Dead Man's Thoughts

by Carolyn Wheat

  “What do you want me to do? Let her mouth off like that?”

  “We take her down in the elevator bleeding, and somebody might notice.” So much for any momentary thought that Dave had been concerned for my welfare.

  “I shut the bitch up, anyway,” Di Anci said with satisfaction. “Christ, that broad can talk.”

  I fumbled in my bag for a Kleenex to hold against my bleeding head. Dave gave me a sharp look. Di Anci went outside to see if the coast was clear for our trip downstairs. As I pulled the Kleenex out of my purse, I recalled the Swiss Army knife Nathan had given me. It was still in my purse, buried under all the garbage I usually carried. Could I get my hands on it, and bring it out without Dave seeing me? And even if I could get it, could I open it? Use it? I’d never done anything but open wine bottles and peel oranges with it. Could I use it to stab someone?

  The Kleenex I was holding to my cut head was sodden with blood. As I reached for another, I resolved to try for the knife. I plunged my hand into the bottom of the bag, felt something hard, and grabbed it. Dave was watching me closely; I had to work fast. As I brought the knife up, I glommed onto a huge wad of Kleenex and used it to cover the knife. So that what Dave saw was a handful of tissues. I peeled one off, held it to my head, and shoved the rest back into the bag. Then I looked Dave full in the face.

  “I’m beginning to believe you’re a crook,” I said conversationally, “but it’s hard to accept you as a murderer. Up to now, Di Anci’s the only one who’s actually killed. You could turn state’s evidence, make a deal, get off lightly. But if you kill me, you’re up for murder. Think about—”

  There was a chuckle from the doorway. Di Anci. “Wrong again, Ms. Jameson. It’s true I killed Nathan and that I had Charlie Blackwell taken care of. But I was at a judges’ meeting when Del Parma was pushed under the train. Your friend Dave did that all by himself.”

  “But—” I began. There were so many buts. They all came down to one big one. But I wouldn’t sleep with a murderer. I’d slept with Dave. Therefore he wasn’t a murderer. Wonderful reasoning. I settled on a less personal approach. “But Marian said nobody’d left the office at the same time Parma did.”

  “True,” Di Anci said. “We’d thought of that, of course.”

  “I had a dental appointment for one o’clock,” Dave said. “So I told Marian I’d be taking the afternoon off. After I left the dentist, I came back here, waited for Del to leave, followed him into the subway, and—you know the rest.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I saw it on TV. It looked pretty gory. Must have been worse in person. Especially somebody you knew. Somebody you’d worked with for years.”

  “Don’t get sentimental, Ms. Jameson,” Di Anci cut in. “It had to be done. Once Parma looked at those files, it was all over.”

  “So how did you lure him onto the subway platform?”

  “Simple,” Di Anci shrugged. “I called him up and told him I wanted to see him. He wanted to see me. So I arranged with him to come to Brooklyn. Then Dave followed him and did what he had to do. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant for him, but.…”

  Dave was looking a little green, but his voice was steady enough. “Del was mad as hell. He didn’t even see me. And it didn’t take much of a push to knock him off balance. The train did the rest. I just stood back in the crowd, screaming, like everyone else. Then, before the police got there, I slipped away.”

  “And everybody assumed it was a punk kid. I think I read where some lady gave a description. Short, black kid with a knit hat. Not exactly a perfect description of you.”

  “No, people don’t expect a person like me to commit a crime like that. They see what they want to see,” Dave agreed coolly.

  Well, I was feeling really bright. I’d figured out the Di Anci part all right, but I’d read Dave wrong from the beginning. When I’d thought he was being helpful, he was really pumping me to see how much I knew. When I’d thought he was personally interested in me, he was just stringing me along, trying to discourage me from talking to Riordan and Winthrop. Playing me for a sucker. I’d been right the first time. Never trust a prosecutor. Always look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Di Anci went out again. There’d been a guard in the hall before. Maybe he would be gone by now and we could go downstairs.

  It was now or never. I reached into my purse for the knife.

  I looked Dave straight in the eye. It was one way to keep his eyes from straying to where my hand was moving, trying to grasp the knife and open it unseen. It wouldn’t be easy.

  “This explains,” I said brightly, “why Charlie was allowed to come through the system. It wasn’t Del who screwed up—it was you. You saw to it that Charlie wasn’t brought here—and you probably tipped Di Anci that Nathan had an appointment with Parma.” As I spoke, my fingers were working on the knife, trying to pry the blade open one-handed, without Dave seeing what I was doing. Also without cutting my finger off.

  I went on, “Parma must have been mad as hell when he found out Charlie had passed through the system instead of coming straight here.”

  Dave nodded, but he didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. I had the blade open. Now for the hard part. The last physically aggressive thing I had done was pulling Susie Pringle’s hair on the school playground when I was ten. Now I was about to stab a man and grab his gun from him. If I could.

  I pulled the knife out of the purse, scattering Kleenex all over the place. I lunged forward, the knife held straight in my hand, and plunged it with all my strength into Dave’s belly. It went in up to the hilt. My hand, for the second time that afternoon, came away blood. This time it wasn’t mine.

  Dave cried out with surprise and pain. He dropped the gun with a clatter and clutched his stomach. I jumped out of the chair and got down on my hands and knees, looking for the gun. If only I could get to it before Di Anci came back, I told myself, I could meet him at least on equal terms.

  No such luck. The first thing I saw was a shoe, coming right up to the gun and kicking it out of my reach. Then the shoe kicked me in the side. I looked up to see a look of pure pleasure on Di Anci’s face. There was mingled in that look no concern at all for the wounded prosecutor.

  When he had enjoyed fully the spectacle of me groaning, rolling on the ground and holding my side, Di Anci turned to Chessler. The knife handle stuck out like a novelty-store trick. Like the arrow Steve Martin uses. Except for the dark stain spreading on Dave’s impeccable shirt front. Dave grimaced in pain, his eyes wide with shock. I felt sick.

  “Don’t take the knife out,” I advised. “If you do, the blood will really start flowing. You could bleed to death.” I don’t read murder mysteries for nothing.

  Dave nodded.

  “Not that your good buddy Al here gives a shit one way or the other,” I went on. “In fact, he’d rather you bled to death than started talking. Wouldn’t you, Judge?”

  “Shut up, you bitch, or I’ll kick you again,” was all Di Anci said. But there was a calculating look in his eyes. He was trying to put together a new scenario, one that would fit the knife in Dave’s stomach into things. The mugging idea was down the tubes now, I decided. Somehow my dead body and Dave’s wound would have to be explained by the same story.

  Di Anci turned to Dave. “We’ll tell the cops you and the bitch surprised a couple of robbers who were trying to steal the typewriters. They turned on you, you got stabbed, and she got shot.”

  I opened my mouth to point out just a few of the obvious flaws in that story, then recollected that it wasn’t in my interest to help out. But Dave, even in his weakened condition, saw a couple of the same things I had.

  “It’s her fucking knife, Al,” he said in a voice edged with contempt. “It’s got her fingerprints on it.”

  “We’ll wipe them off.” Dave grimaced; the wiping-off process was not likely to be without pain. I was searching Di Anci’s face for some sign that his concentration on the conversation was weakening his attention to me, but there was none. The gun wa
s still pointed straight at me.

  “How about we say she pulled the knife, one of the robbers got it away from her, and stabbed me?” Dave suggested. Di Anci nodded. “Okay, but we’ll still have to handle the knife. Even if the robbers wore gloves, they’d obscure her prints. The cops shouldn’t see clear prints on the knife.”

  Now Dave nodded. “It’s not great, but it’s playable. Then how does she get shot?”

  “The robbers get your gun away from you. They shoot her. When the cops get here, you’re wounded, she’s dead. They’ve only got your word for it as to what happened. You’re a prosecutor, a respectable person. Why shouldn’t they believe you?”

  I was putting my own scenario together while they talked. When they’d wanted me out of the building, my only hope had been to refuse to go. Now that they wanted me here, I had to try to get out. Which made sense. It was the first thing I’d learned as a young lawyer—whatever the other sides wants, you automatically oppose. If they want it, it won’t do you any good. So, while Di Anci’s eyes flickered, the little wheels behind them whirring away, I began to assess my chances of making a getaway.

  Di Anci went on. “I can throw things around a little, make it look like there was a struggle. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “we have to get out of Del’s office. The whole thing has to take place in the lobby.” And away from Del’s private files, I thought. That was the biggest flaw in Di Anci’s scheme. He was calling attention to the last place in the world he wanted cops swarming all over.

  Dave nodded, but he was looking too weak to come up with any more objections. “Just so we do it quickly,” he said. “I gotta see a doctor, Al. Soon.”

  “Soon,” Di Anci agreed. But there was something in his eye, an unholy gleam, that told me the truth. The cops weren’t going to find one dead body in Parma’s office. They were going to find two. The mythical robbers were going to kill Dave as well as me.

  Di Anci moved toward the spot on the floor where Dave’s gun lay. He had to lean down to pick it up, so he would use it to shoot me. And Dave? Or was he just going to pull the knife out, thanks to my helpful hint, and let Dave bleed to death? Anyway, that moment when Di Anci concentrated on picking up the gun was my only chance for escape.

  As soon as I saw him bend, I ran. I ran as fast as I could through the Special Prosecutor’s office. Past the cubicles where the assistants worked, into the reception area where the decorative girl usually sat. Through the door and out into the corridor. Toward the elevators. I could hear Di Anci puffing after me. But he couldn’t shoot. He couldn’t run the risk. There might be a guard.

  When I got to the elevators, I pushed the button and prayed. I stood, pouring sweat and gasping with fear, until one came. I jumped inside and pushed the button for the forty-fourth floor. Just as the doors closed, I saw Di Anci, red-faced and panting, run up and push an elevator button.

  I was retracing the steps I’d taken with Dave earlier that afternoon. When I’d thought I was coming to gather evidence against a murderer, not meet him personally. Because the offices weren’t open on weekends, there would only be one elevator running from the forty-fourth floor—a kind of transfer point known in World Trade Center parlance as a skylobby—to the first. So that while I was safe from Di Anci on this elevator, which was taking me from the fifty-seventh to the forty-fourth floor, once on forty-four Di Anci and I would be racing to the same—the only—down elevator.

  As soon as the elevator opened on forty-four, I flew out of it, running like hell down the corridor, past the sign that said New York State Hearing Room, turning the corner and pushing the down button. Behind me, I could hear the door of Di Anci’s elevator, and his footsteps following me. Somehow, the absurdity of the situation chose that moment to hit me. Suppose I saw a guard, I asked myself. What would I tell him? “Help, I’m being chased by an armed judge?”

  The elevator door opened. Shaky with panic, I nearly fell inside, pushing the lobby button with fingers slippery with sweat. Then I leaned against the wall and sighed with relief. The doors were closing.

  Not for long. An arm thrust itself between the padded doors. An arm with a gun in its hand. The doors flew apart, and Di Anci stepped into the elevator. Despite his panting and sweating, there was a smile of deep satisfaction on his face. This time when the doors shut, we were on the same side.

  My eyes clouded over. I saw black spots, just as I had the time I nearly fainted on the subway. It was all over. Di Anci would shoot me in the elevator and come up with a story to cover it later. And why shouldn’t he be believed? He was a judge. If he said something, the cops would buy it. I just stood there, exhausted and despairing, waiting for the blow to fall.

  Yet Di Anci didn’t shoot. Maybe his imagination hadn’t yet come up with a scenario to explain the situation. Or maybe it had, but the story didn’t call for my dying in the elevator. Anyway, the elevator stopped at the lobby with my live body still on it. Di Anci pushed the button to go back up, but not before I ran for it. The lobby, with its tourists riding the escalator to the special elevators that went to the Observation Deck, was a far safer place for me than a lonely elevator.

  My breaking away brought things to a head for Di Anci. If he let me get away, it was all over. If he shot me, he had a chance, however slim, of explaining it away. He shot me.

  I felt the bullet rip through my shoulder. It spun me to the side, and I fell onto the carpeted floor of the lobby. The last thing I remember is the acrid dust of the carpet in my mouth. Then I lost consciousness.

  I came to only partially, for a few seconds. Through a woozy haze, I looked up to see a familiar face. A neat brown face with bright black eyes. Detective Button.

  THIRTY-TWO

  For the rest of Saturday I alternated between sleeping and throwing up. By Sunday, I’d stopped throwing up, but I still fell asleep every five minutes. Mostly because staying awake involved pain. My head throbbed, my shoulder hurt, every muscle in my body ached. I couldn’t figure out why until I thought about the tension I’d felt in that office with Di Anci holding a gun on me. My whole body must have been clenched like a giant fist.

  I was in one of my rare moments of consciousness—wishing I weren’t—when Button came in to my hospital room. There was a broad grin on his face and a bunch of daffodils in his hand.

  “Hi, Counselor,” he said cheerfully. “How you feeling?”

  “Rotten. Thanks for the flowers. Sit down and tell me what happened. I sort of lost interest in the proceedings. How did you manage to turn up in the nick of time, like the cavalry?”

  “Well, to start with, I got the message you left at the precinct. I didn’t much like the idea of you snooping around the World Trade Center on your own, so I came to see what you’d find.”

  “You didn’t know?” I was pleased by the admission. But my triumph didn’t last long.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” he admitted. “You see, we found that spiral notebook you were telling us about.”

  “What!” I sat up in bed. Bad move. A sharp pain shot through my shoulder, and the blood drained from my head. I sat back gingerly, still eager for the news. “Did Nathan write notes about Charlie in it like I said?”

  “Better. Under the notes of his interview with Blackwell, there was a notation for an appointment. ‘Thurs. 9:00 Di Anci. Apt.’ So we can put Di Anci in your friend’s apartment at the time of the murder.”

  “But where has the notebook been all this time? How come it wasn’t found before?”

  Button looked abashed. “To tell you the truth, Miss Jameson, my men have been too busy to really search the place. In fact, we didn’t find it. Mrs. Wasserstein did, when she went over there to pack up a few of her ex-husband’s things for her children. ’Course, we did ask her to be on the lookout for it.”

  “What else have you got on Di Anci?”

  “His blood matches the blood on the towel. But so does a lot of other people’s. Your kid’s, by the way, doesn’t.”

  “Has he made a sta
tement? Has Chessler?”

  “Counselor,” Button gave me the look he reserved for when I was being exceptionally stupid, “the man’s a lawyer. Both of them are. They haven’t admitted to anything beyond the basic pedigree. Name, rank, and serial number. That’s all I’m ever gonna get out of those two shysters.”

  “Button.” I was suddenly suspicious. “You will be able to prove a case against them, won’t you?”

  He nodded, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I think so,” he said. “But it’s all circumstantial. We’ll never get him on Blackwell unless one of the people he used cracks, and I don’t see why they should. As for Chessler, we’re setting up a lineup on the Parma pushing, but after the half-assed descriptions those witnesses gave us, I don’t hold out too much hope. It’s going to be an uphill fight. Of course,” he added, “we’ve got Di Anci for shooting you.”

  “And me for stabbing Chessler?” I asked, only half-joking.

  Button threw back his head and laughed his rich laugh. “Hell, no, Counselor. Chessler’s afraid to talk about it. He musta fell on that damn knife!”

  The nurses came in with lunch. If you could call it that. It was gray and mushy, and I found myself thinking of the gruel I’d read about as a kid in Oliver Twist. It was a measure of my improved health that I could hardly wait for Button to leave so I could wolf it down.

  That night I called my parents in Chagrin Falls. I thought they ought to know their only daughter was in Beekman Downtown Hospital with a broken collarbone and a cut head. I think I left them with the impression that I’d been mugged. I assured them the shoulder would be all right after some physical therapy. As I hung up the phone, I could hear my mother starting to say, “Doug, I knew we shouldn’t have let—”

  I could finish it. “I knew we shouldn’t have let her go to New York.” As though nothing bad ever happened in Cleveland. I could also appreciate Dad answering, “Betty, New York’s a city same as any other. It’s just bigger, that’s all.” But my reminiscent smile turned sour as I recalled Di Anci’s original plan. If it had worked, my mother might be saying those words to a zealous reporter, and they’d be used as a kind of epitaph.