Lawrence Block - Hope to Die

He got back to me twenty minutes later with a name and a number. "I don't know this guy," he said, "but the word is he's straight-up and thorough, though not necessarily the very man you'd want Regis to call for you if you couldn't remember the capital of Ethiopia."

"I hope you were as complimentary when you told him about me."

"I said you probably wouldn't steal a hot stove, and the morals charge was dismissed when the boy's mother withdrew the complaint. I know, you don't know how to thank me, but don't worry. You'll think of something."

The fellow who'd stayed at the curb to make sure Kristin Hollander got into her house okay had a cell phone, and he'd used it to call 911. A car from the Twentieth Precinct responded, and the uniforms reported back on what they found, and within the hour two detectives from the precinct were on the scene. It was their case, but the next day someone in charge saw what a media circus it was going to be and shuffled the cards, and a special unit was set up with a detective from Manhattan North Homicide in charge of it.

"You never like to have a case taken away from you," Dan Schering said. "Ego aside, though, we were better off, because you can't put as much into an investigation if you have to stop once an hour to hold a press conference. The guy from Homicide knew how to play the media, and we went ahead and pursued the investigation, and we cracked the damn thing. Before the stink came through the door out in Brooklyn, we already had a name and a description. All we had to do was pick the bastard up, and the only thing that stopped us from doing just that was he was dead."

Joe had suggested Schering wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he seemed bright enough to me. There was a stolid, Midwestern quality about him, and that might have been enough to lead a New Yorker like Joe Durkin to label him slow. But he reminded me of an Ohio cop I knew named Havlicek, whom I'd liked and respected enough to stay in touch with. There was nothing slow about Havlicek.

Schering hailed from Albert Lea, Minnesota, where he'd played high school football and basketball before going to the University of Minnesota. He played freshman football but didn't make the Golden Gopher varsity, and didn't even bother trying out for basketball, where everybody was six-five or taller.

His girlfriend was a theater major, and after graduation he followed her to New York, where she waited tables and went to auditions. He was riding the subway to his entry-level office job when he saw a recruiting ad for the NYPD. He sailed through the entrance exam and never looked back. The relationship didn't last and he didn't know what had become of the girl, whether she was still in New York or had gone on to L.A. or back to St. Paul, and didn't care enough to find out. When I asked him if he ever missed Minnesota he looked at me like I was out of my mind.

They'd known Ivanko was right for it before the DNA evidence came along to lock it up, he told me, because they'd recovered a partial thumbprint from the fireplace poker. It was just one print, and a partial one at that, so it hadn't led anywhere until they acted on the tip and got hold of Ivanko's sheet.

"It was a match," he said. "Forensics pegged it at something like sixty percent, so it wouldn't stand up in court as an absolute certainty, but it was as sure as you could get given the amount of the thumbprint left on the poker. In other words, we were a hundred percent certain, and it turned out there was nothing we had to sell to a judge and jury. And if we had to, well, we had the DNA. His semen, his pubic hair at the scene, plus Brooklyn Forensics found trace evidence on one of the bodies."

"Trace evidence?"

"Put it this way," he said. "Our boy Carl didn't have time to shower."

It had been exciting when the tip worked out and the case started to break, and slightly anticlimactic when the cops in Brooklyn walked in on Bierman and Ivanko before the Manhattan team could track them down. But he was just as glad it turned out the way it did.

"For the victim's sake," he said. "Not the actual vics, they were past caring, but the daughter. Sooner the better for someone in her position. And the two of them being dead means she's spared weeks of a trial and tons of media hype and it's over now instead of six months from now, or six years from now, or never because for the rest of her life they're calling her every few years to testify at a parole hearing. It's never really over no matter what, because losing your parents like that is something that never goes away, but at least she can close the books on it, same as we can."

He sympathized with the girl, as anybody would have done, but that hadn't kept him from taking a good look at her. "Because that's got to be the first thing enters your mind," he said. "The parents killed in their own home, the daughter discovers the bodies, first thing you wonder is did she make it happen. Because there's cases all the time, one just four months ago in Astoria, high school girl, her parents didn't approve of the boy she was dating, and she shows them how mistaken they are by teaming up with him and shooting them both dead."

I remembered that one. "They didn't do too good a job," I said.

"She stole her father's gun," he said, "and gave it to the boyfriend, and he shot the old man. Then he made the girl shoot her mother, or it was her idea, depending who you listen to. And then he goes out and steals a car and makes a drive-by shooting out of it, pumping three, four shots through the front window. And she's in the house when this happens, and she calls it in, all hysterical, and she's even got superficial cuts on her hands where she's presumably hit by flying glass from the drive-by. Which would be a nice touch except there was no flying glass, the bullets went right through, knocked out a little circle and that's all.

"And when you play What's Wrong with This Picture? the answer comes up Everything. The two bodies are in the front room, where they supposedly got shot from the drive-by, but there's blood spatters in the kitchen and other evidence indicating that at least one of them was killed there and dragged into the living room, including one slug that went through and wound up in the kitchen wall. And the bullets fired from the passing car, the trajectory's all wrong, they wound up in the living room ceiling, and with the woman, the mother, not only is the angle wrong but the wound's got powder burns. That's a neat trick, leaving powder burns around a wound inflicted from outside the house."

So he could hardly avoid taking a careful look at Kristin Hollander. He wasn't hard on her, because chances were she was innocent, in which case the last thing anybody wanted to do was add to her pain and suffering. But he watched her reactions and he checked her alibi, and he kept an ear cocked for any false note.

And there was none. "Anybody claims he's a hundred percent human lie detector, well, he's full of crap. But you develop an instinct. You were on the job yourself, so you know how many times a day you get lied to. Bad guys just lie all the time, even when they got no reason. They got a reason, they'll tell six different lies one after the other, hoping that'll sweeten the odds and you'll believe one of them. 'That bag of dope? I never saw it before in my life, Officer. That bag of dope? It ain't dope, it's talcum powder, case I meet a baby needs his diaper changed. That bag of dope? Hey, man, where'd that come from? Must be you planted it on me.' You're laughing, but that's how it plays out."

"I'm laughing because the routine hasn't changed in thirty years."

"It never will. You don't tamper with a classic. And each of them thinks he's the first one to run this crap by you. Each one's a criminal genius in his own mind. But you're completely used to it and you know the body language that goes with it, and you can tell the lie's on its way before the first words are out of his mouth."