Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (27 page)

“You’d be surprised.” Truth was, this sort of thing was tacitly encouraged; it was getting caught that could land you in trouble. “Like I said, I have something for you. Would you like to meet this afternoon?”

“Sure, Red. That would be swell,” Restivo said dryly, and we made a plan to meet at the precinct in a few hours.

The cab let Alex and me out in front of my apartment building. Alex paid the fare while I rummaged in my bag for my keys.

“This where you live?” Alex said, looking down on me. “There’s no doorman.”

“So?”

“It’s not safe for a single woman to live alone in a building without round-the-clock security.”

“Doormen are overrated,” I muttered, jamming my key in the front door. We entered the small vestibule, walking past two rows of brass mailboxes. “How do you know I don’t have a roommate?” I unlocked the second door and pushed it open.

“Because you would be impossible to live with.”

“That’s nice to hear.” We climbed up three flights of creaky stairs, Alex behind me, pestering me to tell him what I had that the police wanted, why I’d left the office in such a hurry. “Here we are,” I said once we arrived on my floor. Right away, I noticed my door was ajar, a wedge of sunlight spilling onto the hall’s mottled red carpeting. What the hell? No one had a key to my apartment. Not even the super. I hadn’t had a chance to give it to him since I’d had the locks changed.

Alex put his arm out in front of me protectively as he crept forward and pushed the door open wider. The door jam was splintered near the lock. “Stay there,” he whispered.

I ignored him, stepping around him and putting one foot past the door jam, where I halted. The place was trashed. Someone had ripped down my curtains and tipped over my lamps. My bedding, including the quilt that had once belonged to my mother, was slashed to pieces; an old can of paint from my closet had been dumped all over my beloved Persian rugs. Smashed glass littered the floor. It looked like my computer had escaped unscathed, but aside from it and the pearls fastened around my neck, nearly every material thing I valued in the world had been destroyed.

Alex grabbed my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. It’s a crime scene now.”

I shook him loose and walked into the wreckage. Everything was upended. It would take me days to clean and sort out the mess.

“They were looking for something,” he remarked.

I dove for my desk drawer. I had some papers from the case, printouts and other interview notes I’d taken. Everything was still there. Leaning against my desk, my hand accidentally hit the mouse to my computer. The screen lit up.

JIFFY
was written in big, bold letters.

A string of images crowded my brain. I was sixteen again, a sophomore, a social outcast. Jiffy was my nickname. Maybe I’d done some bad things, but nothing as bad as what the other girls did to me. The name-calling, the prank phone calls to my home, the day they locked me in the janitor’s closet in the basement. It was two hours before the art teacher heard my screams. I took a breath and forced myself to focus on what was going on here and now, and what any of
that
had to do with
this
. And that’s when I put it together, that the person who had killed Olivia and Rachel, drugged me and trashed my apartment had either known me as a teenager or knew someone who had.

I put my finger on the delete button.

“W
hat in the hell are you doing? Don’t touch anything!” I backed away from the computer, retracing my steps out of the apartment, my eyes glued to the floor. In the hall, Alex dialed 911. In the stairwell, he reached out for me. I let him hold me, his arms wrapped tightly around my shoulders. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket.

I stepped away. “Get it.” We both knew it was the assignment desk trying to locate him. “Get it,” I repeated. “Let’s not both get fired on the same day.”

“You got fired?”

“Take the call.”

He answered, giving whoever was on the other end of it some false coordinates before clicking off. Then he took my hand, led me down the rest of the stairs and regarded me in the afternoon sunshine.

“I’m not leaving you. Not until you tell me what’s going on. The police want something you have, you’re getting canned and someone just broke into your apartment. If this has something to do with the Kravis case, you have to tell me.”

“No I don’t.”

“Jesus, Shaw. Do you have to be so fucking stubborn all the time?”

“Yes. Now go. I’ll be fine here.”

Alex threw his head back, exasperated. “Where will you go afterward? You can’t stay here.”

I shrugged.

“Clyde, you’re not just in trouble. You’re in
danger
. What did you see on your computer screen?”

Jiffy, because I spread so easily.
I’d hooked up with the wrong guy. He’d gone down on me in his parents’ bed while they were skiing in Aspen, come once in my mouth and twice in the ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms he’d had at the ready. How was I supposed to know he’d tell his girlfriend about us the next day? How was I supposed to know he was dating Missy, my old tormenter from the swim team? She forgave her Yale-bound boyfriend, but spent the rest of her senior year making sure everyone knew what a whore I was.

Alex grabbed me by the shoulders. “What did you see?”

“It was something from my childhood.”

“You know what this means. This person, the murderer—“

“Is connected to my past.”

“They want to kill you. They’re targeting
you
now.”

“If that were true, I would be dead by now. The purpose of all of this is to scare me.”

He squinted into the sun. “Even if you’re right, you can’t honestly be thinking of staying here tonight. What’s one night in a hotel?”

“I am about to lose my job. I don’t have $400 to piss away on a hotel.” A pair of uniformed patrol officers in a squad car pulled up in front of my building. “They’re here. You can go,” I told him.

“Juan’s the doorman. I’ll let him know you’re coming.” Alex dug into his pocket, tossed me his keys and rattled off an address on the East Side before breaking into a sprint.

“What?” I yelled after him.

“You’re staying with me tonight!” I would have argued with him, but he was already halfway down the block.

The cops killed the engine and stepped out of their car. The woman, a tough-looking brunette, asked me questions, while her partner, a tall, dark-skinned cop with a shaved head, took notes. When I was done, the female cop asked me to let her into the building while her partner returned to their car to radio the information into the precinct.

Thirty minutes later, I was waiting on the front stoop when a blue Crown Vic pulled up behind the cop car. Detective Restivo got out wearing rumpled chinos, one of those knit ties I hadn’t seen on anyone since my high-school math teacher, and a face that looked like it hadn’t seen a pillow in days. He greeted me with a curt nod.

“I thought we were meeting later,” I said.

“So did I.” He sounded even more pissed than before. “When were you last home?”

“Yesterday morning, around eight-thirty.”

He removed his sunglasses. “And you came back when?”

“Maybe an hour ago.” My watch said it was a quarter past noon.

He muttered some curse words and looked up at my building. “Wait here with Officer Rivera.” It wasn’t a question.

I returned to the stoop and waited for Restivo to come back downstairs. When he did, the hostility I’d gotten accustomed to receiving from him had been replaced with concern. “Do you have any enemies, anyone you think might want to hurt you?”

“I’ve been in this business seventeen years. Yes I’ve got enemies.”

“Anyone stand out in your mind?”

“On this case? Michael Rockwell. Andrey Kaminski,” I volunteered.

“I meant people not involved in this case.”

“Jack Slane. He’s a lawyer at Rockwell’s firm. I dated him a few years ago and I saw him again for the first time last week. He tried to get security to throw me out of their offices.”

“That’s it? Rockwell, Kaminski, and this Slane guy? No one else has been hounding you, sending you notes? No phone calls or threats?”

“Other than my drugging, no. But—”

“What is it?”

I told him about the message on the computer screen.

Restivo opened the building’s front door. “I think you should come upstairs. Let’s go over this all again up there.”

Seeing my apartment was worse the second time. Now I noticed all the little things that had been destroyed and could never be replaced. I crouched over a pile of broken shards, remnants of my mother’s collection of Herend porcelain.

“Don’t touch it,” the female cop barked from behind me.

I wiped away a tear and stood up. Restivo called to me from the galley kitchen. “What’d you eat yesterday for breakfast?”

I walked over to him. “Nothing, why?” He gestured at the empty packet of crackers on the kitchen counter. “I didn’t do that.”

“Perp was here for a while and got hungry. My guess is that they were waiting for you to come home.”

“That’s what I thought the killer did—wait for Olivia and Rachel to come home. Am I right?”

“We need more than a few cracker crumbs to link these cases.” He looked around the room. “Did the perp target any specific kinds of items? Is anything gone?”

“No.”

“Let’s assume the perp picked the lock sometime last night. They trashed everything except for the computer, which they used to leave you a message connected to your past. We need to talk about why you were at the Haverford last night and not here.” He sighed and I heard his stomach rumble. “It’s been a busy morning. Is there a place I can grab a bite to eat around here?”

“Pizza OK?”

He nodded once.

I pointed westward. “There’s a place on the corner.”

“That’ll do.”

Restivo had me pack up a few of my things in an overnight bag. We walked down the street to By the Slice, a neighborhood place that served thin-crust pizza with gourmet toppings, a few dozen wines by the glass, and five or six beers on tap. It got popular at happy hour. Rest of the day it was mostly empty.

Restivo and I got our pick of tables. He chose the rickety two-seater at the front window, tucking one paper napkin into his collar and patting another on the top of his slice. I wanted to do the same to his forehead and nose. If he ever went on camera for us, the makeup artists would have to powder the hell out of him.

He twisted off the cap of his orange soda and took a sip. Then he said, “You have something to show me?”

“It’s an envelope.” I handed it to him.

Restivo peeked inside. “Nothing’s in it?”

I pointed at the embossing on the front. “It’s from Orchid Cellmark. They are one of the most highly esteemed labs in the world specializing in forensic DNA testing.”

Restivo laughed. I could count his gold fillings waiting for him to stop. “Sorry Shaw, but every reporter I meet’s got a boatload of theories—none of them right. Now, thanks to you, we won’t be able to process this envelope for fingerprints.”

A call came in from FirstNews on my cell, the third since we’d sat down. I pressed the ignore button and tapped the return address on the envelope with my finger. “But you can go to the lab and find out why Olivia was corresponding with them. They have a location in Princeton.”

He carved off another triangle of his mushroom and sausage. “How about we talk about what you were doing at the Haverford last night?”

I was better off telling him the truth. The worst they could book me on was unlawful entry since I hadn’t taken anything of value. If the case ever went to trial, which was unlikely, I would probably be able to plead out with community service.

After giving Restivo a minute-by-minute PG-13-rated account of what had happened the previous night, he asked me a few questions about my brief but revealing conversation with Andrey at the end of the night. I filled him in on everything as best as I could remember, and at the end Restivo closed his notebook. He removed the napkin under his chin and wiped the corners of his mouth with it. Then he drained the last of his soda before slipping on his sunglasses, stuffing his notebook and the envelope from Orchid Cellmark in his pocket, and getting up from the table. “You know if it were up to me, I would’ve read you your rights hours ago. You’re lucky the Kravises aren’t pressing charges.”

I followed him outside. “Why would they not—”

“Apparently they consider you a family friend, which is kind of funny because where I come from, friends don’t break into your house.”

Although I should have felt relieved, I didn’t. The only reason the Kravis family hadn’t pressed charges was because of the firestorm of press coverage that would have been ignited if they had. Getting me fired, conversely, could be done completely under the radar. I was screwed.

Restivo and I walked back down the block to my apartment building. The female officer had joined Rivera on the stoop. The crime-scene techs were upstairs and I had to find somewhere else to stay while they swept the place for evidence. “How long will that take?” I asked.