Aphrodite w-3 Read online

  "No. I was too afraid to move."

  "So you didn't see the car he drove away in?"

  She nodded. "I did. When I heard it start up, that's when I went to the edge of the roof, the back edge. I guess I felt safer. Thought I should try to see something, you know, like the witnesses on Law amp; Order or something. So I saw it pull away. But I don't know cars. I don't know what it was."

  "Do you remember anything about it?"

  She thought, closing her eyes as if that would help her picture it. Then she frowned and shook her head. "Not much. It was kind of boxy. Not sleek or anything. Not a sports car."

  "Color?"

  "Dark. Not red. Black maybe. Or dark green or blue."

  Justin exhaled a long breath. "Deena, you've been incredibly helpful. I'm sorry you had to go through it, but maybe it'll help us find whoever killed Susanna."

  "Can I go now?"

  Leggett looked at Justin, who nodded and said, "You can go." As she stood up, he said, "Where's your daughter?"

  "At the yoga center. She hangs out there. I've got another teacher who watches her." Deena smiled now, for the first time since Justin had seen her on the roof the night before. "Her name's Kendall. She's going into second grade in another couple of months. In September."

  "Do you want someone to drive you home?" Justin asked.

  "I can walk. It's just a few blocks."

  "Do you want someone to walk you home?"

  She smiled again and nodded. Chief Leggett opened the door to his office and called out, "Brian, I want you to walk Ms. Harper home."

  Brian sauntered over and stood in the doorway.

  Justin saw Deena Harper look over at the young cop, then back over at him. She smiled at him one more time and walked over to her escort. Justin wondered if he was reading too much into her expression. He also wondered at the feeling of pleasure it gave him.

  When she realized that Brian would be the one walking her home, Justin was certain she looked disappointed.

  5

  After Deena Harper left the police station, Westwood and Leggett huddled behind closed doors for almost half an hour. The first thing the chief asked was, "Do you believe her?"

  "Don't you?"

  "I don't know. Why'd she wait so long to say anything?"

  "She was terrified, Jimmy, that's why."

  "Pretty weird, being up on that roof and all."

  Westwood chewed on the inside of his lower lip. "That girl wasn't lying."

  "What about the roof thing? Maybe she's the killer."

  The briefest of smiles crossed Westwood's face. "She's about thirty pounds too light to be a viable suspect. If that girl killed Susanna Morgan up close, which is how Susanna was killed, there would have to have been a struggle. She'd be scratched, a couple of nails would be broken, there'd be some physical sign."

  "How do you know there isn't?"

  "Because when I saw her up on the roof she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, no shoes. Not a scratch on her. And I made sure to take both her hands in mine when we were climbing down the fire escape. Nothing there either."

  Jimmy Leggett bent his head forward and shook it. His back was stooped, as if the weight of what was happening had already aged him. "Jesus, you actually checked her hands? I never woulda thought of that." He kept quiet for a few moments, fidgeting, his fingers tapping nervously. "Should we do an autopsy?" he finally asked. "You know, on this Susanna Morgan?"

  Justin tilted his head as if to say Good question, but then he shrugged and said, "Too late. Unless we want to dig her body up."

  "She's buried already?"

  "Yesterday morning. Turns out she was Jewish. They bury quickly." Leggett puffed out his cheek with his tongue and looked embarrassed about something. Finally, he said, lowering his voice, "I've never been involved in a murder investigation. To be perfectly honest, I don't have a fucking clue where to even begin."

  "I know."

  "What about you?"

  "I know where to begin."

  "That's not my question," Leggett said.

  "I know that, too."

  "Maybe we should call in the Southampton boys."

  "Good idea," Westwood said. "I'm sure they have a crack homicide department."

  "Goddammit, Jay! I've been covering your ass for six years! You haven't had to do anything harder than run down some high-school shitheads making obscene phone calls. Now, what, you wanna play macho cop again, all of a sudden?"

  "I don't want to play anything, Jimmy."

  "Then what do you want?"

  "You ever have a homicide in East End?" Westwood asked.

  "Not since I been here. We had one vehicular manslaughter."

  "I know how to get started. I know what questions to ask. So let me ask them. Hopefully, it won't be that complicated. Most homicides aren't. There'll be a boyfriend or someone she fired or a crazy ex-husband. I can handle that."

  "And if it is complicated?"

  When Westwood didn't answer, Leggett said, "If it is? Can you handle that?"

  "I don't have a fucking clue." Westwood let loose with a quick laugh. It didn't have a hell of a lot of humor to it. "If you want a guess, however, I'd say the answer is no, I can't."

  Leggett didn't say anything for a while. Then: "Is there anything anyone else can do?"

  Westwood snorted. "Like who? Gary and What's-his-name?"

  "It's Brian, for chrissake."

  "No, Jimmy. There's nothing Gary or Brian can do."

  "We have other people."

  "We have three other people. And they make Gary look like Serpico."

  "They're gonna ask questions, you know. They're gonna want to know why you're all of a sudden turning into Supercop."

  "Let 'em ask."

  "What do I tell them?"

  "The same thing you tell anybody who ever asks about a homicide investigation: not a damn thing." The first thing he did after leaving the chief's office was go to the computer on his desk in the station. He opened up a file, labeled it susanna morgan, and began typing in information. His brain was working logically and objectively. It all felt surprisingly natural.

  He typed:

  Roof-Blond guy-pale skin.

  Well dressed. Casual.

  Victim (Susanna) shocked to see man on roof.

  He wanted info-she gave it to him. Name of person? Place? Thing? Code?

  Info wanted: "Afro" or "Amfer"????

  "Walrus"????

  Broken glass, staged accident. He's clever. But not as clever as he thinks.

  Dark-color car. Probably stolen or rented.

  He saved his notes on a disk, stuck the disk in his desk drawer, told Gary to check and see if there were any reports of a dark, non-sports car stolen over the previous two days within forty miles of town. When Gary looked blankly at him, Justin said, "You're a cop. Use some cop stuff to figure it out."

  And the next thing he knew, he was headed over to the East End Journal office because that was the logical starting point. You could start with family, boyfriend, or office. Susanna's family was back in Ohio, which was where the body had been shipped for burial. She didn't seem to have a current boyfriend. The office was four blocks from the police station. It was an easy call.

  The atmosphere in the Journal office was solemn and subdued. Not surprising, Westwood decided, since everyone who worked there was in mourning.

  "What was she working on?" Harlan Corning repeated Westwood's question. He leaned back in his chair doing, Justin thought, his best Perry White impersonation. "She was in the middle of a lot of things, as always."

  "Can you be a little more specific?"

  "I just don't see the relevance, that's all. I don't think Susanna was killed-if she was really killed-because she panned Steven Spielberg's new movie."

  "Is that the last thing she wrote?"

  "Is Spielberg a suspect now?" When Westwood didn't answer, the newspaper editor just said, "No. The last thing she wrote was an obituary. A horrible coincidence, isn't it."
>
  "What was the obit?"

  "One of the local old-timers passed away. Bill Miller, used to be an actor. Susanna was quite attached to him. She did volunteer work at the Home."

  "The old-age home on the bay?"

  "Yup. The old boy died on Tuesday or Wednesday and she did the obit."

  "Anything special about it?"

  "Yeah. She screwed up." Westwood raised an eyebrow and the editor said, "She was too close to Miller and it turns out he was a gasbag. He exaggerated about his career and she printed it as if it were the gospel. It happens. We ain't the New York Times, you know what I mean? But we got a crazy phone call from some guy, a movie nut, who caught the mistakes. Demanded a retraction. I sent Susie back to do some fact checking. That's what she was doing, I think, when she got sick the other day."

  "Sick?"

  "Yeah. She went out to lunch, didn't come back. She called in sick. That was the day she…you know…"

  "Do you know where she called from?"

  "No. It wasn't her apartment, though. Probably somewhere in town. I could hear street noise. Cars. She must've been on her cell phone."

  "How crazy was the phone call, Mr. Corning? The one about the mistakes in the obit."

  "From the movie nut? You don't think-"

  "I can't imagine killing someone because she got her facts wrong in an obituary. But I'd like to talk to him anyway, if you have his number."

  "I gave it to Sue, but I've still got it somewhere. That was her punishment-she had to call the guy when she found out what was what."

  "Did she?"

  "I don't know if she found out, and I don't know if she called him. I never got the opportunity to ask her," he said sadly.

  Harlan Corning rooted around in his desk, shuffled through a stack of yellow Post-its. While he was looking, Justin said, "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put anything in the paper about this."

  The editor looked up, surprised. "About what?"

  "The fact that we think Ms. Morgan's death might not have been an accident."

  "I have a responsibility-" Corning began.

  "I know you do. But so do I. If I'm right."

  "So if you are right, you want whoever did it to keep thinking he's home free."

  Justin nodded. Corning went back to rooting through his desk until he found what he was looking for. "Here it is. Wally Crabbe." He held up a scrap of yellow paper with a name, address, and phone number on it. "He lives mid-Island, about an hour from here. The town's called Middleview." The editor wrote down the information for Westwood. "You know," Corning said slowly, "I also have a responsibility to report the facts. You don't know if your theory is fact, do you, Detective?"

  "No I don't," Justin said.

  "And Susanna was a good friend. I have a responsibility to her, too-don't you think?"

  "Yes I do." "Then it would be irresponsible of me to say anything. At least for now."

  "Thank you," Justin said.

  "But you will let me know one way or the other, won't you? When you have the facts, I mean."

  "You'll be the first, Mr. Corning. I promise."

  Harlan Corning handed Justin the piece of paper with the scribbled information. As they shook hands, he said, "Good luck with this guy, Detective. You're in for quite a treat."

  6

  Wallace P. Crabbe was irate.

  This was nothing unusual, because Wallace P. Crabbe was almost always irate. But he always kept his anger deep inside him. Always. On the surface-at work dealing with incompetent co-workers, on dinner dates with women whom he found unattractive and uninteresting, at meetings with authors whose manuscripts he copyedited, catching the most minute grammatical and factual errors-he was civil and polite, hardworking and trouble free. He was never the life of the party. About that he had no illusions. On the other hand, he was always invited to the party because he was appreciative of good food, could talk about the latest novel, was a very good listener, and almost always had a benign smile on his soft and pleasant-looking face.

  That was the surface.

  Inside, he hated smiling while he was bombarded with a constant stream of drivel. He hated all the novels he read and all the food he forced himself to eat at obnoxiously trendy restaurants. He hated almost everything and everyone. Inside, Wallace P. Crabbe was a roiling storm. Had been since he was twelve years old and Tony DeMarco knocked his schoolbooks out of his hands into a big patch of mud, then shoved him into the same mud patch and left, laughing, with his arm around the beautiful and bewitching eleven-year-old Abigail Winters. Wallace had been just about to ask Abigail, who had the most appealing ponytail, to go out to the movies with him. Instead, she went to the movies with Tony DeMarco, and that was when Wallace decided that life was basically unfair and that he was one of the unlucky majority who were going to get screwed over and over again by that very unfairness. But he saw no advantage to griping about it. The more he complained, the greater the chance, he figured, of being shoved into ever deeper and ever dirtier patches of mud.

  By the age of forty-nine, Wallace P. Crabbe had managed to do everything he could to quietly prove his theory to himself and to show that he had zero chance of achieving the slightest bit of happiness. And with each additional proof, Wallace got angrier and angrier.

  Inside.

  He'd been married once, some years ago, and it had lasted six years, until his wife came home and told him she'd been seeing his best friend on the side. Wallace was not happy about losing his wife-she was fairly quiet and easy to be with-but he had to admit he was even unhappier about losing his friend, since he didn't have all that many to spare. On the outside, he was understanding and rather gracious during the entire divorce process. Inside, he began having fantasies of his ex-wife and ex-friend in combination with such things as meat grinders and crossbows and hunting rifles. At age fifty-two, after his publishing company was absorbed by a huge German conglomerate, he was offered-and told to accept-early retirement. He accepted it gratefully and unhesitatingly and was well paid off. But ever since, he had had dreams about the human resources director who gave him the bad news in which his own hands were wrapped around her pale, too-thick neck and he choked the life out of her.

  Since he'd been laid off, he'd sold his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, making a tidy profit, as it was nearly mortgage free, and moved out to Long Island. Not one of the chic places, one of the suburban areas half an hour from the chic places. He got a small ranch-style house with a patch of a backyard and set himself up. Why not? What was in the city for him now? That was an easy one to answer: not much. The move didn't affect whatever work came his way. He could still get his occasional freelance copyediting assignments, that was no problem. There was less noise, less hassle, less pretension in suburbia. His social life had suffered, no question about that; it was a lot harder to meet people, especially women, but even in the city his social life had been moderately successful at best. Currently, he was seeing a woman who worked at a magazine geared for home gardeners. He found her too angular to be attractive and too obsessed with various subspecies of daylilies to be interesting, but he saw her two or three times a week. Either she cooked a bland meal that he didn't like or they went to a restaurant where the maitre d' kept them waiting too long before seating them. Through it all, Wallace P. Crabbe kept smiling. But slowly, he began retreating into the world within his 1950s two-bedroom ranch house.

  His routine there was very consistent. Every morning, Wallace had all three New York newspapers, the Daily News, the Post, and the Times, delivered. As well as Newsday, the Long Island paper. On Fridays, which was the day it came out, he also read the East End Journal. He had tried to break himself of this end-of-the-week habit several times but was unable to do it. He felt compelled to read the inane gossip about famous people he despised and the police reports about thieves stealing leftover chicken out of refrigerators and the idiotic letters to the editor about the new speed-bump controversy. He particularly was unable to resist the obituaries abou
t the barbers who'd been cutting hair so many years they refused to use electric razors and the old biddies who'd been around so long they thought they'd come over on the Mayflower. So, over three cups of strong, black coffee, he read his papers, always in the same order-News, Post, Times, Newsday, on Fridays the Journal-and always cover to cover. Nothing made him angrier than reading about crooked politicians and slimy rich people who broke all the rules and got away with it. On almost any given day, Wallace would rant and rave-silently, to himself-about national politics, local politics, the heat, the cold, the lack of quality on TV, obscene music lyrics by gangster rappers, the price of groceries, the low level of water in the reservoirs. Later that day, right before lunch, when he'd speak with his girlfriend on the telephone or with someone calling to ask him about a possible copyediting assignment, he would bring up a story he'd read earlier, one that had knotted his stomach and caused his throat to constrict. When it provoked no anger on the other end of the line, he would let it drop and say, in an absolutely even tone, "Yes, you're right, it's just the way of the world. It's nothing to get excited about."

  After lunch, he usually spent a couple of hours at his computer, in chat rooms, talking to his new circle of anonymous and mostly pseudonymous friends. In the late afternoon and, if he had no plans, at night, Wallace P. Crabbe would retreat into his one passion that elicited no anger and that never let him down: the movies. He rented at least one tape or DVD a day, sometimes two or even three. He read every book he could about Hollywood: celebrity biographies and autobiographies, critical analyses, books on how to write screenplays, behind-the-scenes "making of" books. He was obsessed with Hollywood movies. Not all of them, not the silents-he couldn't care less about those-but everything from the late thirties on. Screwball comedies. Melodramas. Noir thrillers. The Astaire and Kelly musicals. Mushy romances. He loved them all. At night he was usually awake until two or three in the morning watching his rentals or old films on cable. He thought he knew everything there was to know about the movies; he could tell you who directed what and who the cinematographer was and even the theme song that played over the credits and who wrote it. Watching a 1940s Clark Gable picture or a 1950s Ava Gardner was the one thing that transported him into a state of relative inner calm.