Three-Day Town

by Margaret Maron

  Ever since he wound up in the middle of a murder in a children’s dance theater, Roman’s quirky logic had often cast a new light on her cases. Summing up the sequence of events would clarify things for her as well. So she began with Deborah Knott’s phone call on Saturday and ended with finding the day man in one of those industrial-size trash bags, ready to be set out on the curb. Without mentioning Lundigren’s true gender, she described his wife’s kleptomania and psychological problems and her insistence that there was another thief in the building. “We’d begun to think he was both the other thief and the killer. Instead, he’s another victim.”

  “And the boy you thought was the victim is now your prime suspect?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Not one of the other workmen in the building?”

  “Sidney Jackson, the evening man, lives in Queens and was on duty during the party. He left before midnight and didn’t return till he was called to come in Sunday morning. He lives alone, but he gave us the name of the all-night deli where he stopped on the way home and the name of the café where he was eating breakfast when the call came. The night man, Jani Horvath, was there on Saturday night before the super was killed and he was there when Antoine Clarke was killed. He’s getting old and he says he immediately went to bed when Clarke relieved him. We haven’t confirmed either alibi yet, and we don’t have motives for them, although…”

  “Although what?” Tramegra asked, pouncing on her hesitation.

  “Horvath’s in his sixties and he had the day shift until shortly after Clarke was hired, when they switched shifts. It was supposed to be a mutually agreeable change. We’ve been told that tips are better on the day shift, but that there’s more work, more heavy lifting, and he has a bad back. Now I wonder whose idea it was to make the switch and whether Horvath really didn’t mind giving up the extra tips.”

  “What about the super’s wife?”

  “She could have followed him upstairs and smashed him with that bronze sculpture, but she was in the hospital when Clarke was killed and it’s a stretch to think we have two killers on our hands.”

  “Residents?”

  “No love lost between the super and the people who live in the apartment directly overhead. In fact they’re being evicted and blame the super. Unfortunately, they have a solid alibi for the time of the super’s death. So far, Corey Wall’s looking good for both murders. He needs money for gambling. He crashed the party and could have realized this was a good opportunity to loot a fresh apartment. Let’s say Lundigren caught him there, threatened to have him arrested. The boy hits him with the sculpture and runs out the service door. Either Antoine sees him leave or somehow figures it out. Next morning, when he starts down to go sledding, Antoine lets him know that the tables are turned. It could be a Mexican standoff—‘You turn me in for stealing, I’ll say you killed Phil’—or Antoine realizes that murder trumps larceny and tries to blackmail Corey, whereupon Corey kills him, panics, and stashes the body in one of those wheeled bins and hopes it won’t be found till he’s long gone. He’s just a kid, so it wasn’t well thought out. Both murders were probably unpremeditated impulses.”

  Tramegra frowned and topped off their glasses. “Not much mystery there,” he objected.

  “It’s not one of your novels,” Sigrid conceded. “But I’ve told you before, Roman. Real homicides are usually open and shut. Corey Wall will be picked up in the next few days. He’ll be charged and he will eventually be found guilty. It’s as simple as that. The only puzzle left is who took the sculpture, and we even have a possible for that.”

  Roman sniffed. “Maybe that’s how your case will end. I’ve just realized that the killer in my case is the least likely person. The dean’s secretary. She’s been in almost every scene, but no one’s paid her any attention because she’s homely and timid. She was tired of the dean flirting with all the honor students and he ignored her so completely that it was both insulting and a constant irritant.”

  Amused, Sigrid shook her head. “You got that out of our discussion?”

  “The subconscious works in mysterious ways,” he said airily. He poured the last of the wine into his own glass and rose. “I shall go write the chapter now while it’s still perfectly clear in my head.”

  Ready to tackle personal matters, Sigrid sat down at the computer in her bedroom. As near as she could figure it, New Zealand was about sixteen hours ahead of New York, which probably meant that it was tomorrow afternoon there. Happily, there was a note from Anne that had been sent only minutes before, which might signal that her mother still had her laptop on. She immediately sent a message: “You there? We need to talk.”

  Back came: “We were just on our way out for drinks. Whassup?”

  As concisely as possible, Sigrid repeated what Deborah Knott had told her and pressed the send button.

  While she waited for a reply, Sigrid looked at her own calendar. The long leave of absence she had taken after Nauman’s death had used up all of the time she had accumulated, but at the moment she had a new balance of thirty-four days.

  And Grandmother’s balance? Two months? Three?

  By the time she had brushed her teeth and was ready for bed, there was a final message from Anne: “We’ll see about changing our plane reservations first thing tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  … the refuse from them makes the streets appear unkempt and uncared for.

  —The New New York, 1909

  Upon leaving Elliott, Dwight and I decided it would be just as easy, and certainly a lot cheaper and quicker, to walk over to Seventh Avenue and take the subway uptown. Even though it was cold, cold, cold, the wind had died down for the moment and walking was not too unpleasant as long as we held on to each other and avoided the worst of the ice.

  The subway was half empty and we immediately found seats, but when we pulled into the Times Square stop several minutes later, Dwight suddenly grabbed my hand.

  “C’mon,” he said, and hurried me out of the train and up the steps into the neon exuberance of New York’s theater district.

  Most of the theaters are closed on Mondays, but those that were open were just letting out and the streets were thronged with people despite the bitter cold.

  Dwight smiled down into my dazzled eyes and waved his hand to encompass the whole display. “I got ’em to turn everything on just for you.”

  “Oh, Major Bryant!” I laughed and stood on tiptoes to kiss him. “You shouldn’t have!”

  Grinning happily at my country bumpkin delight and pleased with himself for thinking of it, he stationed himself by a light pole right where Seventh and Broadway intersect at West 42nd Street and I leaned into his comfortable bulk to enjoy the blinking lights, the waterfalls of cascading LEDs, the riotous colors, the eye-popping whites. Brilliant blues and pure yellows chased each other up the front of buildings and erupted in a gush of green at the top. Reds and oranges blazed across the electric billboards. Garish razzamatazz brilliance dazzled my eyes and intoxicated my senses. Except for Dwight’s strong arms around me, I would have gone reeling into the street, drunk with the explosion of flashing lights and color. It was Fourth of July fireworks without the bangs, a thousand overly decorated Christmas trees without the carols, and the perfect antidote for the sadness I felt for Sigrid and Mrs. Lattimore.

  “I want one of everything for our pond house,” I told him when I had looked my fill.

  “Dream on, kid.” He acts appalled by my desire for neon bar signs, and maybe he’s not pretending, but when we do get around to building some sort of screened structure next to the farm pond where we swim and fish in the summertime, I’m determined to wallpaper one side of it with the signs I’ve started collecting.

  We found a place where we could sit with a cup of coffee and watch people passing who seemed oblivious to the lights that blazed overhead. Eventually, we threaded our way over to the bus stop and trundled up Broadway to Columbus Circle and on past Lincoln Center, ablaze in
its own floodlights.

  We got off at our stop, and as we walked up the street to our building, I couldn’t help noticing all the bags of garbage piled along the curb and remembered that Phil Lundigren had told us that first night that pickups were on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.

  “If the porter hadn’t found Antoine’s body before it got loaded onto a garbage truck, it probably never would have been found,” Dwight said. “Just wound up in a landfill somewhere.”

  Sidney was standing inside the lobby when we got there and he held the inner door open for us. He looked drawn and less dapper than when we’d first met. The night man was seated in one of the lobby chairs.

  “Jani Horvath,” Sidney said, introducing us.

  Horvath was the oldest of the elevator men we had yet met, with thick white hair and an even thicker white mustache. He gave us a neutral look and nodded acknowledgment, but said nothing.

  Once inside the elevator, I asked, “Any word on the missing Wall boy?”

  “No, and his mother’s going crazy,” Sidney said heavily.

  Once we were on our way up, Sidney told us that the building was buzzing with fear and speculation. Two men dead and a teenage boy missing?

  “Half the people think Corey killed them both and the other half think one of the residents has turned into a homicidal maniac. They make me wait until they’ve unlocked their doors and got inside safely.” He shook his head in uncertainty. “I’m not really nervous, but it does get pretty deserted here after eleven on a weeknight. Jani’s feeling it, too. That’s why he’s up in the lobby instead of down in the basement. He’s not looking forward to his shift.”

  He stopped the elevator at the sixth floor and pulled back the brass gate. “If you don’t mind me asking, I saw you two leave with those detectives… they don’t really think Corey killed Antoine, do they?”

  “They won’t know till they talk to him,” Dwight said.

  “I hear he was blackmailing Antoine because Antoine killed Phil, but that’s crazy. He’s just a kid. I’ve known him since he was in his stroller. He’s no killer.”

  “Then why’d he run?”

  “Because he’s scared?”

  “If he’s scared, why doesn’t he go to the police? Or call his parents?”

  Sidney’s slender shoulders drooped. “Yeah. That’s what I keep asking myself, too.”

  While Dwight brushed and flossed, I checked my email. There were routine messages from friends and colleagues and six or eight messages from the nieces and nephews. Emma wrote that their mother was taking it better than they had expected. Barbara totally believed Lee but had ruled that he couldn’t post anything else on his Facebook page until it was shown who was responsible for that suggestive picture.

  I clicked over to the site and saw that Lee had written in all caps: SUSPENDED UNTIL I FIND OUT WHO HACKED ME.

  Ashley said she believed him, too, but she didn’t want to go out with him again and had given him back his FFA jacket.

  They had questioned Jamie Benton and Mark McLamb, who had the adjoining lockers, and the freshman girl who had the locker below his. They believed the girl when she claimed to have seen nothing—“She’s a clueless freshman, for Pete’s sake,” wrote seventeen-year-old cousin Jessica, a junior—but they were convinced the two boys knew more than they were saying. They reported, only half facetiously, that they had even examined Lee’s locker with a flashlight (à la CSI) and a magnifying glass (à la Sherlock Holmes) and found no sign of tampering with screwdriver or hacksaw.

  A.K., eighteen and a senior, thought perhaps someone had switched locks, substituting his own for Lee’s, but Lee insisted he had opened the lock with his own combination both before and after his lunch period and both times he had relocked it and twirled the dial on the lock.

  One thing Lee did say was that he now believed someone had opened his locker and gone through his things a time or two before. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different. I thought I was getting absentminded, but maybe I wasn’t.”

  The subject of their last email of the evening was “News Flash.” Emma wrote that she’d just learned that Jamie Benton had asked Ashley out right before she and Lee started going together. “More tomorrow.”

  Dwight joined me on the bed and I passed my laptop over to him to let him check his mail while I went through my own bedtime routine.

  When I returned, Dwight turned the screen around so I could read Cal’s message.

  “Aunt Kate took me over to Granddaddy’s to see Bandit and then she let me bring him back with me. Trooper’s mean to him and growls a lot. He hopes Saturday gets here fast.” It was signed with a full line of X’s and O’s.

  Kate had written, “Trooper does snarl every time he sees Bandit, but Cal’s getting homesick for you two so I thought it would help to have his dog here. He’s asleep now with his arms around Bandit.”

  “That was nice of her,” I said. Truth to tell, I was starting to miss Cal, too.

  We turned off the lights and lay awake a few minutes trying to decide what we wanted to do next day. For Christmas, Dwight’s mother had given us mock tickets to a Broadway play and a check large enough to buy real tickets, but we hadn’t decided what we wanted to see. Comedy or drama?

  “Nothing too heavy,” Dwight said sleepily.

  “Musical?” I asked.

  He yawned. “Anything except Mamma Mia! Okay?”

  “We could just go down to the TKTS booth and toss a dart at the list,” I said, but he was gone.

  I should have been sleepy, too. I was sleepy, but even though I nestled in next to Dwight, I couldn’t seem to turn my brain off. I kept thinking about Lee and how someone seemed to be getting into his locker at will. If Emma was right, if the Benton boy was the one who did it, he might be afraid to admit it. Not only was Jenny Benton overprotective, she also had a wide streak of prudery. She would probably be horrified to think that her son had any idea what a girl’s nude anatomy looked like. If he did it, was it because he was jealous of Lee or was it simply an adolescent joke?

  Like Corey Wall taking the elevator when it was left unattended?

  The digital clock beside the bed clicked from 11:45 to 11:46. When it hit 11:53, I slipped out of bed. No need to switch on any lamps; the reflected glow from outside was more than enough to let me navigate the rooms. I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but I wasn’t really hungry and none of the little boxes or packets tempted me. Instead, I poured myself half a glass of wine from the opened bottle on the counter and wandered back to the living room. Too cold to go out onto the balcony, but I stood by the French doors that let me see a small sliver of upper Broadway where traffic had dwindled to a few cars and cabs.

  The street below me seemed almost as deserted as the lanes that crisscross the farm back home, yet even as I watched, a cab slowed to a stop in front of the building across the way. I moved to the dining room window for an unobstructed look and saw a couple emerge from the cab. The woman wore an evening cape and a long gown. With his back to me, I couldn’t tell if the man was wearing a tux underneath his overcoat, but that was certainly a white silk scarf draped around his neck. Fred and Ginger home from a formal party?

  I was amused by the juxtaposition of elegance and ugliness as he helped her from the cab. The space immediately out front was clear enough for her high heels and his patent leather shoes, but dirty snow still lined the curbs on either side of the polished glass door and large black bags of garbage were piled atop the snow by the service entrances of all the buildings from one end of the street to the other. I counted six bags from this building alone. Trying to multiply the garbage on this one street by the number of streets in the city numbed my brain. I sipped my wine and I wondered how many trucks it would take every day and what did they do with so much trash? Where was it all dumped? Or was it incinerated?

  I vaguely remembered that when I’d lived here with Lev a million years ago, there had been controversy over landf
ills in the Brooklyn marshes, but surely they had long since reached capacity?

  And why was I standing here in the middle of the night wondering about New York’s garbage?

  My glass was empty but I still wasn’t sleepy. Okay, another half glass ought to do it, I decided.

  When I returned to the window, I saw a figure turn the corner onto Broadway. A moment later, the man on duty across the way stepped out onto the sidewalk and flexed his arms as if to get the stiffness out. He seemed to be waiting for something, and sure enough, down the block from West End Avenue came a slender dark-haired woman with a beagle on a leash. She paused to toss a small bag onto their pile of garbage, then the night man held the door for them and followed them back inside.

  One thing about living in the country, you don’t have to walk your dog and you don’t have to pick up after it.

  A cab moved slowly down the street, its headlights bouncing off the shiny trash bags and making the sidewalks sparkle as if dusted by glitter. Glassphalt. Made from recycled glass. Before I could start trying to estimate how much waste glass the city must generate, I finished my wine and went back to bed.

  Just before I fell asleep, I found myself remembering Lee’s comment that he thought someone had been in his locker before today. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different,” he had written.

  Right. Thinking of how messy my own high school locker had been, I yawned and drifted off wondering how he could possibly tell.

  It was still dark and the digital clock read 6:23 when I opened my eyes. I lay there quietly for a moment trying to grasp why I was awake. It was almost as if I had heard Lee’s voice say, “Things look a little different.”

  Huh?

  I closed my eyes and was almost asleep again when it finally registered.

  Quietly, so as not to wake Dwight, I got up and went back to the living room. Without switching on any lights, I went straight to the window, looked out, and saw that I was right.