This particular building was clearer-cut than some and less invaded by yuppies. Above the clothing store, a start-up lawyer and a downscale barber shared the second floor. Farther up were apartments only, inhabited by those whose life options hovered between few and none. If I hadn’t already known this from too many past visits, the fetid odor now enveloping me would have left little room for doubt. One thing about winter-it does stifle any impulse to throw open a window to the fresh air.
Ron Klesczewski’s head appeared over the railing of the top-floor landing-clean-shaven, fresh-faced, even after having been up most of the night. “Hi, Joe. It’s up here.”
He vanished again, allowing me to continue climbing in solitude. Ron had almost resigned a few years ago, after a particularly traumatic shoot-out with some heavily armed Asians. Tentative to begin with, he’d turned inward for a short time thereafter, not coming to work, ignoring his young, pregnant wife. In those days, he’d been my second-in-command, a position I’d realized then had only added to his stress. Giving him time-and his responsibilities to Sammie Martens-had done the trick. He’d reemerged much as before, if anything more solid, and had resumed being our premier logistics man-chasing paperwork, checking records, and keeping the department’s revamped computer system up to date.
There were several apartments feeding onto the top landing, but only one with its door wide open, at the end of a long, narrow corridor leading straight to the rear of the building. I headed that way, following the sound of voices.
I had four detectives under my command, Sammie and Willy Kunkle being the two I had yet to see this morning. I knew they were out there working. But just as it was typical of Ron to have called me about the woman I was about to meet, so it was that neither Willy nor Sam had even bothered to check in, much less give me an update.
Totally unalike in other respects, they were as passionately independent as Ron was a team player. On those rare occasions when all four were acting up, I felt like the single mother of a dysfunctional family.
Klesczewski reappeared in the doorway and ushered me across the threshold, introducing me to a blade-faced old woman propped up in the far corner of a ratty sofa.
“Mrs. Edith Rudd. Lieutenant Gunther.”
We eyed each other across the close, cluttered room and nodded politely.
Ron kept his voice pleasantly upbeat. “Edith has been telling me she might have something to add to our investigation, but she wanted to make sure she only spoke to the man in charge.”
Great, I thought.
“That you?” Her voice took me back to my first viewing of The Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West. She certainly seemed to have the same aversion to water.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I crossed over to her, grabbing a chair from under the kitchen table as I went. The apartment was an efficiency, each wall staking claim to a different domestic function-bedroom, living room, kitchen, or bathroom-and each losing its identity just a foot or two into the room, where a generalized heaping of disassociated jetsam defeated all rhyme or reason. It looked like a neighborhood tag sale right after the last shopper had torn it apart.
I placed the chair opposite her and sat down. “What would you like to tell me?”
She shook her head emphatically, as I feared she might. “Not so fast. I don’t want to do this again. I tell you once, here and now, and that’s an end to it.”
I tried looking sympathetic. “We’ll try to make it work that way, but since I don’t know what you’re going to tell me, I can’t make any promises.”
It was like throwing meat to a wolf. She leaned forward, her face pinched around a pair of glittering eyes. “Just what I thought. They do that at the hospital, too. I’m no whiner. It takes a lot to get me down. So when I call for help, I’m in real pain. And I don’t trust them to begin with, so why would I go see them unless I was really hurting?”
I nodded without comment, since I had no idea what she was talking about.
“But when they come in here from the ambulance, putting their hands all over me, they always ask me a bunch of stupid questions like they think I’m making it up. You think they even listen to what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I do,” I had to admit.
She held up a yellow, skinny finger. “Well, you don’t know much. They may write down a lot of stuff, but the doctors at the ER throw it out. You know why?”
I remained rigidly uncommitted.
It didn’t matter. She stared at me as if I’d just called her a liar. “So they can ask me the same dumb questions all over again. I asked them why they do it, and they told me they wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything out. Can you believe that? Like it’s my fault they won’t listen.”
I got the point. I held up my hand like a traffic cop and spoke loudly to interrupt her. “Tonight, I promise no one will ever ask you the same questions again.”
She stopped in mid-sentence. “You do?”
I glanced at Ron, who looked as startled as she did.
“Yes,” I said. “Now, what did you see or hear that might help us out?”
Her entire demeanor changed from the outraged citizen to the confidential source. Her body relaxed, curving toward me, and she turned her head slightly away from Ron, as if excluding him from the conversation.
“It was creepy,” she said softly.
“I bet it was.” I matched her whisper. “Can you describe it?”
She motioned to me to lean into the acrid odor surrounding her like a fog. Our noses were almost touching by now. “I thought it was aliens at first. It was their talking that woke me up. They had a big bright light, bright enough to bounce right off that ceiling.” She glanced up sideways, reliving the moment. “I could see that man, with no head and no hands, and them around him. And then they began doing things to him…”
She paused as Ron edged toward the front door, shaking his head with disgust. “What?” Her voice had regained its querulous pitch.
“That was us,” he told her.
Edith Rudd straightened and looked at me, startled and uncertain. “What?” she repeated, this time sounding more like a surprised child.
I reached out and laid my hand on hers. “What you saw was the police trying to figure out what happened,” I explained, as Ron left the room, no doubt hoping to escape his own embarrassment. “We needed that light to see better.”
She continued watching my eyes, and I held her gaze, smiling slightly. Suddenly her tears welled up. “It looked so terrible.”
“I know, Mrs. Rudd. I’m sorry you had to see it, and I’m sorry we woke you up.”
She glanced away to the floor and sighed, her whole body trembling slightly with the effort. “Thank you,” she almost whispered.
I squeezed her hand, feeling the sharpness of her knuckles under my thumb. “Thank you for trying to help.”
She looked back at me then. “What’s your name again?”
“Joe Gunther.”
“I was awake before then-before the light came on. I wasn’t really sleeping.”
I nodded encouragingly. “Bad night?”
“I have a lot of them. I was looking out the window at the stars in the river when I saw them. They pulled him out of a car and put him on the tracks, just the way you found him.”
“He didn’t resist?”
“I think he was dead already. They laid him out like he was a sofa pillow.”
“How many?”
“Three that I could see.”
I gestured to the nearby window, narrow and smudged, and raised my eyebrows. “You mind?”
I rose and peered through the glass. The apartment was almost directly above where we’d spent the early morning hours.
“Were you able to recognize or see any of them clearly?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “They were all in coats and hats. And it was dark.”
“How about when they passed in front of the headlights? Did you see anything unusual then?”