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“As I said, this is a homicide investigation. Someone attacked…Cynthia…last month and then dismembered her body. She was also pregnant at the time.”
The shock radiated down Margaret’s body. I asked her if Cynthia had any enemies, anyone who might wish her harm, any grudges. No, no, and no. Perfectly loved Carrie/Cynthia.
“I don’t buy it.”
She looked away, but I cupped her chin with my hand and made her look at me.
“Come on, Maggie.”
“That’s what my friends call me.”
“Then think of me as a friend.”
Tears began. “Men like her,” she said. “Liked her, I mean. Cynthia went out a lot at night, when the manager had gone home.”
“Where did she go?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. But a man always came to get her. He’d bring her back late.”
“What man?”
Now she was crying full out. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“You’re not going to get in trouble. What man? What did he look like? Did you know his name?”
After a long silence, she gave a massive shrug. “All I knew was what she told me. He was a policeman. He wore a hat like yours.”
* * *
I was almost back to town on Seventh Street when a police car came behind me, turned on his siren, and pulled me over. My first thought was that I had used the damned buzzer once too often, and I would be carted off to jail in handcuffs.
“Detective Hammons,” the uniform said, bending into my rolled-down window. We shook hands.
“Hey, Watkins. What’s up?”
“Detective Muldoon has us looking for you. The squeal just came over the radio. You know where the Triple-A junkyard is?”
“Yep. Seventh Avenue and the tracks, right?”
“That’s the place.”
I gunned it south before Watkins even got back to his car. I stayed on Seventh Street past Van Buren, where the Phoenix Union High School students were lined up at the Nifty Nook burger joint. “Twenty-Four-Hour Service,” a 7-Up sign proclaimed. A crossing guard held us up as a covey of coeds crossed, laughing and talking, making me think of Carrie aka Cynthia and her cop friend. Then I went south to Washington Street and turned west, brooding over what Muldoon wanted of me.
At Seventh Avenue, I waited for a long freight train then crossed the seventeen railroad tracks and pulled into the junkyard. I saw Turk’s broad back and Frenchy Navarre, along with some uniforms. I took a deep breath, set the brake, and stepped out onto the hard soil. The uniformed officers nodded and let me pass.
“Geno!” Frenchy clapped me on the arm. He was wiry and intense, with a precise manner. He could be fussy and autocratic on the job, but if he liked you, he was pleasant. “I’m glad they found you. We put out a dragnet. A friendly one!” He laughed, high-pitched and sinister, but maybe I was imagining the last part.
Turk Muldoon came over. He was angular and lanky at six-foot-three, possessing hooded icy-blue eyes. His gaunt face was grim.
“Take a look at this.”
He led me to the wreck of a Model A and pointed to a body resting against the old car’s rust-caked door. The man’s throat had been neatly slashed and his head pushed to the left, with blood on his cream sport coat and flannel slacks.
Zoogie Boogie.
His legs and arms were in the perfect posture of rigor mortis.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Muldoon said. “Him being your snitch and all. When was the last time you saw him?”
