report that some miscellaneous witnesses maybe saw a man of a certain description accompanying a child who might have been the deceased.
“Do we have that man? No. More to the point, do we have a shred of evidence that this maybe-man is connected with Mrs. Dean or her center? Sure we do. We have the statement of a three-year-old child that her deceased sister was given an expensive doll by the bogeyman, and a statement by a doll expert that a doll like that one might have been in Mrs. Dean’s collection or in any of a dozen other collections in the city.
“Was it Mrs. Dean’s doll? We don’t know. Can we find out? No. Why? Because not only is this horseshit not a case, it’s not even probable cause for a search warrant. And yet on the strength of it one of the smartest lawyers in the damn Bureau—that’s you, dummy—goes off and plays Nancy fucking Drew. And I’d love to know why.”
Marlene tightened her jaw and tried to stare Karp down. “I know she’s mixed up in it.”
To her surprise Karp nodded. “Right. I believe you. You’re a great investigator, Marlene. It’s the truth. You got brains and energy and you got the nose for a fishy pattern. So Mrs. Dean is selling chicken out of her day-care center. So what! That’s not the point.
“Christ, Marlene! I could stand on top of the courthouse and hit fifty people with a rock who I know—I know—did stuff that would make Dean look like Mother Theresa. And I can’t touch them. Why? Because I don’t have a case against them that’ll stand up in court. That’s what we do, baby—remember? We develop and prosecute cases. We don’t ride out and chase the bad guys.”
Marlene dropped her gaze and let out a long, silent breath. As usual, Karp had brought forth a great summation. It was a technique Karp had learned from the tough old lawyers in the Homicide Bureau and he had every right to use it on her. She was guilty, no question: aggravated fuckupery and dumbness in the first degree. She could handle that. She understood that getting beat up was part of being one of the guys.
But what made her shudder and bite her lip was that Karp didn’t understand, had never made the effort to understand, and probably never would understand her feelings. Who did he love anyway? The perfect investigator? The great fuck? Why didn’t he say, “I understand what seeing children hurt does to you, and I understand why it clouded your judgment, and I’ll find some way to fix it, and I’ll support you, and together we’ll catch those fiends and make them stop.” That’s what she wanted and at some level she despised herself for wanting it.
She stood up and said in as calm a voice as she could manage, “I’m going to take a bath.” Karp watched her climb down from the sleeping platform and walk naked across the floor to the great tub. He felt a pang of tenderness, mixed with remorse. She looked so vulnerable from the back—you could count her ribs and the bumps in her graceful spine and she had angel wings like a ten-year-old. With her shoulders slumped and her dragging pace she seemed like a whipped child.
He knew himself to be the whipper, and was agile in his retreat from acknowledging his own mean streak, the faint sadistic tincture in his relations with Marlene. Instead he blamed her and affected puzzlement. He knew she was smart, brilliant even. But she would get on these nutty one-track toots and everything she knew would go out the window. And he would have to yank her back, and then she would get all depressed, like now. Why did she do this to him?
They washed and dressed in silence. Karp went to the door and said, “I got an early meeting and then I’m taking a calendar for one of the guys. You coming? We could get breakfast at Sam’s.”
“I’ll be along later,” she said. “I need to make some calls from here first.”
“OK, see you later.” He kissed her on the cheek and she patted his arm absently. He turned to go and then he stopped himself and said, “Hey, we should meet later this week and go up to the jewelry district.”
“Jewelry district? What for?” she said, blank-faced.
“To get a ring. Earth calling Marlene. Your big rock? Engagement ring? You. Me.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure, that’d be great. Fine,” she said, smiling with a sad eye.
When he was gone, Marlene called Dana Woodley at home and told her not to take Carol Anne to St. Michael’s. “But, Marlene,” Dana wailed, “what’ll I do with her? I don’t know ary a soul in my buildin’ and I cain’t miss no more work. An’ I cain’t afford the reg’lar day care …”
“Bring her to work, Dana.”
“Can I do that?”
“Sure. We’ll find some little things for her to do. She’ll be fine and besides, it’s just temporary for the summer and then she’ll start school full-time in the fall. Anybody gives you any heat, tell them to see me.”
That’s that, thought Marlene when she had hung up. That concludes my personal obligation in re: St. Michael’s Child Development Center and Whorehouse. She meant it too. Marlene had substantial reserves of stony self-control, little used of late, but available at need. She would be good from now on. She would forget about ruined children. She would take her medicine like a man. She would do the job. She would get married. She would stay out of trouble.
When Marlene saw the dead pigeon on her door step, she barely noticed it. You see dead pigeons (and cats and dogs and rats) in that neighborhood all the time. If it was still there in the evening she would boot it into the roadway. As she locked the tan steel door to the loft building she saw the reversed cross scrawled on it in what looked like red primer paint. That didn’t impress her either: another graffito. They had to paint over the door every couple of months. New York is as hard on witchcraft as it is on dry cleaning.
As Marlene walked south toward the subway at Broadway and Canal, the Bogeyman stirred out of his shallow doze and started toward the subway too. He had plenty of tokens in his little change purse, and he didn’t have to follow her. He knew where she was going.
Getting chewed out is never pleasant, but getting chewed out by a nasty little empty suit like Sanford Bloom, the District Attorney, is very bad. When he is right it is the worst of all. Bloom didn’t even do it himself. Everybody had to love Bloom, so of course he could never yell at anyone. But he watched with a sad smile while Conrad Wharton, his administrative chief, a Kewpie doll with the soul of a toad, did the deed. Marlene took it, for what else could she do? She promised she would never even say Irma Dean’s name again. She promised that she would stay away from the trash-bag killer case, the Queens trash-bag killer case, for the rest of her natural life. She meant it, too, at the time.
After her chew-out Marlene went to the ladies on the ninth floor and had a good weep among the gurgling pipes. Then she fixed her face and made her nine-thirty court like a good soldier. As she labored, she reflected on how right Karp was. You couldn’t stop crime. You couldn’t even slow it down. You couldn’t save the babies. What you could do was crank the system and put asses in jail. Maybe it did some good. Karp was right, but she found herself blaming him for the way things were, for her own barely contained misery, for the collapse of civilization.
She avoided Karp at lunch. She did not go back to her office, but picked up a yogurt from the snack bar on the first floor and hid out in an empty office. She took off her shoes, leaned back in a swivel chair and began reading a Barbara Cartland romance, one of her secret vices. After a few minutes the silence of the lunchtime office was broken by the sound of footsteps and a whistled tune, the andante from the Second Brandenburg.
“Marlene!” said V.T. Newbury. “What are you doing skulking back here? I see you’re improving both mind and body.” Newbury was a small, elegant, handsome man with dark blond hair worn long and combed back. He had the chiseled features that Gilbert Stuart had painted into portraits of eighteenth century gentlemen, many of which were, in fact, of his ancestors.
“I’m not skulking,” Marlene said, stashing the novel in her bag. “Actually, I am. I’m a little blue today.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No thanks, V.T. It’s just a surfeit of life. New York disease.”
“Yes, I see. Well, crawling into this hole and gnawing on yogurt won’t help. You need a good uptown lunch and half a bottle of decent wine. I’m buying. Slip into your shoes and let’s travel.”
“Thanks, V.T., but I have court at one-thirty.”
“Don’t we all? Lucky for us we’re lunching with a judge. He’ll give us a note.”
The judge was Herbert C. Rice, a large jolly man in his early sixties, with a round dark pink face, fitted with glittering teeth. His hair was curiously baby-like, pale and silken, and he wore it swept back in the old Senatorial style. He was a friend of V.T.’s father.
The restaurant, one of the several hundred scattered through the east side of midtown, was dark and cozy. It had that expensive restaurant smell, too, and after Marlene had ordered the sole and had gone through a glass of the Montrachet that V.T. bought to go with it, she felt better than she had in a while.
Good food and light talk—could it be that simple? Why do I feel like a country mouse in the big town, she asked herself. I’m not a country mouse; 1 was born here and 1 used to do this all the time. When 1 was single. V.T. and the judge here still do it all the time. Partake of civilization. Why else do people live in cities? Because they like muggings and filth?
It was not socially demanding either. Judge Rice had a wealth of amusing anecdotes, mostly at the expense of his colleagues on the bench and other courthouse denizens, and Marlene and V.T. were expected to chuckle appreciatively and not interrupt the flow.
A friendly and urbane fellow, Marlene thought, if a little too full of himself. This pleasant mien belied his reputation on the bench, where he was a severe and impatient tyrant. Not-Nice Rice he was called by the D.A. staff and the court officers. The defendant side called him Hangman Herb. Strange, Marlene thought; but judges were.
Rice was holding forth on the current deficiencies of defense counsel. He had been one, and a brilliant one by all accounts, before his translation to the bench. “It’s simply amazing,” he said, “how some of these nincompoops carry on in court. If you want to see true love, you ought to take a look at the affair between these people and the sound of their own voices. Look, what’s the first law of questioning?”
He snapped this question at Marlene, who shot back with hardly a thought, “Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.”
“Of course,” said Rice professorially. “And what is what we might call the first corollary to that rule?”
This required some thinking. She glanced at V.T., who allowed his jaw to drop slightly and a blankness to come into his eyes, in his famous impersonation of an upper class twit. After a moment, Marlene ventured, “How about, ‘Never ask the same question more than once unless you want a different answer?’”
“Excellent! So this pipsqueak the other day is elaborately establishing that his defendant has never seen this other thug involved in the robbery. ‘Did you ever see him before?’ No. ‘Did you ever meet him?’ No. ‘Are you sure you don’t recognize him?’ Absolutely. But the idiot can’t stop. He says, ‘So this man is a complete stranger to you?’ And the witness says, ‘Yeah, and he better stay a stranger, because if he comes around my house again I’m gonna break his face.’”
Marlene laughed at this, although she had heard the story before, starring another judge and another lawyer. V.T. contributed a similar story and Marlene told the one about the client who complained to the judge about incompetent counsel and when the judge asked the lawyer what he had to say about it, the lawyer said, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, what did he say? I wasn’t listening.”
“OK,” Marlene continued, “we’ve established our superiority over all these dumb lawyers. But when you look at the mess the criminal justice system is in now, I tend to doubt that the quality of legal education has much to do with it.”
“But surely you’ll agree that standards generally have fallen,” said Rice. “Education, respect for the law, civility. My God, it used to be possible to walk in this city. I mean on the streets, and at night too.”
“Yes, but I don’t agree that standards have much to do with the fall of New York. People were the same in the old days, and if anything they’re probably better educated now than they were then. I remember what the city was like—I’m not that young. We used to leave the house unlocked and we never got ripped off.”
Rice was now looking at her as something more than a decorative and passive audience. “Yes, and you wouldn’t dare do that today. To what would you attribute that change, except to a complete collapse of respect for the authority of the law?”
“Too abstract,” answered Marlene, who noticed that she had miraculously stopped feeling like a cretin. “Look—take me: one New Yorker. I was born in the middle of Queens in nineteen forty-eight. Total prosperity, New York the world’s greatest port, one of the biggest manufacturing cities. My dad, who barely finished high school, was able to buy a house and raise six kids, paying for parochial school for all of them, on a skilled worker’s salary.
“Where I lived, I was surrounded by maybe a hundred square miles of houses and apartments in which nearly every man had a job, in which nearly every woman was home all day, taking care of kids and watching the street. Now the schools and the cops are supposed to do both of those two things, with about a thousandth of a percent of the workforce.”
“Surely you’re not blaming women’s lib,” Judge Rice said, cocking an eyebrow.
“Women’s lib is a symptom, not a cause,” Marlene shot back. “Women have to work, and they don’t want to work in crappy jobs for shit wages.”
“Then what would the cause be?”
“Stupidity and greed, like always. And lack of imagination. Look, they industrialized agriculture in Mississippi and Puerto Rico. Where did they expect the people they kicked off the land to go? They came here, a lot of them, just in time to watch the industries leave for the ’burbs on the big highways we were building around then. And then our captains of industry, they let the factories rot, because why invest in making stuff when you can get rich a lot faster in real estate?”
“But surely, there have been hard times before,” said Rice. “The Depression, after all …”
“Yeah, and there was plenty of crime during the Depression, but we had a big country with only a hundred-fifty million people in it—a lot of escape valves there. And remember we hardly had any kids back in the thirties, so we got less of the casual street crime.
“And also—we always forget this—the poorest section of the population and all the blacks, was suppressed by what amounted to state terror. You know what cops used to do to people they thought were bad guys? The kind of bad guys who didn’t pay them off? And not even bad guys—any guy who didn’t look like he belonged in a white middle-class neighborhood. Judge, jury, sentencing, and punishment in thirty seconds.
“So, then we became enlightened—no more nightsticks, no more third degree, we got Miranda, we got Escobedo—fine. I approve. But we have a courthouse and prison system that was built for that middle-class city in which the cops kept most of the crime jammed into the poverty pockets, and handled a lot of it informally. Because, God knows, the people who run this city, who ripped off this city, didn’t want to pay for a criminal justice system. More cops, yes, but no place for the cops to put the mutts they catch. Hence the revolving door we have now.
“And there’s no way out for the poor bastards who feed it either. That’s changed too. My father paid six-thousand dollars for his house, in 1946, and he could afford it on a take-home of ninety a week. He’s been offered nearly two hundred grand for it. I make six times what he made when he was my age and I’ll never be able to afford that house.
“And I want to know—where did all the money go? To Japan? Bullshit! Something a lot closer to home sucked the marrow out of this country, and this city. What you were talking about, the joke of a system down at Centre Street—that’s just embalming the corpse. And I’ll tell you something else. You know who really pays the bill? Children. They always do, because they’re the weakest and there’s no one they can pass the pain on to.”
Marlene had not wanted to get started on this particular hobby horse, knowing it could lead up dangerous paths, but her argument had naturally led to this pass, and she could not stop herself. She thrust on.
“We’re murdering our children, and we don’t know why, and we can’t seem to stop. We have this Disney myth of childhood that we all pretend to believe in, and meanwhile we’re raping and beating and stabbing and burning the actual kids, and even if we don’t get around to the physical stuff we’re grinding their little spirits into powder. The half dozen or so kids who actually end up in dumpsters are symbolic—the whole society is one big dumpster for children.”
She stopped and took a big swallow of Montrachet. V.T. said, “Gosh, Marlene, what a toot! And here I thought you were just another pretty face.”
Rice’s expression had turned grim. “Now that’s something that really concerns me. I couldn’t agree with you more, Marlene. It’s a scandal. I’m far from being a bleeding heart, as I’m sure you know, but my heart bleeds when I see what people do to their own children. I don’t know, though—I still find it hard to credit these sociological or economic explanations you give. Surely there’s some spiritual deficit involved.”
“You mean the decline of organized religion?”
“No, although I do think they’ve failed past all argument. I mean a rebirth of spiritual power, something grounded more in the real nature of the world, and the real needs of men and women.”
As Rice said this, Marlene noticed that for an instant his face took on an expression of terrible longing, one that was at odds with the image of assured authority he presented to the world. It was this revelation, even more than the four glasses of wine, that loosened Marlene’s tongue. Before she had clearly thought through the consequences, she found that she had steered the conversation from child abuse in general to a particular example, and had blurted out the entire story of the St. Michael’s affair, including the fiasco with Raney and Mrs. Dean, and ending with the tongue lashing from Wharton.
“That’s quite a tale, Champ,” said V.T. when she had finished. “What are you going to do?”
Marlene shrugged, “Do? I don’t know—forget the whole thing, I guess.” V.T. sniffed unbelievingly at this and rolled his eyes heavenward. But Rice cleared his throat heavily and spoke as if delivering a judgment. “Yes, from a purely legal point of view, the District Attorney is correct. There is no case, and any further intrusion on your Mrs. Dean might be construed as harassment, especially since a child-care operation is so vulnerable to charges of this type.
“But I have to tell you that what you have said is deeply disturbing to me. It’s disturbing first because of what we were talking about earlier—about the ills of our society being taken out on the children. Surely we have a special obligation to the reputed victims when the victims are young children, and this may tend to counterbalance our traditional concern for the accused. And second, as you may know, I am myself associated in a small way with the center.”
“You?” said Marlene, startled. “With St. Michael’s? How?”
“Well, we have been associated with the church itself for many years—my family that is. And when the center started up, I think it was three years ago, Reverend Pinder asked me to be on the board. So I know your Mrs. Dean—and I agree with your reading of her: a formidable lady indeed.”
“And so what are you saying, Judge? I shouldn’t forget it?”
“Not exactly. Let’s say instead that an investigation should proceed under less formal auspices. Let me poke around and see what I can find out; as a board member I have a certain license. Similarly, if you should happen across any additional evidence—and naturally, I am not suggesting you violate the D.A.’s orders—if you should, then perhaps you could see that it finds its way to me. In time a clearer picture may emerge.”
“I felt like kissing him when he said that,” Marlene confided to V.T. later that afternoon, when Rice had dropped them off at the Courthouse and they were walking together toward their afternoon tasks.
“Did you? He might have enjoyed it if you had. His wife’s been dead for years. Never married again as far as I know. A good guy, I think. Dandled me on his knee when a babe, and so on.”
“He can dandle me if he wants. What a terrific man, especially for a judge! God, I feel like an incredible load has been taken off my head. I’ve been carrying this shit all by myself and now another player is taking it seriously.”
“You’re going to keep poking?”
“Umm … let’s say I’ll be open to anything that drifts by. I think it’d be prudent to keep a low pro for the next couple of weeks, until we see what Rice comes up with. But it would be good if … nah, forget it!”
“No, what? Forget what?”
“Oh, just thinking about Mrs. Dean. I don’t know anything about her, really. Her background, her finances … somebody could probably pick that up without alerting her that an investigation was still going on.”
“Somebody, huh?” said V.T. “Was that loud noise I just heard a hint dropping? Just because I know a few bankers.”
“I didn’t hear any noise, V.T. But if you decide to do anything in that line, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t advertise it.”
“Yeah, Bloom would have a fit.”
“Fuck Bloom,” said Marlene fervently. “I don’t mean Bloom—Karp would have a fit.”
Back in her office, after court finished that afternoon, Marlene called Raney. She felt that maybe she was on a roll, maybe she could needle Raney into putting a little undercover freelance investigative time into Mrs. Dean’s affairs. Nothing fancy—just enough to keep the pot boiling. But when she got through to his office, they told her he was out on an investigation.
This was the truth. Jim Raney was at that moment looking around Stephanie Mullen’s bloodstained apartment. Tapes on the floor showed where Mullen and her son Jordie had recently lain in their blood. The photographers and the forensic people had come and gone. Raney and his partner, Peter Balducci, were alone in the apartment.
Balducci looked at his note pad. “Three A North isn’t home. Three A South didn’t know the deceased, didn’t hear nothing, don’t know nothing. The B’s and C’s are out too. Three D North is an old lady, Mrs. Banda. She said the deceased had visits from men, and that they stayed the night.”
“She a pross?”
“No, a singer. Wrote some songs too. According to the guy in Three E North. Dolan, a plasterer on disability. Had a beer or two with the deceased. Said Mullen was married to a rock musician named Willie Mullen, also the father of the two kids. They were not on good terms, he says. Also, there’s a boyfriend, another musician named Staley or something close, he wasn’t sure. He’s a brother. He also said the victim was close to a woman named Anna Rivas, lived in 3F South. But the super said Rivas moved out about a week ago, in a big hurry. Everybody else was out. What’d you get?”
Raney looked around the living room in disgust. “Not much the forensic guys missed. There’s a big thumb print on the outside doorway. You don’t even need dust to see it. You think this scumbag is maybe not a mental giant?
“Anyhow, I checked out the stuff in her desk. The hubby’s behind on payments. There’s some letters and shit from a lawyer. Also, I talked to the mother, Mullen’s mother. She said she’d been expecting something like this—she seemed more busted up about the little kid than about her own daughter. I gather Stephanie was a disappointment to Mom. Anyway, she likes the ex for it. Apparently, he was a hitter—beat her up for years. And I found this.”
He held up a framed glossy standard publicity photograph of a good-looking black man with long corkscrew curls. He was shown singing and pounding on a bass guitar. The message “Love you babe—always, Dodo” was written across the front of it.
“The name is Dodo Styles,” said Raney. “Quite the stud. He’s first on my list to talk to.”
“Him rather than the ex?” asked Balducci. “Why?”
“It’s a knife job, ain’t it? That always makes me think a jig. Or a PR.”
“Good thinking, Jimmy, I like the way your mind works. Of course, it could be one of us wops. We’re pretty good with knives.”
“Nah, wops have graduated to guns. It’s the jig, you’ll see, Petey.”
“Yeah, well let’s close up here and see if we can get to see these guys. My thinking is, though, it ain’t either one of them.”
“Yeah? How’s that? Who, then?”
“I don’t know, but I figure it went down this way. The perp comes in. He kills the mother right in the doorway. The kid comes down the hallway from the kids’ bedroom, or he’s already standing where the hall meets the living room. He sees his mother get it, the perp sees him, and he stabs the kid right there. The question is now, why didn’t he kill the other kid?”
“But the other kid didn’t see nothing. He was sleeping.”
“Yeah, but the killer didn’t know that. One kid was up, the other kid coulda been up, too, he coulda seen the whole act from down the hall. It’s a straight shot. What I’m saying is, anybody who knew there were two kids in the house woulda taken out the other kid. So …”
“It was a stranger. I get your point. The chain is ripped off the wall there, too, which also says stranger. He had to break in.”
“Definitely a stranger,” Balducci agreed and grimaced. “That means it’s gonna be a pain in the ass.
“Maybe, but if we find Dodo carrying out a bag of bloody clothes, and his prints match, I’m gonna laugh in your face.”