Michelangelo_s Notebook

6

The man looked as though he was in his middle sixties. He was on the short side, five eight or nine, maybe, and reasonably fit. He had gray crinkly-curly hair fading back to midskull from a widow’s peak that made his forehead look abnormally large. The eyes behind his round, steel-framed glasses were a very dark brown, almost black. He was wearing a nicely tailored navy pinstripe three-piece suit that was probably something safe, like Brooks Brothers, a simple, no-name, crisply starched white shirt and a Turnbull amp; Asser tie with thin, dark blue stripes. The shoes were Bally wing tips. The watch on his right wrist was a gold Bulgari that was a little garish but it matched the Yale ring on the index finger of his left hand. There was no wedding ring. He smelled faintly of Lagerfeld.

Someone had taken a nine-inch-long, curved-blade, Moroccan koummya dagger and jammed it into the man’s mouth, slicing up through the soft palette and into the man’s brain, the exposed end of the weapon sticking out between his lips like some sort of nasty silver-and-black tongue, the long, tooled-metal escutcheon keeping the head lifted slightly off the green leather-and-felt blotter that covered the antique desk. There was very little blood; that was the kind of detail Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad was paid to look out for.

According to the title on the office door, the dead man with a dagger in his mouth was Alexander Crawley, director of the Parker-Hale Museum at Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Central Park Zoo. Delaney glanced out the tall windows at the opposite end of the office. The old-fashioned green velvet drapes were pulled back and tied off with matching velvet ropes. Maybe a baboon in the zoo had seen something but Delaney doubted it. He never had that kind of luck. Actually, he’d never been to the Central Park Zoo and he wasn’t even sure if they had baboons there.

There were four other people in the room: Singh from the M.E.’s office, Don Putkin, the crime scene specialist, Yance the photographer and Sergeant William Boyd, his overweight and badly dressed partner. Billy was watching the dead man’s mouth while Singh turned the neck slightly to check for rigor. There wasn’t any. Downstairs at the cocktail party in the main reception hall there were nine hundred elegantly dressed suspects drinking martinis and wondering what the hell was holding up the hors d’oeuvres. Bigwigs, one and all, from the governor and the mayor on down. Delaney sighed. It was going to be a stinker.

“What’s the word, Singh?”

The man from the medical examiner’s office looked up and shrugged. “Dead maybe an hour, a bit more. No rigor yet. Strangled, probably with a piece of nylon rope. I’ve picked up a few fibers so far. Basically someone got in behind him and garroted him.”

“Any ideas about the dagger?”

“It’s not Pakistani or Indian. I can tell you that much. Too long. Probably Berber. Arabic of some kind, by the look of the design work.”

“You said he was garroted,” said Billy, still staring at the dagger. “He wasn’t stabbed?”

“Maybe some kind of ritual thing. The victim was already dead when the dagger was inserted.”

“Some kind of freak,” said Delaney.

“Not for me to say.” Singh shrugged again. “Who knows, maybe he just didn’t like art.”

Delaney’s cell phone twinkled at him, playing the Simpsons theme. His teenage daughter had programmed it in as a joke, and he kept seeing Bart skateboarding through Springfield every time it rang. He popped open the phone, listened for a moment, grunted once or twice and then clapped the phone shut.

Delaney looked across at Billy. “Go find out if they’ve got an intern here named Ryan, would you? First name Finn.”