Pulse

7

New York City, the present

“Y ou sure you need all that mentholated goop under your nose?” Sal Vitali asked his partner, Harold Mishkin.

Sal and Harold worked for Quinn, but they’d been partners in the NYPD. That partnership more or less continued, as Quinn usually used them as a team. Harold had always smeared mentholated cream on his brushy, graying mustache so the fumes would keep his head clear and his stomach from getting upset by the various odors of homicide scenes.

But this wasn’t actually a homicide scene. Macy Collins had been murdered and butchered in the park.

“The killer only spent a short time here after he killed her,” Sal reminded his partner. He knew Mishkin had a delicate constitution, and over the years he’d become protective of him, often in sly and subtle ways. At the same time, Harold could get on Sal’s nerves.

No, that wasn’t fair. Harold could drive Sal crazy.

“Place still smells bad,” Harold said. “Blood and death smell the same. The odor hangs around.”

Sal thought maybe Harold had something there. He didn’t much like the air in the stifling apartment himself.

They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Harold being average height but a beanpole, and with the bush of a mustache that seemed large enough that it bent him slightly forward. Sal was short, stocky, and animated. He waved his arms around a lot when he spoke. Harold was in most matters oversensitive-especially in regard to his stomach, which was delicate enough that he couldn’t stay long at violent crime scenes. Sal pretty much took things as they came. Harold spoke softly, while Sal had a voice like gravel rolling around inside a bucket.

The CSU techs were gone. Since this wasn’t the actual crime scene there was a limit to what they could achieve. They had pretty much left things as they’d found them, only with smudges here and there from fingerprint powder or luminol spray.

As instructed, the two detectives began to look the apartment over, starting with the living room. The furniture there was mismatched and inexpensive. On a bookshelf there were stacks of magazines, which Sal examined and found to be mostly fashion and food publications, along with the weekly Times review of books. There were a few dog-eared mystery novels by writers like Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Joanne Fluke. There was a book by Stephen Hawking about

… well, Sal couldn’t understand it. What the hell was a quark? He figured at least one of the roommates for the intellectual type. Maybe the victim.

Near a window was a tiny wooden desk, its top bare except for a banker’s lamp with a green shade. Next to the lamp was a chipped white mug stuffed with pens and pencils. The shallow top drawer was full of mostly unpaid bills, some of them weeks overdue. The rest of the drawers contained nothing of interest-scissors, a box of yellow file folders, some blank paper and envelopes, a flashlight that didn’t work, colored pencils and a blank sketch pad, an unused or brand-new paperback dictionary, rubber bands, a stapler without staples… Sal saw it as the desk of a procrastinator, not the intellectual roommate’s desk. He moved on.

Harold switched on the TV to see what channel the victim had last been watching. A free movie channel-no clue there. A TV Guide sat on top of the TV. Harold leafed through it to see what movies had been playing on that channel the previous night: They Drive by Night, starring Humphrey Bogart. If victim and killer had been here during that time, had the movie been the victim’s choice, or the killer’s? Or had the TV been switched off before the killer entered the apartment? Or had it been on mute and used as a night-light while love was being made? Or something like love.

Harold joined Sal in the kitchen. The refrigerator held some basic foods like milk, a head of lettuce, a white foam box containing some tired-looking pasta. No meat. Had the victim been a vegetarian?

All in all, it was the kind of apartment you’d picture four young women sharing. A comfortably sloppy, temporary kind of place. A stopover on the road to the good life.

The bathroom was a mess. Bloody towels were on the floor and in the bathtub. The faucets were smeared with blood. Here must be where the killer had seriously cleaned up after the murder in the park.

“No point in both of us going in there,” Sal said. “Why don’t you start on the bedrooms?”

Harold nodded and moved on down the hall. He was holding his hand cupped over his nose.

Sal left the bathroom as they’d found it. Maybe Macy had fought back, and some of this blood was the killer’s. It might be enough to establish his DNA profile. Even if his DNA wasn’t in any of the data banks and couldn’t identify him, it could be matched with a sample from the suspect himself-if they could find him.

Sal went into the first bedroom he came to after leaving the bathroom. Harold was in there. Sal noticed that Harold held a hand on his stomach as they examined the bedroom. There was blood smeared here and there, too, as if deliberately. Nothing like the bathroom. Sal hoped Harold wasn’t going to be sick or make some kind of fuss.

“Why don’t you look around the other rooms some more?” Sal growled. “I’ll check out the drawers and closets in here.”

“I’ll be okay,” Harold said, swallowing hard and crossing the room to open a closet door.

Harold, Harold, Sal thought.

“These clothes,” Harold said, with his head still in the closet, muffling his words, “they’re pretty good-sized. And here’s something, Sal. She wore a lift in one shoe.”

“That’s her roommate’s closet,” Sal said.

“Ah!”

“You notice something’s missing?” Sal asked.

“The lift in the other shoe?”

“No, Harold. A computer. How many people do you know who don’t own a computer? Especially if they’re the victim’s age.”

“I could count them on one thumb,” Harold said. Then he thought. “Maybe CSU took it.”

“It wasn’t on the list,” Sal said, though he hadn’t seen any list. It was just that Harold was beginning to irk him.

“Ah,” Harold said.

They finally left the apartment with some sense of who the victim had been-which was part of their purpose. They also hadn’t discovered anything in the nature of a clue that Quinn, Pearl, and Q amp;A’s fifth associate, Larry Fedderman, might have overlooked during a previous visit. No surprise there. They were an effective trio; even the lanky, potbellied Fedderman, who dressed like a bewildered refugee in a suit he had found, had a mental gear for every problem.

Now for the main purpose of their visit to the building: interviewing the dead woman’s neighbors.

That could be a waste of time, but not always.

As Harold was fond of saying, it was surprising what they didn’t know they knew.