“By myself, lieutenant?”
Grassioli chewed the end of his stylo. “No, I want the report as soon as possible. Take Kulozik with you.” He belched painfully and reached into the drawer for the pills.
Detective Steve Kulozik’s fingers were short and thick and looked as though they should be clumsy; instead they were agile and under precise control. He held Shirl’s right thumb with firm pressure and rolled it across the glazed white tile, leaving a clear and unsmudged print inside the square marked RTHMB. Then one by one, he pressed the rest of her fingers to the ink pad and then to the tile until all the squares were full.
“Could I have your name, miss?”
“Shirl Greene, that’s spelled with an e on the end.” She stared at the black-stained tips of her fingers. “Does this make me a criminal now, with a record?”
“Nothing like that at all, Miss Greene.” Kulozik carefully printed her name with a thin grease pencil in the space at the bottom of the tile. “These prints aren’t made public, they’re just used in conjunction with the case. Could I have your date of birth?”
“October twelfth, 1977.”
“I think that’s all we need now.” He slid the tile into a plastic case along with the ink pad.
Shirl went to wash the ink from her hands, and Steve was packing in the fingerprint equipment when the door announcer buzzed.
“Do you have her prints?” Andy asked when he came in.
“All finished.”
“Fine, then all that’s left is to get the prints from the bodyguard, he’s waiting downstairs in the lobby. And I found a window in the cellar that looks like it was pried open, better check that for latent prints too. The elevator operator will show you where it is.”
“On my way,” Steve said, shouldering the equipment case.
Shirl came out as Steve was leaving. “We have a lead now, Miss Greene,” Andy told her. “I found a window in the basement that has been pried open. If there are any fingerprints on the glass or frame and they match the ones found on the jimmy, it will be fairly strong evidence that whoever did the killing broke into the building that way. And we’ll compare the jimmy marks with the ones on the door here. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“No,” she said, “of course not.”
The chair was soft and the murmuring air-conditioner made the room an island of comfort in the steaming heat of the city. He leaned back and some of the tension and fatigue drained away; the door announcer buzzed.
“Excuse me,” Shirl said and went to answer it. There was a murmur of voices in the hallway behind him as he flipped the pages in his notepad. The plastic cover was buckled on one of the sheets and some of the lettering was fading, so he went over it again with his stylo, pressing hard so that it was sharp and black.
“You get outta here, you dirty whore!”
The words were screamed in a hoarse voice, rising shrilly like a scraped fingernail on glass. Andy climbed to his feet and jammed the notepad into his side pocket. “What’s going on out there?” he called.
Shirl came in, flushed and angry, followed by a thin gray-haired woman. The woman stopped when she saw Andy and pointed a trembling finger at him. “My brother dead and not even buried yet and this one is carrying on with another man …”
“I’m a police officer,” Andy said, showing her his buzzer. “Who are you?”
She drew herself up, a slight movement that did nothing to increase her height; years of bad posture and indifferent diet had rounded her shoulders and hollowed her chest. Scrawny arms dangled from the sleeves of the much worn, mud-colored house-dress. Her face, filmed now with sweat, was more gray than white, the skin of a Photophobic city dweller; the only coloring in it appeared to be the grime of the streets. When she spoke her lips opened in a narrow slit, delivered the words like metal stampings from a press, then closed instantly afterward lest they deliver one item more than was needed. Only the watery blue eyes held any motion or life, and they twitched with anger.
“I’m Mary Haggerty, poor Michael’s sister and only living relation by blood. I’ve come to take care of Michael’s things, he’s left them all to me in his will, the lawyer told me that, and I have to take care of them. That whore’ll have to get out, she’s taken enough from him….”
“Just a minute.” Andy broke into the shrill babble of words and her mouth snapped shut while she breathed rapidly through flared righteous nostrils. “Nothing can be touched or taken from this apartment without police permission, so you don’t have to worry about your possessions.”