Likely to Die (17 page)

 “Yeah, well,you try finding stand-ins at this hour of the night. They’re not exactly throwing themselves at me.”

 “Send one of the uniformed guys down to that all-night drugstore on the corner of Lex. Get some talcum powder. I’d just like to gray them up a bit so they look a little more like Pops, okay?”

 Mercer was telling the array what they had to do to earn their five dollars for the night. Hold their numbers in front of their chests, on their feet when he told them to be, approach the mirror and stand before it for as long as directed, facing front before turning to display each profile, then come back and sit in their seats. A half-hour’s work as a lineup extra would keep these guys in Thunderbird wine for the night.

 I walked out to check on Sarah. She was pounding away at her laptop computer and looked up to tell me that Pops’s clothing was on its way to the lab for analysis.

 Anna Bartoldi was still manning the hotline phone in the corner of the squad room. She got up from her desk and passed me on her way out to the soda machine. “Dinner?”

 I waved Sarah along and the three of us crossed the hallway to pick up a soda from the vending machine and munch on a slice of lukewarm pizza. “Calls still coming in?” I asked Anna.

 “I’m up over three hundred fifty. So far, four women have turned in their husbands and six suspect their boyfriends. It’ll slow up for me tomorrow once word gets out we got a candidate.”

 I put down the pizza and took the soda can with me when I heard Mercer’s voice booming out my name. When I got back to the lineup room, he was sprinkling Johnson’s baby powder on the heads of the younger fillers and I viewed them through the window to compare them to their more mature companions. “Much better, Mercer. Let’s not waste any more time.”

 Peterson’s men had assembled four people to look at the array. One was a third-year student at Minuit who had worked in the sixth-floor library—down the hall from Dogen’s office—until one in the morning on the night she was killed. Two others were the cleaning staff who covered that shift, and the last was a nurse’s aide who sneaked into the medical school on her breaks so she could use the phones at the reception desk to call and talk to her boyfriend at odd times throughout the night.

 I stood in the back of the darkened viewing room while Wallace and McCabe led each of the witnesses through in turn. None of the group looked familiar to the medical student or the nurse’s aide. But both of the women who cleaned the professors’ offices each night recognized the man who called himself Pops.

 I left the room and told Mike to bring the two housekeepers in to me, one at a time, in Peterson’s office.

 I took out a fresh pad and headed it with the date and time: 11:45P.M. Pedigree information on each had already been documented by the detectives who had canvassed the hospital, so I reviewed the Xerox of the notes that told me that Ludmila Grascowicz and Graciela Martinez were both assigned to clean the fifth- and sixth-floor offices in the Minuit Medical Center.

 Both women were immigrants—Ludmila from Poland and Graciela from the Dominican Republic. The former had been at Mid-Manhattan for three years and the latter for six months. Ludmila had requested a change of assignment to day duty after the murder of Gemma Dogen and Graciela had resigned altogether. Both of them knew Dogen by sight since she was often around in the midnight-to-eight shift that they had worked. Neither had much to do with her because they had strict instructions never to enter Dogen’s office during the night. She didn’t like to be disturbed when she was doing her research and writing so her chambers were always cleaned by the day staff and only if her door had been left open. The doctor didn’t like intrusions and she didn’t like anyone touching her files.

 Ludmila’s accent was as thick as her waist and her ankles. Her chest was heaving as she tried to answer my questions, making the sign of the cross after every response. Yes, during the last few weeks she had often seen the man who was holding the number 4 in the lineup. He had tried to talk to her several times but she was unable to understand his speech. She came on duty at eleven-thirty Monday evening and had encountered the man in the stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors. No, there was nothing unusual about his appearance or his clothing. But, then, she usually averted her eyes when she approached him since she had repeatedly complained to security about his presence after hours in the medical college. One last sign of the cross, and an extra blessing for Dr. Dogen, and Ludmila had no more to add.

 Graciela’s jumpiness made Ludmila seem almost calm by contrast. She shared responsibility for cleaning the same two floors. Although she and Ludmila rarely communicated with each other, they had joined forces to complain about Pops’s nocturnal wanderings. The water cup that someone had given the young woman to fortify her for her conversation with me was spilling its supply over the edge onto the desk where I was taking notes because her hand was shaking so badly. Graciela was certain she had seen this man on the sixth floor after midnight in the early hours of Tuesday morning coming out of the men’s room. She didn’t call security because they never listened to her when she tried to make herself heard. But she went immediately to the library to clean there since she knew it was likely that at least one of the students would be burning the midnight oil.

 I thanked the women for their cooperation and passed them on to the lieutenant to arrange for their rides home.

 Sarah came into Peterson’s office to see what we would do next. The warrants were completed and she would make certain they would be signed in the morning as soon as the judge took the bench in the arraignment part.

 We walked back to the lineup room and looked through the two-way mirror. Mercer had rearranged the area after the stand-ins had been discharged and was again sitting at the table with Pops, talking with him in a quiet, steady manner in an effort to gain his confidence and trust. Sarah and I had watched him do it hundreds of times.

 “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Sarah remarked. “They always look so benign when you get these guys into a station house or a courtroom. All the way here in the cab I was hating this man—rethinking my beliefs about capital punishment. A murder like this and I think I’m capable of giving the lethal injection myself.”

 “I thought the same thing the moment I got here and saw him drenched in Gemma Dogen’s blood. How do youdo that to another human being and just walk away?”

 “Then you see the guy half an hour later and he looks absolutely pathetic, doesn’t he?”

 We were standing with our arms crossed, peering in at the duo. “He doesn’t even look strong enough to have taken on someone as fit as Dogen. I guess, like Chet Kirschner figures, that’s the advantage he had in surprising her.”

 “Do we know who he is yet?”

 “Mercer’s trying to get that now. Losenti printed him when they brought him in. Figured they got him for criminal trespass if they couldn’t hold him on anything else. They’ll run the prints through the computer and hopefully have an answer by morning.”

 Sarah stifled a yawn.

 “Let’s make some decisions about what’s next and let me get you home.”

 We walked back to Peterson’s office and asked him to bring Mercer and Mike in to give us a sense of where we stood.

 Mercer came in shaking his head. “He’s falling asleep on me. I don’t think there’s any point in going on tonight. It’s almost one o’clock. Let’s put him to bed, find out who he is, and I’ll start on him fresh in the morning.”

 “You girls oughtta go home,” Peterson added. “Pops is a keeper. He’s under on the trespass. What do we give out about the murder?”

 Sarah and I looked at each other. At the moment, we had nothing at all except the potential for a circumstantial case. “Let McGraw tell them we’ve got no charges on anybody. Still an open case. There’ll be a feeding frenzy if we say much else.”

 Mike came in and closed the door behind him. “You got anything?” the lieutenant asked.

 “Yeah,” he said. “Almost an arrest for public lewdness. Your hospital homeless are in the Anti-Crime Office watching old movies on the television. The short guy in the gray sweats, turns out he’s T. T. Thompson. The T.T. stands for ‘Tippy-Toes’—has fourteen collars for burglary. He’s in there looking atTo Catch a Thief with the rest of them. All of a sudden he stands up, drops his pants, and starts giving himself a lube job. I don’t know if he’s playing with himself because Grace Kelly looks so great or because the movie’s about a cat burglar who gets better stuff than T.T. ever dreamed existed. I practically had to smack him to get him to stop.”

 “How about anything more useful tous, Mikey?”

 “Well, the second shopping cart belongs to another tunnel dweller who’s in there. Agosto Marín. He’s known as ‘Can Man.’ Seems he wheels the cart around the outside of Mid-Manhattan all day picking soda cans out of recycling bins and garbage pails. Sells ‘em to get the money to buy crack. Says you’ll find all he has to his name are several hundred cans—you don’t need a warrant to look.

 “At the moment, Can Man is sober. And he’s swearing to me that Pops was with him in the tunnel from a little bit after midnight until the two of them went above ground Wednesday morning. He knows it was that night because by the time they came up at daybreak, it was snowing. And itdid snow Wednesday morning, remember?”

 “What the hell have we got here, huh?” Mercer asked of no one in particular.

 “We’ve got a blood-soaked suspect who won’t tell us who he is. Opportunity? You bet. ‘Cause he lives in the hospital, illegally. Motive? Depends on what we decide the motive is,” Mike answered. “If it was a sexual assault attempt that failed, I’d say just by looking at him he’d have trouble getting it up.”

 “Wait a minute.” I interrupted Mike’s narrative. “You’re telling me you know bylooking at someone whether or not he can get it up? I’ve got friends who would pay dearly for your services, Mr. Chapman. Let’s leave that point for later debate. This could have been an aborted attempt at a rapeor a robbery. We still don’t know if anything’s missing from her office.”

 He went on. “We’ve got two people who put Pops on or near the sixth floor within the probable time range of the murder. And we got an aluminum can-collecting junkie who’s gonna be his alibi. We got no weapon. No DNA. Unlikely to find prints, according to the Crime Scene guys—but, then, you could pick up surgical gloves anyplace you look in that hospital.”

 “I’m getting nowhere with him tonight. Let’s knock it off and pick up again tomorrow,” Mercer said.

 The excitement of a solution to this brutal killing had lifted all our spirits several hours back and now we were about to crash from the combination of our exhaustion and the stalled progress of the investigation. Detectives were signing out and saying goodnight as they ferried the assorted witnesses—civilians and physicians—to their homes. We packed up our case folders and notepads, figuring our schedules for the next day. Mercer offered to take Sarah, and Mike said he’d drop me at my apartment.

 We walked downstairs and the precinct commander directed us out the back door and down an alley that led out to Lexington Avenue to avoid the camera crews staking out the front of the station house. We turned in a separate direction from Mercer and waved good-bye as Mike led me to his car.

 “What’s your gut say on this one, Mike?”

 “Confused at the moment. I want this guy bad and the blood puts him over the top. Then I look at him and I gotta think, maybe there was a second guy, an accomplice. That would certainly help explain why she didn’t have a chance.”

 “Yeah. Maybe we’re just tired at this point. It’ll look better tomorrow.”

 “I called my mother. For your sake, so you know you didn’t miss anything, I mean. She said the Final Jeopardy question tonight was about physics—something about the quantum theory.”

 “Forget it. I plead ignorance. It’d be my luck to get on the show and lose ‘cause the big question would be about calculus or the New Testament or some of those topics I couldn’t bet a nickel on, you know? Physics is one of them.”

 “Me, too.” Mike was cruising up Third Avenue toward the block my apartment was on, ignoring the string of red lights and making the drive in under ten minutes.

 “She was a real beauty, wasn’t she? Such a class act.”

 I looked quizzically at Mike. “Gemma Dogen?”

 “No, sorry. I was just thinking about Grace Kelly, from the movie tonight. She looked fabulous in this one with Cary Grant. But I remember the moment I fell in love with her, when I saw her inDial M for Murder. Plain and simple, dressed in those dowdy clothes, with that grainy color film.”

 “Great flick.” We both had a weakness for classic movies.

 “I think she looked even more beautiful when she wasn’t all dolled up, like in the scene at the end ofDial M. She’s been in jail for the murder, then they decide to test her story and they let her go home. Remember? Man, she looked so vulnerable, you just had to love her.”

 “I never realized you liked your women so vulnerable, Mike,” I said, intending the line as a joke.

 He pulled in the driveway in front of my building and waited for one of the doormen to open my car door. “Not everybody can handle the self-sufficient types like you, Blondie. It’s nice to be needed every once in a while.”

 Take your best shot, Chapman, I thought to myself as the car pulled away and I walked inside. What would I have to do to look to the rest of the world as vulnerable as I felt?

 I emptied the mailbox of its usual impersonal tidings and took the slow elevator ride to my empty apartment. I didn’t bother to hang up my coat but simply threw it on the ottoman in the living room.

 The change from the precinct’s soda vending machine weighed on the threads in my jacket pocket, so I reached in and stacked the quarters on my dresser before hanging the suit in my closet. I had forgotten to return Gemma’s apartment keys to Mercer and laid the chain, with its souvenir of London’s Tower Bridge, on my bedside table next to the thick volume of Trollope. No one would be needing them tonight.

 At least by this time tomorrow I’d have the company of a cold-nosed weimaraner to console me.