Presumed innocent

Chapter 2

The office has the bizarre air of calamity, of things badly out of place. The halls are empty, but the phones are pealing in wearying succession. Two secretaries, the only ones who stayed behind, are sprinting up and down the corridors putting callers on hold.

Even in the best of times, the Office of the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney has a dismal aspect. Most deputies work two to an office in a space of Dickensian grimness. The Kindle County Building was erected in 1897 in the emerging institutional style of factories and high schools. It is a solid red-brick block dressed up with a few Doric columns to let everybody know it is a public place. Inside, there are transoms; over the doors and dour casement windows. The walls are that mossy hospital green. Worst of all is the light, a kind of yellow fluid, like old shellac. So here we are, two hundred harried individuals attempting to deal with every crime committed in a city of one million, and the surrounding county, where two million people more reside. In the summer we labor in jungle humidity, with the old window units rattling over the constant clamor of the telephones. In the winter the radiators spit and clank while the hint of darkness never seems to leave the daylight. Justice in the Middle West. In my office, Lipranzer is waiting for me like a bad guy in a Western, hidden as he sits behind the door.

"Everybody dead and gone?" he asks.

I comment on his sentimentality and throw my coat down on a chair. "Where were you, by the way? Any copper with five years' service showed."

"I'm no funeralgoer," Lipranzer says dryly. There is, I decide, some significance in a homicide dick's distaste for funerals, but the connection does not come to me immediately and so I let the idea go. Life in the workplace: so many signs of the hidden world of meanings elude me in a day, bumps on the surface, shadows, like creatures darting by.

I attend to what is present. On my desk there are two items: a memo from MacDougall, the chief administrative deputy, and an envelope Lipranzer has placed there. Mac's memo simply says, "Where is Tommy Molto?" It occurs to me that for all of our suspicions of political intrigue, we should not ignore the obvious: someone ought to check the hospitals and Tommy's apartment. One deputy PA is dead already. That is the reason for Lipranzer's envelope. It bears a label typed by the police lab: OFFENDER: UNKNOWN. VICTIM: C. POLHEMUS.

"Did you know that our decedent left an heir?" I ask as I'm looking for the letter opener.

"No shit," says Lip.

"A kid. Looked to be eighteen, twenty. He was at the funeral."

"No shit," Lip says again, and considers his cigarette. "You figure one thing about goin to a funeral is at least no surprises."

"One of us ought to talk to him. He's at the U."

"Get me an address, I'll see him. 'Anything Horgan's guys want.' Morano gave me that crock again this mornin." Morano is the police chief, an ally of Bolcarro's. "He's waitin to see Raymond fall on his ass."

"Him and Nico. I bumped into Delay." I tell Lip about our visit. "Nico's really high on himself. He even made me believe it for a minute."

"He'll do better than people say. Then you'll be kickin yourself in the ass, thinkin you should have run."

I make a face: who knows? With Lip, I do not have to bother with more. For my fifteenth college reunion I received a questionnaire which asked a lot of personal questions I found difficult to answer: What contemporary American do you admire most? What is your most important physical possession? Name your best friend and describe him. On this one, I puzzled for some time, but I finally wrote down Lipranzer's name. 'My best friend,' I wrote, 'is a cop: He is five foot eight inches tall, weighs 120 pounds after a full meal, and has a duckass hairdo and that look of lurking small-time viciousness that you've seen on every no-account kid hanging on a street corner. He smokes two packs of Camel cigarettes a day. I do not know what we have in common, but I admire him. He is very good at what he does.'

I first ran across Lip seven or eight years ago, when I was initially assigned to the Violence Section and he had just begun working Homicide. We have done a dozen cases since, but there are still ways in which I regard him as a mystery, even a danger. His father was a watch commander in a precinct in the West End, and when his old man died, Lip left college to take up a place that came to him by rights of a kind of departmental primogeniture. By now he has been placed in the P.A.'s office on direct assignment, a so-called Special Command. On paper, his job is to act as police liaison, coordinating homicide investigations of special interest to our office. In practice, he is as solitary as a shooting star. He reports to a Captain Schmidt, who cares only that he has sixteen homicide collars to show at the end of every fiscal year. Lip spends most of this time alone, hanging out in bars and on loading docks, drinking shots with anybody who's got good information-hoods, reporters, queers, federal agents, anybody who can keep him up to speed on the world of big-time bad guys. Lipranzer is a scholar of the underlife. Eventually, I have come to recognize that it is the weird weight of that information that somehow accounts for his rheumy-eyed sulking look.

I still have the envelope in my hands.

"So what do we have here?" I ask.

"Path report. Three-sheet. Bunch of pictures of a naked dead lady." The three-sheet is the prosecutor's copy of the arriving officers' reports-he third leaf in the carbon layers. I have talked to these cops directly. I go on to the report of the police pathologist, Dr. Kumagai, a weird-looking little Japanese who seems to have come out of a forties propaganda piece. He is known as Painless, a notorious hack. No prosecutor calls him to the witness stand without crossing his fingers.

"And what's the scoop? Male fluids in every hole?"

"Just the main one. Lady is dead of a skull fracture and resulting hemorrhage. Pictures might make you think she was strangled, but Painless says there was air in her lungs. Anyway, the guy musta hit her with somethin. Painless has got no idea what. Heavy, he says. And real hard."

"I take it we looked for a murder weapon in the apartment?"

"Turned the place upside down."

"Anything obvious missing? Candlesticks? Bookends?"

"Nothin. I sent three separate teams through."

"So," I say, "our man showed up already thinking he'd be doing some heavy hitting."

"Could be. Or else he just took what he used with him. I'm not positive this guy came prepared. Seems like he was hittin to subdue her-didn't realize he cooled her. I figure-you can see when you look at the pictures-that the way the ropes were tied, that he put himself between her legs and was tryin to let his weight strangle her. It's all slip-knotted. I mean," Lipranzer says, "that he was sort of tryin to fuck her to death."

"Charming," I say.

"Definitely charming," says lip. "This was a very charming type fellow." We are both quiet a moment before he goes on. "We got no bruises on the arms, hands, nothin like that," Up says. That would mean there was no struggle before Carolyn was bound. "Contusion's rear right. It's got to be that he hit her from behind, then tied her up. Only it seems strange that he would knock her cold to start with. Most of these creeps like em to know what they're doin."

I shrug. I'm not so sure of that.

The photos are the first thing I take out of the envelope. They are clean, full-colored shots. Carolyn lived in a place on the waterfront, a former warehouse parceled into "loft condominiums." She had divided the space with Chinese screens and heavy rugs. Her taste ran to the modern, with elegant touches of classical and antique. She had been killed in the space off the kitchen which she used as a living room. An overall shot of that area is first on the stack. The thick green-edged glass top of a coffee table has been tumbled off its brass props; a modular seating piece is upside down. But overall I agree with Lip that there is less sign of struggle than I have seen on other occasions, particularly if you ignore the bloodstain worked into the fiber of the flokati rug so that it has the shape of a large soft cloud. I look up. I do not feel I am ready yet to take on the photos of the corpse.

"What else does Painless tell us?" I ask.

"This guy was shootin blanks."

"Blanks?"

"Oh yeah. You'll like this." Lipranzer does his best to repeat Kumagai's analysis of the sperm deposit that was found. Little of it had seeped to the labia, which means that Carolyn could not have spent much time on her feet after sexual contact. This is another way we know that the rape and her death were roughly contemporaneous. On April 1, she had left the office a little after seven. Kumagai puts the time of death at somewhere around nine.

"That's twelve hours before the body's found," Lip says. "Painless says normally, with that kinda time span, he'd still see some of the guy's little thingies swimmin upstream in the tubes and in the womb, when he looked under the microscope. Instead, this guy's wad's all dead. Nothin went nowhere. Painless figures this guy is sterile." Lip pronounces the word so that it rhymes with pearl. "Says you can get like that from mumps."

"So we're looking for a rapist who has no children and once had the mumps?"

Lipranzer shrugs.

"Painless says he's gonna take the semen specimen and send it over to the forensic chemist. Maybe they can give him another idea of what's up." I groan a little bit at the thought of Painless exploring the realms of higher chemistry.

"Can't we get a decent pathologist?" I ask.

"You got Painless," Lip says innocently.

I groan again, and leaf through a few more pages of Kumagai's report. "Do we have a secreter?" I ask. People are divided not merely by blood type but by whether they secrete identifying agents into their body fluids.

Lip takes the report from me. "Yep."

"Blood type?"