“Me?”
“Yeah, you. A guy named O’Malley. He said if he didn’t see you here, he’d probably catch up with you at the funeral.”
“Funeral? What funeral?”
“A guy died name of Toth, he said. Something about him being your father’s partner.”
“Laszlo Toth?”
“That’s it.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah. Shot through the heart in his office. A robbery.” “Wow.”
“Didn’t you read about it in the paper?”
“I haven’t looked at anything all weekend except the Cartoon Channel.”
“Your future is so bright. This O’Malley said the funeral’s tomorrow and that he’d see you there. I’ll tell you, this whole thing makes me glad my dad fitted that shotgun underneath the cash register. Someone comes in here looking for an easy mark, they’ll be pulling shot out of the corpse for a week.”
But Kyle wasn’t listening anymore to Bubba Jr. He was thinking about Laszlo Toth and his getting shot in the heart and about the funeral on Tuesday, and while he was thinking of it all he was smiling.
CHAPTER 7
NICE DAY FOR A FUNERAL,” said Detective Ramirez.
“For the corpse especially,” said Detective Henderson. “Sounds like you’re looking forward to it, old man.”
“Oh, I am, believe me,” said Henderson. “One day life is nothing
but worries, next day all those worries are gone, like a flock of finches flitting into the sky.”
“A flock of flitting finches?”
“Didn’t know I was a poet, did you?”
“Is that what you are?” said Detective Ramirez. “Because I’ve been wondering.”
They were a team, a single unit, Detectives Henderson and Ramirez. It didn’t matter that Henderson was tired and old, a burnout waiting for his full pension to vest so he could sit in his lawn chair and watch his tomatoes grow. Or that Ramirez was young and ambitious and disappointed in drawing Henderson as a partner after her meteoric rise to the Homicide Division. It didn’t matter that they came from different generations, listened to different music, viewed the world from entirely different perspectives. It didn’t matter whether they had gotten drunk together, because they hadn’t, or whether they liked each other, because they didn’t, or whether they respected each other, because they both expected they never would. It only mattered that they were partners.
“Widow looks cut up about it all,” said Ramirez.
“She didn’t seem as upset when we questioned her right after, did she?” said Detective Henderson.
“You think she’s faking?”
“Putting on a show. But then that’s only natural, foul play or no. What were they married, forty-five years? After all that time, love has degenerated into habit, and mostly the only thing that still glows bright is the hate.”
“How long you been married, Henderson?”
“Not quite that long, but we sure as hell are getting there.”
They were standing a bit back from the proceedings, dark glasses guarding their watchful eyes. The sun was bright, the sky lightly dotted with clouds, the air springtime fresh. It was a respectable crowd, not as large as some but enough of a turnout to know that the deceased, one Laszlo Toth, a victim of murder by gunshot, was a living, breathing person before he was a corpse. Beneath a blue canopy, sitting in the middle of a row of folding chairs set next to the freshly dug grave, the widow sobbed uncontrollably as the priest carried on about souls and forgiveness and eternity. Two old women were on either side of her. One, with dark hair and dark glasses and bright, overlipsticked lips, offered comfort as she patted the grieving widow’s hair. The other sat withered and twitching from palsy in a wheelchair but remained an imperious presence nonetheless. A factotum in a navy-blue suit stood behind the wheelchair, apparently ready to answer any whim as the woman gripped her black purse tightly and scanned the crowd.
“Look at the women sitting on either side of the wife,” said Detective Henderson. “It seems a little strange, them sitting there like that.”
“Why?”
“You’d think it would be the daughter comforting the mother, but she’s been shunted off to the side. These other two women have the place of honor. It might be interesting to know who they are. Any idea?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you should find out,” he said.
Detective Ramirez bristled. She never liked being given orders, and she especially didn’t like being given orders by a burnt piece of toast like Henderson. “This is a waste,” she said, turning her head away from the proceedings and scanning the empty landscape. “We should be on the street trying to catch the merchandise being moved.”
“We’ll have plenty of time for that,” said Henderson. “And I’ve already given Robbery a heads-up on the missing items. But for now why don’t you find out who those old ladies might be.”
“You want me to go up and ask them?”
“People at a funeral love to talk. The only place better for learning who screwed whom is at a wedding. Just find someone who can’t wait to spill and you’ll get it all. Go on, now, before they start throwing dirt in that hole.”
Ramirez gave him a hard, canine look, like she was about to bark him up a tree, before thinking better of it and heading off to find someone talkative to talk to.
Ramirez didn’t want to spend her morning at a cemetery. She figured she had it figured, the whole murder-robbery of Laszlo Toth. A rear door accidentally left unlocked, a lawyer working late, an opportunity for mayhem. And the crime scene backed up her view. The wallet emptied, the victim’s prized Raymond Weil watch missing, files scattered, drawers rifled, a clutch of flat-screen computer monitors gone. Ramirez assumed that the killer would have taken the copy machine if he could have lifted it. To Ramirez’s way of thinking, getting a line on the gun and searching for the fenced screens or the watch, keeping constant lookout for the credit card to be used was the way to go, and they could do all that while working the other open files piling up on their desks. Scoping out the dead guy’s funeral was simply a lazy man’s way to pleasantly pass the time as he waited for retirement.
Henderson was lazy, he’d admit it, and he did like cemeteries, admired their peacefulness and fine greenery. And Henderson agreed with Ramirez that their being at the funeral was probably a waste of time. But something about the crime scene didn’t sit right in his stomach, and he wasn’t willing to let any opportunity to figure it out slip away. The murder and looting of the legal office was a bit too careful for a kid coming off the street with a gun in his belt and a habit to feed. In random robberies with drugs as the motive, the destruction often had a frenzied quality to it; the damage wrought here seemed controlled by comparison. And no one in the building could account for the door’s being unlocked, which made it seem that instead of its being a burglary, the killer might have been invited in by the dead lawyer. Maybe the lawyer was staying late just for the meeting. The victim’s wife said the broken fingers were the result of an accident, but Toth could have been threatened before he was killed. And what about the cuff link they found beneath Toth’s desk? The widow didn’t recognize it. What kind of drug-addled killer wore cuff links? But more than anything, Henderson couldn’t understand the peculiar pressure that was being placed on him to solve this thing quickly. The captain had called him in, told him the commissioner was getting heat from the mayor to climb on top of the Toth murder as soon as possible. Which meant the mayor was getting heat himself. That was a lot of pressure for a dead seventy-year-old lawyer facing financial troubles, all of which set Detective Henderson to wondering if there might not be more to this than Ramirez figured.