“Hmm.”
“Now, the fibers taken from her ring look like a tuft of wool, but it’s not wool. And, A—There’s no clothing in the store that matches it. B—We found some fibers that match it from the taping of the storeroom and just the other side of the archway into the showroom. No similar fibers were found out by the front door. C—The M.E. found some in her nose. What does all that suggest to you?”
“Hah.” April had seen the tuft in the ring. “What?”
“Take a guess.”
“We’re not guessing. Don’t play with us, Duke.”
“You guys are no fun.”
“We’re not paid to be fun.” Mike smiled at April. She smiled back, relieved that his mood had lifted.
“So, do you want to know?”
“Yeah, and you’re paid to tell us.”
“Dog,” Duke said proudly.
“No shit. A dog killed her.” Still smiling, Mike glanced at April. “A dog between five nine and six feet.”
“Remember the Tawana Brawley case?” Ducci asked.
April nodded. “Dog hairs in the feces.” The police had analyzed the feces that Tawana claimed her kidnappers had used to defile her. The feces contained dog hairs, not surprisingly, since dogs lick themselves. A check of the dogs in the building where Tawana had hidden for several days showed that the hairs in the feces came from dogs in her own backyard. The dog hairs helped disprove her story.
“Now you’re talking,” Mike said. Then, more seriously, “What does this do for us?”
“It tells us a dog was present at the scene either at the time of Wheeler’s death or very shortly before. You may well be looking for a murderer with a dog.”
“What makes you think the dog wasn’t in the store hours before?” April asked.
“Because the dog hairs in the victim’s nose would have been blown out after a minute or two. They wouldn’t have stayed in there very long if she had remained alive.”
“Dog,” April murmured. “Block doesn’t have a dog.”
“Forget Block. He didn’t do it,” Sanchez said.
“He was at the scene though. That bothers me. How did he get there if she was already dead?” April muttered.
“Hey, he appeared to have been at the scene. There’s no evidence he was at the scene. He described the dress she was wearing but didn’t say anything about the makeup. Maybe he wasn’t ever there,” Mike said.
“It doesn’t play. Maybe the killer left the door open and Block goes in, sees his beloved hanging there, gets scared, and splits.” April turned back to Ducci. “We’ve been over this a dozen times. The guy comes in four days after she dies and confesses. But he has no idea what happened. Face it—Block doesn’t make sense. We could get a shrink evaluation of him to prove he’s a nut. But we already know he’s a nut.”
Ducci coughed delicately, slicking back his already carefully combed black hair. He glanced down at the dots on his tie, looking offended.
“What’s the matter now?” Mike shook his head at April. What a piece of work.
“Don’t you want to know what kind?” Ducci demanded.
“Okay. What kind of what?”
“Dog. You want me to locate the dog for you?”
“Okay, what kind of dog, Duke?”
“Like I said, it wasn’t so easy to identify. We have no known references here.” He patted a stack of slide boxes. “I’ve got over a thousand slides of different animal hairs. Know how long it takes to go through them all, looking for a possible match?”
“Well, you knew it wasn’t an elephant.”
“Very funny. See, the morphology of long-haired and short-haired dogs is different. Add to that wild dogs and mixed breeds.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, and the morphology of underhair is different from the hairs on top. Not only that, underhair has no root ends.”
“That’s very interesting,” April said politely. “What kind of dog is it?”
“The hairs found on Wheeler’s ring and in her nose have a natural twist and no root ends, like underhair, or sheep hair. What does that suggest to you?”
April shrugged. “I don’t know a lot about dogs. My mother wouldn’t let me have one when I was little. She thought the neighbors might eat it. What kind?”
Ducci pretended to consult his notes. “From the color, I’d say a poodle. And I’d say a puppy. The twist isn’t pronounced yet. This is still fluff, probably from a dog that hadn’t been clipped yet.”
“Size?” Mike asked.
“Small.” He smiled at them. “I don’t think it walked in. No traces of it by the door, see.”
“Gee. That’s pretty good, Duke. The dog was carried in.”
Ducci nodded. “And the killer let Maggie play with it. There was dog hair in her ring and in her nose.”
“What about the makeup? And those long hairs on the dress?”
He shook his head. “The hairs are human. Two of them. They don’t come from a wig or anything. I can’t tell you anything about them or the makeup without some references. Go get me something more to work with. Get me the dog.”
“Thanks, Duke, you’re brilliant.” April pushed out of her chair.
Ducci nodded and stroked his tie again. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”
“Everything clear now?” April asked as she and Sanchez piled back in the car a few minutes later.
“Oh, sure—we’re looking for a tall guy with a small poodle. Perhaps with long red hair. What kind of a guy carries a little poodle around?” Mike slammed the car door.
Who indeed. April remembered the shoplifter from Charivari who’d been in the pen when they left. “It would complicate things quite a bit if the perp’s a transvestite.”
“Sure would.” Mike had a new thought. “What do you say the odds are Braun is still there?”
“Probably ten thousand to one. Who’s the one who said only days ago, ‘Life is short, take a chill’?”
Mike pulled out into the traffic. “No one I know.”
33
Between Twentieth Street and Eighty-second Street the traffic was pretty badly jammed up. Labor Day weekend traffic was already assembling for its mass exodus out of the city. Mike turned onto Sixth Avenue in spite of the complication of construction there and got stuck around Twenty-eighth Street.
“So, what was that all about with Ducci?” April asked.
Mike negotiated the car around a bulldozer. “Jesus, last year Central Park West, this year this. What a mess.”
“Umm. So what was the ‘rest in peace’ all about?” she persisted.
“Ah—nothing. Let it go, April.” Mike stopped at the next red light, scowling. The intersection had a big hole in the middle of it, and the green Pontiac Grand Am ahead of them had pulled into the space beside it, blocking all cars trying to cross the other way.
“Will you look at this asshole.” Mike didn’t bother to ask for a turret light to slap on the roof of the unmarked gray car they’d taken. He just hit the hammer. His siren screamed its little “hello-out-there” warning, and miraculously the traffic slowly opened up.
“So, what was Duke doing, huh? Putting down women?” She didn’t let it go.
“No, he was putting up women. So let it go.”
“He sure got to you.”
“Yeah.”
Mike lapsed into silence. She let it be for a whole block.
At the next light she asked, “What woman?”
Mike heaved a great sigh, punctuated by an irritated “humph” at the end. “Jesus, April, not you. My ex-wife. Okay?”
“Oh.” April looked straight ahead, her cheeks flushed. What a jerk. She just forced her way into Sanchez’s private space. She shook her head at herself, wishing she were in China.