Full Frontal Murder Read online

  “He survived prison twice. Short time.”

  “He musta had help. Somebody the other prisoners feared made him an errand boy or something. But Nickie wasn’t the sort of guy who gets killed. He didn’t know nothing, he didn’t understand nothing.”

  “Are you telling me he never initiated a crime?”

  “Naw, not him. He didn’t have the smarts. Besides, Nickie was a natural-born follower.”

  “So he couldn’t have planned a kidnapping?”

  “Kidnapping!” Buchanan looked surprised, then made the connection. “This the Galloway case?”

  Marian said yes. “Mrs. Galloway identified the body this morning.”

  He shook his head. “No way Nickie could have planned that. And I’ll tell you something. He was fed a line of bull to make him take part. Like, the real perp coulda told him the woman the kid was with had stolen him from his real mother. Nickie coulda thought he was saving the boy.”

  She thought that over. “It fits. Even the part about no smarts. He didn’t check to see if there was a prowl car cruising the street. And when the cops caught up with him, he struggled at first instead of just dropping the boy and running.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like Nickie.”

  “Do you know if he ever worked as a janitor?”

  “Coupla times, ’til he’d get fired. Why?”

  “The Galloway boy said he had a strange smell, something like cleaning solvent.”

  “Then he was probably moppin’ floors somewhere.”

  A new voice called out “Lieutenant!” She turned to see Detective Dowd holding up a phone. “Perlmutter. Line one.”

  Marian took the call in her office. “You got her?”

  “Not exactly,” Perlmutter said. “Her name’s Annie Plaxton but she’s no longer at the address we got from Maids-in-a-Row. We tracked down her nephew, and he says she’s moved to Hoboken. And get this, Lieutenant. She’s opened a laundromat there.”

  “Bingo. New money.”

  “Yep. Looks as if our Annie was paid to quit Maids-in-a-Row. Do we go to New Jersey?

  “No, you and O’Toole come on in. We’ve got a name for our dead kidnapper—Nick Atlay, and he may have been working as a janitor. Buchanan arrested him once. Ask him for known associates.”

  “Atlay—strange name. I’ll bet it was ‘Atlee’ at one time. Lieutenant, traffic’s pretty bad—it’ll take us a while to get back.”

  “Okay, do the best you can.” She broke the connection and went to Captain Murtaugh’s office.

  This time he was in, talking on the phone. He hung up and snarled, “What?”

  Marian grinned. “Do you want me to come back later?”

  “No, no. Sit.”

  She sat. “Progress.” She summarized for him what they’d learned. “I’ve put Perlmutter and O’Toole on the homicide, so I want to go to New Jersey tomorrow, to Hoboken—to talk to this former cleaning lady who now suddenly and mysteriously owns her own business.”

  “You’re doing the divorce lawyer’s work for him.”

  “Probably. But if I can pin down the missing Consuela Palmero as Hugh Galloway’s way of playing a dirty trick on his wife, then we won’t have to spend any more time on it.”

  “You’re still convinced he’s innocent?”

  Marian sighed. “No, I’m not convinced. I’m hoping Annie Plaxton in Hoboken will convince me one way or the other.”

  “All right, then, go talk to her. It’s a loose end that may have nothing to do with either the kidnapping or the killing. But tie it up.”

  “Right.”

  “On a related matter,” the captain said, “earlier today I got a phone call from Alex Fairchild. He wanted to come here and take pictures. I told him no.”

  “Good.”

  “We can’t have someone connected with a case under investigation running loose in the station. I told him to wait until the case is settled and then call me again.”

  “Bad.”

  A smile flitted across his face. “You don’t want your picture taken by a world-famous photographer?”

  “Is he world-famous?”

  “Oh yes, he’s quite well known. He takes these stark, stunning photographs that make you come back and look again. You should see his work.”

  “I’m going to,” Marian said. “Tonight.”

  10

  When he picked her up that evening, Holland noticed that Marian had dressed up for the occasion: she was wearing a gold chain around her neck. Everything else was the same.

  On the way to the Albian Gallery, she told him about how she’d misplaced the invitation Alex Fairchild had given her and she could remember only that the gallery was on Fifty-seventh Street. But the computer department had gone to something called a Web site and had been able to pick out all the Fifty-seventh Street galleries from the NYNEX Yellow Pages.

  “It’s called a search function,” he said, “and it’s old news. Don’t you think it’s about time you got wired? You could have looked that up for yourself.”

  She shuddered. “Learn all that stuff? Uh-uh. Besides, I don’t need a computer.”

  “Everybody needs a computer,” he said flatly. “You especially. Here you are, a lieutenant in the country’s largest police force, and you don’t even have an e-mail address!”

  This time she laughed. “You sound scandalized.”

  “Well, I am. If you don’t join the twentieth century soon, you’re going to miss it altogether.”

  “Hey. That was a put-down. Don’t be so damned superior.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She hit his shoulder and he smirked.

  There was no place to park near the gallery, so they had to walk back a few blocks. He didn’t know whether to bring the subject up or not, but he couldn’t leave it completely alone. “How’s Murtaugh?”

  “Murtaugh?” She was surprised. “Since when are you interested in Murtaugh’s health?”

  “I’m not. But you haven’t mentioned him lately.”

  “Hmm. Well, he was a little grumpy today. I think his wife’s out of town.”

  So he hadn’t told her about the incident in the bar. Holland was content to leave it at that. He knew from past experience that Marian didn’t have much patience with his impatience with other people. “Arrogant” she’d called him, more than once.

  Suddenly he pulled her to him and kissed her.

  She didn’t pull away. “That was nice.” But he could hear the puzzlement in her voice.

  He kissed her again. Holland didn’t understand his own need for the reassurance that physical contact with her brought, and it troubled him. But not overmuch.

  “Get it awn!” Three teenaged boys passed, cheering.

  They smiled and broke out of their clinch. Another half block took them to the Albian Gallery.

  All Marian had told him was that the photographer was the uncle of a small boy who’d been the target of a foiled kidnapping attempt. And that the kidnapper had turned up dead that morning … but the case was not closed. Fairchild’s name was known to him; Holland had once looked through a book of the photographer’s stark, memorable images.

  Only one photograph was on display in the window, blown up to poster size. Black and white, details crisp in the foreground but fading to a teasing fuzziness in the back. Shot in one of New York’s grubbier streets. The entire left half of the foreground was taken up by the bleary-eyed, unshaven face of an old wino looking into the lens, some spark of curiosity left after years of self-ravagement. But his curiosity was misdirected; what he didn’t see behind him in the background were the figures of a man and a woman on a fire escape who seemed earnestly trying to kill each other.

  “Strong picture,” Holland remarked.

  Marian agreed. “He told me all his pictures had to have a compelling face in them. This one certainly does.”

  They went inside. Holland automatically checked the place out,
knowing Marian was doing the same thing. Albian Gallery was a long, white, narrow rectangle with a balcony running around three walls and with two doors in the rear wall, one above and one below. No music was playing and no food table was in sight, but most of the twenty-odd people there were holding wineglasses.

  They strolled along one wall, looking. No photographs were of just faces, but the faces were always the focal point of a larger picture. And the faces were almost invariably grim, reflecting fear, anxiety, hopelessness. There were a few exceptions; they stopped in front of one, an elfin little boy laughing with delight as a baby goat in a petting zoo nuzzled his ear. On a greeting card, the picture would have been cute, even coy. But the shot had been taken on a gloomy, overcast day; food wrappers and other trash littered the ground; and a bored zoo attendant was looking on. The child’s laughing face was a moment of sunshine in a drab world.

  “That’s his nephew,” Marian said. “The little boy who was almost kidnapped.”

  The next shot was of an older boy standing at a urinal in a men’s room, while a silver-haired man fondled the boy’s neck and smiled insinuatingly into his face.

  Holland felt only contempt for this blatant bit of mahipulation. “Not exactly subtle, is it? Moving from the innocence of childhood to the corruption of childhood in one easy step. The picture of the boy and the goat was only a setup. Preparation for shock value.”

  “Some people say,” a new voice proclaimed, “that my pictures are easier to take when you have a slight buzz on.” A man with reddish brown hair and large moist eyes handed them each a glass of white wine.

  Marian introduced Holland and Alex Fairchild to each other. “It’s the man’s face that dominates that picture,” she said. “Not the boy’s.”

  Fairchild nodded. “The boy’s face is still amorphous—no character showing yet. But the man’s face—ah, just look at the depravity there! Marvelous.”

  “How did you get that picture?” Holland asked. “Did the pederast pose for you?”

  “Hardly. He didn’t even know I was there until the flash went off. Then he tried to take my camera away from me.” Fairchild smiled a slow smile. “The kid skedaddled. I undoubtedly saved him from a Fate Worse Than Death.”

  Holland smiled; he liked the picture of Fairchild sneaking shots in men’s rooms better than the picture hanging on the wall. “You were hiding in one of the booths?”

  “I was coming out of one of the booths. You take your opportunities where you find them.” Then Fairchild shifted his position slightly so he was facing Marian and effectively cutting Holland out of the conversation. “Rita said the kidnapper is dead.”

  “We have an ID for him now,” Marian replied. “Does the name Nick Atlay mean anything to you?”

  He looked blank, then shook his head. “Who is he? Or was he, rather.”

  “Small-time crook. Very small-time. But without the brains to plan a kidnapping.”

  “So you haven’t closed the case?”

  “Not by a long shot. It’s the one who hired Atlay that we’re looking for.”

  “You know who that is.”

  “I know who you think it is,” Marian said mildly. “But we still need evidence.”

  “Do you have any leads?”

  “Yes, now we do. One of them I plan on following up myself tomorrow morning.”

  “Which is?”

  She just smiled. “Sorry.”

  He smiled back. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask you to give away police secrets … Mary Ann? Isn’t that what Bobby called you?”

  “It’s Marian, actually. And there are no secrets as such. But I can’t disclose details of an ongoing investigation.”

  “Of course not. And that reminds me—I’d love to get pictures of you on the job. But your Captain Murtaugh won’t let me come in until the investigation is finished. I’d like to photograph you in a variety of settings.”

  Holland stepped in closer. Is this guy hitting on her?

  “We can talk about that after the case is closed,” Marian said noncommittally.

  Fairchild was working at being charming, his moist eyes holding hers in contact. “I can be very discreet, Marian. After the first hour, you’ll forget I’m there. It’s how I get my best pictures—by becoming invisible myself. I think you’ll enjoy the experience.”

  Holland felt himself scowling. There was an ingratiating sort of intimacy in the photographer’s manner that bothered him. Slowly and deliberately, Holland put one arm around Marian, resting his hand on her shoulder. He’d catch holy hell later for claiming her like that, but Fairchild needed to be warned off. “You don’t take any posed pictures at all?”

  “Oh, sometimes I still do celebrity heads. When I can find an interesting face.” His eyes flickered toward Holland and away again; he’d gotten the message. “But almost no showbiz people. And never, ever professional models.”

  “No showbiz people?” Marian repeated. “What about Kelly Ingram?”

  He thought a moment. “Yes, I think I would like to photograph Kelly Ingram. There’s some real personality in that face. But most of them in her profession look as if they all came from the same plastic mold. Models are even worse.”

  Holland thought of the model in the bar the night before and had to agree.

  The chat continued in a neutral vein for another few minutes until one of the other invited visitors came up and drew Fairchild away. Holland and Marian inspected the rest of the photographs on the walls and then slipped out.

  “You got a little possessive in there, didn’t you?” Marian asked on the way back to the car.

  “Only a little,” he answered, and waited. But she said no more about it, surprising him.

  They went to her place. Marian headed straight for the bathroom, and Holland wandered into the kitchen. He found the refrigerator filled almost to capacity; when Marian stocked up, she really stocked up. He fixed them a plate of cheeses and white grapes and took it into the living room.

  Her apartment seemed smaller than the last time he’d been there. A cop’s salary apartment. The place had been his haven, once. Back when he barely knew Marian, he’d gone to her for help and she’d taken him in. The apartment had looked magnificent to him then.

  She came back from the bathroom and sat beside him on the sofa. “That looks good,” she said, taking a piece of cheese.

  “You have enough food in there to feed an Olympic Village,” he said. “I take it you’re planning to stay here for a while?”

  She swallowed a bite of the cheese. “When I stay at your place too long, I begin to feel like a kept woman. Why don’t you stay here for a while and feel like a kept man?”

  “Very well,” he agreed. “And you may pamper me as much as you like.”

  “Ha.”

  Then he did something he’d never done before. He asked her to tell him about the case she was working on.

  She told him without hesitation. Marian frequently talked over her cases with Holland, not so much because he’d once been an FBI agent but because explaining sometimes helped her think things through. It was also a sign of trust, and Holland appreciated that.

  Now she explained about the vicious custody battle being waged by Rita and Hugh Galloway over young Bobby, about the spying cleaning woman with the false name, the attempted kidnapping, the firebombing that did minimal damage, and the murder of Nick Atlay.

  “So you’re proceeding on the assumption that whoever hired Atlay to snatch Bobby … killed him to shut him up?” he asked.

  “Right. He’s covered his tracks every step of the way, even to the point of crossing the line to murder.”

  “And this lead you mentioned you were following up tomorrow morning—that’s in connection with the phony cleaning woman?”

  “More specifically, the legitimate cleaning woman she replaced. A woman named Annie Plaxton who now suddenly has enough money to open a laundromat in Hoboken, New Jersey.”

  “Ah. I see. Follow the money. Good lead.” He
thought a moment. “Where does Alex Fairchild fit in? Innocent bystander?”

  “Well, he’s definitely on Rita’s side in the Galloway fight. He even bought her a gun to protect herself from Hugh. But I don’t think Hugh’s behind the kidnapping. And Hugh says Rita arranged a fake kidnapping to discredit him and I don’t think that’s true either.”

  “So?”

  “So, what if I’m wrong? The duel is between Hugh and Rita, and each of them has a second, so to speak. Hugh is backed up by his father, and Rita by her brother. But if Hugh is behind what’s happened, he’s on his own with no help from dear old dad. Walter Galloway is an old man—and, I think, infirm. I can’t be sure because he never got out of his chair the time I talked to him. He looked frail to me. But if it’s Rita doing these things, I can see Alex Fairchild helping her.”

  “And that’s the only way Fairchild might be involved?” He mulled that over. “It’s a bit of a reach.”

  “Granted. I think someone else is just exploiting a volatile situation. Rita and Hugh were bound to suspect each other. Rita is so sure Hugh is guilty that she won’t even give me a list of friends and associates we could investigate. Those two really hate each other.”

  They were both silent for a moment. Then Holland stretched both arms along the back of the sofa and asked casually, “Do you find him attractive?”

  “Hugh?”

  “Alex Fairchild.”

  “Oh, he’s okay, I guess.”

  “He’s interested in you, you know.”

  “He wants another face for his collection.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps he wants more than that.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “I am never silly. He’s after you, Marian. And he’ll come after you again, some time when I’m not there.”

  She sat up straight, astonishment written all over her. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Dead serious. Are you attracted to him?”

  Her face said I don’t believe this. “Why would I be attracted to Alex Fairchild?”

  “Why? Well, let’s see. He’s good-looking, in an offbeat sort of way. He can turn on the charm when he wants to. You can tell from the way he moves that he’s a sensual man. He—What?”