"You up for the wager?" Evelyn asked.
"Maybe," I said. "How're you approaching cases?"
"Traditionally. Newest to oldest."
"Bob?"
"Same."
"Weisburg?"
"Same."
"Hawkins?"
"Yeah, man, me too."
I sighed. "And me too. Maybe that's what's wrong."
"Go again?" Evelyn said.
I leaned forward. "What's your favorite case?"
"Favorite how?"
"Weirdest, strangest, most intriguing. Most unsolvable. I don't give a damn. Whatever rings your bells."
She didn't even have to think for a minute. "I got a shoe on Fifty-third, middle of the damn street. Some bike messenger picked it up, was gonna give it to his girlfriend, I don't know. But it's full of blood. He don't drop it. He carries it to the curb and uses his cell to call the cops. They show up, order a DNA on the blood, find it matches the interior of a bloody car found on Lex three days before. Car belongs to a young married over Central Park West. The wife's been missing two weeks. She takes fifty grand in cash and disappears, and the husband don't think nothing of it."
"You think the husband did it?" Hawkins asked.
"I think we got strange breaks in the case. The DNA on the blood, for one. Who'da thought there'd be a match?"
"Who thought to look?" Weisburg asked.
"I did," she said. "I figure you got a blood-filled shoe, you gotta have other blood-filled items."
"The problem is," I said, "how'd the shoe get to Fifty-third, full of blood, three days later?"
"Give the man a cigar," she said. "That's the most interesting case to me."
This last she said almost as a topper, as if she dared someone to do better. Of course, Hawkins tried.
"I got that torso found in the Hundred-and-tenth Street station."
"Some jumper," Weisburg said.
"Yeah, they probably couldn't find the rest of him 'coz it was mashed against some subway car."
"I think it's more than that," Hawkins said.
"Why?" I asked, more to find out how Hawkins's brain worked than out of any real curiosity about the torso.
"Because the cuts was real neat. Jumpers, they get ragged sheer. This looked like it was done with one of them surgeon's knives. And the skin was clean, too. No dirt, except where it was on the floor. And no blood."
"When was this?" Weisburg asked.
"May. About the fifth. You know, that freaky rainstorm?"
"No wonder I didn't hear," he said. "I was upstate with the kids." Weisburg usually got the body parts.
"Well, I think it's damn strange," Hawkins said.
Weisburg leaned forward a little. "A torso with arms or a torso without?"
"Without. What do you think, I'm some kind of idiot? I'd'a known to run the prints."
Weisburg shrugged. "I'll look at it if you want."
Hawkins looked at me. "If he helps me close, does that make it his case or mine?"
"What are you looking at me for?" I asked. "The wager's Evelyn's idea."
"But you're the one who mentioned favorite cases," she said. "Right, Weisburg?"
He scrunched up his narrow little face. "I think having favorite homicide cases is sick."
"Yeah, like you didn't just get jealous that Hawkins has a torso and you don't," Evelyn said.
I leaned back in my chair. "Come on, Weisburg. You must have a case that intrigues you."
"It's not a favorite," he said a bit defensively.
I shrugged. "I phrased it wrong."
He ducked his head, and I could have sworn that he was blushing. "It's the puppies."
I'd never heard of this one. "The puppies?"
He nodded, raised his head, and sure enough, there was color in his pasty white cheeks. "Outside the Port Authority Terminal, in April, you know that really sunny stretch around tax time?"
We all nodded. Who could forget that weather?
"Some woman calls Animal Control because there's eight German shepherd puppies, about six months old, just sitting curbside. They're well behaved, ain't doing nothing, but they was there all day, and this lady got worried. So Animal Control shows up and finds they're sitting in a ring around this corpse. Now you'd think the guy was homeless except for the dogs. They're purebred, or so the pound tells me, and they have on expensive collars but no tags. It took Animal Control a long time to round 'em up, too. They was guarding this guy, so they were attached."
"What happened to the dogs?" Bob asked.
Weisburg grinned. "I gave 'em to my daughter." His daughter had married money and had a country house near the Catskills. "They're great dogs."
"Nothing on the guy?" I asked.
"No missing breeders, no nothing. We didn't even know it was a homicide for two days."
"What was it killed him, then?" Evelyn asked.
"Choked."
"Choked?" Bob asked.
Weisburg nodded. "On some woman's left index finger."
We let that sit for a few minutes, then Evelyn said, "Bob?"
"I ain't got nothing to compare to that."
"But you have a favorite case?"
He shrugged. "I got one that bugs me. But it's just simple."
"Simple how?" I asked.
He shrugged again. "Or maybe it's not so simple. I don't know."
"Bob,"
Evelyn said.
"Okay," he said. "Husband and wife in the Village are having this argument. They live in a walk-up and their fights are always interesting enough to draw the neighbors. This time, the wife has had it, and she grabs a gun, tries to shoot the husband, but before she can pull the trigger, he grabs her arm and they flail around. Of course, the gun goes off, and one of the neighbors gets it smack in the face. Dies."
"Seems straightforward," Hawkins said.
"Don't it?" Bob said. "Until you come to find that the neighbor owns the apartment building and in his will he leaves it to the couple. Now everyone swears they didn't know he owned it, and everyone swears that no one knew the contents of that will."
"You think it was deliberate?"
"I
know
it was," Bob said. "Just can't prove it. At least, not enough to get the D.A. to look at the case."
Evelyn shook her head. "See? Impossible cases, all of them."
"Yeah, but I'd'a said it was impossible for there to be no murders in the Big Apple for one day, let alone fifteen," Weisburg said.
"So what are you saying?" I asked.
"I'm saying maybe this is our chance. Maybe we can solve these things."
"So what's the wager?" Evelyn asked.
"One week," Bob said. "We get one week to solve our baby or we gotta trade it to someone else."
"If they solve it, we'll look like a putz," Hawkins said.
Bob grinned and pointed at him. "You got it in one."
"Don't get all excited," Evelyn said. "We ain't heard from Spence yet."
I held out my hands. "You guys get all the interesting cases."
"And you're holding out," Evelyn said.
Indeed I was. But she caught me. I felt the color rise in my cheeks.
"Ah, he's got an embarrassing one too," Hawkins said.
I shook my head. "It's the image that got me, not the case."
"Image?" Evelyn asked.
I took a deep breath. Sometimes revealing yourself to your colleagues wasn't all it was cracked up to be. "There's a doll hospital just north of Bloomies—"
"A doll hospital?" Hawkins asked.
"Yeah," Weisburg said. "A place you can take favorite toys to be repaired."
"Or antique toys," Evelyn said.
"Anyway," I said, feeling the heat deepen, "they had this guy. They called him the wiz because he could fix damn near anything. You'd bring in a turn-of-the-century Steif, no stuffing, no arms for God's sake—"
"Stiff?" Hawkins whispered to Weisburg.
"Steif," Weisburg said.
"It's a collectible stuffed bear," Evelyn snapped. "Now shut up and let him talk."
"Anyway, he could turn it around in a day or two and have the thing looking like it just come off the assembly line. He was a master, the best, they all said that."
"And he was murdered," Bob said.
"You got it," I said. "I'd'a thought it was simple burglary too— they had a load of collectibles from Sotheby's that disappeared that night— except for the dolls."
"The dolls?" Hawkins asked, obviously willing to work for every detail.
"The dolls. When the staff came in the next morning, they found dolls all over him— no blood on them, even though he'd been stabbed in an artery and there was blood everywhere. The dolls were hooded and masked in surgical clothes and they were poised over the body like they was trying to fix him."
Hawkins snorted and looked away. "Nice try, but you could've made up something better than that."
I stared at him. He slowly looked back at me. Then he frowned. "You mean you weren't making that up?"
"Nope. They left the body as it was, and the call came in here. I got photos."
"But no suspects."
"No suspects, no motive, no nothing."
"The stolen collectibles?"
"Never were shipped. It was clerical error. Sotheby's dropped them off the day
after
the murder."
"So not even a robbery."
"Nothing," I agreed.
"When was this?" Evelyn asked.
"Valentine's Day," I said. "I remember because we were having that deep freeze."
"Oh, yeah," Bob said.
"So," Hawkins said. "The wager?"
Weisburg shrugged. "I'm willing to give it a shot. I have a fondness for those dogs."
"You gonna mind if someone else cleans up your mess?" Bob asked with a grin.
"I figure The Silence is gonna end by tomorrow morning and this is all gonna become moot," Weisburg said.
Evelyn grinned. "That's his way of agreeing to the proposition. We all in?"
I glanced around the room. Everyone was nodding. "We're all in," I said.
* * *
I had never worked on a case that was six months old before. I'd never had the luxury. But as I reviewed my notes, I realized that the case had only intrigued me in hindsight. I would find myself thinking of those dolls, poised over the body like a Lilliputian surgical team, and smile.
Smile.
Sometimes this job got to me.
I had actually only spent an afternoon on the case, even though when the dead guy's family called long distance every few weeks, I would tell them the file was still open. In truth, the next day I got slammed with three drive-bys, a potential serial, and a famous floater, and the doll-hospital murder got shoved aside by more pressing— and more easily solvable— cases.
I think that's often the way. We usually close about seventy-five percent, but that's because most murderers are stupid. Think about it: The best way to solve a problem is not to take out a gun and blow someone away. The twenty-five percent unsolved are either lost in the shuffle, committed by a professional who knows how to hide his tracks, or done by someone smart who has been thinking of the crime for a long, long time. That's one thing we rarely tell people: If the killer's smart, chances are he'll get away.
The doll-hospital murderer had been smart, or in the very least, lucky. There were no fingerprints in the place, except for the ones that needed to be there, and despite all the blood, there wasn't a decent shoe or hand print either. No murder weapon, and no motive, at least not one I could find.
I stared at the photos. The victim, one Joel Dudich, was slender to the point of gauntness, balding, and had a tattoo of a teddy bear on his right forearm. I took out a magnifying glass and examined the tattoo. The work was fine, even artistic, and bore a vague resemblance to the posable doctor bear who was sitting on the edge of the table, his furry arms crossed as if he were denying the patient treatment.
In fact, the doctor was the only bear, even though I had made a note in my case file that Dudich specialized in bears. The other creatures around him, the ones who were trying to save him, were dressed as orderlies or nurses— no doctors at all. I recognized a ripped Raggedy Ann, an early 1960s Barbie that was missing one arm, and a headless G.I. Joe.