I listened to the silence until she finally said, “This number I called, it’s a cell, right?”
“Yes.”
“Leave it on,” she said. And hung up.
“Mrs. Greene?”
“Who is calling, please?”
“My name is Burke, ma’am. I believe you were told I would be...”
“Yes. Yes, I was,” she said. I could have been a magazine salesman for all the emotion in her voice.
“Can you tell me when it would be convenient for me to come by and—”
“Convenient?”
“My apologies, ma’am. A poor choice of words. If you can give me a time, any time at all, that would be acceptable to you, I would like to talk with you.”
“Here?”
“Or anyplace you wish, ma’am. And in any company you wish, as well.”
“Company?”
“If you would feel more comfortable not being alone when I—”
“Comfortable?”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry if I have offended you in any way,” I said softly, treading delicately. “I have a job to do, and I’m trying to do it as best I can. You could help, considerably. My only point, all I was saying, is that I will do anything in my power to...minimize whatever negatives you might associate with talking to me.”
“You’re from the City, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you know how to get here, where I live?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How long would it take you?”
“To be safe, a couple of hours.”
“Safe?”
“To be certain I was on time,” I said, beginning to catch the rhythm of her communication, sensing that any show of impatience on my part would be a lighted match to her gasoline.
“Can you be here by noon?”
“Absolutely,” I promised her. Easy enough—it was only nine in the morning. And I was already on the Island.
She hadn’t offered me directions, and I hadn’t asked. I had her address nailed. Not just from the street map—I’d driven past her house twice before I’d called. The town was in central Long Island, splayed across the Nassau-Suffolk border. All I knew about it before I drove through the first time was from checking the real-estate section of
The commercial area was long and narrow. A single main street, with no depth to it, bisected by tracks from the LIRR commuter line. The little wooden depot was small and deeply weathered. Either nobody gave much of a damn, or some historical-preservation society wouldn’t let them touch it. I can never tell the difference. The parking lot was big enough for a couple of hundred cars, but only the area closest to the station was paved. At that hour of the morning, it was as full as it was going to get. Maybe thirty cars, each parked a polite distance from the next.
The north side of the strip looked like it had been there for quite a while. The street had a gentle curve to it, and the shops were small, with storefronts laid out in compliance with some quaintness code. A patisserie, a gourmet deli, a tea shoppe, an apothecary, couple of boutiques. Almost everything was two-story. Retail operations at street level, with a plain door between every few shops, probably for access to the second-floor apartments.
The south side of the strip was string-straight, not so much modern as sterile. It felt like an afterthought. Most of the frontage was all-glass, and the individual units were wider. It boasted a discount drugstore, a tanning salon, a SuperCuts, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, and an OTB.
From end to end, little slot-size stores. Not a single supermarket, home-improvement warehouse, or chain bookstore—that size stuff would be in a mall, somewhere close by.
I was way early, so I found a spot at a meter and walked over to the Baskin-Robbins. Got myself a two-scoop cup of mango ice from a young woman with purple hair and a passe nose ring, and took it back to the Plymouth.
I killed half an hour playing with various approaches I could use. All I really knew about the girl’s mother was that I’d most likely not get a second chance with her. When I’d asked Giovanni, he’d just said, “I knew Hazel when we were kids. I could tell you what she was like then. But I don’t know her now.”
If I hadn’t scouted the area beforehand, I would have rented a car for the meeting. Something to go with my medium-gray summer-weight suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie, and scuffed black leather attache case.
Her house was near the middle of a short, straight block. The yards were shallow in front, fairly deep in back, but cramped tight on the sides. The street wasn’t so wide that any neighbor with an interest would need a telescope.
I had to assume she’d had a lot of company back when they’d found her daughter’s body, and I wanted to look like I was more of the same, a year later. Not a cop. Some kind of civilian thief, like an insurance adjuster, or a lawyer.
I parked the Plymouth on the far side of a copse of trees that divided the houses from what looked like a Little League baseball field, a few blocks down from her address. Then I went for a walk.
If anyone wanted to follow me back to the car, they’d have to do it on foot, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of terrain a shadow would want to work. Every neighborhood has some wannabe cop twerp who listens to the police band on a scanner and likes “running the plates” of suspicious cars. But even if I got unlucky enough to stumble across one of those, the Plymouth would come up clean.
For that matter, so would I. Wayne B. Askew was a good citizen. The “B” was for “Burke,” that’s what his friends call him. An undistinguished sort of a guy. Self-employed all his life, now semi-retired. Still kept his hand in, dabbling in real estate. Never been arrested. No military service—that bad ticker, you know.
That’s an extra safety feature, a bad heart. I always carry one of those Medical Alert cards. Mine says Wayne had a quadruple bypass a couple of years ago, takes all kinds of medication for it. And, around my neck, I wear a plain steel necklace holding a small metal screw-cap cylinder. The cylinder is stamped with the serpent-curling- around-the-staff symbol, and the words: “Nitroglycerin. Change Pills Every 2–3 Weeks.” Inside the cylinder, I keep a half-dozen legit nitro pills. If I get busted, I know how to fake a heart attack. And when one of the cops reaches for the life-saving cylinder...
If that doesn’t look like the right play—maybe too many of them in on the arrest—I can always have the attack in the holding cell. When they call the cardiologist listed on the Medical Alert card, the phone rings in my lawyer’s office.
Wayne B. Askew will stand a lot of scrutiny. But if his prints drop, so does the mask.
The house was an ambassador for the subdivision. Started out a basic two-bedroom, one-bath unit on a concrete slab, but the carport had been made into a real garage, and the dormer window showed that the attic had been finished for occupancy. Maybe another bedroom and bath up there, too; no way to tell from the outside.
I noticed other upgrades. Vinyl siding in a rich shade of brown, set off by white trimming for a gingerbread look. A bay window in front. Skylight above it. The lawn was neatly mowed, but not razor-edged immaculate the way some others I passed were. No fence.
Slate slabs, set in an irregular pattern, led up to the front entrance. The door was painted the same color as
