"Yes."
"First thing I thought, well, care to take a guess?"
"Lovers' quarrel."
"Got it in one. Two males, one mattress, and the one who did the shooting's in his shorts and nothing else. He killed his lover, realized what he'd done, and pretended his gun was a dick. Then the next thing I saw was an empty pillowcase, and then another pillowcase that wasn't empty, and I went back into the kitchen and there was a little walnut chest on the card table, with everything inside it including oyster forks. You don't get too many sterling silver oyster forks on Coney Island Avenue."
"Did you guess right off where it came from?"
He nodded. "All the press the case had, all the bulletins coming out of One Police Plaza, that was the first thing came into my mind. My partner, too, and I don't know which of us said it first. It gets your blood going, something like that. You can probably imagine."
"Sure."
"But there's a letdown comes about a minute later, because where are you gonna go with it? They're the ones did it, they're both dead, case closed, end of story. Of course you check it out to make sure, you check it out in detail, but nothing ever turns up to make you change your mind. What's funny is me and Fitz'll both wind up with commendations for this, and what the hell did we do besides look around and call it in?"
"The letter in your file's just as good whether you did anything or not," I said, "and it'll offset all the times you earned a commendation and didn't get one."
"You just said a true fact," he said. "It all evens out."
We talked some more as I walked around the apartment, getting the feel of the place, trying to imagine how it had all played out. Two men walk in the door, laden down with what they've stolen. They've just raped a woman, killed her and her husband, and they feel- how do they feel? How could I possibly guess how they felt?
They walk in, and moments later (or hours later, I didn't know the time frame here) one of them shoots the other. Then strips to his undershorts (unless he stripped first, before he shot his partner) and sits in the corner and eats his gun. Or, in Iverson's memorable imagery, fellates it.
I asked if they'd both lived here.
"Place was Bierman's," he said. "Signed a lease back in April, and, far as any of the neighbors knew, he lived here by himself. Clothes in the closet were his. Just one pillow on the mattress, and even if two people share a bed, wouldn't each one have his own pillow?"
"You'd think so."
"Maybe he brought Ivanko back so they could stash the loot, divvy it up, whatever they were going to do." He shrugged. "Maybe Bierman was queer for him, made a move and Ivanko didn't go for it. Bang bang, you're dead, bang again and I'm dead. If one of 'em lived through it we could ask, but they're both dead and we can't."
"You had to kick the door in," I said.
"Once again, if they were alive they could have opened it for us. But yes, we had to kick it in. Not me personally but the two uniforms who got here first. They must have known what they were gonna find. Nobody's on the job any length of time without getting a whiff of eau de corpse, and for the rest of your life you never mistake it for anything else, do you?"
"Was the super here when they got here?"
"Jorge? He was the one who called them. A neighbor complained and he went and called 911."
"He just let us in," I said. "Why couldn't he let the uniforms in?"
"Oh, I wondered where the hell you were going. The door was bolted from the inside."
"And the key wouldn't turn the deadbolt?"
"Not that kind of a bolt," he said. "This had nothing to do with the lock. It was the kind of gizmo you buy in the hardware store and screw onto the back of your door, half of it, and the other half onto the jamb. And you slide the bolt over and lock the door. Here, you can see the holes where the screws were. One more thing for Jorge to spackle before he starts painting, if he even takes the trouble. I saw the bolt itself when I came in, nice shiny brass thing. The door itself was intact, kicking didn't damage it, the inside bolt just pulled loose from where it was attached. Didn't the bolt show in any of the photos Schering showed you?"
"Maybe I didn't have a complete set." I walked around some more, looked out the bedroom window at the lot in back. There were four garbage cans out there, three upright and one on its side, with trash spilling out of it. There was a black Hefty bag alongside it, and it looked to have been gnawed open by a rat. The rat wasn't there to be seen, but I saw what might have been rat shit. The boys from Forensics could have identified it as such, and told me what the rat had for breakfast.
You could grow flowers back there, I thought, or cook on a barbecue grill, but you'd have to be out of your mind to want to.
"I wish I knew why he took his clothes off," I said.
"Bierman?"
"Was Ivanko undressed too?"
"No, just Bierman. It was warm, and you may have noticed that one of the things this place lacks is an air conditioner, or even a fan. They probably worked up a sweat, toting all that shit back from Manhattan. Bierman was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. He may have figured he'd be cooler without 'em."
"I guess."
"And maybe he just didn't like wearing clothes with blood on them."
"There was blood on his clothing?"
"Pants and shirt both."
"Ivanko's blood?"
He shook his head. "From the Hollander killing. Hers, I guess, but that'd be in the report. She got her throat cut, she's the one whose blood'd get on everything."
"Wasn't it Ivanko who cut her throat?"
"Did they decide for sure one way or the other? Does it matter? They both had blood on their clothes. You cut a throat, one thing there's plenty of is blood. Everybody can have some."
I said, "I wonder why they locked themselves in."
"They'd just killed two people and brought home a couple of sacks full of stolen goods. Maybe they didn't want anybody to walk in on them just then."
"Maybe."
"Or Bierman shot his buddy and wanted a few minutes of guaranteed peace and quiet before he went and joined him. But that's beside the point, isn't it? What you want to know is were they locked in, and they were, and from the inside."
Iverson had things to do, and he made sure the apartment was locked up again before he went off to do them. I don't know what he thought I could find to steal.
When he was gone I went down to the basement for a few words with Jorge, then went through the rest of the building looking for someone else to talk to. Half the tenants were out and most of the others either couldn't speak English or preferred to give that impression. I didn't learn anything, and I wasn't sure there was anything to learn.
I walked up to Avenue M, turned left, and realized when I got to the corner that I could have cut diagonally across Locust and saved myself some steps.
I had to laugh. If I'd wanted to save time, I could have skipped Brooklyn altogether. I walked a few more blocks, climbed the steps to the platform, and waited for my train.
NINE
He gets in the car and starts driving, with no destination in mind. He just feels like a drive, that's all.
And the car's so clean it's a pleasure to be in it. He's a neat person, he keeps his car neat, inside and out, and frequently runs it through a car wash. But he just recently had it detailed for the first time, and when he got into it he'd have sworn it was fresh from the dealer's showroom. It even smelled like a new car, and he's since learned how they managed that. There's this product, comes in a spray can, called New Car Smell.