Victims (3 page)

“Gimme two more minutes.”

The photographer circled, aimed, flashed, photographed from every angle possible. It seemed a waste of time; from any angle, the girl was dead.

Finally it was the medical examiner’s turn, and the neighbors could not see what his work entailed because the detectives were all standing around blocking their view.

Stein moved back and mingled again with the older people. They were not so anxious to catch every word or to identify every new arrival. Death was there under the streetlamp and it had visited a very young woman. They stayed somewhat apart from their neighbors.

“Do you think it is the Spanish girl?” a woman asked her neighbor, who merely shrugged: I don’t know. Who knows?

“Where does the Spanish girl live?” Mike asked quietly, turning, searching the apartment building.

“No, no,” a woman told him. “Over there, in the first building.”

“Not just one girl, two sisters I think live there.”

“Stewardesses, that’s what they are.”

“The third girl, the youngest sister, she goes to school. She’s the troublemaker, she has boys over and plays that music so loud. Her sister, the stewardess, she comes and goes, very quiet.”

There was a sound, a communal moan of surprise, of shock. Stein turned and watched the medical examiner slide the body from its sitting position. Under the glare of the lights that had been set up, the reality of bloody, violent death was revealed to people who had not seen it before. It was not exactly like a movie or a TV event, after all.

There were great wide slashes on both sides of the woman’s face. Her chest and arms were covered with blood to such an extent that it was impossible to immediately verify other wounds. It didn’t take the M.E. very long before he finished his job and packed up.

Stein wandered among neighbors; stopped; listened. They had finished, for the time being, comparing what they had seen and heard. He moved closer now to the body, as close as the police lines permitted and then a little closer. He listened to one detective ticking off to his partner information to be included in their initial report: no apparent rape or sexual mutilation; no apparent robbery—wallet and credit cards intact; victim holding house key in right hand.

Other detectives were moving through the street, now turning their attention to the crowd of people who were watching and waiting for something more to happen. The police were very good at what they did, and careful not to turn people away or frighten them off. They moved and spoke and questioned with great tact and consideration and awareness of who these people were: middle-class Barclay Street, Forest Hill, neighbors who had never seen such a thing before, ever.

The police had picked up the situation, of course. Stein stood quietly watching, listening, catching the surprise and the carefully controlled reaction to the fact that there were people here who had followed every step of this crime: had watched and heard and seen it all from beginning to end. For an estimated twenty minutes.

He glanced around and selected the young blond police officer, who was earnestly watching the detectives and the technicians. He came alongside the young cop with the assurance and authority of a superior officer.

“You first on the scene, Officer?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Well, me and my partner, sir. We picked up the call at about eleven-thirty or eleven-thirty-one. I have it marked in my notebook, sir.”

“Who made the call? Was it called in on 911 or what?”

The policeman glanced around carefully, leaned closer to Stein and confided, “See the bus driver, sir? Well, you should hear what
he
got to say.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“Yes, sir. Well, it seems that... well, all these people are telling me about how they saw this girl, this man grappling with her, hitting on her and yelling and all, and some of them seen him slashing at her, and then they seen him take off and all and watched and all and...”

“Officer, get to the point.”

“Nobody called 911.
All these people, well, some of them, a lot of them, they all watched and they all can tell you what went first, but... no one called. No one... did anything.”

“And the bus driver?”

“Oh, yes sir. He completed his run down at Metropolitan Avenue, and as he turned onto Barclay Street he saw her, he could tell, just the way she was sitting, leaning, like he could see she was dead. And he pulled the bus up, and got out and couldn’t believe it. He says from the amount of bleeding, he could see she’d been there awhile—you could see she was dead. And nobody did anything. But watched from the windows. So he starts yelling and all and got someone to call 911.”

“How many calls were there?” The cop looked blank. “Never mind. That’s okay. Thanks, Officer.”

Stein moved back and moved carefully, not speaking to any of them. He watched the detectives work the crowd: friendly, easy, helpful. They knew. They were trying to get enough witnesses to give the whole scenario, beginning to end, and they knew that the information was available. The whole thing had been witnessed by an audience of movie and TV experts who seemed to have anticipated each move and were surprised only now by the fact that this was real.

He tried not to study the faces too closely, because he began to see things he did not want to see. He wanted to keep a calm distance from this really ordinary street crime. From what he’d heard, it seemed like a lovers’ quarrel. It had been done without stealth, right out in the middle of the street, under lights and before witnesses. That added up to a great emotional upheaval.

But it wasn’t an ordinary event. If the killing was nothing really unusual, the fact of the witnesses, standing around, comparing notes, giving a minute-by-minute scenario to the detectives, was more than unusual. People at the crime scenes he usually covered were silent or said things like “Hey, I don’t know nothin’, man, I don’t even live here, I just lookin’, like everyone else. Hell, ain’t nothin’ to me.”

He felt a sense of fleeting despair at their earnestness. He turned away from the neighbors for a moment and tried to go blank, to suspend judgment, but he could not suspend a familiar if long-dormant charge of electricity that sharpened all his faculties, energized him totally. There was something terrible here on this street, among these people; the spotlighted dead body was merely the most visual evidence. A pervasive sense of outrage swept through Mike Stein. He had been numbed by so many years of observing all the horrors people daily inflicted on each other, he had been desensitized by the ordinariness of crime, the lack of significance and meaning. The electricity crackling through him sharpened and widened his point of view. The greater crime was here, among these good people, in their telling of how they watched. And watched. And waited, while the girl lay dying.

He turned and faced the apartment house directly in line with the lamppost, and he registered the clicking, clicking, clicking from the air conditioner that was balanced on a carrier outside the center window of the apartment just above street level. It was the sound of an old air conditioner that had been turned off: the kind of sound that on a quiet night becomes intolerably loud and steady. There was movement behind the sheer white curtains, a strange apparition: a person standing, watching, listening, leaning against the window frame, nearly invisible. Except, by concentrating, he could make out that the person watching was swaddled in bandages. The whole face seemed hidden.

As he narrowed his eyes and moved closer, the person disappeared, seemed to vaporize, and for a moment he wondered if he had imagined the whole thing.

It was something that made him feel uneasy and he didn’t know why.

There was a commotion coming from the vicinity of the bus. Apparently the bus driver’s supervisor had arrived, and this gave the driver his opportunity to express his opinion of the people on Barclay Street. He had, up till then, been very quiet, conferring only with the detectives.

“Ya know what kinda people they are, Jimmy? I’ll tell ya. They stood around at their windas and watched this girl die out here on the street, right in front of them, and not one of ’em even picked up a phone. Not one of ’em called 911 and tried to get the kid some help. How about that, huh?”

His supervisor tried to quiet him down, turned him toward the bus, but the man was warming up to his moment.

He began to use the kind of language he knew would offend these people; he insulted their conception of themselves as good people. A few voices in the crowd called out that he was wrong; that he should just shut up and go home.

“Ya deserve what happened here,” he shouted back wildly, “all of you—you don’t look out for your own daughters! What kinda people are you?”

“No, no, don’t say that,” an older man said softly. “We didn’t know that the girl...”

The voices around the bus driver were quietly protesting, explaining. He didn’t understand, he had it wrong, it wasn’t like that at all.

“It
was
like that, ya bastards, ya all stood at ya windas and watched her and ya did nothin’ at all. Ya let her die—you’re all fuckin’ bums, all a ya!”

An older man put his arm around his wife’s shoulder, turned her away. They’d seen and heard enough for one night. They didn’t need this man’s crazy yelling and bad language.

A broad-shouldered guy in a gray sweatshirt and blue-jean cutoffs, his face damp and red with anger, pushed through the crowd and confronted the bus driver. They were matched, bulk for bulk, eye to eye.

“Hey, you loudmouth, wadda ya yellin’ about, huh? You didn’t do nothin’, you just kept goin’ first time you passed the girl, so you just watch your mouth around here, ya bum. You’re someone to say something to anyone! Jeez!”

The bus driver pulled away from his supervisor’s grasp and jutted his chin forward. His eyes blazed and his fists tightened.

“I didn’t do nothin’?
Me?
I didn’t do nothin’? I’m the one got down on my knees to help this kid, to tell you people to get the cops. She’d still be there I hadn’t stopped and—”

“Ya didn’t stop the first time, pal,” the big guy said. He turned to face his neighbors. “He didn’t stop the first time. He come past her, made a quick stop at the sign and pulled around the corner.” He turned back to the bus driver, “You finished your goddamn
route,
so don’t say you fucking
helped
her.”

“What?
What?
” The bus driver turned to his supervisor, letting him grab at his shoulders, take him under control, restrain him.

“I saw that, too,” a short round gray-haired man standing next to Mike Stein said to no one in particular.

“Yeah. He did.”

“Yeah. I saw that.”

“Yeah.”

Others in the crowd had watched not just the assault and the dying. They had also watched the bus driver complete a pass without stopping. Had seen him return finally and get out of his bus. When it was too late.

All of these remarks, these accusations, these retellings, were noted, registered, filed away for future examination, not only by Stein but by all the plainclothes detectives now circulating in the crowd.

The bus driver, shaking his head, sorry for himself—no matter what you do, it’s the good guy gets it in the end—let himself be led back to his bus by his supervisor. He had seen enough of these people. What could you say to them, people who had let a young girl die like that?

Without helping her.

“You know who I thought it might be?” an old woman asked Mike. “That woman, Mrs. Hynes, who lives on the first floor? Her daughter, the one who became a nurse. When Mrs. Schroeder said it looked like one of the Spanish girls from the top floor, I thought no. It looked to me, when she was sitting there—My eyes aren’t so good anymore, but I remember the girl, Mrs. Hynes’s daughter, the nurse. You think it might be her? I hope not.”

“I hope not,” Mike said.

“I hope not,” the woman repeated. She grabbed her husband’s arm, and he said, “It’s about time, about time, we should go home. This is terrible. You’ll be up all night now upset from this terrible thing. It’s not safe anywhere, anywhere.”

Acting from automatic signals, from unexamined intuition, from too many years of experience, Mike walked into the courtyard leading to the building at 68-35. He entered the vestibule and was struck immediately by the cleanliness of the hallway. The brass rectangle of apartment buttons was shiny. The floors were clean without the smell of dirty mops. He studied the names of the tenants.

Apartment 1-A, Mrs. Hynes.

He walked outside and studied the setup and took a guess: that would be, he felt certain, the apartment immediately overlooking the lamppost where the dead girl now lay under a light blanket. The apartment with the clicking, turned-off air conditioner; the apartment with the apparition peeking through sheer curtains.

As more detectives arrived and moved among the witnesses, taking names and addresses and phone numbers and information, the homicide man finally signaled that it was all right: he was finished with the body. He pulled back the cover that had been tossed lightly over the dead woman.

“Anyone know her?” he asked, allowing a few of the more curious to glance at the bloody face.

Miranda Torres’ partner was carefully going through the contents of the victim’s wallet. Stein had come into the proscribed circle and stood alongside Torres. No one questioned his presence.

“Anyone know a woman named Anna Grace?”

No one did.

The address given was in Little Neck, and some police officers were dispatched to get her husband.

He read out the “in case of accident” information: husband, William; employer, St. John’s Hospital. This girl a nurse? Anybody know her?

Another card: similar information.

Anna Hynes Grace:
anybody know her?

Stein looked around quickly. The elderly woman and her husband were gone. No one seemed to register the information.

Moving quickly, Mike Stein grabbed Miranda Torres by the arm. She turned, surprised.

“Officer, come with me. We’ll get an ID on the victim.”

He spoke to her in the tone of voice she expected to hear, had been accustomed to hear, from superior officers. She followed him without question. It was an order not open to discussion. She had to take running steps to keep up with him. Apparently he knew exactly where he was going and what he was going to do.