much trouble. In the squad room I played do-you-know with a wiry, long-jawed detective named Antonelli. We knew enough of the same people for him to relax with me. I told him what I was working on and mentioned that Frank Fitzroy had steered it my way. He knew Frank, too, though I didn't get the impression that they were crazy about each other.
'I'll see what our file looks like,' he said. 'But you probably saw copies of our reports in the file Fitzroy showed you.'
'What I mostly want is to talk with somebody who looked at the body.'
'Wouldn't the names of officers on the scene be in the file you saw in Manhattan?'
I'd thought of that myself. Maybe I could have managed all this without coming out to the ass end of Brooklyn. But when you go out and look for something you occasionally find more than you knew you were looking for.
'Well, maybe I can find that file,' he said, and left me at an old wooden desk scarred with cigarette burns along its edges. Two desks over, a black detective with his sleeves rolled up was talking on the phone. It sounded as though he was talking to a woman, and it didn't sound much like police business.
At another desk along the far wall a pair of cops, one uniformed and one in a suit, were questioning a teenager with a mop of unruly yellow hair. I couldn't hear what they were saying.
Antonelli came back with a slim file and dropped it on the desk in front of me. I went through it, pausing now and then to make a note in my notebook. The victim, I learned, was a Susan Potowski of 2705
Haring Street. She'd been a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two, separated from her husband, a construction laborer. She lived with her kids in the lower flat of a two-family semi-detached house, and she'd been killed around two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon.
Her kids found her. They came home from school together around three thirty, a boy of eight and a girl of ten, and they found their mother on the kitchen floor, her clothing partly removed, her body covered with stab wounds. They ran around the street screaming until the beat cop turned up.
'Finding anything?'
'Maybe,' I said. I copied down the name of the first cop on the scene, added those of two detectives from the Six-One who'd gone to the Haring Street house before switching the case to Midtown North. I showed the three names to Antonelli. 'Any of these guys still work out of here?'
'Patrolman Burton Havermeyer, Detective Third-Grade Kenneth Allgood, Detective First-Grade Michael Quinn. Mick Quinn died two, maybe three years ago. Line of duty. He and a partner had a liquor store staked out on Avenue W and there were shots exchanged and he was killed. Terrible thing.
Lost a wife to cancer two years before that, so he left four kids all alone in the world, the oldest just starting college. You must have read about it.'
'I think I did.'
'Guys who shot him pulled good long time. But they're alive and he's dead, so go figure. The other two, Allgood and Havermeyer, I don't even know the names, so they've been off the Six-One since before my time, which is what? Five years? Something like that.'
'Can you find out where they went?'
'I can probably find out something. What do you want to ask 'em, anyway?'
'If she was stabbed in both eyes.'
'Wasn't there an M.E.'s report in the file whats-his-name showed you? Fitzroy?'
I nodded. 'Both eyes.'
'So?'
'Remember that case some years ago? They pulled some woman out of the Hudson, called it death by drowning? Then some genius in the Medical Examiner's office took the skull and started using it for a paperweight, and there was a scandal about that, and because of all the heat somebody finally took a good look at the skull for the first time and found a bullet hole in it.'
'I remember. She was some woman from New Jersey, married to a doctor, wasn't she?'
'That's right.'
'I got a rule-of-thumb. When a doctor's wife gets killed, he did it. I don't give a shit about the evidence.
The doc always did it. I don't remember whether this one got off or not.'
'Neither do I.'
'I take your point, though. The M.E.'s report isn't something you want to run to the bank with. But how good is a witness to something that happened nine years ago?'
'Not too good. Still-'
'I'll see what I can see.'
He was gone a little longer this time, and he had a funny expression on his face when he returned. 'Bad luck case,' he said.
'Allgood's dead, too. And the patrolman, Havermeyer, he left the department.'
'How did Allgood die?'
'Heart attack, about a year ago. He got transferred out a couple of years back. He was working out of Centre Street headquarters.
Collapsed at his desk one day and died. One of the guys in the file room knew him from when he worked here and happened to know how he died. Havermeyer could be dead, too, for all I know.'
