As she shook hands with Detective Cynthia Morrow, fingerprint technician, Priscilla silently wished that Joe Rizzo hadn’t been absent on this of all days.
The weight of the investigation, she was finding, was too great to be borne by one set of shoulders. Although she was appreciative of the team effort mounted by the squad, she felt Rizzo’s absence more keenly than she would ever care to admit.
TUESDAY MORNING, Priscilla greeted Rizzo.
“Never thought I’d be so glad to see you, Joe. I had myself a hell of a day yesterday.”
“Well, if that ain’t the most half-assed compliment I ever got,” he said cheerfully. “But, what the hell, I’ll take it.” He shook his head. “My day wasn’t much better. Two hundred friggin’ rounds through my Colt, a twelve-year-old cop on each side of me on the line, blazin’ away with those goddamned Glocks. I swear, Cil, I ever get shot on this job, it’s gonna be at the friggin’ range by one of those kids.”
“I hear you. They’re gettin’ younger every year.”
“Yeah,” he said, “and stupider, too.”
He dropped his eyes to the reports Priscilla had given him. He sighed. “Don’t make me have to read all this crap. Tell me.”
Priscilla quickly filled him in, responding to an occasional question, pointing to a DD-5 or lab report when necessary.
“And Vince?” he asked.
She shrugged. “He seemed okay with what I told him.”
“Which was?” he asked.
“What we talked about, that Lauria was a closet writer, had a buncha stuff in his apartment we figured maybe we could use to turn up a lead to a friend or somebody who might have more info or somebody we could make as a suspect in his killing.”
Rizzo nodded. “Good. Vince is no dummy, though. He may start smellin’ Mallard eventually, but, for now we can leave him outta this.”
Rizzo picked up the sparse telephone record obtained by Detective Bobby Dellosso. “Guy barely needed a friggin’ phone. You I.D. these numbers?”
Priscilla leaned inward, pointing a finger to the computer printout.
“This is the shoe store where he worked, that one’s his cousin, MaryAnn Carbone. This one here’s his bank’s automated line, the other two his doctor and a pharmacy. I checked it out, he had a sinus infection back in early October.”
Rizzo nodded. “No cell phone, right?”
“None that I could find,” she said. “But see that one incoming call on October thirtieth at eight-o-five p.m.? That’s from a pay phone up on Fourteenth Avenue. That could be the perp calling to see if Robbie was home.”
“Last outgoing call was made on October thirtieth, too, at eleven a.m. That’s twenty days ago.” Rizzo shook his head. “Friggin’ Dellosso. I told you, he takes great witness statements but he ain’t the most thorough detective in town. He shoulda got at least two months of these records. Lauria’s been dead since God knows when, and Dellosso figures this is good enough. We need to go back further.” He paused, looking again to the telephone record. “What’s this one?” he asked. “And these three.”
“Those three nine hundred numbers are phone sex lines. You know, pay your money and get some sixty-year-old grandmother to talk dirty to you in a sexy, young voice. The other one is the Magic Massage Emporium.”
“Let me guess,” Rizzo said. “For thirty bucks you get half a massage, for a hundred you get some immigrant to blow you.”
Priscilla gave a wide smile. “Exactly, Joe. The joint is over in the Six-Oh, near the aquarium. I called the squad, and they told me it’s run by some Russians. The Six-Oh is waiting for Borough to bust it and try to close it down.”
“Well, I guess old cousin MaryAnn was wrong about Lauria’s sexuality,” Rizzo said wryly. “Now we need to check out the joint, show Lauria’s picture around, see if any of the hookers can help us out.”
Priscilla shrugged. “Waste of time, if you ask me.”
“Probably, but it’s gotta get done. We need to find somebody in this guy’s life, Cil. If there is anybody, that is. And if there isn’t, well, we need to establish that, too.”
“Okay,” she said. “I had a thought yesterday. Want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that coat fiber they found at the scene. The lab says it doesn’t match any of Lauria’s clothes, and there’s no junkie runnin’ around in a thousand-dollar raincoat. No b and e men workin’ in them, either. That could point to Mallard.”
“Yeah,” Rizzo concurred.
“But it could also point to a pro,” she said. “Maybe Lauria was leanin’ on Mallard about this play situation, so Mallard hires a pro to whack Lauria. Mallard pays the pro and figures it’s over and done with.”
Rizzo picked up. “But then the pro figures he don’t need some screwy artistic genius a witness to his crime, so he takes Mallard’s hit money, then whacks him, too.”
“Exactly,” Priscilla said.
“We can look at that,” he replied.
“How?”
“Manhattan South probably got an access order for Mallard’s finances. Pretty standard in a homicide, even if they figure it for a random break-in murder. Hell, I put in a slip to legal to get us access to Lauria’s finances, though I don’t expect to see anything. Anyway, I’ll give Mike a call, see if Mallard’s account had any unusual cash activity last two or three months.”
“Okay, Joe.”
“Far as the big ticket raincoat, we’ll have Mallard’s address in the file once Mike hands it to us. Then we can go check out his place, look for a blue raincoat. If we find one, we grab a sample and let the lab check it out. If it matches, we got the Lauria end of this case solved.”
Priscilla smiled broadly. “There’d be some headlines for that one,” she said. “ ‘Famous playwright slays unknown writer-film at eleven.’ ”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess. But the big question would still be out there: Who killed Mallard? If we backdoor it by solvin’ Lauria’s case and hangin’ it on Mallard, Manhattan South boots our asses out of the picture and goes forward with that end.”
“I guess it’s like they say, Joe: That’s showbiz.”
“Yeah. Showbiz.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “And you got nowhere at the shoe store?”
“No,” she said. “It’s like he was a ghost. They sensed he was there, saw him even, but nobody connected. He said hello, he said goodbye, he said it looks like rain, it’s a nice day, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, yes sir, no sir, and out the door. Never even went to lunch with any of his coworkers.”
“Okay,” Rizzo said, “so, I’m thinkin’, this guy is a legit loner. We’ll spend a day or two on it, but it ain’t gonna go anywhere. There’s no avenging butt-buddy gonna turn up here, Cil, but we still gotta look.”
“And where’s that leave us?”
Rizzo shrugged. “Interested third party killin’ both vics, your hit man theory, maybe amateur hour. Or maybe Mallard and one of his butt-buddies go kill Lauria, then the buddy starts thinkin’ about it too much and figures, ‘Fuck Mallard, I gotta protect my own ass,’ so he kills Mallard.”
“What’s the motive for an interested third party?” Priscilla asked. “How would a third party benefit from two such totally different people dying?”
“Beats me,” Rizzo answered. “But one thing’s for sure: if this ain’t the biggest, most improbable, coincidental bullshit ever happened in the history of time, it’s a double homicide tied together by that friggin’ play. That’s the key, the play. That’s the motive, whether the killer was Mallard, Lauria’s imaginary friend, a hit man, or the ghost of William fuckin’ Shakespeare. The play is definitely tied to the motive in this.”
Priscilla shook her head and sighed. “Jesus, Joe, we don’t even know when this guy got killed.”
Rizzo picked up the medical examiner’s report, scanning it briefly, then dropped it back to the desktop.