“Okay.” Roth leaned back in his chair. “Here’s what we do next. Poslowski, you know where she goes. Look up all incidents during the last few days along her routes where she may have seen something in her travels she doesn’t know she saw. Then check with the bank to see if there is a bad odor coming from that branch. When some people have a lot of money flowing under their nose, they can’t resist dropping a few bills on the floor so that they can pick them up when no one is looking. Macrory, you go over what’s on the books in the whole area and look for an anomaly. Since you didn’t major in English, I’ll explain that an anomaly is a deviation from what would ordinarily be expected. Understand?”
“No,” said Maguire.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll know one when you see it.”
He waved them out of the office as the phone rang.
“Roth,” said Marlowe, “I found an anomaly, or what seems to be one, but it’s as far as I can go on my own without being fired. An elderly man walked into a restaurant in Cleveland six months ago. No one paid any attention to him until he pulled out a silenced pistol and put a couple of slugs into a well-known criminal attorney who was having lunch with a female friend. The only reason we looked into it was we thought it was related to organized crime. We still do.”
“Where’s the anomaly?”
“He took off on a ten-speed, which made sense considering how the streets are jammed during the lunch hour. The bicycle was found more than a mile away. The anomaly is that one witness, whom no one paid any attention to, said he pedaled out of there so hard and so fast that anyone as old as he was should have been dead of a heart attack within a few blocks. Now, we either have an elderly man in great shape or—”
“A young one made up to look like one. Like the guy in the bank. You should take this information to Cowpull—”
“Cowper.”
“—and tell him it would pay to look into more of these open cases. Couple more anomalies and he could get to be a big hero and get promoted out of your life before your boobs begin to sag.”
She was still laughing when the phone went dead.
Dorothy was young, with deep russet hair pulled back and gathered with a clip. The slim body was the kind Helga had always wistfully admired; encased in washed jeans, white blouse, dirty trainers, and a man’s leather jacket.
She toured the apartment and settled on the sofa after placing her pistol at her elbow.
Helga recognized it. Glock. She could feel the weight and balance as clearly as if she held it. Uncle Dennis was into handguns and she’d gone shooting with him many times.
You have a natural talent, Helga. You should take up competition shooting as a hobby.
What she should take up as a hobby is shooting Allan, she’d thought. One toe at a time and then the fingers before working her way into more vital body parts. Her uncle asked why his inoffensive remark brought on a fit of hysterical giggling.
“Let me tell you how his mind works,” said Dorothy. “He could have sent someone else, but he asked for me. I know why. Six months ago a guy with an Uzi blew out the window of a car three inches from my head. Psychiatric counseling notwithstanding, it was a long time before I could stop shaking when I thought how easily it could have been my skull shattering into a thousand pieces. I’ve been there and I know how it feels, so if you want to get drunk, jump up and down and scream, or chew up the bedclothes, you go right ahead. It will be between you and me.”
Helga looked at Dorothy’s slim, tapering fingers and then at her own, much blunter and shorter. “He seems to have a lot of authority.”
“He does. He’s the head honcho for this district. You’re lucky. He happened to be in the vicinity when he heard the call and stopped in. Ordinarily, he’d let Maguire and Polanski handle it, but something stirred him to take over.” She smiled. “Maybe you caught his eye.”
“Hardly likely,” said Helga drily. “I’ve never been an eye-catcher. He couldn’t even remember my name.”
“He doesn’t remember anyone’s, including the commissioner’s. He calls me everything from Dolly to Dawnie. Before his wife died, we’d hear him mutter about calling Jenny or June or Janet. Her name was Jane.”
They both laughed.
“None of us mind. We wait to see what variation he’ll come up with next. That’s about the only fault he has. You may not have noticed, but with a haircut and a suit that fits, he’d be a good-looking man.”
Helga didn’t tell her she’d noticed.
“Absolutely nothing,” said Polanski. “Even with long-range radar for eyes, she couldn’t have seen anything, and the bank says the branch is squeaky clean. Buford may be sexy, but she’s hell on wheels at her job.”
Roth had seen someone pass his office door. His mouth tightened. “I thought I’d given orders to keep Mola out of here.”
“Hard to do. He’s a reporter—”
“He’s a worthless piece of scum. So’s his editor. Dammit—”
He broke off, eyes narrowing. Mola. Three days ago, a man had been found shot in the head, slumped over the wheel of his car in the short-term parking garage at the airport. The attendant, a retiree working part-time for minimum wage, remembered checking out an air force major at just about the time the M.E. had fixed for the time of death.
Made sense. The man would have allowed the major to walk up to him in the deserted garage without giving it a second thought. Service people were supposed to shoot your country’s enemies, not you.
Made even more sense when the retiree swore one of the major’s chest decorations showed the green, brown, and white of an ETO campaign ribbon, something he was very familiar with since he’d earned one himself. Except the major would have been born after World War II and certainly never fought in that theater.
But given the bad light and elderly eyes, the retiree might have been mistaken. Until Roth found that no officer of that rank or description could be placed anywhere near the airport at that time on that day. Not active, in the reserve, or in the National Guard.
Okay, the uniform had to come from somewhere, but no theatrical or uniform supplier had a record of selling or renting one recently.
Mola, the reporter, had found out about the attendant. He’d agreed to keep his mouth shut, but the next day his newspaper carried a story headlined BOGUS AIR FORCE OFFICER SOUGHT IN AIRPORT SLAYING, and naming the retiree as the witness. The moment Roth heard, he’d sent a car to the retiree’s house. Dead. Same gun used in the parking garage. The killer must have picked up a very early edition.
Testimony to the power of the press.
“Could be,” Roth muttered to himself.
He called Helga and asked if she’d seen an air force officer in the last two days.
She said she hadn’t seen an air force officer in the last two years.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! I know an air force uniform when I see one!”
He took the phone from his ear and stared at it. Feisty when her common sense was challenged.
Still, the ribbon and the young neck were anomalies that had to connect. Had to be the same man.
“Second time around,” said Polanski as he pushed open the door of the small costume shop. “Doesn’t he think we did it right the first?”
“If he did, we wouldn’t be here,” said Maguire.
The clerk was eighteen or nineteen, short and round, a pad of brown hair sitting on the top of his otherwise shaved skull. He looked up from a loose-leaf notebook on the counter.
“Back again! I told you yesterday, we don’t carry military uniforms, so we couldn’t have rented one.”
Maguire laced his fingers and propped an elbow on the counter. “Doesn’t look as though you rent much of anything.”