Diamond Solitaire

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Crime Scene Unit were running the inquiry their own way, and the detective skills of Peter Diamond were not included in the plans. He was finding that being a bystander was more stressful than heading the murder squad.

Early in the morning, realizing he hadn't eaten anything since the flight from London, he went looking for a coffee shop and found Hungry Mac's on Broadway and 114th. Number Seven on the menu, with just about everything in the kitchen included, carried the promise of what he regarded as a basic breakfast, and he ordered a double portion. He was on one of the stools at the counter-an uncomfortable perch for a big man-in order to get a view of the TV set. The Firbank wasn't the sort of hotel that provided television in the rooms, so he hadn't yet seen if there was any news coverage of the murder and Naomi's abduction. To add to his frustration, some kind of idiot game show was on the screen at present and two of the customers were watching as if it were the high point of their week.

He should have realized he'd get the information he wanted from the man who took his order.

"You think you can put away two breakfasts?"

"I'm certain I can."

"You visiting?"

"Er, yes."

"From England?"

"Yes."

"Where you staying?"

He hesitated. He hadn't personally experienced rapid-fire interrogation by a New York waiter, though he'd seen others getting the treatment. "The Firbank."

"Where they found the dead woman?"

"Yes." He tried to make light of it. "Hot and cold in all rooms. Towels and corpse provided by the management."

"You get some crazies these days," the man remarked to the shop in general, and it wasn't entirely clear whether he meant Diamond. "This guy slept in the Firbank last night." Evidently he did mean Diamond.

The place was pretty full, but no one else seemed interested where Diamond had slept.

When the plateful of bacon, sausages, hash browns and four eggs, easy and over, was served with toast and coffee, there was an extra tidbit in the form of some hard information from the waiter. "I hear they found the car the killer used."

Diamond had the knife and fork poised over the plate. "Where?"

"Some cop spotted it in Chinatown."

"No one in it, I suppose?"

"No chance."

He bolted his double breakfast at a rate that would be a talking point in Hungry Mac's for weeks to come and legged it rapidly down to the 26th Precinct station house. There, his air of authority carried him through as far as Sergeant Stein of the Detective Bureau, a gangling, grizzled man in a faded pink shirt and black jeans, who-this morning-was the senior detective on the case.

"You're the British cop," Stein said in a tone that suggested he'd been warned to look out for Diamond.

"I hear you found the car."

"A patrolman did."

"Chinatown. Is that somewhere near the Bowery?"

"You could say that."

"Where exactly is it, then?"

"Chinatown?"

"The Buick."

"They moved it," said Sergeant Stein, and added, after a considerable pause, "for forensic examination."

"So what time was it found?"

"A statement will be issued later."

"Come on," said Diamond in a flush of annoyance. "I'm not here out of morbid curiosity."

"What are you here for?" Stein asked.

"For a missing child out there with a murderer. Isn't that a good enough reason for the New York Police Department?"

Stein was unrepentant. "Mister, I should be asking you the questions."

"Like what?"

"Like what is your special interest in this kid?"

Diamond tensed. "What exactly are you driving at, Sergeant?"

"We take a good look at middle-aged guys who follow little girls."

The sergeant came within an ace of being thumped, and he knew it, because Diamond advanced on him until they were almost nose to nose like boxers staring each other out. "That is not only insulting, it's also provocation," he said on a note from deep in his gut. "If you want to hang on to your shield, don't ever give horseshit like that to a senior policeman." The minor detail that he was no longer a senior policeman didn't arise. He'd reacted as if he was. In the heat of the moment, he'd have needed to think hard to remind himself that he was not. And Sergeant Stein wasn't to know.

Stein backed down, actually raising his right palm like an Indian making peace. "Just overlook what I said, would you? It was a heavy night."

"Tonight could be heavier," Diamond told him. "Well? What time did they find the car?"

"Around two A.M. on Mulberry Street."

"Anyone see anything?"

"No witnesses yet."

"Where was the car taken to be examined?"

"Forensic has a workshop on Amsterdam."

"Is that a walking proposition?"

"You want to visit? You can ride with a patrol. Just wait here. Mr. Diamond." Nodding a number of times to demonstrate his newfound cooperativeness, Stein departed thankfully from Diamond's presence.

The ride to Amsterdam Avenue in the company of a laconic, gum-chewing officer allowed Diamond to weigh Stein's remark. Child abuse had always been around, yet lately its notoriety had increased sharply. Whether the practice was on the increase was another question. As with rape and other sexual offenses, the statistics needed to be put in the context of the greater opportunities for reporting and detecting the crimes. Whatever the truth, the public perception was that any man not actually a parent or a teacher had better not be seen alone with a young kid. He understood the need for vigilance, but he still regretted the fact that a few sexual deviants and sensation-seeking newspapers could make trust between man and child seem so unlikely as to be impossible anymore.

Without a kid of his own, he couldn't truly view the question as a parent would, but were childless people who liked children fated to be treated as potential perverts?

The place where vehicles were taken for the forensic tests was hardly the squeaky-clean workshop-cum-laboratory Diamond had expected to walk into. It was a converted garage with a couple of ramps and inspection pits manned by young men in greasy overalls. The Buick was parked on the forecourt and was getting no attention at all.

He soon found an easygoing and friendly "evidence technician" who appeared not to have been warned to watch out for a trouble-making British cop, and was quite willing to talk. "The Buick? It'll take us at least a week. From what I can tell so far, half of New York seems to have driven that car and used it for sex and smoking. My guess is that it was owned by a syndicate of students."

"You've done some preliminary work, then?"

"Had to look inside, remove most of the litter for examination."

"What does it amount to?"

"The litter? Cigarette packets and butts, candy wrappers, sandwich wrappers, tissues, condom packets, gasoline receipts, Alka-Seltzers, chewing gum, ballpoints, parking tickets, panty-liners, take-out containers-want me to go on?"

"Quite a heap, I should think," Diamond commented. "Or have you bagged it up already?"

"Give me a break, man. Four cars were brought in last night."

"May I take a look at this collection? I am assigned to the case."

"You're welcome."

He was led to the back of the garage, through an office into a large room where the items he'd just heard listed were displayed on a long trestle table. The impression he'd first gained, of good-natured inefficiency, was given a sharp corrective. Every piece was already labeled and assigned a number, with the position where it was found in the car duly noted.

The Buick's interior hadn't been cleared of rubbish since February at least, judging by the date of a gasoline receipt Someone had collected a stack and clipped them together. It would be the devil's own job to try and identify something discarded by Mrs. Tanaka's killer.

"You checked the boot, I suppose?"

"Which boot was that?" his informant asked.

He could do without differences in the language adding to his problem. "The storage place at the rear of the car."

"The trunk. Yeah. We checked."

"Just that I didn't see any mention of the boot on these labels. Now I understand why."

"Right."

He bent over to look at the ballpoint pens. "I suppose you can tell if these were used recently. It's okay, I'm not going to touch."

"How would we know that?"

"If a ballpoint hasn't been used for some time, it gets dry. When you write with it, you have to run the point over a surface for a moment to get some ink."

His friend the evidence technician received this statement of the obvious more solemnly than it deserved. "That may be true, but I know of no test that would tell you how long it is since a pen was used. It would depend on certain variables, such as the temperature where it was stored. Jesus, man, we can't even tell with accuracy how long the body has been left someplace, so I don't see us succeeding with ballpoints."

"No, but if the pen delivers the ink straightaway, the chances are it was used not long ago." He was sounding like Sherlock Holmes, except that this wasn't impressing anyone, least of all himself. Better say no more about ballpoints. "May I examine the receipts?"

"Sure. Just hold them by the clip and use this probe to separate them."

"I can't imagine the killer stopped at a gas station anyway," Diamond commented, picking up the sheaf of receipts. "It's unlikely any of these would carry his prints."

"We can check the date, no problem," said the technician.

"I'm not looking for a date," Diamond told him. He was acting mainly on impulse now, as he turned the receipts over and used the wooden probe to flick through the blank squares of paper. The pens had suggested a possibility, a long shot.

"You think there might be something written on the backs of those receipts?" the technician asked.

"Have you checked already?"

"Haven't had time. Why would anyone do that?"

"The little girl-the one who was kidnapped-was a dab hand at drawing."

"And you figure that could give you a clue?"

"It might," said Diamond. "Unfortunately," he added, replacing the receipts on the table, "none of these are marked."

He picked up the parking slips and inspected them in the same way. Naomi had not used them for drawing either. He clicked his tongue in exasperation.

"Seen enough?"

"Am I holding you up?"

"It's okay."

"Then I'd like to sift through the rest of this stuff. If you want to get back to your work, I can promise I won't leave my prints on anything."

"That's okay by me."

It was nice to be trusted.

The chance of finding anything significant was remote, but even sorting through a collection of rubbish was better than doing nothing at all. Using two probes like chopsticks, he examined the items systematically, looking for signs of recent use. There was a roll of peppermints, and it occurred to him that Naomi might have been offered one to pacify her, but the mint that was visible was so dusty that it must have been unwrapped months ago.

With his thoughts still on the possibility that Naomi might have been offered something edible to stop her from protesting, he turned to the take-out containers-a stack of six of different shapes from various fast-food places. Odors of sweet and sour-sweet what and sour what he preferred to pass over-lingered around them. Nor did he care to imagine what the interior of the Buick must have smelt like on a warm day when the windows had been closed for some time.

There were two containers apparently of fairly recent origin, so he extracted them from the stack. These weren't polystyrene like the others, but were boxes made from thin white card. Judged by the grease-stained, sugary interiors, they had probably contained doughnuts.

He turned one over to look at the underside. It would have made a good surface for drawing. However, it was blank. Why was he so reluctant to drop this supposition that Naomi had left a drawing-a drawing, moreover, that provided information? He had a sense of being driven by some force akin to telepathy, as if the child were willing him to find what she had left. This wasn't entirely illogical, for occasionally in his life he'd experienced premonitions that had been fulfilled, such as the certainty that he would meet a particular old friend in a strange town.

So when he picked up the second box and saw pen marks on the underside of the lid, his pulse may have quickened, but he did not punch the air with his fist or shout, "Eureka!"

He explained with great patience to Sergeant Stein at the station house how Naomi liked to make drawings, probably to compensate for the noncommunication enforced by her muteness.

"And you think this is her work?".said Stein.

"Not this precisely. It's a copy I made of the drawing on the food container. I left the box down at the workshop with all the other things found in the car. The ink matched one of the ballpoints found on the floor beside the front passenger seat. There's no way of proving Naomi did the drawing, but I could tell from the state of the box that it hadn't been lying in the car for long. I think the killer may have stopped at some point to feed her, or she may simply have found the box in the car and used it for the sketch."

"You call that a sketch?" said Stein. "Don't get me wrong, but it looks more like a doodle to me. What is it?"

"I'm not certain myself yet," Diamond admitted. "The original is about twice the size, or a little more," he added, placing his notebook open on the desk.

Stein said after a pause, "You really think this represents something?"

"If Naomi did it, yes. She has an individual way of looking at things, but her drawing is pretty accurate."

"Is it a map?"

"I suppose it could be."

"If it's going to be any help to us, it has to be," said Stein. "I mean, what have we got here? Is this some kind of overpass? Because they're not common in New York City."

Diamond stared at the drawing. He saw what Stein had obviously seized on-the broad causeway stretching southeast to northwest, apparently crossing minor routes. "If so, what's the rectangular object there?''

"Automobile, I guess."

"A bird's-eye view, you mean?"

"Could be."

"Then what is this elongated shape along the center?"

Stein considered for a moment. "You say this kid has an original way of seeing things. Maybe we're looking at the underside of the Buick. This could be the exhaust."

"The underside?" Diamond doubted whether a child of that age had such technical know-how, and said so. He also doubted whether Naomi was capable of the conceptual ability necessary to draw a map. "She draws from memory what she has actually seen. In England she was taken on a train, and later she made an accurate sketch of the back of the seat facing her."

"Was that helpful to your investigation?"

"Not directly, no."

Sergeant Stein lifted his eyebrows as if to question the value of more time spent deciphering Naomi's work.

Diamond said, "This object that you think could be a car looks awfully like an old-fashioned razor blade to me."

"Uh huh," said Stein without committing himself.

"Before they invented disposable razors."

"I remember razor blades," said Stein, "but if that's a blade, I have a problem understanding the rest of the drawing."

"Me too."

"I'll just attend.to a couple of other things that came up."

A bandoned to ponder the mystery alone, Diamond tried turning his notebook to see if die picture made more sense orientated differently. There was no certainty that what he'd taken to be the top was actually so; you can turn a food container any way you like and draw on it. No new possibilities leapt out. The rectangular shape still looked like a razor blade from every angle. Now that he'd lodged that idea in his brain, he couldn't visualize anything else.

Towards noon, Lieutenant Eastland, the officer in charge of the case-the man who had compared him to Winnie the Pooh-came in and said there was some progress in identifying the dead woman. The Japanese police had checked the Yokohama address in the passport. Mrs. Tanaka was divorced and lived alone. Until the previous November she had been employed as a secretary at Yokohama University.

"A secretary? That begs a few questions," Diamond commented. "It could mean she was a high-powered administrator or simply a typist."

"My information is that she worked in the faculty of science as one of the team of people operating word processors," Eastland told him. "As for the kid-"

Diamond interrupted. "Lieutenant, there's something I should tell you about the kid." This would be embarrassing, but it had to be admitted. "I'm pretty sure Naomi wasn't Mrs. Tanaka's child. She had a daughter of her own who died. I, em, I found this picture of the grave. This was the child listed in the passport." He produced the photo from his pocket and prepared to be sliced into small pieces. The withholding of evidence wasn't the way to win friends and influence people.

The inevitable question came: "Where did you get this?"

He answered, explained and apologized.

"Why are you showing it to me now?" Eastland asked without otherwise reacting. He was a tight-lipped, gaunt-looking cop in his forties, with a measured style of speech.

"Because it may have a bearing on the case."

"You knew that last night."

"I only examined it after you'd finished with me."

"Couldn't take more of the same, huh?"

"That wasn't the reason."

"So what was?"

"Priorities. I wanted to keep it simple. The first thing was to get the machinery in place to find Naomi, never mind who she is."

"Did you remove anything else from the wallet?"

"No."

"Can I rely on that?"

"Absolutely."

"You know what you are?"

"I know what you think I am."

"So long as we both understand," said Eastland flatly. "Now would you be so gracious as to share with me the drawing you were discussing with Sergeant Stein?"

The sarcasm couldn't have been more blatant, but at least there was some recognition of Diamond's efforts at consultation.

He opened his notebook again. Not wishing to preempt any ideas the lieutenant might have, he said nothing about the razor blade.

"You believe the kid drew this?"

Diamond explained that he had made a copy.

Eastland frowned at the drawing for some time. Finally, all he could find to say was, "What's your opinion?"

"I think the small object is a razor blade."

"Could be. In that case, what is it standing on-a shelf? Are we in a bathroom here? This semicircular section-does this represent a sink?"

"I hadn't thought of that."

"The bathroom attached to the murder room has a similar basin, only the shelf is at quite a different angle. No bathroom shelf I ever saw is suspended across the width of the basin. Mind you, kids draw things from strange angles."

"She'd have needed to be taller than you or me to look down on the shelf in that bathroom," Diamond commented.

"I'm saying kids get things out of line."

"She's an accurate artist."

"And you think this is significant?"

"With not much else to go on…" said Diamond, his voice trailing away as a new possibility dawned.

"Even if it is a drawing of the bathroom," said Eastland. "Even if there was a razor blade in there-and I don't have any recollection of one-where does it lead us?"

Suddenly the marks made sense to Diamond. Everything clicked into mental focus. "It's a tattoo."

"A what

"The razor blade is a tattoo. Take another look. This thing you thought was the shelf is obviously someone's arm against a steering wheel. She draws what she sees in front of her. I think that's the suspect's arm. It's the view Naomi must have had if she was strapped into the front seat beside him."

Eastland stared at it for some time. "You could be right."