“Sure, Nasal Forensics. Moskowitz, De Anzoli, couple others, they specialize in that.”
“How about you?”
Conkling angles his head, she’d have to say charmingly, and takes a minute. “Cops and me… You run a nasal scan, the boys get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets. So we always end up at cross-purposes.”
“This is never a problem for Moskowitz and them?”
“Moskowitz is a decorated bunco-squad veteran, De Anzoli has a D.Crim., and there’s family members also on the job, it’s a culture of trust. Me, I’m more comfortable as an independent.”
“Oh, I can relate.” She points her face across the room and then slides her eyeballs sideways to look at him. “Unless you already smelled that about me also?”
“Like is there some notorious pheromone, kicks in whenever—Wait, rewind, now you’re gonna think—”
Maxine beams brightly and sips her Sudden Enlightenment Organic Bamboo tea. “Sure must make dating complicated, this snoot of yours.”
“Is why I can generally keep quiet about it. Except when Shawn tries to fix me up.”
They have a look at each other. Over the past year, Maxine has been out with hat fetishists, day traders, pool sharks, private-equity hotshots, and seldom has she been visited by anxieties about seeing any of them again. Now, a little bit late for it, she remembers to check out Conkling’s left hand, which proves, like her own, to be innocent of a ring.
He catches her looking. “I forgot to check your finger too. Awful, ain’t we.” Conkling has a boy and a girl in middle school who show up on weekends, and today’s Friday. “I mean, they have keys, but usually they find me there.”
“Yeah I’ve got to go punch back in too. Here, this is my home, office, beeper.”
“Here’s mine, and if you’re serious about a crime-scene job, I can either put you in touch with Moskowitz or…”
“Better if it was you.” She allows for a heartbeat and a half. “I don’t want to coordinate with the NYPD any more than I need to on this. Not that they ever take kindly to civilians poking their—sorry, I meant inquiring into police business.”
SO WHAT THEY DO is meet for a noon swimming date at The Deseret pool, it having been proven scientifically, according to Conkling, that the human sense of smell tends to peak on average at 11:45 A.M. Maxine wears some midrange Trish McEvoy scent that’s going to wash off anyway, so it shouldn’t freak her out beyond some proper perimeter if Conkling guesses right again.
Conkling seems to be fit, in a frequent-swimmer way. Today he’s wearing something from one of the WASP catalogs a couple sizes too big. Maxine resists any eyebrow commentary. She was expecting maybe a Speedo thong? She discreetly checks for dick size anyway, curious also about any reaction he might be having to how she looks in this number she has on today, a high-ticket reformatting of the LBD into a swimsuit, instead of the more or less disposable ones she gets through the mail in floral prints it is better not to think about… And whoop there it is. Isn’t it?
“Something, uh…”
“Oh I was just looking for uh, my goggles.”
“On your head?”
“Right.”
From its looks, The Deseret pool could be the oldest one in the city. Overhead you can see soaring into the chlorine-scented mists a huge segmented dome of some translucent early plastic, each piece concave and teardrop-shaped, separated by bronze-colored cames—during the daytime, whatever the sun’s angle, admitting the same verdigris light, its surface at nightfall growing ever more remote and less visible, vanishing before closing time into a wintry gray.
Joaquin the pool guy is on duty. Usually something of a motormouth, today he seems to Maxine a little, you’d say, unforthcoming.
“You heard anything more about the body they found?”
“Much as anybody, which is nothing. Not even the guys on the door, not even Fergus the nightman, who knows everything. Cops been and gone, now everybody’s pretty creeped out, right?”
“It wasn’t a tenant, I heard.”
“I don’t ask.”
“Somebody must know something.”
“Around here it’s deaf and dumb. Policy of the building. Sorry, Maxine.”
After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flipflopped and semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statute of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries. The only light comes shimmering from watertight observation windows in the pool, each enclosed in its private viewing booth, much like a peep show at an arcade, where according to an early real-estate brochure “admirers of the natatory arts may obtain, without themselves having to undergo immersion, educational views of the human form unrestricted by the demands of gravity.” Light from above the pool comes down through the water and through the observation windows and out into this darkened level below, a strange rarefied greenish blue.
It was in one of these cubicles that the police found Lester’s corpse propped up as if gazing into the pool, where earlier a swimmer had noticed him and after a couple more laps, getting the picture, freaked out. According to the papers, a knife-blade of some sort had been driven with great force into Lester’s skull, apparently not by hand because part of the tang still protruded from Lester’s forehead. The absence of a knife-handle suggested a spring-propelled ballistic blade, illegal in the U.S. since 1986, though said to be standard issue for Russian special forces. The Post, for whom the Cold War still emits a warm nostalgic glow, loves stories like this, so the screaming began, KGB assassination squads running loose through the city and so forth, and this sort of thing would go on for the better part of a week.
When she saw the headline, “GONE BALLISTIC!,” Maxine rang up Rocky Slagiatt. “Your ol’ Spetsnaz buddy Igor Dashkov. He would’t happen to know anything about this.”
“Already asked him. He says that knife is a urban myth. He was in the Spetsnaz for about a century and never saw one.”
“Not quite my question, but—”
“Hey. Wouldn’t rule out a Russian hit. On the other hand…”
Right. Wouldn’t rule out somebody trying to set it up to look like a Russian hit, either.
The crime scene itself here, meanwhile, looks pretty picked over. There’s yellow tape around, and chalk marks, along with discarded plastic evidence pouches and cigarette butts and fast-food packaging. Ignoring a background haze of cop aftershave, tobacco smoke, stomach effluxes from neighborhood saloons, crime-lab solvents, fingerprint powder, luminol—
“Wait, you can smell luminol? Isn’t it supposed to be odorless?”
“Nah. Notes of pencil shavings, hibiscus, number-two diesel, mayonnaise—”
“Excuse me, that’s wine-maven talk.”