The World's Finest Mystery Part 83

"I ain't got nothing to compare to that."

"But you have a favorite case?"

He shrugged. "I got one that bugs me. But it's just simple."

"Simple how?" I asked.

He shrugged again. "Or maybe it's not so simple. I don't know."

"Bob," Evelyn said.

"Okay," he said. "Husband and wife in the Village are having this argument. They live in a walk-up and their fights are always interesting enough to draw the neighbors. This time, the wife has had it, and she grabs a gun, tries to shoot the husband, but before she can pull the trigger, he grabs her arm and they flail around. Of course, the gun goes off, and one of the neighbors gets it smack in the face. Dies."

"Seems straightforward," Hawkins said.

"Don't it?" Bob said. "Until you come to find that the neighbor owns the apartment building and in his will he leaves it to the couple. Now everyone swears they didn't know he owned it, and everyone swears that no one knew the contents of that will."

"You think it was deliberate?"

"I know it was," Bob said. "Just can't prove it. At least, not enough to get the D.A. to look at the case."

Evelyn shook her head. "See? Impossible cases, all of them."

"Yeah, but I'd'a said it was impossible for there to be no murders in the Big Apple for one day, let alone fifteen," Weisburg said.

"So what are you saying?" I asked.

"I'm saying maybe this is our chance. Maybe we can solve these things."

"So what's the wager?" Evelyn asked.

"One week," Bob said. "We get one week to solve our baby or we gotta trade it to someone else."

"If they solve it, we'll look like a putz," Hawkins said.

Bob grinned and pointed at him. "You got it in one."

"Don't get all excited," Evelyn said. "We ain't heard from Spence yet."

I held out my hands. "You guys get all the interesting cases."

"And you're holding out," Evelyn said.

Indeed I was. But she caught me. I felt the color rise in my cheeks.

"Ah, he's got an embarra.s.sing one too," Hawkins said.

I shook my head. "It's the image that got me, not the case."

"Image?" Evelyn asked.

I took a deep breath. Sometimes revealing yourself to your colleagues wasn't all it was cracked up to be. "There's a doll hospital just north of Bloomies-"

"A doll hospital?" Hawkins asked.

"Yeah," Weisburg said. "A place you can take favorite toys to be repaired."

"Or antique toys," Evelyn said.

"Anyway," I said, feeling the heat deepen, "they had this guy. They called him the wiz because he could fix d.a.m.n near anything. You'd bring in a turn-of-the-century Steif, no stuffing, no arms for G.o.d's sake-"

"Stiff?" Hawkins whispered to Weisburg.

"Steif," Weisburg said.

"It's a collectible stuffed bear," Evelyn snapped. "Now shut up and let him talk."

"Anyway, he could turn it around in a day or two and have the thing looking like it just come off the a.s.sembly line. He was a master, the best, they all said that."

"And he was murdered," Bob said.

"You got it," I said. "I'd'a thought it was simple burglary too- they had a load of collectibles from Sotheby's that disappeared that night- except for the dolls."

"The dolls?" Hawkins asked, obviously willing to work for every detail.

"The dolls. When the staff came in the next morning, they found dolls all over him- no blood on them, even though he'd been stabbed in an artery and there was blood everywhere. The dolls were hooded and masked in surgical clothes and they were poised over the body like they was trying to fix him."

Hawkins snorted and looked away. "Nice try, but you could've made up something better than that."

I stared at him. He slowly looked back at me. Then he frowned. "You mean you weren't making that up?"

"Nope. They left the body as it was, and the call came in here. I got photos."

"But no suspects."

"No suspects, no motive, no nothing."

"The stolen collectibles?"

"Never were shipped. It was clerical error. Sotheby's dropped them off the day after the murder."

"So not even a robbery."

"Nothing," I agreed.

"When was this?" Evelyn asked.

"Valentine's Day," I said. "I remember because we were having that deep freeze."

"Oh, yeah," Bob said.

"So," Hawkins said. "The wager?"

Weisburg shrugged. "I'm willing to give it a shot. I have a fondness for those dogs."

"You gonna mind if someone else cleans up your mess?" Bob asked with a grin.

"I figure The Silence is gonna end by tomorrow morning and this is all gonna become moot," Weisburg said.

Evelyn grinned. "That's his way of agreeing to the proposition. We all in?"

I glanced around the room. Everyone was nodding. "We're all in," I said.

I had never worked on a case that was six months old before. I'd never had the luxury. But as I reviewed my notes, I realized that the case had only intrigued me in hindsight. I would find myself thinking of those dolls, poised over the body like a Lilliputian surgical team, and smile.

Smile.

Sometimes this job got to me.

I had actually only spent an afternoon on the case, even though when the dead guy's family called long distance every few weeks, I would tell them the file was still open. In truth, the next day I got slammed with three drive-bys, a potential serial, and a famous floater, and the doll-hospital murder got shoved aside by more pressing- and more easily solvable- cases.

I think that's often the way. We usually close about seventy-five percent, but that's because most murderers are stupid. Think about it: The best way to solve a problem is not to take out a gun and blow someone away. The twenty-five percent unsolved are either lost in the shuffle, committed by a professional who knows how to hide his tracks, or done by someone smart who has been thinking of the crime for a long, long time. That's one thing we rarely tell people: If the killer's smart, chances are he'll get away.

The doll-hospital murderer had been smart, or in the very least, lucky. There were no fingerprints in the place, except for the ones that needed to be there, and despite all the blood, there wasn't a decent shoe or hand print either. No murder weapon, and no motive, at least not one I could find.

I stared at the photos. The victim, one Joel Dudich, was slender to the point of gauntness, balding, and had a tattoo of a teddy bear on his right forearm. I took out a magnifying gla.s.s and examined the tattoo. The work was fine, even artistic, and bore a vague resemblance to the posable doctor bear who was sitting on the edge of the table, his furry arms crossed as if he were denying the patient treatment.

In fact, the doctor was the only bear, even though I had made a note in my case file that Dudich specialized in bears. The other creatures around him, the ones who were trying to save him, were dressed as orderlies or nurses- no doctors at all. I recognized a ripped Raggedy Ann, an early 1960s Barbie that was missing one arm, and a headless G.I. Joe.

The others had their little backs to me, but I could probably identify them if I tried hard enough. My father had owned a toy store in the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, and he treated each doll and stuffed animal as if it had a presence all its own. He was a good and gentle man, and he had always seemed astonished that his only son had taken to the violence of police work, ending in the most violent side of all- chasing difficult homicides in the mean streets of New York.

I turned the large glossy photograph of the corpse facedown, skipped the autopsy photos for the moment, and reread my case notes.

Dudich had lived alone in a fifth-floor walk-up that he couldn't afford. His most recent roommate, a woman, had left him abruptly, at least according to the super, two weeks before the murder. The super figured they were lovers, and there was nothing in the record to confirm or contradict that. Dudich's name was the only one on the lease, and none of his friends knew who the girl was.

His coworkers found him strange and fey, his habits those of a prima donna in a small pond. They claimed they never spoke to him about his personal life. He came in late, snapped at anyone who interrupted him, and didn't care who he insulted. But everyone put up with it because his work was so beautiful. Clients came back, asking for him by name: parents wanting their children's toys repaired; collectors wanting their valuables restored to mint condition; and, in the end, galleries and auction houses taking advantage of his relatively cheap services.

"Could've gotten more money," I had written in the margin. It was a reference to an interview with one of Dudich's colleagues, who couldn't understand why Dudich stayed at the hospital when he had been offered a much higher salary with several of the antique shops on the Upper West Side.

I circled the comment and underlined it, thinking it a place to start. But before I went further, I finished with the file, making sure my memory was jogged. The family was out of state- Iowa- and they confessed that they hadn't seen him since he graduated from a cow college at which he had shown no sign of his particular gifts. I had covered a lot of ground that first day. It was too bad that I hadn't followed up on it.

Just before I left the House, I noted that the others were looking more excited than they had since The Silence began. Evelyn had put all her files under her desk. She had gone to her interview, but she had left on her desktop a computer-generated list of all the blood-spattered unidentified objects found around the time her shoe had been located.

Hawkins was on the phone with the forensic pathologist, talking about the possibility of matching a severed arm to the mysterious torso. Weisburg was typing on the task force's computer, doing an Internet search of New York area dog breeders. And Bob was poring over a copy of the dead landlord's will, making notes and circles and lines, and muttering to himself.

Finally, it looked like a normal day in the task force. We hadn't had one for more than two weeks.

I walked down the faded wood steps and through the double doors out to the city. It didn't look different. Horns honked, brakes squealed as taxis nearly rear-ended real cars. Pedestrians didn't even look. They walked, heads high, to their next destination. It was hot, of course, being August, and the men wore short sleeves and slung their suitcoats over their shoulders with one hand and clutched their briefcases with the other. Women wore dresses and no nylons and clutched their briefcases too. A car backfired as I reached the end of the block and everyone ducked, just like they always did, thinking it was a gunshot.

I walked to the doll hospital. It wasn't too far from the House, and I liked to keep a finger on the city's pulse. The heat was unbearable, and within minutes, I had my suitcoat off too. The stink was worse, though. New York always smells bad in the height of summer: garbage sitting on the curbs waiting for collection; the way the exhaust from cars hangs in the air; and the general odor of sweaty humans who have no business being so close to each other, but because of the nature of the city, are.

I didn't have a formal line of questioning ready when I reached the hospital. All I knew was that I wanted to see what had happened since the loss of their star, since Dudich had died on them and taken away so much lucrative business.

When I reached the building, saw the small sign covered with dirt and flies, I had a bad feeling, but it wasn't until I walked up the narrow stairs into a growing darkness that I knew.

The hospital was gone. Not vanished-gone, but out-of-business gone. I stopped at the gla.s.s door with the For Rent sign taped in a corner of the window, and peered through the soaping someone had done to prevent just this sort of snooping.

The tables were gone inside, and all that remained was a gray vinyl floor covered with thin midafternoon sunlight. A doll's arm lay in a corner, and a high-heeled shoe, probably from an early Barbie doll, had a spot all its own beneath a wall. Otherwise, there was no evidence that the doll hospital had been there. The tidy place with the bewildered employees, the ones who had described their job as a happy one until Dudich died, had vanished as if it had never been.

I moved away from the door and went back down the stairs. The tenant below was a women's boutique with about 500 square feet of floor s.p.a.ce. It probably cost a fortune just to maintain that, even though this wasn't one of Manhattan's priciest neighborhoods. I let myself in.

The dresses were all variations on the same theme, a drapey disco sort of dress that I thought had gone out of style twenty years before. Some were decorated with sh.e.l.l necklaces. Others had scarves for accents. The woman behind the small table that served as a counter wore her long hair in a thousand beaded braids. She wore orange lipstick that set off her dark skin, and her inch-long nails, which looked real, were painted orange to match.

"Help you?" she asked in a disinterested New York tone that belied the Jamaican melody in the vowels.

"I was wondering what happened to the doll hospital."

"Closed." She hadn't even looked up yet.

"When?"

"Ah, March. The last day was the freak snowstorm on the third. I remember because they were setting toys out in the snow."

"Is there anyone I can talk to connected with the hospital?"

She pulled open a drawer in the table, and using those long fingernails like pincers, removed a cream-colored business card. "Don't blame me if she doesn't get back to you," the woman said. "She's the only one now, and she's working out of her home."

I took the card. Apparently this boutique got a lot of inquiries about the doll hospital. She hadn't even asked for my ID.

"Do you have any idea why it closed?"

She raised her eyes to mine. They were magnificent, the stunning centerpiece to what I just realized was a remarkable face. "Why, the murder, of course."

"The murder?"

"Of the wiz boy. The one who could repair anything. They say the dolls surprised him in the middle of the night, but I don't believe it."

"You don't?" I asked in a tone that I hoped didn't sound patronizing.

"No. If they killed him, why were they found trying to save him, now? They were found all around him, like little doctors. But they couldn't do anything."

"So, they didn't find out who did it?"

She shrugged. "I don't think they ever will. The police have too much to do to look into the death of one pimply-faced guy with a fascination for teddy bears."