Part 13 (1/2)
PRESENT DAY.
Frank Patrick walked up the flight of steps behind his partner. It gave him an opportunity to watch her hips in action, and they were the only pleasant thing on the horizon of his next hour or two. Mrs. Lily Hammond lived on the third floor of Riverview Apartments, across the Cuyahoga River from the trendy downtown condos but light-years down the socioeconomic scale. From each door they pa.s.sed emanated cries of babies or dogs or both, and from the smell of the place the babies didn't get changed, nor the dogs walked, often enough. Frank's eyes darted to every shadow; he had investigated enough homicides on this crowded piece of real estate to keep his hand close to his gun. They'd made three trips here already, and he hoped that this time Mrs. Hammond would be at home and receiving visitors because he'd really have liked to get this part of the job over with already.
He would bet dinner at Lola's that Kim Hammond had been killed by a violent lover. She would not have been the only Cleveland girl in recent memory to meet such a fate. No, Frank figured James Miller's death to be the more puzzling, not to mention unsettling. What was the point of being a cop if you still weren't safe from something like that? And why did it have to be the Torso killer, getting Theresa all riled up and talking about their grandfather? What sort of bad-humored jokester G.o.d had Frank offended lately?
The door quivered a bit when Sanchez knocked on it, loose in its moorings, and a woman inside called out. When Frank said they had come about her daughter, they heard shuffling sounds and the darkness behind the peephole became temporarily darker. Then a clink of security chain and the door opened. Between her daughter and her neighbors, Mrs. Hammond had no doubt grown used to the occasional visit from the CPD.
Kim's pet.i.te stature had not been purely the result of drug use; Lily Hammond would not have reached Frank's chin and a strong lake breeze would have threatened her stability. But her eyes and voice were calm and sober. ”What has she done now, and don't expect me to know anything about it. I work two jobs; I'm hardly ever home.”
Frank shut the door behind him as best he could. The k.n.o.b no longer worked at all, only the chain at the top. From grooves worn in the carpeting he guessed the tenant secured herself by sliding a short bureau in front of it. ”We're very sorry, Mrs. Hammond.”
She had covered the room's only window with a thin blanket to block the view of other tenants in the courtyard, or perhaps to block her view of them, and the room was dim. She crossed her arms over a worn but clean orange sweats.h.i.+rt, which featured a jack-o'-lantern and two black cats. ”That's a switch. Usually you jump right to possible contempt-of-court charges if I don't tell you-” Then the significance of their wording sunk in and she paled. ”Is she dead?”
A skilled interrogator might have asked, What makes you think she's dead? and received all sorts of tidbits of information in response. Frank could not be that cruel. ”Yes.”
The woman sank to a stained plaid sofa. Frank and Angela Sanchez sat as well, using two worn wooden chairs from the breakfast nook. Frank avoided upholstered furniture in other people's homes-cloth hid dirt and fleas a bit too easily.
Mrs. Hammond made all the right queries-when, where, how, and who? Frank couldn't answer any of them, especially the last. Sanchez made the woman a cup of tea and then they settled into the same series of questions they'd asked a thousand other grieving mothers.
Kim, her only child, would have turned twenty-three in a few weeks. She had been keeping away from the drugs since her last stint in jail. She did not have a boyfriend, violent or non-, so far as Lily Hammond knew, but then Kim did not bring her friends home. She would disappear for days on end and return to say she had been sleeping on so-and-so's couch, so her absence did not immediately alarm her mother. Kim did not have a job, though she had recently applied at several department stores downtown. She wanted to work in retail to get an employee discount. ”A five-fingered discount, more likely,” her mother admitted. ”I loved my daughter, but I know how she thought. She figured that she had it tough so the world owed her a break. I could never convince her that she didn't have it all that tough, that it could be worse. It could be a lot worse.”
Frank didn't ask what could be worse than poverty. The way Mrs. Hammond stared off into the middle distance made him think she could give him a laundry list. A television blared to life in the next apartment; in fact, televisions maintained a steady murmur throughout the building. Tenants left them on to make their unit seem occupied to would-be thieves.
”Kim wasn't always that way,” the woman went on, her voice catching as grief began to blossom. ”She held it together in high school, waitressed at Denny's, and even worked for a summer at city hall. But then she started up with the wrong kind of boys, and that led to the drugs.”
Frank tried to look sympathetic, though he heard the ”good kid, just fell in with the wrong crowd” story from virtually every parent he had ever interviewed. It never occurred to them that their kid was the wrong crowd. ”So Kim stayed here more or less consistently from her release in June until yesterday morning.”
”Yes.”
”How did she spend her time?” Frank asked.
”She'd watch TV, maybe talk to the neighbors.” A smile curved her lips for the first time since they'd arrived. ”Once in a while she'd get ambitious and walk up the street to the market and then cook dinner. She liked to cook, when the mood hit her.”
”The West Side Market?”
”Yeah.”
”Did she have a car?”
”I don't even have a car.”
”What did she watch on TV?” Sanchez asked.
Frank sighed. If his partner had a fault, it was this weird curiosity with the trivia of victim's lives, what kind of music they liked or which pet they doted on. To him, all the prior questions simply served to warm up the mother for the only relevant one: Did Kim have any enemies? Most whodunits solved themselves with that one inquiry.
”Lots of shows. Kim controlled the remote when she was home-those reality shows, usually the ones with cameras following spoiled Hollywood people around. I couldn't stand them. They always wind up with people screaming at each other about some stupid detail. I'd love to have their problems.”
”Where is Kim's father?” Frank asked.
Mrs. Hammond frowned. ”He's not in the picture.”
”All right. But where is he?”
”Kim had just started junior high when he dumped us. By the time family court tracked him down for child support, he was dead. Killed in a traffic accident in Chicago.”
”I'm sorry to hear that. Mrs. Hammond, could we see Kim's room?”
The woman snorted. ”I'm sitting on it. This place has one bedroom and it's mine. When Kim stayed here, she slept on the couch.”
The cops looked around. ”Where did she keep her belongings?” Sanchez asked.
”She hangs some clothes in the closet there. Otherwise it's all stuffed under this couch-it's a futon, really. Take a look if you want.” She traded seats with Frank, warming her hands on the mug of tea.
Frank knelt, gingerly, on the least-stained section of carpet and reached under the metal frame. The sum total of the twenty-two-year-old's worldly possessions filled two cardboard boxes. He slid one over to Sanchez and donned latex gloves to go through the other. This way he would not leave fingerprints on any item they decided to a.n.a.lyze, and he disliked touching other people's stuff with bare hands. Especially dusty stuff crammed beneath ratty furniture in a run-down apartment.
Kim had owned a few necklaces of plastic beads, hoop earrings, a cigar box, a letter from her parole officer and her high school report cards (which weren't entirely bad, he noticed), various makeup items that leaked trails of glittery powder throughout the collection, and a pile of socks, bras, and panties. He couldn't tell if they were clean or dirty, doubly grateful for the latex gloves.
The cigar box revealed a grimy array of two pencils, a medal-an eagle against a cross-on a faded ribbon, a black-and-white shot of a round-faced baby framed in silver, and a small spiral notebook with a worn cardboard cover. Frank flipped through a few pages. The random jottings in close script did not suggest anything to him.
”That was her father's stuff,” Mrs. Hammond told him. ”I don't know why she kept it.”
Sanchez held up the picture of a young man from the other box. ”Who is this?”
Kim's mother squinted. ”I think he went to her high school. They didn't keep in touch so far as I know.”
The detective then held up a birthday card. ”This says Love Always, Bubba. Who's Bubba?”
”Me.” Tears began to leak from the woman's eyes. ”She would get her B's and M's mixed up when she first started to talk. Instead of Mama, I was Bubba.”
Frank replaced his box under the futon and moved on before Mrs. Hammond's composure could dissolve completely. ”You said she had been friendly with your neighbors? Which ones?”
She thought, then gestured to the north wall. ”She would say hi to the Taylor girl, in the next apartment, but not talk much. Kim would chat with old Mrs. Evanston on the second floor, but everyone does; she haunts the lobby and blocks the elevator until she can bend your ear for five or ten minutes. Then that son of a b.i.t.c.h at the end of the hall always flirted with her.”
”A man?”
”A man old enough to be her grandfather, practically, a smooth-talking, drug-dealing b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Kim usually knew how to blow off sc.u.m, but him-she seemed to find him funny. Like his age made him harmless. I kept trying to tell her otherwise, but of course I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned and paranoid.”
”What's his name?”
”Leroy Turner.”
”Does he live alone?”
”Not so you can tell. Always a parade of people coming and going from that place.”