'Under what? I don't know where or when it happened or any of the names. I'd have to scan every issue for the last year, and I don't even know what paper I read it in. It may not have made the Times.'
'Be easier if I made a couple of phone calls.'
'That's what I was thinking.'
'Why don't you take a walk? Have yourself a cup of coffee. Get yourself a table at the Greek place on Eighth Avenue. I'll probably drop in there an hour from now, have myself some coffee and a piece of Danish.'
Forty minutes later he came to my table in the coffee shop at Eighth and Fifty-third. 'Just over a year ago,' he said. 'Woman named Marie Gotteskind. What's that mean, God is kind?'
'I think it means 'child of God.' '
'That's better, because God wasn't kind to Marie. She was reported abducted in broad daylight while shopping on Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven. Two men drove off with her in a truck, and three days later a couple of kids walking across the Forest Park Golf Course came upon her body. Sexual assault, multiple stab wounds. The One- Oh-Four caught the case and bounced it back to the One-Twelve once they ID'd her, because that was where the original abduction took place.'
'They get anywhere?'
He shook his head. 'Guy I talked to remembered the case well enough. It had people in the neighborhood pretty shook up for a couple of weeks there. Respectable woman walks down the street, couple of clowns grab her, it's like getting struck by lightning, you know what I mean? If it can happen to her it can happen to anybody, and you're not even safe in your own home. They were afraid there'd be more of the same, gang rape on wheels, the whole serial-killer bit. What was that case in L.A., they made a miniseries out of it?'
'I don't know.'
'Two Italian guys, I think they were cousins. They were doing hookers and leaving them up in the hills.
Hillside Strangler, that's what they called it. Stranglers, it should have been, but I guess the media named the case before they knew it was more than one person.'
'The woman in Woodhaven,' I said.
'Right. They were afraid she was the first of a series, but then there weren't any more and everybody relaxed. They still put a lot of effort into the case but nothing led anywhere. It's an open file now, and the thinking is that the only way they'll break it is if the perps get caught doing it again. He asked if we had anything tied into it. Do we?'
'No. What did the woman's husband do, did you happen to notice?'
'I don't think she was married. I think she was a schoolteacher.
Why?'
'She live alone?'
'What difference does it make?'
'I'd love to see the file, Joe.'
'You would, huh? Whyntcha ride out to the One-Twelve and ask them to show it to you.'
'I don't think that would work.'
'You don't, huh? You mean there are cops in this town won't go out of their way to do a favor for a private license? Jesus, I'm shocked.'
'I'd appreciate it.'
'A phone call or two's one thing,' he said. 'I didn't have to commit a flagrant breach of departmental regulations and neither did the guy on the job in Queens. But you're asking for disclosure of confidential materials. That file's not supposed to leave the office.'
'It doesn't have to. All he has to do is take five minutes to fax it.'
'You want the whole file? Full-scale homicide investigation, there's got to be twenty, thirty pages in that file.'
'The department can afford the fax charges.'
'I don't know,' he said. 'The mayor keeps telling us the city's going broke. What's your interest in it, anyway?'
'I can't say.'
'Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. You want it all flowing in one direction, don't you?'
'It's a confidential matter.'
'No shit. It's confidential, but departmental files are an open book, is that it?' He lit a cigarette and coughed. He said, 'This wouldn't have anything to do with a friend of yours, would it?'
'I don't follow you.'
'Your buddy Ballou. This got anything to do with him?'
'Of course not.'
'You sure of that?'
'He's out of the country,' I said. 'He's been gone for over a month and I don't know when he's coming back. And he's never been big on raping women and leaving them in the middle of the fairway.'
