by Ann Aptaker
But I push ahead. “And maybe you should take on a partner. You know, to protect your own back.”
I don’t bother saying good-bye on my way out the door.
Chapter Eighteen
Desmond’s not in. The windows of the Garraway house are dark, and there’s no answer to the doorbell. I guess now that he’s not at Eve’s beck and call Desmond can trot around wherever and whenever he likes, at least until the will is read, the estate is resolved, and Desmond Mallory is either the new permanent caretaker of the Garraway house or out of a job and a roof.
I’ll have to find the answer on my own about how James Atchley might’ve gotten into the house without being seen. Without Desmond to show me around unfamiliar parts of the house, I’ll have to rely on what I’ve learned about architecture over the years. In my racket, understanding a building’s architecture tells me how to get in, helps me figure the best route to where the goods are kept and the best route to get out again.
A quick glance of the area confirms that there are only two ways to get inside the houses around Gramercy Park: from the street or from a back garden if they have one. The Garraway house, being on the corner, has a third way, from the south side façade.
I go down the front stairs to the street, avoid the light of street lamps, and slide into the shadows along the house. I made friends with New York’s shadows years ago, learned the difference between shadows of the day and shadows of the night. I’ve treated them with respect, and they’ve protected me ever since from nosy neighbors, passing pedestrians, and patrolling cops. A big house with lots of carved architectural details like the Garraway place casts a lot of shadows, especially at night. I have my pick.
The first thing I do is check the basement windows next to the front stairs and on the south side of the house. I have to push the thick shrubbery aside to get to the windows. They’re all locked. Steel mesh screening embedded in the glass protects the windows from being smashed. Access into the basement through those windows would be impossible.
I look up to the first- and second-floor windows. Their sculpted sills, scrollwork, and cornices could provide good hand-holds, but there’s no way to reach them from the ground without a ladder or something else to stand on. I suppose one could stand on a stack of garbage cans, but that would be noisy, disturb the neighbors, who’d no doubt call the cops.
I can scratch getting into the house unseen from the front or side.
That leaves the back garden, my next stop along the path of shadows.
The garden gate is locked. But I remember the paper clips from Otis Hollander’s office that I’d fashioned into lockpicks. Luck is with me; they’re still in my coat pocket. I put them back into service and unlock the gate.
The trees and plants in the garden are mostly in silhouette. Here and there they catch a bit of light from the rear windows of Third Avenue apartment buildings a block east of Gramercy Park. The Garraway garden is walled off from the street, and since the garden gate is probably always locked, entry would be difficult if you didn’t know how to pick the lock. Difficult, but not impossible, especially for an athletic guy like James Atchley. He could scale the gate or the roughly eight-foot wall, but it would be tricky in daylight, which is when Eve was killed. Atchley may be an arrogant, self-important son of a bitch, but he’s probably not stupid enough to climb the wall in broad daylight for everyone and their grandmother to see and who’d, yeah, call the cops.
But let’s say he got away with it, got into the garden unseen. Maybe he found a shadowy spot along the wall. Maybe, like me, he’s friends with shadows, though I doubt it. I don’t think they’d go for him. He’s not their type. But you never know.
In the thin glow from the windows in the apartment buildings behind the garden, I can just make out the back of the house. And I see a door.
It’s locked, too, and my paper clip lockpicks aren’t strong enough to open this more substantial lock. I can’t get in.
It doesn’t matter, though. It tells me what I need to know. If James Atchley was able to get into the garden and open this door, he could get into the house. If he was stealthy enough, he could slip through the basement and up through the house to the second floor without being seen. He could’ve been in the house for hours, waiting for the right moment to kill Eve Garraway and then escape the way he came.
He could do all that.
• • •
It’s nearly ten o’clock when I get back to my place. I’ve got a headful of questions, but no solid answers. Just a lot of maybes. Maybe James Atchley killed Eve Garraway, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was Dierdre Atchley who was behind the whole thing, or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Sig’s connection to Sterling Auctions is somehow involved with the Garraway mess, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe Sig knows what was in Lorraine Quinn’s photographs or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Vivienne’s moment of concern for me was real or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Alice . . .
The memory of Alice descends on me like a shroud. She’d asked me for a good-bye kiss and I ran out the door, afraid of her desire, afraid I’d be trapped by the need of her. Now I’m trapped by her memory.
I light a cigarette, pour myself a Chivas, and turn on the television. Maybe the box will take my mind off all the other maybes and the haunting memory of Alice. The Lux Video Theatre is starting a drama they stole from a movie, which stole it from a Broadway show about a rich young woman who falls in love with a fortune hunter in New York’s gaslight days. Nothing’s changed. They could’ve written the script yesterday.
Two drinks later, the show’s not improving my mood. I toss around the idea of going to the Green Door Club, let some pretty thing soothe my troubles, but the place carries reminders of Alice that are too recent, too fresh.
I pour another scotch. And then another.
• • •
Light comes at me, and some guy gabbing about . . . pie. Apple pie. I don’t know where the light and the chatter are coming from. I don’t know why there’s light in my eyes since it occurs to me that my eyes are closed. I open them slowly; the light glares through my slitted lids. I figure out that it’s sunlight through my living room window. The noisy blather about apple pie comes from the television, an announcer hawking Fluffo shortening. I see a woman’s hand scoop out a spoonful of the waxy stuff, a gray glop in the black-and-white TV picture. My stomach turns over.
I’m still in my big red club chair. I remember sitting down in it, but don’t remember falling asleep in it.
A hot shower fixes some of the kinks in my chair-bound muscles, clears my head of the alcohol haze. But my cleared head makes room for thoughts and memories to come rushing back in. Sig’s threats loom large. Dierdre Atchley makes an appearance. So does Lorraine Quinn. And Eve Garraway. And Vivienne, Johnny Tenzi, and Alice.
Alice’s funeral is this morning.
• • •
It wasn’t all that long ago that the borough of Queens was mostly small towns, ash piles, factories, and potato farms. People in Manhattan never came out here, and people from the Long Island mansions just passed through on their way into town. But almost overnight after the Second World War the towns of Queens burst with returning GIs and their new wives, new kids, new jobs, and new money. Tract housing grew faster than the trees that supplied the wood. The developments straddled town lines, so that where one town ended the next town now begins just across the street. Shops selling everything from televisions to dishwashers followed the new neighborhoods. These days, GI Johnny and his wife have wall-to-wall carpeting, a Chevy or a Dodge or a Plymouth in their two-car garage, a lawn in front of the house, a barbecue grill in the backyard, and a couple of kids. Queens is fat and happy, and the developers just keep building. The only things in their way are the dead. Queens is New York’s borough of cemeteries.
I turn off Northern Boulevard onto 162nd Street and through the gates of Flushing Cemetery with a few minutes to spare before Alice’s ten a.m. service. The gatehouse guy gives me directions to the Lamarr burial.
Her plot’s at the edge of a treeless section. I guess it was the best Judson could get on such short notice. I pull up behind the only other car parked in the area, the hearse. There’s no one at the graveside except a bored chaplain in a black coat and hat. He’s checking his watch.
“In a hurry?” I say when I get out of the Buick and approach the graveside. Alice’s coffin is on the platform ready to be lowered into the ground.
Surprised at either my question or my arrival, or maybe my black silk suit and tie under my unbuttoned coat, he stammers, “Oh, good morning. I was just wondering whether to start the service or wait for the mourners to arrive. You’re the first.” He might’ve bitten his own tongue if he’d seen my gun, but I’d left it home. I figured a funeral is no place for the violence of my life, and Alice’s.
“What time is it?” I ask.
He looks at his watch again. “Just now ten o’clock.”
I look along the road from the gatehouse. There are no other cars rolling toward Alice’s burial.
The chaplain asks, “Did you know Miss Lamarr well?”
“Intimately,” I say quietly. “Okay, let’s start the service.” I take my cap off.
He takes his place at one side of Alice’s coffin. I take my place on the other. The coffin’s a nicely polished cherrywood with brass fittings. Very classy. Alice would have liked it. Judson did well. There’s no headstone yet, just a marker with “Alice Lamarr” written on it and the name of the funeral parlor Judson dealt with.
The chaplain does the ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust bit, commends Alice to heaven— if there is such a place, yeah, I hope she makes it— and then asks me if I wish to say a few words over the deceased. I’m sure I shock the guy through every organ of his body when I bend down to the coffin and give it a good-bye kiss.
• • •
I park the Buick at my place, but decide to walk up the street to Pete’s for a bite of lunch, Doris’s good coffee, and her good cheer. I need it. I’m just at the door when a cop car pulls up, and a hard-faced cop in a gray coat and fedora gets out of the car and follows me inside. He’s accompanied by a young cop in uniform. The hard-faced guy grabs my arm, shows me his teeth, his detective’s badge and identification. He says, “Cantor Gold, you’re under arrest for the murder of Lieutenant Norman Huber.”
Chapter Nineteen
I shout to Doris, “Call my lawyer, Winston Maximovic! He’s in the book!” as Detective Sergeant Liam Adair and his uniformed sidekick lock the steel bracelets on me and hustle me out of the luncheonette. The uniformed kid pushes me into the backseat of the car, then gets into the driver’s seat.
He turns the siren on to force our way through midtown traffic. The noise kills any chance of conversation. Just as well. I need to think, need to work through the mess that comes from a cop killing. I can’t say I’m sad about Huber being gone from my life, but I’m not happy about the way he was taken out of the picture. Nothing stirs up the cops like the murder of one of their own. The whole department goes wild, like bees on a rampage, stingers out.
It’s no use asking why they’ve stung me for the killing. I’ve been on their prize catch list for years. My testy relationship with Huber, and the Devil’s bargain that threw us together, gives the cops a convenient hook on which to hang me. Whether they can make the charge stick is another story, something I leave Winnie to handle. It will be a lot easier for him if I can figure who’s behind the Huber hit. My first thought is Sig. He was annoyed enough that Huber was disobeying Sig’s behind-the-scenes orders. But I toss that scenario right away. Sig wants the cops complacent, not wild with fury. He knows better than to order a cop killing.
So who? Who would be stupid enough to kill a cop? Who would think they could get away with it?
By the time we pull up to the precinct house, an idea starts to take shape. An idea I don’t like. But I like it better than getting wired up and fried for a murder I didn’t do.
Sergeant Adair yanks me out of the car. The uniformed kid comes around my other side. The three of us walk into the station.
The desk sergeant, tired old Withers, enjoys his smug smile when he sees me bookended by Adair and the uniform. “You crossed the line, Gold,” he says. “You crossed the line.”
As Adair marches me through the building on our way to the holding cells, I get heavy stink eye, murderous looks, sour grins, even mocking catcalls from the precinct’s cops. One guy even jokes, “Can I have your fancy suits after they fry you, Gold?”
I tell him, “The trousers would be too big in the crotch.” This gets a laugh from the crowd.
Adair hauls me downstairs to the booking area. The green walls could induce nausea, and the scuffed and sticky linoleum floor is a color they haven’t invented yet, though beige bears a distant resemblance. I don’t know who the grimy room insults more, the unfortunate souls hauled in here in handcuffs or the booking cops forced to be here all day or all night. Today’s booking officer, a lanky guy who looks like we just woke him up, adds his jeering smile to the ones already thrown my way. He takes too much pleasure in filling out my arrest paperwork, a task cops usually find tedious. I guess I should be flattered. I’ve made his day.
When he’s done, he presses a buzzer and a police matron comes through a door. She wears one of those uniforms designed to turn a woman’s curves into boxy boulders. Her billy club hangs from her belt.
The matron and I have three things in common: she’s around my age, she’s around my height, and both of us think that what the other is wearing is an insult to a woman’s body. She takes my arm with a steel grip that mocks the idea of women as the weaker sex.
The matron takes me through the door to the women’s holding area. She unlocks the cell, pushes me inside, locks the cell, and tells me to put my hands through the bars so she can unlock the cuffs. When she’s done, she takes a seat at her desk nearby where she busies herself with a newspaper.
Three women are in the cell. Two of them are ladies of the night in tight skirts, tight sweaters, well-worn high-heeled shoes, and lipstick red enough to start a fire. One of the women is a bottle blonde with a once-upon-a-time pretty face, which could break my heart if I had the time. The other, a natural redhead, is tough and dull. The bottle blonde gives me a smile. The redhead doesn’t bother. The third woman, though, the woman seated on a bench against the cell bars, her pale blue silk dress out of place in the sordid surroundings, the expression on her face like she’d jump off a bridge if given the chance, stops me in my tracks.
It’s Vivienne.
Seeing me, she gets up from the bench, walks over to me, and slaps my face. Hard. Her expression has changed from despair to icy fury.
The bottle blonde who smiled at me says, “Looks like Miss Fancy Panties has some spine after all.”
Vivienne says, “This is your fault, Cantor. I warned you not to drag me into this— this— whatever it is. My attorney should be here soon to arrange for my release, and when I’m gone, I don’t ever want to see you again. You’re too dangerous, Cantor. You’re a threat to my reputation and my position at the museum.”
“Slow down,” I say. “First of all, what did they arrest you for?” I take her hand to calm her.
She yanks it away. “They said I was interfering with a police investigation.”
“Which investigation? The Garraway murder? And just how the hell did you interfere?”
“I don’t know. A Sergeant Adair showed up at my house this morning and arrested me. He didn’t even give me a chance to get my coat. George was so shaken, I was afraid the poor man was going to have a heart attack. But why are you here? Oh god, maybe I don’t want to know.”
“I think you need to know, Vivienne. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was Adair who hauled both of us in on the same day. We might both be facing the fight of our lives. You want to fight this alone?”
The blonde says, “I’d listen to your friend, missy. Sounds like she wants to save your dainty little life.”
The woman gives Vivienne the once-over, looks her up and down like she’s deciding if Vivienne’s even worth talking to. “Suit yourself, honey. Hell, we’re all sisters under the whack of the billy club. You just don’t know it yet.”
I take Vivienne’s hand again, keep my voice gentle. She doesn’t fight it this time. “Listen, Vivienne. Either somebody wants to tie a rope around the Garraway situation and drop it down deep where no one will find it, or someone is out for revenge. You with me?”
She gives me a reluctant nod, says, “So why are you here? Why did they arrest you?”
“Remember Lieutenant Huber? He’s dead. They say I killed him.”
I’ve never seen the color drain from someone’s face as fast as it drains from Vivienne’s. “Did you?” It comes out so soft, her voice so tight, it almost squeaks.
“This is the second time you’ve floated the idea that maybe I’m a murderer, Vivienne. Do I scare you that much?”
It’s the bottle blonde who answers. “You don’t scare me, sweetie. When we get out of here, look me up. Your money’s good with me.”
I give her a smile and a tip of my cap.
The sisterhood in our cell is interrupted by the ringing phone on the matron’s desk. After her bored “Okay,” she hangs up, comes to our cell jangling her keys, and unlocks our cell door. “Okay, Gold. Your lawyer’s in Sergeant Adair’s office. Get a move on.”
I take Vivienne’s arm as gently as if I’m escorting her to the opera. “Let’s go,” I say.
The matron blocks Vivienne with her billy club. “Not you. Just Gold.”
I push the stick away, stare at the matron. “Step aside,” I say.
The matron stares back, but she’s no match for the steel-hard determination I’m throwing at her. I escort Vivienne past the matron and her billy club.
• • •
Sergeant Liam Adair’s office could be a carbon copy of Huber’s: cramped, dusty, with a battered desk and a greasy window that turns sunlight into an eggy ooze. Adair, though, is neater than Huber ever was. His gray suit, boring and cheaply cut, is nevertheless clean and pressed, and his tie, a black-and-green spiral print, is up to date. The ashtray on his desk has only a few cigarette butts, and the desk is less cluttered. But he has the same attitude as Huber. Behind his desk and his badge, he’s all powerful and Vivienne and I are prey.
