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“I saw you on the news last night.” Vandervellen cackled. “Very photogenic. I mean her.…” He grinned at Jacobi. “What brings you celebrities out here?”
“A little bird named Chipman,” I replied. Estelle Chip-man was the elderly black woman Cindy told me had been found hung in her basement.
He shrugged. “I got a hundred unsolved murders if you guys don’t have enough to keep you busy.”
I was used to the Vandervellen barbs, but this time he sounded particularly edgy. “No agenda, Ron. I just want to look at the crime scene, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, but I think it’s gonna be tough to tie it into your church shooting.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
The Oakland lieutenant got up, went out into the outer office, and came back with a case file. “I guess I’m having a hard time putting together how a homicide as obviously racially motivated as yours could be committed by one of their own.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Estelle Chipman’s killer was black?”
He donned a pair of reading glasses, leafed through the file until he came to an official document marked “Alameda County Coroner’s Report.”
“Read it and weep,” he muttered. “If you’d called, I could’ve saved you the toll….‘Dermal specimens found under the victim’s fingernails suggest a hyperpigmented dermis consistent with a non-Caucasian.’ Slides are out being tested as we speak.”
“You still want to check out the site?” Vandervellen asked, seemingly enjoying the moment.
“You mind? We’re already here.”
“Sure, yeah, be my guest. It’s Krimpman’s case, but he’s out. I can take you through. I don’t get out to the Gus White projects much anymore. Who knows? Riding with you two supercops, I might pick something up along the way.”
Chapter 13
THE GUSTAVE WHITE PROJECTS were six identical redbrick high-rises on Redmond Street in West Oakland. As we pulled up, Vandervellen said, “Didn’t make much sense…. The poor woman wasn’t ill, seemed to have okay finances, even went to church twice a week. But sometimes people just give up. Until the autopsy, it looked legit.”
I recalled the case file: There were no witnesses, no one had heard any screams, no one saw anybody running away. Only an elderly woman who kept to herself, found hanging from a steam pipe in the basement, her neck at a right angle and her tongue protruding.
At the projects, we walked right into Building C. “Elevator’s on the fritz,” Vandervellen said. We took the stairs down. In the graffiti-marked basement, we came upon a hand-painted sign that read, “Laundry Room—Boiler Room.”
“Found her in here.”
The basement room was still criss-crossed with yellow crime scene tape. A pungent, rancid odor filled the air. Graffiti was everywhere. Anything that had been here—the body, the electrical wire she was hung with—had already been taken to the morgue or entered into evidence.
“I don’t know what you’re looking to find,” Vandervellen said with a shrug.
“I don’t know either.” I swallowed. “It happened late last Saturday night?”
“Coroner figures around ten. We thought maybe the old lady came down to do her laundry, that someone surprised her. Janitor found her the next morning.”
“What about security cameras?” Jacobi asked. “They were all over the lobby and the halls.”
“Same as the elevator—broken.” Vandervellen shrugged again.
It was clear Vandervellen and Jacobi wanted to head out as quickly as possible, but something pulled at me to stay. For what? I had no idea. But my senses were buzzing. Find me… over here.
“The race thing aside,” Vandervellen said, “if you’re looking for a connection, I’m sure you know how unusual it is for a killer to switch methods in the midst of a spree.”
“Thanks,” I snapped back. I had scanned the room; nothing jumped at me. Just the feeling. “Guess we’ll have to solve this one on our own. Who knows? By now maybe something’s popped up on our side of the pond.”
As Vandervellen was about to flick off the light, something caught my eye. “Hold it,” I said.
As if pulled by gravity, I was drawn to the far side of the room, to the wall behind the spot where Chipman had been found hanging. I knelt, tracing my fingers over the concrete wall. If I hadn’t seen it before it would’ve passed right by my sight.
A primitive drawing, like a child’s, in bright orange chalk. It was a lion. Like Bernard Smith’s drawing but more fierce. The lion’s body led into a coiled tail, but it was the tail of something else… a reptile? A serpent?
