"But," he added, holding a finger up in the air, "there were a couple of things that came out of that conversation we should look into. And if they pan out, I want the NYPD to get full credit for having trained your guy to be as good as he is."
"You want the credit," Gunther replied, laughing, "we might give you the guy, too, if my bosses get sick enough of him. What were the couple of things?"
"First, he asked about boyfriends, specifically mentioned someone named Andy, which is why I lit up just then when you mentioned Liptak. Mary's girlfriend, Louisa Obregon, drew a blank there, but she did say Mary had been a bit of a party girl and that Obregon even met a couple of her dates. She couldn't remember their names, but they were ordinary-sounding like Bill or Dave."
"Or Bob," Joe said quietly.
Ogden smiled. "Thought you'd find this part interesting. I couldn't get any worthwhile descriptions, but flying a mug shot of Bob Kunkle under her nose couldn't hurt. The other two things she told me were just as interesting: One, she swore Mary was a speedball shooter when she last used. She'd shot heroin in the old days, but had moved to speedballs exclusively and wouldn't have touched straight heroin with a pole, supposedly. Two, she said that Willy really got after her about the Re-Coop- asking who owned it, how was it financed, what was its real story-stuff like that."
"Interesting," Gunther said. "You look into any of that yet?"
Ogden shook his head. "Nope. We've already jammed a lot into a short time. I just haven't gotten to it."
"Maybe we can help. Some of this just requires breaking down data-noncomputer stuff-matching Metro stops to phone call addresses or credit card and sales receipts to various dates we have on hand, or even chasing down the incorporation records on the Re-Coop. Couldn't Sam and I do that while you and your partner do the street cop and computer work?"
Ogden didn't take two seconds to react. "Sure. I'll tuck you away somewhere upstairs. More than one case has been made that way. After losing so much time, we should be that lucky."
He stood up and began collecting his paperwork. Smiling at them as he did so, he added, "But I'm an optimist at heart. Ask anybody."
There was a knock on the door and one of Odgen's colleagues poked his head into the room. "Call for you, Ward. Guy named Willy Kunkle."
"Thanks, Freddy." Ogden waggled his eyebrows at the two Vermonters. "See?"
Chapter 17
The subway dropped Willy Kunkle off at the Essex Street station, just shy of where Delancey begins ramping up to meet the Williamsburg Bridge on its leap across the East River. It's an impressive view and a true monument to engineering, especially superimposed over the Lower East Side backdrop. It's also a visual testament to the cars-over-people mentality born in the twentieth century's first half, when the already downtrodden, roughand-tumble neighborhood was furrowed up to make room for what, even at the time, was deemed a remarkably ugly bridge. It made of the whole area a fractious orchestra of brick and steel, poverty and history, mixed in with the bridge's contradictory, even incongruous promise of a way out. It had forever been a picture Willy could appreciate.
He continued walking toward the river on the northern sidewalk, intending to cut under the bridge at Ridge Street to the precinct house below. But the route had an extra benefit, offering up yet another telling symbol of the neighborhood-one reflecting the locals' ability to rally against the sheer weight of the city around them. It was an enclosed chicken ranch, complete with wire racks jammed with hundreds of red hens strutting around and pecking out of feed trays, all tucked behind the broad plate-glass windows of an otherwise conventional store. Willy pondered an ad that might accompany such counterintuitive offerings: "Manhatten Free-Range Chickens." This was definitely a town for the innovative.
It was dark by now, and Willy paused in the shadows under the bridge to look at the redbrick station house and consider his actions one last time. He and Riley Cox had wasted hours fruitlessly chasing down a match for the name Carlos Barzun had given him: Ron Cashman. They'd even tried calling every Cashman in the phone book. But in a town of so many millions, a good many of whom were less than eager to be located, they hadn't held out much hope. And along those lines, they hadn't been disappointed.
Willy's working out in the cold had just hit its first distinct disadvantage. He didn't have the resources, the equipment, or the manpower to conduct a search like the one he needed done.
The challenge, therefore, was to locate Ron Cashman using police help without losing control of the case, something his recent incarceration and attending mistrust was going to make that much more difficult.
Which is why he'd phoned Ogden a half hour ago.
He broke cover and headed for the Seventh, vowing to make it up as he went along, and hoping to get lucky.
As soon as he entered the detective bureau upstairs, he knew this might be more difficult then he'd thought- certainly more complicated. Both Joe Gunther and Sammie Martens were clustered around Ward Ogden's desk, drinking cups of sacrosanct coffee.
"Hey, Willy," Gunther said affably enough.
"Hey, yourself," he answered, watching Sammie.
Sammie merely looked at him, her expression closed.
"Pull up a chair, Mr. Kunkle," Ogden suggested, "and let's compare notes."
Willy instead parked one hip on the edge of an adjacent desk, so he was sitting with a slight height advantage over them all. "I doubt I have much to offer," he said, "seeing that I've spent most of my time in town behind bars." He suddenly gave his two colleagues closer scrutiny. "Why are you two still here, anyway?"
"I called the boss," Gunther explained. "Sam had vacation time coming, and I told him I was taking emergency grief leave-death in the family with complications. Not too far off."
"And he bought that?"
"I told him the death was the result of a murder."
In the sudden stillness, Willy heard the background clatter of a couple of old-fashioned typewriters and the ceaseless ringing of the phones slowly yield to a buzzing in his ears.
"Is that true?" he asked, his own words sounding distant.
"You surprised?" Gunther inquired doubtfully.
Willy felt a numbness spread throughout his body. Despite his dogged efforts of the past few days and his own nagging doubts verging on conviction, he suddenly realized that he'd still been holding out hope that Mary had perhaps died simply of the despair for which he so pointedly took responsibility. To think that she'd also been murdered compounded his loss, and, as unreasonable as he knew it to be, made him feel somehow doubly responsible for her death.
"I suspected as much," he said quietly, settling into the chair beside him. "I just wasn't a hundred percent sure."
"What made you suspicious?" Ogden asked, obviously keen to know anything he might have missed.
"I don't know," Willy answered vaguely. "It felt wrong. She'd been happy, planning ahead-looking to go back to school. And there were things at her apartment- a missing date book, no address book. She always had those, and they weren't in your file."
He was finding it helpful to talk. "You also have three letters. That may be all there was, but she used to be a pack rat with those, and the birth control pills and her girlfriend both told me she had men in her life. I got the feeling someone had sanitized things, probably one of them."
"Was the girlfriend Louisa Obregon?"
"Yeah. The Re-Coop director gave me her name."
"And she told you about Mary wanting to go to school?"
"Yeah. Why?"
Ogden chose his words carefully, still unsure of Willy's trustworthiness. "We heard she might've visited the CCNY campus in Harlem."