Rolanda? Did he know what we were up to? He wasn’t saying.
“So were you spying on me?”
“Complete accident.”
We made small talk, occasionally blowing on our coffees, although it was more like something to do than an actual safety measure, until the subject returned, as I knew it would, to Jamal Harrington. He proceeded carefully, not wanting to make his offer of a ride seem like a quid pro quo—more information for a warm, dry vehicle and a hot beverage—but it did. Soon after, we pulled up to Lucy’s building without my having said much. He left the engine running.
“Apart from your prime suspect—a seventeen-year-old A student with no motive and no record,” I said, “how’s the case going?”
“Not an A student,” he corrected. “B plus. Looks like somebody whacked Mr. Bleimeister on the head a couple of times with a brick or bricklike object, then dumped him in the river. Might have survived the blows if he hadn’t drowned.” It was a ghastly thought.
“If he was a little slimmer we might not have found him for days.”
“What are you saying—heavy people float better? I would have thought the opposite was true.”
“You would have been wrong. If we hadn’t found him so soon after his death, we might not have connected it to Otis Randolph’s.”
“Another brick to the head?” I asked.
He nodded.
“M.E. says the two men died within an hour of each other, and the marks on the victims’ heads were remarkably similar. Two hours later and there would have been a shift change. Might have gone unnoticed. Randolph stank of alcohol, but there was none in his blood. And it’s a million to one that falling down the escalator and hitting his head—even if he’d been an epileptic—would have been enough to kill him.”
“Was the wound—?”
“About the size of a brick with some indentations on it, and above the brim.” He looked up from his coffee cup. “That means the top of the head. Not easy to fall and hit the top of your head, unless you’re jumping off a diving board into an empty pool,” he said.
“And even then you’d have to be an Olympic medalist to hit the very top of your head. Nobody noticed this when Otis’s body was found?”
“Cause of death was listed as undetermined.”
Poor Otis. What did he know or what had he seen? And what possible connection could Garland Bleimeister and Otis Randolph have had—a sixtysomething-year-old handyman from Harlem and a college dropout from—how did Labidou put it—Smallville, Pennsylvania?
“We know Jamal Harrington was acquainted with Otis Randolph from statements given by Wagner employees, and he was seen talking with Bleimeister on Wednesday. He’s a link, that’s all. We just want to talk to him. No one’s calling him a suspect.” The word
“Isn’t that just semantics? Look, I only met him a few times and doubt I’ll ever see him again. Show’s over tomorrow and I’ll go back to my sleepy Connecticut town and plant pansies or whatever it is you think suburbanites do.”
Stancik placed his coffee cup in the holder, fished two business cards out of his wallet, and gave them to me.
“What’s this for—in case I lose one?”
“I like pansies. One’s for Jamal. The other is in case you decide to call me after you get back to Springfield. It’s not that geographically undesirable.” Very smooth. Had I said I lived in Springfield? Right, he was a cop.
“Thanks for the lift. I’ll be thinking of you at three A.M. when the caffeine kicks in.”
“Feel free to give me a call.”
I turned up my collar and dashed across the wet street into the vestibule of Lucy’s building. A note was taped to her mailbox.
I’d started the day with J. C. Why not end it with her? I’d catch her up on what Rolanda and I had learned, and with any luck there’d be good leftovers.
My shoes squirted water with each step up to J. C’s apartment. I slipped out of them and shook off the rain before ringing her doorbell. Just as my finger hovered near the buzzer, J. C. opened the door, having seen me through the peephole. She looked paler than usual and wore the expression of a disapproving teacher. I wasn’t greeted with the smell of a welcoming dinner and Moochie and Bella didn’t dash out as they usually did.
“You’ve got company.”
Forty-seven
Was the other cop here—Stancik’s partner?
“Are you okay?” I kept my voice down. J. C. glanced in the direction of her weapon of choice. She was either signaling for me to reach for it or indicating she hadn’t needed it. Dang if I could tell which it was; I didn’t know her well enough. I took a tentative step into her apartment and peered to the right. On the sheltered part of her terrace, inspecting her plants, was Jamal Harrington. He was with a girl. All I knew about her was that she wore no makeup, wore a brown corduroy jacket, and wasn’t Cindy Gustafson. I closed the door behind me quickly, as if John Stancik might have followed me up the stairs.
“What the heck are they doing here?”
J. C. shrugged. “Some idiot must have buzzed them in.”
They’d been waiting for me on the upstairs landing when J. C. got home from yoga class. She’d threatened to call the cops—by now she probably had them on speed dial—and not even the presence of a fresh-faced twenty- five-year-old girl would satisfy her that they were not up to no good. She’d read the news—that was how confidence teams worked. One looked innocent and softened your defenses, then the other beat you to a pulp and took your stuff. It was only Jamal’s detailed description of his winning garden exhibit that kept her from swinging her trusty iron bar and braining him on the spot.
“Just because you can tell a gloxinia from a Glock, I’m supposed to believe you’re not thieves or psychos? I’m drawing a blank at present, but haven’t some legendary villains had innocuous hobbies?”
“I don’t know any legendary villains,” the boy had said. “You mean like Al Pacino in
J. C. was still poised to strike, if necessary. But Moochie had seemed fond of the boy, and the cat was usually a good judge of character.
“I’m in trouble and Ms. Holliday was kind to me last night,” Jamal had said. “I have no other place to go.”
With that, J. C. had invited them in.
Jamal and Not-Cindy halted their garden tour and turned toward the front door when they heard our voices. From a certain angle Jamal could be seen from the street where John Stancik might be lingering, so I motioned for him to come in. He ran toward me and grabbed both my hands as if his savior had arrived. The girl was less effusive.
He straightened up and regained some of his tough-guy demeanor. “Ms. Holliday, Ms. Peete said I was wrong about you. She said you’d help.” The boy was polite if nothing else.
“Stay off the terrace for one thing. I just got a police escort home, and my chauffeur may still be outside. I told him I’d probably never see you again, so he wouldn’t be too happy with me if he saw you on the terrace. Just for curiosity’s sake, how did you find me?”
“Followed you when you left the store yesterday. Then I saw the pilgrims and turkeys on the windows and knew which building and which floor you were on.”
The girl said nothing, either getting a new set of lies straight or trying to remember the ones she’d told me over breakfast.
“I don’t think I know your friend,” I said.
Jamal introduced Not-Cindy as Emma Franklin, the late Garland Bleimeister’s girlfriend. At least that was the
