Jen asked a few more standard questions. It was clear that Lucy had no reason to suspect that her father might have wanted to hurt himself. There was a pause in the questioning, and even though Jen didn’t look at me or give me any other signal, I knew it was an invitation for me to join the interview.
I said, “Was your father left handed?”
“No,” Lucy said.
Joe looked puzzled. “Why would that matter?”
“It probably doesn’t,” I said. “We just need to check everything out.” That seemed to answer the question well enough for him. I looked at Lucy. She was slowly sinking into the new reality of her life. Her father was gone. Nothing for her would be the same again.
We asked several more questions and fingerprinted them so we could eliminate their prints from those we found at the crime scene, and then we wrapped up the interview.
“What happens now?” Lucy asked.
“There’ll be an autopsy this afternoon and we’ll be in touch as soon as we have more information for you,” I said.
“Do we”—she paused, as if she were rehearsing her next words in her head—“have to make arrangements?”
“Yes. The medical examiner’s office will contact you to help with that. You’ll probably hear from me before that happens, though.”
Joe slid next to her on the couch, and we listened to her crying as we walked out and shut the door behind us.
The night before, Jen had done a preliminary canvass of the apartment building’s tenants while I was working the crime scene. No one had answered her knock at either of the two studios above the garage. I was particularly interested in talking to the occupants of those units, because of the way the building was laid out. The garage and the studios, along with a small laundry room, made up a second structure separated by ten feet or so from the main building. The foot of the stairs up to the two small apartments was perhaps two yards away from Denkins’s porch, and the landing looked down on his apartment with a clear view of its side door. From there, it was only a few steps to the gate leading into the back alley. That would be the logical escape route.
“Let’s see if anyone’s home,” I said to Jen, tilting my head toward the stairs.
As we climbed the steps, I saw one of the slats on the miniblind fall back into place behind the window next to the closest door. I’d planned on starting with the farther apartment, but went to the first door instead.
I fought the urge to use my standard cop knock and gave the glass a few light raps with my knuckle. “We’re with the Long Beach Police Department,” I said, my voice only slightly raised. “Can we talk to you?”
We heard nothing from inside.
“I know you’re in there. I saw you peek through the blinds.”
Something shuffled on the other side of the door.
“Please,” I said. “We just need a few minutes of your time.”
There was more muffled noise, and the door, secured by a safety chain, cracked open.
The man who answered showed me only a single bloodshot brown eye under a large forehead topped by a mess of disheveled salt-and-pepper hair. “Yes?” he said.
I held up my badge and introduced myself. “My name’s Danny Beckett. We need to talk to you about what happened last night.”
“Okay, I guess.” He didn’t move, just kept staring through the crack.
“Can we come inside?”
His eye twitched and I could feel his anxiety seeping past the edge of the door. “Um, no?”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Would you mind opening the door or stepping outside for a minute?”
He nodded and the door closed. I expected to hear him undoing the chain, but there was only silence. I looked over my shoulder at Jen.
She made a hand gesture asking me if I wanted her to check the back of the building.
I shook my head. Unless he was going to squeeze through one of the tiny windows in back and jump fifteen feet to the alley below, he wasn’t going anyplace.
He kept us waiting long enough for me to think I might have made a mistake. Then the door opened just wide enough for him to slip through and pull it closed. His hair was neater, and he seemed slightly less agitated. He was short, maybe five-seven, and his thin frame made his gray T-shirt look too big. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Maybe forty, maybe