Night Work

by Steve Hamilton

  “Exactly,” I said. “I know who I have to go see first thing tomorrow.”

  FOURTEEN

  This time, when the knock came I was ready for it. I opened the door and let Detective Shea into my room. “Good morning,” I said to him. I was dressed in clean jeans and a white shirt. “You’re late.”

  He looked around the place, at the CDs that were all put back on the shelves, at the general lack of clothes all over the floor or the furniture. He probably noticed that the bed was made, too, but he couldn’t have known it was the first time in two years.

  “You’ve been busy,” he said.

  “That’s the difference between a guilty man and an innocent man.”

  “What, a clean room?”

  “No, Detective. I mean that a guilty man either sits around feeling relieved that he got away with it, or else he takes off running. An innocent man keeps himself occupied. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I had some classic Miles playing on the stereo, just the thing I needed that day. I went over and turned the volume from five to three. “I’m glad you stopped by,” I said. “I wanted to tell you something before I headed out.”

  “Do you mind telling me where you’re going?”

  “Do you mind listening to what I have to say?”

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “It was pretty obvious you were the one who didn’t want to charge me yesterday.” No sense giving up Howie, I thought. Let the man think I’m psychic.

  He was about to say something. He stopped himself and shook his head, looking at the floor.

  “You know I didn’t kill anybody. Your gut tells you that much.”

  “My gut’s been wrong before.”

  “Yeah, well … I know it has to be more than that. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up and started cleaning. You want to know what I figured out while I was folding my clothes?”

  “What did you figure out?”

  I went to the closet and pulled out one of the three ties I had left. This one was blue. I held it up to him with both hands, the way you would if you wanted to choke someone to death. If he was alarmed, he did a good job of hiding it.

  “My red tie,” I said. “It didn’t kill Marlene. It couldn’t have.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The important question is how do you know that? By now, I’m sure you’ve had the tie in the lab long enough. I honestly don’t know that much about forensics, but I’ve got to assume it would have left some kind of mark on her neck. Some kind of, what do they call it, ligature?”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m guessing that anything you use to strangle someone is going to leave a unique mark. Maybe fibers in the skin, too. Am I right?”

  “You know I can’t talk about the details at this point.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I know I’m right, because I know what couldn’t have happened. It explains why Marlene was left outside, too. That never did make any sense, did it—for someone to go to all that trouble, when he didn’t do it for Sandra …”

  “Or your fiancée.”

  I stopped dead. I couldn’t help glancing over at her picture.

  “Right,” I said. “Or Laurel. The reason Marlene was taken from her apartment was that the killer would have needed time to put my tie around her neck. Well after she was killed.”

  “And the shoelaces?”

  “If they were taken when I was out that next day, then they very well could have been used to kill Sandra. There’s no time problem with the shoelaces.”

  “You seem to have it pretty well thought out,” he said. “But now you seem to be suggesting that this person is not only killing the women in your life, he’s also trying to make it look like you did it yourself.”

  “Yeah, that kind of follows, Detective. That’s his game.”

  I looked out the tall window, at the cars going up and down Broadway, at the people walking on the sidewalk.

  “He’s out there,” I said. “It’s like I can feel him watching me all the time now.”

  The detective didn’t come to the window. He stood his ground and watched me.

  “By the way,” I said, “I’m sorry about that little crack I made yesterday. About your earring, I mean. I was having a tough day.”

  “No apology necessary.”

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some more people to go see.”

  It was obvious he wanted to say something about this, but he didn’t. There was nothing he could do to stop me and we both knew it.

  “I have an important question,” I said as I showed him to the door. “How many shoelaces did you find around Sandra’s neck?”

  “We found one.”

  “That’s what I thought. Which means there’s one more left.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to find him, Detective. And if you’re not going to help me, I guess I’ll have to do it myself.”

  I left Ulster County, crossing the Kingston–Rhinecliff bridge over the Hudson River. On the other side was Dutchess County. It had more people than Ulster. A lot more money. I could see some of the old mansions from the bridge, high up on the hills, where the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts once spent their summers.

  The Dutchess County Fair is better than the Ulster County Fair, too. No contest. Which is why, three years ago, Marshall Tilton and three of his friends crossed the bridge to get to it. Four kids from Kingston, not one of them a stranger to trouble. They ran into half a dozen kids from Red Hook, all of them wearing letter jackets and walking down the midway with their girlfriends. One word is all it takes in a situation like that. One word or one wrong look.

  It blows over most of the time. Just teenagers protecting their turf. But this time it ended up with two cars going back across the bridge instead of one, the Red Hook boys following the Kingston boys back home to make good on a promise. Not a good idea in any town. Certainly not in Kingston. When it was over, one of the Red Hook kids, an eighteen-year-old senior named Ronald Ebisch, was lying dead on the sidewalk, a single bullet in his head.

  Howie got the case. Between the eyewitness accounts and the nitrate test to determine whose hand had held the gun, he had more than enough to arrest Marshall Tilton for second degree manslaughter. It was pled down to man three, and Marshall got sent up for twenty years. Last I heard, he was still down in Sing Sing.

  The first problem for me was that Marshall was six months into a year’s probation for simple assault. The second problem was that he’d just been picked up two days before for possession of a controlled substance. Now, the way it works is, if you’re on probation and you get arrested, you don’t automatically violate. It’s up to me as your PO to file with the court for the violation hearing. In extreme cases, I can try to make it happen in a matter of hours, but hell … It was painkillers, for God’s sake. It wasn’t another assault. It wasn’t eight ounces of pure heroin. It was three Percocets. He said he picked them up off of some guy at school because his ankle hurt, the same ankle he had broken a year before, keeping him out of basketball and leaving him way too much free time on his hands. Now for buying three freaking pain pills I’m supposed to find a judge on a Friday afternoon to have the kid put away for the weekend?

  I don’t know one probation officer in the entire state of New York who would have pulled that trigger, but theoretically, I could have done it.

  Instead, I took him home. His mother wasn’t even there. No big surprise. So I told him he needed to stay in the house until Monday morning, and if I saw him anywhere else I’d bounce him off the ceiling. On Sunday afternoon he was driving to the fair, and on Sunday evening he was putting a bullet in Ronald Ebisch’s brain.

  When I was going through my cases, I never even considered putting Marshall on my initial A-list. There was no man in the house, for one thing. Nobody except the mother to blame me for putting her son away, and in her case I never picked up any of that
vibe. Truth be told, I don’t think she ever visited him in prison. Not once.

  No, Marshall wasn’t a candidate for the list, but what about someone in the Ebisch family? I never met any of them, but Howie sure did. He could see firsthand what Ronald’s murder did to them. They were at Marshall’s trial. They were at his sentencing. Mr. Ebisch apparently stood up and made a statement there. How Marshall took his son away. How his family’s life had been torn apart forever. That’s what Howie told me, anyway. He was there through the whole thing.

  It got to me, of course. How could it not? In the end I, though, knew I’d done exactly what I should have done, that if I started second-guessing myself on every judgment call, I’d be no use to anybody. That’s how I ended up being able to sleep at night.

  But what if Mr. Ebisch saw it differently? He probably heard at some point that Marshall was on probation. With a minimum amount of effort, he could have found out about the painkiller arrest. With a little more effort, he could have found out the name of Marshall’s probation officer. To him, I’d be just a name at that point. A faceless bureaucrat who was too stupid and too lazy to do his job. A few months of lying awake at night, saying my name … until one day he decided he had to find me.

  That was the idea, anyway. I was on my way to the man’s house to see if it was anything close to reality.

  I found the house just west of town, another of those new developments that looked like it could have been dropped anywhere in the country. I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a moment, thinking about what I was going to say. This one was different, because I had never met the man before. I didn’t have any kind of baseline to work from, no way to know if this was the same man from three years ago or if he had gone completely out of his mind.

  Just as I was about to get out of my car, the garage door opened. The automatic opener was obviously in need of a good tune-up, because from fifty feet away, sitting inside my car, I could hear the metallic grinding of the chain. When the door finally shuddered to a stop, a car came backing out about as fast as you can make a car go in reverse. I had half a second to realize what was going to happen, and maybe a hundredth of a second more to do anything about it. I had barely gotten my hand on the gearshift when the back of the car hit my front bumper with a sickening thud.

  My car took one big lurch backwards, another forward, then it rocked back before finally settling. When I looked up, I didn’t see the driver of the other car. I was about to get worried when his door opened and the man stepped out. I opened my door and did the same.

  “What in goddamned hell …” he said. He was holding a mug in his right hand, but whatever was in it was now soaking into the front of his pants, his shirt, and his tie.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What are you doing here?” He was trying to pull his wet pants away from his legs. From the look of his face, I could only imagine how hot that coffee must have been. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I didn’t have time to get out of the way,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He kept trying to deal with his pants while he looked at the damage to his taillights. They looked like goners on both sides. “This is perfect,” he said in a low voice. “This is just what I needed today.”

  “My name’s Joe Trumbull,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute. I had no idea you were going to come out of your garage like that.”

  “I had no idea you’d be sitting there. I’m late for work, all right? Now I’m totally screwed.”

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” I said. Aside from the busted taillights, the bumper itself didn’t look completely destroyed. It was dented all to hell, but nothing that couldn’t be banged out or even replaced if he was the kind of person who needed it to look perfect. Meanwhile, my own car looked like it was just scratched up and nothing else.

  “I’m glad you think it’s not bad,” he said. “What was your name again?”

  “Joe Trumbull.”

  “Should I know you?”

  “I was Marshall Tilton’s probation officer.”

  He stopped squirming in his pants and looked up at me. “You were his what?”

  Genuine surprise there. He didn’t know me. I would have bet my life on it.

  “I was his probation officer,” I said. “Three years ago.”

  His eyes narrowed as he processed it. He was about to say something, but the words didn’t come out. He regrouped and tried again. “I don’t understand,” he finally said. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I was one of the people trying to get him back on the right track before he killed your son.”

  “You were trying to get him … What? On the right track, did you say? He was a criminal. He was a murderer. What right track are you talking about?”

  I didn’t want to get into a debate with him. Hell, at that moment, I didn’t want to say anything else at all. My only reason for being there had been vaporized.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about what happened to your son. I know that can’t mean much to you …”

  “You’re sorry.”

  “Yes. And I’m sorry about your car. If you need to call the police, go ahead. Otherwise, I’ll give you my card. When you find out how much it costs to get it fixed, just let me know.”

  “What I need is to be at work right now. That’s what I need.”

  “I understand. I’ll get out of your way.” I went back into my car and grabbed one of my business cards from the glove compartment. When I gave it to him, I got close enough to see his bloodshot eyes and the way his razor had scraped his neck that morning. He had probably been running around like a maniac trying to get ready for work, for whatever he had to do every day to keep a roof over what was left of his family, throwing on his clothes and swearing at the garage door opener as it inched its way up. Then he’d gunned it and run right into me, the man who had apparently given his son’s murderer a weekend pass, the man whose business card he was now holding. He looked at me like I had just handed him a color photograph of a dead rat.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “Three years later, you come to me to what? To apologize?”

  “I should have come a long time ago,” I said, knowing that I never would have if this other reason hadn’t come up. “I’m sorry.”

  “You keep saying you’re sorry. Like that should mean something to me.”

  “I don’t have anything else.”

  “Have you learned something, at least? Like maybe you should lock up murderers instead of sending them to the county fair?”

  I put my hands up. “If I had known,” I said, slowly. “I mean, he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere. He was supposed to be home. All weekend. But really, Mr. Ebisch … I know that can’t mean much to you at this point.”

  “Okay, whatever. So that’s all you wanted to say. Ronnie’s been in the ground for three years and you came by today to say you’re sorry it happened.”

  “Yes. I guess it is.”

  “Fine, then. You said it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go change my clothes.”

  “I meant what I said. When you find out how much it’ll cost to fix your car …”

  “You know that old saying?” he said. “Time heals all wounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s total bullshit. In case you were wondering.”

  “I understand.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t.”

  I hesitated. This one I didn’t want to give him, because he was totally and completely dead wrong. I knew it just as well as he did.

  But I didn’t say anything. I was about to get back in my car when the man waved me back over. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him. I sure as hell didn’t feel like having him take a swing at me.

  “One thing,” he said. “You’re not going to come back here ever again, right?”

  “I don’t plan on it.”

  “That’s good. You were actually pretty lucky today. If my other son were here, he would
have taken you apart.”

  “Your other son?”

  “If you think this destroyed me, Mr. Trumbull … you should see what it did to his brother.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me about your other son. Please.”

  “Greg and Ronnie were both together that day. Greg watched his brother die on the sidewalk. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “No, of course not. It’s nothing to you.”

  “Mr. Ebisch, where is your other son now? Can I talk to him?”

  “You don’t want to do that, believe me. If he had any idea who you were … what you did. Excuse me, what you didn’t do.”

  I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders. Grabbing him and shaking him right there in his driveway.

  “Just tell me about him,” I said. “What has he been doing since it happened?”

  “What has he been doing? You’re joking, right? He couldn’t go back to school. He talked to every counselor, psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever the fuck in the whole state of New York. When he finally seemed to be getting better, he finished up his GED and tried to go to college, which lasted about two days. He was going to be an architecture major, Mr. Trumbull. But now he’s back here, living in his old bedroom. He never sleeps for more than an hour at a time. He’s out every single night doing God knows what. Then he comes home at five o’clock in the morning just to change his clothes so he can go push shopping carts around at the Wal-Mart.”

  “That’s where he works?” I only knew of one Wal-Mart in the area. It was back over the bridge, in Kingston.

  “Do not go near him,” he said. “Do you hear me? He barely has his shit together as it is. If you tell him who you are, I swear to God he will go absolutely berserk all over you. I can see you’re in good shape, but it wouldn’t matter to him. He’d either kill you or he’d die trying.”

  “Mr. Ebisch—”

  “At the very least, you’ll get him fired. I think you’ve done enough to this family, so please don’t go make him lose his job now, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”