Hope to Die

SEVEN

Cost aside, Elaine and I never even considered buying a house. We both preferred apartment living, with a doorman to receive packages and screen visitors, and porters and handymen on staff to fix plumbing leaks and replace blown fuses, to put out the trash and clear the walk of snow. When you owned a house you didn't have to do all that yourself, you could hire people to do it for you, but it was still your responsibility to see that it got done. In our well-run building, everything was magically taken care of. We never had to give it a thought.

You get more room in a house, but we had all the room we needed, and more than we were used to. From the time I'd left the house in Syosset, I'd been perfectly content in a little coat closet of a hotel room, and Elaine had lived and worked in a one-bedroom apartment on East Fiftieth Street a block from the river. To us, our big two-bedroom felt as spacious as Utah.

Still, standing across the street from the Hollander brownstone, I could understand the satisfaction of living in it. It was a fine architectural specimen, of a piece with the houses on either side. The location was hard to beat, with the park a block and a half away and a choice of two subway stops almost as close. You couldn't see it from the street, but there was sure to be a garden in back. You could keep a grill there and barbecue, or just sit outside on a nice day with a book and a pitcher of iced tea.

It had been twelve days since the murder, and just a week since they'd found the two dead men on Coney Island Avenue. The case had finally disappeared from the papers, if not from the collective consciousness of the neighborhood. I couldn't see any yellow Crime Scene tape on the front entrance, or any official seal on the door.

I crossed the street and mounted the steps for a better look. T J, tagging along, asked what we were doing.

"Snooping," I said.

The drapes were drawn, and the front door was windowless except for a frosted fanlight above the lintel. I put my ear to the door, and T J asked me if I could hear the ocean. I couldn't, or anything else. I stepped back and gave the doorbell a poke. I hadn't expected a response, and didn't get one.

"Nobody home," T J said.

I looked at the lock. I could have used more light, but if there was evidence of tampering I couldn't see it. No gouging around the jamb, no fresh scratches on the face of the cylinder. Of course the cylinder itself might have been replaced since the incident. If you were going to occupy the premises, or even if you weren't, changing the locks would be the first order of business.

The ground-floor antique shop was closed, the gates drawn and locked. A card in the door announced the shop's hours, Monday to Friday, noon to six, or by appointment. A decal warned that the premises were protected by an alarm system, and threatened an armed response.

"If we was burglars," T J said, "that'd have us shaking in our boots. 'Armed response.' Not just cops, but cops with guns."

"It's a comforting thought for a lot of people."

"A cop with a gun?" He shook his head. "They best hope they never meet one. You want to break in upstairs? Keypad's in the coat closet, and the password's ten-seventeen."

"Maybe another time."

"You just scared of that armed response."

"That's it."

"If we going to Brooklyn, tell you right now I ain't walking."

"Why would we go to Brooklyn?"

"Coney Island Avenue," he said. "See where the cops kicked the door in."

"I don't think so," I said. "I want to go home. We can take the subway."

"We this close," he said, "we might as well walk."

Elaine fixed a light supper, pasta and a green salad, and I watched the fight on HBO. Afterward I took a hot bath before I went to bed, but I was still a little stiff and sore the next day from all that walking. We left the house around two and walked up to Lincoln Center, where we had tickets for an afternoon concert of chamber music at Alice Tully Hall. There was a string quartet, with a clarinetist joining them for one selection.

They played Mozart and Haydn and Schubert, and it certainly didn't sound like jazz, but there's something about chamber music, and especially string quartets, that puts me in mind of a jazz combo. The intimacy of it, I suppose, and the way the instruments feed off one another. And it feels improvisational, even when you know they're playing notes written down a couple of centuries ago.

We stopped for Thai food after and got home in time for her to watch Masterpiece Theatre. It was Part Three, and she'd missed Parts One and Two, but it didn't matter; she'll watch anything on television where the performers have English accents. I was in the kitchen, fixing her a cup of tea, when the doorman rang up on the intercom to announce a Mr. T. J. Santamaria.

I brought her the tea and told her we had a guest coming up. She said, "Santamaria? Eddie was on the door when we came in. I guess Raul must have relieved him at eight."

We've never managed to learn what T J's last name is (or his first name, come to think of it), but it's a safe bet it's not Santamaria. Somewhere along the way one of the guys working the door insisted on a last name before he would call up and announce him, so he became T. J. Smith. He used that name some of the time, switching now and then to Jones or Brown, or Mr. Smith's partner, T. J. Wesson. ("He sort of an oily dude," he explained.) If the doorman du jour had a discernible ethnic identity, he'd pick a handle to fit, and on occasion he'd been announced as T. J. O'Hanrahan, T. J. Goldberg ("Whoopi's kid brother"), and, as now, T. J. Santamaria. For a few months we'd had a guy from St. Kitts with perfect posture and a piss-elegant manner, and T J'd delighted in making the poor bastard announce him as T. J. Spade.

He came in carrying a file folder with a stack of paper half an inch thick. "Printed out everything that made the papers," he said, "plus some wild-ass shit off an Internet site. Funny how the Times missed out on the connection between the Hollanders and the death of Sharon Tate."

"That sounds reasonable," I said. "Charles Manson had as much to do with the death of the Hollanders as their daughter Kristin did, which is as much as anybody did outside of those two losers out in Brooklyn." He held out the folder and I took it, saying, "What's the point? There's nothing here for us. We spent an hour or so yesterday taking a load off your girlfriend's mind."

"Not my girlfriend."

"Just a friend. I stand corrected." I hefted the file folder. "Why do I need to look at all this?"

"Why did we need to look at the house where it all went down?"

"Curiosity," I said.

"Killed the cat," he said. He pointed at the folder. "Kill a few more," he said, and headed for the elevator.

Monday morning I called Joe Durkin and asked him if he'd like to do me a favor. "It's the real reason I come to work every morning," he said. "What I do for the city is beside the point."

I told him what I wanted.

He said, "Why, for God's sake? What are you, turning into a writer? You plan on writing it up for one of the True Detective magazines?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but it would be a good cover sometime."

"Guys would expect to see clips. Seriously, Matt, what's your interest? And don't tell me you've got a client."

"How could I? They lifted my license."

"Way I heard it, you surrendered it voluntarily. And what difference would that make? You worked years without one."

"That was my point, as I recall."

"One of them," he said, and something hung for a moment in the air between us. He asked who hired me and I said I honestly didn't have a client. He said, "The daughter? How much closure does she need, for Christ's sake? The bastards who did it are dead. What's she need with you nosing around?"

"I haven't even met the daughter," I said, "and I don't have a client. My interest is personal."

"You're a public-spirited citizen and you want to see justice done."

"I gather it's already been done," I said. "Did I mention that Elaine and I were at dinner with the Hollanders the night they were killed?"

"It seems to me you did. You were at separate tables together, the way I remember it. You know, there was an elderly gentleman beaten to death on the G train just last month, and G's my father's middle initial, but I never felt the need to get together with the guy who headed up the investigation. Of course it might have been different if I had a client."

"If I had a client, any kind of a client," I said, "I'd have work to do, and I'd be too busy to waste my time bothering with a case that's already been closed."

"That's reason enough to wish you had your license back," he said. "You're serious, aren't you? Lemme make a phone call, see what I can do."

He got back to me twenty minutes later with a name and a number. "I don't know this guy," he said, "but the word is he's straight-up and thorough, though not necessarily the very man you'd want Regis to call for you if you couldn't remember the capital of Ethiopia."

"I hope you were as complimentary when you told him about me."

"I said you probably wouldn't steal a hot stove, and the morals charge was dismissed when the boy's mother withdrew the complaint. I know, you don't know how to thank me, but don't worry. You'll think of something."

The fellow who'd stayed at the curb to make sure Kristin Hollander got into her house okay had a cell phone, and he'd used it to call 911. A car from the Twentieth Precinct responded, and the uniforms reported back on what they found, and within the hour two detectives from the precinct were on the scene. It was their case, but the next day someone in charge saw what a media circus it was going to be and shuffled the cards, and a special unit was set up with a detective from Manhattan North Homicide in charge of it.

"You never like to have a case taken away from you," Dan Schering said. "Ego aside, though, we were better off, because you can't put as much into an investigation if you have to stop once an hour to hold a press conference. The guy from Homicide knew how to play the media, and we went ahead and pursued the investigation, and we cracked the damn thing. Before the stink came through the door out in Brooklyn, we already had a name and a description. All we had to do was pick the bastard up, and the only thing that stopped us from doing just that was he was dead."

Joe had suggested Schering wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he seemed bright enough to me. There was a stolid, Midwestern quality about him, and that might have been enough to lead a New Yorker like Joe Durkin to label him slow. But he reminded me of an Ohio cop I knew named Havlicek, whom I'd liked and respected enough to stay in touch with. There was nothing slow about Havlicek.

Schering hailed from Albert Lea, Minnesota, where he'd played high school football and basketball before going to the University of Minnesota. He played freshman football but didn't make the Golden Gopher varsity, and didn't even bother trying out for basketball, where everybody was six-five or taller.

His girlfriend was a theater major, and after graduation he followed her to New York, where she waited tables and went to auditions. He was riding the subway to his entry-level office job when he saw a recruiting ad for the NYPD. He sailed through the entrance exam and never looked back. The relationship didn't last and he didn't know what had become of the girl, whether she was still in New York or had gone on to L.A. or back to St. Paul, and didn't care enough to find out. When I asked him if he ever missed Minnesota he looked at me like I was out of my mind.

They'd known Ivanko was right for it before the DNA evidence came along to lock it up, he told me, because they'd recovered a partial thumbprint from the fireplace poker. It was just one print, and a partial one at that, so it hadn't led anywhere until they acted on the tip and got hold of Ivanko's sheet.

"It was a match," he said. "Forensics pegged it at something like sixty percent, so it wouldn't stand up in court as an absolute certainty, but it was as sure as you could get given the amount of the thumbprint left on the poker. In other words, we were a hundred percent certain, and it turned out there was nothing we had to sell to a judge and jury. And if we had to, well, we had the DNA. His semen, his pubic hair at the scene, plus Brooklyn Forensics found trace evidence on one of the bodies."

"Trace evidence?"

"Put it this way," he said. "Our boy Carl didn't have time to shower."

It had been exciting when the tip worked out and the case started to break, and slightly anticlimactic when the cops in Brooklyn walked in on Bierman and Ivanko before the Manhattan team could track them down. But he was just as glad it turned out the way it did.

"For the victim's sake," he said. "Not the actual vics, they were past caring, but the daughter. Sooner the better for someone in her position. And the two of them being dead means she's spared weeks of a trial and tons of media hype and it's over now instead of six months from now, or six years from now, or never because for the rest of her life they're calling her every few years to testify at a parole hearing. It's never really over no matter what, because losing your parents like that is something that never goes away, but at least she can close the books on it, same as we can."

He sympathized with the girl, as anybody would have done, but that hadn't kept him from taking a good look at her. "Because that's got to be the first thing enters your mind," he said. "The parents killed in their own home, the daughter discovers the bodies, first thing you wonder is did she make it happen. Because there's cases all the time, one just four months ago in Astoria, high school girl, her parents didn't approve of the boy she was dating, and she shows them how mistaken they are by teaming up with him and shooting them both dead."

I remembered that one. "They didn't do too good a job," I said.

"She stole her father's gun," he said, "and gave it to the boyfriend, and he shot the old man. Then he made the girl shoot her mother, or it was her idea, depending who you listen to. And then he goes out and steals a car and makes a drive-by shooting out of it, pumping three, four shots through the front window. And she's in the house when this happens, and she calls it in, all hysterical, and she's even got superficial cuts on her hands where she's presumably hit by flying glass from the drive-by. Which would be a nice touch except there was no flying glass, the bullets went right through, knocked out a little circle and that's all.

"And when you play What's Wrong with This Picture? the answer comes up Everything. The two bodies are in the front room, where they supposedly got shot from the drive-by, but there's blood spatters in the kitchen and other evidence indicating that at least one of them was killed there and dragged into the living room, including one slug that went through and wound up in the kitchen wall. And the bullets fired from the passing car, the trajectory's all wrong, they wound up in the living room ceiling, and with the woman, the mother, not only is the angle wrong but the wound's got powder burns. That's a neat trick, leaving powder burns around a wound inflicted from outside the house."

So he could hardly avoid taking a careful look at Kristin Hollander. He wasn't hard on her, because chances were she was innocent, in which case the last thing anybody wanted to do was add to her pain and suffering. But he watched her reactions and he checked her alibi, and he kept an ear cocked for any false note.

And there was none. "Anybody claims he's a hundred percent human lie detector, well, he's full of crap. But you develop an instinct. You were on the job yourself, so you know how many times a day you get lied to. Bad guys just lie all the time, even when they got no reason. They got a reason, they'll tell six different lies one after the other, hoping that'll sweeten the odds and you'll believe one of them. 'That bag of dope? I never saw it before in my life, Officer. That bag of dope? It ain't dope, it's talcum powder, case I meet a baby needs his diaper changed. That bag of dope? Hey, man, where'd that come from? Must be you planted it on me.' You're laughing, but that's how it plays out."

"I'm laughing because the routine hasn't changed in thirty years."

"It never will. You don't tamper with a classic. And each of them thinks he's the first one to run this crap by you. Each one's a criminal genius in his own mind. But you're completely used to it and you know the body language that goes with it, and you can tell the lie's on its way before the first words are out of his mouth."

And Kristin wasn't lying, he was positive of it. You couldn't fake a reaction like that, couldn't go pale on cue, couldn't have your voice climb to the top of its register without even being aware that it had done so. She'd been in shock, that's what the doctor had called it, that was the medical condition she'd manifested, and you couldn't act your way into it.

Plus her alibi stood up a hundred percent. She was with people the whole evening, some who knew her well and others, like the one who drove her home, whom she'd met that night for the first time. No way they were all lying, and their statements overlapped, covering her for the entire evening.

Of course she wouldn't have had to be on the scene when her parents came home. She could have let the burglars in earlier, or she could have supplied them with a key and the keypad code and made sure she was elsewhere when the shit hit the fan. But there was no reason to suspect her, no evidence they could find of any conflict between her and her parents, no screaming fits, no simmering resentments. Nor was there any motive in sight but the admitted value of the house and whatever else she stood to inherit, and she already had the use of the house, she lived in it, for God's sake, and she didn't have any special need for money, so what would motivate her to do something so thoroughly monstrous?