Chill of Night

9

“The victim, Beverly Baker, worked as sales manager at Light and Shade Lamp Emporium on the West Side, not far from her apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street. Hubby Floyd returned from a golf outing with his buddies about five thirty-forty-five minutes ago-and found her dead body.”

So said the uniform guarding the Bakers’ apartment door, a young guy named Mansolaro. He had an improbably long chin, would always need a shave, and looked vaguely familiar to Beam. Looper seemed to know him.

“That hubby in the living room?” Beam asked, noticing beyond Mansolaro, in the apartment, a smallish, plump man in plaid slacks and a white golf shirt, seated slumped forward on a maroon sofa.

Mansolaro nodded. “One Floyd Baker.”

As if there were a two Floyd Baker, Beam thought. He’d been away from cop talk long enough that some of it struck his ear wrong.

“Floyd was gone all day,” Mansolaro continued, “out on the links with his fellow hackers.”

“With his alibi,” Looper said.

“And not a bad one,” Mansolaro said. “He came back, found his wife’s body, and called 911. Me and my partner Al caught the complaint and got here almost immediately after the call.”

“You go right in?” Beam asked.

“Floyd Baker met us at the door, looked like he’d been crying, and led us to the body. Swore he never touched anything, just like he learned on Law and Order. I saw the big letter J on the mirror near where the victim must have been sitting, so me and Al froze the scene immediately and called it in as an obvious homicide.”

“Where’s Al?”

“Downstairs manning the lobby. He told the doorman to stick around, we were gonna talk to him.”

“Excellent,” Beam said, and Mansolaro sort of puffed up. It impressed Nell, what some of her fellow cops obviously thought of Beam. Maybe this odd-ends investigative team would work out. Maybe something positive would come of it beyond capturing or killing whoever was murdering these people.

“Crime scene unit’s inside, along with an assistant ME,” Mansolaro said. He glanced at his watch, anticipating Beam’s next question. “They been here about twenty minutes.”

“Get the neighbors’ statements,” Beam said to Nell and Looper. “Somebody probably heard the shot, even if they thought the noise was something else. We might be able to determine time of death.”

He patted Mansolaro gently on the shoulder in passing, a gesture of approval, as he moved into the apartment.

Another uniform was standing near a fake fireplace-the kind that had a red light in it that was supposed to look like glowing embers-with his arms crossed. Beam nodded to him, and nodded to the distraught man on the sofa. The man on the sofa didn’t nod back, merely gave Beam a distracted, agonized glance.

Beam went into the bedroom, where most of the action was taking place. Crime Scene personnel wearing plastic gloves were standing, bending, reaching, down on hands and knees, searching. They were examining, luminoling, placing minute objects in evidence bags as if they’d found rare and extravagantly expensive gems. And what they found could be extravagantly expensive. It could be life and death.

Beam noticed a high-heeled shoe, a woman’s foot and ankle, and beyond it the open door to a tiled bathroom. When he moved forward a few careful steps, he saw that the victim’s body was in an alcove between bedroom and bathroom.

There was a lot of blood on the carpeted floor. Beverly Baker was sprawled awkwardly on her back, and had apparently fallen from a small upholstered chair that had tipped over. The chair was covered with a cheery floral design that was a mismatch with the ugliness of the event, except for the hole in the material that was stretched across the curved back support.

A little man in a black suit was bending over the dead woman with an intensity that suggested he was making love to her. As soon as Beam saw his balding head, with the thatch of gray hair that stood almost straight up in front, he knew who he was. Assistant ME Irv Minskoff, one of the best at his job.

Minskoff sensed his presence and glanced up. His face had a fiercely gnarled look to it, softened somewhat by thick lensed glasses. “Ah, Beam. I heard you were on this one.”

“Good to see you, Irv. What’ve we got so far?”

“Dead since morning, done sometime between seven and ten o’clock. Shot once. Bullet went in the right side of her back, probably angled in and caught her heart. I’ll know a lot more when I get in there.”

“Looks like a thirty-two caliber.”

“Be my guess, too. Can’t say for sure, since the slug they dug out of the wall’s so misshapen. But before it went through the victim, the bullet went through the back of the chair, and the hole in the underlying wood looks like it was made by a thirty-two.”

“Slug must have been misshapen before it hit her,” Beam said, looking at the vast and ugly exit wound. He could imagine the kinetic force of the distorted bullet slamming through the woman’s slender body. His gaze took in her exposed shapely legs, slender waist, strong features. She must have been vital and attractive before the bullet. He noticed her mouth was smeared red in an obscenely crooked grin despite her horrified eyes. The smear wasn’t quite blood red. It was the same color as the letter J scrawled on the mirror of a small vanity cluttered with cosmetics.

“Nice legs,” Minskoff said.

“Gonna mention that in the post-mortem?”

Minskoff gave him a gnarly look.

“Shot while putting on her lipstick?” Beam asked.

“Or surprised by whoever she must have seen in the mirror. Caused her hand to jerk, then she was shot.”

And almost immediately, Beam thought. It appeared that Beverly Baker hadn’t had time to stand up.

Minskoff must have known what he was thinking. “Entry wound is about where it would have been if she’d been sitting all the way down on her little tush in her little chair, so maybe she did die while applying her lipstick. Could be she was so shocked by seeing her assailant in the mirror, her body gave a little start, then she was paralyzed.”

“As if maybe she saw somebody she trusted standing there with a gun pointed at her,” Beam said. “Somebody like hubby.”

“Hubby’s always enticing in these kinds of cases,” Minskoff agreed. “But then there’s that letter lipsticked on the mirror. My guess is the lipstick tube won’t reveal the fingerprints of the victim-or the killer, though I’m sure the killer wrote with it. This woman died instantly, but even if she had time to leave or begin a dying message, if it meant anything incriminating, the killer would have simply made it illegible or removed it from the mirror.”

“So Detective Minskoff is sure it was the killer who wrote on the mirror.”

Minskoff grinned, embarrassed. “Just trying to help, not play detective. But, yes, I am sure.”

“Always the possibility of a copycat killer.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for hairballs,” Minskoff said.

Beam figured it was time to stop speculating and talk to Floyd Baker.