Riker sighed. She might be making this up as she went along, but there was no fault in her logic. One ticket holder was in the wind, and one of the four people in that lobby might have seen the escape. “So you just worked this out with the ticket count? That’s how you know one cop lied?” Fat chance.
“I can even tell you which cop.”
He knew she was not doing this with tea leaves. Too easy.
“It was the younger one,” said Mallory. “The rookie. I nailed him five minutes after I got to the theater. He couldn’t look me in the eye when I asked if anyone got past him.”
Punch line.
And well timed. They turned onto Peter Beck’s side street, traveling slowly in the wake of a snowplow. The neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen had long ago lost its gangland reputation. Thanks to an infusion of wealth and an invasion of interior decorators, only pansy criminals would live here.
“I guess our guy walked to the theater,” said Riker. The sidewalks were passable, shoveled by shopkeepers and building supers, but not the road ahead.
• • •
Axel Clayborne had downed many shots of Chivas Regal, but the actor was not yet hammered, not by half. He left his apartment and climbed the steps to the roof, where a door opened upon a square field of pristine snow. To the north, the Empire State Building was a needle on the skyline. Closer to home, colored holiday lights were strung on balconies, and tinny notes of song wafted up from the street. He leaned over the brick parapet to look down at the sidewalk far below, where drunken ants were singing Christmas carols by the neon glow of a bar sign.
He was surrounded on all sides by the bright windows of his TriBeCa neighborhood, though no close rooftop was higher than this one. The storm had covered the deck chairs and the table. They were unrecognizable mounds. Axel unwound his scarf and used it to whack the furniture and send the snow flying. When the tabletop was clear, he laid out two shot glasses and a whiskey bottle.
Now . . . where was Dickie Wyatt? He had so much to tell this man with whom he shared everything. Once, they had even shared a toothbrush on a red-eye flight out of Cairo.
Axel turned east. That way? No, he had bearings now, and his feet punched deep holes in the snow as he made his way to the opposite corner of the sky, shouting, “Dickie! I’m home!”
• • •
Peter Beck’s doorman had a typical New Yorker’s reaction to the sudden death of one of his tenants. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He tilted his head to one side in the attitude of So what else is new?
The hour was late, and the old man wore a bathrobe over his pajamas as he answered questions in the lobby of the building where he was also a resident, though his studio apartment was underground. “No windows,” he complained, and their crime victim lived in the sky “—with God and the pigeons. But I haven’t seen Mr. Beck for a week. Not in the daytime. There used to be a second shift, but we had budget cuts. Cheap bastards. And me? I go off duty at six-thirty.” He turned from one detective to the other, the giveaway sign of awaiting a challenge.
“But tonight you left early,” said Mallory.
His eyes darted right to left. Looking for a way out? He raised his hands, palms up, a prelude to coming clean. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”
“Okay,” said Riker, “let’s say that’s true. What time did you leave? And before you answer that, if I think you’re lyin’, we’ll bang on doors all over this building till we—”
“Around five o’clock, maybe quarter after.”
Mallory pointed to the main entrance. “And that door was locked when you left?”
“Oh, yeah. The tenants got their own keys.”
“What about Beck’s visitors?” Riker waved the old man into the waiting elevator. “Anybody stand out?”
“Well, yesterday this little guy shows up. He wants to see Mr. Beck. I think his name was Bugsy. Yeah, that’s it. But Mr. Beck never answered his intercom buzzer.” The doorman pushed a button, and the elevator hummed as they rode upward. “The little guy was worried—said Beck wasn’t taking phone calls, either. So I get the manager’s key, and we go upstairs to knock on the door. No answer. But I don’t use the key ’cause I hear somebody moving around in there. So this guy, Bugsy, he was satisfied, and he left.”
The elevator opened, and the doorman said, “I got no keys tonight. If you want in, I have to call the—”
“Got it covered,” said Riker. “Go back to sleep.”
The detectives stepped out to walk down a hallway carpet that was the pale green shade of money. And when they stood before the dead man’s door, the top lock, one of three, was not a fit for any keys on Peter Beck’s ring, but Riker unlocked it with the loose one from the victim’s coat pocket. And Mallory refrained from saying, I told you so.
He flicked on the light switch in the foyer, and then he whistled. “Beck must’ve been a great playwright.”
In a town where success was measured in square feet of living space, the foyer was big enough to park a truck. And beyond the window glass, the Hudson River spanned the entire wall of the front room. Come morning, it would be flooded with light, another marker for wealth.
But prosperity had not brought happiness to Peter Beck.
The signs of depression were recognizable from Mallory’s rare forays into her partner’s apartment. Every surface and much of the floor was littered with unopened mail, empty liquor bottles, cast-off clothes and crumbs of food from take-out cartons. In Riker’s place, this effect was cumulative. But here, in a neighborhood of once-a-week cleaning ladies, it was the excess of a very sad man. And now she noticed golden statues of theater awards, some of them broken, all of them knocked to the floor below the mantelpiece—evidence of an angry man.
Riker bent down to pick up a receipt with the logo of a liquor store. “Delivery charges. This address is two blocks away, but the guy got his booze delivered. Lots of it.”
Mallory found another receipt, one stapled to a paper bag from a vegan restaurant.
A vegetarian drunk?
A cursory search of the room’s drawers and cabinets gave up nothing more than the average hotel suite. Very neat. Too neat. This would not square with the litter trails of a man who did not bother to cart his garbage to the trash chute in the outer hallway.
Riker closed a drawer. “Let’s toss the whole place. Better us than Loman’s crew.”
Mallory agreed. If Clara Loman saw the same evidence of a tidy vegetarian recently turned boozing slob, she might make a call of suicide by a man unhinged, and that CSI had done enough damage tonight.
The detectives moved on to the next room, Beck’s den, where a handsome desk and a long table provided workspace for the playwright, but there were no writing tools in sight. And the air was stale. It smelled of abandonment. A light gray film covered every surface to mark the last visit of a cleaning woman. It outlined the rectangular shape of a recently moved, maybe stolen, laptop. An easy guess. Disconnected wires led to the desktop printer and a scanner. The lone, shallow file drawer told Mallory that Beck had been a purger of hard copy. The rest of his personal papers would have been committed to the missing computer and then to the document-shredder in the corner. Other drawers were clutter free, and their spare contents could be seen at a glance.
Thieves prized compulsive neatness in their victims; valuables were so quickly found for the taking, and so it took less than a minute to know that there were no thumb drives or any backup disks left behind. The thief’s fingerprints would not be found here, either. Only the missing laptop had left a track in the dust.
A second hallway door opened onto a toilet, a sink and a wide mirror lined with vanity lights. Her foster mother, Helen, would have called this the powder room, a convenience for visitors. Farther down the hall, Mallory entered another doorway and walked past a king-size, unmade bed. The stink of booze rose off the sheets. She stepped into the master bathroom of modern luxury appointments, marble tiles and a sauna. The only old thing, a worn leather case, lay o
pen beside the sink, and it held an incomplete set of antique barber tools. One empty well of the velvet lining was molded to fit a missing straight-edge razor. So the murder weapon had belonged to Peter Beck.
Her partner stood just outside the bathroom door, looking down at a week’s worth of clothing strewn about the floor. Then he turned to the open closet, a contradiction of clean shirts and suits hung in an orderly row and, beneath them, shoe trees lined up like soldiers.
“Peter Beck’s killer was here tonight,” said Mallory. “He was here twice.”
Riker only glanced her way to ask where this was coming from.
“Beck let him in the door,” she said. “That’s how our perp stole the key. He needed it so he could come back later.” She held up the old barber kit to show him the razor shape of the empty well. “He couldn’t get at it while Beck was in the apartment. No good reason to come in here, not with a guest bathroom outside.” So far her partner was nodding in agreement—until she said, “I know Beck left the building with his killer tonight.”
He folded his arms and smiled to say, Okay, I’ll bite.
Mallory quit the bedroom, followed by Riker, her expert in all things alcoholic. “Let’s say you’ve been drinking—a lot.” She crossed the front room to open the foyer closet. After checking the pockets of a down parka, she moved on to other jackets and coats. “Ever have trouble threading a key in a lock?”
No need for him to answer. Mallory had been eleven years old the first time she had performed that small service for Riker. She held up the house keys and jingled them. “So Beck’s on his way out the door, and the killer snatches the keys. Just being helpful. And he locks up the apartment. Only one lock. Our killer slips that key off the ring before he returns it to Beck.” This key ring was not a fingernail breaker. It opened easily with a simple catch, and she demonstrated a quick theft for her partner. “The perp doesn’t steal a key for the street door, and that’s smart. Even falling-down drunk, Beck might notice two keys missing from a ring of five. But you know that’s no problem.”
When the killer had returned to steal Beck’s razor, he only had to wait until a tenant showed up, and then he would have followed that person through the untended door. This was the time-honored way for every burglar in town to enter a well-secured building.
Riker followed her through all the back rooms to watch her make short work of ransacking closets and drawers. “Too bad this guy did his drinking at home. We’re not gonna find any helpful bartenders to tell us who he was with tonight.”
“Yes we will.” Mallory waited a beat, just long enough to make him a little crazy. “Peter Beck was on his way out, wearing his overcoat when the killer locked up.”
Riker bit down on his lower lip. He was not going to play. He trailed her into a kitchen of many cabinets and more drawers to plunder, and finally he cracked and said, “So?”
“Let’s say our perp stuffed the key ring in Beck’s coat pocket. Easier to get at it again—after he cut the man’s throat. Then he could slip the key back on the ring. That’s what I’d do.” She closed the last drawer, and her search was done. “Good idea. But later on, the keys got shifted to a pants pocket, and the killer couldn’t get at them. Beck would’ve done that if he’d stopped off someplace between here and the theater—a place that checks coats. Even drunks go through their pockets before they hand a coat to a stranger.”
“No way,” said Riker. “Kid, you got lucky tonight. It all panned out, but don’t push it, okay? Every guy in the world keeps his house keys in his pants pockets. That does not mean he checked his damn coat in a—”
“So where are the gloves? It’s cold outside. We didn’t find any gloves on the body, and they’re not here, either.”
And her partner said, “What?”
• • •
The wind was rising, the temperature falling. Impervious to cold, Axel Clayborne topped off his shot glass and smiled at his rooftop companion, the man in the neighboring deck chair. “So . . . Peter’s dead, we covered that. . . . Oh, and I met the most extraordinary girl tonight. A blonde with a gun.” The bottle was half gone when the actor looked up at the sky. The clouds had parted and the stars were out, but not many. Starlight was chintzy in New York City. “She’s in her twenties. I’m pushing forty. Fancy my chances?”
Tactfully, Dickie Wyatt said nothing. But what was age to him anymore? He seemed to have grown younger with the passage of time. His brow had smoothed. The worry lines were gone.
His eyes were closed.
Good night, sweet prince.
With no fear of interrupting the man’s rest, Axel raised his voice to say, “You don’t smell, Dickie. Not a bit.” He intended this as the highest of compliments. It was said that the corpses of saints did not stink, either.
• • •
Traveling along the shortest route to the theater, they found two restaurants with bars and coat-check service. The detectives got lucky with the second bartender to look at the photograph of their crime victim. The man left them for a moment and returned with a box of lost items. Passing over pairs of woolen gloves, he pulled out one of black leather lined with fur. “The guy came in alone, and this was lying on the bar when he left.”
“Only one glove,” said Mallory.
“Yeah, one glove. I saw him check all his pockets. I guess he was looking for the other one. He drank scotch. Paid cash. Tipped big. That’s all I know.”
In search of the second glove, they backtracked to a small saloon that had not made their shortlist for lack of a coat-check. The woman mixing drinks was Riker’s dream bartender, not much on looks, more of a maternal soul, who coddled her customers by leaning on the pours for every shot of booze.
Motherlove for drunks.
She instantly recognized the dead man in the photograph, and Riker gave her points because she did not blanch at the sight of blood. The playwright had been a regular customer for the past three or four weeks. “A big tipper,” she said with appropriate sadness and no need to add that, on this account, he would be missed.
Riker opened his notebook to scribble down the approximate time when Peter Beck had walked in the door. “And he had two gloves when he sat down?”
“Yeah.” The bartender handed over a solitary black glove, the only one left behind. In answer to the next question, she said, “Peter came in alone. . . . At least, I think he did. He was looking around for somebody.”
Mallory flashed her partner a gotcha smile.
Riker’s pencil was stalled, as if it might have run out of lead. “Did the guy check his watch, like maybe he was lookin’ to meet up with—”
“No,” said the bartender, “he was surprised. It was more like he lost someone between here and the door.”
This squared with the theory that Peter Beck had company when he left for the theater tonight. And now it seemed likely that the killer had ditched Beck here—to return to the apartment with the stolen key—so he could steal the victim’s cutthroat razor.
And Mallory’s punch lines just kept on coming.
• • •
The whiskey had a warming effect on Axel Clayborne. Or was he merely numb?
Certainly drunk.
Barehanded, he covered Dickie Wyatt’s corpse with snow and smoothed this whitest of blankets until there was no trace of a mound, no sign of a grave.
Done. Hidden.
Till it be morrow.
One last toast?
No, the bottle was dry. He sent it flying across the rooftop. And only now, in Dickie’s absence, Axel felt the cold.
• • •
Back in the car and on the roll, heading south through Greenwich Village, Riker slouched low in his seat. “It’s late, kid. Time to pack it in.”
“All right,” said Mallory. “I thought we might visit the missing ticket holder, the guy who slipped past the cops in the lobby. . . . He lives in this neighborhood.” After putting on some speed to pass through a red light before it could turn legal green—always a
challenge—she made a left turn onto Houston. “But he didn’t kill Peter Beck. So I guess that can wait till tomorrow.”
Never would Riker ask how she had divined all of this from a flawed ticket count and a rookie cop’s lie. He turned away from her to lightly knock his head against the passenger window.
SUSAN: (hushed): Don’t they ever speak?
ROLLO: (loudly): My brothers grunt. Sometimes they giggle. And their needs are met. What use do they have for words?
—The Brass Bed, Act I
Mallory was dressed for cold weather this morning, but the hallway was overheated by a hissing radiator, and she unbuttoned her new winter jacket, a rust-colored shearling. Riker was no fashionista. He could only guess that it was at least the price of ten topcoats like his own.
It was his turn to bang on the door of their runaway ticket holder. He could hear noises of a pet inside the apartment, one too small to bark like a real dog. Now the yappy little beast went silent. A dog with an off-switch? More likely the owner had hushed the animal—or thrown it out a window. He pictured Leonard Crippen snug in his bed, not at home to the police at this early hour.
Mallory bent down to slip a card under the door, and then Riker followed her into the elevator. He had so many questions, and he knew she would never give him straight answers. Where was the fun in that? They rode down to the ground floor in silence.
Last night, she had volunteered very little about Crippen, only mentioning that his theater seat had been surrounded by other people. And so it was easy to follow her logic for innocence. Given only forty seconds to kill a man—moving down a row of occupied seats in the blackout dark and on the run, trotting on toes without getting decked—well, that was just too tricky.
The detectives left the Greenwich Village apartment house to stand under a bright blue sky on Sixth Avenue. This was a neighborhood of human-scale structures, and a snow-covered playground across the street allowed more sunlight than other parts of town. Riker was quick to don his shades. He was not a morning person, but at least it was winter—no chirpy birdsong, only soft coos from dive-bombing pigeons that defecated on sidewalks and pedestrians all year long.
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 5
