the super telling me I had to come back in.”
“Your shift is eleven to seven a.m., right?” Most Upper East Side buildings followed the same schedules: seven to three, three to eleven, eleven to seven.
“The guy before me needed to get off earlier and the super couldn’t cover him. I got to the Haverford at nine. Miss Kravis came in about an hour later.”
“Ten o’clock? You sure?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“Anyone with her?”
“Her friend. The one with the nice—” I could tell he was going to say rack , because I caught him looking at mine, but he paused, reconsidered, and chose a smarter approach. “Nice body.”
I nodded as my stomach did a series of flips. Things had just gotten about a thousand times more complicated. “Anyone else come up for a visit?”
He shook his head, blew out some more smoke.
Damn . “Are you sure?”
He nodded again.
I sighed, forcing myself to focus on what I knew for sure. Bludgeoning wasn’t for the weak of heart—or body. Olivia was my height—five-foot-nine—and whippet thin. But she was stronger than she looked. She jogged the reservoir whenever she could, practiced yoga a couple of times a week, and last year she’d traveled to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I knew that the woman Kaminski was referring to was Rachel Rockwell, and although we’d never met in person, I had seen pictures of her. She had warm brown eyes, exotic features, and long dark hair. Her small stature made it hard for me to imagine her overpowering Olivia, but neither could I rule her out. Anger was a powerful thing; it turned the meek into the mighty, the humane into the beastly. I’d seen it happen.
“Anything else you remember? Were Olivia and her friend in good spirits or did they look like they’d been arguing?”
“Well, her friend was wearing a fur coat. Sort of a purple color.”
Generally speaking, purple fur is not what one wears to a slaying. If Rachel had killed Olivia, it must have been done in the heat of the moment, in other words, a crime of passion . But purple fur? Our viewers were going to devour that detail. I hated that this even occurred to me, but I could already see the line on the ticker tape: SUSPECT IN KRAVIS MURDER CASE WORE PURPLE FUR, SAYS EYEWITNESS. As a producer, I lived for moments like these. As a friend, I was horrified.
“When did Olivia’s guest leave?”
“She didn’t.” Andrew stopped at the entrance to the Hunter College subway stop. A bunch of kids streamed past us in their backpacks and jeans, talking loudly, jumping around. We let them go past. “I’m on until seven. Then the day guy comes in. If she left through the front door, she didn’t do it while I was there.”
“C’mon, I’m sure you take breaks. Go to the bathroom? Make a call?”
“That’s true.”
“And what about the service entrance?” Buildings like the Haverford kept security cameras on all their points of entry and egress, plus the elevators. The latest systems recorded on digital hard drives—not VHS tapes—and could store up to two weeks of video.
He threw his cigarette to the ground, grinding it out with his heel. “I don’t know about that stuff. You have to ask the police. Or the super.”
It occurred to me that Rachel could have been slain alongside Olivia, but I didn’t think we were dealing with a double homicide—the PD would have released that information from the get-go. My guess was that she had managed to sneak out of the building unseen. But was she running from the killer or from the scene of a crime she’d committed?
Andrew gestured toward the flight of stairs leading down to the subway platform. “We’re done?”
“For now. How about you go home, get some sleep, take a shower and then let’s talk to set up another interview? This time on camera,” I ventured.
He gave me a look.
“Don’t judge. We all got a job to do.” I stuffed my pad and pen back in my bag. “You ever hear of Georgia Jacobs?”
“Sure
Marina von Neumann Whitman