“The plaza was filled with suspects,” I recited. “Lazarus and Singer because they worked there; Krieger and Riordan because they were lured there by the killer.”
“You don’t know the killer brought them there,” Lani pointed out. “It could be a coincidence that Riordan and that cop were promised—”
“Oh, come on,” I interrupted. “If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that someone wanted Krieger and Riordan in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone knew exactly how to bait the hook to get Riordan there; I assume they did the same to Krieger. Someone told them precisely where to stand in the plaza so they’d be on the scene. Someone set them up to be—”
“What about Singer and Lazarus? Do you think they were manipulated too?”
“Not anymore,” I conceded. “At least not Lazarus. I believe him when he says he went to see Zebart. Which means he changed his usual pattern, and the chessmaster didn’t expect that, hadn’t done anything to prevent it. As for Singer,” I went on, thinking aloud, “it seems to me the chessmaster knew she was in the habit of meeting Eddie at the sculpture, and just took advantage of that. The killer knew she’d wait at least fifteen minutes. So he dangled some kind of bait in front of Eddie, told Eddie to meet him at the top of the courthouse steps, then blew his head off while the others waited in their appointed places.”
“This killer is someone who really knew the area,” Lani remarked.
“Yeah, I’ve thought of that,” I said. “But that applies to all of them. With the possible exception of Krieger, I suppose. He’s a Brooklyn cop, but it wouldn’t be hard for him to survey the area, figure out how to position people. As for Riordan, he knows that plaza like—”
“Let’s make a list,” Lani cut in. “The killer is a person who knew the area well,” she began. She grabbed a legal pad and a pen and began to write. “The killer also has a strong motive for getting rid of Eddie.”
“So far, so obvious,” I commented. Lani stuck her tongue out at me and continued her list.
“And the killer knew Lazarus walked to the subway the back way, not going through the plaza. He also knew Singer would be waiting for Eddie beside the sculpture.”
“I know all this,” I pleaded. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“How do I know what you know or don’t know?” Lani replied equably. “Do try for a little patience, dear,” she went on. “I am coming to the more arcane pieces of knowledge this killer had to have.”
“Pray continue,” I invited, echoing Lani’s Victorian-novel manner of speaking.
“The chessmaster, as you call him, dangled exactly the right bait in front of Riordan,” she pointed out. “The chessmaster knew Riordan would believe Eddie taped his conversations with Lazarus, and the chessmaster knew Riordan wanted those tapes so he could nail Lazarus. Which argues a pretty good knowledge of your client’s character, it seems to me.”
“Which the chessmaster could have gotten from a cursory reading of Jesse Winthrop’s column,” I reminded her.
“Yes, but how did the chessmaster know Eddie made those tapes?”
I opened my mouth and then shut it. She had a good point. Riordan and I had speculated about the tapes, particularly after Stan Krieger had told us of Eddie’s boast that he’d taped his interview with Psych Services. But how did the chessmaster know Eddie had a reputation for surreptitiously recording interviews?
Unless the chessmaster was Stan Krieger.
What was Stan Krieger doing in the plaza at the time Eddie Fitz was killed? Who was he meeting and why? Had he been lured to the scene of the crime in the same way Riordan was lured—and, if so, what was the bait?
Or had he lurked in the plaza, waiting for Eddie? Had he grabbed his pal’s shoulder and walked him up the steps to the federal courthouse? Had he stepped behind a pillar, pulled a gun, and blown away half of Eddie Fitz’s head?
“You think Eddie put the gun in Dwight’s mouth, is that it? You think he pulled the trigger, that this is some kind of dumb murder mystery?” Stan Krieger looked at me with a contempt he made no effort to conceal. I didn’t blame him. I’d given up trying to get past the desk sergeant and had shown up on his apartment doorstep. He’d let me in with ill-concealed resentment, but he’d let me in. That was the important thing.
“No, Stan,” I replied, echoing his tone of barely controlled exasperation, “I do not. Any more than you do. But I do think Dwight Straub would be alive today if he’d been assigned to a precinct that didn’t have Eddie Fitz in it.”
The light of combat died in Stan Krieger’s eyes. The muscles of his face sagged a little as he let my words sink in. Ten years jumped onto his face; he looked ready for retirement, ready to pack it in and start hanging around in cop bars telling war stories.
“Ah, shit,” he said at last. “Fucking kid couldn’t handle it. Anybody could see that. Anybody but Eddie would have let the kid alone, work whatever he was doing around Dwight, make sure he didn’t know what was going down.”
“But Eddie didn’t do that,” I volunteered.
“Hell, no. He made sure Dwight was in it all the way. He teased Dwight a lot, gave him that stupid nickname.”
“Ike,” I repeated. “So tell me about Ike,” I invited.
“Don’t call him that!” Stan’s voice was harsh; his left eyelid twitched uncontrollably.
“Someone made sure you were in the plaza the night Eddie was killed,” I pointed out. I sat in a sagging armchair; Stan perched on the edge of his couch like a bird about to take flight. “Were you meeting someone?”
“Why should I tell you?” Stan shot back. He shifted back in his seat, as if trying to add to his bulk and solidity. Sending me a message that he was not to be moved.
“Why not? Somebody made damned sure you were in a position to be suspected of killing Eddie. Someone set you up. Doesn’t that make you mad?”
“Lady, I’ve been mad since the day Eddie Fitz first walked into my precinct.”
“So why did you let him get away with it? Why did you let him call the shots?”
His mouth twisted into a sneer. “In the first place,” he replied, “the money was good.”
“You knew there were investigations pending,” I guessed. “I suppose whoever lured you to the plaza promised inside information.”
“One of the guys who used to be in this precinct works at Headquarters now,” Stan explained. “I had a message from him, said to meet him in front of One Police Plaza. Said he’d be working late, and he could tell me when charges were going to be filed.”
“Which means whoever set you up knew the name of someone in Headquarters who might help you,” I mused aloud.
“Lazarus would know,” I pointed out. “And Singer. I imagine the U.S. attorney’s office would keep close tabs on an internal police investigation of cops who worked with their undercover.”
And Riordan wouldn’t know, I thought, but didn’t add. Or would he? How hard would it be for a man with his connections to find a detective now working at Headquarters who’d once shared a desk at Stan’s old precinct?
“I suppose your old friend at Headquarters says he never sent you a message,” I remarked.
“Hell, yes,” Stan replied. “He cursed me out when I called him, said I was jamming him up by even making a phone call. He said he sure as hell wouldn’t have put his career on the line to help me out. I believed him.”
“How did Eddie talk you into registering TJ as a confidential informant?” I asked, shifting back to the heart of the matter.
“Hey, that was a good idea,” Stan replied, stung into defending the man he’d hated. “If anyone started nosing around, they’d find out TJ was on our side, that any dealing he was doing was for the sake of making cases. It was a perfect cover.”
“At first,” I agreed. “But that meant that when TJ became a liability instead of an asset, your name was on the paperwork. You were the one who stood to lose when the Department found out what TJ was all about. So when it came time f
or TJ to die, you took him out and—”
He’d started shaking his head in the middle of my recitation, and now he broke in. “No,” he said in a hard, decisive tone. “No, that’s not how it was. I didn’t want it to come out, but now everything in the fucking world is going to come out, and, besides, the poor schmuck’s dead, so—”
I caught on at last. “Dwight,” I said. I sat back in my chair. “Eddie conned Dwight into killing TJ with him.”
“Not with him,” Stan objected. “It was worse than that. He had Dwight kill TJ for him. Eddie had an alibi all set up; he talked Dwight into taking out TJ all by himself.”
“And the alibi was …” I let my voice trail off, trusting Stan to finish the sentence for me.
“A poker game with half the guys in the squad. Good guys,” Stan explained. “Guys whose word would be believed. I was the only one there who knew what was going on. I was the only one who knew that when Dwight got there late, it was because he’d just come from killing TJ.”
He shook his head at the memory. “Fucking kid looked sick as a dog,” he recalled. “His face was pasty-white, and I thought he was gonna heave. In fact,” he went on, “I think he did heave. Said he was coming down with stomach flu and left the game early. But it wasn’t the flu, it was the fact that he’d just killed a guy in cold blood.”
“Sounds like Eddie, all right,” I said, feeling a little sick myself. It was all too easy to visualize Dwight Straub trying to macho his way through his first murder—and failing miserably. “Conning someone else into doing his dirty work for him.”
“Ah, shit,” Stan said through a long, exhaled breath that should have been blue with cigarette smoke but wasn’t. He had the raspy voice of an ex-smoker; I wondered how long it had been since he’d put out his last butt. “The trouble was, Dwight married a ball-busting bitch,” Stan pronounced. “That was the whole fucking trouble in a nutshell. You know who he should have married?”
I said nothing. I had no idea who Dwight should have married.
“He should have married a gum-chewing bottle blonde with a high-school diploma and a job at the Key Food checkout counter, is who he should have married. Some girl from the neighborhood who thought he was hot shit, who’d sit in the audience and clap her fucking hands off when he made detective. Trouble with Annie,” he said, as much to himself as to me, “is she always wanted Dwight to be something he couldn’t.”
“I got the feeling she would have been happier if Dwight had left the Department,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. I’d liked Annie Straub and I didn’t buy the idea that any woman who didn’t idolize her man was a ball-buster.
“Is that right?” There was a challenge in Stan’s dark, angry eyes. “Is that the feeling you got from meeting Dwight and Annie for, what, a whole fucking six minutes? That is bullshit, Counselor, bullshit pure and simple. Annie wasn’t nearly that straightforward with the poor bastard. If she had been, he might still be alive. No,” Stan went on, “underneath it all, she wanted him to be the same kind of guy, the same kind of cop, as her precious father, Sergeant Mick Cohagan. She wanted him, when it came right down to it, to be Eddie Fitz.”
“But she loathed Eddie,” I protested.
“That’s what she said,” Stan concurred, undercutting any real agreement with his tone of voice. “And maybe that’s what she really believed in some part of her twisted brain. But make no mistake,” he went on, fixing me with his intense eyes, “Annie got turned on by Eddie. He may have been a prick, but he was a man, and she was a bitch in heat around him. What she really wanted was for Dwight to punch Eddie’s lights out, then take her to bed and fuck her brains out. She wanted—”
“Give me a fucking break,” I muttered, but my words didn’t even slow Stan down.
“She wanted her husband to show he had bigger balls than Eddie. Which the poor sap never had and was never going to have. A woman without Annie’s smarts wouldn’t have seen all that, would have appreciated Dwight without comparing him to the macho cops. But Annie was Mick Cohagan’s daughter, and she knew Dwight didn’t have the balls to make it, and she let him know she knew it. Even more so after she got sober.”
Balls. It came down to balls, always. Who had them, who didn’t, whose were bigger. As someone who’d gotten through forty-some years without any, I had a hard time understanding how they could have dominated Dwight’s thinking.
“Dwight killed himself because he was afraid of being charged with TJ’s murder,” I said.
Stan shook his head. “It was more than that,” he explained. His face wore a mournful expression. “It was Annie. Not only would Dwight stand naked as a murderer, he’d be revealed as a jerk who was set up by a man he thought was a hero. He’d be a schmuck. And the last thing in this world a schmuck can stand is for everyone to know he’s a schmuck. It wasn’t so much that Dwight couldn’t face the music, it was that he couldn’t face Annie.”
It was only after I left Stan’s Bay Ridge apartment and rode the subway train through the dingy little stops along the way to Borough Hall that I let myself understand the relief I was feeling. If Dwight killed TJ, then Warren Zebart was wrong about Matt. He was innocent of TJ’s murder, and, by extension, of Eddie’s.
But why was that such a relief? Hadn’t I always believed in Riordan’s innocence?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I stood outside the church, waiting for the meeting to end. There was a light drizzle, the kind of rain that makes you feel foolish whether your umbrella is up or down. If it was up, you felt that you were overreacting because it was, after all, only a mist. But if you kept your umbrella furled, you felt like an idiot because you were getting wet while holding an umbrella you weren’t using. A can’t-win kind of rain.
My umbrella was up. I needed protection, not so much from the rain as from my thoughts. I’d spent a long, sleepless night running through my list of suspects, and I thought I knew at last who’d killed Eddie Fitz.
I’d known it longer than I’d admitted the truth to myself. In some corner of my mind, I’d known it even as I’d confronted Lazarus, lectured Singer on her moral choices, hunted down Stan Krieger. I’d wanted very much for the killer to be one of them. To be anyone other than who it was.
To be anyone other than the person who was going to walk out of St. Andrew’s in five minutes.
People began streaming out of the little room at the side of the church. I walked to the stone portico of the Federal Correctional Center and stood under it, folding up my umbrella now that I was no longer being rained upon.
The meeting was almost over. People were leaving. Why didn’t I see the person I was waiting for?
At last I gave up and dashed across the alleyway, going through the gate with the little wooden AA sign on it. I ducked into the doorway.
She was alone in the room. She held a red banner with gold letters that read “One Day At A Time”; she was getting ready to put it away in a cupboard.
“We have to talk,” I said, my voice echoing in the empty room. Chairs sat where people had left them, in ragged rows grouped around a scarred wooden table. There were empty paper coffee cups and an occasional brown paper bag wadded up on the floor. I wondered if it was Annie’s job to clean it all up, or if a janitor came in.
“No, we don’t,” she replied, rolling the banner up as if I hadn’t come in. “We have nothing to talk about.”
“We have Eddie to talk about,” I replied. I moved toward her. I picked one of the chairs, turned it around so it faced her, and sat myself down in it.
“Eddie’s dead,” she said. “And if you want me to shed tears about that, you’ve come to the wrong person. But that doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.”
“But you did,” I countered. “You were the chessmaster.” She gave me a blank look that had nothing to do with pretending. I realized the term was my own; there was no reason it would mean anything to her.
“You were the one who made sure all the suspects would be in the right place at the rig
ht time,” I explained. “You were the one whose boss’s office overlooked the plaza, the one who could see the possibilities from twenty stories up.”
She hugged the furled banner to her chest as if it could warm her. The day was dank and cool, but she was dressed for sun. “I’m right, aren’t I?” I asked in a tone I kept carefully conversational. “The Department of General Services is on the twentieth floor of the Municipal Building, isn’t it?”
She shook her head. “Nineteenth,” she corrected in a flat tone of voice. Then she smiled a one-sided smile and added, “but who’s counting?”
“People must look like chess pieces from up there,” I mused aloud. “Easily manipulated, easily put in whatever place you want them to be in. Not,” I added, “that you needed to manipulate Nick Lazarus or Davia Singer to be in the plaza at the right time. You knew Lazarus worked killer hours, and that Singer worked almost as late as he did. All you had to do was get Eddie to the top of the courthouse steps while Singer waited for him at the sculpture.”
No reply. She stood with her arms folded, making me spin it out, making me lay all my cards on the table. I kept talking, in hopes something I said would force her to respond.
“So all you had to do,” I continued, my voice growing strained, “was arrange for Stan Krieger and Matt Riordan to be on the scene.”
She turned away abruptly and walked toward the cupboard. She put the banner away and headed for the window, where two large cardboard signs had been propped up for the meeting. One listed the Twelve Steps, the other the Twelve Traditions. She hefted the Twelve Steps and walked it over to the cupboard.
“Let’s take Stan first,” I said, trying not to let her lack of response interfere with my train of thought. “Whoever baited the hook for Stan had to know he had a buddy at Police Headquarters. At first, I thought that pointed to Lazarus or Singer. I knew they were monitoring the internal investigation into the squad.”
Annie stood beside the cupboard where she’d stored the huge poster. She looked thin, hungry. Sad. I forced myself to keep talking, to keep making my case, setting out my indictment.
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