“Take a picture of it,” she said, “and get away from the body. You know how easily cops can get the wrong idea if they find you standing over a corpse. Hey, why don’t you call Cindy?”
“She can’t just gallop in and grab a case,” I said. “There’s such a thing as chain of command. And every precinct has its territory.”
“It can’t hurt to have a detective in our corner, even if it’s not her case.”
Within a few minutes, uniformed cops arrived, stashed us on a bench to wait for the detectives, and started putting up crime-scene tape. Through the trees, I could see police cars, red and blue lights whirling, herding the pedicabs and horse-drawn carriages that usually hung out waiting for customers at the 72nd Street entrance to the drive away from the scene. It was seven o’clock by now, and a curious crowd was beginning to gather.
“Well, well.” Detective Natali had been the lead investigator on Cindy’s first homicide case. “Ms. Rose. Kohler.” He nodded at me. “I’m told you reported a body, Ms. Rose.”
“Detective Natali. I’m afraid so.”
“You won’t mind answering a few questions, then,” he said. “Have your name or address changed since we last met?”
“No,” she said, “but I have gotten married and had a baby. I’m nursing, so I’d really appreciate it if we can do this quickly, so I can get home and feed my daughter.”
TMI is Barbara’s middle initial. Initials. But Natali’s face softened, and I knew why. He had a new baby too, and his wife was also nursing. Cindy told me. I also knew he’d transferred to the Central Park precinct, which had its own detective squad.
“We’ll do our best,” he said. “What were you doing in the park during the hours of closure?”
“We weren’t—”
“Barb.” I laid a hand on her arm. “We ran down Central Park West,” I said. “We wanted to see Strawberry Fields without the crowds, but we tried to time it so we didn’t turn into the park before six. Maybe we were a little early.”
He asked his questions while the crime-scene folks and the medical examiner did their thing. Why did we think the victim was already dead? What made us think she had been murdered? Had we touched anything? Had we seen anyone at all on or near the scene? Did we know who she was? That was kind of a trick question, because we did and we didn’t. Sure, we knew her. She was Lady Lost. She was a regular. We’d seen her there almost every time we’d passed through Strawberry Fields for the past couple of years at least. She had a beautiful singing voice. Her real name? We had no idea. She had a partner, the Homeless Troubadour. He could tell them more. His name? Not a clue. Was she homeless too? Where did they stay? In the park? On the street? In the shelters? Maybe one of the other performers knew more than we did.
“Poor Homeless!” Barbara said when Natali finally let us go. “He’ll come today expecting to find her here, and he’ll be devastated.”
“Not your problem, Barb,” I said. “Leave it to the NYPD. Go home.”
Barbara’s hormones made my case by leaking breast milk through her T-shirt. I averted my eyes and shooed her toward the park exit.
“Stick around and see if Homeless shows up,” she called back over her shoulder. “And talk to Cindy!”
I dropped by their apartment again that evening to pick up Jimmy and make a meeting. Sunshine, riding her mother’s hip, removed a saliva-coated fist from her mouth to give me a welcoming poke in the eye.
“Did Homeless come?” Barbara asked. “How did he take the news? Could you hear what he said to Natali? Did you talk to Cindy? What can she tell us about the case? Did you talk to any of the other witnesses?”
“Natali made me leave right after Homeless arrived. He looked broken up, but I couldn’t hear what he said. The cops didn’t let anyone who’d known them — the regulars — talk to each other while I was there. And I haven’t got hold of Cindy yet.”
“Don’t you want to help?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Nobody with a gift like Lady Lost’s sings for tips and sleeps in the park on purpose. Had she dreamed of a second chance? Would she have gotten one if she hadn’t been killed? So far, all I was doing with my second chance was staying sober one day at a time and being the best damn friend and boyfriend and godfather that I could. Maybe helping get some kind of justice for Lady Lost was something I could do to give back.
“How hard will they try to find the killer of a homeless person?”
“That’s not fair, Barb,” I said. “They’ll do their best.”
“They don’t even know who she was.”
“Homeless can tell them,” I said.
“I wonder if she had ID on her,” she said. “Cindy will know. Should I call her?”
“I’ll ask her myself,” I said.
How I got Cindy in the mood to share information was none of Barbara’s business. I told her and Jimmy everything else the following evening, while we ate Chinese food and Sunshine tried out her single tooth on a fortune cookie. She was going to be persistent like her mother.
“So what’s the Homeless Troubadour’s story?” Barbara asked. “What’s his name?”
“Natali dropped the ball on that,” I said. “Cindy says he’s furious with himself. Homeless was so upset when he saw Lady Lost dead that he started wailing and tearing his hair. He was in no state to be interviewed, and Natali couldn’t lock him up for being overcome with grief. He had a squad car take him to the men’s shelter over on East 30th Street. He told him to get some rest and a hot meal, and they’d come and get him in the morning so they could talk about how he could help them find whoever killed his lady and what should be done with her body. But when they showed up, he had disappeared.”
“Natali didn’t even look at his ID?” Barbara asked. “A Medicaid card? Anything?”
“He didn’t have any on him,” I said.
“It’s not a crime to be carrying no ID in New York City,” she said. “Yet.”
“What about Lady Lost?” Jimmy asked. “What do they know about her?”
“Only what the medical examiner could tell them,” I said. “She wasn’t carrying ID either.”
A mug shot of Lady Lost dead and her fingerprints would have been enough to identify her if she’d ever been arrested, but she hadn’t. They also drew a blank with the city’s social-service agencies. The staff at the shelter where they’d left the Homeless Troubadour not only hadn’t seen him that night, they didn’t know him.
Barbara and I went back to Strawberry Fields and chatted up the witnesses ourselves. Barbara had Sunshine in a carrier on her chest, face outward for maximum viewing and general cuteness. We listened to a few songs, bought a few buttons, and generally paid our dues before we started asking questions. I let the Dollar a Joke Man tell me a joke. The baby requested an encore on “Hey, Jude.”
They were perfectly willing to talk once we got them going. The Dylan wannabe looked disgruntled when the others agreed on what phenomenal voices the pair had had.
“No one ever dropped so much as a quarter in his hat,” a white-haired Woodstock-era hippie whispered to me, “when they showed up. Mine either, but so what? They had the gift. You gotta respect that.”
“He wasn’t a bad guitar player,” the Dylan guy said. “You could see he used to be really good, but he had arthritis in his hands.”
“Wasn’t?” Barbara said. “Do you think something’s happened to him too?”
“I didn’t say that!” the Dylan guy said. “He’ll be back once the fuss dies down.”
“Why would it die down?” I asked. “Somebody killed her. He disappeared, and that looks bad. Don’t you think they’ll keep looking for him?”