Paper Doll

chapter two

“HE HIT HER with a framing hammer,” Quirk said. “The kind with the long wooden handle that gives you leverage so you can drive a sixteen-penny nail with two strokes. Hit her at least five times.”

Quirk was wearing a gray silk tweed jacket with a faint lavender chalk line, a blue Oxford button-down shirt, and a lavender knit tie. There was a dark blue display handkerchief in his jacket pocket. As he talked, he straightened the stuff on his desk, making sure everything was square and properly spaced. There wasn’t much: a phone, a legal-sized lined yellow pad, a translucent Bic pen with a black top, and a big plastic cube with pictures of his wife, his children, and a golden retriever. He was careful to have the cube exactly centered along the back rim of his desk. He wasn’t thinking about what he was doing. It was what he did while he thought about something else. “He left it at the crime scene.”

“Or she,” I said.

Quirk realigned his pictures an eighth of an inch. His hands were big and thick, the nails manicured. They looked like the hands of a tough surgeon.

“Ah, yes,” Quirk said. “Liberation. It could have been a woman. But if it was, it was a strong one. He, or she, must have held the hammer down at the end and taken a full swing, like you would drive a nail. Most of the bones in her head were broken.”

“Only the head?”

“Yeah,” Quirk said. “That bothered me too. If some fruitcake runs amok with a framing hammer and assaults a random victim, why was his aim so good? Head only. Except where he seems to have missed once and badly bruised her left shoulder.”

“Seems more like premeditation,” I said. “If you’re going to murder somebody with a hammer, you don’t waste time hitting them in the body.”

“I know,” Quirk said. His hands were perfectly still now, one resting on top of the other. “It bothered us too. But things always do in a homicide. You know that. There’s always stuff you can’t account for, stuff that doesn’t fit exactly. Homicide cases aren’t neat, even the neat ones.”

“You think this is a neat one?”

“In one sense,” Quirk said. He looked at the pictures on the plastic cube while he talked. He was not so much weary as calm. He’d seen too much, and it had left him with that cop calm that some of them get-not without feeling, really, but without excitement.

“We have an explanation for it that works. It’s not laying around loose-except that we don’t have the perpetrator.”

“Perpetrator,” I said admiringly.

“I been watching a lot of those reality cop shows,” Quirk said.

“Her husband wants the guy caught,” I said.

“Sure he does,” Quirk said. “Me too.”

“You can’t find a motive,” I said.

Quirk shook his head.

“This broad is Mary Poppins, for crissake. Mother of the year, wife of the decade, loyal friend, good citizen, great human being, dedicated teacher, accomplished cook, and probably great in the sack.”

“Never is heard a discouraging word,” I said.

“None,” Quirk said. “Nobody had a reason to kill her.”

“Almost nobody,” I said.

“The crazed-killer thing still works,” Quirk said. “It happens.”

“Husband checks out?”

Quirk looked at me as if I’d asked him his sign.

“How long you think I been doing this? Who do we think of first when a wife is killed?”

“Cher chez la hubby,” I said.

“Thank you,” Quirk said.

“No problems between them?”

“None that he’d mention.”

“He doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

“Says he doesn’t.”

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend?”

“Says she didn’t.”

“You able to confirm that, as they say in the papers, independently?”

“Cops aren’t independent,” Quirk said. “Hot dogs like yourself are independent.”

“But you looked into it.”

“Far as we could.”

“How far is that?”

Quirk shrugged.

“These are powerful people,” Quirk said. “They have powerful friends. Everybody I ask says she was a candidate for sainthood. And he is a candidate for sainthood, and the kids are a couple of saintlettes. You push people like this only so far.”

“Before what?”

“Before the commissioner calls you.”

“And tells you to desist?”

“And tells me that unless I have hard evidence, I should not assume these people are lying.”

“And you don’t have hard evidence.”

“No.”

“You think there’s something there?”

Quirk shrugged.

“That’s why you sent Tripp to me,” I said.

“This wasn’t a Jamaican whore got smoked in some vacant lot, twenty miles from the Harvard Club,” Quirk said. “This is an upper-crust WASP broad got bludgeoned to death at one corner of Louisburg fucking Square for crissake. We got a U.S. Senator calling to follow up on our progress. I got a call from the Boston Archdiocese. Everybody says solve it, or leave it alone.”

“Which isn’t the way to solve it,” I said.

Again Quirk was silent.

“The way to solve it is to muddle around in it and disrupt everybody’s lives and doubt everything everybody says and make a general pain in the ass of yourself.”

Quirk nodded.

“You can see why I thought of you,” he said.

“So if Tripp doesn’t want this solved, why did he hire me?”

“I think he wants it solved, but with his assumptions and on his terms,” Quirk said. “He thinks he can control you.”

“Somebody ought to,” I said. “Any money to inherit?”

“A small life insurance policy, probably covered the funeral.”

“No mental illness?”

“No.”

“Kids?”

“Son, Loudon, Junior, twenty-two, senior at Williams College. Daughter, Meredith, eighteen, freshman at Williams.”

“They seem clean?”

“American dream,” Quirk said. “Dean’s list for both of them. Son’s on the wrestling team, and the debating team. Daughter’s president of the drama club and a member of the student council, or whatever the fuck they call it at Williams.”

“Any history on the kids that doesn’t jibe?”

“Son had a few routine teenage scrapes. Nothing that matters. I’ll give you the file,” Quirk said.

“You still got a guy on it?” I said.

“Yeah, Lee Farrell,” Quirk said.

“He’s new,” I said.

“Yeah, and he’s gay.”

“Young and gay,” I said.

“I got no problem with it, long as he doesn’t kiss me. But command staff don’t like it much.”

“So he gets the low-maintenance stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“He any good?”

Quirk leaned back in his swivel chair and clasped his hands behind his back. The muscles in his upper arm swelled against the fabric of his jacket.

“He might be,” Quirk said. “Hasn’t had a hell of a chance to prove it.”

“Doesn’t get the choice assignments?”

Quirk smiled without meaning anything by it.

“They had to hire him, and they had to promote him. But they don’t have to use him.”

“I’ll want to talk with Farrell.”

“Sure,” Quirk said. “You and he will hit it right off.”