by David Daniel
“He’d be close to four years older than that,” I said.
“He was … harder too. Toughened. What’s he done?”
I hesitated; but Rittle had come to me voluntarily. I owed him. “He might’ve murdered several people, including Bhuntan Tran.”
“Jeezum.”
“Yeah.”
He swallowed, took another peek at the photo, then set it on the desk. “Shouldn’t we go to the police?”
I found myself wishing I had spoken to St. Onge. “If the person you saw isn’t him, how do you think he and the other people there will take a lot of cops in riot guns and flak vests?”
Walt was rubbing again at his arms, lightly freckled under the sandy hair. “I wish I could be more certain, but I had just that one glance as he went up the stairs.”
“What’s up there?” I asked.
“Apartment, I guess.”
If it was Khoy, he would have to know he was being sought. Maybe he was already gone. “Can you show me the building?”
As Rittle went out to get the elevator, I stayed behind a moment. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my file cabinet and got out the Masterpiece. The walnut grips smelled faintly of linseed oil. I swung the cylinder open and checked the full load, then slipped the .38 into the side pocket of my jacket. It was not the best way to carry, but I did not want to advertise to Rittle by taking time for the holster.
We took Walt’s pickup, a little blue Isuzu with a trailer hitch with a faded yellow tennis ball over the ball tow. The cab was air-conditioned, but I felt myself sweating. On Broadway we drove past wooden tenements with clotheslines running across the porches, flapping sheets and tube socks and Day-Glo shirts. He indicated a door and drove beyond and parked. The place was a sagging multi-unit done in a faded gray that would chalk off on your eyeballs if you looked too long. Someone had ripped an ancient heating system out of one of the basements, leaving ducts and casings heaped at the curb like a body pile after a robot war.
“You want to wait here?” I said.
Walt’s Adam’s apple bobbled like a soft-boiled egg. “I reckon I’ll have to show you.”
On the scabbing clapboards outside the door was an array of mailboxes, each with a little padlock attached to keep the welfare checks from walking. The security lock on the door looked like it had quit the first time the cops knocked with a sledgehammer. The door swung into a dingy hall lit only by the plank of daylight that fell through the open doorway. I shut the door, and we let our eyes adjust, the ragged wainscoting and graffiti on the walls coming slowly into view. We did not have to wait for the smell. It was an amalgam of garbage, dry rot, grungy carpet, and Third World cuisine. I looked at Rittle, and he pointed. “Fourth floor,” he said quietly.
“Last chance,” I said.
He drew a deep breath. “I’ve got to satisfy myself now.”
I led. From behind doors on the landings came music and raised voices, none of it in languages I wanted to know. Starting on the second floor, there were dim lights in overhead fixtures filled with the husks of fossil bugs. On the third floor I began noticing the little embossed plastic strips. PLEASE SHUT THE DOWNSTAIRS DOOR, and NO RUBBISH IN HALLWAY.
“This is where I passed him,” Rittle said. “He went up there.”
We climbed the final flight of steps. NO BICYCLES OR SHOPPING CARTS ON LANDINGS, advised another strip. The landlord must have got a tape writer with his tax refund check; he definitely wasn’t going broke on building maintenance. Rittle showed me a door, battered wood like the others, with a stick-on number 12 on it. Piled next to the wall just beyond it were several collapsible cardboard inserts of the kind that come in wine cartons.
“Must’ve been a party,” Rittle whispered.
“There’d be bottles,” I whispered back; it was catching. “Where’s the first place you go to get empty boxes?”
“Oh, yeah. Then somebody moved?”
“Looks like it.” I laid my ear to the closed door. No sounds came from the other side. Reaching into my pocket and fitting my hand to the walnut grip of the Masterpiece, I put the other hand to work knocking. Behind me Rittle was doing a nervous little dance.
Surprise! There was no response.
That business on TV about jiggling a safety pin in the lock and “open sesame!” is a crock. Most decent locks are resistant to anyone but a locksmith, or a man with a hammer. I was neither. This lock felt like a deadbolt.
“Maybe the landlord lives in the building,” Rittle said.
“Don’t make jokes.”
There was a gap under the door you could have rolled a baseball through. As I tried to figure a way to make it work, Walt got down on the cigarette-burned linoleum and peered under.
“Hey, Alex—got a pen?”
I gave him one, and he used it to slide out a key. I used the key on the lock.
“And I wanted you to stay in the car,” I said.
He gave a shaky smile.
The apartment was stifling, and vacant—newly vacant, I judged. I didn’t break my neck looking for the last month’s rent or a forwarding address.
PLEASE TURN OFF LITES WHEN NOT IN USE, a sign urged. I used them. The place had a few sticks of furniture, the kind acquired by getting out ahead of the city rubbish fleet. We walked through four box-like rooms, moving slowly, but in the heat it was enough to have our sweat plopping onto the linoleum. The dripping sound I started hearing, though, was coming from the bathroom.
A stained plastic shower curtain was drawn across the tub. Too many scenes from movies flickered through my mind. Rittle must have seen the same movies. We exchanged a look. He stepped back, and I yanked the curtain aside.
We gazed into an empty tub, scummed like the hull of a boat in Boston Harbor. Drip … drip … drip said the faucet. DO NOT THROW OBJECTS IN TOYLET, said a sign. “Whew,” said Walt Rittle.
In the kitchen I gave up and opened a window. Whoever had lived in the apartment last had never really settled in. There was scant sign of life at all if you didn’t notice the dried seeds of rice and a few petrified bean sprouts that the roaches had not carried off. In a straw wastebasket I pulled out from under the sink, there was a copy of yesterday’s Sun. It was folded-open to the account of the Castle funeral. Rittle looked at it over my shoulder. “Isn’t that the guy who was killed in his house in Andover?”
“Shot in the back of the head. Like Tran.”
“Jeezum.”
The news set Rittle dancing again, watching the door, eager to be gone. I stood by the sink, figuring. We could learn where the landlord was, get hold of him and find out who his late tenant had been; but there was little chance the name would be Khoy. If he had in fact been here, had killed those others in Texas and California, he would be five aliases away now. Suppositions. John Potter had linked the victims for me, but there was still no clear evidence or motive to tie the killings together. Those could come later. As we stood there, burning gray matter, someone was laying down tracks. I needed to find out who.
There was nothing else in the wastebasket but some dust and a shiny strand of metallic cellophane. We locked the unit and pushed the key back under the door. Two floors down I got Rittle to knock on the door of the apartment belonging to his welfare client. A very dark man wearing a red, black and green knitted hat answered. He recognized Rittle and flashed a smile. “Mr. Walt,” he said in an accent that explained the hat and the ebony skin, “do come in.”
Rittle addressed the man as Joseph, said I was his colleague, and asked if I could use the telephone. Joseph seemed honored by the request. He led me in past a smiling family lineup.
St. Onge was not in. I asked the desk officer his name. Patrolman McGroarty. It rang no bells, and I hoped mine didn’t either. Very briefly I urged him to notify the state police to put on an alert at Logan Airport and the train and bus stations for Suoheang Khoy. I told him there was an outstanding California warrant on Khoy for parole violation—just to give paper weight to my request—then added what I suspected
Khoy of having done and gave the best description I could manage. McGroarty took the information without a lot of nuisance questions.
When we got into the hallway, Rittle said, “Joseph claims the man who rented unit twelve was Asian. He was there less than a month. It was news to Joseph the guy had moved out.”
Downstairs in the foyer of the building something on the carpet winked in the sunlight as we opened the door, and I stooped and picked up a strand of cellophane tinsel. I glanced back up the stairway, thinking about icicles in July.
30
FUNNY WHAT THE mind will hang onto. There is a place up there like the junk drawer, only you cannot always find what you want, because there is no inventory list. Sometimes, though, you are surprised.
It was four o’clock. An accident on one of the bridges had traffic snarled. Cutting cross-grain to police headquarters was going to mean time, and more time I did not want to fritter away on talk once we got there. Instead I directed Rittle into the flow, down Market Street, right onto Central, thinking as we went. Another right on Middlesex, past the boardinghouses and barrooms, missions and shelters. In front of the bar where I had paid the blackmailer’s stoned woman for pictures of the politician’s naked girl, a group of men stood smoking and passing a paper bag, waiting for Godot. I pointed out the cratered side road next to a big lot behind chain-link fence. At the end we turned into a cobblestone street between mill buildings. Some of the mills were operational, but most were defunct, or turned to purposes other than what, a century and a half ago, they had been designed for. In the deep shade, puddles from yesterday’s rain were the color of an old penny. Walt swamped through one, pumped the brakes, and drove on.
At the second of two enclosed connecting ways that ran overhead between buildings, I held my hand up. I was not sure which building I wanted, but it was here somewhere. We went over a low curb and down rutted dirt toward a clump of sumac. Among weeds and hills of broken brick lay discarded appliances and dead automobiles. Rust in piece. When I told Walt to stop, he asked the question with his eyebrows.
“That used to be Hamilton Textiles,” I said, nodding at the building ahead. “These days it’s storage. Remember when you were a kid and the Christmas decorations were kept in the attic?”
“Not sure I’m with you,” Rittle said.
“That’s the city’s attic.”
He frowned. He still wasn’t with me. “You think this guy came here?”
From my inside jacket pocket I tweezed out the strand of tinsel I had found in the apartment hallway on Broadway, which was like the one in the wastebasket in apartment twelve. “You know anywhere else you’d pick this up this time of year?”
“Jeezum,” Rittle said, but as he did, I felt my idea dwindle, lost in the patchwork of hunches I had been stitching together and the scale of the edifice before us. It was a vast and dilapidated building of dirty brick. The windows that were not stuffed with rags were coated with grime that had begun to accumulate when Roosevelt was president—Teddy Roosevelt. I must have read somewhere that all the holiday trappings which bloomed on city lampposts and public buildings before Thanksgiving dinner was fairly digested were kept there during the rest of the year.
Well, I had had sillier ideas; this was no time to begin rejecting them on that basis. I dropped the strand of tinsel into the ashtray.
We were partly hidden by the sumac. This time I did not suggest that Walt wait in the car. I told him. Tension had frozen the convivial softness of his face, but it was not panicky fear; not if he had been with the 82nd Airborne. “I want you to keep an eye on that gate over there,” I said. “Anyone interesting comes out, take notes.”
I climbed from the pickup and walked toward a big archway in the facade that was partly barred by rusty iron gates which opened in from both sides, like the portcullis of a Norman fortress. It was the kind of gate that had locked out workers a hundred years ago when the owners sent the yard bulls in with truncheons, and blood had spilled. A memory stirred, of another time I had gone into the courtyard of an abandoned mill, that time to keep a midnight appointment. I touched the shape of my .38 in my coat pocket, but for the moment the only thing I drew was a steadying breath. I slipped sideways through the opening and walked into an enclosure hip-deep in summer weeds that snatched at my pantlegs like small warning hands. A faint trail told me a vehicle had passed through not long before, but I was not left to wonder how long. In the courtyard, on an apron of broken asphalt, sat a little Ford GT, white with white sport wheelcovers. There was an Alamo rental sticker on the rear bumper. Damn. I had not remembered the Alamo.
The car was not locked, but I gave the interior only a cursory look through the dusty driver’s-side window. A few wrinkled shirts on the back seat, the flashy kind that go with heavy gold chains and bad taste. On the hump where the transmission ran under the gear shift I saw what could have been the shed skin of a garter snake but wasn’t. It was a plastic tube that rocks of crack came in. Someone was getting sloppy. Which meant I had better not.
The mill door was unlocked, the hasp having been jimmied loose. This was getting too easy. I opened the door as quietly as you can a 150-year-old door built to Frankenstein scale. I went inside and closed the door behind me.
There were enough uncovered windows high in the wall at my back so that daylight fed through in sulfur-stained shafts, diffusing into the gloom, making the place an eerie cathedral. I was able to see the cutout sleighs and reindeer, snowflakes and snowmen—and there were probably snowwomen too: the government would require it. Ahead I saw a big pointy star fashioned from sheet metal painted gold and realized it was the one that graced the front of city hall each December.
The high ceiling was supported on wood posts thicker than phone poles, and there were rusty stanchions where cogs once had been mounted and overhead hangers where drive belts had run, empty now except for the nests that birds had built with twigs, and bits of straw, and shimmery tinsel.
Along the far wall, running the length of the room and twenty feet above the floor that I was on, was a loft. Behind the railing, I could see reels of electrical wire and the cables that DPW crews strung across the city streets with plastic bells and wreaths. I listened and did not hear Nat King Cole, or any other sound.
But I saw footprints. A trail of them in the dust led to the stairs on the right. Time for the Smith & Wesson. I started to climb, trying to be quiet. I might as well have tried to look like Mel Gibson. The stairs creaked and groaned with each step.
On the upper level I picked my way among the snaking wires and cable reels. There were actually two sets of footprints, I realized now. My own prints were the third. The person who had left one of the other sets sat on the floor, upright against a crate, back to me so I could see only a bleached tangle of hair. I stepped nearer.
It was the woman who had delivered the blackmail photos for Tony Rossi. The eight A.M. party girl. Her name had vanished from my memory, though that did not matter, because I wasn’t going to use it anytime soon. No one was.
I squatted and set the .38 on the floor next to my knee. I nudged her arm. She was as stiff as a department store mannequin. I could not gauge how long she had been dead, but it had not been too long. There was no decay that I could detect, no odor getting past the wrinkled sleeveless blouse and the soiled jeans and the dust drifting in my nostrils. I saw no blood, no signs of wounds or injury.
Bending closer I noticed a few delicate white crumbs above her upper lip, like frost crystals. It was not hard to figure. When you were as far gone as she had seemed the other time I had seen her, you weren’t fussy about where or with whom you partied. Maybe she never delivered the blackmail money. More likely Rossi had given her a few bucks, then taken his lion’s share and split for some new enterprise, while she sank her cash into the highest-risk investment there is.
The looks she had had were gone now in the swollen tissues of her cheeks, snuffed from the dull, dented eyes, and I felt a wrench of regret that I had not extended more
of a hand when I had seen her going down that week-ago morning in the barroom.
I didn’t have time to indulge the sentiment. A gunshot shattered the stillness and tore a knot out of the floor a yard from my left knee.
I rolled backwards, looking for something to get behind. There was nothing close. A crouched figure lurched from behind a wall of crates.
“Stop!” he screeched. He held a small, shiny automatic pointed at me.
I didn’t push it. He could not have missed me by the distance he had if he hadn’t wanted to. I put my hands in view. Slowly I got up.
Rittle had been right: the face had put on years since the airport photo. It was a road map of hard travels on bad roads.
“I didn’t kill her,” Suoheang Khoy said in a tense voice.
I did not move.
“I didn’t kill her!”
“I know you didn’t, Suoheang.”
Khoy’s eyes narrowed, then widened. He was agitated, full of nervous energy that wanted someplace to go. The automatic was jerking like a baton, flashing a bright reflection on the ceiling and walls. My own weapon lay on the floor near my right foot, as useful as a beanbag. I could almost see Khoy’s mind trying to decide what came next. I gave him an option.
“She overdosed,” I said. “You sold the jade and used the money for coke. Your addiction has taken over, man. You’re on the run. You need help.”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said again, more desperately.
“We’ve been there. What do you want to do?”
“Not anyone,” he said, shuffling closer, adding something in a language I didn’t know. I kept my hands up. Off to the left, far behind him, a sudden trapezoid of light caught my eye, then was gone. I realized what it had been. I did not look again. My heart was drumming a fast, even beat.
