Trail of Blood (15 page)

Frank shut the door behind him as best he could. The knob no longer worked at all, only the chain at the top. From grooves worn in the carpeting he guessed the tenant secured herself by sliding a short bureau in front of it. “We’re very sorry, Mrs. Hammond.”

She had covered the room’s only window with a thin blanket to block the view of other tenants in the courtyard, or perhaps to block her view of them, and the room was dim. She crossed her arms over a worn but clean orange sweatshirt, which featured a jack-o’-lantern and two black cats. “That’s a switch. Usually you jump right to possible contempt-of-court charges if I don’t tell you—” Then the significance of their wording sunk in and she paled. “Is she dead?”

A skilled interrogator might have asked,
What makes you think she’s dead?
and received all sorts of tidbits of information in response. Frank could not be that cruel. “Yes.”

The woman sank to a stained plaid sofa. Frank and Angela Sanchez sat as well, using two worn wooden chairs from the breakfast nook. Frank avoided upholstered furniture in other people’s homes—cloth hid dirt and fleas a bit too easily.

Mrs. Hammond made all the right queries—when, where, how, and who? Frank couldn’t answer any of them, especially the last. Sanchez made the woman a cup of tea and then they settled into the same series of questions they’d asked a thousand other grieving mothers.

Kim, her only child, would have turned twenty-three in a few weeks. She had been keeping away from the drugs since her last stint in jail. She did not have a boyfriend, violent or non-, so far as Lily Hammond knew, but then Kim did not bring her friends home. She would disappear for days on end and return to say she had been sleeping on so-and-so’s couch, so her absence did not immediately alarm her mother. Kim did not have a job, though she had recently applied at several department stores downtown. She wanted to work in retail to get an employee discount. “A five-fingered discount, more likely,” her mother admitted. “I loved my daughter, but I know how she thought. She figured that she had it tough so the world owed her a break. I could never convince her that she didn’t have it all that tough, that it could be worse. It could be a lot worse.”

Frank didn’t ask what could be worse than poverty. The way Mrs. Hammond stared off into the middle distance made him think she could give him a laundry list. A television blared to life in the next apartment; in fact, televisions maintained a steady murmur throughout the building. Tenants left them on to make their unit seem occupied to would-be thieves.

“Kim wasn’t always that way,” the woman went on, her voice catching as grief began to blossom. “She held it together in high school, waitressed at Denny’s, and even worked for a summer at city hall. But then she started up with the wrong kind of boys, and that led to the drugs.”

Frank tried to look sympathetic, though he heard the “good kid, just fell in with the wrong crowd” story from virtually every parent he had ever interviewed. It never occurred to them that their kid
was
the wrong crowd. “So Kim stayed here more or less consistently from her release in June until yesterday morning.”

“Yes.”

“How did she spend her time?” Frank asked.

“She’d watch TV, maybe talk to the neighbors.” A smile curved her lips for the first time since they’d arrived. “Once in a while she’d get ambitious and walk up the street to the market and then cook dinner. She liked to cook, when the mood hit her.”

“The West Side Market?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she have a car?”

“
I
don’t even have a car.”

“What did she watch on TV?” Sanchez asked.

Frank sighed. If his partner had a fault, it was this weird curiosity with the trivia of victim’s lives, what kind of music they liked or which pet they doted on. To him, all the prior questions simply served to warm up the mother for the only relevant one: Did Kim have any enemies? Most whodunits solved themselves with that one inquiry.

“Lots of shows. Kim controlled the remote when she was home—those reality shows, usually the ones with cameras following spoiled Hollywood people around. I couldn’t stand them. They always wind up with people screaming at each other about some stupid detail. I’d love to have their problems.”

“Where is Kim’s father?” Frank asked.

Mrs. Hammond frowned. “He’s not in the picture.”

“All right. But where is he?”

“Kim had just started junior high when he dumped us. By the time family court tracked him down for child support, he was dead. Killed in a traffic accident in Chicago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Mrs. Hammond, could we see Kim’s room?”

The woman snorted. “I’m sitting on it. This place has one bedroom and it’s mine. When Kim stayed here, she slept on the couch.”

The cops looked around. “Where did she keep her belongings?” Sanchez asked.

“She hangs some clothes in the closet there. Otherwise it’s all stuffed under this couch—it’s a futon, really. Take a look if you want.” She traded seats with Frank, warming her hands on the mug of tea.

Frank knelt, gingerly, on the least-stained section of carpet and reached under the metal frame. The sum total of the twenty-two-year-old’s worldly possessions filled two cardboard boxes. He slid one over to Sanchez and donned latex gloves to go through the other. This way he would not leave fingerprints on any item they decided to analyze, and he disliked touching other people’s stuff with bare hands. Especially dusty stuff crammed beneath ratty furniture in a run-down apartment.

Kim had owned a few necklaces of plastic beads, hoop earrings, a cigar box, a letter from her parole officer and her high school report cards (which weren’t entirely bad, he noticed), various makeup items that leaked trails of glittery powder throughout the collection, and a pile of socks, bras, and panties. He couldn’t tell if they were clean or dirty, doubly grateful for the latex gloves.

The cigar box revealed a grimy array of two pencils, a medal—an eagle against a cross—on a faded ribbon, a black-and-white shot of a round-faced baby framed in silver, and a small spiral notebook with a worn cardboard cover. Frank flipped through a few pages. The random jottings in close script did not suggest anything to him.

“That was her father’s stuff,” Mrs. Hammond told him. “I don’t know why she kept it.”

Sanchez held up the picture of a young man from the other box. “Who is this?”

Kim’s mother squinted. “I think he went to her high school. They didn’t keep in touch so far as I know.”

The detective then held up a birthday card. “This says
Love Always, Bubba
. Who’s Bubba?”

“Me.” Tears began to leak from the woman’s eyes. “She would get her B’s and M’s mixed up when she first started to talk. Instead of Mama, I was Bubba.”

Frank replaced his box under the futon and moved on before Mrs. Hammond’s composure could dissolve completely. “You said she had been friendly with your neighbors? Which ones?”

She thought, then gestured to the north wall. “She would say hi to the Taylor girl, in the next apartment, but not talk much. Kim would chat with old Mrs. Evanston on the second floor, but everyone does; she haunts the lobby and blocks the elevator until she can bend your ear for five or ten minutes. Then that son of a bitch at the end of the hall always flirted with her.”

“A man?”

“A man old enough to be her grandfather, practically, a smooth-talking, drug-dealing bastard. Kim usually knew how to blow off scum, but him—she seemed to find him funny. Like his age made him harmless. I kept trying to tell her otherwise, but of course I’m old-fashioned and paranoid.”

“What’s his name?”

“Leroy Turner.”

“Does he live alone?”

“Not so you can tell. Always a parade of people coming and going from that place.”

“We’ll talk to him. Did you notice any difference in her this past week? Changes in eating or sleeping habits? Did she keep different hours, make a new friend, seem depressed?”

“No,” the woman said with a tone of surprise. “Not depressed at all. Tuesday morning—the last time I saw her—she had that sneaky little attitude going again that used to mean she’d gotten up to something, but sober…maybe a bit restless. I think she couldn’t make up her mind to get a legitimate job or…find an alternative. She hated being broke.”

“Anything else?”

The dead girl’s mother thought, frowned, and bit the tip of one thumb.

“I don’t know if it means anything, but I remember being pleased about it on—Friday night, I think it was. I got bad food at lunchtime and I spent the evening throwing up every twenty minutes. So I didn’t pay a lot of attention, but I remember she finally laid off the reality shows.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Got real interested in watching the news. Flicked through every channel, all evening long. She muttered some stuff to herself, but like I said, I was so sick I didn’t listen to anything except my stomach. But later on that night—”

“Yes?”

“She went down to the pop machine in the lobby and bought me a can of ginger ale. For my stomach. That was new, for her to do something like that.”

At the door nearest the stairwell, Leroy Turner opened up before Frank could finish knocking and invited them in with great courtesy. This told Frank three things: one, that Turner had been informed of their presence from the moment they set foot on the property, through that uncanny network of interested tenants that made it seem as though the building itself lived and breathed and thought; two, that during their interviews of Mrs. Hammond and her neighbors, Turner had had ample time to hide or give to others any evidence of his dealings; and three, that Turner wanted them to know all these things to illustrate why he should not, and would not, be the slightest bit afraid of them.

Short, a bit stocky, with graying hair, he wore a brown T-shirt with long sleeves and a logo of some obscure indie band on the front. The shabby but relatively uncluttered surroundings could have belonged to any law-abiding pensioner. He leaned back in his chair and made an expansive gesture at the empty chairs on the other side of the cracked Formica-covered table.

Sanchez sat on one of the upholstered cushions, but Frank remained standing. Open windows and a helping of Febreze almost hid the lingering smell of pot, but the faint reek of sauerkraut concerned him more. How did people eat that stuff?

“Now,” Leroy Turner began, “how can I help you officers?”

“Did you know Kim Hammond?” Frank asked.

The man blinked, and for a split second his expressive face went still.
Is he relieved,
Frank wondered,
that we’re here about Kim instead of the drugs, or dismayed because we’re here about Kim and not the drugs?

“Yes,” Turner answered. “Nice girl. Lives up the hall.”

“Lived,” Sanchez corrected.

Now he did not try to hide the surprise. “What happened to her?”

“When did you see her last?” Frank asked. With this witness, cruelty didn’t apply.

“What happened to her?”

“Answer our questions first.”

“Why?”

“So we don’t have to get a warrant to toss your place. Did you consider Kim your friend?”

If Frank hadn’t been lied to by every person he had ever encountered in the drug trade, he would have eliminated Turner as a suspect in Kim’s death purely by the fleeting glimpse of true sadness in his face. “Yes. I did. I assume from the past tense that I shouldn’t anymore. What happened to her?”

“Did you sell her drugs?”

“In the past. Not since this last time she got locked up. Did she OD?”

“Was she using again?”

The aging man shook his head. “Not that I know of. But people back-slide. How she die?” he asked, of Sanchez this time, perhaps thinking the woman would be more forthcoming, but, of course, he didn’t know Sanchez. She said nothing.

Frank said that she had been murdered and that they were still working on exactly how.

Turner spoke without hesitation—again, not afraid of them. Kim had stopped by his apartment on both Thursday and Friday evenings. She had been sober and upbeat, chatting animatedly, “finally acting the way a young girl oughta, showing me a little optimism for a change.” He did not see her after that and did not really have an alibi for Friday night or Saturday. He had been home alone for most of the weekend but had also spent part of Saturday down at the West Side Market. With friends.

Frank asked his standard enemies question.

“Kim never hung here long enough to grow enemies. She been inside for a while, she flits in and out of her mama’s. Nobody in this building took much notice of her.”

“Except you.”

“She and me got along.” Again, that glimpse of true regret on his face. Frank had no doubt the man could kill, but in such a melodramatic way? It didn’t fit with Turner’s ability to stay under the radar—if he wanted her dead as a lesson to other acquaintances, he would have left her body in the alley behind the building. If he only wanted to get rid of the body he could have dropped it in the river behind the building without the effort of cutting it up first. “She could talk to me about stuff she couldn’t say to her mama.”

“Like drugs?”

The man nodded. “Yeah. And being inside.”

“What did she talk about on Thursday and Friday?”

He appeared uncertain for the first time. “Thursday, nothin’, just the same old bull. Friday, she kept asking what I would do if I had a bunch of money.”

“Money?”

“Yeah. Like if I won the lottery or something.”

“Where was she going to get this money?”

“She didn’t say
she
was going to get it. She asked me what I would do if I got it. Just talking. She’d go off into these fantasies now and then, get all excited about one of them Hollywood skanks and their cars and their clothes and how she’d have stuff just like that someday. Kid talk.”

“So what did you tell her?”

Turner settled back again, the chair creaking under his shifting weight. “I said I’d put it in a bank in the Caymans and retire to Cancún. You ever been to Cancún?” he asked Sanchez, his eyes roaming her figure.

“What did Kim plan to do with her theoretical windfall?” Frank’s partner asked.