"Did he say anything else?"
"No, he was very open about the whole thing. He told me he was treated like a suspect, everything but the fingerprints and the lie-detector test."
April snorted-another stupid criminal. They got the fingerprints and the DNA (should they need it) from his water bottle. Only the molds of his handprints were left to do, and they wouldn't do it until the ME told them they had a mark on the body they might be able to match with it. "Was he disappointed about that?" she said.
"No. Completely secure in his innocence. He was excited. He wanted to make a lunch date to tell me all about it."
"What, at midnight?"
"He sounded a little high, April."
"Interesting."
"It was a little creepy. He didn't seem to mind being a suspected murderer."
"Well, people like attention," April told him. "What did you say about the lunch?"
"I don't know where you're going with this, but I can't be sure he didn't break my arm, so I said no to the lunch. I told him I was going out of town for a couple of weeks."
"Good. I'm going to want you to look at some dog photos in the morning. See if you recognize any of them from the neighborhood. What time are you leaving?"
"Noon. Can I go to bed now?"
"Sweet dreams."
"Help me out, querida," Mike said when she hung up. "I told Marcus we need the list of martial-arts studios in a twenty-block radius of Fourteenth Street, especially the ones on the East Side with professional sparring partners and non-Asian masters. He wants to know what system Frayme favors-karate, tae kwon do, judo, tai chi, kickboxing, hapkido, kung fu. There's a mess of them."
"Put him on speaker. Marcus, hey. The serious practitioners learn more than one system. Bear with me while I fill you in. The Chinese claim that karate derived from kung fu. They're both unarmed methods of combat with all parts of the body used to punch-strike, kick, or block. Karate itself means 'empty' or 'China hand.' Judo, jujitsu, and go ti are wrestling forms and considered the art of the gentle. That's out. Tae kwon do is the Korean method-probably the most popular form of martial arts these days, called 'way of the hands and feet.' There are tournaments for all the systems, but the belt grades and many terms derive from the Japanese. And everybody has to learn the kata, the moves and maneuvers. Kenpo may be what Frayme favors, since he's a fist man. Kenpo comes from Hawaii and the Americas, introduced by a guy called Ed Parker. Most people learn several mix-fight methods, bits and pieces of several systems."
"Can you narrow this down a little?"
"Frayme probably goes to a place called Tiger Strike, or Praying Mantis, or Silent Warrior-as you said, no Korean or Japanese or Chinese name. Maybe U.S. professional, something macho without a particular accent." April lifted a shoulder.
"That's what I told them. What about the brick thing?"
"Okay, my take on this is he doesn't break bricks at all. That's too old-fashioned. A clumsy party trick. He was talking about doing it for balance. That means not standing there and pounding something but moving. That means he'd be working with kick mitts and striking pads, coaching pads. I believed him when he said he did that at home. You can get sandbags and platforms and various kinds of striking pads to practice at home, but it wouldn't be enough. He certainly had the ridge hand of a fistfighter, which means he could fight without a protective mitt, but I wonder if he was wearing one when he killed Birdie."
Mike slowed in front of the precinct, where they had to switch cars. It was one-thirty. "We need to clear this up with Gloss. This may be what was bothering him. The bruise on her neck might be wider than the blade of a hand," he said. He turned off the headlights.
"Want me to call him?" April asked as he went inside to return the keys.
"I already did. He's not picking up the page." "Well, he'd better get to it if we want to resolve it before the funeral." April yawned and got out of the car. She could hope, couldn't she?
Fifty
After April and Mike switched cars and drove home, it was both a long night and a short one: long on worry, short on sleep. Bernardino's case was a little like lightning. The one strike sent down more than one deadly streamer and left some unresolved issues. Even if they indicted Frayme for the murder, four million dollars was still missing, and Harry Weinstein had briefly been in possession of two hundred and fifty thousand of it. So far there was no trail that led to Bill or Kathy. But for Bernardino's sake, April was not going to be able to let go of that. Launching further assaults on a tough old cop was not going to be easy. More important at the moment, though, their only really viable suspect was still walking around, making late-night phone calls and working out with his unregistered weapons. Mike and April were too wired to calm down.
April was up again at five-thirty, drinking hot water and scanning the yellow pages for martial arts. She was not surprised to find some of the names that had come to her on the spur of the moment. Silent Warrior would be a natural. It was there. So was Praying Mantis. She was also attracted to the strongly American typeface of Professional Prepare at Twenty-second Street and Broadway.
Mike was up at eight, on the phone again trying to reach the ME. More than forty-eight hours after Birdie Bassett's murder, the preliminary death report on the cause of her death still had not left his desk. Her funeral was set for Sunday afternoon out in New Jersey, and he was determined to have some resolution before then. Dr. Gloss didn't pick up the second urgent page and return the call until nine-thirty Saturday morning. By then, Mike and April had already visited Ducci in the lab for the second Saturday in a row and were on their way into the city.
"Yeah, Mike, what's up?" Dr. Gloss said.
"How about Birdie Bassett? We're at a critical juncture here."
Gloss sighed. "Yeah, I know. You'll have the prelim as soon as I do. I'm still working on it."
"By now you should already know pretty much everything you're going to know."
"What's your hurry?"
"The funeral's tomorrow, and we need some specifics to move forward."
"Well, nobody told me there was any particular rush," Gloss said.
"I'm telling you. Aren't I good enough?"
"Don't get huffy. I can give you generalities. What do you need?"
"How about the murder weapon?"
"Look, that's what I'm working on. I want to be sure. She has some deep premortem bruises on her neck. It looks like he roughed her up a little before he killed her. The bruising on the neck is consistent with manual strangulation, the kind from his squeezing and her struggling that would take place in that circumstance. There's a bruise at the base of the neck possibly caused by pressure from the killer's hand."
"But…?"
"But there are no petechiae in the mucosa of the lips and lids of the eyes. And, of course, you saw her face. It wasn't the dark red that would be consistent with the slow bleeding that occurs with strangulation. And her neck is broken."
"So the blow killed her. Tell me about the blow."
"Okay, the blow. More force was used than would have been necessary to kill her. The neck is broken, as I said. The spinal cord is crushed. All this indicates that she did not ultimately choke to death slowly."
"Okay, we know that. So he started to strangle her and changed his mind."
"It looks that way. He changed his mind and hit her. Maybe somebody interrupted him. Maybe she did something to infuriate him."
"Okay, could be either. But what did he use?"
"That's what I'm working on. We know it's some kind of blunt instrument. He could have come at her with his hand, but I want to be sure it wasn't a pipe or a baseball bat. We're measuring, okay; we're trying to make a match with different things. It's too easy to go for the karate stuff. It's possible he hit her with something else."
"Lao really hit a nerve, huh," Mike said.