“You put on another suit.” He tapped the pack of cigarettes in his T-shirt pocket. “Expensive habit. Some days I go through five or six suits.”
A crew of men came out of the fire hall. Each man stripped his blue plastic suit off while standing on the front step, and then shoved it into an additional red bag held open by the first guy who had exited. The men remained gloved, and after the suits were off, they carried sealed red bags to the last white van and loaded them in through the back. If there was any evidence left over that the detective hadn’t found, it would be in one of those bags. I imagined two-day-old goose that hadn’t been refrigerated, bloodstained towels, and bleach-covered rags, and I shuddered. The ick factor was off the charts.
When the last bag was loaded, one guy slammed the van door shut. “Yo, Bartlett! We’re done,” he called out. Smoker #1, Bartlett, nodded at him and then turned to me.
“Does your boss want a suit for the walk-through?” he asked me.
It took only a moment to realize his erroneous assumption that I worked at the fire hall. “Yes,” I said quickly. He reached into the front seat of the van and pulled out a flat square sealed in clear plastic. “And one for me too, please,” I added.
He grabbed a second package. “One size fits all,” he said, thrusting the packages at me. “Let’s go.”
I waved the owner over to us and held out a suit. “They’re ready to do your walk-through,” I said.
“Why do you have a suit?”
I smiled my most charming smile. “I thought you might like a second set of eyes, you know, to make sure they didn’t miss anything. I mean, no sense in having to get them back out here and lose another day, right?”
“Good thinking.”
The professionals didn’t bother putting suits on for the walk-through. I didn’t really expect to find any clues in the fire hall after the professional crime scene crew had done its job, so I wasn’t disappointed when the walk-through netted nothing more than the less-than-flattering blue plastic jumpsuit. The owner accepted that the job had been completed with a high level of satisfaction. He thanked the men and left. I stepped out of my own suit after he was gone and balled it up.
“Do I need to do anything special with this?” I asked the smoker who shall be called Bartlett.
“I already told you, the place was clean. We wear them to avoid contact with the chemicals and with any of the biological waste. Chuck it in the trash or keep it as a souvenir.” He elbowed his friend and they both laughed.
“Are they expensive?” I asked.
“Why? You planning on making a fashion statement?”
“No. I run a costume shop, and we don’t have anything like these.” I thought about the alien costumes my dad was bringing back from Area 51, and envisioned a dedicated science fiction display in the store.
“I thought you worked for the bald guy.”
“No, I was just helping him out.”
“Well, if it’s the costumes you want, you can get ’em online. Most medical supply stores have them too.” Bartlett slapped Smoker #2 with the back of his hand. “The game’s starting in twenty minutes. Let’s go.”
Smoker #2 nodded. “Hey, lady, sorry about the costumes.”
“What costumes?”
“We found a couple of costumes shoved into the back of the oven in the kitchen.”
“Where are they now?”
He nodded toward the back of the truck. “Incinerated. They went with the first round of stuff we pulled out of the place. Once the crime scene was released, we were told to gut the place and burn everything.”
He headed around the back of the van and I chased after him. “Wait!” I said.
“For what? Listen, lady, it’s late and we gotta get out of here.”
“Before you go, can you tell me anything about these costumes?”
“Sure. There was a hat, like one of them plaid ones that Sherlock Holmes wears.”
My heart sank. Blitz was wearing the classic Sherlock costume when I’d found him, but the hat had been missing. It must have come off and rolled away in whatever it was that had amounted to his last seconds of life. “That hat was part of the victim’s costume,” I said. “I guess it fell off before he died.”
“Guess so.” He climbed into the driver’s side and started the van. “Did his costume include a trench coat?”
“No. Why?”
“Found one of them too. The coat was in worse shape than the hat.”
The van pulled forward. I put my hand on the door handle and jogged alongside. He slowed to a stop. “Lady, you gotta let go of the car.”
“Just one more thing,” I said. “Can you describe the trench coat?”
“Yeah. It was rumpled and it was dirty. That mean anything to you?”
It did. It meant Columbo had been involved in Blitz’s murder. Now all I had to do was find out who had worn the Columbo costume.
Chapter 15