“Captain Marino, I understand the police were led here by a tip.”
Rain smacked and engines rumbled. We ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape stretching from railing to railing. The door suddenly swung open and an officer named Butterfield let us in.
“Glad as hell to see you;” he said to both of us. “Thought you were on vacation,” he added to Marino.
“Yeah. I got vacated, you’re right.”
We put on gloves, and Butterfield shut the door behind us. His face was tight, his attention going everywhere.
“Tell me about it,” Marino said, eyes sweeping the foyer and zooming into the living room beyond.
“Got a nine-one-one call made from a phone booth not too far from here. We get here, and this is what we find. Someone beat the holy hell out of her;” Butterfield said.
“What else?” Marino asked.
“Sexual assault. Looks like robbery, too. Billfold on the floor, no money in it, everything in her purse dumped out. Watch where you step;” he added as if we didn’t know better.
“Damn, she had big bucks, no kidding;” Marino marveled, looking around at the very expensive furnishings of Bray’s very expensive home.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet;” Butterfield replied.
What struck me first was the collection of clocks in the living room. There were wall clocks and hanging shelf clocks in rosewood, walnut and mahogany, and calendar and steeple clocks, and novelty clocks, all of them antique and perfectly synchronized. They tick-tocked loudly and would have driven me mad were I to live amidst their monotonous reminder of time.
She was fond of English antiques that were grand and unfriendly. A scroll-end sofa and a revolving bookcase with dummy leather book dividers faced the TV Placed here and there with no thought of company in mind, it seemed, were stiff armchairs with ornate upholstery and a satinwood pole-screen. A massive ebonized sideboard overpowered the room. The heavy gold damask draperies were drawn, and .cobwebs laced box-pleated valances. I saw no art, not a single sculpture or painting, and with every detail I took in, Bray’s personality became colder and more overbearing. I liked her less. That was hard to acknowledge about someone who had just been beaten to death.
“Where did she get her money?” I asked.
“Got no idea,” Marino answered.
“All of us been wondering that ever since she came here,” Butterfield said. “You ever seen her car?”
“No,”- I replied.
“Huh,” Marino retorted. “She takes a brand-new Crown Vic home with her every night.”
“A damn Jaguar, fire-engine red. In the garage. Looks like a ninety-eight or ninety-nine. Can’t even guess what that cost” The detective shook his head. .
“About two years of your working ass,” Marino commented.
“Tell me.”
They talked on about Bray’s tastes and wealth as if her battered dead body didn’t exist. I saw no evidence that an encounter had occurred in the living room, or that anyone even used it much or bothered to clean it thoroughly.
The kitchen was off the living room to the right, and I glanced inside it, again checking for blood or any other sign of violence and finding none. The kitchen did not feel lived in, either. Countertops and the stove were spotless. I saw no food, only a bag of Starbucks coffee and a small wine rack holding three bottles of merlot.
Marino came up from behind and edged past me through the doorway. He opened the refrigerator with gloved hands.
“Doesn’t look like she was into cooking;’ he said, scanning sparsely stocked shelves.
I surveyed a quart of two-percent milk, tangerines, margarine, a box of Grape-Nuts and condiments. The freezer held no more promise.
“It’s like she was never home, or ate out all the time,” he said, stepping on a pedal to pop up the trash-can lid.
He reached inside and pulled out pieces of a torn-up Domino’s pizza box, a wine bottle and three St. Pauli Girl beer bottles. He pieced together fragments of the receipt.
“One medium pepperoni, extra cheese,” he mumbled. “Ordered last night at five-fifty-three.”
He dug around some more and found crumpled napkins, three slices of the pizza and at least half a dozen cigarette butts.