Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (5 page)

That was the end of the bullying. It was also the first time I realized I’d never have another friend like Olivia. She was one in a million, and now she was gone.

“Food, Clyde?” Jen asked again.

I shook my head. Food was the last thing on my mind. “I’ll pick something up later.” I pulled out my pad and paper and headed back toward the building.

It was surprising how much information you could pick up just by being on the scene, watching what happened and talking to witnesses, neighbors, whomever. Good producers were like good investigators in that both believed in leaving no stone unturned. You never knew where you were going to stumble upon a detail that flipped a case upside down or ignited the public interest. Something as small as the color of the victim’s shoelaces could do it, and when you’re in the middle of a media feeding frenzy you guard those little nuggets like first-born babies.

I was about ten feet away from the blue police barricade when I spotted Andrew Kaminski, the doorman, coming out of the building. He was heading straight for me.

“You doin’ OK?” he asked.

I looked him over. He looked like hell. Ashen face, bloodshot eyes. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” I asked.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m not the one who puked on the street.”

Already it seemed like days since I’d lost it behind our van. “Not my finest hour,” I admitted. “But I’m OK now. Can we talk?”

Kaminski pulled out a cigarette. I lit it for him. “You don’t smoke but you carry a fancy lighter?” He blew a plume of gray smoke out the corner of his mouth.

“It has sentimental value.” I dropped the engraved memento in my bag, and touched the strand of gum ball-size pearls I had around my neck. They were both my mother’s.

“You want to talk here?” he asked.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Penny Harlich approaching us, her long blond hair blowing in the autumn wind. A few fallen leaves swirled at her feet. I grabbed Kaminski by the elbow, leading him away. If
Horsedick
thought she could steal my No. 1 source out from under me, she had another thing coming. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” I asked Kaminski.

He held his hand out so I could see it was shaking. “Too much caffeine already. Cops just loaded me up,” he said, hitching his hand back toward the Haverford. No doubt, they’d just spent the last hour grilling him.

I glanced backward. Penny was still on our tails. I quickened my pace. “Juice?”

“I’m headed home.”

“I’ll give you a lift then.”

He shrugged. “I take the train.”

“Great, I’ll walk you to the subway.” Penny had no chance of keeping up with us in that super-tight pencil skirt. I was wearing one too, but I’d had my tailor cut an extra few inches into the back slit. It made it easier to speed walk—or run—if need be.

Once we’d rounded the corner on to Lexington, I dove into my first question. “What did the cops say?”

“They wanted to know the last time I saw Olivia.”

“And when was that?”

“Friday night. Around ten.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Wait a second, were you the last person to see her alive?”

He took a drag of his cigarette. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

“Olivia was my best friend. I need to know what you know. I need to know who did this to her.” I looked him squarely in the eye until he shifted his gaze to the cracked sidewalk at his toes.

“Are you asking me as her friend or as one of those news people,” he said.

“Her friend.”

His shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

“If you want, we can do this on background,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I explained to him that
background
meant I could use whatever information he gave me, but I couldn’t attribute it to him. We stepped to the side to make way for one of those massive double strollers. “Please, Andrew. You know me. You’ve seen me with Olivia. You can trust me.”

Kaminski shrugged. “You won’t use my name?”

I nodded, fishing my pen and a spiral notebook out of my carryall as we started walking again. “So you were just coming off your shift when I saw you?”

“I’d already gone home. I was just about to hit the sack when I got a call from the super telling me I had to come back in.”

“Your shift is eleven to seven a.m., right?” Most Upper East Side buildings followed the same schedules: seven to three, three to eleven, eleven to seven.

“The guy before me needed to get off earlier and the super couldn’t cover him. I got to the Haverford at nine. Miss Kravis came in about an hour later.”

“Ten o’clock? You sure?”

“Yeah, about that.”

“Anyone with her?”

“Her friend. The one with the nice—” I could tell he was going to say
rack
, because I caught him looking at mine, but he paused, reconsidered, and chose a smarter approach. “Nice body.”

I nodded as my stomach did a series of flips. Things had just gotten about a thousand times more complicated. “Anyone else come up for a visit?”

He shook his head, blew out some more smoke.

Damn
. “Are you sure?”

He nodded again.

I sighed, forcing myself to focus on what I knew for sure. Bludgeoning wasn’t for the weak of heart—or body. Olivia was my height—five-foot-nine—and whippet thin. But she was stronger than she looked. She jogged the reservoir whenever she could, practiced yoga a couple of times a week, and last year she’d traveled to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I knew that the woman Kaminski was referring to was Rachel Rockwell, and although we’d never met in person, I had seen pictures of her. She had warm brown eyes, exotic features, and long dark hair. Her small stature made it hard for me to imagine her overpowering Olivia, but neither could I rule her out. Anger was a powerful thing; it turned the meek into the mighty, the humane into the beastly. I’d seen it happen.

“Anything else you remember? Were Olivia and her friend in good spirits or did they look like they’d been arguing?”

“Well, her friend was wearing a fur coat. Sort of a purple color.”

Generally speaking, purple fur is not what one wears to a slaying. If Rachel had killed Olivia, it must have been done in the heat of the moment, in other words,
a crime of passion
. But purple fur? Our viewers were going to devour that detail. I hated that this even occurred to me, but I could already see the line on the ticker tape: SUSPECT IN KRAVIS MURDER CASE WORE PURPLE FUR, SAYS EYEWITNESS. As a producer, I lived for moments like these. As a friend, I was horrified.

“When did Olivia’s guest leave?”

“She didn’t.” Andrew stopped at the entrance to the Hunter College subway stop. A bunch of kids streamed past us in their backpacks and jeans, talking loudly, jumping around. We let them go past. “I’m on until seven. Then the day guy comes in. If she left through the front door, she didn’t do it while I was there.”

“C’mon, I’m sure you take breaks. Go to the bathroom? Make a call?”

“That’s true.”

“And what about the service entrance?” Buildings like the Haverford kept security cameras on all their points of entry and egress, plus the elevators. The latest systems recorded on digital hard drives—not VHS tapes—and could store up to two weeks of video.

He threw his cigarette to the ground, grinding it out with his heel. “I don’t know about that stuff. You have to ask the police. Or the super.”

It occurred to me that Rachel could have been slain alongside Olivia, but I didn’t think we were dealing with a double homicide—the PD would have released that information from the get-go. My guess was that she had managed to sneak out of the building unseen. But was she running from the killer or from the scene of a crime she’d committed?

Andrew gestured toward the flight of stairs leading down to the subway platform. “We’re done?”

“For now. How about you go home, get some sleep, take a shower and then let’s talk to set up another interview? This time on camera,” I ventured.

He gave me a look.

“Don’t judge. We all got a job to do.” I stuffed my pad and pen back in my bag. “You ever hear of Georgia Jacobs?”

“Sure I’ve heard of her.” He scratched the back of his neck, giving me another glimpse of green scales decorating his forearm. “But my boss says if I go on camera again, he’ll can my ass.”

“He can’t do that. The union won’t allow it.”

“Sorry, but that’s not how it works. If the people who live in that building want me gone, they’ll find another reason. They can write me up for anything.”

“As long as you didn’t sign a confidentiality agreement, they can’t fire you for talking to the media.”

He shook his head. “It’s not worth it.”

It’s not worth it.
Something about his choice of words rubbed me the wrong way. “Olivia’s dead, Andrew. She may be just another spoiled rich chick to you, but she had family who loved her and friends who will miss her.” I put my hand out to shake his. “Thanks for the interview.”

“Wait a second. I didn’t mean any disrespect. You know that.”

“Sure I do,” I said dryly. “My friend’s dead and you’re worried about your job.”

He looked appropriately chastened. “Let me take you to dinner.”

I coughed. I hadn’t seen that coming. “I don’t think so.”

“Can I have your number?”

“No.”

“Not for a date.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “In case I find out something about what happened, how am I going to get in touch?”

I was being baited, but there was a chance Andrew would have access to information I could use, and I couldn’t afford to dismiss him out of hand. I fished out my business card and handed it to him. “If it’s urgent, you can reach me on my cell. I’m hardly ever at my desk.”

I was on my way back to the Haverford when I remembered to turn my phone off of vibrate. I’d missed five calls, all from Jen. She picked up on the first ring. “Where are you?” Her voice was panicked.

“Not far. I was talking to the doorman.”

“You better get back here.”

“
Hoestick
scooped us,” Jen announced as soon as I was back at the van.

While I was talking to the doorman, she’d gotten hold of someone who knew about Olivia’s female visitor. Worse than that, this person knew about the purple fur. The first big scoop should have been mine, and Penny Harlich had stolen it right from under me.

Alex didn’t share my opinion on the matter. He was in the truck, which now reeked of the greasy sandwiches Aaron must have brought the crew for lunch. He pointed to Harlich on one of the monitors. “She’s pretty so you assume she’s not smart, but she is smart, and not only that, she’s ambitious. You underestimate her, and that’s why she’s a threat to us.”

“She got lucky.” I grumbled.

Alex snorted. “She’s gonna hand us our asses if we don’t up our game.”

“Agreed. But I’m not the only one on this team. Penny’s on-air talent
and
she lands scoops. Where are yours?”

“Working on it,” he muttered.

“And so am I.” I stepped out of the van and made a beeline for the building. Penny Harlich had a source on the PD. There was no other way to explain it. No one else could have possibly known about the visitor except for a police officer. She had a leak, now it was time for me to find mine. I started to dial his number on my phone, but then I saw him. Standing ten feet from the awning—practically right in front of me—was Detective Neal Pandowski, aka Panda.

Panda and I had met five years earlier. I was covering the rape and murder of a New York University co-ed and Panda was one of the detectives assigned the case. The victim, a beautiful Indian girl, had gone missing several days before her body turned up stuffed under a mattress in a vacant room in her dorm. Because the police and university hadn’t shut off access to the building as soon as they’d discovered Anjali was missing, some had argued that vital crime-scene evidence had potentially been tampered with or lost. Panda was singled out for making the call not to close the building, but I convinced Georgia to argue that he’d made the right decision, given the facts available at the time. A month later, when Panda cracked the case and the killer admitted to sexually assaulting and strangling the girl, Panda’s error in judgment was swiftly forgotten. Still, he remained grateful to me for coming to his defense, and had repaid the favor several times over by acting as my best source on the NYPD.

Since Panda was on the street, shooting the breeze with a bunch of patrolmen, and not upstairs studying the crime scene, I could surmise two things: First, that his partner, John Ehlers, had been teamed up with the detective from North Homicide; and second, that Panda was miffed about not catching the case himself. At sixty years old, he was nearing retirement and wouldn’t have too many more shots at solving a blockbuster case like this one. Selfishly, I was glad Panda hadn’t. This meant he’d have access to all the case information
and
plenty of time to share it with me.

I got his attention. He shook his head once. I knew what that meant:
Not now.
Five minutes later, my phone rang. “You eat yet?” he asked when I picked up.

I hadn’t. I suggested our usual spot.

“Meet you there in 10,” he replied.

Pastrami Queen was a little hole-in-the-wall near Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side. There was a counter displaying all manner of pickles and cole slaw, knishes, brisket, corned beef, pastrami, and the like. The floors were covered in white tiles and there was a mounted flat-screen television tuned into ESPN. Panda had introduced me to Pastrami Queen’s corned beef on rye, extra juicy, and most of the times we met up, we did it there, over root beers, half-sours, and massive, artery-assaulting sandwiches. By the time I arrived, he was already there. Two root beers sat unopened on the plastic-covered table in front of him.

I plopped down and popped open one of the drinks, taking a sip straight from the can. Slipping my arms out of my trench, I glanced around the small room. No cops. No media. We could talk. “I need to know everything.”

“Holy smokes, Clyde, I thought you’d at least comment on my tie before pumping me for information.”