Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

“Why don’t you walk us through, Alex, from room to room. Perhaps your eye will catch some detail we’ve overlooked. And if you recognize any objects that belong to Miss Lascar, or that don’t belong to you, point them out for us, will you?”

“Of course.” I hadn’t been to the house since Labor Day, not quite a month earlier, but no one else had been there since, except my caretaker, and then Isabella.

“Does it matter if we touch things now, Luther?”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to see that my team has, uh, dusted quite a few items for prints already. Obvious things. Drinking glasses in the kitchen and bathroom, mirrors and metal surfaces…"

My stomach churned. Another thing I hadn’t focused on, despite all my professional experience. The police and agents would have been looking for clues inside the house, especially if they thought Isabella had been killed or set up by her traveling companion. Hundreds of victims in cases I’d worked on had described to me the painful intrusion caused by their well-intentioned investigators, rifling through drawers and brushing black powder on possessions to see whether the oils from someone’s fingers had left latent prints prints not visible to the naked eye that could link an assailant to a crime scene.

Waldron continued, “We got some lifts, Alex, so we’ll have to do a set of eliminations before you leave. I directed the coroner to get Miss Lascar’s prints, too. Sorry about the mess that black powder is terrible. You’ll need someone to clean it up after we’re out of here.”

It was routine for the cops to take prints of anyone who had legitimate access to the location, to eliminate them from the latent prints found. It would be expected to encounter my fingerprints as well as Isabella’s on some of the surfaces.

And once we were eliminated, the inquiry would tighten to find the source of the unidentified whorls and ridges that might be hiding on glassware, porcelain fixtures, and cabinet doors throughout the rooms.

I stepped through the front door into the tiny hallway central to most colonial farmhouses, with its staircase leading up to the guest bedrooms. I led the solemn troupe past that to the left, into the living room, its crisp Pierre Deux upholstery and clean lace curtains looking just as I had left them.

“She must have used the fireplace,” I observed aloud, assuming that was the kind of detail Luther might want to know.

“Those cinders weren’t there after my trip. It wasn’t cold enough to want a fire.” And I had been alone Labor Day weekend, conscious of how romantic the setting becomes with a fire lighting that cozy room.

“That candle is Isabella’s, too,” I added. “I’m sure there’s one in the bedroom just like it.”

“You’re right about that,” Luther said.

“She always travels with them. Rigaud. Takes her own scent wherever she goes to create the feeling of being at home.” I had seen those tiny green votives – cypres was the one she favored in every hotel suite or guest room Isabella had ever planned to stay in for more than an hour.

Mike rolled his eyes in mock disbelief. The habits of the rich whether movie stars, yupsters, or cocaine addicts they were all grist for his mental mill, to be worked into the routines he schemed up to delight the guys back at the Homicide Squad as they waited out the night watch for news of another corpse.

I doubled back, seeing nothing else out of the ordinary in that room and passed my three escorts as I crossed the hallway and peered into the dining room. The table was empty, eight chairs drawn close around it, and as I leaned to look at its surface I could see the thin film of dust that usually collected within a week’s time of non-use.

“It doesn’t look like she ate in here,” I said, which did not surprise me, since the kitchen was twice the size of the dining room and had a sturdy oak table where I usually ate, except when I was entertaining, with the help of a local catering service.

We walked single file into the kitchen, and my jaw dropped at the sight of the black fingerprint powder coating the cupboard handles, refrigerator door, coffee mugs in the sink, the wineglasses still in the Rubbermaid drain, and the receiver of the telephone.

“Sorry, Alex, but we-‘ I interrupted Luther briskly.

“I understand what you had to do. It’s just unpleasant to see it in my own home.”

“Would you check the food supply, please? Anything different or unusual?”

Luther held his handkerchief around the handle of the refrigerator as he pulled open the door.

“There was nothing in it when I left except diet Coke and beer, so all of this is Isabella’s,” I told him.

There was milk and juice, English muffins and butter, yogurt and half a packet of hot dogs.

“Was she a vegetarian?” Wally asked.

“Yes, Wally. But I guess her boyfriend went both ways.”

I looked in the pantry and cupboards, which were pretty bare. Just as I left them.

“Must have cleaned out your shelves so the mice don’t get nothing over the winter, Alex,” noted Wally.

“Wally, she’s got the skinniest roaches in all of New York City. If they wait around for Alex to serve ‘em food, they’ll die of starvation,” joked Mike, knowing that my dislike of cooking meant that the cabinets were usually empty.

Luther moved to the old Welsh cupboard which held my collection of antique pitchers and opened the doors below, where the liquor was stored.

“Anything missing?”

“I don’t measure the bottles, Luther. I wouldn’t have a clue what was here last month or whether something’s an inch lower than it was before. I told Isabella to help herself to whatever she wanted, of course.” I thought of my Aunt Gert, who used to swear that her housekeeper sipped gin every Wednesday morning when she came in to clean her apartment. Gert took to using the tape measure from her sewing kit to check the level in the bottle, but could never remember where she hid the slip of paper with the number on it from week to week. The housekeeper long outlasted Aunt Gert, but the old girl would have been right up Luther’s alley.

He was about to close the door when Mike asked if the cops had dusted the bottles.

“Obviously not. There’s no powder on them, is there?”

“Well, take those three in. The front ones. I’d be willing to bet you’ll find prints maybe Isabella’s, maybe someone else’s but they’ve been moved since Labor Day.”

Even I looked puzzled.

Mike went on.

“See how the Stoli and Jack Daniel’s are in front? If Alex was the last to use them, the Dewar’s would be the closest to the door. But the Scotch is a step back and the other two are in front.”

Luther was frowning as he looked from Mike’s triumphant expression to my grin. I guessed that he was more upset by the suggested intimacy of our friendship than the thought he had missed a point he had no reason to know about, but I had missed it, too.

“He’s right, Luther. And Isabella usually drank vodka, so…”

“I thought she was a vegetarian,” mused Wally, puzzled by the significance of any of this.

“Do they drink?”

“She was a man-eating vegetarian, Wally,” Mike said, deadpan, ‘and a heavy-drinking one at that. Alex used to tell us she liked vodka, wine, and lighter fluid best, didn’t you? That’s what kept her so arrogant and frisky.“

Luther had his notepad out and was starting his list of additional things to do. There was nothing else of significance in the kitchen and we paraded out the far door ahead of him, through the room I had converted into a small office which seemed untouched and into the master bedroom.

While I stopped to take in the tableau of Isabella’s interrupted retreat, Mike walked across the large room to stare out the glass doors, which made up the entire wall, at the stunning view down the grassy slope to the blue tints of the pond and sound. This room was my favorite, sunny and cheerful all day, and so private that not a curtain or shade covered an inch of the opening. My only encroachers were the deer who ventured out at night and the osprey I had built a nest for at the edge of the property. Over my bed was a whimsical trompe painting of my wildflower field done by a local artist who liked to come to my hilltop to paint, and who gifted me with it years ago.