Apaches (7 page)

“When are you and Dad gonna get a divorce?”

Mary was surprised at the question. “Who says we are?”

“Somehow I don’t think I have to worry about throwin’ a surprise fiftieth anniversary party,” Frank said, finishing off a chicken burrito.

“We were kids when we married,” Mary said. “Too stupid to know better. I finished high school and he pumped gas. I went to the Academy and he pumped gas. I was pregnant with you and there he was, still pumping gas.

“And this is better?” Frank asked. “Sitting in cold cars, waiting for some guy to make a mistake?”

“For me it is,” Mary said. “Putting cuffs on a guy that iced somebody who should still be alive beats a ten-dollar fill-up in my book.”

“Dad likes what he does,” Frank said. “He’s good at it.”

“I like what I do,” Mary said. “And I’m good at it.”

“You still love him?”

“In my own way,” Mary said. “I do. It’s just that my own way may not be good enough for him anymore. If it ever was.”

“Would you be happier married to a cop?” Frank asked.

“I don’t think so.” Mary smiled at her son. “They’re good to have around at work, but a waste of time otherwise. Just like me. Given a choice, I’d stick with the guy pumping gas.”

“That’s good, Mom,” Frank said, smiling back.

“And speaking of gas,” Mary said, holding her stomach, “why the hell do you always make me eat these damn tacos?”

“Don’t forget,” Frank said. “You’re the one went in there once and asked for their recipe.”

“Had to flash my badge to get it too,” Mary said with a full laugh.

•    •    •

T
HE BODY OF
the thirty-two-year-old bookkeeper had been hanging from a closet door for three days. The skin on his face was ash white, his limbs were stiff, eyes open and bulging. His feet had been cut off at the ankles and tossed on top of a nearby bed. There were puncture wounds, large and small, up and down the front and back of the seminude corpse. His hands were tied behind his back, held together by black leather straps, and his throat was slashed. Rats had feasted on the remains and maggots were starting to fester.

“Did a knife do that to the throat, Doc?” Silvestri asked the M.E. on the scene.

“Worse,” the medical examiner said in a weary voice. He was short, bald, and looked older than his forty-eight years. Three years on a job that averaged close to two thousand homicides a year, and he was already looking for the fastest way out.

“What’s worse, Jerry?” Mary asked.

“Corkscrew,” the doctor said. “Same one that was used to open the bottle of wine over on the bureau.”

“How long’s something like that take?” Tony Russo, Mary’s partner on the case, asked.

“As long as the killer wants it to,” the doctor said with a shrug, walking with head bowed away from the crime scene.

“You wanna get some coffee?” Russo asked Mary. He watched as the forensic team went about their business of taking photos, dusting for prints, bagging evidence, sealing up the cramped one-bedroom second-floor apartment that overlooked the Bronx River Parkway.

“You have to really enjoy killing to end a life like that,” Mary said, eyes focused on the young man hanging from the closet door. “How else do you explain it?”

“You can’t,” Russo said. “Not until we have ourselves a cup of coffee. And maybe a sweet roll.”

•    •    •

T
HE BOOKKEEPER
, J
AMIE
Sinclair, was single and unemployed. He had held one job over the last two years, working freelance on and off for a Manhattan firm specializing in TV commercials. He ran three miles a day, and, when he did work, attended an aerobics class four nights a week. He had a brother who lived in Jackson Heights and worked for the city in the marriage license bureau. His mother died in 1980 after a long battle with a brain disorder, and his father shared a two-bedroom Co-op City apartment with a twice-divorced mother of two. In a life that had spanned thirty-two years, there
wasn’t much else for Silvestri and Russo to go on. There were no known girlfriends
or
boyfriends. There were few friends of any kind. All indications were that Jamie Sinclair preferred to spend his time alone.

Except on the night he died.

“Uniform on the scene saw no sign of a break-in,” Russo said, taking a huge bite from an apple turnover. “Whoever sliced and diced him was let in.”

“Or was already there when Sinclair came home,” Mary said, hands wrapped around a container of black coffee.

“Either way, the victim knew the perp,” Russo said.

The detectives looked down the street, neat row houses mingling with three-story apartment buildings. Two blocks up, the el rumbled over White Plains Road. A squad car blocked off traffic access, and yellow crime-scene tape was spread across the front of the murder building. Onlookers stared from stoops and the tops of parked cars.

“Where you wanna start?” Russo asked her, finishing off the turnover.

“Let uniform do the first pass around the neighborhood,” Mary said. “We’ll follow up later. Let them look for the usual. Make sure they ask about anyone not from the area hanging around. Especially these past couple of days and especially if it’s a woman.”

“You kiddin’ me?” Russo put one hand on Mary’s elbow. “You know somethin’ already? You were up there only, what, ten minutes.”

“Relax, Sweet Tooth,” Mary said, pulling her arm away. “When I know, you’ll know.”

“Tell you one thing, Mrs. Columbo,” Russo said. “I hang around you, I’ll be a captain before I lose my hair.”

Mary looked at Russo’s thin strands of dark hair rising in the mild spring wind. “Then we better work fast,” she said.

•    •    •

B
Y THE TIME
Jamie Sinclair’s body was toe-tagged and put in a freezer drawer, BCCI, the fingerprint unit of the department,
had found three sets of prints in the apartment not belonging to him. One set belonged to his brother, who had a key and said he’d let himself in to leave some family documents for Sinclair to sign. Another belonged to the building’s landlord, who also had a key and would occasionally let himself in to drop off books and other packages. The third set belonged to Alison Walker, a fifty-eight-year-old woman with a bad heart, hefty trust fund, and Upper West Side brownstone in her name.

Her name shot its way to the top of Silvestri and Russo’s interview list.

“Why’s a rich Manhattan chick hangin’ with a loser from the Bronx?” Russo wondered, dodging Manhattan traffic as he drove crosstown on Park Drive.

“She’s fifty-eight years old,” Mary said, trying to read her notes. “She passed the chick stage when Kennedy beat Nixon.”

“Think she’s the one opened him like a can of soup?”

“
And
cut his feet off? I doubt it.”

“What, women don’t kill?”

“Women don’t kill brutal. A gun maybe. A knife if they’re really determined. But no, not like that. Not vicious.”

Mary put her notebook in her purse and opened a paper bag resting against her hip. She took out a container of coffee, popped the lid, and poured in three packs of sugar.

“You had to ice somebody,” Russo said, swerving past a yellow cab. “A guy. Husband. Boyfriend. Whoever. We’re just talkin’ now. What would you use, gun or knife?”

“Neither,” Mary said, stirring the sugar in the coffee.

“What then, a bomb?” Russo said. “Put a timer in and crack his car?”

“Strychnine,” Mary said. “Five drops in a clear drink and the muscles hit adenosine triphosphate stage. Guy’d be dead in a few minutes. It’s also hard to trace, unless you
hit the scene within three hours, because rigor sets in as soon as the body’s dead, not when the temp is down.”

“You’ve given this some fuckin’ thought, I see,” Russo said, looking away from the traffic and at his partner.

“Here’s your coffee,” Mary said, handing Russo the cup and smiling. “Fixed it the way you like it.”

“You drink it,” Russo said. “I ain’t thirsty.”

“I was hoping that’s what you’d say,” Mary said, taking a long sip.

•    •    •

A
LISON
W
ALKER LED
the two detectives into the living room and offered them cups of tea and a platter filled with an assortment of fresh-baked cookies. Alison was short, wiry, and, despite the skin lifted tight around her jaw and neck, quite attractive. She had on a peach-colored blouse, tan skirt cut at the knee, and brown pumps. A double string of white pearls wrapped around her collar, and a set of earrings matching her blouse hung under golden-brown hair that was brushed and curled.

Mary Silvestri sat on a thick cream-colored couch that from feel and texture cost double any piece of furniture in her own home. The room was large and immaculately kept, the many antiques chosen with a sharp sense of style and concern for detail. The window behind the pale gray silk curtains was open, letting in a soft spring breeze.

Silvestri looked at the older woman and smiled.

“It’s a beautiful home you have here,” Mary said. “Really. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to keep up with a place like this.”

“It takes a great deal of time and work,” Alison Walker said in an accent so bland and flat, one would never know she was the only child of a New Jersey fisherman.

“And money too, right?” Mary said.

“That goes without saying,” Walker said, her manner
finishing-school calm, her clear blue eyes devoid of emotion. “There isn’t much one
can
do without money.”

“Mind if I light one up?” Russo asked from the other end of the couch, trying hard not to polish off the entire tray of cookies.

“Yes,” Walker said, eyes never moving from Mary. “I do mind.”

“Thanks for nothin’, then,” Russo muttered, tucking his smokes into a shirt pocket.

“Did you know a man named Jamie Sinclair?” Mary asked.

“What do you mean, did?” Walker asked.

“He’s dead,” Russo said. “Someone used him as a coat hanger a couple of days ago. Other than the cookies, that’s why we’re here.”

A hand went over Walker’s mouth and her eyes did a slow, calculated twitch.

Mary glared at Russo. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Walker. “Did you know him?” she asked again.

Alison Walker stood from her chair and walked toward the front door of her brownstone. She kept her head up as the sounds of her heels echoed on the polished wood floors.

“You both must leave,” Walker said without turning, the door now open to outside sunlight. “Immediately.”

“We’ll only have to come back again,” Russo said, tossing two cookies into his jacket pocket. “Or have somebody bring you down to us.”

Mary took a napkin off a pile next to the teapot, filled it with cookies, and folded it. She handed the napkin to Russo.

“Wait for me in the car, Sweet Tooth,” Mary said to him. “I’ll be there before you polish these off.”

“You sure?”

“What, you want milk too?” Mary said. “Now, go.”

“You gonna be okay here with her?” Russo asked. “Alone, I mean.”

“She whips out a corkscrew, I’ll scream for you to
come get me,” Mary whispered. “Until that happens, be a good boy and go eat your cookies.”

“If she made these,” Russo said, “she ain’t that bad a cook.”

“Lizzie Borden liked to bake too,” Mary said, watching as her partner walked out the door and down the front steps of the brownstone, his pockets lined with cookies. Then she turned back to the older woman.

“You knew him,” Mary said, now sitting next to Alison on the couch. “You didn’t kill him, but you did know him.”

The woman nodded her head slowly and took in a deep breath. “Yes,” Walker said, avoiding eye contact, staring instead at a crystal vase in the center of the coffee table, a fresh rose dangling off its edge. “We were friends.”

“And you knew he was dead,” Mary said, her voice soft and warm, two women talking about the demise of a mutual friend and not a cold-blooded murder. “Even before we knocked on your door.”

“How do you know that?” Walker asked, moist eyes now looking over at Mary.

“Most people are surprised when two cops show up at their door,” Mary said. “They go against normal behavior. You almost seemed happy to see us. You let us in without even asking what we wanted.”

“Next time I’ll know better,” Walker said, trying to manage a smile.

“Were you and Sinclair lovers?” Mary asked, leaning closer.

“No,” Walker said. “Jamie wasn’t interested in the physical. At least he wasn’t with me.”

“Sounds like any other husband,” Mary said with a smile.

“I wouldn’t know,” Walker said. “I’ve never married. Jamie was my last chance for that. At my age and in my position, most men are interested in only one thing. And it isn’t sex.”

“How much money were you giving him?”

“I gave what I wanted to give,” Walker said, a hint of defiance to her words.

“And how much was that?” Mary asked, pressing the issue.

“Two, sometimes three thousand dollars,” Walker said.

“A week?”

“He earned it,” Walker said.

“Doing what?” Mary asked, looking around the room. “You’ve got a housekeeper, you do all the cooking, and the place doesn’t look like it needs a paint job.”

“Jamie was very good with numbers,” Walker said. “He helped me with my investments, paid my bills, arranged my taxes. I trusted him. And he never gave me reason to think I shouldn’t.”

“How long was he helping you?”

“Almost three years.”

“And you were paying him that kind of money all that time?” Mary asked. “Three thousand a week?”

“Yes.”

“How did you pay him?” Mary asked. “Check or cash?”

“Cash,” Walker said. “As organized as Jamie may have been for me, that’s how disorganized he was with his own life. He didn’t even have a checking account.”

“Where’d he keep the money?”

“I never asked,” Walker said. “I just know he never spent much of it, if any. Jamie didn’t seem at all interested in money.”

“Interested enough to charge a few thousand a week to cook your books,” Mary said, standing and folding her notepad.

“Will I have to answer any more questions?” Walker asked, tilting her head toward the detective.