Chapter Twenty-Three
The article was only considered newsworthy enough to register three lines of text at the bottom of an inside page of the New York Times but its message was powerful enough to make Leyton Drisdale spill the cup of coffee he was holding. Seconds later and he was reaching for a telephone and asking for the number of the NYPD. He was soon connected to his favourite contact within the police department, the convivial Raymond Richens, who, although professing not to have even heard of the case that Drisdale mentioned, volunteered to “find out what he could” and give the solicitor a ring back. “Soon” had been Drisdale’s final word.
Soon, had proved sooner than even the optimistic Drisdale had imagined, and an hour after having read the article he was in possession of as much knowledge of the case as the cops actually working on it.
“We’ve not got a lot to go on,” Richens had admitted, adopting the plural pronoun Drisdale had noted, either as an expression of solidarity with his work colleagues, or to absolve himself from direct responsibility for any shortcomings in the investigation. “Name, Maria Gomez - common enough I suppose - age 45, address, small apartment block in Queens, pretty shitty neighbourhood. I was up in the same street only last week on a different case. Single gun shot wound to the head, fired from a 7.62 millimetre cartridge. We’ve found the slug.”
“A Tokarev?”
“You tell me. You seem to be one jump ahead of us on this one, Leyton.”
“No, not really. Carry on.”
“Sniper’s accuracy. Single shot from range. No messing.”
“A professional hit?”
“It looks that way, but the victim...” Richens had hesitated. “She is not your typical contract killing target. No previous criminal record. And I mean, nothing. Not the smallest misdemeanour, nothing. No known links to any Latin mobs. We are working on the assumption that it was a case of mistaken identity. Unless you’ve got something which will make me think otherwise.”
Richens had been fishing for an exchange of information but Drisdale had not been prepared to reveal what he knew before he could make clearer sense of all the facts, “What did she do for a living?” Drisdale had asked.
“Private nursemaid. Not live-in, but you know. Had apparently been looking after a pair of old Argentinean biddies up in Jackson Heights. They were really distressed to hear what had happened, said she was a lovely lady. Same as her neighbours, they all say the same thing.”
“And before that?”
“Same line of work since school. She must have been good. She’d got qualifications, and all.”
Leyton Drisdale had begun to see a little shaft of light at the end of the tunnel: an idea had presented itself as to how the seemingly innocent Ms. Gomez could possibly have once surfaced into the same orbit as the maniacal Garnet G. Wendelson, and as a consequence of which her name was to appear on what was increasingly looking like a hit list for a faceless assassin called Medea. Now all that Garnet and Maria Gomez shared was death. If his suspicions were correct, Drisdale could not imagine somehow that the two of them would be companionably reminiscing about old times from either side of the Pearly Gates. Still he had not been prepared to let Detective Richens know what he knew, not until he had had a chance to do some private investigations of his own, amongst the vast files of paperwork which he had inherited as part of the Wendelson estate. He had had one final question for the policeman.
“Anything else? You said that you found the cartridge.”
Drisdale had waited while he had heard Richens skim reading the remainder of the investigating officer’s report. “Nothing much,” he concluded, “Time of death was sometime on Tuesday evening, we won’t know more precisely until the lab reports come through. She was shot through her open apartment window from a vantage point on the roof of the building opposite, and her body wasn’t discovered immediately. No one has come forward yet to say they recall hearing a shot, in that neighbourhood chances are they’ll keep shtum. No prints from the roof. Apparently there was a strange grease stain though, next to where the sniper’s gun must have been rested, perhaps something that was used to lubricate the trigger mechanism. Initial analysis describes it as some kind of animal fat, but as I say, we’ll know more when we get the lab reports back.”
Drisdale had thanked Richens and promised that he would ring him in a day or two.
The solicitor now sat in his office chair, twirling his Montblanc fountain pen between his fingers, his brow furrowed in thoughtful concentration. On a large writing pad on the desk in front of him were a list of six names: the first three names, working down from the top of the page - Wendelson, Chin and Gomez - all had a bold strike through them, the next two - Drisdale and Carver - remained unadulterated. It was beside the final name on the list - Meek - that Drisdale now added a big ink question mark.