The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  “You’re lucky if you want to be,” Myra said, and quoted him a price ten percent below asking.

  Amy wanted to speak but instead looked up at Ed, who was staring at the carpet.

  “I’ll go into the next room,” Myra said, “and let you two discuss this privately.”

  “There isn’t any need,” Ed said. Man of the house, already looking around in a proprietary way. “We’ll take it at that price.”

  Myra looked at Amy. “Are you sure?”

  Amy grinned and nodded yes. She began to cry. Ed leaned over and kissed her. Myra had had about enough of it. But the deal was good; she knew the owner, who was pressed by time before moving out of the country, would gladly accept the offer.

  “What happens next?” Amy asked.

  “One of the things that happens,” Ed spoke up, “is that the co-op board has to approve us.”

  “He’s right,” Myra said, “but believe me, you two won’t have any problems there. Unless Ed is secretly the city’s crime czar.”

  “Not yet,” Ed said with a grin.

  Myra laughed. “If you two have the time, we can go back to the office now and write up the contract.”

  Again Amy looked to Ed.

  “We’ll make the time,” he said.

  “This place,” Amy said when they were leaving, “This day! Everything’s absolutely perfect!”

  “Days like that are so rare,” Myra said, thinking hormones, young love, pregnancy. It was all so much more complicated than contracts, title searches, and closing statements. She decided she was glad to be where she was in life, and glad for Amy, where she was.

  Myra smiled most of the way down in the elevator. The world seemed to be in order. Young Ed Marks had his castle in the air. Mrs. Marks had her family and home. Myra had her tubal ligation and her deal. And would never change a diaper.

  SEVEN

  January 2002

  Eden Wilson was at Rollie’s Restaurant celebrating her sixth birthday. The clown who blew up balloons and twisted them and put them on everyone’s nose like funny red noses had just left. Eden’s school friends, Letty and Carmelle and Vincent, were at the table with her. Everyone had ice cream and cake and it was wonderful. Mommy and Daddy were at the next table, but they were leaving the kids alone unless someone acted bad. Colored hats, presents, things if you pulled on a string they went pop and shot little red pieces of paper…They scared you at first, but only at first. Eden’s favorite present was the doll with the blond hair that her mommy said looked so much like her.

  Nothing had ever been this much fun.

  At the next table, Eden’s parents forgot about their half-eaten pieces of chocolate cake and watched their daughter enjoy herself. Her golden laugh was marvelous. If only she could laugh like that from time to time all through her life.

  If only her future could be as wonderful as her sixth birthday party.

  Stack watched Rica perch on the edge of his desk, arching her back and trying to look seductive. Succeeding. He pretended not to notice. Mathers, walking past the desk, glanced over and smiled. Stack decided Rica was getting to be a real embarrassment.

  He mused again on the idea of transferring her out of Homicide, save himself the trouble that was sure to happen. On the other hand, she was undeniably sexy, and he was in the process of getting a divorce. What would it hurt if they had a bit of fun? Other than destroy their working relationship, threaten the terms of his divorce settlement, ruin both their careers, and take from him the thing he loved most in what he knew was a perverse way—the Job.

  “…no prints other than Danner’s on the safe,” she was saying.

  Stack hadn’t thought there would be. Whoever killed Danner probably didn’t know the wall safe was there. And nothing in the apartment seemed to have been stolen or even rearranged.

  “Any trace on the bills?” he asked.

  Rica shook her head no, causing the light to change in her dark eyes, to soften them. He knew she was only half Hispanic, on her father’s side. Her mother had been a Swede working as a maid on Park Avenue, and had died five years ago from ovarian cancer. Rica was short for Erica. He didn’t think she’d told anyone else at the Eight-oh about that; he seemed to be the only one who knew.

  “No record on the serial numbers,” she said. “The bills appear to be clean. Danner himself appears to be clean. Upstanding attorney, or seems to have been. Kept up on his child support payments to the ex-wife in Oregon, served on the board of his co-op, gave regularly to charity as well as political contributions.”

  “To which party?” Stack had been absently tapping a pencil point on the desk. Rica was almost imperceptibly pumping a shapely, crossed leg to the rhythm. He stopped with the pencil.

  “Both parties,” she said. “Danner was a man who hedged his bets. Everybody seemed to like him at least okay. And you saw how broken up his girlfriend was.”

  “Yeah. So he was a Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “Well, yes and no. A few people described him as distant, kind of arrogant and standoffish.”

  “A Jekyll and Hyde?”

  “Nothing like that. A Mr. Nice Enough Guy.”

  “And he had twenty thou in cash in a wall safe when he died.”

  Thou. Rica wondered if anyone other than Stack had said thou since Frank Sinatra died. “When you think about it, it isn’t that much money, Stack.”

  “I guess not, to a man like Danner. But nobody at his law firm or who knew him socially seems to know where he might have obtained it.”

  “Might have sold some stock.”

  “No record of it with his broker.”

  “Bet on a horse and won.”

  “Possible.”

  “Or collected a fee from a client without the knowledge of his law firm.”

  “More possible. The sort of thing I’d like to believe, since it’d provide a motive.”

  “Hm…the partners in an established law firm get together and decide to murder one of their own who screwed them out of twenty thousand dollars. Sounds real reasonable, Stack.”

  He wished she’d take her sarcasm and—

  Rica shifted position on the desk, flashing some thigh and jumbling his thoughts. “I don’t think whoever killed Danner did it for the money, Stack. If that had been the motive, the apartment would have been tossed, and there was no sign of a search.”

  “What had he been working on?” Stack asked. “As a lawyer.”

  “Most recent court case, he defended one Raymond Masters on a drug possession charge. Pro bono.”

  “Mr. Nice Enough Guy again,” Stack said.

  “Not necessarily. Danner’s field was corporate law. He had the Masters case because a certain amount of pro bono work is required at his law firm.”

  “That’s…” Stack glanced at his notes “…Frenzel, Waite and Conners. Anybody talk with them?”

  “Them?”

  “The three partners.”

  “The last one died in nineteen-forty. That’s the kind of law firm it is, very traditional. Everybody’s in a contest to see who has the rattiest briefcase. Most of the younger lawyers probably don’t think that way, but they pretend.”

  “You seem to know a lot about lawyers.”

  “My divorce,” Rica said. “You’ll learn.”

  “How long have you been divorced?”

  “Thirteen years. I was young and dumb, but I wised up fast. Lawyers haven’t changed.”

  Stack thought about his own divorce attorney, Gideon Fine. He wasn’t anything like Rica had described. Or was he?…

  “We should talk to Raymond Masters,” Stack said. “Where’s he being held?”

  “He’s not. He beat the rap. And it would have been his third conviction, the first two for beating the hell out of his wife. Illegal search. Danner did a good job defending him.”

  “We’ll locate Masters and talk to him,” Stack said. “See if we can find out what kind of confidences passed between attorney and client.”

  “You smell motive?�
��

  “Maybe. A lawyer like Danner might know an embezzler or two, but Masters would probably be his only acquaintance in the even less desirable corner of crime where violence is a regular occurrence.”

  “Speaking of desirable,” Rica said.

  “Get off my desk,” Stack told her, “before you char it.”

  Rica didn’t bother playing dumb.

  Rica knew this: Early in her life she’d let circumstances control her, push her around. She’d settled for whatever came her way and tried to make the best of it. That hadn’t worked. That had, in fact, become hell.

  Not anymore, she’d decided just before becoming a cop. It didn’t matter what the other female cops said, or the men. She’d determine what she wanted, be at the mercy of what she longed for, and go after all of it hard, be it Stack or anything else.

  There had been some tough times in the years after the divorce, in the department. Jagged emotional debris to sort through. But Rica ran Rica’s life. Rica would play the game hard because she’d learned she had to be hard.

  Rica was afraid to play it any other way, of where it might lead.

  Even lighting a cigarette, Chips had to stare at the lighter flame longer than was necessary. More and more often he thought a lot about fire, the way it warmed and destroyed, gave light and death, comfort and pain, protected and imperiled. It was a friend but it was dangerous. You couldn’t trust it even when you got to know it well.

  Tonight, when there was no reason to stay and every reason to leave, he had to stand and watch how it danced and devoured. It fascinated, the way it licked at the fringe on the bottom of the sofa, writhed along the carpet, and flicked out a tongue of flame at the drapes, liked the taste, and began to devour the material, curled smoking black at the ceiling, testing, testing bare plaster, nothing there, across the valance to the matching drape, twisting and curling like a woman who couldn’t get enough—

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He turned and saw the man standing in the doorway. A big man with bull shoulders, eyes wide and bright with the flames, face a mask of rage writhing like the fire. His fists were clenched, his bulky body tight for the charge.

  The man did charge, but in a measured, ominous way, body hunched, fists balled tight and held at chin level. Maybe he’d been a fighter, a pro. He was so methodical. Maybe he could kill with a bare-fisted punch.

  Christ! Fear took over. Nothing to do but show the gun, scare him. Stop him, for God’s sake!

  The gun made the big man pause, then shrug. Something about his eyes and the way he cocked his head, as if he’d been drinking. “You really think that fuckin’ peashooter’s gonna stop me from tearin’ meat from your bones?” He kept coming. Faster.

  The first shot merely made him grunt and brush his stomach with his hand where the bullet had entered, as if he might flick away the wound.

  The second made him stagger.

  The third dropped him to his knees.

  Don’t get up! Please, don’t get up!

  But he did get up. Slowly swaying in the hot wind. The only sound was that of the flames crackling. The fire was like the searing, rancid breath of a beast now, a dragon closing in like the man only from another direction.

  The fourth shot brought the man down again but didn’t kill him. He was on his stomach, trying to raise himself with his arms, looking confused and scared for the first time. “Legs don’t goddamn work! Can’t…”

  The heat was getting unbearable. Reflections of flame in the man’s saucer eyes. Terrified now. Bewildered. He began thrashing around, his arms and upper body, even his head. Everything but his legs. His left arm was bleeding where a bullet had caught it, bone or sinew showing glistening white. He tried again to raise his upper body and drag himself along with his arms, but the left arm bent at an unnatural angle and he flopped back down. “Help me! Help me stand up, damn you!…”

  He was going to burn if he didn’t get help. He was going to die in flames.

  Nothing to do now but run.

  Christ!

  “Help me! Can’t get up…”

  Help us all! You’re the one that wanted trouble, asshole! Your fault! Why couldn’t you have just let me finish here and leave?

  “Please!…”

  Your fault, not mine!

  Christ!

  EIGHT

  May 2000

  Sitting in her luxuriously appointed office with its grand view of Central Park, Myra Raven thought about when she had been Myra Ravinski. Her gaze fixed on a horse-drawn carriage wending its way through the park, but its image didn’t really register on her mind. She was trying to conjure up the face of her first husband, the cop like Ed Marks and about Ed Marks’s age when he died.

  But she found that she couldn’t. Not with any precision. That was the real tragedy, not that we remembered the faces of the dead, but that with time we forgot them. Only now and then, unbidden, did they appear out of time and with memory like pain.

  A different life for Myra Ravinski so long ago, a young woman nominally educated, not particularly attractive, and—thank God!—not pregnant. Newly widowed, she’d returned to college at NYU, then left when her money ran out.

  She’d thought her life was finally straightening out when she met and married Irwin Seltzer, a man in his fifties but still handsome and vigorous. But there were two problems: she was still in love with her dead husband, and Irwin couldn’t stop ending their increasingly frequent arguments by using his hands on her. Not his fists, which would leave bruises, but his palms, slapping so the red marks and occasional welts would fade quickly. It turned out that Myra was his second wife; the first had accused him of physical abuse and left him. Myra, no fool, left Irwin in the position of searching for piñata number three.

  That’s when she learned why Irwin had gently insisted they sign a prenuptial agreement. The money she walked away with after the divorce lasted about six months.

  No way to return to school now, and no desire. Myra had studied for her sales license and gone to work at a real estate agency in New Rochelle. Here was something she could do well, concentrating on the woman, if she were selling to a couple; letting the property seemingly sell itself; sometimes deftly steering the conversation so she could sense what the potential buyers really wanted, what they needed, rather than what they said were their wants and needs. Seeing into them. It was the gift everyone working in sales thought they possessed, or they belonged in other occupations. Myra didn’t only think she had the gift—she had it, and converted it into fat commissions.

  But the commissions were even fatter in Manhattan, in the high-end residential property in the Upper East Side, Sutton Place, and areas of the Upper West Side, as well as potentially trendy neighborhoods. Myra had a nose for money, and it led her to a position with an agency in Tribeca just when the neighborhood was getting hot.

  The track was faster in Manhattan real estate, and she became faster. Myra was cunning, which is better than smart, and she was ruthless, which is better than cunning. Whatever the cost to take a step forward, she paid it. Whatever sacrifice it took to get out ahead of the pack, she made it. Whatever was required to close a sale, she somehow came up with it.

  Within two years she’d opened her own agency, and within three more the Myra Raven Group (which sounded so much better than “Ravinski”) was the most successful apartment sales and rental agency in New York City.

  Five years, three severe diets, three rounds of cosmetic surgery, and three men later, she was the present and complete Myra Raven, molded by survival of the fittest to persevere and to thrive. Lean and attractive in a way striking if brittle, she was single and independent, knew personally the city’s wealthy and influential, and was successful and rich. And contented as a shark in a stocked pond.

  Meeting the Markses had stirred old memories in Myra. Ed the shiny new cop. Amy the naive and love-struck wife, and with an obvious devotion and loyalty Myra recognized. And pregnant with twins. How might that last have been
if it had happened long ago to Myra Ravinski? Young Myra would have shown the same determined happiness and burgeoning love that glowed in young Amy.

  What a different life Myra Ravinski would have led if things had been only slightly different. How careful she’d been not to become pregnant! How she’d wished, at least for a while after her young husband’s death, that she were pregnant.

  Only later did she realize what a pregnancy at that time would have meant. What a millstone and a hardship.

  Well, Amy Marks’s husband was alive, and she was pregnant. Not only that, the young couple had a windfall and could afford a nice place to live and bring up twin daughters. Myra would see to it that the co-op contract would go through; she was a genius at putting together deals, at settling differences and arranging financing, at fitting customer to co-op or condo. An absolute genius, or so had said the Times last year in a feature article they did on her.

  Smiling, she watched the horse-drawn carriage with its white canopy disappear in the darkening park below. She had it in her power to help the Markses buy some happiness, and she would help them. There was no need to closely examine her motives. It did occur to her that maybe she was trying to prove to herself she wasn’t quite the hard, venal bitch she knew some people said she was. She had overheard that assessment of her more than once, in a restaurant where she used to dine, even in the elevator in her building. It didn’t concern her. Usually.

  The hell with that kind of thinking! She was simply doing a good deed and that was the end and all of it. There was no need to question herself. She wasn’t some rich bitch trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle and enter heaven.

  Then why would it have occurred to her that she was?

  “Fuck it!” she said softly to the lowering night. If there really was a heaven, it was right here on earth, and you made it for yourself and by yourself.

  The streetlights had winked on in the park, graceful patterns of curved illumination, like stars in a galaxy with pattern and purpose. She turned away from the window and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter. Then she sipped from the glass of single malt scotch she’d set aside on a marble-topped table, glanced at her Patek Philippe watch, and picked up her cell phone to place a call before it got too late.