Victims (2 page)

He drove down past the crowded collection of shops that lined both sides of the street, until he reached the underpass of the Long Island Railroad, and then it came as a surprise. It was like driving into a still-existing past: there was the cobbled brick square around which had been built the Forest Hills Inn. He sat for a moment and it was as he remembered it. Archways led to quiet streets of large, expensive houses. It was all still there, had been preserved as if existing in some sort of time warp. It was intensely quiet, and the old-fashioned lanterns on the privately owned streets glowed brighter than he remembered. There were signs warning that Forest Hills Gardens was not a parking lot; violators would be towed away.

Now on every other privately owned lamppost was a neat metal sign
:
THIS AREA IS PATROLLED BY GUARDIAN SECURITY PERSONNEL
/
TRAINED SECURITY WATCHDOGS.
That took the Disneylike cast off the setting; it was indeed modern times.

He made a right turn onto Barclay Street, which was one long uninterrupted stretch along the deserted fenced-in tennis courts on the left. On the right was a slightly raised embankment leading to the fenced-in Long Island Railroad. Barclay Street continued right out of the elite, private, Forest Hills Gardens. As it made a turn and swung into Sixty-ninth Avenue to the left and continued Barclay Street to the right, it was just plain Forest Hills, and it was as he remembered it.

Barclay Street was lined on both sides with pre-World War II six-story apartment buildings with Tudor façades. Courtyards faced courtyards. There were neat little lawns, low, precisely clipped hedges, clean sidewalks. It formed an old-fashioned enclave of a middle-class neighborhood. The past was sitting on a fortune of real estate that someone had missed for the time being.

Mike Stein drove slowly past the collecting crowd, getting a quick overall view. There was only one patrol car on the scene, although the night was filling with those awful wailing, rising and falling sounds of approaching cop cars that reminded him of movie Nazis. He pulled up and parked and walked slowly back up the block.

He stood back in the crowd, carefully getting oriented to the event at the center of which was a small, bloody body, seated, leaning in death against the base of the lamppost. She glowed under the orange light, which was designed to simulate perpetual daylight so as to discourage crime on the streets. After a quick glance at the body, he turned his attention to the crowd.

This wasn’t the normal scene of a normal everyday, every-night killing in the city of New York. The difference wasn’t in the victim. She was bloody enough and dead enough. The crowd was made up of
white
faces—that was the immediately discernible variation from the norm. Street crime scenes are usually dark brown in color.

There was an absence of children at the scene. This was a white middle-class street. Children did not stay out on the street alone at night, not even on a summer night. They were not habitual witnesses to casual violence. The few children present at the periphery of the crowd were held fast by a parent’s hand and were hustled away once the reality of a bloody death on their sidewalk faced the parent with a problem of explanation.

The street sounds were different. Instead of heavy and continuous noise from shoulder-resting ghetto blasters, loud voices, inappropriate laughter and hooting, an occasional scream echoed by some cruel imitation of expressed anguish, there was a palpable silence. The soft and far-off sounds of television sets or indoor radios, the hum of air conditioners, provided a low-keyed background for the arrival of the police cars. The motors being sharply shut off, doors opening and being slammed shut, could be clearly heard cutting through the near-silence.

Overhead, the surprisingly close-you-can-almost-touch-it sound of jets, unnoticed by the residents of Barclay Street. This had always been a pathway to both Kennedy and La Guardia. This was normal and accustomed noise, as was the low rumble of the Long Island Railroad train which could be felt vibrating through the soles of his shoes.

Mike Stein turned his attention to the policeman guarding the body. Technically, he had to be at least twenty-one years old, but with his smooth cheeks, light-yellow hair, thick light eyelashes blinking nervously, tongue darting out over dry lips, hands shaking slightly, he looked no more than twelve. He tried to be cool. He stood tall and straight, unaware of how incongruous his skinny six-foot frame appeared inside a police uniform. But he did his job, which was to keep the neighbors away from the body. He lost his supposed cool for one split second as two other police officers arrived, older, more settled into themselves and their responsibilities. He actually said, the young cop, what he had been thinking. It was doubtful he was even aware of having spoken. What he said was, “Thank Christ! Am I glad to see you guys!” It was a thought spoken aloud, and it seemed improbable to Stein that anyone else actually heard him.

On command, the gathering crowd did what it was told to do: stand back, make some room here. As if to allow the victim some air, a chance to breathe. Then the crowd did as expected. They leaned forward to see the effect. There was none. The young woman was unquestionably dead.

This was a crowd of neighbors, and it was easy for Stein to drift around, pretending to be one of them. He looked enough like someone you’d see every day walking the dog, waiting for the elevator, checking the mail, carrying a bag of groceries. He could fit in and be mistaken for the neighbor down the hall whom you saw occasionally, nodded to maybe, but never really noticed. That’s what neighbors were: vaguely familiar faces or forms, people who were seen but rarely known. People you never actually talked to except on special occasions: an accident, a blackout, a car slamming into another car in the middle of the block, an elevator caught between floors, an ambulance pulling up, a heart-attack victim hustled out expertly by the professionals who handle such things, a death of an elderly lady who used to sit in the window on the ground floor. A few older women and some retired men knew more than they let on. They could put names to the faces and weave relationships: married sons and daughters, college students who dropped out or graduated; a job lost, a career changed. They were here, too, the older people. They didn’t press too close. They stayed together and waited and watched.

“Who is she? She’s familiar a little bit.”

“I thought she was, you know, that girl who...”

“Yeah, that’s who I thought, but now...”

“When she cried out...”

“Did
you
hear that, too?”

The question was directed toward Mike Stein, and he shrugged vaguely and gestured over his shoulder, indicating he lived at the other end of the street.

“Even across the street they could hear,” a man told his wife. She pressed her lips together and nodded and he said, “We thought at first it was a dog. You know, hit by a car.”

Yes. That’s what it sounded like at first. There was some agreement as to the sound: a high-pitched, far-carrying, wounded-animal sound which had carried up and down the canyon of Barclay Street. A sound repeated many times, it seemed. The information was offered and affirmed by people first from one side of the street and then from the other.

“We turned the sound off on the TV, we thought it was interference of some kind, from the radio waves, you know, those CB radios that sometimes get into the TV.”

Yes, it sounded like that. At first.

Stein looked toward the dead body. The young woman had at some point been alive before sliding down and tilting in death against the lamppost. Many people could bear witness to that fact. They had heard her voice.

“I thought she was drunk, you know, or drugged, staggering like that.”

And now the crowd had her staggering. Had watched in life what they all looked at from time to time in death.

“The way she moved, hunched forward...”

“Not at the end. She threw her head back and...” The young man’s demonstration brought forth some agreement and some contradictions.

“That was when she screamed the last time, she threw her head back and...”

“No, that was before she fell.”

This crowd was filled with witnesses, and there was a relaxing, an almost relieved atmosphere, a freewheeling unloading of information they wanted to be rid of; they unburdened themselves by comparing impressions of the dead girl’s last moments.

An unmarked police car pulled up alongside several patrol cars. The driver was unmistakably a police officer. The gold shield pinned to the lapel of his jacket gave him authority on the scene. His manner would give him authority anywhere. He let the uniformed officers come to him. He turned his back on the crowd and spoke in a deep, quiet rumbling voice, lifted a hand and snapped his fingers. He was taller than everyone except the young blond officer, whom he outweighed by about fifty pounds.

“Torres,” he ordered, “go over there and take a look. And don’t touch nothing.”

A tall slender young woman, her face obscured as she adjusted the detective shield on the chain she had slipped over her head, nodded. She pinned a plastic ID card to the collar of her lightweight linen dress and checked to see that it wasn’t bunching the fabric. She moved so quickly, so efficiently, that she provided her audience with nothing more than a flash of the coppery-red-gold muted colors of her dress. She worked methodically, ignoring everything but her assigned task.

The Crime Scene Unit arrived, and from their van they quickly brought out wooden horses with paper signs:
CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE.
The crowd of observers moved back, pushing itself in place as these barriers were quickly and expertly set in place.

“Who’s that? That girl, who’s she?”

“The sister, maybe?”

“No, they wouldn’t let the sister near the body yet, would they? Look. She’s got a police badge around her neck.”

“Imagine! She’s so skinny, that girl, and she’s a policeman.”

She was a slightly built girl and she moved carefully within the periphery of the victim. Without touching anything, she observed and noted the position of the body. She jotted down whatever information could be discerned. Alongside the body was a shoulder bag, large canvas, similar to an airline carrier. Contents were scattered where they had apparently fallen. She noted a wallet, apparently filled with bills; a cosmetic case, a pillbox, small sealed brown envelope. It was more of a contents count; nothing could be touched or examined until Homicide said it was all right.

“I thought she was the Spanish girl’s sister. She looks a little like her.”

“They all look alike.”

Mike Stein registered the remarks; filed them away for later examination. He studied the woman police officer as she stood up and glanced around at the crowd, which was now focused on her.

In the orangey glow of the streetlight, Miranda Torres’ face took on a deep burnished color: warm, cinnamon brown with a strong underlay of red. Her high sharp cheekbones caught the light, which accentuated the hollows of her cheeks. Her fine jawline was clean and tight. Her eyes were large and dark, her brows black, her lips turned up slightly at the corners into less than a smile. Her black hair was cut very short, very boyish, and framed her face in strong silky wisps along the temples and the forehead. She stood and gazed through the crowd, her face revealing nothing. She might have been staring off into empty space, but a quick pull at the corner of her lips gave her away. The calm expression, the placid veneer, hid a rigidity that was costing her a great deal. She was tall and slender to the point of fragility and there was something proud and tribal in the way she held her head, high and slightly tilted; her back absolutely straight, her body centered like a dancer’s.

The homicide men arrived. Stein could spot homicide people under any circumstances. They were grim without being horrified. They approached a murder victim prepared for any atrocity, and in some minute corner of their minds they focused on some perverse incongruity in any death scene, something they could all laugh about later. Morgue humor; saving grace. No matter what it was, there had to be
something
funny about the human condition. They were generally very careful, however, about keeping their jokes, wisecracks and observations “within the family.”

The crime scene widened considerably as the technicians spread out in the search for a weapon and any other physical evidence. Chalk circles were drawn around blotches of blood which led to the other side of the street. They conferred, pointed, measured, took blood samples from within each circle and photographs from various angles to trace the route and action of the murder.

There were enough stories coming from the crowd, and detectives moved in, chatted up, looped an arm around a shoulder and let themselves be led along the row of parked cars. They nodded and noted and questioned and listened as witnesses to the event pointed and explained.

One man pointed out what might be the victim’s car. He had been looking out the window to wave goodbye to a friend, had stayed there for a moment, had seen the yellow Toyota pull into the space his friend had just vacated. Pretty sure, yeah. Anyway, a girl, a woman, got out and locked the car and started across the street and no, he didn’t watch anymore, he went to take a shower so he hadn’t seen or heard anything more until there was all this noise and police sirens and he got dressed and came down and then he realized that the woman who parked the car might—maybe, must be—the woman who got killed. Think so, maybe?

Maybe. The detective went to check on the ownership after advising a uniformed man to stand guard on the Toyota.

A small, graying man in a dark suit, carrying a doctor’s black bag, approached the dead woman. They all knew who he was—they’d seen it all before in the movies, on TV. He had to be the medical examiner, and sure enough he was. He greeted a few of the homicide cops before he even looked at the victim, then finally he turned and stared.

“You got all you need, Ed?” he asked the crime scene photographer.