The Price of Innocence (6 page)

‘I nearly got disintegrated by a bunch of vampires?’

‘No, Georgians. As in Georgia in Europe, not the place with magnolia trees and the Falcons. They say the current president there stole the election from a Vladimir Minksky.’

‘So go blow up freakin’ Russia or something,’ Frank protested. ‘Why us?’

‘The Vlads say that the current president got much of his funding from expats in Cleveland. And there
are
a lot of them. Seven per cent of our foreign born population is from Ukraine and Yugoslavia alone, with other eastern European sites close behind.’

‘What did they expect to accomplish? As if anyone in DC or freakin’ Russia or Georgia or wherever would care if Cleveland got blown off the map.’ Frank hit the brake for a red light at East Sixty-Fifth, maybe a bit too hard.

‘You OK?’ Angela asked.

‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’

‘Because you
did
nearly get disintegrated and buried beneath four floors of rubble, and then your cousin winds up at the scene of a cop killing?’

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ he grumbled, wondering, not for the first time, if Angela and Theresa ever talked about him behind his back. Theresa was blood and Angela was his partner, but they were women, and women felt anything they did could be justified. ‘My money’s on the building owner. No one can afford trendy downtown lofts any more. Most of the units were vacant – just as well, kept the body count low – and he had to be running into the red.’

‘Skirting it,’ Angela agreed, ‘according to tax returns. But not bankrupt yet.’

‘Smarter to quit while you’re ahead.’ Frank steered past the sagging roofs and cars parked on lawns of East Eightieth. Accumulating seniority in the detective unit had its privileges; the Crown Vic had rolled off the assembly line a month before and still had that pristine smell. Angela had made Frank promise not to smoke in it if she would refrain from leaving empty coffee cups under the seat. So far, they’d stuck to the deal.

In any case, he had
not
been freaked out by the explosion, or taken it personally. The cop killing, however, was a different story. The powers that be and a particularly vindictive Fate had decided to drop the investigation for the killing upon the shoulders of Frank and his partner. He needed to be freaked, he needed to be obsessed, and most of all he needed to come up with a viable suspect. Do it fast and make it stick. Failure would be felt in his record, in the squad room, in the locker room, in the eyes on him everywhere he went. Failure, to put it mildly, was not an option.

They’d probably even take the car back. He and Angela would be driving a rusted Pinto from now until retirement.

‘Did you know him?’ his partner asked.

‘Marty Davis? No.’

‘I talked to the guys on his shift,’ she said. ‘I even looked up a few from shifts past, but they all sounded pretty consistent. A stand-up guy, not on the take, not the most powerful round in the ammo belt but reliable. He lived to write tickets.’

‘So who did he tick off badly enough to come gunning for him?’

‘They all had a list of suspects. A few came up more than once, a crazy ex-girlfriend—’

‘Doesn’t every cop have a crazy ex-girlfriend?’ He braked, enjoying the quiet rotors.

‘I don’t.’

‘Crazy boyfriend, then.’

‘Nope. Annoying, certainly. But the girlfriend has since moved to LA to pursue her dream of working at Disneyland, so she’s out. Then there’s an alderman named Bevilaqua with fifteen outstanding parking tickets. He and Davis had been having a pissing contest going back two years over the man’s habit of parking in the fire lane when late for a meeting. Apparently he doesn’t handle his temper any more efficiently than his schedule and threatened to, quote, string Marty up by his thumbs, unquote.’

‘If he wants to intimidate a cop he needs to use a threat coined in the last century. I mean the last last century.’

‘True, but he repeated this one on a number of occasions. The third choice is the most likely. Marty arrested him three times for domestic violence. The last time he served four years and has a permanent restraining order to keep him away from both his wife
and
children.’

‘Threats?’

‘Lots of them, but only to other inmates, who relayed the info to the correctional officers, who passed it on to Marty when the guy, Terry Beltran, got out early for good behavior last month.’

‘Has he approached Davis?’

‘Marty didn’t say anything to his friends, and they say he wouldn’t have been shy about something like that. The guy’s probation officer said he’s been making his meetings, not with good grace, but showing up, and has neither mentioned Marty nor asked about him.’

‘And that’s it? The guy’s a cop for twenty years and only has three enemies?’

Angela shrugged. ‘You know what patrol’s like. The scumbags talk big when you’re putting the cuffs on, but once they’re in the system you get crowded to the bottom of their payback list.’

‘Problem is you never know which scumbag is going to be particularly good at holding a grudge.’

‘And smart enough to keep it to himself,’ Angela added. ‘One of our instructors in the academy said we were signing up to walk around with a bull’s-eye painted on our backs for the rest of our lives. I never forgot it. You ever had someone come back on you?’

‘Not yet. But tomorrow
is
another day.’ Frank pulled over to the curb, stopping in front of a tiny house near Superior. He heaved a sigh and unfolded his aching body from the car, hoping to find it – the car – in the same condition when they returned. The two-story home appeared ready to fall down, or at least think about it. An apple tree, the only concession to landscaping on the entire street, looked as old as the house. Apples littered the ground; frozen all winter, they had waited for these spring months to resume decomposition. Angela preceded him up two sagging wood steps to a screen door with no screening left in it. She reached through and knocked on the inner door.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘Just leave it.’

‘Can’t. We’re the police. We need to talk to Lily Simpson.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to do a notification. She isn’t in any trouble. Are you her?’

The voice continued from inside the house, to the left, and didn’t seem to be moving. ‘Yeah, but I’m really busy right now.’

‘Sorry, but we have to interrupt.’

‘Oh, for the love—’ the woman shouted. ‘Just come in, OK?’

‘You want us to come in?’ Frank asked. The department lawyers had said to clarify these matters.

‘As in open the door your damn self! My hands are full.’

Frank shrugged, pulled open the empty screen door and turned the knob of the inner door. Then they entered and saw what Lily Simpson had her hands full with.

Through a cluttered front room with an antique fireplace, the lady of the house stood at her kitchen table, bathing a small dog in a large plastic tub. The dog, a brown thing with long hair and perky ears, stared with pleading eyes from a coating of soapsuds.

Lily Simpson had hair the color and consistency of straw and not nearly enough pounds on her slight frame. Her driver’s license reported her age as forty-five, but as Frank came closer he saw how the lines on her face belonged to someone twenty years older. Her eyes were bloodshot, with jumpy pupils, but no alcohol bottles in sight. Crack, he figured, or something similar. Her clothes, a T-shirt with rust stains and a pair of sweatpants held in place by a drawstring, had large wet spots.

‘What do you want?’

‘You’re Lily Simpson?’

‘Yes. What do you want? They didn’t do anything.’

Her hands must have relaxed ever so slightly, and the dog took full advantage, putting two paws on the edge of the tub and pushing. This accomplished nothing save for adding another layer of water to the already soaked tabletop. Lily got a firmer grip and continued sudsing.

‘Who didn’t?’

‘The kids. Or me. None of us did anything.’

Frank decided to bypass the getting-to-know-you stage. ‘Are you acquainted with a Martin Davis?’

‘Marty?’ This got her full and un-irritated attention. She stared at them until the dog made a leap for it, leaving itself stranded over the edge of the tub, half out, half in. Lily dragged it back into the water without moving her gaze from Frank’s face. ‘What about him?’

‘We’re sorry to tell you that Martin Davis was killed in the line of duty on Monday.’

She froze, but briefly, then went back to the task at hand. ‘I’m not surprised. I always said that job would kill him. Why he wanted to be a cop – no offense.’

‘None taken.’ Frank waited for her to ask another question, but she kept her head down, concentrating on the dog, until he realized she was crying. ‘What was your relationship with Officer Davis?’

With a twitch of her neck she dried one cheek on her shoulder before answering. ‘We were friends.’

‘Just friends?’

Now she looked up with freshly red eyes, before hauling the dripping dog over to the kitchen sink and dropping him on top of two spoons, a plate and a cereal bowl with corn flakes adhering to the rim. A cockroach scattered, but didn’t make it up the side of the basin before Lily turned on the tap. She adjusted the water to a comfortable temperature, and began the rinse cycle. Only then did she answer: ‘Off and on. I mean we were always friends, and off and on we were more. I’ve known Marty, Geez, seems like all my life. Since high school, but we got together in college.’

‘You went to the same college?’ Frank tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible. Neither the victim nor this woman struck him as brainy.

He didn’t keep neutral enough and a defensive tone crept into her voice. ‘Yeah, we went to Cleveland State. I was going to major in elementary education, believe it or not. That was before I knew what kids were like.’ She turned off the water and Frank noted the relief in the dog’s eyes. Its tail even gave a half-hearted wag as Lily pulled a frayed terry-cloth towel from the edge of the table. Half if it had already been soaked from the washtub overflow.

‘What did Marty study?’ Angela asked. She had a habit of that, popping up with these off the wall questions. Frank would have preferred to do the notification and get out before one of the cockroaches decided to hitch a ride on his shoe.

‘Beer. Women. Video games, anything to have an excuse to get away from his parents without having to get a job. One of his room-mates had a Nintendo, and that’s what Marty studied more than anything else.’ Lily wrapped the dog and transferred him back to the kitchen table, absently pushing aside two water glasses and a magazine to make room. ‘Isn’t that funny, I don’t remember what Marty was supposed to be majoring in. Chemistry, maybe? Or math? I guess it doesn’t matter, he never graduated. Neither did I. I got pregnant with my first, and that was that.’

‘Marty’s?’

‘What? Oh. No, Shawna wasn’t Marty’s, we were broken up by then, sort of. Her father joined the Army to get out of child support and died in the Gulf War, good riddance. I couldn’t even get any of the death benefit because I couldn’t prove she was his.’

‘Paternity test?’ Angela suggested.

‘Those cost money, don’t they?’ The dog’s mood seemed to improve under the vigorous toweling, though Lily didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her own actions. Her countenance appeared to be a million miles away, or perhaps twenty-odd years. ‘It don’t matter. I can’t see me as a teacher, anyway, wearing little sweaters and cutting things out of construction paper.’

Something in her voice made Frank think she could see it, and sometimes did.

Lily dried the inside of the dog’s ears with the towel, gently, then got out a brush. The dog never took its eyes off Frank, as if hoping he might have a treat with which to reward him for all this suffering. Frank decided to get the conversation back on track. ‘We’re here to tell you that Marty named you as beneficiary in his will.’

A look of panic leapt to her face. ‘I can’t pay for a funeral.’

‘The police department has already taken care of the funeral. It was this morning.’

‘Oh my God, I didn’t even get to go to the funeral? Why didn’t you guys tell me sooner?’ She lowered the dog to the floor.

‘You didn’t see it in the papers? On TV?’

A boy of twelve or thirteen threw open the back door, took one look at the two cops, and began to back out again.

Frank said, ‘Come in. No one’s in any trouble.’

The kid maintained his position by the door, just in case. ‘Who’re you?’

‘They’re cops, Brandy. Nothing to do with you.’

‘It’s
Brandon
. Did Shawna get knifed in the shower room?’

His mother shrugged without energy. ‘His sister’s doing two years for grand theft. No, Brandon, it isn’t about Shawna.’

‘Too bad.’ The boy appeared visibly disappointed. He also appeared to need a good deal of the care his mother had just lavished on the dog. Pasty skin carried a layer of grime and a cut festered on his left hand. He hadn’t been starving, though.

‘Go to your room.’

‘Why?’

‘Grown-ups are talking. Beat it,
Brandy
.’

The kid shuffled off, with heavy steps and a few backward glares which tried for intimidating and came off as pouty. The dog, now the cleanest thing in the room, obviously lacked the intelligence to escape while it could and instead began to investigate Frank’s shoes. Meanwhile Frank explained that they hadn’t found the will until that morning, a preprinted form on which Marty Davis had filled out the blanks longhand. He had kept it stuffed into a pile on his dining room table, along with a collection of
Playboy
s, a picture of his swearing-in, a tattered copy of the police union rules and notebooks going back to high school. ‘Actually you were the contingent beneficiary after his mother, but she died several years ago. He listed her as emergency contact and we couldn’t find an address book. He didn’t have a lot of close friends, and none of them mentioned you.’

She sat in one of the mismatched chairs, heavily, leaning one arm on the still-sodden table. ‘Not surprised at that either. I’m from the first half of Marty’s life.’