And she took advantage of always knowing what she wanted to do, which was to be a cop. Here she was, bang, a female on the Detective Squad at age thirty-two, hammering out fifty words a minute on the old Selectric, finishing a page without having made a single mistake. Arnie’s four-fingered method frustrated her, though Arnie thought he did well, and he did, for a cop, compared to the old-timers he used to work with. Fifteen, twenty years on the job, fully half their time spent doing paperwork, you’d think a guy would learn to type in self-defense.
Lili could be sexy, very sexy if Arnie let himself think of her that way. He was more attracted to the all-American blue-eyed blonde type, but there was no denying Lili had a lot of what a lot of guys went for. He asked her once, and he hoped he wasn’t out of bounds, why she wasn’t dating some nice young fellow. She blushed and that made Arnie blush, but her answer was a hundred percent honest: If I met some guy I liked and that guy asked me out, don’t you think I’d go out with him?
He knew for a fact that Lili and Robotaille saw each other a few times during Robotaille’s divorce proceedings, but it hadn’t worked out between them. Nobody’s fault and no hard feelings, just one of those things. Martinson had been pulling for Robotaille. He was a good cop and a good man, handsome enough for Lili, but it was supposed to be this big secret, so Arnie never opened his mouth about it to Lili or Robotaille or anybody else.
Feeling his eyes on her, Lili looked up from her typing. “What?” she said. “What is it?”
“I thought you were with the French girl.”
“I handed her off to Robotaille. What’re you doing?”
“Going over to the morgue,” Arnie said. “Cranston’s still on vacation, I think.”
Lili typed a few more words. He was distracting her.
“I hate dealing with that assistant of his,” Arnie said.
“Which one?” Lili said, still typing. “Williams? Not exactly the life of the party, is he?”
“He gives me the creeps, that guy.”
“Whereas Cranston leaves you with a fuzzy glow.”
“Cranston I’m used to. Williams is in a different league of creepy. What is it, the accent?”
“I’m trying not to draw any racial inferences here, I want you to know that.”
Lili had attended the same sensitivity training session as Martinson. It was one of their running jokes. “Race, gender, and socio-economic background,” the sensitivity trainer summed up, “these are the three categories most likely to arouse prejudice in any of us. Break the pattern of stereotypical thinking. This,” he allowed, “will be more difficult for some of us than for others.”
The last comment seemed to be directed at Martinson. Afterwards, Arnie and Acevedo got a good laugh out of the bias suffered by overweight Miami Beach natives from Jewish families whom nobody thought of as Jewish.
Martinson did not much identify with being a Jew. He couldn’t remember the last bar mitzvah he’d been to, and in the last wedding he was at, his niece got married by a Unitarian minister. Anybody who would’ve said a peep about it on the Martinson side had been dead for a decade, and when he’d been married briefly himself, it was to a Catholic girl of German-Irish ancestry.
This, Martinson remembered his mother saying, was how a Jew lost his Jewishness. She had a Yiddish word for it, though the truth of it was, she had never been what you’d think of as religious, and his old man believed in nothing, ever, and had encouraged the same in his children. In his opinion, it would only hold them back in life. That sensitivity trainer would’ve had a field day with Arnie’s father, but he’d been gone twenty years before afternoons like that were ever dreamt of.
“It’s all that hoogus-boogus island shit,” Arnie said of Williams. “Where’s he from, Haiti?”
“I believe his country of origin is Trinidad. He is now, however, an American.”
“Tell me the truth, Lil,” he said, leaning in toward her, his palms on her desk. “Couldn’t you just see the guy as a witch doctor?”
“Stop it,” Lili said.
“Grass skirt, headdress, whiteface?”
“I am not hearing this.”
“Dancing with a torch, maybe casting a spell?” He had his fist balled and he opened it twice quick, throwing the fingers at Lili, casting a spell of his own.
As much time as Martinson spent around the morgue, he’d have thought by now it wouldn’t faze him, but the combination of florescence and formaldehyde left him cold with a sense of futility that fell just short of panic. The sheet spread over the body, the repeating squares along its fold lines screaming for order, mocking the scientific discipline that could give you what and when, and where and how, but wasn’t going to tell you why. But if you got yourself all twisted up in why, you’d eventually take your service revolver and hold it to your temple and send your brains steaming out one side of your head, just like Frank Matzalanis.
Matzalanis was the best homicide investigator the Beach Detective Bureau ever had, and as far as Martinson was concerned, ever would have. Because Matzalanis was possessed. No wife, no family, no life outside of work, and no interest in one. He drank too much whiskey and soaked up the booze with fried chicken and donuts and solved every homicide that had the balls to cross his desk, except two.
The first was at the very beginning of his career. It involved a little girl who was thought to have drowned in Indian Creek, but an autopsy revealed ligature marks on her throat. She’d been strangled and dumped, and she’d been raped. The kid was nine. Her killer was never found. Twenty-some years after the fact, Matzalanis would periodically re-open her file, putting in whatever hours of his own that he could spare. That was Matzalanis. Haunted.
Then in 1987 there was a series of murders that scared the living shit out of every grandmother living in South Florida. The actor had done three. All women, none under sixty, all rape-strangulations. Martinson worked the case with Frank. They had it narrowed down to one very strong suspect, an ex-Florida Power and Light employee by the name of Karl Bogosian. Bogosian had read all the meters of the victims during his tenure with FPL and would have been able to ascertain that each of them lived alone. During a break-in of Bogosian’s apartment, they found a uniform he neglected to return after he’d been terminated, and a trove of porno magazines and videos that featured old broads.
They couldn’t match a single shred of evidence at any scene to Bogosian. That hurt their investigation. No judge would allow a blood test with such flimsy circumstantial facts. Maybe due to the strain of the investigation, or maybe just because his time had come, Bogosian died of a heart attack. The wave of murders stopped. Matzalanis was more convinced than ever that Bogosian was their man, and Martinson thought he was right.
But why hadn’t he left anything behind? Not a fingerprint or a cigarette butt or a thread from the FPL uniform, nothing. Matzalanis theorized that Bogosian had gone in with a hand vacuum, which they did not find in his apartment, and was deliberate and meticulous and compulsive about cleaning up his various messes. He would have had all the time in the world.
Near the end, Matzalanis re-opened the case of the nine-year-old, and was attempting to establish a connection between her murder and the ’87 series, defying the wild dissimilarities in their ages, the fact that the little girl had been dumped and the women left in their homes, and his own inability to tie any successive rapestrangulation to the original, the one that had eluded him, had escaped his instinct and his investigative genius. Matzalanis must have concluded the little girl’s murder and the old women had to be linked, if only because he couldn’t solve them.