Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

standards if you were just going to abandon them all at the last minute? And anyway, whether Marty believed it or not, I was still sure Lisa’s death hadn’t been a suicide, any more than Paul’s had happened during a random mugging.
    I took one last look and closed the folder, turning my attention to the big windows that looked out over Tenth Street . Had I walked over to them and looked out, I would have seen the wrought-iron gate that led to my garden, just across the street and a few doors west of the precinct.
    “Is that it?”
    I nodded. “I thought—”
    “Suppose someone killed her,” he said, his voice low, his back turned to the detectives so that neither of them would hear what he was about to say.
    “Okay,” I told him. On second thought, I might not have been able to see my gate, had I walked over to the windows. The precinct had moved here from Charles Street in the late sixties, and it appeared that no one had had the time to get the windows washed since then. They were practically opaque.
    “Might you then suppose the ex-boyfriend, Wilcox, was killed by the same individual, not by a mugger?”
    “I might,” I said, turning back toward Marty.
    “And is there any particular individual you have in mind? Is there someone you suppose it might be, or haven’t you gotten that far yet?” Sounding just like my brother-in-law, the mamzer.
    “Look,” I said, but Marty held up a hand to stop me.
    “In order to make an arrest,” he said, “we need more than suppositions. We need—”
    “Yeah,” I told him. “I get it. Evidence. Not hunches. Something concrete, airtight. A bloody glove. Particularly helpful if it actually fits the suspect. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene, preferably right to the suspect’s house. Or a signed confession. Something of that sort.”
    “We don’t need a signed confession. It could be videotaped. That would be acceptable, too.”
    Okay, I thought, so we were both having a bad day. It happens. “I’ll get back to you,” I said.
    “You do that,” he told me.
    How much pressure was the precinct under, I wondered, with an unsolved murder in the area? Like Marty really wanted to up it to two, go tell the detectives they’d made a little mistake about Lisa Jacobs’s death, tell the press, inform her parents. That sure sounded like a half an hour alone with a box of Twinkies and a quart of chocolate milk.
    “Look, I know you’re busy. Thanks a million for showing me the photos.”
    “No problem, kid,” he said. “Sorry I jumped all over you.”
    I shrugged my shoulders to tell him it was no big deal, water off a Labrador retriever’s back. He picked up the folder and turned to go.
    I almost stopped him, but decided against it. He was right. I didn’t have evidence. I only had a hunch. And the terrible feeling that time was running out.

31

He Couldn’t Get In, Could He?

    I GOT TO Stewie’s apartment much later than I’d hoped I would, wondering as I knocked and waited exactly how early he left work. The welfare system was corrupt on both sides: people who should have been taxpaying, productive citizens getting checks, sometimes in more than one location, and employees signing out to the field and going to the Bronx Zoo, teaching t’ai chi, or merely going home.
    Someone was playing with me now, letting me know he knew where I really lived, sending me flowers, calling up to see if I was home. I had to move fast, I thought, slipping the first of three keys into the first of the three locks on Stewie Fleck’s apartment door, because whoever had killed Lisa and Paul was clearly playing for keeps, and it wouldn’t take a genius to guess who might be next on his list.
    I opened the door and quickly followed Dashiell in, closing the door behind us and locking the middle of the three Medeco locks. Then I waited, letting my eyes acclimate to the dark before feeling around for the light switch.
    Stewie’s studio apartment was on the first floor in the rear of a six-story tenement building on Bedford Street, a block and a half from Chumley’s , where we’d had a couple of beers while he’d told me the story of how he found t’ai chi. Stewie was apparently one of those people who straightened up but didn’t clean, as in, “I’ll straighten up the bathroom.” Whose husband hasn’t said that? But there was no exasperated wife in Stewie Fleck’s life to utter sarcastic epithets under her breath while handing him the Comet, Fantastic,