A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  “Hey, stop!”

  And Leonard could feel the spray as it was released into his hair. He could feel it dripping down his neck, and he could tell even then that it was stinging a little. Just don’t put your hand up there and wipe your eyes. He ran toward the open window, leaping over the radiator and slipping out.

  “Stop! Come back here!” The cop, in his weak and soft way, was demanding compliance. Now Leonard was out in the dark, and nowadays no cop was dumb enough to try to stop someone running away by pulling out his gun and firing. All Leonard had to do was get out.

  The fence to his left was maybe six feet tall. On a good day it wouldn’t be a problem. He leapt for it and grabbed the top. The pepper spray had dripped down onto his back, through his jacket. It felt like he had a sunburn across his shoulders and down his spine. As he lowered himself in the next yard, this one neat and manicured, he saw a light go on inside the house. The neighbors would be calling the police now, for sure. Through the yard and over another fence, Leonard left a trail of pepper spray. Then again, and into the next one. Behind him the cop, the neighbors, were all already looking for him. The last three fences were only waist high, and he was able to hop them quickly. He flipped the last one and landed in the parking lot. He was in the clear. He passed the parked cars in a hurry and skipped toward the subway.

  Mulino would not have his back on this one. The detective believed in protocol and the chain of command. There was only one person who might take him in, who might understand. It meant spilling more than a few secrets. But that was okay with Leonard now. He slipped into the subway. A train pulled in and he dashed inside. It would be only a few minutes now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  As Detective Peralta made her way through the lobby of 80 Smithdale again, it was just as quiet as the first time. The front door was still unsecured. But the place had been cleaned up. The detritus spilling out past the doors and mailboxes had been swept. If the lobby wasn’t clean, exactly, it was empty. That was a surprise. It had been only two days. When you run a slum-for-profit, you don’t waste money on sanitation. The trash left in the lobby gets cleaned up when the rats eat it, and the rats get cleaned up by eventually eating each other. Even the speckled floor had something of a shine to it. Like maybe it had even been mopped. The main reason a slumlord would mop a lobby is that someone had died and he was cleaning up the new rental for the first and last time ever.

  But 80 Smithdale wasn’t even a rental building; the residents were forced there and the city was picking up the tab. That left the other reason to clean up. The landlord was expecting a visit from a housing inspector and had to hide what he had been doing for the last six years. Or he was expecting a visit from the police. Detective Peralta put her hand down to her waist, making sure her gun was where she expected it to be. Not enough of a worry to unholster it. But she wasn’t in uniform, and you never know. She reached inside her sweatshirt and tugged out her shield.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. At least that hadn’t changed. No doors in this building were open to strangers. Even less so to cops. When someone asks for help enough times and ends up being shuttled into a rat-infested pit without electricity, with a quarter of the living room ceiling in a state of collapse, she doesn’t think people are coming to help her anymore. Whoever lived in this building had been screwed over so many times by the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and the Department of Buildings that the Police Department appeared as just one more incompetent mob. Peralta didn’t bear a grudge. But she wasn’t about to cut power cables to get someone’s attention again. That had only barely worked out okay last time.

  She had some real information on Robert Armstrong now. Leonard Mitchell had given her his date of birth, his home address, and the fact that he managed the slum. But she didn’t want to barge in on him in his house in Sheepshead Bay without a little more. She didn’t have a warrant. If he didn’t want to open the door there was nothing more that she could do. So before leaving OCCB she had stopped and done what she should have done to begin with. She ran his name through the Booking, Arrests, and Dispositions System. BADS. Anyone who was up to something serious now had likely been up to something less serious once upon a time.

  Turns out he had been arrested but never charged with a credit card scheme about ten years ago. Not enough to tie him in to anything now. Innocent until proven guilty, and for reasons that the database couldn’t tell her, the PD or the DA or someone had figured they couldn’t make the case. But he had been booked, which meant he had been fingerprinted and photographed. Which meant that Detective Peralta could print his mugshot and bring it to 80 Smithdale. If her friend Evangeline could give her a positive ID, that would be enough for a warrant.

  The picture was ten years old, of course, but it was the kind of face that probably didn’t look much different now. Armstrong’s eyes were set deep and very dark; his cheeks were sharp and his chin was soft. In the photo, his hair was just about half gray, still neatly parted and sprayed in place. His narrow, crisp eyebrows hadn’t grayed yet. He wore a suit. That meant that he had probably turned himself in. Planned his morning and showed up with a lawyer and gotten photographed with a thin little smile. Probably walked in and out of the precinct on the same day, released on recognizance and never spent ten minutes in custody.

  Peralta turned the corner up the stairway to the second floor. It had been cleaned too. Peralta wasn’t afraid, exactly, but it was unnerving to know that someone had been through the building. Sweeping and scrubbing and then getting the hell out. At the top of the stairwell, she looked into the air shaft where Manny Reeves had fallen. That pile of trash was still there. Nobody’s perfect. There were still power cords in the hallway running under the doors. Sending someone by to clean the hallways was one thing. Getting the dead sockets fixed would have taken real work. Peralta stopped at Evangeline’s door and knocked.

  “Evangeline? It’s Detective Peralta. You spoke to me the other day.”

  Silence behind the door. Peralta didn’t blame anyone in the building for keeping her door closed to strangers. She would have done the same. But she really wanted to speak with this woman.

  “Evangeline? We spoke the other day? I have some more questions for you. I have a picture for you to look at.”

  Peralta could hear a rustling now behind the closed door. Someone was in there. Peralta remembered being inside Evangeline’s apartment: it was neat, and you could find your way to the door in a hurry. It wasn’t like the guy upstairs. Evangeline would not have to climb over a pile of abandoned paper and forgotten clothing to answer. Inside, it had been just like any other apartment. But that didn’t mean that Evangeline lived free from fear. And it didn’t mean that she would open wide for a detective, even one who had been here before.

  Footsteps. Evangeline was right behind the door. The door was thin and cheap and Peralta could hear her straight through it.

  “Detective.”

  “Evangeline, can you let me in?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What happened? The building’s been cleaned up.”

  “The trash got cleaned up. The building is the same as ever. Maybe worse.”

  Peralta looked up and down the hallway. There was no one there. A clean, empty hall with a few thick orange extension cords running across it. There was no reason Peralta could think of for Evangeline to keep her out.

  “Let me in. I have a photo to show you.”

  “I’m sorry, Detective. I don’t know when they might come back. You don’t know what they’ll do if they see me talking to you. I told you everything I could.”

  “They can’t do anything to you while I’m here. I can protect you.”

  “But at some point, Detective, you’re going to leave. You can’t be here all day and all night.”

  Whoever had come by had done more than clean the hallways and lobby. They had issued a warning. They had injected an extra dose of fear into
a building that was already brimming with it. They had reminded everyone that someone had been found basically dead in this building four days ago, and it wasn’t as though it was on the front page of the papers. It wasn’t as though the city cared very much about some stranger falling down an air shaft somewhere out in Flatbush. And if they didn’t care the first time, then why would they care the next?

  Peralta breathed out. She reached into her pocket and took out the piece of paper. She had folded it twice, neatly. She didn’t like to carry a bag or a backpack, anything that might slow her down. She didn’t need the full gun belt with a flashlight, pepper spray, and a memo book. She had a pair of slacks with a pocket big enough for her notebook. With the notebook and her handgun, she was good to go anywhere. The sweatshirt hung low enough so that most people couldn’t see the gun, or the notebook for that matter. She unfolded the printout of the mugshot. She knelt on the tile and slid it underneath the door. She whispered.

  “Evangeline, do you recognize this man? When you saw someone last week walking upstairs. Was this him?”

  Silence on the other side of the door. Peralta worried for a minute that Evangeline would take the picture. That she’d be afraid to be caught with it in her apartment, and that she’d shred or burn it. Peralta stood up. She leaned back into the door again.

  “Evangeline?”

  There was the slightest sound from behind the door. Evangeline wasn’t speaking, but she was doing something. There were footsteps. There was the sound of tapping, scratching maybe. Peralta was not naturally patient: the wait from behind the door was interminable. She was ready to try to force the handle of the door when the paper slid back out again, and the voice along with it.

  “Now go away. Leave me alone. I’ll manage much better without you.”

  Peralta crouched over and picked up the paper. It had been unfolded, written on, and folded again. She stood and opened it. Across the bottom of the page, below the mugshot, Evangeline had written two words in neat, formal script: “That’s Him.”

  “Thank you, Evangeline.”

  But there was no answer from the door. The woman had already returned to her tea, her business, and her fear. Peralta made her way back to the stairs and out of the building. She had enough now. It was late, but that was on her side as well. The man was likely to be home. As she stepped out into the dark autumn night, Detective Peralta took a deep breath. Leonard and Mulino were still trying to find the missing boy. The homicide detectives were busy railroading an innocent man. She was the only one pursuing Robert Armstrong. She was about to solve a murder all on her own. And she was ready.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Eleanor Hill turned the stack of paper to its side. She clicked it level on her desk. At night, with no secretaries around, everyone is her own assistant. After six hours of writing and two hours of review, the packet was complete for the closing in the morning. That meant having it ready to go last thing at night. As the only one left in her office, Eleanor would have to copy and staple and collate the whole thing and leave it on her secretary’s desk for the morning. But it was all worthwhile, because after next week, she would be all square with her father and she could go back to running her business.

  It had taken her a few days to put the idea together, but now it was ready. She had lured in the outside investors. They had come up with the astronomical number that her accountant told her she had to pay out. Her father might not hold her strictly to the deadline, but he wouldn’t give her too much slack. So it was worth the time in the office, going over the bid, running through the numbers for the fourth or the fifth time. It was a funny world, real estate, where the best way to collect a bunch of cash was to go into even greater debt. But Eleanor was long used to that.

  She collected the paper and stepped out of her office into the severe glass hallway. As she turned right, toward the copy room, she heard a sound behind her and froze. A smooth click; the elevator had opened around the corner. It was almost ten. The last employee had left by five-thirty. Janitorial had come and gone before eight. By this time, there wasn’t even a night guard downstairs at the desk. You’d have to swipe in to the building and the elevator both. She turned, her back against the hallway. Someone would be turning that corner in only a few seconds. Copying the bid papers would have to wait, but she wasn’t about to drop them on the floor. And it wasn’t as though she kept a gun in the office. She reached her free hand into her pocket for her phone. She had been raised not to call the police. Once they show up, they follow their own rules. But she wanted to be ready to call somebody.

  As soon as she saw what was turning the corner, she knew she wasn’t going to need to call anyone after all. At least not yet. A thin white guy in a torn suit stumbled out of the elevator and toward her. Leonard Mitchell was a wreck. His pants were a mess, his shoes were thick with mud, and his coat and hands were drenched in an ocher oil that Eleanor recognized as pepper spray. If he touched his eyes, he would start convulsing in pain.

  “Eleanor. I need your help.”

  How many times did she hear that in a week? “You need to clean up.”

  “The police are after me.”

  That was the last thing she needed, to start harboring a white guy in a suit from the police. As soon as they found him, she’d somehow be the one under arrest and he’d be getting a medal for turning her in. “Before you say anything else, Leonard, go down the hall to the bathroom. Wash your hands. Get the pepper spray off of them. Take off your jacket. If you get that in your eyes there is going to be nothing I can do for you.”

  Leonard nodded and turned. So much for hiring someone who was going to keep the place quiet. So much for making up for last summer. She had never imagined, when she started her business, how many problems would be caused by her own staff. She had been prepared to negotiate hard with sellers, with contractors, and even with the construction unions. She hadn’t realized that every person she put on payroll was a potential thief, that her office administrator might be a mole for her competition.

  It had been eye-opening, last summer, when the law firm had finally told her how much damage Robert Armstrong had done to her company. And over the past few days, she had learned that even then she had been, if anything, too soft. She had forgiven Wade Valiant. She had given him another chance. But Armstrong, or whoever was working with him, obviously hadn’t. And now this.

  Leonard came out from the bathroom. He had soaked his hands and scrubbed off the pepper spray. His face was clean but his hair was matted wild past his ears. His suit would never recover. His shoes were a waste. She would need to have the carpet cleaned. The easiest thing would be to fire him and kick him to the street. Let the cops deal with him. But the lessons of her father were too ingrained for that. Still, she didn’t put down the phone.

  “So what happened?”

  “I have to go back a little.” And he did. He had been working, he told her, with a cop. The detective investigating Wade Valiant’s death. The supervisor, not the screwballs who had showed up at her father’s church. Her last deputy had been a thief, and this one was a spy. Looking into her transactions, her deals, to see if there was any reason she would want to murder a construction worker, one who was a shop steward to boot. Maybe her motive was to end up in the papers as an unsafe business, delay putting her building up, and pay a death benefit to a union fund that would eventually go to political candidates who wanted to shut her down. The right kind of cops could come up with a theory for anything.

  “What makes you think I would want to murder my own employees?”

  “Someone you knew might. Or someone you dealt with. Because his death began to look very quickly like it wasn’t an accident. You know that.”

  This much was true. And she had held back this much too. After all, why wouldn’t she? The police could issue a report blaming the inspector at the Department of Buildings. She wasn’t about to call them up and tell them about Robert Armstrong. She wasn’t about to guess whether someone she had fired
for stealing from her company maybe wanted to do in his accomplice. That simply wasn’t good for business. It was a lesson learned, but a quiet one.

  “I know about Robert Armstrong.”

  Eleanor gripped her phone. He really had been snooping. He must have been reading year-old emails to find out what had happened with Armstrong. And that meant that he knew Armstrong’s connection to Valiant. Which meant he might have put together her own suspicions. She held still. She spoke softly. You are always more powerful when you speak slowly and softly.

  “Okay.”

  “He was stealing from you. And Valiant was helping.”

  “I’m aware of that. That’s why we got rid of him.”

  “But that’s not all of it. Right? Because you don’t actually make money here by putting up buildings. You put up buildings for show. You make money by swapping one piece of land back and forth with your friends until it actually costs too much to develop. And then you sell it to someone who doesn’t know any better. And they get stuck with it.”

  So he knew. Eleanor had made plenty of money on a couple of townhouse flips back when she started. And sometimes you could sell and re-sell the same lot, taking a cut each time, and it would still be a steal in the hands of the last developer. But the easiest way to make money is to sell something for more than it is worth. And when you learn the contours of real estate in Brooklyn, pretty soon you learn that there are a lot of people out there willing to pay more for land than it is worth. And why shouldn’t you let them? If a Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund wants to pay double the market price for a plot of land in Brooklyn, why turn them down? She wasn’t in this business to go broke, after all.

  It starts that way, but pretty soon it is easy enough. There are enough buyers out there with enough loose money. At first you feel as though they have wandered into you, but pretty soon you start seeking them out. It’s an easy flip, with the buyers in another country and maybe with reasons of their own to sink their money in a faraway city. So maybe it was true enough. True anyway that there were enough big deals that left enough foreign holding companies with overpriced land. And you never know. Sometimes it’s the guy on the other side who knows more than you do. As she had told him on the first day he showed up, you have to have good reflexes to catch a falling knife.