That almost made him laugh but he stopped himself.
“What do you need to know exactly that you can’t guess?” he said, holding his hand over the body like he was in a séance. He walked to the door. “Okay, so the shooter is either invited in or the door is unlocked—no forced entry. Victim’s standing at the counter when shot from behind, six to twelve inches, I’d say. Vic flops forward, bounces back to the ground. Bullet’s probably in the wall behind the cabinet. You got anything else?”
“Shooter was invited in. Victim knew him,” said Vega quietly.
“How do we know that?”
Vega pointed to the counter.
“Two coffee cups. Can of Folgers.”
Cap sighed. “Yeah, looks like he was going to make the guy coffee.”
Cap put his hands on hips and stared down at the body. Vega watched his face change as he thought of something disappointing, swept his open hand over his mouth.
“Oh shit, Vega. Maryann Marsh. Fucking Maryann Marsh,” he said.
This seemed to exhaust him; he slumped where he stood.
“Yeah, I know,” said Vega.
“Okay, okay,” Cap muttered, like he was talking to himself. “Okay, Vega, look. You want to put your hands all over the stiff first, go for it. You want to drag your feet through this place, muddy up the fibers, do it. Can we please just give the ME a shot here after, see what he can pull?”
Vega wondered if this was how he got women to sleep with him, disarming them by giving in to them on one thing and asking for something else at the same time.
So she made him wait for a few fat seconds before she said yes.
—
An hour later there were six cops on the scene, two paramedics and the ME, a guy named Baker who had been smoking for forty years and looked like it, his skin a mess of pale folds. Baker and the cops seemed glad to see Cap, their faces expectant, surprised. They looked at Vega like she was a spiky tropical fruit, some exotic unknown thing. They had started to comb the room, splitting it into a grid of squares, Baker kneeling over the body making a disappointed hound dog face.
Cap and Vega waited on the landing outside, watched as the cops dusted and bagged. One of them, Torres, a young guy in a wrinkled uniform, took pictures with a digital camera.
“Any idea why they’re not questioning us?” said Vega, leaning against the railing.
Cap’s gaze went to the road, to a tan sedan pulling in next to the ambulance and the cruisers. Cap nodded to it.
“I have an idea.”
The car door opened. It was Ralz.
“Hey, Ralz,” said Cap. “We going for a ride?”
—
Then they were in the goddamn cruiser. In the backseat behind the filmy polycarbonate partition like a couple of drug dealers.
Ralz drove them and didn’t speak, kept glancing at Vega in the rearview.
“Junior does this. This is his thing,” Cap said to her.
“Wasting time during an investigation?”
“He gets angry, asserts himself, calms down. Happens very quickly.”
Cap looked out the side window into traffic. He patted his knee with his hand; Vega watched the fingers curl. She glared at Ralz’s face through the partition. Maybe 180 pounds but mostly muscle. Dead-eyed and stoic, which seemed to be his signature look. He would win in a fight between the two of them with his eyes closed, one hand tied behind his back, without breaking a sweat, and all the rest. Unless she had one or two seconds on him.
Perry would have said that if someone crosses you on the wrong day, you grab the nearest pint glass and shove it in their teeth. Don’t stew in your juices, don’t let anything sink in. Don’t wait, don’t bide your time, don’t save your breath, don’t sleep on it. You don’t have the weight, kid, but you got the fire, so burn the motherfuckers to the bone.
—
The wind had picked up, blowing leaves and trash in spirals in the street outside of the station. As they pulled up, Cap saw Junior standing on the front steps like an angry dad. Hands on his hips and everything. Em and some other cops filtered out behind him.
Ralz opened the doors for Vega, then Cap.
“What the fuck!” Junior yelled to him.
“Hey, Junior,” said Cap, checking the impulse to grin.
He came down the stairs and stood in front of Cap and Vega, pink in the face and sweating through the blond fuzz on his upper lip. He pointed a thin finger at Cap’s chest.
“You got some bad fucking luck, Cap, you know that?”
“I’m pretty keenly aware of it, yes.”
“This is cute, asshole?” said Junior, hushed. “You think turning up at a murder scene with your girlfriend after I told her to stay out of my town is funny?”
Cap felt a prickly numbness on the back of his head, something sour in his throat. His mild amusement at Junior’s pissy little face started to shift.
“You want to give us shit or you want our statements?” said Cap, dry mouthed.
“Wow, Cap, how about both?” said Junior, snotty. “The two of you can sit in the box until you scrape some lawyer off the bottom of your shoe, and then I’ll have you arrested for obstruction anyway. Then you can add gross misdemeanor to your list of fuckups….”
He kept talking. Cap watched a drop of foam form in the corner of Junior’s mouth, and couldn’t hear him anymore. Cap looked down at his hands, front and back. Shaking.
He remembered times like this before. A lot when he was younger, so skinny and scared he couldn’t do anything about it, in high school in Sheepshead Bay when those goddamn gangster Russian kids jumped him and beat him with an umbrella. Then later, when he was a cop, when he wasn’t skinny or scared anymore, some punk they had in for armed robbery kept calling him a Jesus killer and talked about how Hitler was A-OK in his book. And then he saw the picture of Jules on Cap’s desk and said, “Your wife looks like she likes gettin’ raped.” Cap had to go in the bathroom so he wouldn’t slam the kid’s face into the desk edge. Then fights with Jules, the time she said so incredibly fucking coldly, “The worst part about you, Max, is that you don’t even know why you’re angry at me anymore—you’re just too lazy to figure it out.” So he threw the beer bottle at the door and it cracked into a few unsatisfying pieces and dented the old damp wood.
Stop, Junior, please stop.
Cap made himself step back.
“What’s the problem, Cap?” said Junior, a smirk spilling across his face. “You think you might hit me?”
Then came Vega. Before Cap could answer or think or move, she put herself between him and Junior, chin angled up. Junior almost looked charmed.
“You got a thing to say, sweetie?”
Cap could sense her body filling up with some kind of current, the warmth from her back on his chest. For a second he thought he could feel her heart beat.
“I know guys like you,” she said with an air of discovery. “You’re the kind of guy has to beg girls to let you screw them.”
Junior coughed out a laugh now.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “You missed your calling, California. Should have been a shrink.”
“You beg your wife to marry you too?”