“Could be. It’s still in his head, so we’ll know better after the postmortem.”
On the floor, near the hand clutching the cloth J, was a small brass key. “Mailbox?” Beam asked, pointing to the key.
“Haven’t touched that, either,” Minskoff said, deftly using the back of his wrist to adjust his glasses. “But his mailbox is open. Looks like he came downstairs to get his mail, but never got a chance to read it. It’s still in the box. Envelope I can see looks like it contains a rebate check. His lucky day.”
“You notice a lot for an ME.”
“Too many years hanging around guys like you. I learned to observe. Too much, I might add.” He bent back to his task, signaling that he was now ignoring Beam.
“I’m observing blood getting on your shoes,” Beam said, backing away from the doorway.
“Damn it!” he heard Minskoff say.
“Let’s find the super,” Beam said to Looper, “so we can have a look at Aimes’s apartment while Nell keeps tabs on things here.”
What they learned as soon as the super opened the door for them was that Aimes had bad taste and didn’t bother keeping things neat.
Aimes had been a smoker. His apartment reeked of tobacco smoke, and there were ashtrays scattered around, most of them with ashes or filtered cigarette butts in them. Looper closed his eyes and took in a deep and blissful breath, like a man who’d stepped into a perfume factory. The blinds on one of the windows were broken and hanging crookedly. The furniture was a mishmash of styles, a couple of uncomfortable looking Danish chairs, a fat sofa with a rose and vine pattern, an Oriental rug that managed to avoid every color in the sofa. On one wall were some framed photos of a racehorse-“Secretariat,” Looper announced, after closer inspection-and a blown-up color photo of a big sailboat, the racing kind, listing to starboard almost enough to capsize. There was a crew of about half a dozen in the boat. Beam looked closely and saw that one of them was a younger version of the dead man in the lobby.
“This prick used to have a lot of money,” Looper said. “Did things like race sailboats and kill girls. After the trial, his family still thought he was guilty and disinherited him.”
“Maybe played the horses, too,” Beam said, looking again at Secretariat. “Trying to regain his lost wealth.”
After putting on evidence gloves, they searched the apartment and found a sagging, unmade bed, a closet full of expensive but mostly out-of-style clothes. There was a desk drawer full of unpaid bills, past due notices, a checkbook that showed a balance of eighty-seven dollars and change. The checks were written for cash or to places like bars, restaurants, and shops.
Beam thumbed through the check pad. “Oh-ho! A ten-thousand-dollar deposit front end of every month.”
“Family buying his absence,” Looper said. “Black sheep, wild goose.”
“Probably.” Beam glanced around. “Whatever the species, you’d think he could still live better than this on a hundred and twenty thousand a year.”
“Gambled most of it away, would be my guess.”
Beam opened the desk’s shallow center drawer. There were some postage stamps in there, pens and pencils, a couple of race track stubs, Mets and Yankees schedules, a shabby deck of Bicycle playing cards. Beam thought Looper’s guess was a good one.
Looper was looking over Beam’s shoulder. “If he owed anybody money, they’re gonna be outta luck and pissed off.”
“Reverting to the mean,” Beam said.
“Huh?”
“That’s how most gamblers wind up.”
“Oh, I dunno. You ever been to Atlantic City? Vegas?”
“Yeah,” Beam said. “I left a little of me both those places.”
“I hit for nine hundred dollars once on a quarter slot machine,” Looper said. “Three smiling strawberries, straight across the pay line.”
“That would suggest you’ve got some bad luck coming.” Beam shut the drawer. “Let’s go downstairs and see if Nell’s got anything.”
What Nell had was a short, serious-looking bearded man wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt, and rubber flip-flop sandals. He appeared to be in his fifties, and had medium length, unkempt gray hair. Despite his casual clothes, there was a professorial air about him. Probably because of the oversized wire-framed glasses.
Nell and the man were standing at the curb, next to a parked radio car with its red and blue roof-bar lights winking almost unnoticeably in the bright sunlight.
“This is Vash Kolinsky,” she said, and introduced Beam and Looper.
“This is a terrible thing, this kind of violence,” Kolinsky said, glancing toward the crime scene. He had a slight middle-European, or maybe Russian, accent.
“Would you repeat to these detectives what you told me?” Nell asked.
“You ask nice, not hit me, so sure.” He was grinning-his idea of a joke. “I was playing chess on my laptop up there.” He pointed to a third-floor balcony on a building diagonally across the street. There were potted plants on it that might block a view of anyone sitting there. “My opponent in the Internet chess club, a dummy in Vancouver, is so slow it bores me to play him, so I wait for him to move, and wait and wait, and happen to look over here, toward this building. I see this policeman, and he was there when I first came out on the balcony half an hour before. There was something about him, like he was pretending to look into the parked cars. But I don’t think he was interested in the cars at all. He was up to something, watching for something or someone. Me? I worry. I have family in Kiev. I didn’t leave Russia under the best circumstances. I know policemen, and when something’s not right with them. With this policeman, something wasn’t right.”
“Can you be more specific?” Beam asked.
“Mostly, the way he acts. Like there’s more than one thing on his mind. And he had on a jacket, on such a hot day. And his uniform cap didn’t look right, didn’t fit him right.”
“Did you see him go into the building?” Beam asked.
“No. But I look away, look back, and he’s gone.”
“Then what?” Nell asked. She was staring at Beam as if he should pay special attention to Kolinsky’s answer.
“I move my queen’s pawn two spaces.”
“Mr. Kolinsky-”
“Then I hear a bang.”
“Like a shot?” Beam asked.
“Could be like a shot. I didn’t pay much attention. This is a noisy street, all the traffic, horns honking, and kids around, they bang on things. I see that dummy in Vancouver has already fallen into my trap, so I go back to playing chess. Then I hear sirens, hear them stop, look back outside, and see something is wrong. More police come. A crowd. I hear loud talk, people yelling back and forth, and I learn someone has been shot. Then I remember the bang.”
“Do you remember the time?”
“Exact? No. About one-thirty.”
“After you realized someone had been shot, did you continue to observe from your balcony?”
“Yes, I look, see everything. More police, ambulance. Saw the lady detective arrive, then you and you.”
“The cop wearing the jacket, did you see him again?”
“No. He was there before the shooting. Not after.”
“He could have left through the basement,” Looper said to Beam. “The way we went in to get the super.”
“That could be,” Kolinksy said. “I wouldn’t have seen him. I wasn’t looking for him.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” Beam asked.
“No. Someone in uniform, you see the uniform, not the face. He was average man. Not too tall or short or fat or thin. Average man.”
“Hair color?”
