Small Town

“That don’t make him gentle,” Hurley said. “He’s got that wiry kind of build, he could be a lot stronger than he looks. He could be a ballet dancer, and they’re real strong.”

“Ballet dancer. You’re just sayin’ that on account of he’s gay.”

“You think he killed them, Arthur?”

“No.”

“We’ll check his alibi, but what do you bet it holds up?”

“No bet. One in the Village was strangled, wasn’t she?”

“And these three were beaten and stabbed.”

“And besides,” Pender said, “they already got the writer for the one in the Village.”

“If he did it.”

“Yeah, the man could be innocent. You ask him, bet that’s what he says he is.”

“As a newborn baby. Arthur, you see any connection between the two cases besides the Warsaw Whiz? Where’d he say he was from, Ham Sandwich or something?”

“Hamtramck. Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

“Outside of Detroit, he said.”

“Inside of Detroit. It’s an autonomous area within the bounds of the City of Detroit.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

“No idea. One in the Village sold real estate?”

“Something like that.”

“Be an easy thing to say you did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just looking for a connection besides Mop & Glo. Any chance she could have been a working girl?”

“Lived in the Village and tricked on Curry Hill? Be interesting to know.”

“And not too hard to find out,” Pender said, and reached for the phone.

“No record of prostitution, no rumors she was ever in the game. Marilyn Fairchild didn’t just call herself a real estate agent, she made a good living at it. Commissions in 2001 exceeded $150,000, and ninety percent of that must have been in eight months, because how many co-ops changed hands after 9/11?”

“It was worth a call,” Hurley said.

“Plus she had a reputation for going out and dragging men home with her, which is the story on how she and Creighton wound up together.”

“That’s his name. It was driving me nuts I couldn’t think of it.”

“And working girls aren’t like musicians, they don’t finish up their paid gigs and then jam all night for free.”

“You know what we’re going to get, Arthur? It was some fucking john, he went with one girl and she didn’t want to do what he wanted her to do—”

“ ‘No, no, not in the ass, what kind of a girl do you think I am?’ ”

“Or he planned it from the jump, whatever it was, but either way he went batshit. He killed everybody and went home.”

“Must have planned it. Used a hammer and a chisel, according to the ME. You don’t find those layin’ around in your average whorehouse.”

“Unless it’s some kind of special whorehouse for carpenters. I’d say he brought his tools with him. Came late, too, after the other girls called it a night.”

“Right.”

“Probably fixed it so he was the last customer. Only had women to kill that way.”

“Another reason why it’s not the Polack. You kill what you want to fuck, basic principle of lust murder.”

“If that’s what this was.”

“What else could it be? Madam wasn’t paying the right people and this was to teach her a lesson?”

“Some lesson. How’s she gonna pay now?”

“Even if someone in one of the families is pissed at her, nobody’d do it like this. A hammer and chisel?”

They batted it around, thinking out loud, trying out theories.

“I hate the coincidence part,” Hurley said. “Creighton goes home with Fairchild and strangles her. Our perp—”

“The Feebs’d call him the unsub.”

“Our perp goes to a quiet little whorehouse, picks up a hammer and chisel and thinks he’s a kid again in shop class. And both premises, Fairchild’s apartment and our whorehouse, have the same ballet dancer come by to do a little dusting and cleaning.”

Pender said, “About Creighton.”

“What about him?”

“They have an argument, he’s half in the bag, next thing you know she’s dead.”

“So?”

“Lot more people get drunk than kill somebody.”

“Where you going with this, Arthur?”

“Meaning he’s most likely leaning that way from the start.”

“Leaning toward murder.”

“I been drunk a whole lot of times,” Pender said. “I never once wound up with my hands around nobody’s neck.”

“So he killed Fairchild, and then what? He finds out he likes it?”

“Happens like that, sometimes.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget he got arrested. You figure they let him out nights so he can go get laid?”

“He’s in a cell? Do we know that?”

Maury Winters said, “Talk to him? Ask him questions? No way I’m gonna let that happen.”

“Sir, three women were killed last night, and—”

“I’m sorry to hear that. If it was up to me everybody would live forever, and that goes double for women. The Mets lost, did you happen to notice? Mo Vaughn struck out three times and hit into a double play. You want to ask my client anything about the game?”

“Was he there?”

“What, at the game? They’re on the road, they were in Houston. He’s on bond, he had to surrender his passport, so how could he go to Texas?”

The lawyer had the cops grinning. Creighton, under strict instructions not to open his mouth, found the spectacle entertaining. At least until you considered the content, which was that they were trying to hang another killing, a triple murder, on him.