“Did anyone else see you around the hotel that night?” Pawlowski asked.
“I suppose. The clerk was there, and I spoke with him for a while. And when Elizabeth was done, I hung out with her. I also visited a friend of mine a little later on, a broad that owes me some money from a while back.”
“You’re being honest with us?” Ava asked. “If we go back and ask the clerk about this…?”
“Yes, I’m telling the truth. What are you even…hold on. Wait. What is it? What’s happened?”
Ava knew it would never be enough to convince a jury, but the flash of worry she saw come across Kathleen’s face told her everything. Up until this very moment, Kathleen Branson had no idea that Alfred Perkins had died.
Pawlowski seemed to be take note of this, too, because when she spoke again her voice was soft and somber. “Ms. Branson, have you ever spent any time near the site of the Chrysler Building?”
The question seemed to legitimately confuse Kathleen. She looked back and forth between Ava and Pawlowski as if she were expecting either of them to finish a joke at any moment,
“No. I’ve passed by it a few times since they started building it, but…no. Please tell me what’s going on. Has something happened to Alfred?”
She had a glistening of tears in her eyes already and when Ava broke the news to her, they spilled freely. Ava did not approve of the relationship that Kathleen and Alfred had shared, but she also knew a broken heart was a broken heart no matter how you looked at it. She hated to have broken the news in such a way and, more than that, felt almost guilty that her mind had already moved on to other aspects of the case.
Kathleen Branson was not their killer. Which meant they were back to having no leads and very likely less than a day to find the truth. Ava sat with a weeping Kathleen Branson and Pawlowski (whom Ava was learning was very uncomfortablewith the sight of someone crying), trying to think of which step to take next.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
“So what are we supposed to do now?” Pawlowski asked.
They’d left Kathleen ten minutes ago. She’d still been crying when they left but insisted that she’d be okay. She’d go back to Elizabeth’s room and figure out what she could do from here on out. Ava felt for the woman but also figured she had, in a way, done it to herself in allowing a man to pay for every single expenditure without having that same man as her husband.
“I honestly don’t know,” Ava answered. They’d not yet hailed a cab, simply walking in the direction of the precinct, which was still roughly four miles away. “For me, the answer is usually going back to the crime scene or digging through records and reports. But we’ve pretty much exhausted revisiting the crime scene, and there aren’t really any records to dig into. What about you, Pawlowski? Any ideas?”
“I have one, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Well, let’s hear it anyway.”
“I think we just need to go back to the precinct and face the music, as they say. No sense in thinking we’re running against the clock without actually being told that’s the case.”
Ava knew it was the best way to look at things, but it also felt like defeat. She was pretty sure that Frank would have been suggesting the same thing, reminding her that sometimes the face a crime presents is its actual face—that there isn’t always an alternative answer. And in this case, maybe the glaring, obvious answer was that Alfred Perkinshadkilled himself.
“I hate to say it, but I think you might be right.”
Her agreement brought on a silence that lingered between them, awkward and uneasy. For the first time, Ava found herself wishing she’d never been sent to the Seventeenth Precinct. She understood that change was good and she even understood thereasoning behind Minard’s decision (along with the Chief) to move her. She also knew that if she’d been given this case at the old precinct, with Frank as her partner, she’d be facing the exact same hiccups and obstacles. In that moment, though, she just missed the familiarity of it all.
She began to scan the streets for a cab, but saw none. She knew there would be more of them several blocks further ahead as they neared the busier part of Manhattan. And that was fine with her. Some time spent walking might help her to clear her head, to help to—
Up ahead, she saw a familiar face in a thin stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk. She stopped walking as her head and heart tried to process what they were seeing.
Not quite a block away, Frank was standing by a man in a nice trench coat, speaking rather quietly about something. This obviously made no sense because he had no business being on their side of town. She tried to recall any case they’d worked on that had brought them this far out but couldn’t think of anything.
In that moment, she forgot that she was walking with Pawlowski. She started walking faster, her eyes now locked on Frank. She was ecstatic to see him but was also curious as to what might have brought him all the way out here. Before she was aware she was doing it, Ava was sprinting towards him. As she did, she watched as Frank nodded politely to the man he’d been speaking to, breaking the conversation, and then turning around. He started walking in the opposite direction, further away from Ava. She watched as he took a right at the end of the block, walking out of her sight.
She could hear Pawlowski calling out behind her, but she was far too focused to turn around to address her. With Frank out of her sight, there was no guarantee she’d be able to find him now. She knew perhaps better than anyone just how easily it wasto lose sight of someone in the unpredictable flow of New York City’s pedestrian traffic.
“Gold, what are you doing?”
But Ava pressed on, coming to the same corner she’d watched Frank go around just fifteen seconds earlier. When she rounded the corner, she was relieved to see that there weren’t many people on the street. She caught sight of Frank right away, just several feet ahead of her. He was walking slowly, looking down at a newspaper in his hands and—
Ava’s heart plummeted.
It wasn’t Frank at all. It was a man that bore a slight resemblance to Frank but now that she was up close, the differences were very clear to see. This man was a bit shorter, and his hair was not only darker, but longer.
A wave of embarrassment washed over her. She stood in place, not sure if she wanted to be angry or sad. She watched the man walk on, nodding to a few people that passed by him. Ava’s heart still ached a bit as she started to understand just how upset she truly was about how Frank had basically distanced himself from her ever since the meeting in Minard’s office two days ago. She’d tried to convince herself it wasn’t too big of a deal, but that denial was quickly wearing off.