Empire State Building, and this one went only as high as the twenty-fifth floor. After that you walked. Charlie climbed two flights and nodded to the bodyguard who sat at the foot of the stairs to the next floor. He had been here before and the man knew him, as did the three other guards at the head of the stairs. One of them unlocked the door for him.
With his shoulder-length white hair Judge Santini bore a strong resemblance to an Old Testament prophet. He didn’t sound like one.
“Crap, that’s what it is, crap. I pay a goddamn fortune for flour just so I can get a good bowl of pasta and what do you turn it into?” He pushed the plate of spaghetti away distastefully and dabbed the sauce from his lips with the large napkin he had tucked into his shirt collar.
“I did the best I could,” his wife shouted back. She was small and dark and twenty years younger than he. “You want somebody to make spaghetti for you by hand, you should have married a
The shrill ring of the telephone cut through her words and silenced her instantly. They both looked at the instrument on the desk, then she turned and hurriedly left the room, closing the door behind her. There weren’t many calls these days and what few came through were always important and about business she did not want to hear. Rosa Santini enjoyed all the luxuries that life provided, and what she didn’t know about the judge’s business wasn’t going to bother her.
Judge Santini stood, wiped his mouth again and laid the napkin on the table. He didn’t hurry, not at his age he didn’t, but neither did he dawdle. He sat down at the desk, took out a blank notepad and stylo and reached for the phone. It was an old instrument with the cracked handpiece held together by wrappings of friction tape, while the cord was frayed and spliced.
“Santini speaking,” he said and listened carefully, his eyes widened. “Mike — Big Mike — my God!” After this he said little, just yes and no, and when he hung up his hands were shaking.
“Big Mike,” Lieutenant Grassioli said, almost smiling; even a mindful twinge from his ulcer didn’t depress him as it usually did. “Someone did a good day’s work.” The bloodstained jimmy lay on the desk before him and he admired it as though it were a work of art. “Who did it?”
“The chances are that it was a break and entry that went wrong,” Andy said, standing on the other side of the desk. He read from his notepad, quickly summing up all the relevant details. Grassioli grunted when he finished and pointed to the traces of fingerprint powder on the end of the iron.
“What about this? Prints any good?”
“Very clear, lieutenant. Thumb and first three fingers of the right hand.”
“Any chance that the bodyguard or the girl polished the old bastard off?”
“I’d say one in a thousand, sir. No motive at all — he was the one who kept them both eating. And they seemed to be really broken up, not about him I don’t think, but about losing their meal ticket.”
Grassioli dropped the jimmy back into the bag and handed it across the desk to Andy. “That’s good enough. We’ll have a messenger going down to BCI next week so send the prints along then and a
While Andy was making a note on his pad the phone rang; the lieutenant picked it up. Andy wasn’t listening to the conversation and was halfway to the door when Grassioli covered the mouthpiece and snapped, “Come back here, Rusch,” then turned his attention to the phone.
“Yes, sir, that’s right,” he said. “There seems no doubt that it was a break and entry, the killer used the same jimmy for the job. A filed-down tire iron.” He listened for a moment and his face flushed. “No, sir, no we couldn’t. What else could we do? Yes, that’s SOP. No, sir. Right away, sir. I’ll have someone get on it now, sir.”
“Son of a bitch,” the lieutenant added, but only after he had hung up the receiver. “You’ve done a lousy job on this case, Rusch. Now get back on it and see if you can do it right. Find out how the killer got into the building — and if it really was break and entry. Fingerprint those two suspects. Get a messenger down to Criminal Identification with the prints and have them run through, I want a make on the killer if he has a record. Get moving.”
“I didn’t know Big Mike had any friends?”
“Friends or enemies, I don’t give a damn. But someone is putting the pressure on us for results. So wrap this up as fast as possible.”
“By myself, lieutenant?”
Grassioli chewed the end of his stylo. “No, I want the report as soon as possible. Take Kulozik with you.” He belched painfully and reached into the drawer for the pills.
Detective Steve Kulozik’s fingers were short and thick and looked as though they should be clumsy; instead they were agile and under precise control. He held Shirl’s right thumb with firm pressure and rolled it across the glazed white tile, leaving a clear and unsmudged print inside the square marked R THMB. Then one by one, he pressed the rest of her fingers to the ink pad and then to the tile until all the squares were full.
“Could I have your name, miss?”
“Shirl Greene, that’s spelled with an
“Nothing like that at all, Miss Greene.” Kulozik carefully printed her name with a thin grease pencil in the space at the bottom of the tile. “These prints aren’t made public, they’re just used in conjunction with this case. Could I have your date of birth?”
“October twelfth, 1977.”
“I think that’s all we need now.” He slid the tile into a plastic case along with the ink pad.
Shirl went to wash the ink from her hands, and Steve was packing in the fingerprint equipment when the door announcer buzzed.
“Do you have her prints?” Andy asked when he came in.
“All finished.”
“Fine, then all that’s left is to get the prints from the bodyguard, he’s waiting downstairs in the lobby. And I found a window in the cellar that looks like it was pried open, better check that for latent prints too. The elevator operator will show you where it is.”
“On my way,” Steve said, shouldering the equipment case.
Shirl came out as Steve was leaving. “We have a lead now, Miss Greene,” Andy told her. “I found a window in the basement that has been pried open. If there are any fingerprints on the glass or frame and they match the ones found on the jimmy, it will be fairly strong evidence that whoever did the killing broke into the building that way. And we’ll compare the jimmy marks with the ones on the door here. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“No,” she said, “of course not.”
The chair was soft and the murmuring air-conditioner made the room an island of comfort in the steaming heat of the city. He leaned back and some of the tension and fatigue drained away; the door announcer buzzed.
“Excuse me,” Shirl said and went to answer it. There was a murmur of voices in the hallway behind him as he flipped the pages in his notepad. The plastic cover was buckled on one of the sheets and some of the lettering
