Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

On their way back into Manhattan Harrison said, “If you guys had spent another five minutes in that closet I’d have had Mary giving me head. Did you ever see tits like that?”

“No,” Townley said. “Should have been cast in stone.”

“What did you get?” asked Danilov, impatient at the relief-in-the-front-line camaraderie.

“A fly farts in that place, we hear it,” promised Harrison. “And a lot more besides …. Hey, we made a great team, the three of us. We should all be in movies-the new Marx Brothers.” He erupted into laughter at his own joke, prodding Danilov. “Get it, you being a Russian. Marx Brothers, like …?”

“I got it,” Danilov said soberly. “It’s very good: very funny.”

Pamela argued essential continuity to have Paul Lambert lead the forensic team, which was enlarged by the inclusion of a D.C. police pathologist, a bald doctor who only just tiptoed beyond being a dwarf and seemed prepared to confront anyone. He had, fortunately, brought nose clips, which everyone was now wearing: having come close to losing her lunch-as well as her credibility in front of men waiting for her to throw up-Pamela would have marked her cross on a ballot paper to elect the man president. The pathologist scarcely had to bend to remove the bullet-split pillow that had been put over Roanne Harding’s face. There were two bullet wounds, one in the center of the forehead, a second that had destroyed her left eye. Both sockets were maggot filled.

Lambert surveyed the room and said, “I’m not happy with this.”

“I shouldn’t think Roanne Harding is, either,” said Pamela. “What’s your point?”

“What do you see?” demanded the scientific examiner.

“Dead woman, maybe sexually violated. Apartment turned over, searching for something ….” She paused. “There is something,” she said.

Lambert called to one of his team, “What’s the count?”

“One,” the fingerprint expert called back. “Hers, I’d guess. No way of getting anything from her, decomposed like that. But her prints are on the personnel file we got from the Pentagon.”

The boyish forensic head raised a warning finger at the approach of the police surgeon and said to the man, “How’s it look to you?”

“Intrusion,” said the pathologist at once. “Guy breaks in to an apartment he thinks is unoccupied, starts to toss it. Girl wakes up, naked. He takes the diversion, rapes her, shoots her through that pillow to deaden the sound. Zips his fly, takes what else he wants. Goes home to watch the Letterman show. I’d have said it was all in a night’s work.”

“Except for what?” pressed Lambert.

“For you guys being here. This should be PD, not bureau. She the girl from the Washington Monument you guys been looking for?”

Pamela didn’t answer. Instead, waving her arm around the destroyed room, she said to Lambert, “This is neat, isn’t it! Tidy trashing?”

Lambert smiled broadly. “Right! It’s my job to go through tossed rooms. This stuff has been put down.”

Pamela said, “Might help if the Watchmen thought we’d bought it.”

“Give us a little time, at least,” agreed Lambert.

She said, “I’ll get the director to talk personally with Commissioner Frost. Have it released as a homicide not connected with us. The surrounding apartments were cleared because the danger was a gas explosion. No one was identifiably Bureau.”

Pamela was aware of Lambert shifting beside her and the doctor looking at her questioningly. She said, “Let’s give it a try, at least!”

The doctor shrugged. “All I’m responsible for are the medical findings.”

“Which are?” pressed Pamela.

“Decomposition has stages,” said the man. “From the maggot samples I’ve taken, forensic entomologists will be able to date the death to within a day or two. I’ve taken vaginal samples but there won’t be any semen left, for DNA. No fingernail debris, either: There aren’t any finger ends.”

“We got a long way to go,” said Lambert, exasperated.

“We always did,” said Pamela. She hoped Lambert would spread the word on how she’d recognized the intended deception.

Jack Harrison most definitely had turned 69 Bay View Avenue, Brooklyn, into a sound box. And just as definitely got a lot more besides. Arnie Orlenko had married Mary in a drive-through ceremony in Las Vegas eighteen months earlier-cajoling from her the actual, traceable month, May, by telling her that he’d arranged his divorce on the anniversary of his wedding to his first wife-and that she and Arnie had been in Chicago for the previous two weeks, seeing import-export business friends of Arnie’s. She hadn’t liked Chicago, her first visit: The wind was too cold, coming off the lake, even in summer. She didn’t like where they lived in Brooklyn for the same reason. They’d move, maybe. Arnie was always talking deals, about moving on. If they did move, she hoped it wouldn’t be to Chicago.

“And she slipped me her number!” declared the ebullient FBI technician. “As if I didn’t have it already.”

“Let’s test,” suggested Cowley, pressing the replay button for what had been recorded during their return journey from Brooklyn.

“Brooklyn’s out, for fuck’s sake! What are you worrying about?” Mary’s voice.

“The day we get back?” Orlenko.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I know cops. Can smell cops. They were dumb-assed electricians probably jerking off right now from the memory of the titty show I gave them.”

“What did you tell that guy you were with most of the time?”

“Small talk. Nothing! But if they had been cops, you’d have rung bells with your tight-assed number.”

“Show me exactly where he went! What he did.”

“He fixed the things that broke, for fuck’s sake. Put funny things on wires and stuff, made needles jump.” There was the sound of movement, people walking. “Now what the fuck are you doing!”

“Looking.”

“For what?”

“Won’t find it!” intruded Jack Harrison.

“I don’t know.” Orlenko.

“That’s why he won’t find it,” said Harrison, talking to the ceiling.

The noise of scratching and squeaking, as screws were unscrewed, came loudly into the Manhattan office.

“So!” demanded the woman.

“Looks all right.”

“The fucking trucks are still driving up and down the street, for Christ’s sake! You seen too many movies.”

“What’s the time?”

“Ten after four.”

“I’m going to nap before we go out.”

“You wanna fuck? Fool around a little?”

“I wanna nap.”

“Just offering value for money,” she said.

“Jesus! The waste!” Harrison moaned.

“Las Vegas found the registration,” said Cowley. “Mary’s full name is Mary Jo James. Born in Montana. Orlenko is Arseni Yanovich Orlenko, born-wait for it-in Gorki, June 10, 1958. Job description on the marriage certificate is engineer. Got a match for Mary Jo from a forefinger print on one of the in-flight magazines from the flight. She’s got three convictions for prostitution, two for the larceny of her Johns’ wallets. Served three months in a correctional institute in Billings five years ago. Nothing recorded since then.”

“Time I called Moscow,” said Danilov.

Pavin reminded him that the fingerprint comparison had to be made mechanically and visually, against a named offender, because none of their records was computerized. Having Orlenko’s full name might help, but nothing had shown against any of the Orlenko’s so far checked.

The positive connection came from elsewhere. The Gorki number from which two calls had been made to 69 Bay View Avenue and to which one had been returned was a garage rented by Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov. The Moscow number to which the two other outgoing international calls had been made from Bay View Avenue was to a newly opened restaurant named the Golden Hussar on Pereulok Vorotnikovskij, off the inner ring road. There was no intelligence of its having been adopted by any known organized crime brigade.