The Art of Deception Page 3

  Walker’s face was pinched, as if he’d been sat on as a baby. She couldn’t see the green for the dark, deep eye sockets. Behind him, on the high wooden workbench where the water ran pink, a wood-handled fish knife rested, its curving blade like an ill-fashioned smile. Walker’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy as he answered her first question. Had he called the police to report his sister as missing?

  He looked at her almost as if he knew her—men did this to her all the time, but Walker’s variation was pretty convincing, and disquieting.

  “Not like Mary-Ann to miss work,” Walker said. “And when that asshole said he hadn’t seen her either, that didn’t sound right, so I called you guys . . . you people . . . whatever.”

  She asked for and received the sister’s pedigree, some of which matched what she’d learned from the driver’s license: twenty-six, blond, 135, five foot six, smoker, worked here at dock five. Last seen—and this was the most troubling to her of all—roughly three days earlier. Those in the know put her in the water over forty-eight hours. This timing made Mary-Ann Walker a likely fit. Matthews had a Polaroid of the woman’s waterlogged, crab-eaten face in her pocket but couldn’t bring herself to deliver it to this kid. Mention of “that asshole” made her think she might have another candidate to ID the body.

  “You’re making reference to a boyfriend?” she asked.

  “Wait, tell me it’s not Mary-Ann,” he said. “Tell me this didn’t happen.”

  “What’s her boyfriend’s name?”

  “Lanny Neal.” He still had hope in his voice. “The description in the paper . . . tell me I’m wrong about it sounding like Mary-Ann.”

  Matthews looked around for a place to sit, but thought better of it. She didn’t like the smell here, the sound of the dead fish slopping wetly down onto the cutting tables. She didn’t like the sad look in Walker’s tired eyes, or the thought that LaMoia had passed this off to her so that she’d be the one delivering bad news.

  “Anna’s a cleaner, too,” Walker said. “Boss is on me that it’s somehow my fault she hasn’t showed. So basically, I’m picking up her work, putting in a double.” He hesitated. “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like this—not without calling or something. This body . . . it looks like her?”

  “Unfortunately, the body doesn’t look like much, Mr. Walker. Too long in the water. Now, you asked this Lanny Neal about her, and his reaction was what exactly? And I urge you to recollect what was said, not what you felt about what was said.” She interrupted herself again. “I take it your sister is living with this individual, or involved in a way that suggests he might have knowledge of her whereabouts?”

  “He’s jumping her, if that’s what you’re asking. And, yeah, she’s pretty much shacked up, since we don’t have the boat no more. Which is on account of Neal anyway. ’Cause once they started hanging out, she bailed on me—thirty years of our family fishing these waters, down the drain—and that pretty much finished me off with the fucking bankers, thank you very much.”

  “Mr. Neal’s reaction to your call?”

  “Lame,” Walker answered. Dead fish were piling up, awaiting him. “You mind?” he asked, indicating the table.

  She did mind, but she told him she didn’t, and so they stepped up to the cleaning table where Walker, gloved once again, worked the curved blade of that knife in such an automatic and efficient way that it bordered on graceful. He tore loose the entrails and tossed them into a white plastic pail.

  “Take me through the call, please. You asked to speak with Mary-Ann.”

  “Listen, lady . . . lieutenant . . . whatever . . . Neal’s a scum-sucking piece of shit. I know it, and he knows I know it. He beats her up, and she goes back to him, and I just don’t fucking get that, you know? And me? I’m looking out for her, and she blows me off like I’m the pond scum, not that dirtbag she’s hanging with, so what I’m saying is, we didn’t exactly get into it, Neal and me. He essentially blew me off.”

  “His exact words were?”

  “Just tell me it isn’t her.” His fingers moved, the blade sliced and another fish was processed.

  She waited for his attention. He was sad-eyed by nature, a dog starved for affection. Her job biased her into such snap appraisals, and though loath to admit it, she went with first impressions. “I sincerely hope the Jane Doe is not your sister. The fact remains, your cooperation is essential if we’re to clear Mary-Ann’s name from our list, and that means answering my questions as they’re asked. Do you understand?”

  Walker’s gaze lifted off the fish he was cutting, the look he gave her so penetrating that she averted her eyes.

  “We haven’t identified the body.” She now wondered whether she had handled this correctly. She observed grief on a regular basis and tried to avoid labeling it. Some screamed, some cried, some went silent, some became violently sick. Some became violent, period.

  “Neal said she wasn’t there, that he hadn’t seen her, and that at this point if he did it would be for the last time.”

  Matthews scribbled down notes. “Okay . . . ,” she said automatically.

  “It’s not okay,” he said. “The guy beats her, lady. He’s awful with her, and if he’s done anything to her . . .” He lifted the fillet knife. “I’ll turn him into chum and feed him to the crabs.” His eyes reminded her of killers she’d interviewed. Grief could do that—make us do things we never intended.

  “It’s important we all keep cool heads, Mr. Walker. We’re still just collecting the facts, the evidence. There has been no positive ID—identification—of the body we found. It would be a mistake to make assumptions about Mr. Neal’s involvement at this point.”

  “I’m not making an assumption,” he said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “It isn’t anything until we know who, and what, we’ve got.” He was more kid than adult, she thought. A lovesick brother with a fishing knife sharp enough to split hairs—she reminded herself to thank LaMoia for this one.

  Rain fell, wetting her pad.

  “Did she take prescription drugs? Recreational drugs?”

  “If she was drinking and drugging, Lanny got her into it.”

  She wrote that down as affirmative. Booze, drugs, abuse— the father, son, and holy ghost of domestic disturbances.

  As the rain increased, she debated pulling up the hood on the jacket but decided she wanted him to know she could take the weather.

  “Do you have an address, a phone number for Mr. Neal?”

  Walker recited a Wallingford address and Matthews wrote it down. He went back to the fish. This time, he hacked the head off with a single blow, then the tail. Then he minced the body, entrails and all, into pieces and swept it down the drain and the seagulls attacked the surface of the water with a frenzy.

  “Remember, Mr. Walker, we have not connected Mr. Neal to any suspicious act. This is the first I’ve heard of Mr. Neal. Are we clear on this?” Matthews worried where a younger brother might take this. He’d lost the family boat, the family business. What had she been thinking, implicating Neal? She hoped she might steer her way back out. “Women disappear, Mr. Walker. Tens of thousands every year. Some just up and walk away, from their families, their husbands, their boyfriends—their brothers. That’s right. Most show back up, a few days, a few weeks later. I’d like to think we can pretty much put Mary-Ann in that last category.”

  He dragged a salmon in front of him with the knife’s sharpened tip. “If it is Mary-Ann,” he said matter-of-factly, “then all the more reason you’d better talk to Neal. Anna’s afraid of heights.”

  “Acrophobic?”

  “Whatever.”

  She made note of the phobia on the page of her notepad.

  As it rained harder, she again almost pulled up the jacket’s hood but decided against it once more. Rain drizzled down both their faces. His eyes hardened, making him seem much older than his twenty years.

  “So what do we do next?” he asked.

  “You tell us if Mary-A
nn shows back up.” She passed him a business card that carried the office number and wrote LaMoia’s extension on the back. “I’m concerned I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Walker. About this being Mary-Ann. I apologize for that. I don’t want you doing something stupid—harming Mr. Neal in some way. All for nothing.”

  “People get what they give in this world. It’s no concern of yours.”

  “Sure it is. It’s every concern of mine.” She added, “Could you give me a phone number? Residential. Something other than work.”

  “I told you, after Neal got into her head . . . I don’t have a phone.”

  “An address?”

  “I’m kind of between places right now, okay?”

  “This is pretty miserable weather, this time of year.”

  “There’s ways around it.”

  “So this is where I reach you,” she said, looking around. “What’s your work schedule right now?”

  He ignored the question. “I asked what’s next, in terms of if I don’t happen to call you, if Anna doesn’t happen to show back up.”

  “We’re attempting to identify the body.”

  “And I should be part of that.”

  She heard herself say, “We could arrange for you to view the body, but there’s absolutely no requirement for you to do so at this time. Mr. Neal could do it, if you’d prefer.”

  Walker read meaning into her statement. “That help you get him? Watching him look at her? Something like that?”

  “I’m not going to speculate on where the lead detective might take this. I am not the lead detective.”

  “You are as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

  Matthews wished she could start again.

  He said, “If Neal looks at that body, then I want to be there. I got any kind of rights like that, me being her brother and all?”

  “None whatsoever,” she said, unsure herself. “It’s all up to the lead detective.”

  “Yeah? Well, you tell him I want to be there.”

  “I’ll pass it along.”

  “You do that,” he said, hoisting the next fish on the tip of the knife to its place of evisceration. “You help me, I’ll help you.”

  6 Bowing to Buddha

  Lou Boldt had an ordinary look that few would expect in a cop. Fewer would expect the traits that accounted for a homicide clearance rate that shattered every SPD record: an enduring patience and an empathy with the victim that had gained such legendary proportions that the man made the law enforcement lecture circuit a second source of income. His heightened sense of hearing not only kindled a love of bebop jazz but also could discern the most subtle nuance in the voice of a suspect or a witness in the throes of a lie. His rise through the ranks had been predictable, though far from supercharged. He got the job done and seemed to enjoy himself in the process. He shunned exposure in the press, and yet notoriety proved inescapable. The only sergeant to decline consideration for a lieutenant’s shield five years running, he had remained in that position for more than a decade, succumbing to promotion only when family finances necessitated. He walked with something of an exaggerated stoop—typically lost in thought. A family man, he’d come to fatherhood somewhat late in life. Whenever he attended preschool parent functions, he found himself with little to talk about. Dead bodies, murder, and assault made him a reluctant conversationalist. It was while at one such function that his wife, Liz, had introduced him to Susan Hebringer.

  Hebringer, who had last been seen downtown, had now been missing for several weeks, following on the distant heels of one Patricia Randolf, who’d disappeared nearly two months earlier. Both missing, and now presumed dead. The case was eating a hole in Boldt’s stomach to go along with other such scars—his medals were empty bottles of Maalox liquid, discarded like the bodies of victims whose deaths he hoped to solve. Thankless work, but a job he wouldn’t trade. The Susan Hebringer case was an exception—it put a voice to the face, a child watching the back door for mommy—it put Boldt on notice, serving up a reminder of the randomness of it all. It could have been Liz. It could have been him and his two children staring at that back door, waiting. The ghost of Susan Hebringer, a woman he’d met only briefly, but a friend of his family, had come to own him.

  Boldt’s relationship with Mama Lu, on the other hand, had begun with an illegal immigrant scam involving shipping containers, and it had developed over time into a professional association of sorts, in which she acted as an unpaid informer in exchange for later favors. Boldt understood perfectly well that such relationships were two-way, and he believed that his current visit to Mama Lu signaled traffic flow in the reverse direction—she needed a favor, and he was obliged to do his best to deliver. Tonight he knew only that her inquiry involved a death and that like it or not, if he could help, he would. If not, he would do his best to appease her.

  Boldt knew from prior visits to the Korean grocery that he needed to clear himself with the first of the two Samoans, a thick-necked, squinting structure of a human being dressed in black. It felt vaguely humiliating for a twenty-odd-year homicide veteran to seek the approval of a bodyguard, but Boldt came to get the job done, not pee on a fire hydrant, so he flashed the man his shield, playing along, and announced—he did not ask, his one concession—that he was there to see the venerable Great Lady.

  Thick with the smell of pickled ginger and sesame, the grocery’s interior made him suddenly hungry. An elderly Korean man with few teeth, a chapped grin, and expectancy in his arched eyebrows welcomed Boldt from behind a deli counter that offered mostly unrecognizable cuts of meat, fish, and poultry. Fish heads and chicken feet quickly killed Boldt’s appetite.

  Canned goods and sundries reached floor to ceiling, enhancing the narrowness of the aisles—a claustrophobic’s nightmare. Two ceiling fans spun lazily, a dusty cobweb trailing from a paddle like a biplane banner at the beach. Boldt climbed the steep stairs, cautious of a trick left knee, the sweet pungency of chai overtaking the ginger. Oddly out-of-tune Chinese string music grated on his musician’s ear. Of all the affronts to the senses, this dissonance proved the most difficult to take.

  A Buddha of a woman, Mama Lu occupied an ornately inlaid black lacquer chair like a queen on a throne, so wide and vast of flesh as to fill out a muumuu like a sleeping bag in a stuff sack. Her eyes shone like tiny black stones in a balloon of a face accented by generous swipes of rouge, implying cheekbones now submerged in an overindulgence at the soup bowl. Her lips gleamed a sickening fire-engine red, a color echoed in an application to her blunt fingernails, one of which, her index finger, curled to invite Boldt closer.

  “Mr. Both,” she said, having never gotten his name right in the several years they’d been associated.

  “Great Lady.”

  “You like some soup?”

  “Thank you.” He had learned long ago not to refuse. A female attendant of seventeen or eighteen, a petite thing with a wasp waist who wore embroidered silk from neck to ankle, delivered a small table before him. She averted her face, avoiding his eyes as he sat.

  Mama Lu chewed on a string of Chinese words, and the girl took off in a flash to points unseen. The place was a rabbit warren.

  “You mentioned a death, Great Lady.” He tried to push her, knowing she might drag this out for over an hour. He didn’t have an hour. Neither did Susan Hebringer. Mama Lu smiled, but said nothing in reply.

  There was only the music as they awaited delivery of the steaming bowls, also black lacquer. A wonton dish with streams of egg swirled in a dark broth. The Chinese spoon, flat on the bottom and wide at the mouth, allowed the soup to quickly cool. Mama Lu concealed a burp that she clearly savored.

  “Greatest detective ever work this city.”

  “You must need an awfully big favor,” he said.

  “Do I exaggerate?”

  “Always.”

  “My heritage.” A face-consuming grin. “Please excuse.”

  “You are a friend to this city, Great Lady. You give much back
. Others should follow your example.”

  “You humor me.”

  “I honor you,” he said. “You are a dear and noble friend.”

  “Since when you running for office?”

  “I’m just trying to stay above water these days.”

  “Soup make you feel better. You tell Mama Lu what troubles you.”

  Boldt took a spoonful. The soup defined depth and character. “The two women who’ve gone missing,” he said, feeling no need to fill in the blanks—the whole city knew about Hebringer and Randolf. “My wife and I knew one of the women.”

  Mama Lu grimaced and after a long moment nodded.

  Boldt ate more and requested a second bowl, winning great favor with her. If he could have raised a burp, she might have adopted him. “You should write a cookbook sometime,” he said.

  She said, “You busy man, Mr. Both. Forgive an old woman her selfishness.”

  “I am always at your service, Great Lady.” Protocol was not to be dismissed. Boldt let her have her self-deprecating moment but waited for her to reveal the true nature of her summons. The second bowl of soup proved even tastier than the first.

  “You familiar with water main break, Mr. Both?”

  “I might have missed that, Great Lady.”

  “Yesterday night.”

  “I caught the rain. We had a couple of assaults overnight. A huge trash spill in the bay. I think I missed the water main.”