Red Man Down (11 page)

‘Maybe, but you never sell it all,’ Leo, the faithful husband and father, had endured many moves. ‘Dishes, pictures, books – those things you move.’

They all looked around at the bare walls and sparse furniture. ‘You’re right,’ Ray said. Bombarded with wedding gifts, he was newly sensitized to housewares. ‘Geez, not even a good mixing bowl in this kitchen. Looks like she did all her cooking in these two pans.’

‘What you can’t use at the moment,’ Leo said, ‘you store.’

Delaney, coming back in with the spare keys to the apartment and to Angela’s car, heard them speculating and said, ‘Let’s talk to that building manager some more.’

She was round, tan and hard-surfaced, like a nut. Her brown hair was wound around her head in braids, and she wore a blue denim apron with several pockets. ‘She’s got one trunk in the basement, come to think of it,’ the woman said. She picked a key off a pegboard wall and opened a door that connected the building’s office to her living quarters. Sarah could see a pair of men’s legs on the footrest of a tan plastic recliner.

‘Herb,’ the woman shouted, above a TV game show on high, ‘show these officers to the storage room of number two hundred and fourteen, please.’ A hand reached across the feet and took the key that dangled from her fingers. Another hand, out of sight, snuffed the noise and lowered the footrest. With a grunt, the man stood up. In the doorway, whiskery and disheveled, he muttered, ‘This way.’ He didn’t speak again as they followed him out the doorway and across the graveled dooryard to Angela’s building.

In a suffocating storeroom, he helped them find the crude metal rectangle with Angela’s nametag on it. It was about four feet wide and six feet long, with seams welded on the outside. The hasp lock was held by a padlock. And the key? The man shrugged. When Ollie went back to the office, the woman said, ‘She sure never gave it to me.’

The next thing they noticed was that the trunk was too heavy to lift. They called for an assist from the operator of their tow service, who brought the truck with the cowcatcher. Four men heaved it up from the basement and onto the scoop, which ferried it back to the station.

The detectives went back to Angela’s apartment to search for the key – not very hopefully.

‘Hell,’ Ollie said, ‘we already looked at every hair and bug in this place.’

‘Twice,’ Jason said, rubbing his neck, which was sore from his long search of closet drawers.

Ten minutes into the fruitless search for the key, Delaney came back to check on progress. ‘Never mind the key,’ he said. ‘We’ll just cut the hasp.’

‘But I just thought of something,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s probably in her purse.’

‘All right,’ Delaney said. ‘Where’s her purse?’

All the detectives grew guilty looks as they realized that in two hours of searching this small space, they had never asked that question.

‘Maybe she left it at that store where she works,’ Jason said.

‘Nah,’ Sarah said, shaking her head. ‘If she did, she’d go back for it. She was here, so her purse should be here.’ She looked around at doubting faces. ‘Trust me, guys. A woman would not go ten minutes without having her purse. It’s got all her stuff. Driver’s license, credit cards, makeup …’

‘OK, OK, I agree,’ Delaney said. ‘Just for the hell of it, though, let’s call that store and ask.’ He looked around. ‘Who’s got the number?’

‘Um. I’ve got it, come to think of it … in my notes from …’ She went back through pages in her notebook till she found it. Then she stood with her smartphone in her hand, looking pained. ‘I don’t remember what her purse looked like.’

‘I do,’ Oscar said. He looked around at the astonished faces of the other male detectives. ‘I told you,’ he reminded Sarah, ‘that my sister owns a women’s clothing boutique. I help her there sometimes, so I notice purses. You’re right, women care a lot about them – they take forever to decide which one to buy. Angela’s purse was old but not shoddy like the rest of her outfit. It was a leather Coach bag – cowhide, not cheap – from back when they made quality purses that lasted forever. Had several compartments—’

‘I remember now. With neat brass toggles. A place for everything.’

‘Yes. Magenta. With a shoulder strap.’

Sarah dialed the store while the rest of the detectives worked to contain their amusement. Jason, in fact, had lost it when Oscar said ‘magenta,’ and stood with his back turned, shaking.

The store owner, who said her name was Marjorie Springer, answered with her customary rasp. ‘We keep all our purses and junk in one bin,’ she said, ‘Hang on a minute.’ In a minute she came back on the phone to assure Sarah that Angela’s purse was not there.

‘Are you sure? It’s a Coach …’

‘I remember her purse very well, Detective. The day that it showed up in the store, Angela and my other helper just about came to blows over it.’

‘Would you happen to remember if she was carrying it when she left work Monday evening?’

‘No. But I’m sure she was. Angela was well organized; she didn’t forget things.’

‘You know, I really need to ask you several more questions. Could I come and see you at the store?’

‘Too many interruptions here. Why don’t I come to you?’ She knew where the headquarters building was, she said, ‘but now that I’ve lost my one reliable helper, I can’t get away from here during store hours. Give me a couple of days to get somebody in here I can trust. I’ll call you, OK?’

‘Fine.’ To be safe, she wrote down the woman’s name and numbers. She punched
end
, looking thoughtful. ‘Imagine that. Somebody who actually
wants
to talk to me.’

‘Be careful,’ Leo said. ‘She must be selling tickets to something.’

Back at the station, Delaney sent out a Need to Locate order on Angela’s purse, putting Oscar on the phone for the description. He agreed they need not go back to the bare apartment, and went looking for somebody to break open the trunk. The detectives went back to their desks and returned phone calls till Delaney called Leo and said, ‘OK, come and see. I recruited a kid from the support staff to make a list for us.’

They all trooped down to the evidence room, where Delaney waited with a legal tablet and a white board. His recruit was pretzeled behind the board, tightening screws and muttering to the legs, which kept threatening to collapse. As the detectives deployed around the board, the recruit dropped his wrench, swore, dropped to the floor and crawled after it as it slid across the tiles.

Leo bent to look under the board and said, ‘Genius Geek! Good to see you. Look what we got here,’ he told the other detectives. ‘This quirky smart-ass finds information that’s invisible to the rest of us.’ At Sarah’s urging, he’d partnered skeptically with the teenaged temp on an earlier case, and been surprised by how fast the noisy kid could pull information out of a computer.

He turned to Sarah now and said, as if the boy he’d just called Genius Geek were not in the room, ‘I can never remember, is his name Scott Tracy or—’

‘Tracy Scott,’ Sarah said. She felt a proprietary interest in the bright temp she had rescued last year from exile behind the file cabinets. Unable to keep from annoying his supervisor, who liked his speed and skill on computers but couldn’t abide his noise, he was frequently sequestered in a remote corner of the support staff room. Sarah had learned to enjoy his outlandishness because she greatly valued his skill and speed.

She bent over the pocked face and super-thick glasses peering up from the floor. ‘Glad to see you, Tracy,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been around much lately.’

‘Dear lady!’ Tracy said. Dust bunnies and hairs cascaded from him as he rose and bowed from the waist. ‘I had to get serious about college applications for a while. Now that I’ve compromised my soul and mortgaged my future to at least a dozen bloated exploiters of team sports, I can work for justice while I wait to get rejected.’

‘Oh, nonsense, they’ll all want you! And I think you’re just what we need right now. Because in the foyer of her apartment we found what we believe to be the decedent’s laptop computer. We did bring it over, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ Delaney said.

‘Reckon I can probably suss out what-all’s inside it if’n ya like, ma’am.’

‘Ah, you’ve been reading the southern novelists again.’

‘There you go, detecting as usual. Soon as I get this evil instrument set up,’ he said, tackling the wobbly legs again, ‘I am yours to command.’

‘Here, let me do that,’ Delaney said. He grabbed the wrench away from Tracy and straightened the legs with two expert motions. ‘Here’s a marker, Tracy. You remember how to write?’

Tracy looked down at it, sniffing. ‘We’re going back to whiteboards and markers? Why not stone tablets and a stylus?’

‘Shut up and listen. Make three columns, label them ITEM, SENT TO, and RETURNED. Got that? We’ll start with the computer – one laptop, Dell. Ollie, you’re doing the search for Angela’s background, you take it. Now, Tracy, write ‘laptop’ in the first column and ‘Ollie’ in the second.’

Tracy watched the transfer of the laptop with glistening eyes. Sarah caught his eye and made a hand motion,
wait.

Ollie said, ‘What if it doesn’t have anything I need?’

‘That’s what the third column’s for. Listen to this, everybody: you get done looking at anything signed out to you, bring it to me and we put it in the column marked, Returned.’

‘And we put the item back in the trunk?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re keeping the list?’

‘Better believe it. Next? Four nested stainless steel pans—’

Jason said, ‘This isn’t all going to be useful stuff, is it? For us.’

‘No, but we better look at all of it once before we decide. So take the pans, Jason. What’s next?’

They each acquired a stack of goods they’d be responsible for inspecting and entering in the case record. Eventually, Delaney claimed, all items would get signed back to Returned and put back in the metal trunk. Sarah got a collegiate dictionary, four sweaters in a plastic bag, a stack of six white porcelain soup bowls, two pillow covers featuring needlework in shades of lavender and rose, and a quilted tea cozy.

Handling the things Angela Lacey had carefully stored away – to wait for what? – seemed rude, like a violation of her privacy. At the same time, Sarah began to feel the satisfaction a successful search always brought. This was the nearest she had come, in all the Martin/Lacey investigations, to a sense of what had been killed. Whatever the cause, it had sometimes seemed as if these three people had public lives but no private ones.

But looking at some of the things Angela had considered worth keeping, Sarah began revising her opinions of Ed Lacey’s wife. The woman she’d met at lunch had seemed cold, contemptuous and edgy. This one showed evidence of caring and warmth. Angela Lacey had never had much money or social status in the time they were examining, but these items suggested an attempt to live well, hold things of lasting value and to give and take small comforts. For Angela, during the few years when her marriage with Ed Lacey thrived, it appeared that life had been a pleasure. Even when it ended, she had made a careful effort to preserve the best of it. Would such a person embezzle money from a bank and pin the blame on someone so dear to her loving husband? Sarah felt another strong suspicion fade.

R
ay Menendez drew the autopsy assignment and spent most of Wednesday at East District Street. Delaney called all the rest of his crew into his office first thing to kick-start the Angela Lacey investigation.

‘A couple of reporters turned me every way but loose last night,’ he said, ‘trying to get me to say what killed Angela Lacey. I told them, “She died of suffocation.” They said, “But was it self-inflicted?” and I said, “We don’t know yet. You’re just gonna have to report that no conclusions have been reached.” They carried on like I owed them an answer.’

‘My wise old gut says this is one too many suicides in the same family in so short a time,’ Tobin said. ‘But of course my wise old gut has been wrong before, once or twice.’

‘I don’t think it is this time,’ Sarah said.

‘Me neither,’ Jason said. When they all looked at him, he ducked his shining scalp and mumbled, ‘For what it’s worth.’ But then Ollie and Oscar said together, ‘I agree.’

‘It seems to me,’ Sarah said, ‘that we ought to go back and re-open the investigation into all three deaths. Take another look at Frank’s alleged theft of the money and that crazy message he left. Every one of these deaths is bizarre in some way. And all in one family – it feels now as if they form a series, doesn’t it? Like they’re each part of the same story.’

‘Maybe,’ Delaney said. ‘I don’t know. Remember, when Ed Lacey pulled his wire-pulling stunt and got shot we were speculating over why he went so bad so fast, and somebody mentioned that his uncle got disgraced. So I asked you all, “When’s the last time you knew a guy to go off the rails over something that happened to his uncle?” And as I remember it, none of you said a word.’ He looked around. ‘So what’s changed that makes you think different now?’

‘We found out he wasn’t just any uncle,’ Oscar said. ‘He was the man who rescued Ed Lacey from his mother’s house, where the boyfriend was beating him up. And besides raising his nephew, he did all these volunteer things for the whole community. Everybody loved him because he drove for Meals on Wheels and helped with Bike Safety Day …’

‘Stop before you make me cry,’ Delaney said. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Angela told us,’ Sarah said.

Oscar said quickly, with a little head-shake at Sarah, ‘And other members of his family – Cecelia and Chico – both said everybody loved him.’

‘And I went back and checked some old records yesterday,’ Sarah said. ‘The newspaper was indeed full of it at the time Frank got arrested. People tweeted and called in from all over town to talk about his good deeds. “He helped with the Kiwanis car wash, he found shelters for homeless vets,” they said, “you’ve made a mistake.” They wanted the bad bank examiners to stop persecuting Frank and go find the person who took the money. You don’t remember any of this?’

‘I usually just read the headlines,’ Delaney said. ‘I get all the drama I require right here, most days.’