Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  The music in Barker's office was still Rachmaninoff, but the tape loop had been changed. Now it was Variations on a Theme by Paganini. A big showstopper in pop classical concerts. It was another piece that Paine liked, and now, he knew, would come to hate.

  Fucking idiot.

  As he sank into the chair opposite Barker the tape ended.

  Then, seconds later, it started again.

  "You're going to Boston," Barker said, staring out the window at a place above Paine's head. "Gloria Fulman wants to talk to you."

  "Why can't she talk to me on the phone?"

  Barker affected disinterest. "Because that's what she wants. She's paying for it."

  "She's not a client."

  "She is now."

  "Did she sign a contract, or just buy you?"

  Now Barker looked at him. It was the kind of gaze a man gives a sample of pond scum under a microscope.

  "Go," he said.

  He turned to some work on his desk, pretending that Paine had already left.

  After a while, Paine had.

  FIFTEEN

  The limousine picked him up at Logan Airport. Paine had been in Boston once on police business and once when his cousin got married. Both times he'd gotten lost. Boston was a maze you drove into where, no matter how sure your sense of direction, you always arrived at a place different from your destination.

  But the limo had no such problems. It glided through one-way streets like a magnet drawn to iron. The iron was Gloria Fulman.

  Paine tried to look through the smoky gray glass to the front seat and see if the driver was really doing his job, or if the car worked by radio control.

  There was a driver up there, because when they arrived at the Fulman Building he emerged and opened the door for Paine. Paine felt like tipping him. There was a doorman, in a smart red suit and a red pillbox hat brocaded in gold, who held the front door of the building open. Paine went in. There was a desk man, who merely nodded as Paine walked by.

  He walked toward the elevator banks but a discreet cough from the desk man made him stop. The desk man smiled primly and motioned to a lone elevator set inconspicuously into the marble facade of the lobby to the left. The desk man looked down at his desk again. To him, Paine no longer existed. The man was standing. Paine wondered if he had to stand all day long.

  As Paine stepped in front of the elevator, there was the audible click of a lock being disengaged. The door slid smoothly open. There was no up button. The interior of the elevator was marble-facaded, a mock of the lobby; there were recently polished bronze columns set into the four corners, bottomed in claw feet and topped in lions' heads. The elevator ceiling was paneled in mirrors. Paine looked up at himself. He could barely feel movement, and he wondered if the elevator was moving until it bumped demurely to a stop and the door whispered open.

  More marble. A hallway, the walls bordered with bronze-framed mirrors every half dozen feet. The hallway ended in a right turn. There was another length of hallway which finally ended in huge double doors. Another doorman, more red velvet and brocade. This one stood. Again no seat. The doorman had heavy-soled shoes on, brightly and blackly polished. The build underneath the pillbox cap and organ-grinder's monkey suit looked like ex-middleweight.

  "Mr. Paine," the doorman said. His eyes were flat, devoid of expression.

  The doorman must have been miked; he never moved but the doors opened from within. As Paine walked in, the doors were closed by yet another doorman.

  This is getting silly, Paine thought.

  He was in an entrance hall as large and as furnished as his apartment. Gloria Fulman was there to greet him.

  "Mr. Paine," she said, her voice as flat as the doorman's.

  "Hello," Paine said.

  She turned, personally escorting him to a sitting room off the entrance hall. She even opened the white doors leading into it herself. Paine was more interested than flattered at the attention. She wanted more than to buy him, that was sure.

  The sitting room was elegant and cold. The rugs looked as old as Persia.

  "You'll take coffee?" she asked. On cue, the maid Paine had seen at the suite in New York appeared with the same silver service and the same kind of tea sandwiches. The maid handed coffee to him the way he liked it.

  Gloria Fulman sat down on a lavender Sheraton sofa, and Paine sat down on a matching piece on the other side of the coffee table. As in New York, Gloria Fulman didn't touch her coffee.

  "I want you to do an important piece of business for me, Mr. Paine," she said.

  "And what would that be?"

  "I want you to find Les Paterna's brown folder."

  "You'll have to stand on line to get it."

  Something stirred in the coffee-cold depths of her eyes.

  "I know all about Henry Kopiak," she said. "This matter concerns the Fulmans. Your employer understands."

  Paine stood up and walked to a framed etching on one wall. It was a beautifully frozen moment capturing two young girls on a swing in a park arching into the air, while a bum on a bench admired them. "So you're saying you made a deal with Barker that if I find the folder, you get it, and the hell with Kopiak?"

  The etching had a pencil signature in the lower right-hand corner and was dated 1907.

  Behind him, she rose from the couch.

  "Mr. Paine," she said, and he turned to see her standing nearly at his elbow. She was pleasantly plump as he had remembered her, but this close he saw that she would look even more plump if she did not have the finest clothes altered with precision. If she had been forced to buy off-the-rack, she would not look so pleasant. Up close, she still looked ten years older than twenty-five.

  "I'm saying that your employer expects you to do what you're paid for. My circumstances are . . . special."

  He waited for her to go on. After trying to stare into his eyes for a few moments she turned and paced away from him.

  "My husband," she said in a lowered, careful voice, "is in a precarious political position. There are people who will destroy him if they can."

  "Are you being blackmailed?"

  She stopped in front of her coffee and sat down again. She picked up the cup and then put it down. Her hand slipped, and coffee spilled over the rim onto the saucer. Paine watched a drop of it fall to the highly polished coffee table. He expected an alarm to go off, the mechanical maid to rush in with lemon polish and whisk the drop into oblivion.

  Paine said, "I can smell blackmail a mile away. I smell it everywhere I look with your family." He looked at her levelly. "Did you know Lucas Druckman?"

  This time he had caught her. Her eyes shifted subtly, filled in with life before going blank again. Her hand brushed across the top of her coffee cup, upsetting it again. "Who?" she said, not as firmly as she wished.

  He took Druckman's picture out. "I already showed you this once."

  "I don't know him," she said. She looked at the coffee table, and for a horrible moment Paine thought she was going to summon the maid to clean her spill. Instead she dabbed it up herself, with the corner of a napkin.

  Paine sat down on the sofa and leaned forward. "Mrs. Fulman, has someone tried to kill you?"

  "What do you mean?" she said. She was more and more unsure of herself, and Paine admitted to himself that he was enjoying it.

  "I mean the bodyguards posing as bellboys you've got all over this place. I know hired muscles when I see them. This place looks like a Mafia don's love nest. I doubt you keep three armed men around all the time, even if your collection of etchings is valuable. Has someone tried to kill you?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "And you're sure that whoever tried to kill you killed Les Paterna, and maybe your father and sister, too?"

  She had regained some of her composure. "I've hired you to find out who killed Les Paterna."

  "Why do I get the feeling I'm only getting exactly what you want me to know?"

  "Because that's true."

  "Was Les Paterna blackmailing you?"<
br />
  "That doesn't matter."

  "Why didn't you tell me you knew him?"

  She was silent, a part of the furniture, the room, the money itself.

  Paine suddenly swept his arm across the coffee table, knocking the china cups, the coffee, the tea service, the little square sandwiches with the crusts removed, onto the rug. There were coffee droplets spattered in a line along the coffee table, and coffee stains setting comfortably into the Persian rug. He hoped they would be hard to get out. He hoped there was mayonnaise in the tea sandwiches, and that that would be hell to get out, too.

  Gloria Fulman didn't move.

  There was a polite knock at the double doors, and then they opened. Paine heard what sounded like a kitten crying. The maid wheeled a large white bassinet on large wheels into the room. The crying came from the bassinet.

  "It's time for her four o'clock feeding, ma'am," the maid said. "I thought you'd want to know."

  "Thank you, Barbara," Gloria Fulman said. There was a baby in the bassinet, small as a cat, and she picked it up. Paine studied her face and there was something akin to maternity on it.

  Gloria Fulman said to Barbara, "We've had a little accident. We'll need someone to come and look at the rug. And please tell Jeff to bring the limousine around front. Mr. Paine will be going back to the airport now."

  SIXTEEN

  At twenty-five thousand feet in the air, with the sustained muffled scream of jet engines to lull him, Paine closed his eyes and the third bad place found him.

  It was a night place. There was only darkness, the snick-snick of windshield wipers, the tarp-bright, slick blackness of wet street reflecting the colors of man-made night: dirt-yellow streetlamps, squares of dim light in rows of dead black buildings. The windows in the patrol car were down; the night smelled wet and close and dirty. Dannon was driving, and he wouldn't stop talking. He had been talking ever since they went on shift, first about his fishing trip, the Pennsylvania walleye pike he had caught in a big reservoir. Then he talked about the Yankees.

  Paine felt sick. There was a constant gnaw in his belly that had risen slowly to the back of his head and settled behind the back of his eyes where it throbbed dully. His head felt like a giant squeezed fist.

  "Sure you don't want to go in?" Dannon kept asking. He knew Dannon was taunting him. Good cops did their job. Good cops stuck with their partners, didn't go in sick in the middle of a shift.

  "Come on, Jack," Dannon said with mock heartiness, punching him lightly in the ribs. "Want a nice bowl of chili? Maybe a greasy bucket of Chinese ribs?"

  Paine groaned and Dannon laughed.

  Dannon was always like this—a sour mix of paternalism and riding, suppressed brutality. Paine had given up long ago trying to figure Dannon out. He seemed to like being a cop, but there was a deep, festering resentment in him, an itch he never scratched in front of Paine. He hovered on the edge of unpredictability. At first it had seemed like camaraderie, the complaining and dissatisfaction, but Paine had learned that Dannon's resentment also held room for Paine himself. After Paine had refused to have anything to do with Dannon's small payoffs, the free hamburgers and coffees, the twenties cheerfully collected here and there, he knew he had found his way onto Dannon's crap list.

  "Little high and mighty for a rookie whose old man blew his own brother's head off, don't you think?" Dannon had said one night, his joking manner layering the hostility beneath. In the locker room he subtly rode Paine all the time, doing it in such a way that, without looking cruel, he drew laughter from anyone who was around. When they were alone, he could be just as subtle and vicious, and often was.

  "Sure you don't want a taco, kid?" Dannon laughed, pushing Paine with his fist in the ribs again. His voice turned mean. "Want me to bring you in, Jack? Take you to the nurse?"

  "Fuck off," Paine said.

  The dull yellow lights flashing off the black wet tarp were like pins stabbing into his eyes. He wanted to squeeze his head with his hands and scream.

  Dannon drove without speaking, blessing Paine with the near silence of windshield wipers slapping water from the glass in front of him.

  They were in the center of Yonkers now, a run-down mix of gasping businesses and warehouses bordered by low-rent apartments. Paine fought to keep his eyes from squinting against the stabbing hurt that assaulted them from the sodium vapor lamps overhead. There had been a lot of trouble near here lately.

  Dannon slowed the car to a crawl.

  Paine thought his partner had seen something. Ignoring the anguish his eyes felt, he searched for a problem. If he missed something, Dannon would get on him. But there was nothing. Dannon began to talk.

  "You know, kid," he said, his voice conversationally hiding the menace that crept into it, "I don't understand how you can afford to be a fucking saint."

  "Let it drop," Paine said.

  Dannon laughed. "I can always stop for those tacos." His tone changed to mock seriousness. "I just don't understand you."

  "I told you," Paine said, wanting more than anything to ram his eyes shut, but keeping them open, looking through the sweeping path of the wipers, out through the water-spattered, half-opened window on his right, "I don't give a shit what you do. Just leave me out of it."

  "You're my partner, Jack," Dannon went on. "I can't leave you out of anything."

  "Learn."

  Anger, the thing Paine had fought to control since he had started with this man, rose in him.

  "Look," Dannon began, but the anger spilled over in Paine and he grabbed Dannon's arm, hard. Dannon braked the car in the middle of the street and turned his cold eyes on Paine.

  "Leave me the fuck alone," Paine hissed. "I don't give a shit if you're screwing your grandmother on the side, just leave me out."

  Time stood still as Dannon stared into his face. Then he broke contact and turned back to the road. "All right, kid," he said quietly.

  They drove in silence. The night melted away around them. Yellow lights, black streets. Yellow and black. The rain made everything ghostly; a few wisps of misty fog trailed up from the gutters to nuzzle the darkness. They circled the center of town, skirted the outskirts, started from the bottom and drove back up again.

  The night stabbed at Paine and he fought to keep his eyes open.

  Dannon began to say something, then stopped and said, "Holy shit."

  He jerked the car to the curb and was halfway out before Paine focused on what was happening. On the sidewalk ahead of them, a man in a stylish raincoat was just collapsing to his knees. As Paine watched, he fell forward. Even in the dreamlike yellow and black light, Paine saw the red tear across the bottom of his face. And up ahead, a small figure in a leather jacket was running away.

  Paine pushed his door open. Pulling his .38, Dannon ran past the fallen figure in the trench coat in pursuit of the boy in the leather jacket. He gave a quick glance back at Paine, indicating with a nod that Paine should check the fallen man.

  The man in the trench coat lay unmoving, next to a bench. His leather briefcase had fallen open on the ground, leaving a scatter of papers soaking in the light rain. The man was black, maybe thirty years old. He looked like he had decided to curl up and go to sleep, but he was dead.

  Paine pulled him over. The left side of his neck looked like a cherry bomb had gone off in it, taking out a ragged wedge half the size of Paine's fist.

  Paine settled the man back down in the rain and let him sleep forever. He looked up. Dannon was well up the street, gaining inevitably on the figure in the leather jacket. The boy took a sudden right corner and Dannon disappeared after him.

  Paine ran back to the cruiser and radioed for backup. Then he followed Dannon. He reached the corner Dannon had turned, and stopped. His eyes were burning. He closed them tight and then opened them. He was surrounded by night and drizzling rain and yellow and black. He shook his head, bringing his eyes back to focus. He listened. Ahead of him footsteps slapped against wet pavement. He caught movement between two apartment bui
ldings.

  He ran. The pavement hit his feet, hard. He felt detached from himself. He felt like someone else was running, watching the pounding of feet against sidewalk. The black and yellow night blurred, cleared. He drew his hand across his eyes, pulled in burning lungfuls of air.

  Dannon was twenty yards from him, motioning for Paine to follow him into an alley.

  Paine stood before the opening of the alley and swayed. It looked like a cave mouth, the mouth of a dark giant beast. He stumbled forward and it swallowed him.

  He fell to one knee, drew a rasping breath, then stood. His eyes focused and unfocused. He felt perhaps he should lie down in the alley, go to sleep, let the other detached self who watched him continue.

  "Paine!” he heard from a great distance. It was a giant’s bellow muffled by darkness, the enclosing alley, his own disjoined self.

  He grunted, staggering forward.

  Dannon was next to him. That much he knew. Dannon was shouting, pointing with his long hand, and Paine fought his body and stood still and looked where Dannon was pointing.

  Everything slowed as if he had been dropped into water. The alley was black but suddenly it became very bright. There was light ahead. Someone stepped out of the darkness, a man-boy with a leather jacket on. He pointed something at Paine. Paine remembered the man in the trench coat with the wedge of neck missing, the thick clotting flow of red that melted into the rain and made the man sleep. The man’s eyes had looked as though the life had been yanked out in one surprised pull.

  "Paaaaaaaaaine!” he heard. The world slowed even more. The figure in front of Dannon’s pointing finger moved, stepped into the bright light, because part of it, the thing in his hand, the bright sun-flash of the thing in hand pointed at Paine . . .

  When Paine awoke in the hospital twelve hours later, Dannon was there to tell him what had happened. The boy with the leather jacket on was fifteen years old. The thing in his hand had been a four-cell Radio Shack flashlight he’d gotten for free that afternoon. He had stepped into the alley to try it out. His mother had told him not to go out but he had gone anyway. He was not the one they were looking for. Dannon told him that he had yelled for Paine not to fire; that Paine had taken out his gun and pointed it at the boy. Dannon told him how the alley had lit up like lightning when Paine fired his .38. He hit the boy in the head from five feet away, killed him instantly.