Vicky copied his name, address, and date of birth, then asked for his Social Security number and added that to her notebook. It would all be used later for a computer check at the National Crime Information Center. Finished, she gave him another smile. “Now open the damn door.”
Juan took out a massive ring of keys, found the one to Darlene’s front door, and opened it.
“You can go back to your apartment,” Harry told the super. “When we’re finished somebody will come and get you, so you can lock up.”
“How long?” Juan asked.
“It’ll be a couple of hours.”
Harry watched the man shuffle away, jotted his name in his own notebook with the words New York beside it, then got on his cell and called the CSI team.
“They still at the preserve?” Vicky asked when he had finished.
“They’re just loading up. Be here in half an hour.”
Darlene Beckett’s apartment was immaculate. Not a thing out of place; not a dirty dish in the sink. Even the bath off the master bedroom was scrubbed clean. Except for the full closets it looked like a model apartment; as if no one really lived there. Harry and Vicky donned latex gloves and cloth shoe coverings like those worn in hospital operating rooms and moved slowly through the apartment. They found the ankle monitor on the first pass through her bedroom.
“Somebody had to help her get that off,” Vicky said. “And that somebody is going to have some heavy questions to answer.”
They continued with the walk through.
“You think Darlene was this much of a neat freak?” Harry asked when they had been in every room.
“If she was, she was like no single woman I ever met.” Vicky paused and thought about what she’d said. “Actually, she was like no single woman I ever met.” She turned to Harry. “You think the perp came in here and cleaned up? Like maybe he’d been here before and wanted to make sure there was nothing for us to find?”
“There’s always something,” Harry said.
“Yeah, but maybe the perp doesn’t know that.”
They spent an hour looking through Darlene Beckett’s personal effects- clothing, bills, letters, books and magazines, makeup, food supplies, and prescription drugs-drawing together a picture of what the woman had been like, her personal needs and tastes.
Vicky concentrated on Darlene’s bedroom. Like the rest of the apartment the closets and dressers were neat and carefully arranged. Even so, they were close to overflowing. The woman had owned twice the amount of clothes and shoes as Vicky herself.
In the top drawer of a small bedside table Vicky found a collection of sex toys and a plain white envelope that held what appeared to be five Viagra tablets. She pointed them out to Harry.
“No prescription bottle,” she noted. “Probably bought on the street, either by her boyfriend or maybe she bought them herself. There’s a regular black market on stolen E.D. pills.”
“A boyfriend’s not gonna leave them here, unless he’s a pretty regular boyfriend,” Harry said. “According to Juan there were plenty of guys, but nobody special.”
“So you think she bought them?”
“Just a guess. Maybe she wanted to make sure her lovers could handle seconds or thirds.”
Vicky gave him a wide-eyed, innocent look. “Guys can do that?”
“You’re a regular comic.”
“I try,” Vicky said, turning away to hide an impish grin that had broken through.
“There’s something even more interesting in the kitchen,” Harry said, causing her to turn back.
“What’s that?”
“Come and see.”
Vicky followed him into the small, galley-style kitchen.
Harry opened a drawer next to a battered gas range. Inside Vicky saw a collection of red paper matchbooks, each identical to the one they had found on the Brooker Creek hiking trail, each bearing the name The Peek-a-Boo Lounge.
“Looks like Darlene had a favorite bar,” Vicky said.
“Looks like,” Harry agreed.
Vicky studied the floor, then raised her eyes to Harry. “I told you I never met a single woman like her. You can put a big star next to that line. I guess we better check that place out tonight. And bring some pictures of her with us.”
The CSI team arrived just as Harry and Vicky finished their search and were preparing to hit the streets to interview neighbors. Martin LeBaron, the deputy sergeant who headed up the unit, collected Harry and Vicky’s shoe coverings and bagged them so they could be processed for any trace evidence they had picked up.
“So tell me what you found,” LeBaron said.
Reading from his case notebook, Harry gave him a detailed list.
“Matches from a tits-and-ass bar, huh,” LeBaron said. “I’ve driven by that joint. It’s the pits. That broad, she was a piece of work, wasn’t she?”
Harry ignored the comment and reminded LeBaron that he needed a complete workup on the apartment as quickly as possible.
“I know, I know,” LeBaron said. “I already got that be thorough, be fast crap from your captain, as well as some clown in the chief’s office.” LeBaron was tall and slender and somewhere in his forties, with unruly black hair, a large nose, and eyes that seemed perpetually tired. “You guys seem to think we’ll do a half-assed job if you don’t stay on top of us. I promise you that won’t happen.”
“It’s a big case,” Harry said.
LeBaron grinned at him. “Harry, all your cases are big cases, and every time you have one you tell me the same thing.” He looked at Vicky. “You his new partner?”
“I am,” Vicky said.
“God help you.” LeBaron laughed and waved a hand at them. “So go canvass the neighborhood and let me do my work.”
Like Juan, the building super, most of the neighbors seemed unmoved by news of Darlene’s death. One woman even expressed relief that she was “finally out of the neighborhood,” and several others said they had kept a close eye on who visited Darlene’s apartment. According to the neighbors there had been a steady stream of men, but no one visitor who seemed to come more than the others. There was also an older man and woman, who neighbors had assumed were Darlene’s parents. Several emphasized that none of the visitors had been children, with one woman flatly stating that she would have called the police “if anyone under eighteen had gotten within ten feet of her front door.”
At an apartment directly across the small green from Darlene’s unit, a man in his mid-to late-seventies confessed to keeping an even closer eye on his notorious neighbor.
“I watched her good,” he explained with a clear element of pride in his voice. His name was Joshua Brown and he was short and slender, almost frail, with a white beard masking his chocolate-colored face. He was the kind of witness that Harry both loved and hated-someone with enough time on his hands to watch what was going on very closely, but who also might not live long enough to testify at a trial.
Brown grinned and nodded his head as he spoke. “Whenever she had a visitor I took my dog Junie for a walk,” he explained. “So’s I’d get a better idea of what was goin’ on.”
Harry looked past the man and saw an ancient tan mongrel sleeping on the floor next to a battered leather recliner. The dog had not stirred when they rang the doorbell, or even opened its eyes while he and Vicky interviewed the man. Harry smiled to himself, thinking how the old man must have dragged the dog out the front door every time he felt the need to spy on Darlene Beckett.
“You think you could identify the men who visited Ms. Beckett?” Harry asked.
“Kin do better than that,” Brown said. “I kin give you a list of the license plates on their cars, and the dates I saw them parked in her driveway.”
Harry was seldom shocked by what came out of a neighborhood canvass, but this time he was. “Why did you keep a list like that?” he asked.
“Figured somebody might need it if they turned out to be a bunch of perverts like she was,” Brown said.
When the door closed, he turned to Vicky and shrugged. “That old man just saved us a day or two of work.”