Three-Day Town dk-17

by Margaret Maron

  “You ever go deer hunting?” he asked Hentz.

  “Huh?”

  “Deer can’t count, you know. They’ll stay in the bushes and watch while four guys climb up into a deer stand.” Dwight had gradually lowered his voice till Hentz could barely hear him. “When three guys climb back down and leave, the buck doesn’t know there’s still a man in the stand.”

  “Because deer can’t count?” Hentz asked, humoring him.

  “You got it, pal.” Raising his voice to a normal conversational level, Dwight said, “No, we can cross the boiler room off. He’s not here.”

  He opened the door for Hentz, gave the detective a significant look as the other man passed through, and in one fluid motion flipped off the light and slammed the door loudly.

  Then he stood in the darkness and waited. Almost immediately, he heard a faint sigh, followed by that same rustling sound he’d noticed before.

  It came again and he finally recognized it for what it was. His first impulse was to dig Jackson out of his hiding place and wring his scrawny neck. Instead, he opened the door and motioned Hentz back inside.

  “He’s over there,” he told the detective. “Burrowed down deep in that bin full of tarps and drop cloths. I was sloppy when I checked it the first time. Didn’t go down far enough.”

  Hentz walked over to the wooden bin and gave it a kick. “Come on out, Jackson. It’s over.”

  They heard strangled noises as that pile of plastic tarps heaved and shifted till the night man surfaced and stood up. His face was contorted and they realized that he was crying like a guilty child who fears there’s a whipping in his future.

  “I didn’t mean to!” Sidney Jackson sobbed when he hoisted himself over the edge of the bin. “They made me do it.” He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief. “They made me! Phil! And Corey! Oh, God, Corey!” he wailed. “I knew him since he was a baby. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t! I used to help take his stroller in and out. I let him pull the gate back for me when he was just a little kid. Why would I want to hurt him? Three minutes later—three lousy minutes!—and he’d still be alive.” He wiped his streaming eyes and nose and tried to make them understand his hard luck.

  “You think I wanted them dead? But they kept popping up. Every time I turned around, there they were—Phil, Corey, even Mrs. Bryant. Every damn time! I couldn’t let them tell, could I? Could I?”

  Sobbing as they led him out into the basement, he was a mixture of remorse and indignation. Grief for his victims mingled with petulance and self-pity for what he felt they had forced him to do. He collapsed onto the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands, blubbering and snuffling.

  “Where is she?” Dwight snarled. “What have you done with my wife?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt her,” Sidney sobbed, “but she was out there on the sidewalk when I got here to beat the garbage truck. She found Corey. She wanted me to call 911. She was going to tell. What could I do?”

  CHAPTER

  26

  People when “cabined, cribbed, confined,” cannot be very happy or comfortable.

  —

  The New New York

  , 1909

  I came to slowly, disoriented and hot. I was lying on my side in total darkness. Cautiously I wriggled my fingers and felt rough cloth. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t make myself concentrate. More cloth touched my face and weighed on my body, which was probably why I was so warm. To my surprise, I could breathe. Not as deeply as my oxygen-deprived lungs wanted, but enough to keep me alive. My mouth and one nostril were completely covered with the duct tape, but as long as I lay quietly and took slow even breaths, I wouldn’t suffocate.

  Where the hell was I, though? Taped and swaddled, I had no clues. I could hear voices, muffled and far away. Should I try to draw attention to myself, or would that make Sidney come back and finish me off for good? Stupid, stupid, stupid not to have realized that he was the figure I saw disappear around the corner last night after setting the bag with Corey’s body out by the curb.

  He must have come back to make sure it got on the garbage truck without one of the sanitation workers noticing. Probably threw it in himself. Is that where he is now? Will he come back with a garbage bag for me?

  I moved my head forward almost imperceptibly and felt a solid wall. Oh, God! Was I in a coffin? About to be buried alive? I gingerly tried to flex my legs backward. They were hampered by the weight of the cloth, but there seemed to be nothing solid behind me. Wherever I was, it wasn’t a coffin.

  Yet.

  The muffled voices came closer. Two men?

  I felt the surface where I lay give as something heavy pushed it down. Then light hit my eyes.

  And I was not the one who screamed.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Indeed, one hardly knows what New York would do if the police were not on hand to keep the lawless and the violent in restraint.

  —

  The New New York

  , 1909

  Frustrated and enraged, it was all Dwight could do not to grab Sidney Jackson by the scruff of his scrawny neck and shake him till he answered.

  “Easy, Bryant,” Sam Hentz said. “We found him, we’ll find her.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant!” Vlad Ruzicka rushed down the hallway from the break room. “Come quick. She’s in here! Jani almost sat on her! Hurry!”

  Sigrid immediately started down the hall, but Dwight pushed his way past her. At the far end of the long room, they saw a startled Jani Horvath staring at what had been concealed behind the tumbled covers on the bottom bunk bed next to the wall. It looked like a silver-gray cocoon, a cocoon that wriggled. With the hood of her parka still over her head, Deborah lay bound in duct tape from her mouth to her toes. In his haste to get out to the curb before the sanitation workers discovered Corey’s body, Jackson had evidently used a full roll of tape to keep her immobile while he made sure he was the one to toss Corey’s body into the truck.

  As Dwight gently turned her over, he was relieved to see blue eyes implore him and to realize abruptly why she wasn’t struggling harder.

  “Somebody get me some scissors,” he called. Without waiting, he pushed back the strip that partially blocked her nose. “Better?”

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  Scissors were produced and he carefully cut the tape on both sides of her face where it wound around the hood of her coat. She made impatient sounds that it was taking him too long. “Wait a minute, shug. You don’t want me to cut your hair, do you?”

  A moment later he had eased the tape off her lips and then cut enough to free her arms and legs. She looked like a mummy festooned with tattered wrappings, a beautiful mummy come back to life when he feared she was lost forever.

  She insisted on standing, but moaned when he touched her head. “Ow! That hurts like the devil.”

  “Where?” Dwight pushed back the wool-lined hood and gently examined the spot she had touched. “You’ve got a goose egg there, but no blood.”

  “What the hell did he hit me with?”

  “Whatever it was, you were lucky you had that hood on,” Sigrid said.

  She instructed one of the uniformed officers to take the Bryants to the nearest hospital and to wait until she was either released or kept overnight for observation. To her surprise, Deborah did not protest.

  When they returned three hours later, patrol cars were still thick around the service entrance and a cop remained by the lobby door to check IDs.

  “Mrs. Bryant!” the new elevator man exclaimed. “You’re okay? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”

  Deborah gave him a dazzling smile and looked at the shiny new brass name tag pinned to his neat brown jacket. “I thought you were going to be Jim here.”

  “Yeah, I forgot to tell them, so go ahead and say it.”

  She laughed. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”

  CHAPTER

  28

  From 1860
to 1880, steam and hydraulic elevators were in use, but it was not until about 1888 that electric elevators came into vogue…. With the coming of the elevator the eight-story buildings began to pay better in their top floors than in their middle or lower ones. “High livers,” so called, preferred the light and air up aloft. Everything began to rise with the elevator—buildings, prices, ambitions, expectations.

  —

  The New New York

  , 1909

  I’ve heard too many stories about stoics who insist they’re fine, just fine, after a blow on the head, then twelve hours later they’re dead from a blood clot or other complications.

  Not me, baby. Life’s too good to risk losing it because I might feel silly for taking up a doctor’s time. I admit that I fought it the first time around when a crazy woman smacked me on the head last year, but the doctor who examined me then made me a believer when he described how one of my favorite actresses would still be making movies if she’d only seen a doctor after a minor skiing accident.

  Dwight told me that I must have been wrapped up in those hot blankets motionless for about an hour, and that was serious enough for the doctor at the hospital to make me jump through several hoops, including a CT scan and a series of perception tests. My head was sore where I’d been hit, but I didn’t have a headache, my reaction times were within normal parameters, and I could perfectly remember everything up to the moment I was whacked. The doctor finally theorized that I’d been stunned just enough to let Sidney Jackson swaddle me in tape and hide me in the lower bunk by pushing the blankets over me to look like an unmade bed.

  “Between your lack of sleep, the adrenaline rush you must have had after finding that body in a bag, and your oxygen deprivation, you probably just transitioned from a daze into an exhausted sleep.” He told me that I was a very lucky woman and discharged me with nothing more than a few samples of a mild pain reliever that he had on hand.

  Once we were back in the apartment, Dwight wanted to coddle me. I myself wanted to go down to the basement and find out what was happening, but Sigrid had called him at the hospital while I was being examined and said she would be stopping by later, so Dwight convinced me I’d be in the way downstairs.

  Just as well, because as we were getting off the elevator, James had handed me a small Tiffany Blue shopping bag. The handles had been tied together with a tag that had “For Apt. 6-A” crudely printed on it in black ink.

  “It’s been so busy today, I didn’t see who stuck it there,” he said, gesturing to a small pile of UPS and FedEx parcels in the corner, waiting for people to come home from work.

  As soon as I felt the heft, I knew it was that piece of bronze erotica that Mrs. Lattimore had sent up to Sigrid’s mother. I pulled the cords of the bag apart enough to peek inside and saw that it was swathed in white tissue.

  “We’d better leave it for Sigrid’s people to open,” I told Dwight. “Though I’m willing to bet they won’t find a single fingerprint or a single smidgen of DNA.”

  “None of Cameron Broughton’s anyhow,” Dwight agreed. Like me, he was convinced that it was Luna DiSimone’s decorator who had taken it.

  “You’re probably right about Broughton,” Sigrid said when she got there a little later. “I suppose we could link him to that flip-flop, but any good attorney would argue that your earring could have been dropped anywhere on this floor. And if he polished off his own fingerprints, then he polished off Jackson’s. We might still find a trace of Lundigren’s blood. Jackson admits that he panicked and grabbed up something heavy when Lundigren caught him rifling the apartment here. A man of impulse, our Sidney Jackson.”

  “Is he still blaming everybody else?” Dwight asked, as he opened a bottle of wine and filled our three glasses.

  “Oh, yes. According to him, none of this would have happened if people had been where they were supposed to be. If Lundigren had come or gone five minutes earlier, if Corey hadn’t come down to the basement at the precise moment he was disposing of Clarke’s body, if Deborah hadn’t come out just before the garbage trucks got here…”

  We were seated around the coffee table in the living room. I suppose it was callous to ignore the reason a bath mat would be lying at an odd angle on the hardwood floor by the French doors, but truth to tell, I had almost quit noticing it. After a certain amount of time, an eyesore becomes something the eye passes over without really registering. I had finally changed out of my nightclothes and was seated at one end of the comfortable leather couch, ready to explore the plate of cheese and crackers Dwight had set out. I put a dab of Brie on a pita chip and popped it into my mouth, suddenly ravenous after missing breakfast and lunch. “So Denise wasn’t the building’s only thief?”

  Sigrid was seated in a squishy leather club chair across the table from me and waved away the plate when I offered it, but accepted a glass of wine from Dwight.

  “Jackson kept tabs on the whole building—who was home, who was out. Conditions for any one apartment had to be perfect.” She sat her wineglass on the coffee table to tick them off on her thin fingers. “Denise Lundigren had to have cleaned there the same day that outside workmen were there, and the residents had to be out for the evening. Plus, the service doors had to have one of the old locks on it. He’d helped carry in enough packages over the years to know which apartments had valuable little objects sitting around like those gold pillboxes.”

  “What about Antoine?”

  “Jackson says Clarke figured it out right away and was willing to tell him what went on during his eight-to-four shift for a cut of the profits. Only he was greedy and wanted to hit every apartment that met Jackson’s conditions, and Jackson didn’t want to do it more than three or four times a year, so Clarke was starting to freelance for himself.” Sigrid lifted her glass and took a swallow of wine. “Clarke drew the line at murder, though. He relieved Jackson during the party, but he’d gone to sleep before he heard that Lundigren had been killed. As soon as he heard the next morning, he called Jackson and accused him. Jackson knew it was either blackmail or exposure, and he couldn’t afford either. He figured correctly that Horvath would go to bed before he got here and the porters don’t work Sundays, so he thought he’d have plenty of time to dispose of Clarke before the man was missed, only here came the Wall boy down to get his sled and go have some fun in the snow.”

  Sigrid lapsed into contemplation of the wineglass she held cradled in her hands and I figured she’d had a rough session with the boy’s parents. That’s always the hardest part for Dwight. I glanced at his face and he looked as if he was remembering some bad times of his own.

  To break the mood, I said, “I know he hid that wheeled bin with Antoine’s body, but what did he do with the Wall boy? Don’t tell me he stashed him in one of those bunk beds, too?”

  Sigrid shook her head. “Not with Horvath snoring away in one of them. No, he used the boiler room.”

  “Under the tarps?” Dwight asked.

  She nodded.

  “So the cavity was already there when he needed a bolthole.”

  “Right. He was no longer thinking clearly—”

  “Hitting me and taping me up like a mummy was thinking clearly?” I asked indignantly.

  Sigrid and Dwight both smiled.

  “No, I guess not. I don’t think he knew what he was going to do with you. The main thing was to get outside and sling Corey Wall’s body onto the garbage truck before one of the sanitation workers tried to lift the bag. He no sooner got back inside than he heard the elevator descending, so that’s when he dived into the boiler room and hid.”

  “Elevators,” I mused, holding out my glass for a refill. “All that coming and going.”

  “Only up and down,” Sigrid said. “Never in and out. Horvath told us that Antoine was jealous because Corey would be going off to college, working at a better job, making a richer life, while he was going to be an elevator operator all his life.”

  She swirled the wine in her glass. “In an odd way, I suppose th
e same went for Jackson, only he couldn’t afford to lose this job at his age. Especially since he’s still paying off the nursing home bills for his father.”

  Sigrid finished her wine and stood to go.

  “Don’t forget this,” I said, handing her the little Tiffany bag. “If you ever find out why Mrs. Lattimore had it, I hope you’ll tell us. Maybe we can get together if you’re down next month.”

  “Maybe.” She seemed almost shy for a moment as she thanked me again for telling her about her grandmother. “Mother’s due in tomorrow night. I know she’ll want to meet you.”

  “That would have been nice,” I said, “but we’ve decided to cut our trip short and go home tomorrow morning.”

  (In the squad car on the way back to the apartment, we had agreed that we’d rather finish our honeymoon at home. With Cal.)

  “I’m sorry your trip turned out like this,” Sigrid said. “I hope it hasn’t soured you on New York.”

  “It would take more than a murder investigation to sour me on this city,” I said. “Only next time we’ll bring our son with us. There’s so much to show him.”

  “And I still want to hear Sam Hentz play the piano,” Dwight said.

  She smiled. “Me, too.”

  I gave her our Gilbert and Sullivan tickets, and as we walked her to the door, Sigrid paused with her hand on the knob. “Did your nephew figure out who used his cell phone and hijacked his Facebook page?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t talked to the kids today, but I think I would have heard if they did.”

  “This may sound strange, but my housemate—he writes mystery novels, and something he said last night made me wonder.”

  “Oh?”

  “You said that two other boys had the lockers next to his and a freshman girl had the one beneath his?”