Par Four, page 15
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
“Um. Why is that our problem?”
“It’s just so weird! Y’know, my brother owns Al’s Smokes. That newsstand and tobacco store on South Broadway? He busts his hump every day, stays open all kinds of crazy hours in order to make it. These two stores up here, they open up any old time, close up again any time they feel like it. Just put a note on the door and take off.”
“Clint, it may not be your work ethic but it’s not illegal,” I said.
“No, but it’s a sign of something,” Maddox said, “and at the pawn shop I think I know what it is.”
“What?”
“I’m almost sure he’s got another place. When he closes his store during business hours, he does the same thing every time.”
“What’s that?”
“Gets in his car, drives north to Fourteenth Avenue, and turns right.”
“Well, hey,” I said, “that sure does sound suspicious.”
There was a little silence, and Maddox said, “Okay, forget it,” and hung up. I stood holding the dead phone for a few seconds, first disbelieving and then so angry my chest hurt. He hung up on me! I didn’t have time for horseshit like that! Now he’d be crying to Frank that he wasn’t getting any cooperation in the department. My brain ran amok through idiot swearwords, damn shit fuck sonofabitch bastard. When the roaring in my head eased enough so I could think, I called the station. Sally answered and I said, very calmly, “Page Maddox, will you?” It took several minutes to get him back on the line. I counted backwards by ones from one hundred to keep from sliding back into outrage. When he answered I said, too fast for him to interrupt, “I was sarcastic because I’m in the middle of a pile of shit here that has nothing to do with you. I want you to accept my apology and then tell me quickly what you want and I’ll try to do it.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath and said. “What I need is somebody to help me for a couple of days. If I just had one guy, staked out in the neighborhood in some nondescript car with a radio…Then when I called him he could follow these guys when they close their shops, and maybe we could figure out what they’re up to.”
“I’ve got just the man. If I send him to the front of the pawn shop in about an hour, will you meet him there and brief him? I haven’t got time.”
“I’ll do it. Thanks, Jake.” He added sheepishly, “I’m sorry I got pissed.”
“ ‘S’awright.” I punched off and called Frank. “Is the old Dodge van in good enough shape to run?”
“Just about. What’s up?”
“Maddox wants help. Okay if I take the van and tell you about it later?”
“Sure. You need manpower?”
“I gotta guy. Will you switch me to my section?” Lou answered and found Darrell Betts for me. Darrell was thrilled to be picked for a stakeout, and he promised to remember my admonition not to let the gas gauge on the old van get below a quarter full, lest he stall out in traffic and kill a taxpayer. “Take a sandwich,” I said, “and pee before you go.”
“BCA’s here,” Kevin said as I hung up. Megan was coasting toward us, peering at house numbers, when we stepped outside and waved. As soon as she backed into a spot Jimmy jumped out and began throwing open doors. When I walked up to him he said crossly, “We don’t have time for this crap, Jake, you should have told me this morning there was a house to check!”
“Didn’t know it then,” I said and walked away from him. I’d just recovered from one fit of rage; it was too soon to start another. I climbed up into the van, where Trudy was hanging camera bags on herself as usual, and said, “Your pack mule is here.” She grinned and said, “Oh, Jake, really, you mean it?” but then pulled me close and murmured into my ear, “Why don’t you see what you can do for Jimmy before he has a worm?” I touched her cheek and moved reluctantly away from her sweet-smelling softness. Sidling warily through taped and bungeed equipment thickly hung from pegboard side panels, I found Jimmy rooting in a rear cupboard.
“Why don’t you let me show you the house first,” I said, “and then Kevin and I will carry stuff in for you.” He turned angrily with his prim little mouth open to tell me he didn’t need any help, but just then Megan Duffy vaulted up the back step in her ratty baseball cap, grabbed his list out of his hand and gave him a bump with one hip. “Go on, I’ll get the stuff out,” she said. “You want the spatter kit? Luminol? Coomassie Blue? You gonna need a vacuum filter?”
Megan’s air of affectionate disrespect seemed to loosen up something in Jimmy that was usually wrapped very tight. He gave a funny little shrug, flung half a dozen incomprehensible terms at her, and followed me into the house. I guided him around the bloodstained hazards I was coming to know so well and found him a safe viewing spot in the kitchen. As soon as he got a good look at the carnage, I could see I wasn’t going to have any more trouble with Jimmy Chang.
“Jesus,” he said. “It’s like a demo kit. Some of everything.”
“First thing we need to find out,” I told him, “is how many people were in this fight.”
“Yes, well,” he said, “plenty of blood to test.”
“The neighbors say they only heard Babe and Randy. The two people you saw at the river. But if you find more than two blood types, or an extra set of fingerprints, we have to rethink this family fight.”
“For sure,” he said dryly. He looked around some more. “One thing I may be able to do, after I’ve analyzed the spatters and those two big smears, is reconstruct the fight from the point of view of the woman.”
“You serious? God, that would be great.”
“Well, you see, I’ve just finished her autopsy. I’ve got her wounds firmly in mind. I should be able to match up that information with what we see here. Did I hear Kevin say you found the weapon?”
“Uh-huh. One, anyway. It’s in the yard.” We went out to my marker. He walked slowly around the knife, knelt to get a better look.
“Okay,” he said finally. “This could be it. The blade is long enough for the deepest wounds and slender enough to have made the smaller cuts, I think. I’ll be able to make a careful match back at the morgue. I don’t want to pick it up till Trudy takes pictures of the location.” We went back in the house just as Kevin and Megan, chatting amiably, squeezed through the front door, loaded with gear. “Oh,” Jimmy breathed, “be careful…” Trudy was right behind them with her own bags. The little house began to fill with physical mass.
We addressed the crowding first. Trudy took pictures of the broken lamp and TV set, and we bagged them and took them away. The overturned chairs in the living room could be fumed in our box at the station, we decided, so we tagged them and put them in Kevin’s car. Soon we had a path through the front of the house. Competition for work space in the kitchen continued fierce, however, so I told Kevin, “Let’s you and I look upstairs,” and he followed me up the narrow painted steps.
Three doors led off the small linoleum-covered landing. Babe’s bedroom had sprigged wallpaper and a pink spread turned back on pink-checked sheets. Babe got up for the last time in her life from the right-hand side of the bed, stepping onto a pink throw rug that was shaggy from many washes. Her purse was on the dresser, but the wallet was missing.
Randy’s chaotic bedroom had olive green walls and dark gold-painted furniture. Posters on the wall featured football stars and race car drivers in heroic poses, the Stones and Kiss looking gleefully crazed. A red print quilt and matching pillows were heaped on his unmade bed, dirty clothes festooned the two chairs, and the red shag throw rug by the bed was a jumble of socks and shoes, sweatshirts and a backpack.
“Bathroom looks pretty clean,” Kevin said from the hall. “Wonder why it smells so bad?”
I went in and looked in the toilet and closet, lifted the lid of the clothes hamper, and said, “Here.” A bloody white T-shirt lay on top of blood-soaked cutoffs.
“Wait, Trudy’ll have to get pictures before we look at them,” I said.
“I’ll get bags and stuff,” Kevin said and went out to his car. I stuck my head in the kitchen, found Trudy flashing away at the counter and stove, and asked her, “Would it foul you up if you took a couple pictures upstairs right now?”
Without looking up she said, “Whatcha got?”
“Bloody clothes in the hamper. We’d like to look and we can’t till you get pictures.”
“Uh…okay. I can make a note and come back to this. Hang on.” She noted the shot number and the subject in a small spiral notebook, wrote the next shot number on the line below and followed me up the stairs. The first thing I liked about Trudy was the seamless way she fit into her team’s work, so well-organized inside her head that she could deal with the commotion around a crime scene good-naturedly, without getting confused. In the bathroom she took one look at the mess in the hamper, said, “Uh-huh,” and started flashing away at high speed.
Kevin came back with paper bags, labels, and a flare pen, and laid them out in the hall. Trudy finished her shots, noted the numbers in her journal, and said, “Okay, it’s yours.”
“Thanks. You’re a pal,” I said, and she flashed one of her 200-watt smiles as she went back down the stairs.
Kevin watched her all the way down and said, “She’s a real doll, isn’t she?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t even think about it.”
“Oh-ho,” he said, “like that, huh?”
“Hope so. Lay out three or four of those bags in a row, will you?” I pulled on fresh gloves and began dropping bloody clothes onto the paper bags. We laid the shirt and cutoffs out flat and added the socks and shorts I found underneath.
“God, blood on the under shorts, even,” Kevin said.
“Uh-huh. Matches that mess in the kitchen, doesn’t it? Still damp in places, too. When you check these in, downtown, be sure you tell the guy on the evidence door to hang them till they dry out, so they won’t mildew. Isn’t it funny? To judge by his room they’re the first clothes he ever put in a hamper,” I said. “I wonder why he did that?”
“Musta been in shock,” Kevin said.
He wrote up the labels but left the clothes laid out so Jimmy could see them. The rest of the bathroom looked clean, except for a small brown streak on the outside of the sink that might have been blood, and one brown smudge by the shower at elbow height. We went back in Randy’s bedroom, raised the blinds, and went over all the walls and woodwork without finding any bloodstains. His desk drawers and pockets and the backpack yielded a couple of dollars in change, the only money we found in the house.
We went back down to the kitchen. Jimmy and Megan were working together on the spatter pattern by the pantry. Megan, using a magnifying glass and a tiny metal tape, was measuring the length and width of half a dozen widely separated spots on the wall. As she called numbers to Jimmy, he fed them into the sine function on his hand-held computer, wrote the answer on a sheet of paper, and measured and cut a length of waxed string off a spool. Megan took each string from him as he handed it to her, speared it with a pushpin and fastened it to the spot she had just measured. When six lengths of string hung down from the wall, Jimmy gathered them gently together, sliding the ends he held till he found a point in front of him where the ends of six taut strings met.
“Here’s where the victim was standing when she was struck,” he said. Trudy took several pictures over his shoulder. “Once you find the location,” Jimmy said, “you can see very plainly how the blood flew. Want to look, Jake?” I stood behind him and traced with my eye the separate paths a thousand drops of Babe’s blood had traveled from her body to the wall.
“Trudy and I want to lift that hand print intact, if we can,” Jimmy said, “and Megan’s going to finish getting slides from each blood smear on the floor. Then we can put down paper and quit this hopping over everything.”
“Jimmy,” I said, “you’ve got something, haven’t you, that tells you if there was blood on something and then it was washed off?”
“Sure. Luminol. You mean this maniac actually washed something?”
“Himself, I think. Upstairs.”
“Okay, soon as we’re done here we’ll test it.”
Trudy took several close-ups of the tragic handprint above the spatters.
“Seems to fade out a little from the flash,” she said.
“Hang on a minute,” Jimmy said, dug through his stash of treasures, and came back with a bottle that looked like glass cleaner but was marked “Coomassie Blue.”
“Wait,” she said, “I haven’t lifted a print yet. Where’s my duster kit?” She disappeared into the living room and came back with a small jar of powder and a long-handled brush.
“Looks like a makeup brush,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “My contribution to the State of Minnesota. It’s softer than the one they furnish. I like it better.” She twirled it between her palms to fluff the bristles, dipped the brush lightly in the black powder and began delicately brushing black powder onto the tops of the ridges in the hand print. When she had applied enough to suit herself she blew on the wall, gently, in a couple of places, took the brush and powder back to the living room and came back with a sheet of lifter paper and a hard rubber roller. She handed the roller to Jimmy, held the sheet of paper two inches from the wall and made tiny adjustments till she was satisfied that it covered the hand print.
“Okay,” she said, “now,” and pressed the sheet of paper to the wall. Jimmy, standing a little ahead of her, raised the roller between her two raised arms, pressed it hard against the wall, and rolled it down the paper. When he stepped away I realized they had both been holding their breath.
“Wow,” I said. “All in one swoop.”
“One is all you get,” Trudy said grimly. “You fuss with it, you ruin it.”
Trudy turned the paper and they stood looking down at it, intently, the way fingerprint experts do, never quite satisfied. “Mmmm,” Jimmy said, pointing his little finger at something, and Trudy sniffed and said, “nnch.” To me it looked flawless.
“Megan, you got your blood sample from this hand print yet?” Trudy asked.
“Uh-huh,” Megan said from under the table.
“Good. Give it a shot of that Coomassie Blue, then,” Trudy said and Jimmy sprayed the hand print. It turned dark purple, and Trudy took more pictures, with Jimmy fussing around her, muttering requests.
Finally Jimmy quit mooning over the hand print and said, “Okay, now! Megan, you’ve got a few more blood samples to get here, right?”
“Ah-hah,” Megan groaned, from a tight space between cupboards.
“Good. Trudy and I will have a look upstairs.”
Jimmy and Trudy were able to get into the bathroom together, if Kevin and I stayed in the hall. Jimmy sprayed the sink and the shower from a bottle marked “Luminol.”
“Turn out the hall light,” he said, and closed the window blind. We stood in the dark together like kids at a teen-age party, and after a couple of minutes the sink and shower began to fluoresce. They turned blue-white, glowing brighter as we watched.
“Be damned,” I said. “Still works after two days, huh?”
“Oh, much longer than that,” Jimmy said. “Months. Years, sometimes. In fact the older the blood gets the longer it will glow.”
“So he washed blood off his hands in the sink and then took a shower,” I said.
“Somebody did,” Jimmy said.
“There’s a little smear on the outside of the sink, might be blood,” I said, “and one mark on the wall there. Is that enough to test?”
“Yes, I should think so. I’ll get Megan up here, she’s the best with these tiny samples.”
“You got yourself a good new assistant, huh?”
“Indeed. The best. If I can put up with her mouth,” he said, with an uncharacteristic, rueful laugh, and then clamped his Awesome Asian look back on. “Trudy, now you need to get out in the back yard and get some pictures of the knife that Jake found out there. When you’re done, go ahead and bag it and tag it.”
“You need any help?” I asked her.
“Let Kevin help her if she does,” Jimmy said. “If you want to talk to me about this fight, it’s got to be now.” He stuck his arm out and glared at his wrist watch.
We went down and stood by the chalk mark in the living room where the broken lamp had been. I turned on my tape recorder and spoke the date and time into it. “The argument appears to have started here,” Jimmy said. “We didn’t find any blood in here, did you? No. But somebody got excited enough to knock over the lamp, and a couple of chairs. Then for some reason they moved to the kitchen.
“As we’ve all observed, a great many dishes were thrown. No way to know who threw them till the fingerprint work is completed. Maybe not then. The first knife cuts were probably the small, shallow ones you saw on her face and neck. They look somewhat tentative. Then maybe she threw that roaster and hit somebody. It’s dented. The battle escalated, for whatever reasons, and I believe the first deep wound was administered here,” he said, moving to the table. “He, or they, must have held her, bent backwards over the table, and brought the knife straight down. That’s the deepest cut I found on her. It punctured her lung, and caused this,” he pointed up at the fine brown spray arcing across the ceiling. “Blood tests have to confirm this, of course, but that’s the way blood would spray out of a lung that was still working. If that’s not the woman’s blood on the ceiling, then you’re looking for another seriously injured party, because there’s no wound on Randy’s body that would have produced that spray. You can tell Pokey he was right; Babe almost certainly died before she went in the river.”
“About when, do you think?”
“We’ll be arguing about that for a while. Being in the water confuses everything. If your officer is right that she was somewhat buoyant, then I want to say the longest time you can possibly afford me.”
“I talked to her myself Tuesday morning. Could have been any time Tuesday after that, I guess. But Kevin’s witnesses all say the fight took place late afternoon Tuesday.”
