Black smiled again. “The city was livid, but there was nothing they could do. The zoning laws were on the books. Since then, this area has gentrified so much that only artsy types and retirees like me live here. But the first boats were owned by the poor rabble, the people who had nowhere else to go.” He shook his head. “I guess you’re not interested in my Claire Lake history lesson.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, which was true. I pulled out my phone. “Is it okay if I record this conversation?”
Detective Black looked amused. “So I’m on the other side of the recording this time. Okay, I give my permission.”
I put the phone down, hoping it would pick up the conversation with Black, standing a few feet away. I didn’t want to ask him to sit down in his own house, and I didn’t want to stand up and crowd him. But Black had been a cop for thirty-five years, and I realized his position was deliberate.
The thought made me salty, so I said, “I’d love access to the original Lady Killer interview tapes, if you’re feeling generous.”
“The transcripts were leaked online.”
Nice try. “Only sections were leaked. Not the entire tapes.”
“True, but the leaked sections were pretty relevant.”
“According to you,” I countered. “The entire tapes would give a better idea of your interview technique.”
“You mean mine and Detective Washington’s.”
I nodded. “It’s too bad I’m too late to interview him, too.”
He gave me a wry look. “You’d have to time-travel to early 1980 to do that.” His tone said that he hadn’t liked Washington very much.
“Tell me how you two started working together,” I said.
Black’s eyebrows rose. “You’re warming me up,” he stated. “Getting me talking before asking what you really want to know. It’s a time-honored technique. You forget you’re dealing with someone who has done this a lot.”
For God’s sake, was every single person involved in this case going to be difficult? “I can sit here all day,” I said.
That caught me a ghost of a smile. “Now I can see why Beth likes you. Okay. I met Washington for the first time the day after Thomas Armstrong got two bullets to the face. I was one of the only detectives on the Claire Lake force, and I’d never worked a homicide before. We didn’t have many murders. Mostly I worked assaults, robberies, and rapes. I was only thirty-one.”
“So the Claire Lake PD brought in the state police,” I said.
Black nodded. “Washington was a state detective. He’d never seen anything quite like the Armstrong case, either, even though he had more experience than me. The murder seemed random, but random murders had been done before. It was the note that threw us.”
I nodded. Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either. Publish this or there will be more. Everyone who was obsessed with this case knew that note by heart. “What did you and Washington think the note meant?”
Black’s eyes were looking at something far away now, and the words came easily as he remembered. “Well, the Zodiac had done his business down in San Francisco,” he said, “killing people at random and mailing notes to the newspapers. So we’d seen a similar MO before. But the Lady Killer note was in a woman’s hand, a rounded cursive with flourishes that the handwriting experts said a man wouldn’t make. The Armstrong murder was heartless and cruel, particularly brutal. Whoever had killed him had looked him in the eye as they shot him in the face. That isn’t a woman’s method.”
“Are you going to tell me that poison is a woman’s weapon?” I asked, stating the cliché. “Diane Downs shot her three kids point-blank, then drove slowly to the hospital, hoping they’d bleed out.”