Manhattan Is My Beat

of folders.
    The captain—the one she’d met in Mr. Kelly’s apartment—breezed in. He glanced down with a splinter of recognition but didn’t say anything to her.
    “They want to hear today,” he told Manelli. “About the tourist killing.”
    “They’ll hear today,” Manelli said wearily.
    “You got anything?”
    “No.”
    “The mayor. You know. The
Post
. The
Daily News
.”
    “I know.”
    The captain looked at Rune once again. He left the office.
    “We’re doing everything according to procedures,” Manelli told her.
    “Who’s the tourist?”
    “Somebody from Iowa. Knifed in Times Square. Don’t start with me on that.”
    She said, “Just let me get this straight: You’re no closer to finding Mr. Kelly’s killer than you were yesterday.”
    On Manelli’s desk, opening up like a mutant flower, was a piece of deli tissue around a mass of corn muffin. He broke off a chunk and ate it. “How ‘bout you give us a day or two to make the collar?”
    “The …?”
    “To arrest the killer.”
    “I just want to know what happened.”
    “In New York City, we’ve got to deal with almost fifteen hundred homicides a year.”
    “How many people are working on Mr. Kelly’s case?”
    “Me mostly. But there’re other detectives checking things out. Look, Ms. Rune …”
    “Just Rune.”
    “What exactly is your interest?”
    “He was a nice man.”
    “The decedent?”
    “What a gross word that is. Mr.
Kelly
was a nice man. I liked him. He didn’t deserve to get killed.”
    The detective reached for his coffee, drank some, put it down. “Let me tell you the way it works.”
    “I know how it works. I’ve seen enough movies.”
    “Then you have no idea how it works. Homicide—”
    “Why do you have to use such big fancy words? Decedent, homicide. A
man
was
murdered
. Maybe if you said he was
murdered
, you’d work harder to find who did it.”
    “Miss, murder is only one kind of homicide. Mr. Kelly could have been a victim of manslaughter, negligent homicide, suicide….”
    “Suicide?” Her eyebrows lifted in disbelief. “That’s a really bad joke.”
    Manelli snapped back, “A lot of people stage their own deaths to look like murder. Kelly could’ve hired somebody to do it. For the insurance.”
    Oh. She hadn’t thought of that. Then she asked, “Did he have an insurance policy?”
    Manelli hesitated. Then he said, “No.”
    “I see.”
    He continued. “Can I finish?”
    Rune shrugged.
    “We’ll interview everybody in the building and everybody hanging around on the streets around the time of the killing. We took down every license number of every car for three blocks around the apartment and we’ll interview the owners. We’re going through all of the deced— through Mr. Kelly’s personal effects. We’ll find out if he had any relatives nearby, if any friends have suddenly left town, since most perps—”
    “Wait. Perpetrators, right?”
    “Yeah. Since more of ‘em are friends or relatives of, or at least
know
, the vic. That’s the
victim
. Maybe, we’re lucky, we’ll get a description of a suspect that’ll go something like
male Caucasian, six feet. Male black, five eight, wearing dark hat
. Really helpful, understand?” His eyes dropped to a notepad. “Then we’ll take what ballistics told us about the gun”—he hesitated—”and check that out.”
    She jumped on this. “So what do you know about the gun?”
    He was glancing at his muffin; it wouldn’t rescue him.
    “You know
something
,” Rune insisted. “I can see it. Something’s weird, right? Come on! Tell me.”
    “It was a nine-millimeter, mounted with a rubber-baffled silencer. Commercial. Not home-made, like most sound suppressors are.” He seemed not to want to tell her this but felt compelled to. “And the slugs … the bullets … they were Teflon coated.”
    “Teflon? Like with pots and pans?”
    “Yeah. They go through some bulletproof vests. They’re illegal.”
    Rune nodded. “That’s weird?”
    “You don’t see bullets like that very often. Usually just professional killers use them. Just like only pros use commercial silencers.”
    “Keep going. About the investigation.”
    “Then sooner or later, while we’re doing all that work, maybe in three or four months, we’ll get a tip. Somebody got ripped off by a buddy whose cousin was at a party boasting he iced somebody in a drug robbery or something because he didn’t like the way somebody looked at him. We’ll