Fisher was going to be Kenneth’s ticket to a promotion all right. His goal when he came on the force was to make Lieutenant before he was forty and to start collecting his pension by the time he was forty-five. He was thirty-nine now, so time was running out. He already had a time-share at a condo on the Jersey shore, but he couldn’t wait until he was retired, and could spend all his days on the golf course.
Two days after the murders, Kenneth and his partner, Detective Louis Ortiz, were in Kenneth’s office. Louis said, “Gluckman from Ballistics just called. They ran the bullets and shells through Bulletproof and Brasscatcher and came up dry.”
Kenneth finished a long sip of coffee, said, “But they still say it was a. 38, right?”
“Yeah, but get this – they think it was a Cold Lady. 38. Our killer wouldn’t be too smart if he bought a broad’s gun on the street.”
“Unless the killer is a broad.”
“You really think so?”
“I doubt it sincerely. But I think the guy might’ve fucked up on purpose – sets the alarm and buys the pussy gun because he wants to give us a lot to think about.”
“You really think that’s what happened?”
“You know what I think. The job was sloppy – the guy who did it wasn’t a pro. He was a friend or someone Fisher had met. We got any priors with this gun?”
“ Nada so far.”
“Any word on the street?”
“They’ve been debriefing everybody they bring in, all Manhattan precincts, but so far nothing. Nothing from Forensics either. They said the women died somewhere between five-thirty and seven-thirty – probably closer to five-thirty, and both right around the same time. Nothing to go on with the blood either – it all came from the victims. The coroner also said the perp liked what he did. Some of the wounds were unnecessary, the victims were already dead. He called it overkill.”
“And Fisher’s alibi?”
“Rock-fucking-solid. A stripper remembered him – said she was giving him a lap dance around that time. Gave me her business card, too, by the way. She said she likes giving freebies to cops. You should’ve seen his friend, the client he was ‘entertaining.’ The guy was shitting bricks, man. He was like, ‘You gotta promise me – this won’t go back to my wife, right? This won’t go back to her, will it?’ Man, and I thought I was p-whipped.” Then, smiling, he added, “But maybe we’ll get lucky and get some DNA off the turd the shooter left.”
Kenneth got up from his desk and stretched. He’d helped his wife move some furniture last night and he’d thrown his damn back out. He said, “Let’s give it a couple of days – see what happens. At least the media isn’t jumping all over this case the way I thought they would. Gives us a little more room.”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “It’s lucky that crazy bitch set her kids on fire in Brooklyn.”
“Hey, I’ll take a break anyplace I can get it.” Then Kenneth, rocking his hips to keep his back loose, added, “We still got one big problem – motive. Why did Max Fisher want his wife dead?”
“Wild guess – she was fucking some other guy.”
“That’s the obvious answer, so where’s the other guy? And how come none of her friends or relatives ever heard her talking about a lover? I’m telling you, there’s something about this case that just doesn’t fit. The answer’s out there – we just gotta find it.”
As he always did when he was distracted, or when he was angry or frustrated about something, Kenneth touched the gold pin in his lapel. It showed two hands reaching out to each other, never quite touching and looking like they never would. It was the symbol for Down Syndrome, and one night on CNN he was thrilled to see Bill Clinton on there wearing the pin. Kenneth had done a little Google search, and discovered the pin had been given to Clinton by some obscure mystery writer. When he told his wife all she could say was, “I don’t read mysteries.”
Kenneth looked up, saw Louis watching him playing with the pin.
“You really wanna nail this motherfucker, don’t you?” Louis said.
“Yeah, I really do,” Kenneth said.
The next few days brought a couple of new developments. It was discovered that Max Fisher had made several withdrawals from his bank accounts the few days before the murders, but it only added up to several thousand dollars – something worth thinking about, but it wasn’t enough money to prove that he had hired a hit man. Ballistics’ Brasscatcher database determined that the Lady Colt. 38 may have been the same gun used in the unsolved homicide of the owner of a shoe store in Queens a year and a half ago. At first, Kenneth thought this could be the big break, then he found out that Brasscatcher couldn’t be one hundred percent about the match. And, even if the same gun was used in both crimes, it didn’t mean that the gun hadn’t changed hands on the street one or more times since the Queens murder. It was suggested that the Boyos, who had a front in the Bowery, were selling these guns on the street but it was almost impossible to pin anything on them. Worse, people liked them, because everyone had seen In The Name Of The Father and thought that’s the way it really was. Trying to arrest an IRA guy was like trying to arrest a Mafia guy, you were messing with the public’s romantic notions.
Louis questioned people at Max’s office and friends and family members of Deirdre Fisher and Stacy Goldenberg and came up with no new leads. Jeez, it was going cold already.
Kenneth and Louis were having lunch, sitting at one of the back tables in Pick-a-Bagel on Second Avenue, when Louis said, “We gotta start looking at other possibilities, man.”
Kenneth swallowed a bite of bagel with tofu scallion cream cheese, then said, “Like what?”
“Like maybe it was just what it looked like at the beginning – a guy was robbing a townhouse, the women came home, he panicked and shot them.”
“The alarm was reset,” Kenneth said. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the past two nights, his frustration with the case getting to him. “Fisher set the alarm off when he went into the house. Unless Fisher was lying – and I see no reason why he would lie about that because it just makes him look more guilty – then Fisher must’ve given the alarm code to whoever killed those two women.”
He’d gone over this a hundred times till his wife had roared, “You’re obsessed.”
She was right.
“Hey, that makes sense to me,” Louis said. “So why don’t we just bring Max Fisher in?”
“If I thought that would help – believe me, I wouldn’t be sitting here on my fat ass eating bagels. But we gotta make Fisher think he’s safe, let him get complacent. Every day that goes by that he doesn’t hear from me he gets a little more nervous. Right now he’s probably thinking, ‘Why isn’t Detective Simmons calling? He said he’d call.’ But pretty soon he’s gonna think we forgot all about him and that’s when his big shot side is gonna come out. He’s gonna think he’s above the law, king of the world, and that’s when he’s gonna slip up. And that’s when I come in and go for my knockout punch. That’s when he gets the new tracksuit.”
“Tracksuit?” Louis asked.
“Trust me on this one,” Kenneth said. “We keep up with the silent treatment a few more days and start tailing him. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be like Alexis Morgan all over again. Maybe he’ll dig his own grave.”
Kenneth put a twenty-four hour surveillance on Max Fisher, but this didn’t turn up any new leads. Fisher went to the park, the supermarket, his health club, and other normal places. Then, just when it seemed like the case was going nowhere, there was a breakthrough. Some of the jewelry that was stolen at Max Fisher’s apartment turned up at a pawnshop in Chinatown. The owner of the shop, Mr. Chen Liang, didn’t speak a word of English, but through a translator swore to Kenneth that he didn’t know who the man was who’d sold him the jewelry, he’d never seen him before. The man had allegedly come into the shop on Saturday afternoon, the day after the murder. He dumped the jewelry on the counter and said “How much?” Liang said he offered the man five thousand dollars, even though the jewelry was worth ten or twenty times that much. The man must’ve not known jack about jewelry because he didn’t complain, didn’t even try to negotiate. He happily took the cash and left the store.