Night Victims

2

NYPD Homicide Detective Paula Ramboquette pulled the unmarked car to the curb in front of the Layton Arms apartments on East 56th Street. She’d been in New York almost a year now, and this was the first case where she, and not her partner Roy Bickerstaff, was lead detective. This was because Bickerstaff was retiring and would be gone by the end of the month.

A large, potbellied man who favored cut-rate woolly suits and ineffective cheap deodorant even in summer, Bickerstaff sat still in his seat and waited for Paula before raising his bulk out of the car. He did have a certain sensibility she hadn’t noticed at first, and he was a good detective. And God knew Paula had seen worse.

The uniformed doorman had emerged from the lobby and was walking toward them, not realizing the unmarked was a police car like the rest of the cruisers angled in at the curb. He was a short, dark-haired man with an aggressive curved nose that reminded Paula of a beak, and he was waving them away. “This space is for police,” Paula heard him say through the glass. “We have an emergency here today.”

“Straighten this bird out, Roy,” Paula said, thinking Bicker-staff, in his rumpled brown suit, would be quite a contrast with the hawklike doorman in his royal blue outfit with gold epaulets. While the wheezing Bickerstaff opened the car door and squeezed out, she glanced over her shoulder for oncoming traffic, then climbed out on the driver’s side.

Despite being sartorially outranked, Bickerstaff had been persuasive. By the time Paula had gotten around the car, the doorman was holding one of the glass front doors open for them. “Ms. Bridge is on thirty,” he said politely, as if she were expecting them. Which Paula knew was impossible because Ms. Bridge was dead.

Paula and Bickerstaff crossed a tile lobby with a square blue area rug and gray leather furniture. Everything looked new and unsat on or unwalked on. Back In New Orleans, Paula had worked the Garden District and was more used to decaying elegance than this kind of contemporary tidiness.

They zipped up to thirty in a polished steel, hexagonal elevator that reflected them so many times it made Paula feel as if she were standing in a crowd. Not much high-speed elevatoring in the Garden District, either.

It was easy enough to find Sally Bridge’s apartment on the thirtieth floor. Hers was the one with the door open and the blue uniforms lounging nearby in the hall.

“Ms. Bridge still at home?” Bickerstaff asked, still caught in the doorman’s mood of civility.

“You mean have they removed the body?” one of the uniforms asked. Then answered his own question. “No, she’s still at your disposal.”

Bickerstaff gave the man a glance and waited like a gentleman for Paula to enter before him. Old school.

And it was Paula who led the way past the techs dusting for prints and into the bedroom where the body lay. As they entered the room, she noticed that the door frame near the latch was splintered. The door had been forced.

The assistant ME was still there, a seedy little guy even more rumpled than Bickerstaff. Paula had seen him around and remembered him because his name was actually Harry Potter. And he looked like Harry Potter, grown up and gone to. . well, pot. Put on a little weight, lost most of his hair, wore a different style of glasses. Still had the calm, intelligent look, though.

Paula had pinned her shield on her lapel in the lobby, and now identified herself and Bickerstaff.

Potter straightened up from the body on the bed and stared at her. “What kinda accent is that?”

“Cajun,” Paula said. “Is this Ms. Bridge?”

Potter nodded. “The late. She departed this world sometime last night, past midnight.”

“We all want to die in bed,” Bickerstaff said.

“Not like that.”

“Sex crime,” Bickerstaff said, as they all stared at the dead woman on the bed. She still had on a short nightgown, though it had worked up over her breasts, and the bed was stripped down to the mattress pad. Bloodied white sheets were in a pile at the foot of the bed. Bickerstaff bent over the stained linen. “The sheets were stabbed lots of times like she was.”

“Over three dozen times, actually,” Potter said. “At least that’s what we’ve found so far. And she doesn’t appear to have been sexually violated. Though we’ll have to check more closely for semen.”

“There’s different kinds of sex,” Bickerstaff said.

Paula took a closer look at Sally Bridge. She’d been an attractive blond woman in her thirties. This was evident even though there was a rectangle of silver duct tape over her mouth and her features were contorted in horror. A well-built woman. Probably men had thought her sexy in a blowzy way. Her almost nude body was smeared with crusting blood, but something other than the obvious didn’t look right.

“Stabbed all those times,” Paula said, “there should be even more blood.”

Potter nodded approvingly at her. “There was plenty of blood. Most of it was stemmed by and then absorbed by the sheets. I had to unwind them to get to the body.”

“Unwind?”

“Yeah. She was wrapped tight like she was in some kind of shroud. Sheets are full of holes, too, like your partner says. She was wrapped alive, tape put over her mouth, then she was stabbed repeatedly with a narrow, sharp instrument. Few of the wounds are fatal. I’d say she bled to death, and it took her a long time.”

“Different kinds of sex,” Bickerstaff repeated.

“The killer wrapped her up alive?” Paula asked.

“Wrapped her tight as a tick.”

“Was she drugged?”

“We’ll find that out later.”

Paula moved closer to the body and took it all in: the blood smears, the pale flesh, the narrow slits made by knife thrusts, the eyes like dull marbles that barely reflected light, that seemed to draw light in and make it darkness. Sally Bridge’s arms were still at her sides, her legs pressed tightly together. The way Potter had unrolled her. Never in her life had she dreamed strangers would look at her this way.

“So what are those angular marks on her flesh?” Paula asked.

“Creases. That’s how tightly she was wrapped.”

Bickerstaff said nothing, standing and watching with his arms crossed while Paula studied the bloodied mattress pad, still neatly held at the corners by elastic. If there’d been much of a struggle on the bed, the pad would have been pulled loose.

“Odd she didn’t put up a fight,” Bickerstaff said. “Looks like the killer kicked open the bedroom door or slammed his shoulder against it. You’d think the noise would have woke her up and-” He was staring at something on the floor.

“I wondered when you were going to notice,” said Harry Potter.

Paula walked over to look where Bickerstaff was staring. There was a faint and partial bloody footprint on the carpet. The surprising thing about it was it appeared to be the back three-fourths or so of a bare foot.

“Hard even to figure the size,” Bickerstaff said, “but it’s a right foot and almost surely a man’s.”

“Maybe he stripped nude before the murder so he wouldn’t get blood on his clothes,” Paula said. “We need to Luminol this place, try to bring more of the footprint out. Then check the tub or shower stall drain, see if the killer cleaned up before putting his clothes back on.”

“The way she’s wrapped up tight as a tamale,” said Harry Potter, “her killer probably would have gotten little if any blood on him. You can see near the footprint that there’s blood where some of it soaked through the sheets and ran down to the floor. But that’s the only blood I saw on the carpet.”

“More might show up under the lights,” Paula told him.

“Have you talked to the uniforms who took the call?” Potter asked.

“Not yet,” Bickerstaff said.

“One of them forced open the door. The super was supposed to repair a leaky faucet in the bathroom. He got no answer when he knocked, so he let himself in and started to work. Bathroom backs up to this room. When he wanted to see if there was an access panel in here to get to the plumbing, he found the door locked. Knocked and got no answer. Thought not much of it till the phone rang and Sally Bridge didn’t pick up. Super figured she might be in the bedroom and need some kinda help, so he pounded on the door, still got no answer, and called the cops. He’s got keys to the hall doors, but not the inside doors, so they had to break in here.”

“You been playing detective?” Paula asked the little ME.

“I got eyes and ears.”

Paula glanced at Bickerstaff.

“I’ll go talk to the super,” he said, and lumbered out of the room.

“Crocker’s his name,” Potter said.

“Crocker,” Bickerstaff repeated without glancing back. “Like Betty Crocker.”

The ME stared at Paula.

“He does that all the time,” she said, “to help his memory.” She then added, “He’s about to retire,” knowing that probably had nothing to do with Bickerstaff ‘s memory method.

“Mmph,” was all Harry Potter said, nodding.

Paula went to the window where long sheer drapes were dancing rhythmically in the summer breeze. In the room’s other window an air conditioner was humming away. Who’d open one window on a hot night, then switch on an air conditioner in another?

“Was this window open?” she asked.

“That’s just how I found it,” Potter said.

Keeping her hands away from the brass handle, Paula gripped the wooden frame and lowered the window until it was almost closed. It worked smoothly and silently.

She was about to turn away when she noticed through the inner glass that a small crescent of glass had been neatly cut from the bottom of the top window. It was centered precisely over where the lock would be if the window were closed and secure.

“I’ll be damned,” Potter said, looking where she was staring. “The killer got in through the window.”

“And out,” Paula said, “seeing as the door was locked and had to be forced by the cop who got the call. Unless the killer had a key and locked the bedroom door on the way out.”

“If he had a key,” Potter said, “he probably wouldn’t have come in through the window. And anyway, he’d have no reason to lock the bedroom door behind him when he left.”

“You oughta be a detective.”

“So I’ve been told,” Potter said. “But not often.”

Two white-uniformed men appeared in the doorway. EMT had arrived to remove the body. The paramedics were both hefty guys with black curly hair, and could have been brothers.

“Okay to take that now?” one of them asked, motioning toward the dead woman.

“If she says so,” Potter said, pointing to Paula.

“Police photographer been here?” Paula asked.

Potter nodded. “Left just before you arrived.”

“She’s yours,” Paula told the paramedics.

“What kinda accent is that?” one of them asked, as they bent to their task.

“Cajun.”

“Alabama?”

“Louisiana.”

“Cajuns make great music,” Harry Potter said.

“Jumbalya,” said the paramedic.

“That’s food,” said the other.

“A song, too,” Potter said. He began to sing. It didn’t sound like singing.

“Yuck,” the paramedic said, working his gloved hand beneath the butchered body. “Crawfish pie.”

Harry Potter packed his instruments into his bag and said good-bye. Paula was glad he was finished singing.

As Sally Bridge was leaving her bedroom, Bickerstaff returned.

“Got the officers’ story,” he said. “And Crocker the super’s. And the doorman said nobody suspicious entered or left the building all evening.”

“Our killer came in through the window,” Paula said.

Bickerstaff raised his bushy brows. “No shit?”

Paula walked with him to the window and opened it wider, still careful not to touch the glass. They both looked down. Paula got dizzy up high and had to back away a few steps.

“Hell of a climb,” Bickerstaff said.

“But the street’s pretty deserted after midnight, and once the killer got a few stories up he’d be in darkness and nobody’d notice him.”

“But it’s damn near a sheer brick wall. How’d he climb it?”

“Maybe pulled himself up on some kind of line,” Paula said. She examined the windowsill for marks where a grappling hook might have been attached. The sill was unmarked, and nothing else in the room seemed to have been disturbed other than Sally Bridge.

“The super said she lived alone,” Bickerstaff said.

“I gathered.”

“She was a casting director. Even did some work on Broadway.”

“Really? She have a boyfriend?”

“She was between them, according to the super and the doorman. They both said she was always working and didn’t have much opportunity for romance. She used to joke about it, how she needed more time to meet interesting men.”

“She found time last night.”

“And she isn’t joking,” Bickerstaff said. “Or even slightly interested.” He nodded toward the bloody sheets. “Maybe because she’s on the rag.”

Police humor, Paula thought. She could live without it.