Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Read Free Page A

Triboro. It was pretty Spartan, but it had the advantage of being near Washington Street, so the guys could still hit the sheriff’s office and the metro cops’ watering holes for lunch and afterward. Besides Horace Stackpole, Tony Martinelli and Pardee Bell had joined us from the wreckage of the MCAT. None of us worked full-time, and the money from the contracts went proportionally to the people who put in the most hours. Most of them were filling up 401(k)s, while I took a dollar a year and the biggest office, a massive corner suite some twelve feet square and overlooking a culturally interesting back alley.
    The other two of the original “guys” had been women, Allie Gardner and Mel Lindsay. They’d both gone through the trauma of having husbands slide way off the marital reservation, Allie twice, and now did a flourishing businessof pre-divorce-court reconnaissance work for outraged spouses. They
loved
their work, and the rest of us enjoyed their after-action reports, although with sometimes nervous laughter. Of the two, Allie had been the sweetheart. Pretty in a plain way, she arrived every morning with a sunny smile and a positive attitude, which inevitably brightened when she had some stone-hearted, sneak-cheating, low-down, good-for-nothing sumbitch husband in her evidentiary gun sights. She was an expert with photographic evidence and sported a collection of her best pictures in a rogues’ gallery on one wall of her office. She’d bring the prospective client, inevitably an angry woman, into her office and ask: This what you need? It worked every time. She wasn’t a man-hater, per se, but simply one of those women who’d been kicked in the heart enough times by careless men that she no longer cared for their social company. I think the guys in the office were the only men she talked to, and we, of course, didn’t count on her life’s scorecard.
    But not anymore, I realized. I looked out the window at the streetlights coming on in the business park we’d moved to from our Washington Street hovel. I wondered now if I should call some of the original six—five now, wasn’t it—and give them the bad news. I decided not to: no point in spoiling everyone’s evening. I’d call a meeting tomorrow morning before leaving for Wilmington.
    Allie Gardner was dead? Maybe it
had
been a heart attack, or one of those artery-bombing embolisms I’d been reading about. She’d been an unrepentant smoker, as were about half the people working at H&S. So maybe the cancer sticks had done their evil work. But surely not a homicide. I couldn’t think of a single soul who would want her dead, except maybe one of her two ex-husbands. The truth was that we’d never had any indications of an ex coming back at the PI. They were usually too embarrassed at having been caught in the first place. If they were mad at anybody, it was the ex-spouse for hiring a snoop in the first place.
    I’d have to get into her personnel records to find out what family she had left. I vaguely knew about the sister, but Alliehad been closemouthed about the rest of her family. I’d gotten the impression that they hadn’t approved of her forgoing college to become a cop in the first place, and that she was estranged from them.
    “C’mon, mutts,” I said to my shepherds, Frick and Frack. “I need a drink. Let’s go home.”

WILMINGTON

     
     
    I met with Sergeant Price the next day right at lunchtime. We went down the street to get a sandwich, and then Price drove us east to New Hanover Regional Hospital, where the Wilmington city morgue was collocated. We checked in at the security desk and then began the inevitable wait.
    “Face up or TV?” Price asked.
    “Has there been an autopsy?”
    “No. If there’s gonna be an autopsy they go to Jacksonville or Chapel Hill. This here is just stage one. Our ME takes a look and signs a toe tag. If cause of death is obvious, say, an MVA injury, or a gunshot to the head, then that’s usually it.