Manhattan Is My Beat

“Name’s Susan Edelman. Lives next door.” He nodded toward the building where Rune had seen the jogger stretching.
    “Ice her?” the captain asked.
    Ice … do
… These people had no respect for human beings.
    “No,” Manelli said. “But Edelman’s in no shape to say anything. Not for a while.”
    Rune remembered the woman lying on the greasy cobblestones of the alley. Blood on her pink jogging suit. Remembered feeling guilty that she’d put down the poor woman for being a yuppie, for being pert.
    “This young lady”—Nodding at Rune—”saw the car too. Says she didn’t see much.”
    “Yeah?” the captain asked. “You get a look at the perp?”
    “The what?”
    “Perp.”
    Rune shook her head. “I speak English. It’s my native language.”
    “The driver.”
    “No.”
    “How many people were in the car?” the captain continued.
    “I don’t know. There was glare. I told
him
that.”
    “Yeah,” the captain said doubtfully. “Some people think there’s glare when they just don’t
want
to see anything. But you don’t hafta worry. We take care of witnesses. You’ll be safe.”
    “I wasn’t a witness. I didn’t see anything. I was getting out of the way of a car that was trying to run me over. It’s a little distracting….”
    Her eyes strayed again to the corpse; she found she’d eased to the side of the slow detective. Finally she forced herself to look away. She glanced up at Manelli.
    “The tape,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Can I get the tape? I’m supposed to take it back to where I work.”
    She saw the cover for the cassette.
Manhattan Is My Beat
.
    Manelli walked over to the VCR and pushed eject. A clatter of the mechanism. The tape eased out. Manelli motioned to a crime-scene cop, who walked over. The detective asked, “Whatta you think? Can she have it?”
    “One of my biggest fears.” The crime-scene officer’s latex-gloved hand lifted the cassette out of the VCR; he looked it over.
    “What’s that?” Manelli asked the officer.
    “I rent
Debbie Does Dallas
and get hit by a bus before I can return it. My widow gets a bill for two thousand bucks for some sleazy porn and—”
    Rune said angrily, “That’s
not
what he rented and I don’t think you should joke.”
    The technician cleared his throat, kept an awkward grin on his face. He didn’t apologize. He said, “Thing is, look at the TV. You know, him shooting it out? Maybe it’s a coincidence but I’d say we better dust this tape pretty careful. Maybe the perp looked at it. And we do that, well, I’ll tell you I wouldn’t run it through
my
VCR with powder on it. This shit’ll gum up anything.”
    Rune said, “You can’t just take our tape.”
    She didn’t care about Washington Square Video’s inventory. No, what bothered her was that the cops were keeping the one thing that connected her to Robert Kelly. Stupid, she thought. But she wanted that tape.
    “We can actually. Yeah.”
    “No, you can’t. It’s ours. And I want it.”
    The captain was irritated with her but Manelli, even if he too was pissed off, was trying to remain civil-servant polite. He said, “Why don’t we go downstairs? You’re not supposed to be here anyway.”
    Rune glanced one last time at Robert Kelly, then followed the detective into the hall, which was hot and filled with the smells of dust and mold and cooking food. They walked down the stairs.
    Outside, leaning on an unmarked police car, Manelli said to her, “About the tape—we’ve gotta keep it. Sorry. Your boss wants to complain, have him or his lawyer call the corporation counsel. But we gotta. Might be evidence.”
    “Why? You think the killer watched the movie?” she asked.
    The detective said, “He may have picked it up to see if it was worth taking.”
    “And then shot the TV because it wasn’t?”
    The detective said, “Maybe.”
    “That’s crazy,” Rune said.
    “Murder’s crazy.”
    She was remembering the pattern the blood made on Mr. Kelly’s chest.
    He asked, “Tell me true. How well did you know him?”
    Rune didn’t answer for a moment. She wiped her eyes and nose with the tail of her shirt-vest. “Not well. He was a customer is all.”
    “You couldn’t tell us anything about him?”
    Rune started to say, sure, but then realized that, no, she couldn’t. Everything she thought she knew, which was a lot, she’d just made up: the wife who was dead of cancer, the children who’d moved away, a distinguished military career in