The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 5

  I felt her wrench away from me like a ship breaking its moorings. I sensed this separation, though physically we remained glued together. Suddenly I felt needier than ever and wanted to be next to her all night, wanted to be there in the morning. She held me tightly, a little too tight for comfort, in fact, and her hot breath chuffing into my neck was the last thing I remembered before sleep.

  7

  In the morning, I stopped at home to shower and change, making it to work at the Eye at eight o’clock. I half expected Bucky to take the day off to recuperate, but he was there, working in the composition room when I went back to get a cup of coffee. He glared at me but didn’t speak. They’d be playing for the Stanley Cup in Hell before I was going to apologize. Waves of resentment rose from him like steam from a wet dog.

  The elder Rinkell checked in briefly to meet with me on our front-page stories. I reminded him about the body dumping and promised a story for tomorrow’s edition. The subject of Bucky didn’t come up. He took off in his gigantic leased Oldsmobile to call on some advertising accounts.

  I got right on the phone to Ciesla. “Anything more on that homicide yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Time of death between one and four A.M., no sexual assault, no signs of struggle, one .22 slug in the head, uh, uh...” He stopped, flustered. Out of character for him.

  “Yeah?” I said encouragingly.

  He went on in a different direction, “Address in Southfield. Married, no kids, no connection with drugs—we talked to the husband yesterday, you know. We’re working with the Southfield police on this. Um, and she worked for O’Connor Services.”

  “The temps?”

  “Yeah, temporary service. She did clerical stuff, word processing. The last assignment she had was at Monolyne.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A plastics company in Troy.”

  Nothing about the Snapdragon. “Anything else on the circumstances of death?”

  “That’s pretty much it.” Only because I knew Tom Ciesla so well could I detect a slight note in his voice, something a little too official. I was sure there was more.

  “Any theories? You’ve ruled out suicide?”

  “Oh, yeah. That shot was right in the back of the head. And she was dumped for sure.”

  “Will you be talking more to the husband? Any suspicion on him?”

  “’Course, we always check out the guy. He seems clean right now.”

  “How was he at the morgue?”

  “Oh, the usual. Traumatized but not hysterical. There’s no obvious motive for him. He had a pine-box insurance policy on her. No other money involved.”

  “Love triangle?”

  “So far no evidence of that.”

  “History of abuse?”

  “Nothing there either. All he says is, she was gone when he got up in the morning. When she didn’t come home by noon, he called it in. They didn’t write up a report, ’cause it hadn’t been twenty-four hours. But the desk guy saw our message and remembered the call.”

  I toyed with the space bar on my IBM Selectric. Though we were well into the 1990s here, when it came to publishing technology we at the Eagle Eye were still snorting around in the Stone Age. Rinkell had shelled out big bucks for a used Compugraphic, but we weren’t composing pages on it; Nona was too afraid of its forbidding console to learn anything more than how to make it spit out columns.

  That was all right. I preferred to work at my typewriter, to hammer down my words onto nice white paper instead of a flickering screen. Plus I enjoyed composition-room work, at least until Bucky had started his shenanigans.

  “Her car?” I asked. “Is that missing?”

  “Yeah. We haven’t found it yet.”

  “Seems like maybe robbery, then? Car theft, then they kill her?”

  “Well, you’d figure, if it was a carjacking, a professional job, that’d explain why we haven’t found the car, but why the execution and dumping? And then some psycho, or somebody who knew her and wanted to kill her, they wouldn’t necessarily have a way to dispose of a car. You’d figure they’d have left it somewhere and we would’ve found it by now. Maybe it’ll turn up this week.”

  “Some psycho?” I repeated. Once again Ciesla seemed to go over a bump with a quick silence.

  “Or the car could be out of state now,” he said doubtfully. “The missing car I don’t get. The fact that we don’t have a crime scene yet might make this one a bitch to solve.”

  “No crime scene?”

  “Yeah, in this case the place where the body was found wasn’t where the crime was committed. The actual crime scene can tell you—well, practically everything. The dump site isn’t giving us much to go on.”

  “Oh. Did she have friends who could tell you more?”

  “You’re pretty interested in this,” Ciesla said with a sudden edge.

  Yikes. “Aw, I’m just trying to think like a cop.” I swallowed a nervous laugh.

  “As a matter of fact, the Macklins have only been in town a few months. He’s an executive for Hastings Benevolex. Got a transfer here to work on a Chrysler project. They’ve moved around. Their last address was in Cleveland.” Hastings Benevolex, a hugely successful data-processing company, made news every so often because of its ultraconservative policies and fascist dress code. Ciesla continued, “We’ll be talking with her coworkers today.”

  I decided to cool it on the questions. “I’ll stop over later to get the last few specifics—DOB, family details...”

  “OK. If I’m not here, Porrocks’ll have the file. Lillian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure you didn’t know her? You really looked at that picture.”

  “I didn’t know her. Ah, to tell you the truth, she did look a little familiar at first, but—no.”

  “Where from, familiar?”

  “I just really can’t place her. I—it was just a momentary thing.”

  “OK.” He hung up.

  8

  Christine, our receptionist, popped into my office with the News and the Free Press, the two dailies, refolded from Rinkell’s desk. I assumed they’d have the basic facts on the murder, nothing more, but I was wrong. As soon as I laid flat the front pages, a dark feeling ran through me.

  Both papers had run a small story on page one below the fold, with the immediate info from the white sheets, including the victim’s name and address, so they must have called back after Iris was identified. But in addition, the Free Press must have paid a visit to her husband at home the previous night, because they ran a small, grainy, dark photo next to the story.

  It was an old picture. Iris was younger, her hair much longer—it was straightened and done in a big winglike style—and she was wearing thick glasses. Was this the best picture they could find? I’d been betting I wouldn’t have to come forward with information about Iris’s night job because someone else would. But no one who knew her as Jean would recognize her.

  9

  I worked on other projects for about an hour, until I thought Ciesla would be out questioning Iris’s coworkers. I finished my editorial for the week, “Recycling: Let’s Bloom Where We’re Potted.” Porrocks, I hoped, would be out too, but when I arrived at the detective division she was at her desk doing paperwork. Sitting behind the police-issue gray desk, with her slight build and longish plain face, she looked like a kid being forced to do Sunday-school homework.

  There aren’t that many female senior detectives out there, but somehow Porrocks fit in: the result of unwavering professionalism, phenomenal patience, the guts of a rhino, and pure longevity. She was about fifty.

  “Too bad you can’t be out right now playing cops and robbers,” I said with a smile.

  She looked up briskly. “It’s too damn hot out there anyway.”

  “Is that the file, on Ciesla’s desk? For the murder thing?”

  She nodded and rose quickly as I moved for the file. “Wait, I’ll get it for you.” She reached it first and pulled out a few pages. They were th
e white sheets and the notes Ciesla had made after talking with the husband at the morgue. The missing car was a maroon Escort, and the husband’s name was Gerald Macklin. What I really wanted to see, of course, was the autopsy report. They cranked them out like pancakes when they felt like it. Sitting at Ciesla’s desk, I took notes slowly from the pages Porrocks handed me. The file now lay on her desk next to her elbow.

  As a child I’d had a touch of asthma and so had a fair amount of experience with coughing fits. I began coughing quietly, then built to a small crescendo. Porrocks looked up, but I met her eye and shook my head with a reassuring smile. She bent to her paperwork again.

  I scribbled in my pad, then suddenly took a sharp breath, let it catch halfway, then began cranking out big, steady, chesty coughs. Porrocks looked up again anxiously. As my body began to jerk spasmodically, I pantomimed drinking and mouthed “water.” She jumped up, hesitated over the file (at which point I dropped my head helplessly), then dashed out of the office.

  Still coughing, I moved quickly to the file and flipped it open. The autopsy report was on top. It looked long, but I knew the important stuff would be at the beginning. The upper floor of the cop shop had no water cooler, so Porrocks had to either run downstairs to the squad room cooler or find somebody’s coffee cup and take it to the washroom to fill up.

  My eyes skimmed over the description of the body, then the measurements and characteristics of the bullet wound. The payoff, halfway down: “...lips and oral tissues slightly swollen. Examining the mouth now...observe...all teeth except several molars have been extracted. Extraction likely occurred postmortem...absence of massive bleeding and swelling. Teeth missing are numbers four through fourteen inclusive and nineteen through thirty-two inclusive.”

  Holy hell, somebody yanked her teeth out. The report went on, but I closed the folder, listening for Porrocks’s running feet. I coughed some more and was about to turn back to Ciesla’s desk when, to my surprise, Ciesla himself strode in. I would’ve beaten Porrocks, but Ciesla caught it: my hand flashing backward from the file folder, my guilty look.

  “Whoa, Lillian Byrd,” he said, and walked around the desk to me.

  Porrocks swooped in with a paper cup and stopped short. “What?” she said.

  “Um,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t snoop,” Ciesla said cheerfully, throwing his sport coat across his desk. “Did you look at it?”

  I coughed weakly and Porrocks handed me the water. “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “So,” he said, “you’ve checked the autopsy information when you knew we didn’t want you to and you’ve stolen a picture of her. Tell us what’s going on.” Ciesla indicated a side chair for me, and took his chair at his desk. Porrocks perched on the edge of her desk.

  “How’d you know I took the picture?”

  Porrocks said, “I shot nine pictures at the scene. The sheriff’s artist took the two best ones. You had one in your hand when we left. When I came back there were six.”

  “I didn’t think you were that meticulous, Erma.” She gave me a wounded look. I took a deep breath. “Well, what do you want to know?”

  Ciesla said, “The question is, what do you want to know?”

  “Hey, I’m naturally curious. I haven’t covered a murder lately. I’d like to beat the dailies on something for once.” I swallowed and folded my arms.

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” Porrocks asked.

  “I might have.”

  “Well?”

  “Can you guys actually make me talk? I mean, what if I don’t want to tell you?”

  “For God’s sake, Lillian,” Ciesla said, “you stole the picture from us. Now you’re caught attempting to steal another police document. What do you expect here? Come on, come on.”

  I sat there trying to think of a way out, my eyes focused on Ciesla’s shirt front. Ciesla liked to look sharp. He bought good clothes, tailored to fit his massive neck and short waist. Nothing fancy, just good. As most energetic men are, however, he was hard on his clothes. In and out of the car, shouldering through courthouse crowds, taking down the occasional suspect, grabbing a fast hamburger. You could usually spot a button on him ready to fall off, an abraded elbow, a hastily rubbed mustard stain. Today I noticed a small ravel at the cuff of his otherwise perfect blue broadcloth shirt.

  We sat in silence. Cops can sit in silence longer than Trappist monks. Finally I said, “OK. I saw this woman at a bar. Her name was Jean, somebody told me. OK? That’s it. I saw her one time. I barely even talked to her.”

  “What did you talk about?” Ciesla fingered his raveled cuff.

  “As I remember, it was a brief conversation about orange juice and rye bread.”

  Porrocks said, “That’s it?” Ciesla made a note.

  “Well, what bar?” Ciesla asked. He and Porrocks stayed tuned in, their expressions neutral. However, the air molecules in the office started zinging around, as if the air pressure within the room had increased.

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “The Snapdragon.”

  Their faces were blank. Then Porrocks crunched her eyebrows. “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Livernois, down the street from Baker’s, near here.”

  Ciesla said, “How come we don’t know that bar?”

  I hollered, “Oh, goddamn it!”

  They waited.

  I clenched my teeth and growled, “It’s a lesbian bar.”

  “For women?” Ciesla said. He and Porrocks nodded and exchanged glances, Friday-and-Gannon style.

  They granted me a split second to work with. I said, “Oh, guys, grow up.” They exhaled together and regarded me solemnly. The air pressure returned to normal.

  Ciesla asked, “Are you sure that was the woman you saw at the bar?” I told him I was pretty sure.

  “Because you just saw her that once, right?” Porrocks said.

  “That’s right, just that once. But there’s a difference between just noticing someone and sort of being hit between the eyes by someone.” Ciesla nodded in his guy way, his head and neck moving as one unit. “Of course, I could be wrong. I figure you guys’ll find that out. But I don’t think I am.”

  I told them some more facts I thought they’d want to know. After a few minutes Ciesla started zeroing in.

  “Now, this woman who owns the bar,” he said, “her name’s Bonnie, Bonnie what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anyone say her last name.”

  “And you think she might have killed Ms Macklin?”

  “I think she might know something about it. I can’t say whether she killed her. Why she might have done it, I don’t know. All I’m saying is, you should check her out. She about took my eyebrows off when we talked. I think it’s also interesting that the husband didn’t say anything about Iris having a night job. At least I’m assuming he didn’t. You guys didn’t say anything about it.”

  “That’s right,” Ciesla said.

  “Maybe he didn’t know about it,” Porrocks said.

  “Macklin let us look through her things at the apartment,” Ciesla told me.

  “And you didn’t come up with any check stubs or anything?” I said.

  The three of us looked at each other and said in unison, “Paid under the table.”

  Ciesla questioned me more about the Snapdragon and the people I knew there. I told him about Sandra, Bonnie’s sidekick, and Kevin, the waiter. “Lots of other people work there, though. But this isn’t about them—it’s about Bonnie.”

  Ciesla said, “What this is, Lillian, is an investigation. You try to get the big picture. You do that in your reporting.”

  “The kind of reporting I do around here is pretty surfacey. But I know what you mean.” I tended to take at face value anything anybody told me, even if my gut said it was wrong. But I was learning fast, you bet.

  “Trusting your gut’s important,” Ciesla said, reading my mind. I smiled. “For example, I knew right away you knew more about Ms Macklin than you admitted. You gotta trust
yourself to read people.”

  “Thanks, I’ll work on that.”

  “And you gotta know they’re trying to read you,” Porrocks chimed in.

  “OK, Erm. Well, now the both of you know what I know. Now tell me, what the hell was that stuff about her teeth being extracted?”

  Ciesla said, “Well, somebody put a boot on her chest and pried them out. No clue yet as to why.”

  Porrocks said, “We didn’t realize it at the scene—it just looked like her mouth was bloody.”

  “But why would somebody do that?”

  The two cops shrugged.

  “There’s a lot more psychos out there than you think,” said Porrocks. “Actually, I believe there are other cases on record where people had their teeth pulled out after they were dead.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” She looked a little sheepish. “It just seems like I’ve heard about this kind of thing before.”

  “To me it seems either really vicious or really ritualistic,” I said.

  “Both,” Ciesla said. “Lillian, we have to ask you not to print that detail. It’s something we can use when we finally get a suspect, or if we get a confession, to verify it.”

  “I’ll keep quiet about it. Are you guys running tests on that piece of carpet she was wrapped in?”

  Important stuff could be determined, I knew, from forensic tests on evidence like that. As a child I’d developed an interest in extreme crime—murders, kidnappings. I read the few books about such things in the library over and over, eventually convincing myself, when I was about twelve, that in a prior life I’d been a murder victim, dismembered and hidden under the floorboards somewhere.

  One of my favorite books was about serial murders, except they called them mass murders then, not distinguishing between a bunch of people killed all at once and a bunch of people killed one at a time. I read about a guy who killed two children and got nailed because the handkerchiefs he used to strangle them had a defective weave. They found the third handkerchief from the set of three in his dresser, looked at it under a microscope, then told him what they found. He confessed.