“Don’t call me ‘honey’,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not appropriate in today’s world to refer to a woman doing her job in those kinds of terms. You can call me Ms. Tucker. Or Jessie, if you prefer. But not ‘honey’.”
Aguirre just shrugged and sat down behind a desk in his office. I sat down too.
“What brings you here today, Miz Tucker?” he said, exaggerating the “Ms. Tucker” for effect.
“Maura Walsh.”
Aguirre shook his head sadly.
“A terrible tragedy.” He frowned. “I feel so badly for her father.” He said it like he meant it too. Then I remembered reading somewhere that Walsh had been one of Aguirre’s mentors in the department, who’d helped him advance to the rank of detective lieutenant. Maybe Aguirre had some feelings after all.
He brought me up to date on the investigation. Not that there was much to tell. There had been very little progress in the case so far, he said, which was one of the reasons he’d been brought in to take it over during the last few days.
I asked him about Billy Renfro.
“He didn’t have anything to help us,” Aguirre said.
“Don’t you wonder what he was doing while Maura Walsh was killed?”
“He was eating pizza.”
“For an hour?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That he must have eaten a lot of pizza?”
“C’mon…”
“His story doesn’t sound right, Lieutenant.”
“So what do you think? Billy Renfro shot her himself? Or else he deliberately went off to eat pizza so someone else could shoot his partner? My goodness, the guy feels terrible about what happened. He knows he screwed up by being out of contact with her for so long, but nobody follows the regulations all the time. You’re barking up the wrong tree on this, Tucker. There’s nothing going on there.”
“Any possible suspects or motive at all?”
“Not yet. We wondered about her boyfriend at first. Well, her ex-boyfriend. They broke up a few months ago. He’s a cop too, name of Charlie Sanders – works out of the Bronx. Breakups can get nasty, especially when both parties are armed like Sanders and Walsh were. But Sanders has got a pretty airtight alibi. He was on some stakeout in the Bronx the entire night of the murder.
“Look, Maura Walsh was probably killed by a junkie or crazy person or someone like that. He took her gun, killed her and then fled. Probably didn’t even have a real motive or reason for it. Just a random act of violence – she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those are the toughest kinds of murders to solve. We’ll catch the killer – hopefully one day soon – when her gun turns up on a hopped-up addict shooting up in another alley somewhere.”
Aguirre shook his head. “Summertime blues, Tucker. Summertime blues. D’you know what I’m saying?”
I understood. “Summertime blues” was a term cops used for the spike in murders – many of them senseless ones – during the summer months in New York City. It always happened: when the temperature soared, so did the violent crime on the streets. Maybe it was because there were more people outside during the summer months. Or maybe it was the heat that made people crazy enough to kill for no apparent reason. But it made the job of a police officer even tougher than it usually was. Which was why many of them referred to July and August as “the summertime blues” from the old rock song sung by Eddie Cochran and The Who and a lot of other people. That’s the way police officers sometimes felt about it too.
“And so, Lieutenant, you’re sure it was just some crazy person – a senseless crime with no real motive – that cost Maura Walsh her life?”
“What else could it be?” Aguirre asked.
Six
The first place Walsh and Renfro had been to that last night together on the street was an Upper East Side strip club called Hands On.
I went to visit the place. I had no reason to think that what happened there had anything to do with Maura Walsh’s murder a few hours later in an entirely different part of Manhattan but I decided to check it out anyway. Because that’s what a reporter does. We check things out, we check out everything. It was a newspaper rule I’d learned a long time ago, and I’d followed it faithfully since on every story I did.
And since Maura Walsh had visited there first on the night she was killed, I decided to start there too.
I pushed open the door and walked inside. It was only the middle of the day, but the place was already crowded. I guess there must be a big audience for watching scantily clad women dance for men. Who knew? There was a stage, complete with poles for the dancers to slide up and down on, in the center of the room. Next to that was a long bar where men sat drinking and watching the entertainment. There were a few other women in the room, but because of the way they were dressed (or, more accurately, not dressed) I assumed they were working. Me, I had on a tan V-necked blouse I’d gotten on sale at Macy’s and an old pair of dark brown slacks – I definitely stood out like a sore thumb. Or, as Raymond Chandler once put it in a book I read a long time ago, I was “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake”.
Sure enough, the bartender hurried over and asked me what I was doing there. I told him I wanted to talk to the manager. He said the manager was busy in a back office, but would be out in a few minutes.
“Hey, sweetie!” some guy yelled at me. “Aren’t you on the wrong side of the bar?”
“Yeah,” another one laughed. “Get up on stage and let’s see what you’ve got.”
I ignored it all until a door opened in the back, and the manager came out to see me. He was a balding, trim man of about sixty in faded jeans and a leather vest.
He cleared his throat nervously when he reached me. “Ma’am, I think you may have inadvertently wandered into the wrong place? I really don’t think you want to be here.”
“And who are you?”
“My name is Martin Clauson. I’m the manager here.”
“Hey, that’s great, Marty. You’re just the person I want to talk to.”
I introduced myself and handed him my press card. He looked at it carefully, then shook his head and handed it back to me.
“Sorry,” he said, “I don’t like talking to the press.”
I grunted. “Right. I’m sure you get a lot of media interview requests, huh?”
Next to me I heard a woman snicker. Clauson whirled around and glared at her. “Shut up, Bubbles!” he snapped.
The woman was a freckle-faced young blonde who looked barely old enough to have graduated high school.
“Look,” I told Clauson, “I don’t care about you. I want to talk to you about Police Officer Maura Walsh and her visit to this club on the night she was killed. It’s listed in her police log as one of the stops she made.”
“Sure, I remember her,” he said. “I wondered if it might be the same woman when I heard about it on the news. Yeah, she was here that night.”
“What was she doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she was on duty at the time. It was an official visit. There must have been a reason she came here?”