The Sniper's Wife Read online

  And despite the sterility implied in the “concrete canyons” of lore, there were as many smells to this world as might linger in any rain forest. As he strode along, reacquainting himself with the rhythm of the evenly spaced city blocks, ignoring the metronomically regular pedestrian crosswalk signs in favor of what the traffic was really doing, Willy Kunkle picked up dozens of odors, some sour, some surprisingly sweet, most reminiscent of food, cooking or rotting, depending on his proximity to restaurant or alleyway. Most surprising was the occasional whiff of grass or silage, a furtive gift from an elusive Mother Nature.

  Willy had walked such streets as a beat cop, fresh out of the academy, both proud and nervous to be in uniform, conscious of the heavy .38 bumping his hip, and honing the sarcastic, tough-guy demeanor he’d used defensively at home and which would become his trademark. He instinctively sought the company of the rougher crowd at the precinct, the guys who bent the rules and made sure the law was enforced to their own best advantage—the bullies and braggarts who in later years would turn his stomach and rank among his favorite targets.

  It seemed so long ago now, before he went to Vietnam, before the booze he began sharing with those same men became more than a social habit, before he fled to Vermont, got married, and hit bottom.

  There had been good times during his short stint as a New York cop, times of redemption and grace when his actions had benefited others. Why those moments hadn’t guided him instead of being mere oases, he didn’t know. Nor did he fully remember why he’d left to enlist, although there was a typical perverseness to joining a wrongheaded war everybody knew was a defeat in the making, and which even the right-wingers were hardpressed to defend. When Willy landed in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon was barely a year away.

  But there were other reasons pushing him to leave, too. Not just his own tension-filled family dynamics, but larger, cultural ones. New York in the late thirties, when his parents arrived from Europe, was the most powerful, influential city on Earth. Then, over the next forty years, hundreds of neighborhoods were gutted by expressways and gargantuan building projects. The autocratic Robert Moses and his urban renewal cronies sacrificed a city of people to a future devoted to the automobile, disturbing the intricacy of a living human tapestry and encapsulating huge numbers of displaced poor inside towering clusters of bland, geographically marginalized housing units that served as thinly disguised penitentiaries. The postwar economic expansion challenged the concept of centralized urban powerhouses like New York, and with startling speed the city went broke, garbage piled up in the streets, and the fuse began to burn. It became a city to abandon, and Willy took the hint.

  He was in the East Village section by now, going strong, no longer mindful of the night air, watching how both the architecture and the mood had changed from that of just a few blocks earlier. This was the fringe of old New York, where numbered streets became names, and the strict grid pattern slowly yielded to the quirky remnants of an agrarian past, where waterways and farm-tomarket paths marked the way people traveled hundreds of years ago. The city of neighborhoods began opening before him, the buildings becoming lower, older, more eccentric in design, their ground floors occupied by a bazaar of mom-and-pop outlets selling everything and anything. This was where the opposition to Moses and his road builders had finally succeeded, and made of New York one of the few big cities in the U.S. without a freeway splitting the downtown in two.

  There was the inevitable dark side, of course, and ample evidence of decay. As he neared the Lower East Side—a slum virtually from its inception—where Mary had last lived, this transition grew exponentially, until at last all that was left, up and down her actual street, was a grimy, silent, commerce-free backwater of urban depression: a home for rats, cockroaches, and humanity’s rejects.

  Willy stood across from his late ex-wife’s address and thought back to how often he’d gone to buildings similar to this, both here and in Vermont’s grittiest corners, knowing that all he would find would be hopelessness personified.

  For a man who pretended he’d lost the habit, this was way too much thinking. Willy took a deep breath and crossed the street.

  Chapter 3

  The security in Mary’s building was poor, no great surprise. Willy punched ten of the call buttons above the row of dented, graffiti-decorated mailboxes, got an atonal chorus of mixed replies over the loudspeakers, and at least one person who merely hit the buzzer opening the front door lock.

  He decided to reconnoiter first, climbing to the third floor to find the apartment number he’d seen in the lobby under Mary’s name, reacquainting himself with the familiar smell of poverty that clung to the walls like fresh paint. One flight up, however, he was stopped by an elderly woman who stepped out from behind her door.

  “You ring downstairs?” she asked, her voice sharp and her jaundiced eyes narrowed. “Somebody rang.”

  He put on a surprised expression. “Me? No. Why?”

  She ignored the question. “I don’t know you.”

  He reached into his back pocket with feigned boredom and flashed his Vermont badge too fast for her to read it. It didn’t actually look much like a New York detective’s gold shield, but it was the right color, and he had the right attitude.

  “Believe me, lady, the pleasure’s all mine.”

  Her faced reddened and she slammed the door. He continued upstairs.

  On the third floor, he caught sight of the yellow crime scene sticker down the hall to the left. The apartment was halfway to the end, the telltale sticker carefully applied to span where the door met the jamb. He studied the door briefly—old, battered, in need of paint, but undamaged— and gave the knob a tentative twist.

  That would have been too lucky.

  He checked out the rest of the floor, getting a feel for the place, before retreating back downstairs, past the lobby, and descending to the basement. There, he found a door labeled, “Super,” just as he’d hoped.

  A small, dark-skinned man with a thick mustache opened the door at the second knock. Willy already had his pad out, opened to a blank page.

  “What?” the man asked.

  Willy glanced at the pad. “Mr. Martinez? Detective Murphy. I need to get into apartment 318.” Seemingly as an afterthought, he did the same dismissive badge flash he’d pulled on the old woman.

  The super didn’t even glance at it. “My name is José Rivera. I don’t know Martinez.”

  Willy flipped back a couple of pages. “Jerks. Somebody screwed up—has you as Martinez in one place, Rivera in another. Typical. You got the key?”

  Rivera looked disgusted. “Yeah, I got the key. Why, I don’t know. Somebody dies and I lose the place for a year. You watch. What good’s a key for a place I can’t rent? You people need to fix that. The system stinks, and the apartment stinks, too. All the shit that’s in there, and nobody to clean it up. The neighbors bitch and I can’t do nothing about it. I had a guy die two years ago and rot for a week before I found out. I lost three places that time— the people next to him moved out ’cause of the smell. Three places I was out.” He held up three fingers.

  Willy nodded. “Key?”

  Rivera stared at him a moment. “You guys,” he muttered disgustedly, before unhooking a key from the wall just inside the door. “Here.” He pointed to an oldfashioned mail slot cut into his front door. “When you’re done with it, put it back here.”

  Back upstairs, Willy paused before Mary’s door, again listening to the murmurs of life around him, and more specifically to how well he could hear them. It was a reflex born of years of practice. His pilgrimage here was emotionally stimulated. He wasn’t running an investigation. But habits, good and bad, were hard to break, and this one told his subconscious that the walls in this building were as thin as might be expected—and, as the woman downstairs had demonstrated, not without ears.

  He carefully slit the police label at its crease, fitted the key to the lock, and pushed the door open.

  The smell that swept
out to envelop him wasn’t staggering, but it wasn’t good, either: cloying, sweet, with an overripe pungency that caught in his throat. He began breathing through his mouth and closed the door softly behind him.

  He didn’t turn on any lights at first. He just stood there, looking around, letting his eyes adapt to the darkness. He could see from the faint glimmer seeping in through the far door facing him that he was already in a small, narrow kitchen. He’d noticed earlier that the building easily dated back a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. The kitchens had probably all been afterthoughts, put in where entryways had once allowed visitors to take off their coats.

  Moving slowly, he passed by a counter, sink, and stove to his left, a closet and a shallow pantry on his right. At the doorway opposite, he stopped again.

  Light through a dirty window on the right wall etched a glowing rectangle across the floor and partially up the wall beside him, brightly enough that he could see most of the room’s details. There was a dark, caved-in couch before him facing the window, a narrow coffee table in front of it, and some shelves lining the wall opposite, bracketing both sides of the window. In the corner across from him was an armchair, covered with a shawl. Hard to his right, doubling back and paralleling the kitchen, was a tiny bathroom, and just beyond its open door was a wooden crate, also draped, supporting a small, ancient television set. A little incongruously, given the cool temperature, there was a plastic electric fan balanced on top of the set.

  On the far side of the living room was another open door.

  He studied the gore and debris spread across the couch and the floor before it—the bodily fluids showing black, and the gloves and other discarded medical paraphernalia looking like bits of bleached wreckage in the gloom. Overlying it all, quivering and moving with a barely perceptible clicking, a carpet of cockroaches was feasting.

  His heart rate didn’t increase, he made no gesture or comment, he showed no emotion whatsoever as he recreated in his head the scene that had left such a signature. He could almost see Mary’s body sprawled across the couch, and the paramedics doing whatever they routinely did to bodies they had no real intention of reviving.

  He’d seen too much of this kind of thing to do anything other than look at it clinically.

  He crossed over to the last room in the apartment, noticing as he did that the window overlooked a fire escape and a dark alleyway below, and that the light seeping through it came from an assortment of apartments across the way.

  He was now looking into a small bedroom, the darkest corner yet, especially with him filling the doorway. Its one narrow window had been blocked with a colorful poster and jammed shut with a wad of old subway Metro cards. But the lingering odor in here, even tainted by what was behind him, was fresher, cleaner, and faintly scented by intimate memories of a bright-eyed, smiling, happy young woman.

  He returned to the living room window, drew down the paper shade for privacy, and began turning on lights.

  This should have resulted in a jarring contrast: a place of misery cloaked in darkness, revealed in brittle brightness as even worse than imagined. Instead, the reverse proved true. What Willy discovered was a poor, rundown, seedy little apartment enhanced by paint and colorful fabrics, highlighted by fake flowers and cheerful calendar pictures. The mask couldn’t hide the reality of the setting, but the attempt had been heartfelt and thorough, and by and large successful. The mess covering the couch stood out not as confirmation of the lifestyle echoed throughout the rest of the building and the neighborhood, but in gruesome contrast to Mary’s concerted efforts to make this hole a home.

  Willy made a second survey, still not touching anything, carefully placing his feet. The apartment was far from tidy, although the mess had clearly been made by others: the bedroom drawers had been rifled, the nearby desktop pawed over, the closets opened and their contents disturbed. All signs of a typical police search. Somewhere in here, the detectives who’d caught this case had found Mary and Willy’s divorce papers in their pursuit of a next-of-kin, and, he assumed, had removed them and any other relevant records and items of value for safekeeping. What they’d left behind was the miniature version of a passing army’s pillaging.

  But as with any army, what had been taken were things of specific worth, here relating to identity and research and to closing a case quickly. Left behind was the rest, details of a life interrupted in midcourse, and the very items Willy Kunkle most wanted to peruse.

  He returned to the kitchen, scattering all but the most brazen of the roaches, and began reacquainting himself with his ex-wife from the outside in, starting with her eating habits. Using his pocketknife or grabbing things by their edges, he opened drawers, doors, and cabinets and took inventory.

  What he found didn’t fit the usual profile of a junkie. The standard binge items heavy in sugar or fat were missing, the lopsidedness of a larder composed solely of canned soup and frozen dinners was also absent. Instead, he was left with an economical and healthily varied assortment, neatly sorted and arranged. He closed the last cabinet softly, leaned up against the doorjamb, and gazed out into the living room again for a moment’s careful reflection. A process born of instinct but without particular purpose now shifted gears with this finding. He began thinking like an investigator.

  He crossed over to the bedroom, knowing the living room would hold the least, although perhaps the most subtle, information.

  He started with the bed. It was disturbed, but only slightly, as if the person sleeping in it had just gotten up. Otherwise, its bottom corners and far side were tucked in, indicating the habitual tidiness he remembered of Mary in her prime, and he could tell from the single pillow and the way the night table and reading light were arranged that she was used to sleeping alone. Pushing his nose against the sheets to close off the odor from the room next door, Willy found they were also clean, and smelled faintly of detergent.

  He checked beneath the bed. The floor was free of dust, and all he saw was a small, empty suitcase and a pair of well-worn slippers, neatly arranged.

  Next came the closet. Again, he was struck by the same sense of order that had ruled the kitchen. There were no clothes on the floor, the few shoes were lined up, the odds and ends found in every closet were either stacked on the overhead shelf or hidden away in several small cardboard boxes. He checked their contents and found only belts, gloves, rolled-up pantyhose, hair clips, and an assortment of other mundane items. He went through the two purses he also unearthed and the pockets of every coat, jacket, and pair of pants. All he located were a few neighborhood grocery receipts, an old movie stub, and several more expired Metro cards, which he placed in a small stack along with the other Metro stubs he now extracted from the window jamb.

  He moved to the desk, knowing the most obviously useful material had already been removed. Still, as he went through what was left—mostly old bills—he was once more struck by the sense of a life under control, rudely interrupted.

  The desk doubled as a makeup table, and after looking through its one deep drawer, Willy sat back and studied the boxes, bottles, and paraphernalia spread before him, again mentally subtracting from them what had obviously been disturbed in the search. What it revealed to him was a woman concerned with her appearance, whose aids in caring for it were new or well maintained. All the containers of lipstick or powder or mascara were capped, carefully arranged, and out for ready use.

  Willy paused thoughtfully. Now that his professional interest had been called up, he regretted the thoroughness of those preceding him. They’d taken almost everything of value. Mary had used a date book in the old days. It was missing. She’d always kept personal letters. There were none around. No phone records were in the desk, no bank statements. Oddly, touchingly, tucked into the mirror’s edge was a small snapshot of Willy and Mary on a ferryboat crossing Lake Champlain, with Burlington in the background.

  He reached out and plucked it from its niche. On the back, in pencil, was the year they were married. He stared at it
for a while, studying both their faces, watching his own eyes for any signs of what lay ahead, thinking he saw it all clearly, and wondering why she hadn’t. He also looked at his then-functional left arm, draped casually across her shoulders. The guy who’d taken the picture had asked him to do that, saying it would look friendlier. Willy had told her later he’d thought the guy was an asshole. She’d merely looked at him sadly. In his mind’s eye, he could again feel the warmth of her shoulders through the fabric of his shirt.

  He tossed the picture onto the tabletop and got up. So far, he hadn’t found any sign of her being involved with another man.

  He went to the small bathroom beside the kitchen. There was a shower curtain running around the inside of an old claw-foot tub, a pedestal sink facing a wall cabinet with a mirrored door, and a toilet. It was all ancient and battered, but built to withstand the average artillery assault—heavy porcelain, cast iron, a tile floor. What Mary had been able to make clean, she had. The rest was either chipped, cracked, or stained beyond the help of minor surgery. It was standard New York fare, and made him think back to his own bathroom as a boy, or at least the one he’d shared with the rest of the family. He’d hated that bathroom—the constant interruptions when he’d hoped to be alone, the presence of so many other people’s personal items, from Kotex pads in the pail by the toilet, to mangled toothbrushes and mysterious smears of whoknew-what around the sink. And his mother used to leave her underwear hanging off the shower nozzle overnight, after washing it in the sink. Drove him nuts.

  Not Mary, though. Here, nothing was out of place. That had driven him nuts, too.

  He opened the cabinet door: aspirin, brush, comb, a headband to hold back her hair, cotton balls in a dish, a variety of lotions and creams, toothbrush and paste, a backup bar of soap, still in its wrapper.