Night Work

by Steve Hamilton

  “I don’t know about that. We did work together before and we got a good result. We’ve kept in touch ever since.”

  “Fair enough. So what’s going on with Marlene? Do you have any leads yet?”

  He had a leather case on the table. He opened it up and took out a red notebook. “I’ll tell you what we have so far,” he said. “You let me know if I’m missing any details, no matter how small.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “I understand you were the last known person to see her alive. That was on Saturday night. The two of you had a date?”

  “A blind date, yes.”

  “Right. From what you told the chief yesterday, it sounds like you brought her home a little after eleven. That checks out with what her landlady says.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “Today we did, yes. Mrs. Hornbeck. She lives downstairs.”

  “I remember,” I said. “Marlene said we had to be quiet because she was a light sleeper.”

  “Well, you weren’t quiet enough, apparently. According to Mrs. Hornbeck, she heard the two of you going up the stairs after eleven, and then there was some music played?”

  “Marlene on her piano.”

  “Okay. Well, apparently after that, things got quiet for a while.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, you know I have to ask. The two of you were intimate at that point?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Hornbeck says she went back to sleep at that point, but that she woke up again after two o’clock. Somebody was going down the back stairs.”

  “No, I was out of there by one thirty,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “She was quite adamant about the time. She said she made a note of it, the fact that it was two fourteen and here she was, getting woken up again. She said whoever was going down the stairs was making a real racket this time.”

  “When I left, Marlene asked me to be as quiet as possible.”

  “And you’re sure it was before two o’clock?”

  “Around one thirty. I’m positive.”

  He wrote this down in his notebook, then tapped the page with his pen. “So she may not have heard you leaving at all,” he said. “Maybe Marlene left later, for whatever reason, and Mrs. Hornbeck woke up then.”

  “But Marlene would have known to be as quiet as I was.”

  “You’re right. So now we have another story altogether. You leave, and shortly after, another person goes up the stairs. While Mrs. Hornbeck’s still sleeping. She doesn’t wake up until this second person leaves, making a lot of noise.”

  “The second person being …”

  “Whoever killed her, most likely. Odds are that person took Marlene down the stairs at that time, too. Which reminds me.”

  He flipped the page in his notebook.

  “When we opened her apartment, we found a large number of beads all over her floor …”

  “Jewelry beads,” I said. “That was me.”

  “I don’t think you mentioned that to the chief last night.”

  “No, I just remembered. I knocked over a container of beads, all over the place. I started picking them up, but she told me to leave them, that she’d do it.”

  “I guess she never got the chance.”

  “No, I guess not.” I was starting to feel sick again. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes.

  “I didn’t ask you about your hands before,” he said, “but now I’m curious.”

  “I had to go look at a woman’s dead body last night. Somebody I had just been with the night before. I do a lot of boxing, so I should have known better than to take it out on my hands.”

  “You’re a boxer, eh?”

  “Not for real. It’s just something I do to stay in shape.”

  “Looks like it works.”

  “Should I be asking you if I’m being considered as a suspect at this point?”

  “Joe, you know the law. You know I’d have to tell you if you were.”

  “I understand that can be kind of a gray area.”

  He shook his head. “In the state of New York, you’re officially a peace officer, am I right?”

  “Officially, yes.”

  “Okay, so we’re talking one officer to another here. Obviously, you know my first job is to evaluate your standing in this case and to eliminate you as a suspect if that’s the way things add up. Beyond the fact that you were with her last night, there’s nothing else to make me believe you’d have anything to do with her death. The chief himself certainly vouches for you, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re just our best source of information on this case, and maybe the only person who can really help us right now. Will you do that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know this isn’t easy. So tell me, did she mention anything to you at all? Any bad blood with anybody? Or any reason to think that somebody was after her?”

  “No. Although, when we were talking … I think she said something about things being a little crazy down in the city, and her wanting to get away …”

  “What else?”

  “That’s really all she said about that.”

  “Think about it. She didn’t say anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’d like you to try something,” he said, taking out a pad of legal paper. “Instead of you talking and me writing it down, I want you to write it down yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll remember it better that way. I want you to write down every single thing that comes to you. From the moment you saw her … or before that, even. Where did you meet her last night?”

  “At a restaurant uptown.”

  “Okay, then. Start with you going to the restaurant. Every single detail you can remember. Everything, no matter how insignificant it might seem. Going to the restaurant, who you might have seen there, inside the restaurant, outside the restaurant … then everything she said to you. Every word you can remember.”

  “You want me to write all that down?”

  “It’ll take a while, Joe, but it’s important. I want you to write down every single thing. What color the tablecloths were. How big the pepper grinder was. Everything you can remember, no matter how insignificant it may seem. It may seem a little strange, but this is a technique that works. I’ve seen it happen, believe me. When you do this, you start prompting your mind to remember in a certain way. It’s like self-hypnosis.”

  “Self-hypnosis?”

  “Exactly. You’re hypnotizing yourself into remembering. At some point last night, something happened, Joe. You heard her say something. Or you saw something. There has to be … something. We need that if we’re going to figure out what to do next.”

  He put his pen on top of the pad and slid it over to me.

  “Otherwise, we don’t have much to go on, Joe. Will you give it a shot?”

  “I’ll try.” I took the pen. “From the moment I arrived at the restaurant…”

  “Yes.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until you got all the way back to your place. Who knows what you might have seen as you were leaving?”

  “Okay. I got it.”

  “Every detail, Joe. Every single little thing. I’ll leave you alone for a while. You want that coffee now?”

  “Maybe a Coke instead.”

  “I’m on it.”

  He opened the door and left the room, leaving me there with one pen, one pad, and a hell of a lot of details to remember. I started writing. I arrived at the restaurant just before 7:00 p.m.

  Details, he said. He wants me to hypnotize myself with details.

  Le Canard Enchaîné, on Fair Street.

  A quick trip back to high school French class. The little hat thing on the i and the accent acute on the e, right?

  We had arranged to meet there. I had parked down on Front Street, and had walked to the restaurant. As I approached the bui
lding

  What do I say? I was too nervous to notice anything? You could have led a conga line of dancing poodles in front of me and I wouldn’t have even blinked?

  As I approached the building I do not recall noticing anything out of the ordinary. There were cars parked up and down Wall Street on either side, as usual. This is why I had parked on Front Street.

  This is ridiculous, I thought. This is a complete waste of time.

  God damn you, Joe. Just get over yourself and do this. Marlene needs you to give this your best shot.

  Shea came back in and put a can of Coke on the table next to me. He didn’t say a word. He took one peek over my shoulder, gave me the thumbs-up, and left the room again.

  I kept going, trying to re-create the entire evening in my mind. The conversation came back pretty well, but everything around us was a blur. Aside from the waitress bringing our food over, I just didn’t have any reason to notice anything else in the restaurant. If someone was there watching us … As a witness I was a total bust.

  The time passed slowly. I worked hard at it, going through the rest of the evening, walking around town, going upstairs to her place. The music on the piano. Me leaving, driving back home. I ended up filling nine pages.

  When I was done, I leaned back in my chair. My right hand was stiff from all the writing, aside from hurting like hell to begin with. I finished the rest of my Coke, now lukewarm.

  I was about to stand up when the door opened behind me. Shea poked his head in and asked me how I was doing.

  “I think I’m done,” I said.

  “Very good.” He came in and sat down across from me. I slid the pad over. “So how did it go?” He skimmed the first page, then flipped through the rest. As he was doing that, I found myself staring at his earring. He looked up and caught me.

  “I was just wondering about the earring,” I said.

  He reached up and tugged on it. “My little pistol,” he said. “My wife gave this to me. I collect western six-shooters.”

  “I’m surprised the BCI lets you wear it.”

  “They’re cool with it.”

  Just one more strange note on a strange day. The BCI is cool with earrings.

  “So what did this do for you?” he said, paging through my write-up. “Did it make you remember anything?”

  “I’m afraid not. I don’t remember seeing anyone suspicious, or her saying anything specific about … I don’t know … anything. Or anybody who might have wanted to hurt her.”

  “It was worth a shot,” he said. “Maybe something will still come to you. Let me give you my card.”

  He took a silver card holder out of his pocket, opened it, and handed me a card. William T. Shea, New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

  “What are you going to do now?” I said.

  “We’re still trying to contact her family in Pennsylvania. If we can’t reach her parents by phone, we’ll get the state police down there to find them.”

  “That’s going to be rough.”

  “Before you go,” he said, “let me ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The chief tells me you suffered a personal tragedy a couple of years ago.”

  “Yes, my fiancée was murdered.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” he said. “Do you think there could be any kind of connection?”

  “To Marlene?”

  “Is it possible?”

  “I don’t see how. Laurel was killed in her house in Westchester, over two years ago. Her parents came home from a vacation and found her in her bedroom. She was …” I didn’t even want to finish the sentence.

  “Somebody broke in,” Shea said.

  “Yes. Through the back door. But people break into houses all the time. You and I both know that. That’s the only thing in common here.”

  “Besides you.”

  “Besides me. If you really stretch it.”

  “You or somebody you know,” he said. “Maybe somebody from your life, I mean. Not Marlene’s.”

  “Two years apart,” I said. “A fiancée and now a woman I just met.”

  “You’re probably right. It’s a stretch. I’m just trying to cover all the bases.”

  “I hope you’ll let me know if you find out anything,” I said. I stood up and straightened my back. It felt like I had been sitting in that chair all day.

  “Of course I will. In the meantime, let me know if anything else comes to you.”

  “I’ll keep thinking about it,” I said.

  Like I’d be able to do anything else.

  SEVEN

  By the time I got back to work, all of my kids had come and gone, keeping their regular appointments as required by the terms of their probation. Charlie had covered all of them, it turned out. While I was down at the station, writing down every single little detail I could think of from Saturday night, Charlie was sitting here with my clients, listening to them talk about what they’d been doing for the last week. It was a pretty mundane part of the job—a good week was a boring week, after all. No drugs bought or sold. No fellow students assaulted. No items taken from their rightful owners. Still, boring or not, this was maybe my favorite part of the week, hearing these people talk about their lives, the struggles they went through every day, the battles they fought, big or small. It felt good to be a part of them. Other people’s lives, not my own.

  Charlie had already left, leaving only some fairly cryptic notes for me. “Jamaal said it’s all been tight”—that was maybe the best of them. Like “tight” was something I could follow up on the next time I saw him.

  I sat in my chair while the day faded away. I took out a pad and a pen, sat there for a good twenty minutes waiting for something to hit me.

  Somebody from my life, he had said. Detective Shea’s idea, that maybe I was the common link between Laurel and Marlene. That it wasn’t all a horrible coincidence.

  Insanity, Joe. Sheer insanity. Isn’t it?

  Before I could answer my own question, Larry poked his head around my door.

  “You came back,” he said.

  “Yeah, I wanted to make sure everything was okay here. All my appointments from today.”

  “I told you, we had it covered. You should go home now.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  “How’d everything go at the police station?”

  “Good.” That’s all I felt like saying at the moment.

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  I looked at him. Every conversation we had, he’d always be standing out in the hallway, leaning in at me but never actually stepping foot in my office.

  “We should make some time tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Good enough. I’ll see you then. Have a good night.”

  That sounded like my cue, so I packed up my bag and got the hell out of there. It was almost dark when I stepped outside, the whole day having slipped right away from me. Not much accomplished, nobody’s life made any better at all. On the way home, my cell phone rang. It was Howie.

  “How’d it go?” he said. “What’s Billy the Kid up to?”

  “Billy the who?”

  “Detective Shea. That’s his nickname, Billy the Kid. Did you see the little gun in his ear?”

  “The six-shooter, yeah.”

  “So come on over,” he said. “You can tell me about it in person.”

  “You guys don’t want me over there tonight.”

  “Elaine says you need to come over.”

  “No, Howie. Really …”

  “She made her lasagna for you.”

  “What time should I be there?”

  “That’s more like it. We’ll see you at seven thirty?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I drove to the gym and parked in my usual spot by the back stairs. When I went inside, Maurice was finishing up his workout. It didn’t look like he’d
done any sparring, but then I didn’t see Rolando around. Maybe life was changing for him already, before his baby was even born.

  Maurice grabbed me by the head, the way only a man who is twice as strong as you can do. He looked at my eyebrow, at the scar he was personally responsible for. “You healed up well,” he said. I was no longer surprised by how soft his voice was, how thoughtful he seemed in every moment outside of the ring. Rolando was the same way, and just about every other good boxer I had ever seen step into this gym. As much as boxers thrive on violence, how can it be that they turn into philosophers when they take off the gloves?

  “But why are your hands taped up?” Maurice said.

  Anderson saved me before I had to explain it again. “Leave the man alone,” he said. “He’s having a bad enough day already.”

  “I’m just looking after my friend here,” Maurice said. “I’m not supposed to do that?”

  “How long did you jump rope, anyway? Two minutes?”

  I could tell where this was going, so I tried to excuse myself. Anderson stopped me before I could hit the stairs.

  “Joe, that woman came back,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The woman who was here last night, the one we sent to the shelter.”

  “She came back here? What did she want?”

  “She was looking for you,” he said. “I tried to talk to her, but I didn’t get much out of her. I think I got her general feeling, though …”

  “Which was what?”

  “That the whole thing last night was a big mistake. That she was heading back home and wanted to, hell, I don’t know. Tell you to leave well enough alone next time.”

  Not good at all, obviously. Not if she was heading back into a war zone. But why stop here to tell me off? Unless she really wanted me to talk her out of it.

  “We should call that shelter,” Maurice said. “Make them come and get her again.”

  “They can’t take her against her will,” I said. “If she wants to go home, she can.”

  “I’m telling you, we should all go pay her husband a visit,” Anderson said. “We’ll straighten him out real quick.”

  “I’ll go see her,” I said. “If I need you, I’ll let you know. I promise.”

  That didn’t seem to satisfy either of them, but I knew it was the only way to go. It might make me late for dinner, but this was something I could do, at least. Instead of hanging around the gym, thinking about dead women … I could go help somebody who was still alive.