Judgement Day

by Andrew Neiderman

  Stoker slipped away, clinging to the shadows, and didn’t even look back.

  The scene shrank into a pinhole and disappeared in the mirror.

  Funny, how he remembered the details of this hit more vividly than the others. Was that a sign of something? Could he have a conscience, after all?

  He turned on the shower. It took a damn two full minutes to run warm enough to get into it.

  “Why the hell do you stay in this hell hole?” he asked himself. In the shower, he muttered and complained to himself about other details in his life. His complaints were flowing as fast as the water, a constant stream of regrets and accusations that went as far back as the day he was born. At this point, it had become at least a weekly chant.

  “You know, you’re fucking crazy,” Tanya said, getting in beside him. “I mean that literally,” she added, reaching for his dick. “You fuck like crazy.”

  He laughed. The sound of it reminded him of something: the laugh he had heard in his sleep.

  The laugh that had woken him.

  It came from somewhere deep inside him . . . very deep inside him, and it wasn’t his laugh, either. It was as if there was someone else in there, someone else laughing and mumbling a stream of raucous thoughts, the stuff of which nightmares were made.

  He wanted to squeeze and squeeze himself until all of it oozed out of his ears, mouth, and nose and left him as white as a sheet flapping in the wind.

  2

  Lieutenant Matthew Blake paused just inside the doorway of Warner and Sheila Murphy’s apartment and closed his eyes immediately. His body swayed a little. He seemed to be saying a silent prayer. Detective John Fish nearly walked into him. He had gotten out of the elevator and followed Blake but had his head down, thinking about the building’s layout and security system.

  From what they already had determined by viewing recorded video of the lobby taken just before Warner Murphy’s death, no one had entered the building other than receptionist Charlie Bivens, coming to replace the night receptionist. The mailman hadn’t arrived yet, and the only people visible were residents leaving the property. The only anomaly was a five-second blackout on the lobby that Bivens said was related to the computer shifting tracks. When measured against everything else, it didn’t seem significant.

  Fish so wanted to impress Lieutenant Blake with some new idea, lead, or brilliant insight, from the moment he had been assigned to partner with him two weeks ago. In the NYPD, Matthew Blake was as famous as Sherlock Holmes when it came to his determination to solve crimes and bring down the evil that occurred in New York City. Fish knew that Matthew Blake had turned down promotions that would take him off the streets. Obviously, he enjoyed the work and the contact with people—oddly enough, especially with victims. It didn’t take Fish long to realize that Blake had a passion for solving crimes and bringing some closure to those who had suffered a loss. Other members of the department said that Saint Matthew, as they called him, had a religious fervor about solving crimes. They warned Fish that Saint Matthew kept a maddening pace.

  Blake’s last partner, Peter Thomas, was a career man who had reached retirement age and opted for it, even though no one was pressuring him to step aside. All Fish knew was that something dramatic had recently occurred, and although he wouldn’t admit it, it spooked him. Some claimed he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He wasn’t burned out. He was more like someone who wanted to leave through the fire escape and not the front door.

  Lieutenant Blake wouldn’t talk about it. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t talk about anything personal relating to other members of the division. Sometimes it seemed as if he believed he was in a special division of his own.

  Whatever his problems are, Fish had thought when he heard about Thomas’s abrupt departure, it doesn’t really matter to me. One man’s problem is another man’s opportunity, or we wouldn’t have doctors and lawyers, he had concluded gleefully. And opportunity, despite all the progress and inroads, was still not as available for African Americans, or it came at a much slower pace. He thought it but would never voice it. Whiners and complainers didn’t win much sympathy in a world where the ugliest actions of humanity were too often seen. There was too much other injustice.

  He nodded at the patrolman standing guard outside the door, who was also looking curiously at Lieutenant Blake. The long pause registered like a piano out of tune. It actually spooked him a little.

  Blake seemed to shudder. He still hesitated. Both he and Fish had put on their plastic gloves and covered their shoes. A forensics team was on its way. It didn’t surprise Fish that they had beaten them to the apartment. The body had been taken to the morgue, and it was an unusually busy morning: two definite homicides, an armed robbery, and two rapes before noon in their precinct. Blake had muttered that it seemed it was raining down on them today, as if evil came in storm waves like the weather. He sounded as if he literally meant it. He’d even looked up as if he expected to see some unusual dark cloud hovering over the city.

  “Something wrong, Lieutenant?” Fish asked. Blake turned and looked at him as if he had just said the dumbest thing uttered anywhere, anytime. “I mean . . .”

  “Relax, Fish. It’s not going away.”

  “What?”

  “The homicide,” Blake said, nodding at the inside of the apartment.

  “We don’t know yet that it’s a homicide,” Fish offered meekly. “Do we, Lieutenant? If anything, on first look, it seems like suicide.” Did I miss something? Fish wondered.

  Blake glanced at him again, this time with a stone-cold expression. “Taking your own life is still a homicide,” he replied, and finally stepped into the apartment. Fish shrugged at the patrolman, who looked a little uncomfortable, to say the least, and then followed Blake in.

  Anyone listening to the tone in his voice and seeing the expression on his face might think Lieutenant Matthew Blake had resented John Fish for replacing Peter Thomas, but from what Fish had experienced so far, he wasn’t prepared to say that Blake was hesitant about accepting him at his side. Admittedly, he wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it. If Fish could characterize it at all, it would be as an expression of indifference. It was as if it didn’t matter much if Fish or anyone else were there, in Blake’s view of things. He could almost hear him thinking the same word he had thought when he was told about Peter Thomas: Whatever.

  Fish wondered if Blake had even read his résumé. The quality or experience of the proposed partner seemed to be of no concern. It was like putting another handkerchief in your pocket to replace the one that had been lost or was in the laundry.

  Other officers in the division had already briefed Fish about Blake. Despite his success, there was something about him that irked many of them. When they referred to him as Saint Matthew, it sounded derogatory. They almost had Fish reconsidering whether it really was an opportunity to be partnered with him, despite his stellar record. No one could explain it in any terms that made sense to him. The closest anyone came, and it was sort of ridiculous, was Deputy Inspector Cullen telling him, “Blake has some psychic powers. It’s not what you would call hunches or even a sixth sense. He seems plugged into something the rest of us aren’t.

  “But it hasn’t hurt anyone,” he’d quickly added. “You just wonder what the hell he does for excitement. The guy’s thirty-four. He’s not gay—he hasn’t been involved with any man, but he hasn’t been involved with any woman for the last four years, either, as far as I know. The man lives and breathes the job. He’s the best example of a police vampire, someone who feeds on crime day or night. That’s what Thomas used to say. He’d swear the man never sleeps. So get whatever sleep you can.”

  “We checked the video replay, Lieutenant,” Fish offered now, right after they had entered the apartment. “No nonresident can use the elevator without the receptionist greenlighting it at the approval of a tenant, and all tenants have a special elevator key, no matter what floor they are on. The receptionist claims that he didn’t unlock the elevat
or for any guest before Murphy plunged to his death. He has to activate the button for the floor of the specific tenant they want to visit after the tenant approves them.” Fish checked off the points on his pad as Blake turned slowly and studied the apartment before looking back at him. “We viewed the tape to confirm what he said.”

  Blake knew all that.

  Fish was still impressed with the building’s security system. “Never seen such security. It’s more like a maximum-security prison.”

  He looked up, expecting at least a nod. Blake was six foot two, broad-shouldered but lean and hard. He always walked with a steely spine and sat erect, head high. Fish hadn’t been with him that long, but he had never seen him slouch. In fact, he never looked tired or bored. His energy was always under control. He reeked of efficiency, which only made Fish more self-conscious about himself. At five foot eleven and a half and nearly one hundred ninety pounds, Fish wasn’t insecure, but there was just something about Lieutenant Blake that made him feel smaller—even dreadfully inexperienced—when he was beside him. Suddenly, he was walking straighter and was sucking in his stomach. He made a mental note to get himself to the gym more often.

  But Blake’s most striking feature was his eyes. He had extraordinary piercing green eyes; when he fixed them on someone, he seemed to look beneath that person’s skin and into his or her very brain. Fish had learned that Blake was a master at interrogation. The hardest suspects acted as if he made their skin crawl and not vice versa.

  “He has instincts that ain’t been discovered yet,” Cullen had added to his description. It wasn’t really a critical analysis. His voice was full of admiration, even some envy, Fish recalled. Actually, in the end, it reinforced his desire to be Blake’s partner. So Lieutenant Blake worked hard and sincerely cared about victims of crime. So what? We should all work harder and have compassion, he thought. He was confident that he would learn many things while working with Blake, things he didn’t know or, more important, didn’t realize that he didn’t know.

  “We checked the service entrance video, too, and no one entered that way all morning. I mean, what are you thinking?” Fish continued when Blake didn’t even nod. “If there is a perp, he lives in the building?”

  Blake’s dark red eyebrows lifted. Fish thought it meant he had made a good suggestion. Finally. “Possibly,” Blake said. “Although . . . it feels like something else, Fish.”

  What the hell did that mean? Fish gazed around. Feels like something else? Nothing was disturbed in the luxurious apartment. It looked as if it had just been cleaned. Everything was neat and organized. There wasn’t even a magazine out of place. It was a showcase.

  He ran what they knew through his mind. Once Murphy’s wife had been notified of his death, she had not returned to the apartment. She had passed out and was taken to the hospital emergency room. Their daughter had been picked up by Sheila Murphy’s parents and was with them at the hospital or at their Manhattan apartment by now. So no one else had been in this apartment since the death. What was it that gave Blake the idea that it was something more?

  “What am I missing, Lieutenant? Why does it feel like something more?”

  “Coincidence,” Blake said.

  “Coincidence? What coincidence?”

  Blake didn’t answer. He walked slowly through the apartment to the still opened patio door, so slowly that it was as if he were tracing steps only he could see. He paused at the door, looked back at Fish, and then stepped out onto the patio. For a while, he just stood looking out at the city.

  Fish approached him, standing just inside. He was a little acrophobic, maybe because at the age of five, he fell out a first-floor window. Even though he had landed on a bed of newly piled leaves, it still had been terrifying. Your home was supposed to be a vessel of safety.

  “You know what always bugs me about all this, John?” Blake said, still looking out at the city, his voice taking on an entirely new tone, more like that of a young man in a state of wonder.

  “What?”

  “That no matter how terrible the incident is, whatever we’re investigating, the city goes on as if nothing’s changed. There’s barely a hiccup. It’s like it glances at the crime, the victims, and then turns back to whatever . . . I mean, except for the families of the victims and sometimes close friends, no one seems to notice crime. Oh, we have the cable networks concentrating on some horrendous act ad infinitum, but that’s almost become nothing more than another TV show to capture ratings. Makes it all pretty impersonal. Unreal.

  “That receptionist downstairs, for example,” he continued, “probably knew Murphy well enough to be a little disturbed and upset enough to bring up his breakfast when he saw him splattered on a car roof, but he’s going to have his lunch and dinner and do whatever he does as if nothing’s changed today. Maybe that’s why evil has the upper hand.”

  Fish just stared. Was he supposed to contribute to this philosophical rant?

  Blake looked at him. “Ever think about any of this, Fish?” he asked.

  “Not like that,” Fish said. “I suppose . . . you’re right,” he added, but he wasn’t sure what Blake was right about.

  Blake nodded and studied the railing. Then he touched it, and Fish saw him close his eyes as if he were trying to draw up a vision. Was this what Cullen meant when he said he was plugged into something the rest of them weren’t?

  It was weird, all right. Fish couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable. He looked back to see if the officer at the door was watching. He wasn’t.

  “He was struggling,” Blake said. “But we don’t have to wait for forensics. Check this out.”

  He looked back when Fish hesitated, so Fish moved quickly onto the patio and looked at the railing. What the hell was he supposed to see? He shook his head. “There’s nothing unusual there. It looks recently polished.”

  “Exactly,” Blake said. “No scuff marks, no sign of any shoes on these rungs. They’re pretty clean. He didn’t climb up and over. This railing is too high for someone to accidentally fall over it. Even a man that tall would have to work at it a little.”

  “So you think he was thrown over?”

  Blake continued to look out as if the answer was in the sky or something.

  “He is . . . was a pretty big guy,” Fish added. “Not the easiest man to heave over a railing this high.”

  “Exactly. Whoever did this had to lift him at least six feet or so. Imagine what such a man might look like.” Blake looked around the patio and back at the door. “There’s no sign of a struggle in this part of the apartment and nothing out here. No bleeding, nothing. It’s all pristine,” he said. “But he was thrown over,” he insisted. “He was drawn to the patio or forced to it some way, without disturbing a thread on the furniture in that living room. What happened to him had to have the element of surprise.”

  Fish nodded. At the moment, he couldn’t think of any reason not to agree. “What did you mean back there when you said ‘coincidence’?”

  “Before you came on, Peter and I investigated a murder about a dozen blocks from here. We made an arrest. The trial is supposed to be held next month.”

  “So?”

  “This victim, Warner Murphy, was the defendant’s attorney.”

  Fish just stared for a moment and then shook his head. “That’s amazing, but what’s one thing have to do with another? Unless you think the district attorney was afraid he’d lose the case because of this Murphy and had him killed. You don’t think that, do you?” He didn’t mean to sound facetious, but it came out that way. “I mean, I suppose someone who liked or even loved the victim hated Warner Murphy for defending the accused killer, but . . .”

  “I don’t know what to think yet, Fish, but what I’ve learned in life is that there’s no such thing as a coincidence.”

  Fish didn’t want to disagree, but Blake wasn’t making any sense to him. “Well, if you suspect something foul, I guess we should start on the other residents. See who knew him and who didn�
��t.”

  “Yeah,” Blake said. He shook his head. “But I don’t think it will lead to anything.”

  How the hell does he know that? Fish thought. “Why not? We’ve pretty much established that no one came up here through the lobby. If you think he was murdered, it has to be someone already in the building, doesn’t it? Who else could get up to this floor? They’d have to slip past the receptionist and the CCTV and have that special elevator key. I’ll review the video of the elevators. I guess another resident could have used the stairway.”

  “Maybe,” Blake said, but he still didn’t sound as if he believed even in the possibility.

  “Well . . .”

  Blake turned as if he had just remembered Fish was there. “Go on. Check it all out. I’m going to dig around at his law firm and later see if I can talk to his in-laws and maybe his wife at the hospital, although that might have to wait. Call me if you come across anything interesting.”

  “Right.”

  Blake started out and then stopped and suddenly began to look at everything more closely. He went into both bedrooms and the kitchen and the dining room before joining Fish, who waited in the entryway.

  “What?” Fish asked. Blake had a look on his face that suggested he had discovered something. “Were there signs of some struggle in another room?”

  “No. But there’s not a religious icon hanging on any wall in this house or on any shelf, not a cross, nothing,” he said.

  “Maybe they wear them around their necks. I do,” he said, showing his cross.

  “I don’t think so,” Blake said. “I suspect religion is not important to them.”

  “Not unusual these days, Lieutenant. At least, not organized religion.”

  “No, not unusual.”

  Then why mention it at all? Fish thought but didn’t say. What did that have to do with the man’s death, anyway? He wanted to ask but couldn’t. Blake was already out the door, as if he had stumbled on a hot lead, and for the life of him, Fish couldn’t think of anything even remotely resembling one.