“Who’s Polly?” he asked.
Straight out. Sometimes if you took them by surprise, they blurted out a memory they didn’t even know they possessed.
“She takes care of me,” the woman said.
“Where?”
“Home.”
But was she referring to home as in house , or home as in nursing ?
“Where’s that?” he asked. “Home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who brought you here, ma’am?”
“Policemen.”
“Where’d they find you?”
“I don’t know.”
Bewildered look on her face. Eighty, eighty-five years old, Meyer guessed. Too many new things happening to her all at once. Confused. Sitting there wanting to watch her TV show, which was something she knew and understood, but instead she had to talk to this person asking her questions she couldn’t answer.
“Do you remember a railroad station?”
“No.”
“Do you remember someone taking you to a railroad station?”
“No. I remember lightning.”
“If I described a man to you, would that help you remember?”
“Maybe. It’s hard,” she said. “Remembering.”
“He would’ve been forty or forty-five years old,” Meyer said, repeating what Charlie had told him this morning. “About five feet ten, with brown eyes and dark hair.”
“Buddy,” she said.
“She’s mentioned that name before,” Elman said. “Buddy. We think he’s a grandson.”
“Buddy what, ma’am?” Meyer asked. “Can you tell me his last name?”
“I don’t remember it.”
“Was he wearing blue jeans and a brown jack…?”
“I don’t remember what he was wearing.”
“Yellow shirt…”
“I told you I don’t remember ,” she said. Getting angry with herself. Getting angry with not being able to remember things.
“Ma’am, do you know whether the railroad station is close to home?”
“I was in a car,” she said suddenly.
“Driving in a car with someone?”
“Yes. Lightning.”
“Driving from home?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s that, ma’am?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
She was about to start crying. Frustration and anger were building tears behind her eyes. He did not want her to cry.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry we bothered you,” and picked up the remote-control unit and turned on her television show again. In the corridor outside, he asked Elman if he could have a look at the woman’s clothes. Elman took him downstairs to what Meyer guessed was the equivalent of the police department’s Property Clerk’s Office, asked the female attendant there to bring Mr. Meyer the clothing the Jane Doe in 305 had been wearing when the police brought her in, and then excused himself and went back to the emergency room.
Sometimes a nursing home stenciled its name into the garments its patients wore, for identification when the clothes were sent out to be laundered. There were neither stencil marks nor laundry marks in the woman’s robe or nightgown, nothing in her panties, nothing in the diaper except a dried urine stain. The corner edges of labels were still stitched to each article of clothing, but the empty space between them indicated where the labels had been scissored out. In each of the bedroom slippers a sticky rectangular-shaped residue showed where the labels had been torn from the inner soles.
For all intents and purposes, the woman was still anonymous.
THE NAME of the second victim’s wife was Debra Wilkins.
She was a petite blonde with green eyes and a Dutchboy bob, in her mid-thirties, they guessed. The driver’s license in her husband’s wallet had given Parker and Kling a name and an address; the telephone directory had given them a phone number. When they’d called her at a little before nine yesterday morning, she’d just been leaving for an exercise class. Instead, she came to meet them at the hospital morgue. They hadn’t been able to get much from her yesterday when she’d sobbingly—uncontrollably, in fact—identified the remains of her husband, Peter Wilkins.
They sat now in the living room of the Wilkinses’ three-story brownstone on Albermarle Way, a cul-de-sac off Silvermine Road, on the northernmost edge of the precinct territory. Through the living-room windows, they had a clear shot of the River Harb as dusk settled on the water. It was time to get down to business.
“Mrs. Wilkins,” Kling said, cautiously taking the lead, “I know this is a difficult time for you, but there are some questions we have to ask.”
“I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
She’d just got back from the funeral home. Parker was thinking that her hysterics yesterday had given the killer a healthy lead. Couldn’t talk to the goddamn woman. Every time they mentioned her husband, she’d begun wailing like a banshee. She seemed pretty much in control now. Sitting there in a simple blue suit, blue pantyhose, French-heeled blue pumps. Eyes rimmed with red, all those tears. Waiting attentively for Kling’s first question.
“Mrs. Wilkins,” he said, “your husband was found near the…”
Her lip began trembling.
Careful, Kling thought.
“Near the Reed entrance to the River Highway,” he said. “In front of an abandoned building at 1227 Harlow. That’s about a mile from here. Coroner’s Office has estimated the time of death…”
He cleared his throat, kept his eye on that trembling lip. He didn’t want her to go to pieces again.
“…at around midnight Tuesday. It was raining all that night, and it was still raining yesterday morning when we got to the scene. Ma’am, if you could tell us when you saw him last, and what he said to you before he left here, whether he gave you any…”
“The last time I saw him was after dinner on Tuesday night. He left the apartment at around eight-thirty. There was a movie he wanted to see. Something that didn’t interest me at all. A cop movie,” she said.
“What time did you expect him home?”
“Eleven, eleven-thirty.”
“But he didn’t come home.”
“No. He didn’t come home.”
Turning her head away.
“That’s why I called the police.”
Kling looked at Parker. Parker nodded. It was possible.
“When was this?” he asked.
“At midnight. I was really worried by then. I knew it was raining, but the movie theater’s only a few blocks from here, on Stemmler, and he could’ve walked it in ten minutes. And Peter isn’t the…wasn’t the sort of man who’d stop in a bar or anything on the way home. So I…I was worried. I called nine-one-one and described him and…and what he was wearing…and I told them he should have been home by then. I don’t know what they did about it.”
What they’d have done, they’d have alerted the local precinct, which in this case was the Eight-Seven, where there wouldn’t have been a chance in hell that the patrol sergeant would instruct his blues to keep an eye out for a husband who was half an hour late getting home.
“When you called yesterday morning,” Debra said, “I thought it…I thought you might have some news. I wasn’t expec…expecting what you…told me. That he was dead. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Controlling herself. Biting down hard on her lower lip again. She would not cry. She would help them. Kling admired that. Parker wondered if it was an act. In many respects, Parker and Kling were the perfect good cop/bad cop team. That was because neither of them had to act a part; Parker really was a bad cop and Kling really was a good one.
“What was he wearing when he left here, can you tell us?” Kling asked.
“Blue jeans. A T-shirt. A barn jacket. From J. Crew.”