The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  “For the loan?”

  “No, for the co-op board. They go through the formality of approving prospective owners, and I don’t want to blow this deal by being turned down. I can afford this place, but I need for them to know that. To know me, and how I’ll work a second job, if it comes to that.”

  “I’ll be glad to write them a letter.”

  “That’s great, Ben. A character reference, is all. Don’t overdo it. You know, I’m not asking you to lie for me, or even to exaggerate.”

  “You have character,” Stack said, “and I take your word you can afford what you’re buying. Don’t worry, I’ll make you a cross between Mother Teresa and Ivana Trump.”

  She laughed. The conversation had loosened up. Maybe they could actually be good friends after the divorce was final. “Thanks so much, Ben. I really do appreciate it.”

  She gave him an address on East Fifty-third near First Avenue. He knew the neighborhood. It wasn’t bad, near the UN Building.

  As he was hanging up the phone, Rica approached the desk. She was carrying two cups of coffee. She set one down on the desk, then took a nearby chair.

  “She wants a reference letter,” Stack said, knowing Rica would ask. “She’s buying a co-op.”

  Rica sipped her coffee, thinking about that. “Have you stopped to consider?” she asked.

  Stack tested his coffee with a tentative forefinger and found it too hot to drink. “Consider what?”

  “That you’re being asked to write a glowing letter of recommendation for someone you’re divorcing and might do battle with in court.”

  “Not so long ago you were trying to get me to reveal any leftover tender thoughts about her.”

  “I was not. I wanted you to admit to yourself how you felt so you could let her go.”

  “You mean get in touch with my feelings so I can get on with my life?”

  “And feel good about your new empowered self. Don’t patronize me, Stack. It’s too soon after your lecture on serial killers. I just want to see you straighten out your emotions so you don’t get roughed up too much in divorce court combat.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Stack said.

  “Like what?”

  “Combat.”

  “It might become so,” Rica said. “Please listen to me and don’t sign or even write anything without your lawyer’s approval.”

  “You really think that’s necessary?”

  “I think it’s why you have a lawyer.”

  Rica stood up with her coffee and stalked away, giving him privacy. Stack sat and watched her. Women were so damned practical. And insightful.

  That one, anyway.

  He dragged the phone over to him and called Gideon Fine.

  The incinerator. They all had to go to the incinerator.

  The Torcher stood staring at the stack of New York newspapers whose headlines screamed and captions ranted about recent deadly fires. Someone mad, the writers speculated. Someone insane must be responsible.

  The Torcher laughed. Was it possible to be insane and responsible simultaneously? Maybe the newspapers deserved a letter asking that very question.

  No, there was no reason to write letters, to ask or explain. The flames would explain eventually, would purify and explain and end. After the fire came the long night of the soul.

  The incinerator waited for the newspapers. To keep them because of vanity would be running a risk. To keep them would be inviting suspicion, if anyone happened by some remote chance to see them. So they had to be destroyed, with all their accounts and speculation and terror between the lines. Flame to fame to flame.

  The Torcher picked up the stack of papers and curled it so it fit into a grocery sack. A neat bundle now, ready for its plunge through darkness to the building’s bowels and the waiting flames.

  Like a chute to hell.

  NINETEEN

  Stack and Rica spent the next several days trying to link the victims together. But for all their work they came up zero. The Torcher’s victims seemed to have virtually nothing in common other than that they all lived in apartments. They were respectively a tax attorney; a plastic surgeon; and the latest, James Healy, who’d made money buying and selling taxi medallions—a lucrative and distinctly New York business. For the last few years Healy had fancied himself a day trader and bought and sold stocks at his home computer. Roy Wilson, who died in the apartment adjacent to Healy’s, didn’t count. His death had been accidental, as had the death of his daughter, Eden.

  The deliberately killed victims were male, reasonably well-off financially (which they would be in order to live where they had), but beyond that were downright dissimilar. As far as Stack and Rica could determine, the victims’ paths had never crossed. Two were single, one was married. All had stock or bond portfolios, but who didn’t these days if they had a few extra dollars to rub together? Photographs of the three victims before death were no help. The three men looked nothing alike. It would be a real stretch of the imagination to think anyone could see them as the same type.

  That there was no forced entry didn’t necessarily mean killer and victim were acquainted. Maybe only that the victim had answered a knock on the door.

  Stack knew what the next step had to be, and O’Reilly instructed them to do just that: get off the victims, for a while at least, and look for some commonality in where they’d lived and died. The physical properties. If those apartments had something in common, that something could be the catalyst that led to murder. Obviously the killer had to be someone who’d been in all three. That narrowed the list of possible suspects considerably among the millions of people who lived in or were a short train or plane ride from New York City.

  Stack and Rica had come in early this morning and sat for hours studying crime scene photos of the burned apartments where Torcher victims had died. It had taken Rica about fifteen minutes to realize they were wasting their time.

  “All we’re looking at is charred wood and drywall and ashes,” she said, leaning back in her chair and stretching. She threw her shoulders back, putting on a breast show, but Stack ignored it.

  He agreed with her but kept shuffling through the photos in each murder file. “What we need are shots of the apartments before they were burned.”

  “Just the kitchens,” Rica said, “where the bodies were found.”

  “Not necessarily. If the apartments rather than the victims had something in common that might have set off our firebug, it might show in photos of the other rooms.”

  “Or the other rooms themselves.” Instantly Rica wished she could reach out and grab her words before they reached Stack. She knew he wouldn’t let them pass.

  Methodical, relentless Stack. She thought she’d say it before he did: “I suppose that’s our next move, visiting each of the apartments.”

  “Nope, we’re going to the funeral,” he said. “Eden Wilson’s going to be buried this morning.”

  Rica should have remembered. They would go to the funeral and watch for anyone in any way suspicious. It wasn’t unknown for killers to give in to a compulsion to attend their victim’s funeral, and their firebug was driven by compulsion. And maybe this time, guilt. At least they could hope.

  “Then,” Stack said, “we visit each of the apartments.”

  The man could be frustrating, but he made her glad she wasn’t a criminal.

  Eden’s funeral took place after a service in a small mortuary in Brooklyn. Her mother, who’d buried her husband and Eden’s father only days ago, looked numbed from grief and medication. The girl’s grandparents looked old, much older probably than they had last week.

  After the service, Stack and Rica drove the unmarked in the funeral procession to a cemetery situated on a slight hill and crowded with headstones and religious statuary. It was near a busy highway and would seldom be silent. No place for a child to be laid to permanent rest.

  Hunched against the late-morning cold, Rica read the engraving on Eden’s headstone: In the violent world around us, i
n God she is secure.

  Rica sure hoped so.

  Standing near a concrete Christ with outstretched arms, she tuned out the graveside service and let her gaze slide over the group of mourners. They all appeared profoundly grief-stricken, many of them crying. The death of a child…

  Rica and Stack had studied the mourners earlier in the mortuary, if or how they approached the closed casket with the girl’s photograph resting on it, how they interacted with each other. Everyone there seemed to be known to at least one other person. No one behaved in any way unusual under the grim circumstances.

  Rica was sure that attending the memorial service and funeral had yielded her and Stack nothing. It had to be attended, though, and by the chief investigators themselves rather than the NYPD representatives who’d covered the other, adult victims’ funerals, whose reports Stack and Rica had read, dismissed, and filed away as useless. It was all a sad part of routine police work, of the deceased’s devolution from person to a set of facts and statistics.

  The funeral ended the way they all do, with a tentative, heartbroken sense of loss and sad new beginning. Eden Wilson was completely gone now, and her brief existence had been summed up. All that was left was memory losing its battle against time.

  Gray clouds had become darker and caused the shadows of the tombstones to disappear. The wind was colder and carried light rain like specks of ice that seemed to burrow into exposed skin like acid.

  Rica was never more glad to leave a place.

  The next evening, Stack and Rica sat wearily on a gray sofa in the lobby of the Whitlock Building. Other than a section of carpet that had been removed and awaited replacement, dark scrapes on one of the walls, and scuff marks on the marble floor, there was little indication that a major fire had occurred here. Life did go on.

  They were both bone tired. They’d visited the apartments in the order in which they’d burned, carefully examining and then photographing each. They saw nothing linking them together. They’d concluded that Danner had owned no valuable art; Dr. Lucette had possessed only moderately expensive and rather tasteful erotic art; Healy’s taste in art ran to dogs playing poker. None of any sort of art seemed to be missing. Art theft seemed not to be a motive. Nor for that matter theft of any kind. Plenty of jewelry and cash had been left behind in each apartment.

  All indications were that major amounts of money hadn’t been kept in the apartments. Only the twenty thousand dollars in Danner’s bedroom safe had been a considerable enough sum to suggest motive. And of course the money hadn’t been removed from the safe.

  “White,” Stack said in a tired voice.

  Rica looked over at him. “What?”

  “All three apartments were painted one shade or another of white.”

  “Almost every apartment in New York is white,” Rica said. “It makes them look larger.”

  Stack realized his own apartment was white.

  “It’s like some kind of game with him!” Rica said in frustration. “Only he can see and we have to play in the dark!”

  “It’s a game with all of them, but a damned serious game.”

  Stack’s cell phone chirped. He glanced at Rica as he pulled it from an inside suit coat pocket, pressed it to his ear, and said simply, “Stack.”

  Rica sat staring at the scrapes on the wall and listening to his end of the conversation:

  “Yeah, I’m sorry…It isn’t me saying no, it’s my lawyer…For God’s sake, we both have lawyers, so it makes sense that we oughta listen to what they say, take their advice…Yeah…yeah…yeah…”

  One of The Beatles, Rica thought.

  “Yeah…”

  Nope. Too many “yeahs.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense…I don’t mind, Laura, but I’ve gotta let Gideon Fine know. That’s right, because he is. Yeah…yeah…yeah. No, it sounds reasonable, and I can’t think why I shouldn’t, but then I’m a cop, not an attorney…yeah…yeah…yeah.”

  Stack hung up. “Laura,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s ticked off because my lawyer told me not to write that letter of recommendation for her. He said it was unwise to put sterling praise in writing about someone I might yet be engaged with in litigation.”

  “She must see the sense in that.”

  Stack made a face. “Hell, I don’t know. Why does a divorce between two people who aren’t contesting it have to be such a walk on eggs?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Rica said, “but it is. And eggs break real easy.”

  “Since my lawyer told me not to put anything in writing,” Stack said, “Laura wants me to drop by and talk to this co-op board in person.”

  “You mean, like, testify before them?”

  “No, no, they’re not a panel of judges or a grand jury. It’ll be more of a conversation, is all.”

  “See what your lawyer says about that,” Rica suggested.

  “Oh, I will. I never liked it when lawyers played cops; I’m not gonna try playing lawyer.”

  “I know you can be persuasive, Stack. You’re a nice guy and want to help Laura. But don’t try to talk your lawyer into giving you the okay.”

  “I won’t.”

  But she knew he would.

  They sat silently and watched an elderly woman walking a small, sweatered dog that looked like a schnauzer but probably wasn’t enter the lobby. She nodded, smiling at them, as she crossed to the elevator. Rica thought she remembered the woman from the night of the fire but couldn’t be sure. She was pretty sure about the dog, though, that had been weaving around legs in the crowd of tenants watching their building burn.

  What kind of cop am I, that I can remember a dog but not a person? Height about sixteen inches, eyes brown, hair gray and brindle, clothing red sweater with leg holes.

  The dog glanced back at her as if it knew her thoughts.

  “So we come up empty again,” Rica said, when the elevator door had glided shut behind the woman and her canine. “Not surprising, since we have no idea what we’re looking for.”

  “I know what to look for,” Stack said. “Larry Chips.”

  “Gut feeling?” Rica asked.

  Stack took a while before answering. “I’m going with my head this time. Chips is the best we’ve got.” He met her eyes with his steady gray appraisal. “How do you feel about it?”

  “You ever get in your car and have the feeling you’re going to have an accident, but you ignore it and go ahead and drive off anyway? Then it turns out you were right to ignore the feeling and you didn’t have an accident?”

  He kept studying her. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s how I feel about Larry Chips.”

  TWENTY

  Etta Daggett said, “Let’s do it.”

  She was Leland Brand’s unofficial campaign manager. Not that Brand had declared himself a candidate for the next New York City mayoral election. The next such election was years away, and he was still, after all, an aide to the present mayor. But the present mayor had announced that for personal and business reasons he wasn’t running for another term. The Office of Public Safety, the Division of Safety and Health, and several other city departments were about to be combined into one new office, the Department of Public Well-being. To be appointed commissioner of that office was an obvious stepping-stone to the mayoral candidacy, if the new commissioner played the game cleverly enough. That was where Etta Daggett came in.

  On hearing of the proposed departmental realignment, the first thing Brand had done was quietly hire Etta Daggett. She’d handled several present elected officials and had a reputation as a mudslinger and a ball-kicking political infighter. Brand didn’t have much stomach for that kind of thing, but one did what one must.

  “What’s the mayor say?” he asked. He was almost Etta’s physical opposite, short while she was tall, military erect while she was stooped, blond while she was dark, alert and handsome while she was deceptively drowsy looking and sporting a mustache of fine dark fuzz she defiantly preferred to
depilatories. Brand wore tailored pinstriped suits, white shirts, and drab ties without pattern. His hair was cut short and expensively coiffed, his collars made rigid with plastic stays, his pants pressed as if the creases were sewn in, his colors coordinated as if by computer. Next to him, Etta appeared to have dressed in the dark.

  “The mayor is leaning toward appointing you commissioner of the Department of Public Well-being,” she told Brand. “That means you can stake out your claim for the foreseeable future. Ask the right questions and provide the right answers. High-rise apartment fires are a major threat to a city built mostly in the air. Why wasn’t New York ready for this threat?”

  Brand raised a golden eyebrow. “The mayor will go along with that approach?”

  “Sure. Because there’s something to it. The technology isn’t there to fight fires hundreds of feet in the air. Not on a city budget, anyway.”

  “I read about some special helicopters equipped with fire retardant sprayers—”

  “So don’t tell anybody,” Etta said. “Most of that shit doesn’t work anyway. It’s usually some guy who invented something in his garage and wants to take advantage of a bad situation. You’re above that. What can we do now? That’s your approach. You make a success of this commissioner’s job, then use that success for all the media time you can get, especially in periods of crises.”

  “You really don’t think it’s a little early to be moving on the next mayoral election?”

  It’s a little late to be changing your mind about it. Or your guts. “Not the way politics are, what they’ve become. You’ve got no choice but to spend a long time laying the groundwork for a successful campaign. The voters can spend the next several years getting used to depending on you for their safety, their lives, because you know what to do. And then you promise that if elected, you’ll damn well do it.”

  “If I may play devil’s advocate,” Brand said, “do what?”

  “You mean as mayor?”

  “No, too soon for that. As commissioner.”