Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  “Fuck that. We got probable cause.”

  Brubaker shook his head again.

  “Then let’s just forget this shit,” Myers said. “It’s a fucking waste of time.”

  “Tell that to Jimmy Hathaway,” Brubaker said, invoking the name of the cop killed under mysterious circumstances four months earlier. The only link to Kurtz, Brubaker knew, was Little Skag Farino’s comment to him that Hathaway—who had been the Farinos’ bitch for years—had tapped a phone call and followed Kurtz somewhere on the night of the detective’s murder. Hathaway had been eager to earn a bounty on Joe Kurtz’s head at the time.

  “Fuck Jimmy Hathaway,” said Myers. “I never liked the asshole.”

  Brubaker shot a glance at his partner. “Look, if Kurtz leaves the state, we’ve got him on parole violation.”

  Myers pointed two cars ahead of him. “Leave the state? The fucker’s not even leaving the county. Look—he just turned back toward Hamburg.”

  Brubaker lit a cigarette. It was hard to follow Kurtz now that it was really dark.

  “You want him,” said Myers, “let’s roust him tomorrow in the city. Use the throwdown. Beat the shit out of him and turn him over to County.”

  “Yeah,” said Brubaker. “Yeah.” He turned back to Highway 219 and the Thruway to Buffalo.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  When Kurtz was sure that the unmarked car had turned back, he took the back road from Hamburg to the Thruway, accepted a ticket at the toll booth, and drove the two hundred miles to Cleveland.

  Dr. Howard K. Conway’s office and home were in an old section not far from the downtown. It was a neighborhood of big old Victorian homes broken into apartments and large Catholic churches, either closed or locked tight against the night. As the Italian and Polish residents had been replaced by blacks in the old neighborhoods, the parishes had died or moved to the suburbs. Despite its new stadium and rock-and-roll museum, Cleveland was still, like Buffalo, an old industrial city with rot at its heart.

  If Emilio Gonzaga’s compound was a fortress, Conway’s home was fortress-lite, circled by a black iron fence, its first-floor windows caged, the old house dark except for a single lighted window on the second floor. The sign outside read DR. H.K. CONWAY, DDS. Kurtz unlatched the iron gate—assuming that an alarm was being tripped in the house—and walked to the front door. There was a buzzer and an intercom, and he leaned on the former and moaned in the direction of the latter.

  “What is it?” The voice was young—too young for Conway—and harsh.

  “I ’ave a ’oothache,” moaned Kurtz. “I ’eed a ’entis’.”

  “What?”

  “I ’ave a ’errible ’oothache.”

  “Fuck off.” The intercom went dead.

  Kurtz leaned on the buzzer.

  “What?”

  “I ’ave a ’errible ’oothache,” moaned Kurtz, louder now, audibly whining.

  “Dr. Conway doesn’t see patients.” The intercom clicked off.

  Kurtz hit the buzzer button eight times and then leaned his weight on it.

  There came a thudding on bare stairs and the door jerked open to the length of a chain. The man standing there was so large that he blocked the light coming down the stairway—three hundred pounds at least, young, perhaps in his twenties, with cupid lips and curly hair. “Are you fucking deaf? I said Dr. Conway doesn’t see patients. He’s retired. Fuck off.”

  Kurtz held his jaw, keeping his head lowered so that his face was in shadow. “I ’eed to see a dentist. It ’urts.”

  The big man started to close the door. Kurtz got his boot in the opening. “P’ease.”

  “You fucking asked for this, pal,” said the big man, jerking the chain off, flinging the door open, and reaching for Kurtz’s collar.

  Kurtz kicked him in the balls, took the big man’s offered right hand, swung it around behind him, and broke his little finger. When the man screamed, Kurtz transferred his grip to his index finger and bent it far back, keeping the hand and arm pinned somewhere around where the big man’s shoulder blades were buried under fat. “Let’s go upstairs,” Kurtz whispered, stepping into a foyer that smelled of cabbage. He kicked the door shut behind them and wheeled the man around, helping him up the first stairs by applying leverage to his finger.

  “Timmy?” called a quavery voice from the second floor. “Is everything all right? Timmy?”

  Kurtz looked at the blubbering, weeping mass of stumbling flesh ascending the stairs ahead of him. Timmy?

  The second-floor landing opened onto a lighted parlor where an old man sat in a wheelchair. The man was bald and liver-spotted, his wasted legs were covered by a lap robe, and he was holding some sort of blue steel .32-caliber revolver.

  “Timmy?” quavered the old man. He squinted at them through pop-bottle-thick lenses set in old-fashioned black frames.

  Kurtz kept Timmy’s mass between him and the muzzle of the .32.

  “I’m sorry, Howard,” Timmy gasped. “He surprised me. He…ahhhhh!” The last syllable erupted as Kurtz bent Timmy’s finger back beyond design tolerances.

  “Dr. Conway,” said Kurtz, “we need to talk.”

  The old man thumbed the hammer back. “You’re police?”

  Kurtz thought that question was too stupid to dignify with an answer. Timmy was trying to lean far forward to reduce the pain in his arm and finger, so Kurtz had to knee him in his fat buttocks to get him upright in shield position again.

  “You’re from him?” said the old man, voice shaking almost as much as the gun’s muzzle.

  “Yes,” said Kurtz. “James B. Hansen.”

  As if these were the magic words, Dr. Howard K. Conway squeezed the trigger of the .32 once, twice, three, four times. The reports sounded loud and flat in the wood-floored room. Suddenly the air smelled of cordite. The dentist stared at the pistol as if it had fired of its own volition.

  “Aww, shit,” Timmy said in a disappointed voice and pitched forward, his forehead hitting the hardwood floor with a hollow sound.

  Kurtz moved fast, diving around Timmy, rolling once, and coming up fast to knock the pistol from Conway’s hand before the crippled dentist could empty chambers five and six. He grabbed the old man by his flannel shirt-front and lifted him out of the chair, shaking him twice to make sure there were no more weapons hidden under the slipping lap robe.

  French doors opened onto a narrow balcony at the far end of the room. Booting the wheelchair aside, Kurtz carried the struggling scarecrow across the room, kicked those doors open, and dangled the old man over the icy iron railing. Dr. Conway’s glasses went flying into the night.

  “Don’t…don’t…don’t…don’t.” The dentist’s mantra had lost its quaver.

  “Tell me about Hansen.”

  “What… I don’t know any…good Christ, don’t. Please don’t!”

  With one hand, Kurtz had literally tossed the old man backward and caught him by the shirtfront. Flannel ripped.

  Dr. Howard K. Conway’s dentures had come loose and were clacking around in his mouth. If the old piece of shit hadn’t been a silent accomplice to a dozen or more children’s murders, Joe Kurtz might have felt a little bit sorry for him. Maybe.

  “My hands are cold,” whispered Kurtz. “I might miss my grip next time.” He shoved the dentist back over the railing.

  “Anything…anything! I have money. I have lots of money!”

  “James B. Hansen.”

  Conway nodded wildly.

  “Other names,” hissed Kurtz. “Records. Files.”

  “In my study. In the safe.”

  “Combination.”

  “Left thirty-two, right nineteen, left eleven, right forty-six. Please let me go. No! Not over the drop!”

  Kurtz slammed the old man’s bony and presumably unfeeling ass down hard on the railing. “Why didn’t you tell someone, Conway? All these years. All those dead women and kids. Why didn’t you tell someone?”

  “He would have killed me.” The
old man’s breath smelled of ether.

  “Yeah,” said Kurtz and had to stifle the immediate urge to throw the old man down onto the concrete terrace fifteen feet below. First the files.

  “What will I do now?” Dr. Conway was sobbing, hiccuping. “Where will I go?”

  “You can go to—” began Kurtz and saw the old man’s rheumy eyes focus wildly, hopefully, on something low behind Kurtz.

  He grabbed the dentist by his shirtfront and swung him around just as Timmy, who had left a bloody trail across the parquet floor, fired the last two bullets from the pistol he’d retrieved.

  Conway’s body was too thin and hollow to stop a .32 slug, but the first bullet missed and the second hit Conway in the center of his forehead. Kurtz ducked, but the spray of blood and brain matter was all from the entry wound; the bullet had not exited.

  Kurtz dropped the dentist’s body on the icy balcony and walked over to Timmy, who was clicking away on empty chambers. Not wanting to touch the weapon even with his gloves on, he stepped on the man’s hand until he dropped it and then rolled Timmy over with his boot. Two of the original .32 slugs had hit the big man in the chest, but one had caught him in the throat and another had entered below the left cheekbone. Timmy would bleed out in another minute or two unless he received immediate medical assistance.

  Kurtz walked into what had to be Dr. Conway’s study, ignored the row of locked filing cabinets, found the big wall safe behind a painting of a naked man, and tried the combination. He thought that Conway had rat tied it off too quickly, under too much stress, to be lying. and he was right. The safe opened on the first try.

  Lying in the safe were metal boxes holding $63,000 in cash, stacks of bonds, gold coins, a sheaf of stock certificates, and a thick file folder filled with dental X-rays, insurance forms, and newspaper clippings. Kurtz ignored the money and took the folder out into the light slamming the safe door and scrambling the lock as he did so.

  Timmy was no longer twitching and the viscous flow of blood ran out onto the cement balcony where it had pooled around Dr. Conway’s ruined skull and was coagulating in the process of freezing. Kurtz set the folder on the round table next to the empty wheelchair and flipped through it. He didn’t think that this was a neighborhood where people would dial 911 at the first sound of what could be a gunshot.

  Twenty-three news clippings. Fifteen photocopies of letters to various urban police headquarters, dental X-rays attached. Fifteen different identities.

  “Come on, come on,” whispered Kurtz. If Hansen’s current Buffalo identity wasn’t here, this whole mess had been for nothing. But why would it be here? Why would Conway know Hansen’s current alias before it was necessary to identify him to the next round of homicide detectives?

  Because Hansen has to have the cover story ready in case the old dentist dies. Timmy would do the honors then. But there has to be a dentist of record.

  The next-to-last paper in the folder had the record of an office visit the previous November—a cleaning and partial crown. No X-rays. There was no bill, but a handwritten note in the margin read “$50,000.” No wonder Dr. Howard K. Conroy accepted no new patients. Beneath it was an address in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda, and a name.

  “Holy shit,” whispered Kurtz.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Where the hell is he?” Detective Myers asked Detective Brubaker. The two had requisitioned a much better surveillance vehicle—a gray floral-delivery van—and were parked on station near the Royal Delaware Arms at 7:30 A.M., just in case Kurtz took it in his head to go to his office early. They’d discussed where and how to interdict him—an observed traffic violation on Elicott Street would be the pretext—and then the fast roust, the discovery of a weapon—the throwdown, if Kurtz wasn’t armed in violation of parole, which they guessed he would be—the attempted resisting arrest, the subduing, and the arrest.

  Brubaker and Myers were ready. Besides wearing body armor, each man was carrying a telescoping, weighted baton in addition to his 9mm dock, and Myers had a 10,000-volt Taser stun gun in his pocket.

  “Where the fuck is he?” repeated Myers. Kurtz’s Volvo was nowhere in sight.

  “Maybe he left early for that shithole office of his,” said Brubaker.

  “Maybe he never came back from Orchard Park last night.”

  “Maybe he was kidnapped by fucking UFOs,” snarled Brubaker. “Maybe we should quit speculating and go find him and get this over with.”

  “Maybe we should just skip it.” Myers was not eager to do this thing. But then, Myers was not being paid $5,000 by Little Skag Farino to bust Kurtz and get him back into prison so he could be shanked. Brubaker had considered telling his partner about the payment and sharing the money. Considered it for about two milliseconds.

  “Maybe you should shut up,” said Brubaker, shifting the van into gear and driving away from the Royal Delaware Arms.

  James B. Hansen had to wait for the two other homicide detectives to drive off before he could park his Cadillac SUV where their van had been, and then go in the back entrance of the fleabag hotel. He took the back stairs up all seven flights to the room number Brubaker and Myers had listed in their report. Hansen could have used his badge to get the passkey for Joe Kurtz’s room, but that would have been terminally stupid. However legitimate his excuse for checking on Kurtz might sound later, Hansen wanted no connection between the ex-con and himself until the investigation of the murder of one John Wellington Frears.

  Hansen noticed the plaster dust in the center of the stairs and hall leading to the eighth-floor room. Knowing that Kurtz had come and gone over the past few days, it had to be some sort of paranoid alarm system. Hansen kept to the walls, leaving no trace. The door to Kurtz’s room was locked, but it was a cheap lock, and bringing out the small leather-bound kit of burglary tools he’d used for fifteen years, Hansen had the door open in ten seconds.

  The suite of rooms was cold and drafty but strangely neat for such a loser. Wearing gloves but still touching nothing, Hansen peered into the adjoining room—weights, a heavy bag, no furniture—and looked around the big room where Kurtz appeared to spend his time. Books—a surprise. Serious titles, a bigger surprise. Hansen made a mental note not to underestimate the intelligence of this shabby ex-con. The rest of the room was predictable—a half-sized refrigerator, a hot plate for cooking, a toaster, no TV, no computer, no luxuries. Also no notes or diaries or loose papers. Hansen checked in the closet—a few well-worn dress shirts, some ties, a decent suit, one pair of well-polished black shoes. There was no dresser, but a box in the corner held folded jeans, clean underwear, more shirts, and some sweaters. Hansen looked in all the obvious hiding places but could find no guns or illegal knives. He went back to the box of sweaters and raveled a long thread from the top sweater on the pile, dropping it into a clean evidence bag.

  In the sink was a rinsed coffee cup, a small plate, and a sharp kitchen knife. It looked as if Kurtz had used the knife to cut a slice of French bread and spread butter on it, then rinsed the blade. Lifting the knife gingerly, Hansen dropped it into a second evidence bag.

  The bathroom was as neat as the main room, with nothing beyond basics in the medicine cabinet—not even prescription pills. Kurtz’s hairbrush and shaving kit were lined up neatly on the old pedestal sink. Hansen had to stop himself from grinning. Lifting the brush, he found five hairs and transferred them to a third evidence bag.

  Checking to make sure that he had left no trace, Hansen let himself out of the hotel room, locked the door behind him, and kept to the walls while descending the stairs.

  Kurtz had returned late from Cleveland, driven to the office, used his computer to double-check Captain Robert Millworth’s address in Tonawanda, and then, around 6:00 A.M., had driven to Arlene’s small home in Cheektowaga. She was awake and dressed, drinking coffee in the kitchen and watching a network early morning show on a small TV on her counter.

  “Don’t come into the office today,” Kurtz told her as h
e stepped past her into the kitchen.

  “Why, Joe? I have more than fifty Sweetheart Searches to process today—”

  He quickly explained about Dr. Conway’s demise and the information he’d found in the dentist’s safe. This was information Arlene had to know if she was going to be a help over the next few days. Kurtz glanced at the manila folder on the table. “Are those the photos I asked you to process?” Their old office on Chippewa Street years ago had been big enough to hold a darkroom in which Arlene had developed all the photos he and Sam had shot on the job. After her husband’s death, Arlene had converted an extra bathroom into a darkroom at home.

  She slid the folder across the table. “Shopping for property?”

  Kurtz glanced through the blowups of the Gonzaga compound he’d taken from the helicopter. They’d all turned out.

  “So what do I do from home today, Joe?”

  “I’ll be back in a while and someone may be with me. You have any problem entertaining a visitor?”

  “Who?” said Arlene. “And for how long? And why?”

  Kurtz let that go. “I’ll be back in a while.”

  “Since we aren’t going into the office, is there any chance we can look at new office space today after your visitor leaves?”

  “Not today.” He paused by the door, tapping the folder of photos against his free hand. “Keep your doors locked.”

  “The Hansen thing, you mean.”

  Kurtz shrugged. “I don’t think it will be a problem. But if the cops get in touch, call me right away on the cell phone.”

  “The cops?” Arlene lit a cigarette. “I love it when you talk like that, Joe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a private eye.”

  So he’s not at his fucking flophouse and he’s not at his fucking office. Where the fuck is he?” said Detective Myers.