Ridley Pearson: No Witnesses

She picked up the model and held it at eye level.

“He’ll finish that one of these days,” Boldt encouraged.

“Are you finished ?” she asked angrily.

Boldt detested these acts of violation. He resented discovery of a victim’s closely guarded secrets, the intensely private side of a person’s life that often surfaced at death: the drugs, pornography, handcuffs, hidden bottles, home videotapes, and inappropriate phone numbers. His detectives on the fifth floor got a lot of mileage out of such things, finding needed humor wherever possible. Uncomfortable miles for Lou Boldt. A victim surrendered all rights, knowingly or unknowingly, but it didn’t make it any easier. If he died suddenly, he didn’t want some dog-tired detective discovering his manuscript and parading it about. He knew damn well that the fifth floor would be tossing jokes around about “Johann Sebastian Boldt.” They would be humming mockingly. He cringed.

When she opened the front door, anxious to be rid of him, Boldt spotted the city’s recycle truck blocking his car. For a moment it felt to him like just another delay, another hurry-up-and-wait inconvenience. A cop’s life. At the last possible second he saw beyond all that.

He hollered at the workman, interrupting him before he dumped the plastic barrel. Boldt hurried out to the street and plunged his face into the first of the three large containers. He dug his way through the crushed aluminum cans. “Okay,” he said, giving this over to the worker and returning to curbside, where a confused and bewildered Betty Lowry joined him.

“In here?” she asked, joining Boldt in his search, though unaware of what he might be looking for.

Boldt noisily stirred the discarded jars with his pen; they clanged like dull bells. The worker hovered behind him and complained, “I can’t hang here all day.”

“Leave it,” Boldt ordered, waving the man off and adding at the last moment: “She lost her engagement ring.”

“Good luck,” the man called back.

Two of the jars near the bottom wore labels containing the Adler Foods logo and the script Redi Spaghetti . Boldt, beside himself with excitement, intentionally slowed down, increasingly precise and careful. This was where a cop made mistakes-oddly, enthusiasm was an enemy. The third bin contained the Lowrys’ discarded cans. He dug down. Dog food. Clam chowder. Tuna fish. Green chilies. He hooked a can well within the bin, and carried it aloft on the end of his pen like a New Year’s noisemaker. He jerked his wrist and it spun. The label came off, like a colorful flag. That same logo: Adler Foods. Mom’s Chicken Soup. “Ah!” he allowed in a moment of triumph. “Soup,” Boldt said.

“It was cold over the weekend, remember?” she reminded in a nervously apologetic tone. “Slater loves all the ‘Mom’s’ soups,” she added, sounding like an ad.

The can stopped spinning. Boldt felt hot all of a sudden. He asked her hoarsely, “Where did you buy the soup? Do you shop a certain grocery? One in particular?”

“Foodland,” she replied, without hesitation. It was the immediacy of her answer, her certainty, that pleased and convinced Boldt most of all.

“Foodland,” he repeated. It was a regional chain. “Which one?”

“Broadway.”

“You’re sure?” It was the cop in him that asked that; it just spilled out.

“Of course.”

“When?”

“When?” she asked.

“The soup,” he emphasized.

“Oh, God, I don’t know. This week? Last week? I’m in that store five days a week. Is that bad?” she asked, catching his expression.

“Do you save receipts? Pay by check?”

She slumped, “No to both.”

Boldt nodded. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Evidence! That was his only real thought. Evidence! The fuel that drove the engine of any investigation.

He kept evidence bags in the trunk of his car. He captured the cans and bottles into separate bags. Trophies. He told her the crew would be back for the bins, and reminded her one last time about the need for confidentiality.

She nodded and stuck her hand out for him to shake.

Hers was ice-cold.

He called ahead to the lab on the way downtown. But first, and much more important, he would have to convince the lieutenant.

Boldt dropped the evidence at the police lab on the second floor of the Public Safety Building with specific instructions that the lab techs follow procedure concerning the handling of infectious diseases. The anticipated difficulty arose when Bernie Lofgrin asked him for the case number. No case number, no lab work.

“What if I recorded my Costa for you?”

“You already owe me Scott Hamilton’s Radio City .” Lofgrin wore thick glasses that enlarged his eyes. He was balding.

“Both of them, then. Plus Hashim’s Guys and Dolls .”

Lofgrin grinned. “We’ll go ahead and start the workup without the number, but if you want the results-”

“I’ll be down with the number within the hour.”

“Sure you will,” Lofgrin replied sarcastically.

“What’s up?” Boldt asked his friend.

“Shoswitz is on a tear. Rankin is all over him about the clearance rate.”

“That’s my clearance rate,” Boldt said knowingly. “Or lack of it.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

Boldt thanked him for the warning and hurried upstairs.

Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz oversaw three squad sergeants, of whom Boldt was the most senior, the most experienced and, until recently, had the highest clearance rate. Boldt had five detectives under him; the other two squad leaders had four each. Shoswitz reported to Captain Carl Rankin, a political captain and a real asshole most of the time. This kept the lieutenant ever vigilant. His crew had homicides to work. They tracked them in “the Book,” a cardboard-bound, thumb-worn ledger that sat at its own table outside the coffee room with a pen Scotch-taped to a worn string at its side. When you were assigned a case, it went into the Book under your name. When the case went “down”-when it was cleared-it received a check in the right-hand column. The sergeant’s job was to keep those check marks coming. The lieutenant’s job was to ride the sergeants. Boldt’s squad had turned in an extremely respectable 72 last year: Seventy-two percent of all homicides and crimes against persons investigated by their squad had cleared. A clearance was defined as any investigation ending in an arrest, a warrant for arrest, or compelling evidence against a particular suspect whose whereabouts remained unknown. The clearance rate had nothing to do with how many cases went to trial or how many of those resulted in convictions or sentences, or how many of those sentences actually resulted in time spent in a correctional facility. It was merely a yardstick of how well a sergeant and his squad conducted their investigations. It was also the figure used for crime statistics, and therefore a figure the public eventually took note of. The last six months had not served Boldt well. There had been a double homicide down by the docks-three months now and still unsolved. A black hole . There was an apparent swan dive off the Fremont Bridge, a paraplegic who no way in hell threw herself to her death. A black hole . There was a two-week-old torture/homicide that wasn’t going anywhere. Another two hit-and-runs, both in the same neighborhood. A drive-by shooting, drug-related. All unsolved: black holes . Boldt’s squad had drawn the tough investigations-sometimes it worked out that way. You answered the phone, you took a call; you took whatever case was there. You signed into the Book. With his squad’s clearance rate in the low 50s, there was hell to pay for Boldt. They needed a couple of domestics, a suicide or two-some “slam dunks”-and they might possibly pull that number up into the low 60s by Christmas.