Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [38]
Luckily the walls were still covered with surveillance photos of bank robberies in progress, a reminder that this remained the bank robbery coordinator’s office, even if she did pump her breasts with a monstrous machine every four hours. Now there was no more sale hopping during lunch, no three-hankie “girl movies” on a weekday night, since Barbara went home to her hungry daughter on the dot of five. Although she had not lost her baby weight, Barbara still wore prim pastel suits with a single pearl on a chain around her neck; oldest of a sprawling Irish family in Chicago, she had been like a big sister until she became a mom. Gradually our lives had grown incomprehensible, and even uninteresting, to each other.
I did not realize how much I would give up by leaving the bank robbery squad and pushing over to C-1. In the old days, before the matrix, we used to have potlucks in the conference room and Mike Donnato and I would flirt outrageously, just because we knew it could never go anywhere. He was still as attractive and elegantly turned out as when he had been my senior partner and mentor. He had a law degree from Yale and wore three-piece suits and a well-barbered graying beard, even though he lived in Simi Valley. He and Rochelle moved the family out there because they were afraid of raising kids in the city. Donnato and I had a special claim to each other. We had put in a lot of miles in a crap brown Chevrolet. Barbara and I had a special claim to each other, too. Those claims do not expire. That’s the way it is in the Bureau family.
“You’re just fried because the case isn’t moving,” Mike said.
“I haven’t had time to go swimming,” I complained. “I don’t eat lunch until four in the afternoon. Everybody’s always on me, every minute of the day. Ana! Where’s this? Ana! They never called me back! Ana! Ana! Ana! I swear, it makes you want to change your name.”
“To what?”
“Fritzy.”
“What?”
“I don’t know!” I was suddenly stupid with laughter, sliding off Barbara’s couch in a spasm.
They shook their heads.
“How about Ditzy?” Mike suggested, and that really put me away.
“Oh my God.” I was slumped on the floor, wiping my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I don’t have enough to profile the offender so my criminal investigative analysis is basically nowhere, and Rick is upset.”
“What’re you missing?” asked Mike.
Certain people make you feel uplifted just by asking a question in a certain tone. By telling you with their hazel eyes, however lined and worn, there will always be enough to share: their acceptance of you, but rarer still, the willingness to see you clearly, to pause and sit with you through it, even if it’s small.
“I can’t get the victim statement. She was traumatized to the throat. It’s like he choked her into silence.”
“Was that his ritual?”
I nodded. “We’ve got the same MO on a case in Florida. You know he’s going to do it again. If he hasn’t already a dozen times.” And for a moment we fell silent.
Mike gave me a sad smile.
I smiled back. “Don’t you bozos have a robbery to solve?”
“This is still my favorite,” Mike said, tapping the wall.
Out of two hundred or so photos, he had unswervingly picked the one taken on the robbery where Andrew and I met. It was up there as a joke, and Mike had picked it because it was the most unflattering shot imaginable. As the automatic camera kept clicking away, Andrew and I had been interviewing the managers with our backs to the lens. We looked like a pair of dodoes. He had on the pretentious motorcycle jacket and his legs were awkwardly splayed like he was getting ready for a broad jump;