The others had their little backs to me, but I could probably identify them if I tried hard enough. My father had owned a toy store in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, and he treated each doll and stuffed animal as if it had a presence all its own. He was a good and gentle man, and he had always seemed astonished that his only son had taken to the violence of police work, ending in the most violent side of all— chasing difficult homicides in the mean streets of New York.
I turned the large glossy photograph of the corpse facedown, skipped the autopsy photos for the moment, and reread my case notes.
Dudich had lived alone in a fifth-floor walk-up that he couldn't afford. His most recent roommate, a woman, had left him abruptly, at least according to the super, two weeks before the murder. The super figured they were lovers, and there was nothing in the record to confirm or contradict that. Dudich's name was the only one on the lease, and none of his friends knew who the girl was.
His coworkers found him strange and fey, his habits those of a prima donna in a small pond. They claimed they never spoke to him about his personal life. He came in late, snapped at anyone who interrupted him, and didn't care who he insulted. But everyone put up with it because his work was so beautiful. Clients came back, asking for him by name: parents wanting their children's toys repaired; collectors wanting their valuables restored to mint condition; and, in the end, galleries and auction houses taking advantage of his relatively cheap services.
"Could've gotten more money," I had written in the margin. It was a reference to an interview with one of Dudich's colleagues, who couldn't understand why Dudich stayed at the hospital when he had been offered a much higher salary with several of the antique shops on the Upper West Side.
I circled the comment and underlined it, thinking it a place to start. But before I went further, I finished with the file, making sure my memory was jogged. The family was out of state— Iowa— and they confessed that they hadn't seen him since he graduated from a cow college at which he had shown no sign of his particular gifts. I had covered a lot of ground that first day. It was too bad that I hadn't followed up on it.
* * *
Just before I left the House, I noted that the others were looking more excited than they had since The Silence began. Evelyn had put all her files under her desk. She had gone to her interview, but she had left on her desktop a computer-generated list of all the blood-spattered unidentified objects found around the time her shoe had been located.
Hawkins was on the phone with the forensic pathologist, talking about the possibility of matching a severed arm to the mysterious torso. Weisburg was typing on the task force's computer, doing an Internet search of New York area dog breeders. And Bob was poring over a copy of the dead landlord's will, making notes and circles and lines, and muttering to himself.
Finally, it looked like a normal day in the task force. We hadn't had one for more than two weeks.
I walked down the faded wood steps and through the double doors out to the city. It didn't look different. Horns honked, brakes squealed as taxis nearly rear-ended real cars. Pedestrians didn't even look. They walked, heads high, to their next destination. It was hot, of course, being August, and the men wore short sleeves and slung their suitcoats over their shoulders with one hand and clutched their briefcases with the other. Women wore dresses and no nylons and clutched their briefcases too. A car backfired as I reached the end of the block and everyone ducked, just like they always did, thinking it was a gunshot.
I walked to the doll hospital. It wasn't too far from the House, and I liked to keep a finger on the city's pulse. The heat was unbearable, and within minutes, I had my suitcoat off too. The stink was worse, though. New York always smells bad in the height of summer: garbage sitting on the curbs waiting for collection; the way the exhaust from cars hangs in the air; and the general odor of sweaty humans who have no business being so close to each other, but because of the nature of the city, are.
I didn't have a formal line of questioning ready when I reached the hospital. All I knew was that I wanted to see what had happened since the loss of their star, since Dudich had died on them and taken away so much lucrative business.
When I reached the building, saw the small sign covered with dirt and flies, I had a bad feeling, but it wasn't until I walked up the narrow stairs into a growing darkness that I knew.
The hospital was gone. Not vanished-gone, but out-of-business gone. I stopped at the glass door with the For Rent sign taped in a corner of the window, and peered through the soaping someone had done to prevent just this sort of snooping.
The tables were gone inside, and all that remained was a gray vinyl floor covered with thin midafternoon sunlight. A doll's arm lay in a corner, and a high-heeled shoe, probably from an early Barbie doll, had a spot all its own beneath a wall. Otherwise, there was no evidence that the doll hospital had been there. The tidy place with the bewildered employees, the ones who had described their job as a happy one until Dudich died, had vanished as if it had never been.
I moved away from the door and went back down the stairs. The tenant below was a women's boutique with about 500 square feet of floor space. It probably cost a fortune just to maintain that, even though this wasn't one of Manhattan's priciest neighborhoods. I let myself in.
The dresses were all variations on the same theme, a drapey disco sort of dress that I thought had gone out of style twenty years before. Some were decorated with shell necklaces. Others had scarves for accents. The woman behind the small table that served as a counter wore her long hair in a thousand beaded braids. She wore orange lipstick that set off her dark skin, and her inch-long nails, which looked real, were painted orange to match.
"Help you?" she asked in a disinterested New York tone that belied the Jamaican melody in the vowels.
"I was wondering what happened to the doll hospital."
"Closed." She hadn't even looked up yet.
"When?"
"Ah, March. The last day was the freak snowstorm on the third. I remember because they were setting toys out in the snow."
"Is there anyone I can talk to connected with the hospital?"
She pulled open a drawer in the table, and using those long fingernails like pincers, removed a cream-colored business card. "Don't blame me if she doesn't get back to you," the woman said. "She's the only one now, and she's working out of her home."
I took the card. Apparently this boutique got a lot of inquiries about the doll hospital. She hadn't even asked for my ID.
"Do you have any idea why it closed?"
She raised her eyes to mine. They were magnificent, the stunning centerpiece to what I just realized was a remarkable face. "Why, the murder, of course."
"The murder?"
"Of the wiz boy. The one who could repair anything. They say the dolls surprised him in the middle of the night, but I don't believe it."
"You don't?" I asked in a tone that I hoped didn't sound patronizing.
"No. If they killed him, why were they found trying to save him, now? They were found all around him, like little doctors. But they couldn't do anything."
"So, they didn't find out who did it?"
She shrugged. "I don't think they ever will. The police have too much to do to look into the death of one pimply-faced guy with a fascination for teddy bears."
Ouch. That one hit too close to home. I took a step away from the table, as if I were getting ready to leave. "Aren't you afraid to work here, after someone got murdered upstairs?"
She laughed. "Mister, I live in New York. If I was afraid of everything that happened, I'd move to somewhere where nothing happened."
I smiled in response. "Good point," I said, and thanked her for her time. Then I left the store and stepped back into the oven that was the street.
Halfway down the block, I paused and looked at the card. It had a name— Lena O'Dell; an occupation— toy repair; and a contact phone number with a Manhattan exchange but no address. I walked back to the House and used the number to trace the address. She lived in the Village. I thought of calling before I went to see if she was home, but then I changed my mind.
She was the only lead I had, and I didn't want to scare her away.
* * *
Evelyn was just arriving as I was leaving. She had changed out of her power suit and into her usual jeans and blouse. She was whistling as she came up the stairs.
"What're you smiling about?" I asked as we passed.
"Found the other shoe," she said.
"Really?" I stopped on the way down.
"Yep. Recovered from a dumpster on Fiftieth, same area. Forms a triangle with the first shoe and the car. And, get this, there's a bloody handprint on the back. That's why the station kept it."
"Lucky break."
She grinned over her shoulder at me. "You don't know the half of it."
She was close. She had to be or she wouldn't be in such a good mood. "Give."
She shook her head. Then she turned and jogged up the stairs before I could ask the next question.
She did that on purpose, of course. I sighed, and walked down the rest of the way, wishing my luck were running the same as hers.
* * *
I took my company car to the Village because I didn't want to hassle with getting a cab. Parking was hell, even on days like this, but I squeezed into a spot on a side street without denting any bumpers. Then I walked around the corner to the address I had.
It was a dilapidated building with a recessed steel door with a 1970s security system. Someone had propped the inner door open with a brick and I suspected it was often left that way. I glanced at the names penned beside the row of doorbells and saw O'Dell in Number 3. I slipped through the door into the hallway and started up the stairs.
The place felt like a sauna. A window on the landing was painted shut and caked with dirt. Not that it mattered. It provided a view of the building across the back alley and nothing more. I doubted that opening it would provide a breeze.
The second floor smelled of garlic and feta cheese. There was a narrow hallway that ran the length of the floor, and the stairs continued up one side. Apartment 3 was just beyond the railing, the door firmly closed.
I knocked.
I heard a small scraping against the wood as someone peered through the peephole. Then a woman's voice said, "What?"
I held up my badge. "Miss O'Dell. I'm Detective Spencer Gray. I'm handling the murder of Joel Dudich."
"God," she said. "And here I thought you were gonna wait until the Second Coming before you continued your investigation."
I heard several locks click and then the door opened, sending frigid air into the hallway. A window air-conditioning unit hummed in the background.
O'Dell leaned against the door frame. She was slender and barefoot, wearing jeans and a ratty T-shirt that was covered with bits of thread. Her hair was red and curly, her skin nearly as dark as the boutique owner's.
I didn't remember seeing her before, but that had been months ago, in a case I normally would have forgotten.
"Gray," she said. "You were there asking questions when they took Joel's body away."
I nodded. I guess I had seen her.
"You wanna come in, or you gonna interrogate me in the hall?"
"It's not an interrogation, Miss O'Dell. I just need information."
She stepped away from the door. I went inside, glad for the icy air. Her apartment was a clutter of books and spider plants, with plush toys on every available surface. A coffinlike box stood against one wall. It was filled with broken toys like the ones I had initially seen in the hospital. A thick wooden door was braced on cinder blocks and on top of it were several stuffed dogs, all missing the right leg. A series of half-finished legs sat in a row beside them.
She took a doll off a caftan-covered armchair and asked me to sit. I did and nearly sank to the floor. The chair had no springs. I tried not to show my surprise.
"What happened to the hospital?" I asked.
She glared at me, then sat on the blanket-covered couch, next to a group of limbless dolls. "It didn't go without Joel."
"One employee couldn't be that important."
"He had a talent, he did, and everyone came for him. When he died—" She held out her hands and didn't finish the sentence.
"What kept him at the hospital? I heard he could have worked for Sotheby's or any of the antique stores at a much higher rate."
Her face softened. She had been a beautiful woman once, several years of stress ago. "The kids," she said.
"You had children in the doll hospital?"
She nodded. "They came with their parents, mothers usually. It took some work to get men to come into a place devoted to dolls." And then she looked at me like that was the reason I hadn't finished the investigation. "Joel liked watching their faces when he gave them the fixed toy. Said it made his entire week."