“She wasn’t and didn’t.”
“Now he could have been a smoker and not smoked in her apartment, out of respect for her wishes.”
“I suppose,” I said, “but when he had her tied up and started tortur-ing her, I wouldn’t think respect would play much of a role.”
“No, you’re absolutely right. She’s tied up with tape on her mouth, first thing he’d do is light one up. And most likely use her for an ashtray, far as that goes, and that’s one thing I can tell you we didn’t find.”
“Burn marks.”
“He worked her over pretty good. I didn’t want to go into detail in All the Flowers Are Dying
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front of your wife, but this guy was a fucking animal. If he’d had a cigarette going, we’d have seen evidence on the corpse.”
“You don’t smoke yourself.”
“No, I never started.”
“When you walked into the crime scene—”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question. Did I smell smoke? I didn’t notice, but would I? I can’t answer that. Plus my partner and I weren’t the first people there. A pair of uniforms responded to the 911
call and were first on the scene. She hadn’t been dead that long, so there wasn’t the intense odor of advanced decomposition that develops over time, but you know the things that happen. The bowels let go, the bladder lets go. You know right away you’re not in a perfume factory.”
“So one of the blues might have lit a cigarette.”
“They’re not supposed to,” he said, “but people do it. To mask the smell and just because you’re standing around and there’s a dead body there and it’s the middle of the night and you’re a smoker and you want a cigarette so you light one up. But I didn’t notice the smell of smoke, and neither did my partner, and I’ve got a call in to ask the two uniforms if they noticed the smell of smoke when they went in, but if they’re smokers all bets are off.”
“If they say no, they’re too used to it to notice. If they say yes, they might be lying to cover up their own smoking.”
“You know how a cop thinks,” he said with approval. “Long and short of it, strongest argument is he’s not a smoker because he didn’t put out his cigarettes on her. And now that we’ve ruled your guy out, suppose you tell me who he is and how to get ahold of him.”
“Now that we’ve ruled him out.”
“Right.”
I told him I had a problem with that. I’d be compromising my client’s interests. She’d wanted a confidential investigation of a new boyfriend, just to make sure he didn’t have an arrest record or a wife in Mamaroneck, and the last thing she’d want me to do was put the guy front and center in a murder investigation.
He said, “I thought you were looking into something for a friend.
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Now she’s a client. You licensed? You working for an attorney? If not, there’s no privilege here.”
“I never said there was. If I thought for a minute there was a possible connection—”
“You must have, or you wouldn’t have raised the issue. You had enough of a feeling about the guy to call me, and I spent the better part of an hour on it, so where do you get off holding out?”
“You’re right,” I said, “but I haven’t got anything to give you. His name is David Thompson, except that may not be his name. Now you know everything I know.”
“Not everything. Who’s your client?”
“No,” I said. “Privilege or no, I’m not giving you that. I’ll talk to her, and if it’s okay with her I’ll give you the name. But do you really want to send the investigation in this direction? If you want to start checking out every guy who may have lied to a woman . . .”
“Let’s leave it that you’ll talk to her.” That’s where we left it, but as soon as I’d rung off I remembered something that had been sticking in the back of my mind. I called him right back. “The 911 call,” I said. “You said middle of the night?”
“Well, not quite. Four in the morning. Close enough to the middle of the night, although I guess it would have been ten or eleven in the morning in Prague.”
“The call came from Prague?”
“It might as well have. Didn’t show up on Caller ID, and when we checked the LUDS we got an unregistered cell phone.”
“They record the 911 calls, don’t they?”
“Oh, absolutely, and it’s all on tape. Or digital, I guess. Everything’s digital nowadays.”
Even fingers and toes. “Somebody called in at four in the morning.
You said ‘he.’ The caller was male?”
“Probably. It’s hard to tell too much from a whisper.”
“He whispered? Unless they refined the technology, that means no voiceprint ID.”
