Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [21]
“You can’t,” Russo said. “Not until we have ourselves a cup of coffee. And maybe a sweet roll.”
• • •
THE BOOKKEEPER, JAMIE Sinclair, was single and unemployed. He had held one job over the last two years, working freelance on and off for a Manhattan firm specializing in TV commercials. He ran three miles a day, and, when he did work, attended an aerobics class four nights a week. He had a brother who lived in Jackson Heights and worked for the city in the marriage license bureau. His mother died in 1980 after a long battle with a brain disorder, and his father shared a two-bedroom Co-op City apartment with a twice-divorced mother of two. In a life that had spanned thirty-two years, there wasn’t much else for Silvestri and Russo to go on. There were no known girlfriends or boyfriends. There were few friends of any kind. All indications were that Jamie Sinclair preferred to spend his time alone.
Except on the night he died.
“Uniform on the scene saw no sign of a break-in,” Russo said, taking a huge bite from an apple turnover. “Whoever sliced and diced him was let in.”
“Or was already there when Sinclair came home,” Mary said, hands wrapped around a container of black coffee.
“Either way, the victim knew the perp,” Russo said.
The detectives looked down the street, neat row houses mingling with three-story apartment buildings. Two blocks up, the el rumbled over White Plains Road. A squad car blocked off traffic access, and yellow crime-scene tape was spread across the front of the murder building. Onlookers stared from stoops and the tops of parked cars.
“Where you wanna start?” Russo asked her, finishing off the turnover.
“Let uniform do the first pass around the neighborhood,” Mary said. “We’ll follow up later. Let them look for the usual. Make sure they ask about anyone not from the area hanging around. Especially these past couple of days and especially if it’s a woman.”
“You kiddin’ me?” Russo put one hand on Mary’s elbow. “You know somethin’ already? You were up there only, what, ten minutes.”
“Relax, Sweet Tooth,” Mary said, pulling her arm away. “When I know, you’ll know.”
“Tell you one thing, Mrs. Columbo,” Russo said. “I hang around you, I’ll be a captain before I lose my hair.”
Mary looked at Russo’s thin strands of dark hair rising in the mild spring wind. “Then we better work fast,” she said.
• • •
BY THE TIME Jamie Sinclair’s body was toe-tagged and put in a freezer drawer, BCCI, the fingerprint unit of the department, had found three sets of prints in the apartment not belonging to him. One set belonged to his brother, who had a key and said he’d let himself in to leave some family documents for Sinclair to sign. Another belonged to the building’s landlord, who also had a key and would occasionally let himself in to drop off books and other packages. The third set belonged to Alison Walker, a fifty-eight-year-old woman with a bad heart, hefty trust fund, and Upper West Side brownstone in her name.
Her name shot its way to the top of Silvestri and Russo’s interview list.
“Why’s a rich Manhattan chick hangin’ with a loser from the Bronx?” Russo wondered, dodging Manhattan traffic as he drove crosstown on Park Drive.
“She’s fifty-eight years old,” Mary said, trying to read her notes. “She passed the chick stage when Kennedy beat Nixon.”
“Think she’s the one opened him like a can of soup?”
“And cut his feet off? I doubt it.”
“What, women don’t kill?”
“Women don’t kill brutal. A gun maybe. A knife if they’re really determined. But no, not like that. Not vicious.”
Mary put her notebook in her purse and opened a paper bag resting against her hip. She took out a container of coffee, popped the lid, and poured in three packs of sugar.
“You had to ice somebody,” Russo said, swerving past a yellow cab. “A guy. Husband. Boyfriend. Whoever. We’re just talkin’ now. What would you use, gun or knife?”
“Neither,” Mary said, stirring the sugar in the coffee.
“What then, a bomb?” Russo said.