Dead Certain

we’d finished, the place I had once called home had been transformed into a crime scene. I kept hearing the sound of the intercom and the buzzer and the voice of the uniform who’d been charged with the task of letting people into the building.
    The neighbors, normally not a gregarious lot, began coming out to investigate the commotion. The graduate students from across the hall stuck their heads out only long enough to gawk, but old Mrs. Leavitt from upstairs, a mathematician’s widow, cried softly when she heard the news. Later she insisted that she be let in to bring me a cup of tea in a rose-patterned China cup. She also brought an ancient cardigan, which she laid across my shoulders as if Claudia’s death had somehow turned me into an invalid. It had holes in it, and like its owner, it smelled of lavender and mothballs.
    I sought refuge in the sunporch at the front of the apartment. There, curled up in my wicker chair in the darkness, I could see the morgue wagon pull up to the curb, and watch as the patrolman urged passersby to keep moving, assuring them that there was nothing to see. Joe Blades arrived at about the same time as the TV minicams. I don’t know which I was more surprised to see. He drove up in a Caprice Classic, which he left parked in the bus stop. He stopped for a minute on the sidewalk, straightening his glasses and buttoning his tweed jacket against the wind. Elliott must have called and asked him to come.
    Blades was an old friend from the days when they both worked the white-collar crimes unit in the state’s attorneys office. Joe was a Princeton grad who’d turned down the chance to go to law school in order to pursue a career in law enforcement, rapidly rising through the ranks to his natural resting place—homicide. Elliott came out to the front steps to meet him. They shook hands, their heads close together, conferring gravely. I forced myself to get to my feet and walked out to meet them.
    “I’m so sorry,” said Joe, taking my hand in both of his and giving it a quick squeeze. Indicating the man standing next to him, he said, “This is my partner, Pete Kowalczyk. He and I have been assigned to investigate your roommate’s death.”
    Kowalczyk doled out a syllable in greeting, not enough for me to be able to tell how he felt about being pulled off whatever he was working on to look into a murder on the south side. He was a brick wall of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, with arms as thick as a stevedore’s and a thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair above the wide planes of his Slavic face.
    I know this has been a bad night,” continued Blades kindly. “But if you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions.” I nodded as the crime-scene crew brushed past in their dark overalls, lugging their heavy boxes of equipment. “Is there someplace out of the way where we can talk?”
    “Why don’t you two go into the living room?” suggested Elliott, separating himself from the official police investigation and letting his friend go about his job.
    “I’m going to take a quick canvas of the building,” reported Kowalczyk to Blades. “See if any of the neighbors heard anything.”
    Blades nodded, and we went inside. The homicide detective drifted around the room for a bit before he finally settled in Claudia’s favorite armchair across from me on the couch. I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Blades dug into his pocket and produced a clean white handkerchief and passed it to me without a word. In his line of work, I figured, he must buy them in bulk.
    With efficient questions he quickly took me through the story of discovering Claudia’s body. After that, the conversation turned to Claudia, with Blades quickly focusing in on the things most likely to lead him to her killer: her boyfriends, her habits, and her vices. I did the best I could to fill him in on the details of Claudia’s life. I told him about her parents, children of the sixties who were both tenured professors at Columbia, and her fellowship in trauma surgery. Then I told him about Carlos.
    “Do you know his last name?” asked Blades, taking notes.
    “No. But anybody who works in the ER at Prescott Memorial should be able to tell you. Like I said, he’s a paramedic.”
    “And how long did you say they were seeing each other?”
    “I’m not sure. Maybe two or three months.”
    “And you said she broke it off when she found out he was married?”
    “Yes. And almost immediately afterward