(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  The elevator bounced to a stop and the doors slid open.

  Abby Lang stood facing him. Dart stepped out into the hall feeling vulnerable.

  For a brief second, Dart felt caught off guard—his complaint waiting on his lips. He told her triumphantly, “Kowalski investigated Stapleton in a meth case.”

  When she spoke, tension strangled her words. “A patrolman came by the office. They know there’s an extra cleaner in the building. He headed down the stairs. Told me they would work room by room, both floors. He’s young. New to the force. Bored, probably. Taking it very seriously,” she said. “Did you sign in?” she asked anxiously. During the night shift, all officers, regardless of rank, had to sign in and sign out; the desk sergeant tracked who was there.

  “I used the back door,” he informed her. “And I didn’t call down.” He added, “There are worse offenses.” There would be no official record of his having entered the building. To him it was a minor offense, but the more he thought about it, one that might be associated with the imposter cleaner and end up a nightmare. The more he considered it, the worse it looked.

  “Not good,” he admitted.

  “We can try the stairs,” she suggested wearily, knowing it was a bust.

  “The first thing we do is distance you from me,” he announced. “You use the stairs. I’ll figure something out.”

  “No,” she objected. “I’m part of this.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am.”

  The elevator doors closed, indicating that it had been called.

  Dart tried to think of any way out other than the elevator or stairs. It was a fairly large building, though only two stories. And in a room-to-room search he’d be trapped.

  He thought about walking down the hall, around the corner, and into CAPers, but there would be a skeleton crew there who knew that this wasn’t his shift.

  “What about the crib?” she asked.

  Windowless, a glorified closet used for poker games and quick naps, the crib had been converted from unused storage space. If empty at the moment, Dart realized that he might be able to feign sleep there without raising too much suspicion—although questions would still be asked.

  “I’m official,” Abby reminded. She had signed in properly. “I have every right to be in this building. Stay here.” Dart watched her as she hurried down the hall, passed Narco, and threw open the door to the crib. She reached in and turned on the light.

  “Clear,” she hissed down the hall at him.

  Dart ran to catch up, and as he did a thought occurred to him—a way to avoid the questions—though the likelihood of her going along with it was slim.

  They stepped inside and he shut the door and locked it. They were both breathing hard.

  “Now what?” she asked. “A game of cards, I suppose?” she asked sarcastically, “at one-thirty in the morning? Oh Christ!”

  “Take off your clothes,” Dart advised her, already working down his own shirt buttons.

  “Yeah, right,” she snapped.

  “Now!” he said strongly as he continued undressing. He glanced over at the sad excuse of a couch, and Abby Lang blushed, understanding him.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “It’ll work,” he told her.

  “Oh, shit,” she repeated.

  He threw his shirt onto the back of a chair and unfastened his belt and unzipped his pants, adding, “But only with both of us.”

  She hesitated, looking once to Dart, and then again at the sagging couch. Her fingers reluctantly found the buttons to her blouse and she began to undress herself. As her blouse hung open she suddenly moved more quickly. “I have to tell you,” she said apologetically, “that I’m not real comfortable with my body.” She mumbled something about having had children and being forty-six, and it was the first time that Dart knew her age.

  “I would have guessed mid-to-late thirties,” Dart reported honestly, sitting down to pull off his socks.

  “No, no, no,” she set straight, clearly uncomfortable with which piece of clothing to remove first. Her blouse hung open and her jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped. “How about the lights?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the couch and waiting.

  Dart tossed her one of the two blankets folded on the shelf. She caught it. He turned off the light and banged a shin coming over toward the sound of her jeans rubbing her skin as she slipped out of them.

  A young patrolman would not pursue identifying two detectives sexually engaged in the crib. He would switch on the light, apologize, shut the door, and go tell stories. It might just work, he thought. It also occurred to him that it might get them both suspended, and he felt awful about that.

  Sitting down on the couch, his shin throbbing, Dart felt embarrassed.

  He heard the unmistakable snap of her bra coming off, and she whispered, “Underwear?”

  “Let’s leave it on.” His skin prickled with heat.

  “Agreed!” she replied.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, groping in the dark for her.

  They hugged awkwardly, clumsily, and lay down together. She pulled the blanket over them. “How weird,” she said. But then she wrapped her arms around him strongly and held to him tightly, and said, “This is not a pass, Joe. I’m frightened.”

  “You didn’t need to—”

  “Sh!” She held him more tightly. “A little late at this point.”

  As if to punish himself, Dart suddenly became aroused. He wanted to say something, to make some excuse, to apologize, but he said nothing, attempting to move away from her instead but finding the couch too narrow.

  Abby said, “This definitely goes into the books as the strangest first date.” She chuckled; Dart laughed, and then they shushed each other, which only served to make them laugh all the harder. Their chests bounced together with the nervous laughter and it fed on itself until it was uncontrollable. Trying to suppress it only made it worse.

  Rubbing herself against his erection, still laughing, she said, “Maybe someday we can make the most of that.”

  “I’ve got one for you,” she added, the both of them tight with laughter. “What if they give up the search?”

  Dart buried his face into her shoulder and muffled his laughter. “We could be here all night,” he said. He felt her nodding along with him.

  When she placed her open hand on his head and held him to her skin, their laughter stopped, running down like a windup clock. The mood changed in this instant. Dart felt his arousal even more substantial. She stroked his back.

  “Abby?” he said.

  “I know,” she answered in a whisper, while her hands kept petting him. “No harm in hugging, is there?”

  And so they hugged each other intimately, warmly, affectionately—the kind of hug that can take the place of breathing, he thought. It can take the place of food, and confuse time, and stop all thought.

  “Maybe they won’t come,” she said, kissing his cheek and moving toward his lips. All humor associated with that thought had passed.

  He kissed her, tentatively at first, and then with the passion that consumed him. She returned the kiss, parting her lips and opening her mouth to him.

  When the door opened a few minutes later, Dart failed to look up. He had planned to say Get the fuck out of here, because he enjoyed the irony of the statement. But he just kept kissing her instead, oblivious to the intrusion.

  The voice of the young cop said hastily, “Sorry, sir,” and the door bumped shut.

  Abby Lang began to laugh. She held Dart close and whispered, “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Joe Dart.

  CHAPTER 10

  Knowing what had to be done, and doing it, were two different things, especially given the consequences: death. Contemplating another man’s death was a power all its own. As much as this man wanted to believe otherwise, to ignore the palpable high coursing in his veins was nearly impossible. Tonight, his was the power of God, there was
no denying it. He felt drawn toward intoxication, but he resisted this. He felt like humming, and so he did, though out of tune—he had never held a tune in his life.

  He stood on a Hefty garbage bag just inside the back door and stripped naked, revealing his uncomfortably thin body. Carefully stepping off the garbage bag, he turned it inside out, capturing the clothing, and slung the bag over his shoulder like Santa Claus, and carried it through the sitting room, up the narrow stairs and into the bedroom, where he set it down into the closet.

  He entered the bathroom still humming, his gaunt frame a stranger to him—he still thought of himself as the muscular beefmeister he had once been. Wearing the latex gloves that he had donned prior to entry, he opened the medicine cabinet. A small wire showed in the metal seam of the cabinet, and as he pulled on this the entire cabinet came free of the wall, and he set it aside, revealing a clear glass vial, a box of disposable syringes, and a box of needles. He removed the vial and a single syringe and a needle and returned the medicine cabinet to the wall so that he could see himself in the mirror.

  He hated this part: the needles, the pain.

  Standing before the mirror he studied his face, wiped the alcohol-soaked cotton ball across the sun-hardened, aged skin, lifted the syringe, and pricked the needle into his top lip, wincing with the puncture, and drawing a drop of blood. The injected fluid stung and itched at the same time—histamines—and the lip swelled and enlarged almost immediately, turning a bright red, as if an insect had bitten him. The lower lip was next, and again he winced. He worked his lips, as would someone standing too long in the cold, and attempted to speak. “Good evening,” he said to the mirror, working his puffy lips painfully until they formed the words more clearly. “Good evening, Mr. Payne.”

  Another injection, just below the mandible joints, produced swollen jowls and distorted his face magnificently. But it was the two shots, one below each eye, that altered him to the point of establishing a new identity. He was, at once, a squinty, puffy-faced bulldog with gray hair showing around the edge of the Yankees baseball cap—synthetic wig hair sewn to the edges of the cap, not his at all.

  The image in the mirror was no longer that of the man who stood before it, but instead one Wallace Sparco—the name on the bills, the apartment lease, and even on the credit cards that had bought the clothes hanging in the upstairs closet. An invented identity. The man did not feel himself as Sparco—he wouldn’t allow himself to go that far, to allow that dangerous switch to be thrown in his head. He knew damn well who he was and what was going on here—he was going to kill a man. A worthless piece of shit. He was going to fix things. He was more than willing to make the sacrifice necessary. Prepared. But he would not allow himself to enjoy it—despite the occasional rush—try as part of him did to do just that—and he would not allow any part of himself to fool any other part: It was wrong to kill, regardless of the justification; he knew this in his heart, his soul, in the quiet depths of his being. He was doing a job, that’s all. Charity work.

  He kept humming as he drew the cosmetic pencil through his thin eyebrows, darkening them. He envied Pavarotti that enormous talent, that gift. He thought of Mozart as a freak—some step beyond genius. Einstein belonged there with him. Michelangelo. Cuban cigars. Mexican beer. The stuff of life.

  And in this mirror, another man, a man of his invention—there were many ways to play God.

  You do what you have to, he reminded himself.

  The face that had started in this mirror before the charade of the injected histamines was one this man hardly recognized as his own: gaunt and drawn, pale, with jaundiced eyes. He thought of himself as handsome, but the face he saw there was not.

  He drove an old beat-up Mazda two-door, registered to Mr. Wallace Sparco, dressed in Mr. Sparco’s clothing, and wore Mr. Sparco’s old brown shoes, Timex watch, leather belt, and carried his nylon wallet. He slouched as the fictitious Mr. Sparco slouched and yet he hummed as only the driver hummed.

  He drove up the hill toward Trinity College, the view to his right a spectacular display of the sparkling lights of the valley, and slowed before turning left as the street became chaotic with costumed college-aged trick-or-treaters out for an evening of self-abuse. The costumes were products of educated imaginations, and the willowy, womanly legs, clad in black tights, were those of eighteen-year-old WASPs, wobbly from beer and steadied, no doubt, by concern and giddy anticipation. Mr. Wallace Sparco drove slowly through the teeming students, reminded of Mardi Gras. He beeped his horn lightly and turned left, not understanding exactly why he bothered to drive up the hill but deciding each life, even that of Wallace Sparco, was entitled to the occasional distraction. Back on course, he made his way to Farmington Avenue and headed for the affluence of West Hartford only a short ten-minute drive away, where the dismal poverty of the south end ghetto gave way to the manicured comfort of the Caucasian enclave, where black gave way to white, and project housing to suburbia. The AMEX cards were quiet tonight, the downtown deserted. Parents were home supervising another Halloween. A few minutes past the retail core, Wallace Sparco turned right and, a few minutes after that, on into the nestled canopy of darkness and the colonial-style homes that hid here from the fear of the inner city only a few short miles to the east.

  Wallace Sparco turned left onto Westmont and up the winding hill, then right onto Wendy Lane, driving to the very end of the cul-de-sac, where he pulled into and drove down the long driveway of the Tudor house marked with the Twentieth Century Real Estate sign, switched off his headlights, and parked. He waited five minutes in absolute silence. The area in front of the garage could be seen from only one aspect of one other house, a neighbor a hundred yards away through thick woods. The Tudor was shown occasionally, and when it was, it was often at night to accommodate a working couple. But it wouldn’t be shown tonight because Wallace Sparco, introducing himself as Alfred Gluck, had booked a showing with the agent who carried the listing—the rendezvous planned at the agent’s office, six miles away and scheduled for an hour earlier. By this hour, a no-show. Now, all his.

  The back wall of 37 Orchard Street, covered in the gray, strangling veins of dormant ivy vines, could be seen through the two acres of barren autumn woods. Payne’s young and attractive wife was said to be at her regular Wednesday dinner with friends, where she would remain until dropped off at 10:00 P.M. She was, in fact, fucking wildly with the man who headed the local community theater group, a man ten years her junior who paid an uncanny resemblance to Dustin Hoffman but possessing little talent. At least acting talent, he thought. She had never once, in the three weeks that he had kept her under surveillance, made it home before ten, leaving her husband, Harold, on this night, to become a victim. A statistic. A suicide.

  Reviewing his carefully orchestrated plan, Wallace Sparco checked his Timex watch and saw that he had a full fifty minutes to accomplish what had to be done.

  Plenty of time in which to play God.

  CHAPTER 11

  Colt Park occupied nearly twenty city blocks of open grounds, with copses of trees—maples, oaks, pines—a jungle gym and a parking lot. Like any of Hartford’s city parks, after sunset it was not a particularly safe place. Dart kept his eyes open for movement and his ears alert. He felt on edge.

  The occasional ghost or goblin appeared on the sidewalk, far in the distance, for this was the night of tricks or treats, a night any cop dreaded, a night as unpredictable as New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of July. By midnight, the gangs would be out in full force. By one o’clock in the morning a teenager would be dead of a bullet wound; on Halloween, that was virtually guaranteed.

  Dart waited for her in the early evening dusk that arrives in October like an unwanted cousin, waited beneath a yellow cone of an overhead street lamp, waited nervously for a woman he had loved too recently to forget but had loved too strongly to allow himself to fully remember, waited as a few early-fallen oak leaves tumbled across the grass sounding like spilled seashells, waited and felt hurt. The
heat of Indian summer had surrendered to the insistent cool of autumn, the sky seemed a gloomier color, and the air had lost its fragrance. For the last two weeks, Dart had gone about his regular job of domestic assaults and gang-related homicides. But it was the string of suicides that occupied his mind. He had reviewed reports, studied photographs, and kept a keen eye on Roman Kowalski. He had not spoken to Abby Lang. Their night in the crib had not gone past kissing, and yet they passed each other in the halls with only a furtive glance, as if by sharing too much too soon, by breaking all kinds of rules together, personal and professional, they had erected a wall between them.

  Ginny wore a dark overcoat that covered her to her ankles. A scarf curled loosely around her neck. She had parked out on the street and crossed the corner of the park at a brisk pace, properly concerned about her choice of location for the rendezvous.

  Dart moved out from under the parking lot lamp, cloaked by the gray dusk, to where the two of them, observed from a distance, would appear as two indistinguishable forms in a quickly thickening mist.

  “Hi,” she said softly, unbuttoning her coat and removing an envelope that she then handed him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Priscilla Cole, as you asked. Her med insurance records.”

  He had lived with Ginny long enough to interpret her expressions. The eight months that they had been apart seemed only a matter of days at times like this. “What about them?”

  “One of the very seamy sides of the insurance world is the attempt on the part of the insurers to—as they put it: protect themselves from unforeseen losses. Unexpected losses. If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco they may deny or limit earthquake coverage. If you’re a known drunk they may refuse to insure your auto. The same practice carries over into medical coverage. Smokers may be restricted to certain qualified coverage, excluding or limiting what will be paid out for emphysema or asthma, lung cancer or other pulmonary disorders.”