Cuts Through Bone (11 page)

“The old man I started with. I think he originally came from another universe, because he sure didn't belong here. He said you gotta ride the trains if you want to be a real New Yorker.”

They climbed out of the Ford into the morning sunshine. The old stonework in the Village glimmered. They walked across Washington Square and up to Grove Street. The traffic was thinner and people on the streets hurried by with only glances. Parking spaces were open like missing teeth; Guthrie sighed and touched the brim of his brown fedora each time he walked past one.

Number 33 was part of an old nineteenth-century brownstone. It had an underground alley entrance, surrounded by a wrought-iron railing with a swing gate. The door was built into an old window well, matching the others on the bottom story of the brownstone. A short, steep flight of brick steps showed signs of decades of passing feet. Guthrie was disappointed. The entrance was only partly visible from the street. He studied it for a while, checking it from different angles. He told Vasquez to watch, and settled down to wait for a while.

The sun climbed, glowering down, until the morning could no longer pretend coolness. Passersby ignored Guthrie and Vasquez, except for an occasional momentary puzzled stare. About nine o'clock, a white-haired old man marched from the front door of a narrow town house on the other side of the street, pulling a slender water hose and nozzle. He studied them placidly for a moment, then turned and began rinsing his stoop. He sprayed the front of his building, then chased the sidewalk debris into the gutter. Guthrie walked across the street to watch.

“Just giving her a bit of a sprinkle before the day gets too hot,” the old man said to him.

The detective nodded. “You pretty much stay in?”

“Been pensioned off for a while.” The old man smiled, taking a closer look. “You ain't too far off, with that dust you're showing. I'm Phil Overton.”

“Clayton Guthrie.” He nodded at the other side of the street. “I was having a look at that underground. I guess you really can't see it from here.”

“A few steps down the alley?” Overton asked.

“Sure. You know who lives there?”

The old man nodded and wiped a palm on his khaki trousers. “That pretty little girl did. She got killed. Probably they aren't ready to let it yet.” He paused to take a long look at Vasquez, who was standing on the other side of the street, her red windbreaker spread like a sail to catch the faint breeze while she looked toward Seventh Avenue. “Your daughter?”

“I wish. She works for me. Right now, I'm doing background work for a lawyer, relating to that young woman who got killed.”

Phil Overton frowned. “They arrested someone, I thought.”

“They did,” Guthrie said, “and mostly that's why I'm taking a look. Maybe you know what kind of hours she kept? Did she have visitors, and like that?”

“I saw her,” Overton said, “but it sort of runs together. Late in the day, mostly I rest.”

“Sure. Okay,” the detective said. “I'm going to take a longer look around, though, if something comes to mind.”

Guthrie walked back across the street, beckoned Vasquez, and then went to the underground door. The seclusion of the alleyway suggested that anyone could have gone inside, and they wouldn't have been spotted except by going back and forth. Guthrie unlocked the door with a key James Rondell had sent by messenger. A simple alarm pad waited inside the door, and he disarmed it as Vasquez came inside and shut the door. The apartment smelled a few days stale, from unwashed dishes, unmade beds, and cast-off clothes.

The apartment was surprisingly large. The underground door opened on a living room combined with a kitchen. A bathroom and bedroom opened onto the living room. A third door opened into a short hallway. A den, another bedroom, and a second bathroom lay beyond. The bathrooms and kitchen were away from the street, but each bedroom, the den, and the living room had windows looking out into bricked street wells, with wrought-iron railings above them. Careful remodelling hid the evidence of being an understory but left the apartment with a warm, lived-in feeling, with wooden floors and doors, well-used couches, and ranks of framed posters and photographs marching along pastel walls.

“This's the poor branch of the family,” Guthrie muttered.

The front bedroom had an unused four-poster bed and a small desk with a stack of books, notebooks, and neatly arranged pens and pencils. The notebooks had the same handwriting as those in Olsen's Livingston Hall dorm room at Columbia. A laptop computer and cell phone sat on the desktop. In the closet hung clothes that might've come from a costume shop, and there were stacked boxes of hats, shoes, and smallclothes in different sizes. The boxes were labeled “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large”—seemingly for the sizes of clothing or shoes—with some jumbled inside and others neatly folded. The room was impersonal, perhaps even little used except for the desk.

The back bedroom was disarranged, the bed unmade. A number 42 red Wisconsin Badgers jersey was smoothed across one pillow. A single dresser held a mixture of clothing, for a small woman and a large man. A mirror looked over the crowded dresser top at an array of books, cologne, cosmetics, and loose change. In the closet, a bundle of records in a plastic case huddled among the shoes, and one class-A uniform still wrapped in a dry cleaner's bag fought with the dresses.

The den was an electronic paradise. Two wall-mounted plasmas overlooked the desk, with another wide monitor for the desktop computer. A second laptop was tucked into a cradle with a rack of cameras, recorders, and players. The room smelled like electricity. The wastebasket was filled with scraps of paper, each bearing an elaborately written piece of gibberish made from numbers and letters. Guthrie grunted as he shuffled through a handful before letting them slide back into the wastebasket.

Numerous photos decorated the apartment. Movie posters filled the broad spaces, ranging from 1920s silents with Valentino up to 1950s promos for Elvis and Monroe. The smaller pictures were snapshots of the city and anonymous pedestrians, except where they were pinned to the refrigerator or clustered in the den. Those were an album of Olsen and Bowman, at Columbia and elsewhere. Many pictures included Tompkins, or featured Tompkins. Some were of sedate studying, and others of drunken happiness, but none were suggestive.

NYPD's warrant for Olsen's .44 placed it in the bedroom, in a locked case in the bedside table. The case was gone, taken for evidence, but the police had seized nothing else. Guthrie gathered the electronics—laptops, phone, and hard drive—and the paper records in the back bedroom closet. They fit into a gym bag. He didn't seem encouraged.

“What's next?” Vasquez asked.

“We'll come back and canvass the neighborhood,” he replied glumly. “I'll look around to see if somebody's security cameras caught anything. We could get lucky.”

Vasquez nodded her way through his list. “What'd the old man tell you? Was he any help?”

“He sundowns,” Guthrie replied with a grim look.

“What do you mean?”

“Sundowns—it's what people with Alzheimer's do. He's lucid in the morning, but he gets fuzzy in the afternoon. He don't remember nothing, so he thinks he rests in the afternoons.” He let out a slow breath. “I had an uncle go down that way.”

Guthrie reset the alarm on the door and locked up when they left. The swing gate at the top of the brick stairs had a faint creak each time it moved, but not enough to call attention from the street. The apartment windows facing the outside had all been undisturbed, and the little detective thought a break-in unlikely. An intruder would've needed the expertise of a professional burglar. Walking away with the gym bag in his hand, he paused a few times to turn and examine the brownstone. Each time, he shook his head and started walking again.

Vasquez stopped him when he finally seemed settled on leaving, and pointed back down the street. Phil Overton was hurrying up the far side of the street, in their direction, waving a light blue hat. He shouted when they paused again, and kept coming. Guthrie and Vasquez crossed the street and went back. The old man wanted them to talk to his wife, but she was an invalid and couldn't leave their house. They walked back with him. The sunshine had baked Overton's stoop almost dry, but a faint dampness lingered, and it was cooler.

Inside the narrow town house, the bare wooden floors were spotless. Shaker furniture balanced neatly on slender wooden legs. Philip Overton took their hats and pegged them, then waited patiently for Vasquez's jacket. She was embarrassed, but the old man seemed not to notice her gun belt. He ushered them into the front room. A tiny woman with white hair pulled into a bun sat beside the large front window. She had a light green-and-blue shawl thrown over her legs. Another wooden-backed chair sat opposite hers at a small card table, with two hands of cards already waiting. Facing the window, a spindle-back couch had thin cushions, with a low, bare coffee table before it.

“Hello,” she said in a clear, bright voice. “You're Clayton Guthrie. Phil told me you had some questions. I'm Jeannette.” Phil sat down in the other chair at the card table, picked up his hand, and began to study it.

Guthrie sat down on the couch, leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees. “How long have you been married, Jeannette?”

The old woman smiled. “Phil and I have been married for forty years,” she replied. “He took perfect care of me. I hope to return the favor for as many.” She picked up her hand of cards.

“Okay. There's an apartment across the street. You can't really see the door from here, but you can see the gate, maybe. I wonder if you know anything about who lived there?”

“Phil told me you wanted to know about the pretty girl. I can see the street from where I sit, here. I don't watch television, so I watch the street. I suppose someone might call me nosy, but I'm really not. I don't bother people with questions. That's nosy, if you're not being paid to do it.”

Vasquez laughed. The old woman was being polite to the detective.

“Did anyone live there with her?”

“I know you know that big young man did. You just came from inside, Clayton. I hope I can call you Clayton and not offend you. That's such a wonderfully old name. Couples don't name their children like that anymore. But you shouldn't play slow. The police say he killed her; that was in the newspaper. I don't believe that, because I watched them. They were in love, and they were nesting. He did not kill her. Nor did she sleep around on him. That's foolishness.”

“That's a strong opinion from watching a doorway, Jeannette.”

“I suppose you could say so. But if I watch a rock fall, can't I say how it came to be on the ground?” She glanced at Vasquez, who wore a frown. “She was a very pretty girl, like yourself, dear. She had many suitors. Until she met that boy, her suitors came and went at all hours. After that, she had only two visitors—that boy and the other girl. And she kept a regular schedule.” She tapped her cards on the tabletop. “I suppose it's difficult to describe how they walked, how they paused, waited, or hurried to catch up with each other. I've been around long enough to know when two people are smitten with each other. That was them.”

“You make a good argument, but those aren't the questions that need answers,” Guthrie said. “Let me give you some examples.” She nodded, and he continued. “When was the last time you saw Camille Bowman go in or out?”

“That was the morning of the day she was murdered, the twenty-third, a Thursday. She came out for school. The young man wasn't there that morning.”

“You're
sure
?” Vasquez asked.

“Of course, dear. We have tuna on Thursday for lunch. She was going to school because she was carrying her books. Oh, do you mean am I certain I saw her? I always noticed her, dear. I would say it was jealousy. I used to be pretty myself, sometime long ago, and so maybe I see myself, or saw myself, in her. I always noticed her.”

“She didn't come back?” Guthrie asked.

“No. The boy did. Of course, we didn't know she was dead, not for days. You should have seen the poor boy mope around. The dark-haired girl was just as upset as he was. I came to think those two were like sisters, the way they ran around together, and then she was the only one who kept coming back after the pretty girl met her boy.”

Guthrie nodded. “So just those three came and went, and then after the twenty-third, just two of them?”

“Well, yes, of people who belonged here,” she said.

“You mean people who lived in the Village?” Vasquez asked.

“Yes, dear. This was unusual. They had deliveries. They didn't ordinarily have deliveries. I suppose really it was an installer or a courier, not a deliveryman, but he brought a nice large box.”

“When was this?” the little detective asked.

“Well, the first time was Tuesday, the twenty-first. I remember thinking that he
just
missed them. But one of them must have known that, and perhaps told him when to come. He went inside, because there's nothing else down the alley. Yes, I remember seeing him swing the gate.”

“He left a box? He didn't take anything out?”

“No.” Jeannette shook her head. “I remember thinking it must be some sort of computer thing, because he stayed inside for a while. I've read in the paper where they'll do that sort of thing nowadays—come to your home and install something electronic. I thought it must be a present.”

“That was the first time,” Vasquez said. “How many times did they get a delivery?”

“Once more,” she replied. “At the same time of day. He brought another nice large box. That was Friday, the twenty-fourth. She was already gone, bless her. The boy must have felt horrid when he came back and found the present. I don't know which was giving it to the other.”