Diamond Solitaire (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Crime Scene Unit were running the inquiry their own way, and the detective skills of Peter Diamond were not included in the plans. He was finding that being a bystander was more stressful than heading the murder squad.

Early in the morning, realizing he hadn't eaten anything since the flight from London, he went looking for a coffee shop and found Hungry Mac's on Broadway and 114th. Number Seven on the menu, with just about everything in the kitchen included, carried the promise of what he regarded as a basic breakfast, and he ordered a double portion. He was on one of the stools at the counter—an uncomfortable perch for a big man—in order to get a view of the TV set. The Firbank wasn't the sort of hotel that provided television in the rooms, so he hadn't yet seen if there was any news coverage of the murder and Naomi's abduction. To add to his frustration, some kind of idiot game show was on the screen at present and two of the customers were watching as if it were the high point of their week.

He should have realized he'd get the information he wanted from the man who took his order.

"You think you can put away two breakfasts?"

"I'm certain I can."

"You visiting?"

"Er, yes."

"From England?"

"Yes."

"Where you staying?"

He hesitated. He hadn't personally experienced rapid-fire interrogation by a New York waiter, though he'd seen others getting the treatment. "The Firbank."

"Where they found the dead woman?"

"Yes." He tried to make light of it. "Hot and cold in all rooms. Towels and corpse provided by the management."

"You get some crazies these days," the man remarked to the shop in general, and it wasn't entirely clear whether he meant Diamond. "This guy slept in the Firbank last night." Evidently he did mean Diamond.

The place was pretty full, but no one else seemed interested where Diamond had slept.

When the plateful of bacon, sausages, hash browns and four eggs, easy and over, was served with toast and coffee, there was an extra tidbit in the form of some hard information from the waiter. "I hear they found the car the killer used."

Diamond had the knife and fork poised over the plate. "Where?"

"Some cop spotted it in Chinatown."

"No one in it, I suppose?"

"No chance."

He bolted his double breakfast at a rate that would be a talking point in Hungry Mac's for weeks to come and legged it rapidly down to the 26th Precinct station house. There, his air of authority carried him through as far as Sergeant Stein of the Detective Bureau, a gangling, grizzled man in a faded pink shirt and black jeans, who—this morning—was the senior detective on the case.

"You're the British cop," Stein said in a tone that suggested he'd been warned to look out for Diamond.

"I hear you found the car."

"A patrolman did."

"Chinatown. Is that somewhere near the Bowery?"

"You could say that."

"Where exactly is it, then?"

"Chinatown?"

"The Buick."

"They moved it," said Sergeant Stein, and added, after a considerable pause, "for forensic examination."

"So what time was it found?"

"A statement will be issued later."

"Come on," said Diamond in a flush of annoyance. "I'm not here out of morbid curiosity."

"What
are
you here for?" Stein asked.

"For a missing child out there with a murderer. Isn't that a good enough reason for the New York Police Department?"

Stein was unrepentant. "Mister, I should be asking you the questions."

"Like what?"

"Like what is your special interest in this kid?"

Diamond tensed. "What exactly are you driving at, Sergeant?"

"We take a good look at middle-aged guys who follow little girls."

The sergeant came within an ace of being thumped, and he knew it, because Diamond advanced on him until they were almost nose to nose like boxers staring each other out. "That is not only insulting, it's also provocation," he said on a note from deep in his gut. "If you want to hang on to your shield, don't ever give horseshit like that to a senior policeman." The minor detail that he was no longer a senior policeman didn't arise. He'd reacted as if he was. In the heat of the moment, he'd have needed to think hard to remind himself that he was not. And Sergeant Stein wasn't to know.

Stein backed down, actually raising his right palm like an Indian making peace. "Just overlook what I said, would you? It was a heavy night."

"Tonight could be heavier," Diamond told him. "Well? What time did they find the car?"

"Around two A.M. on Mulberry Street."

"Anyone see anything?"

"No witnesses yet."

"Where was the car taken to be examined?"

"Forensic has a workshop on Amsterdam."

"Is that a walking proposition?"

"You want to visit? You can ride with a patrol. Just wait here. Mr. Diamond." Nodding a number of times to demonstrate his newfound cooperativeness, Stein departed thankfully from Diamond's presence.

The ride to Amsterdam Avenue in the company of a laconic, gum-chewing officer allowed Diamond to weigh Stein's remark. Child abuse had always been around, yet lately its notoriety had increased sharply. Whether the practice was on the increase was another question. As with rape and other sexual offenses, the statistics needed to be put in the context of the greater opportunities for reporting and detecting the crimes. Whatever the truth, the public perception was that any man not actually a parent or a teacher had better not be seen alone with a young kid. He understood the need for vigilance, but he still regretted the fact that a few sexual deviants and sensation-seeking newspapers could make trust between man and child seem so unlikely as to be impossible anymore.

Without a kid of his own, he couldn't truly view the question as a parent would, but were childless people who liked children fated to be treated as potential perverts?

The place where vehicles were taken for the forensic tests was hardly the squeaky-clean workshop-cum-laboratory Diamond had expected to walk into. It was a converted garage with a couple of ramps and inspection pits manned by young men in greasy overalls. The Buick was parked on the forecourt and was getting no attention at all.

He soon found an easygoing and friendly "evidence technician" who appeared not to have been warned to watch out for a trouble-making British cop, and was quite willing to talk. "The Buick? It'll take us at least a week. From what I can tell so far, half of New York seems to have driven that car and used it for sex and smoking. My guess is that it was owned by a syndicate of students."

"You've done some preliminary work, then?"

"Had to look inside, remove most of the litter for examination."

"What does it amount to?"

"The litter? Cigarette packets and butts, candy wrappers, sandwich wrappers, tissues, condom packets, gasoline receipts, Alka-Seltzers, chewing gum, ballpoints, parking tickets, panty-liners, take-out containers—want me to go on?"

"Quite a heap, I should think," Diamond commented. "Or have you bagged it up already?"

"Give me a break, man. Four cars were brought in last night."

"May I take a look at this collection? I am assigned to the case."

"You're welcome."

He was led to the back of the garage, through an office into a large room where the items he'd just heard listed were displayed on a long trestle table. The impression he'd first gained, of good-natured inefficiency, was given a sharp corrective. Every piece was already labeled and assigned a number, with the position where it was found in the car duly noted.

The Buick's interior hadn't been cleared of rubbish since February at least, judging by the date of a gasoline receipt Someone had collected a stack and clipped them together. It would be the devil's own job to try and identify something discarded by Mrs. Tanaka's killer.

"You checked the boot, I suppose?"

"Which boot was that?" his informant asked.

He could do without differences in the language adding to his problem. "The storage place at the rear of the car."

"The trunk. Yeah. We checked."

"Just that I didn't see any mention of the boot on these labels. Now I understand why."

"Right."

He bent over to look at the ballpoint pens. "I suppose you can tell if these were used recently. It's okay, I'm not going to touch."

"How would we know that?"

"If a ballpoint hasn't been used for some time, it gets dry. When you write with it, you have to run the point over a surface for a moment to get some ink."

His friend the evidence technician received this statement of the obvious more solemnly than it deserved. "That may be true, but I know of no test that would tell you how long it is since a pen was used. It would depend on certain variables, such as the temperature where it was stored. Jesus, man, we can't even tell with accuracy how long the body has been left someplace, so I don't see us succeeding with ballpoints."

"No, but if the pen delivers the ink straightaway, the chances are it was used not long ago." He was sounding like Sherlock Holmes, except that this wasn't impressing anyone, least of all himself. Better say no more about ballpoints. "May I examine the receipts?"

"Sure. Just hold them by the clip and use this probe to separate them."

"I can't imagine the killer stopped at a gas station anyway," Diamond commented, picking up the sheaf of receipts. "It's unlikely any of these would carry his prints."

"We can check the date, no problem," said the technician.

"I'm not looking for a date," Diamond told him. He was acting mainly on impulse now, as he turned the receipts over and used the wooden probe to flick through the blank squares of paper. The pens had suggested a possibility, a long shot.

"You think there might be something written on the backs of those receipts?" the technician asked.

"Have you checked already?"

"Haven't had time. Why would anyone do that?"

"The little girl—the one who was kidnapped—was a dab hand at drawing."

"And you figure that could give you a clue?"

"It might," said Diamond. "Unfortunately," he added, replacing the receipts on the table, "none of these are marked."

He picked up the parking slips and inspected them in the same way. Naomi had not used them for drawing either. He clicked his tongue in exasperation.

"Seen enough?"

"Am I holding you up?"

"It's okay."

"Then I'd like to sift through the rest of this stuff. If you want to get back to your work, I can promise I won't leave my prints on anything."

"That's okay by me."

It was nice to be trusted.

The chance of finding anything significant was remote, but even sorting through a collection of rubbish was better than doing nothing at all. Using two probes like chopsticks, he examined the items systematically, looking for signs of recent use. There was a roll of peppermints, and it occurred to him that Naomi might have been offered one to pacify her, but the mint that was visible was so dusty that it must have been unwrapped months ago.

With his thoughts still on the possibility that Naomi might have been offered something edible to stop her from protesting, he turned to the take-out containers—a stack of six of different shapes from various fast-food places. Odors of sweet and sour—sweet
what
and sour
what
he preferred to pass over—lingered around them. Nor did he care to imagine what the interior of the Buick must have smelt like on a warm day when the windows had been closed for some time.

There were two containers apparently of fairly recent origin, so he extracted them from the stack. These weren't polystyrene like the others, but were boxes made from thin white card. Judged by the grease-stained, sugary interiors, they had probably contained doughnuts.

He turned one over to look at the underside. It would have made a good surface for drawing. However, it was blank. Why was he so reluctant to drop this supposition that Naomi had left a drawing—a drawing, moreover, that provided information? He had a sense of being driven by some force akin to telepathy, as if the child were willing him to find what she had left. This wasn't entirely illogical, for occasionally in his life he'd experienced premonitions that had been fulfilled, such as the certainty that he would meet a particular old friend in a strange town.

So when he picked up the second box and saw pen marks on the underside of the lid, his pulse may have quickened, but he did not punch the air with his fist or shout, "Eureka!"

He explained with great patience to Sergeant Stein at the station house how Naomi liked to make drawings, probably to compensate for the noncommunication enforced by her muteness.

"And you think this is her work?" .said Stein.

"Not this precisely. It's a copy I made of the drawing on the food container. I left the box down at the workshop with all the other things found in the car. The ink matched one of the ballpoints found on the floor beside the front passenger seat. There's no way of proving Naomi did the drawing, but I could tell from the state of the box that it hadn't been lying in the car for long. I think the killer may have stopped at some point to feed her, or she may simply have found the box in the car and used it for the sketch."

"You call that a sketch?" said Stein. "Don't get me wrong, but it looks more like a doodle to me. What is it?"

"I'm not certain myself yet," Diamond admitted. "The original is about twice the size, or a little more," he added, placing his notebook open on the desk.