The Art of Violence

by S. J. Rozan

  Peter said, “No, Les, you didn’t do that. So Sam would look guilty? No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, she did,” I said. “She took the Hoboken earring out, because that was while Sam was still inside, and then she put the box in Sam’s studio. Ellissa Cromley is Sam’s friend, though. She’s nuts, but she’s trying to be as good a friend as she can. I think she half-believes he is a serial killer, but she still doesn’t want him caught. She heard someone in his studio. She thought it was Sam. But it was Leslie.” I said that as though it were proven fact. “Cromley found the box and took it. I found it in her studio and I took it. Now the police have it. I’m curious, though, like Lydia is, why you took Kimberly Pike’s earring from the wrong ear?”

  I was also curious where the hell Grimaldi was, but maybe it was okay she hadn’t called yet. The more Lydia and I could get out of these two before they were arrested and got lawyered up, the better. It was all hearsay, none of it usable in court, but it would give Grimaldi a place to begin.

  Peter stared calmly at me. “I didn’t.”

  “Peter, come on, there’s no point anymore—”

  “No,” Lydia interrupted me. “He didn’t. He didn’t kill Kimberly. Leslie did.”

  “You bitch!” Leslie took a step forward.

  Lydia ignored her and went on. “I don’t know why it took me this long. I must be losing it. That’s why the earring was from the wrong ear. You didn’t know. Outside the Whitney, when Kimberly was screaming, ‘It’s him, it’s him’? She didn’t mean Sam. She meant Peter.”

  “Jesus,” I breathed. “We’re both losing it. Maybe we should retire. She recognized you as the dark-haired white guy who’d hit on Annika, didn’t she, Peter? And you realized that, Leslie. That’s why you had to kill her.”

  Leslie’s breath was starting to come hard, as though she’d been in a fight.

  “Here’s how I think it went down,” I said. “Leslie, you found the box in one of those organizing whirlwinds you were having because Peter was letting everything go to hell. You confronted Peter and he spilled. That’s why you were so testy when we spoke, Peter. And then, when Leslie killed Kimberly Pike—for you, to hide your crimes—that knocked you down. You felt like hell. You couldn’t go to work. You couldn’t think. But Leslie could, as usual. She planted evidence. She took care of things.”

  “And I’m going to take care of them now.” Leslie spoke in a steel-hard voice. In her hand was an automatic, small, but not a .25 like the one Cromley had been waving around. This looked like one of the new smaller 9 mms, and Leslie looked like she knew what to do with it. Proof of that was that she was pointing it at Lydia, not at me. She might not have known Lydia shoots better than I do, but she’d clearly calculated the difference between my reaction to being threatened and my reaction to Lydia being threatened.

  “I know you both have guns,” Leslie said. “Put your hands on your heads. Very slowly.”

  Lydia and I did what she said.

  “Les!” said Peter. “What are you doing?”

  “Saving my own ass and, as usual, yours with it. You should never have let them in. This is on you.”

  “No,” said Peter. “No, don’t.” He sounded about as effectual as Sam ever had, and Leslie paid him about as much attention.

  “Now take your guns out and put them on the floor one at a time,” Leslie said. “You first, Smith.”

  I did, and after me, Lydia did the same.

  “Pick them up, Peter. Peter! The damn guns!”

  Peter bent in slow motion and collected our weapons.

  “Get in the basement,” Leslie said, moving the gun just once between me and Lydia. “Peter, you come, too. You’re going to help me do this.”

  “No,” he said again, but he started to trudge toward a door under the curving stair.

  “The police know we’re here,” I said. “I called them before we left.”

  “Yeah, sure. The cavalry’s on the way. Though if that’s true, it’s just more reason to do this fast. So, move or I’ll shoot her right here, and then you, and then Peter will drag you downstairs.” Leslie leveled the gun at Lydia’s head.

  The doorbell rang.

  Both Leslie and Peter snapped their heads to the door. Lydia dove under the gun, shouldering into Leslie’s knees. They fell together. The gun discharged. Glass rained down as the bullet broke the hanging lamp. Lydia wrestled the gun from Leslie and flung it away. I snatched it up, pointed it at Peter in case he was thinking of using one of the two he was holding. He just stared at me.

  Lydia was trying to pin Leslie down, but Leslie kept struggling, so Lydia hauled back and clocked her one. It slowed Leslie but didn’t stop her. Lydia slugged her in the gut. Leslie moaned and curled around herself, like a centipede when you touch it.

  Panting, Lydia stood. Peter kept staring. I went to open the door for Grimaldi. “What the hell took you so long?”

  A confused look. “We told you half an hour.”

  It was the pizza guy.

  40

  Eventually, it was Grimaldi.

  Before that, I’d grabbed the pizza, given the guy a twenty, and shut the door in his drop-jawed face. I wasn’t sure what he’d seen or heard, but the worst that could happen was he’d call the police. I dumped the pizza on the hallway table and told Peter, who was still just standing there, to put the guns on the floor. He did. I told him to go sit in the living room. Face pale and flat, he did that, too. While I collected the guns, Lydia hauled Leslie up, dragged her into the living room, and dumped her on the couch. Leslie started to stand, but she snarled and dropped down again when Lydia raised her fist.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” Leslie said, rubbing her jaw where Lydia had hit her. “It was Sam. He killed them all. Yes, sure, I put the tie under the body in the truck. And when I found the box in his apartment—God, yes, all right, I went there looking for something, any kind of evidence. When I found that goddamn box, I knew exactly what it was. I was disgusted, oh my God. I put it in the studio to be sure the police saw it. Don’t you see? We had to get rid of him, had to stop him before he just kept killing people—”

  “Stop it, Les.” That was Peter. His head was turned toward her, and though his voice was dull, his stare was fierce. “Stop it. You’re lying. You got that box from me, not Sam. I killed three women. You killed another and, God help me, that’s my fault, too, and I’ll never stop being sorry. About all of them. I couldn’t… I’m not… I don’t… Oh, God.” He rubbed his hand down his face. It came away damp with tears.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Lydia, gun out while she kept an eye on the Tabors, stepped out of the doorway’s line of sight. I put my gun away in case it was Grimaldi and she decided to shoot me. I opened the door and said, “You forgot the anchovies.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” It was, in fact, Grimaldi, and she frowned.

  “The extra pepperoni was pretty cool, though,” I said. “Come on in.”

  She did. “What the holy hell is this?”

  I explained the situation. Grimaldi listened without interruption. When I was done, she called for backup. She Mirandized both Tabors and, Leslie red with fury and Peter damp with weeping, sent them off in separate squad cars.

  “Which one of them killed Oakhurst?” Grimaldi asked. We were standing on the stoop watching the cars drive off. “And why?”

  “Ask them. Though my money’s on Leslie. Probably because once she saw the photo with the tie, she was afraid he’d identify her as Pike’s killer.”

  “When did she see the photo?”

  “After he identified her as Pike’s killer and invited her to come see it?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He was interested in what turtles look like without their shells.”

  “I’d like you better if everything you said made sense. Get in.”

  Lydia and I rode to the precinct with Grimaldi. While the Tabors were booked, we followed her up to the squad room. The big de
tective, Iglesias, looked up from his desk when we came in.

  “Closed it?” he asked.

  Grimaldi nodded. “Unless the DA says otherwise. Thanks for the moral support, Gabi.”

  “What I’m here for.” He went back to his typing.

  Grimaldi deposited me and Lydia into separate interrogation rooms to take our statements. She started with me.

  “I recommend you be plain and fast—none of those metaphors and whatever,” she said. “Because as soon as those sons of bitches are lawyered up, I’m going to go at them, and if I’m not finished with you guys by then, you’ll be here for a while.”

  I was straightforward in my recital and apparently so was Lydia, because by the time we were sent away with instructions to remain available, the Tabors’ lawyers had not yet arrived. Two attorneys had been called, one for her, one for him.

  “You think they’ll try to sell each other out?” Lydia asked as we left the precinct and headed for the subway.

  “She will. She’ll try to pin Kimberly Pike and Tony Oakhurst on him, in addition to the ones he did. He won’t. He’ll take the rap for what he did. He might even try to cop to what she did. I don’t think he’s together enough to make that work, though.”

  “For better or worse, for richer or poorer.”

  “In sanity, in lunacy. Do I hear you knocking marriage?”

  “Not really. Only, how do you know if you’re married to a crazy person?”

  “By definition,” I said, “I would be.”

  As we walked, Lydia called her mother. She spoke in Chinese, then she pulled me over to the shelter of a building wall and switched the phone to speaker.

  I heard: “Hi, Lydia. It’s Sam.”

  “I know, Sam. We’ll be back soon. We can talk then.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Solve everything.”

  Lydia and I met each other’s eyes. “Yes,” she said. “We did.”

  “Did I kill Tony? All those women, and Tony?”

  “You didn’t kill anybody.”

  “I killed Amy.”

  “But nobody else.”

  “How do you know? Because you know who did?”

  “We’ll talk about it when we get there. It’ll be soon.”

  “Okay.”

  The phone was quiet for a moment and then Lydia’s mother’s rapid-fire Chinese came streaming out. Lydia answered, and that conversation was short.

  “How’s it going there?” I asked when she switched off.

  “I think she’s ready to adopt him. Though he won’t let her look at the drawing.”

  “She might change her mind when she sees it, then.”

  In Chinatown, we stopped for red bean cakes and made our way to the Chin apartment. We’d agreed I would be the one to tell Sam, but we hadn’t figured out how. Lydia unlocked the door and we stepped into the tiny entryway to take off our shoes. I could see Sam in the living room, drawing pad in his lap.

  “Hi!” he called. “Oh, it’s you. I thought it was Ellissa.”

  Lydia stepped into the living room. “Why would it be Ellissa?”

  “I called her to come here. I told her that it was all okay, you knew who it was and it wasn’t me, and you’d tell us all about it, but meanwhile I wanted her to see all these wonderful things your mom has. The tiny statues, and the ducks, and the cabinet with the little people inlaid on it.”

  So much for Sam’s being stashed away. Well, it wasn’t necessary anymore.

  “She’ll have to buzz from downstairs,” Lydia pointed out.

  “Oh, right. I guess she will. Hey, look where I’m allowed to sit.”

  It must have been true that Mrs. Chin had grown fond of Sam. He was in Lydia’s father’s chair.

  “Wait, just a second.” Looking from his model to his pad, Sam added a few lines and said, “Okay, time for a break.” He put the pad aside and jumped to his feet. He wiggled a come-on-get-up hand to Mrs. Chin, who stood from the couch and stretched, then walked across the room to look at what he’d done. Smiling, she blushed, waved at the air in front of her face, and spoke to Lydia.

  “She says you’re a very bad artist because you’re making her look too pretty,” Lydia told Sam.

  “What do you mean? She’s beautiful. You’re beautiful!” he called to Mrs. Chin, who’d taken the red bean cakes and disappeared into the kitchen, where she was bustling with the plug-in tea kettle. “Does she really think I’m a bad artist?”

  “No more than she thinks she’s a bad cook when she apologizes for dinner. Can we see?”

  Sam turned the sketch pad to face us.

  “Oh, Sam,” Lydia breathed. “That’s gorgeous.”

  It was. No mistaking it was Lydia’s mother, every wrinkle and gray hair shown; but also a glow of energy, kindness, humor. She didn’t just look pretty. She looked absolutely captivating.

  I peered more closely. The drawing was exactly what it looked like; nothing violent or ugly hid in its shadows. “Sam,” I said. “That’s terrific. I didn’t know you did this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing? I told you I did portraits inside, of the other cons.”

  “Yes, you did. I just—”

  The doorbell buzzed before I could get my foot too far into my mouth. Lydia went to ask who it was, and to no one’s surprise the answer was, “Ellissa Cromley, who’s this?” Lydia didn’t answer, but she did buzz Cromley in.

  Cromley’s arrival would complicate the issue of how to tell Sam about Peter and Leslie, but he seemed to have forgotten his questions for now in his excitement about his drawing and the things he wanted to show Ellissa. I relaxed, thinking maybe now I’d have more time to figure out how to break it to him. I wasn’t prepared, therefore, when Lydia, having gone to the door to open it for Cromley, backed into the room with her hands up, keeping a distance from Cromley’s gun.

  41

  “Hi, Ellissa! Come see this—Wait. Ellissa? What are you doing? You don’t need that here, it’s not like at the studio.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “I’m getting tired of this shit.”

  “What shit? Get your hands up!” Ellissa barked.

  “It’s amazing. Even when you’re desperate you’re unoriginal.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s the third time today someone’s stood behind a gun she wasn’t going to use. And twice it was you.” Actually, I wasn’t sure Cromley wasn’t planning to use this one, and I was certain Leslie had had every intention of using hers. But planting the thought that it wasn’t going to happen seemed like a good idea.

  “Ellissa?” said Sam. “Come on, I want to show you some things.”

  “We have to go, Sam. You wait outside, and then I’ll come down soon and we’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Far away. Where you can paint anything you want and no one can bother you. I’ll take care of you.”

  “We can do that here. I can be in my studio and you can be in yours and we can visit and drink beer. That’s what artists do.”

  “No, we can’t. How can we? Now that they know. We have to go away.”

  “You mean Lydia and Smith, and they know who killed everyone? That’s right.” Sam turned to me. “You said you did and you said it wasn’t me. Who was it?”

  Both Sam and Cromley looked at me, he with absorbed interest, she with wide-eyed fear.

  I saw the light dawn in Lydia’s eyes the same moment I felt it dawn in mine.

  “It was three different people, Sam,” I said. “One of them was Ellissa. She’s the one who killed Tony.”

  Sam looked at Cromley. “Tony was my friend. Why would you kill him?”

  “Because Tony told her you’d killed Kimberly Pike,” I said. “He thought he had proof.”

  “He thought I killed her? So do I.”

  “You didn’t. Leslie did.”

  Cromley shook her head. “Sam killed her. I saw the photos.”

  “Wrong. Your Bo
nnie-and-Clyde fantasies aside, Sam’s not a serial killer.”

  “Neither were Bonnie and Clyde, dumbass! Tony’s photos—”

  “A frame. Leslie killed Pike and left Sam’s tie with her body. Tony photographed the scene and then took the tie. He fell for the frame, and so did you. He showed you those photos to torture you, didn’t he? Just to see what would happen.”

  “And he saw! He saw!” She looked at Sam. “He wasn’t your friend.”

  Sam said, “You killed him?”

  “He said, ‘Sam’s a killer! Look, see! They’re going to take him back to jail!’ He thought I’d fall apart. Idiot. I had my gun with me. You thought I was stupid for having two guns.” She sneered at me.

  “Of all the things I ever thought you were, I never thought you were stupid.”

  “I had the second one for insurance,” Ellissa continued. “In case some shit like you stole the other one. And I took it to Tony’s for insurance, too. But he had one, too! In the back of his jeans, like he was scared of me. Asshole!”

  “You had a gun,” Sam said. “Why shouldn’t he be scared of you?”

  Cromley didn’t react to the Sam-logic question. This was her moment in the sun. She’d done something that mattered, something that had a big impact, and she wasn’t going to let it go unnoticed.

  “As soon as I saw his gun,” she said, “I shot it out of his hand. I’m pretty good, you know. With all kinds of guns.” She waved her pistol to encompass Lydia, Sam, and me, as if daring us to test her. “He screamed! Big macho man! When he dropped the gun, I grabbed it and shot him with it. Right in the gut. The bastard. Then I thought for a minute, and shot his hand, too. And I dug my gun’s bullet out of the floor and picked up my shell casing. That’s called ‘policing your brass.’ ” She directed that, with a smirk, at me. “Then I erased the photos and took the memory card out of the camera. You see, Sam? I can take care of you. But we have to go away.”

  Sam stared at the carpet, his brow furrowed. Lifting a finger, he said, “Leslie killed that woman in the truck. But she wanted people to think it was me, so she put the tie there. Tony believed it, but he took the tie out. But he showed you the pictures with it. You got mad at him and killed him. Is that right?” Sam turned to me. “Smith, is that right?”