Burning Time awm-1

by Leslie Glass

The words struck a chord. Emma put her hands to her face.

  Ronnie leaned over, concerned. “Jesus, what’s the matter?”

  They were surrounded by sunlight and springtime and the glow of a golden future. They should be eating caviar and drinking champagne in The Russian Tea Room, and Emma was crying her eyes out.

  33

  “Newton, honey. You got to do something about that dripping tap.” That was the last thing Rose said to him as he walked out the door that morning. You got to do something about the faucet. It left a bad taste in his mouth as he headed to work. She had been saying the same damn thing for weeks, and she knew she could get it done just as easy as he could, maybe easier.

  Sometimes he couldn’t understand why she didn’t see he had something on his mind—didn’t sleep the whole night, worrying—and leave him alone about faucets.

  He didn’t like got-to-dos.

  If Milt got a match on that body, and it turned out to be that girl from New York, then he’d have a big got-to-do. She died in his jurisdiction. That made it his case. He couldn’t just close it up because there was no physical evidence. He’d have to investigate it. But hell, there were not really enough of them to start running around asking questions. Shit.

  Newt half hoped Milt and his friend, the coroner from Twentynine Palms, would get together on this and find the same MO on the two bodies. Then they could inform the FBI at VICAP and let them deal with it as a serial murder thing. Never mind that it was just two. More than one was good enough. Those guys had the experts and the computers. They were used to checking and cross-checking every kind of killer and every kind of bizarre twist the human mind could think of.

  But even though Milt and his friend agreed there was a striking resemblance between the injuries on the chest, even though the two girls did appear to have been tortured and were found in similar circumstances, that’s all there was. They had not been murdered in the usual way. For homicides, you needed more than a body. You needed a murder weapon. You needed a place of death, some indication someone else was there.

  Newton Regis certainly couldn’t go to the FBI and say he had a serial killer. Yes, sir, and by the way, sir, the desert did it.

  Maybe the guy hadn’t worked his way up to killing them yet. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. In any case, at the moment it was some kind of sex crime thing. And they certainly didn’t have a Sex Crime Unit in Potoway Village. So Rose should understand he had a problem, if the girl Milt had on ice was the girl from New York.

  Newt got in at eight and sat at his desk gloomily until ten, when Milt finally called him. They had a positive ID.

  34

  Jimmy leaned against the driver’s door of the white LeBaron. His hair had gotten quite long, and his face was lean and narrow. Even in its best moments, it was not a generous face. Now it had kind of a pinched look about it, as if he had just eaten something sour.

  April knew the sour thing he had to swallow was her insistence that he come into Manhattan right away. She called him every place she could think of, and someone must have given him the message.

  “What’s so urgent?” he said on the phone when he called her back.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You skipped our lunch. The least you could do is say ‘Hello, how are you, April,’ ” April said.

  She had gone up to the dorm at Columbia to look for letters, and had found Connie Sagan but no letters. Connie was sure there had been no letters. She was sure Ellen hadn’t been seeing anyone since she broke up with her boyfriend, and certainly didn’t go to California with someone. Connie was absolutely sure she would have known that.

  “I guess you haven’t found her yet,” Connie said. She was the opposite of Ellen, a fat girl with a lot of pain in her face.

  April shook her head. “No, I don’t have any information on that.”

  She had gone back to the precinct instead of home to wait for Jimmy’s call. She was in a bad mood and didn’t care who knew it.

  “Look, I’m sorry about lunch. Something came up,” Jimmy said. It didn’t sound like he was in a good mood, either.

  “You haven’t called me in two weeks.” She was sitting at her desk. Everyone was out. For some reason she felt strong.

  “I’ve been on a case. What’s the big deal? Are you my wife or something?”

  “You have my car, Jimmy.”

  “You gave me your car. You told me to drive carefully.”

  “Now I want it back.”

  “Huh? I’m on a case right now. You called me for that?”

  “You’re off duty right now, Jimmy. Today was your day off. We were going to go to lunch. You stood me up.”

  “Look, you asked me. I told you it wasn’t convenient. So just because I couldn’t get there you want the car back. That’s not a nice way to be.”

  “Jimmy, I want the car back because I need it to get around.”

  “I’m disappointed in you.”

  Yes, she’d heard that before. Whenever she opened her mouth to disagree with him, he either called her a crazy woman or said he was disappointed in her. She thought she used to be a crazy woman. Now she was a sane woman.

  “You’ve changed since you’ve been Uptown,” he complained, like she was contaminated in some way because of it.

  “How soon can you be here? I’m not leaving here without my car. I’ll let everyone know you have it. I want it now.”

  He showed up in an hour and had to wait outside the building because there was no way he would go in and look for her. He was leaning against the car scowling when she ambled out of the building and crossed the street.

  “I told you I’d be here. Why’d you have to make me wait on the street?” he grumbled.

  April held out her hand for the keys.

  “I kept you waiting three minutes. You kept me waiting for an hour and a quarter. You knew where I was. You could have called. Now you know what it feels like.”

  His face turned red. There were some blue uniforms watching him lose face.

  “Uh, get in. I’ll drive you home,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’m not going home.”

  “Then I’ll take you where you’re going.”

  “I thought you were on a case,” April reminded him.

  “I have time to take you where you’re going.” He cocked his head at her, telling her to get in the car.

  “Uh-uh. You can’t take me where I’m going, Jimmy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not going to the same place anymore. So we’re not seeing each other again.”

  “What, just like that?”

  His thin face was very red.

  “Not so just like that. It’s been coming on for a long time. You don’t love me, Jimmy, and I don’t love you. I guess that about covers it.”

  “How do you know I don’t love you?” he said very quietly, with daggers coming out of his eyes.

  She wanted to get away from those angry eyes before he found a way to curse her for all time.

  “Because of the way you act,” she replied.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve been together almost three years.”

  “And that’s about long enough.” Too long.

  “Look, I said I was sorry about the lunch.” He was very angry now. His voice was tight. His eyes had all but disappeared into their Mongolian folds.

  She looked around for someone she knew. “Give me the keys, Jimmy. I have to go now.”

  He saw her nod at a uniform, a big guy, probably Irish. He handed her the keys.

  She got in the car and closed the door very gently. “Have a good life,” she said, careful not to curse him.

  It was more than he would do for her. He sloped off toward the subway without a word.

  35

  Troland knelt on the floor and lifted the blind just a few inches, so he could peer out sideways at Mrs. Bartello’s living room window. He did this every few minute
s. She never seemed to be in there. That was good. Sometimes he thought she was dead. There was no sign of life in her house.

  When she came to the door the first time, the old lady was wearing a stiff black dress and said, “What do you want? I’m in mourning.”

  That was good. He switched his attention to the front window. Out on the street the traffic was backed up. A jet thundered in over the roof, heading for LaGuardia.

  “I want to rent the place,” he said. He pointed to the hand-lettered sign in the window, GARAGE APARTMENT FOR RENT.

  He had seen the sign as he wandered around looking for the way into Manhattan the first time, and knew it was there for him. He exited to the service road and parked in front, just like he had lived in the neighborhood all his life. It didn’t feel good, though. He breathed in the air and felt dangerous particles entering his body. It was gray and damp. He didn’t think much of New York.

  “You can call me Mrs. Bartello.” She was a small, thin woman. She looked him and his rented Ford Tempo over. “I guess you’ll want the garage, too.”

  “I have to have the garage,” he said.

  She shrugged. He had to have it. It was the only way into the apartment.

  “You don’t have wild parties with loud music, do you?” she asked, looking him over again. He was blond and not too big. He had blue eyes, was wearing a leather jacket, black jeans, and boots.

  “I don’t like music,” he said.

  “What about drugs?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay.” She took the two hundred in cash he gave her, counted the bills with surprising speed, and shut the door.

  He liked that about her. She wasn’t interested. She let him look at the place alone because she didn’t like going there. Reminded her of her dead husband, she said. For days after he took it, he kept looking for a flaw. He couldn’t find one. It was a perfect setup.

  He could drive into the garage and go upstairs without being seen from the outside. He had two rooms, one with a sofa, table and chairs, a little kitchen, and a telephone; the other, a tiny bedroom with a single bed and a skylight. He didn’t like the skylight. He saw faces looking in from above. Airplanes and faces.

  There were windows on three sides. Troland checked the back and the side. When he got restless he took the rental car into Manhattan. The first few times he did it he had a map with him. He experimented crossing different bridges and working his way across town to the West Side. Then he tried taking the subway. The subway was faster, but an old crazy lady pulled up the two skirts she was wearing and urinated in front of him, squatting between two cars, as the train sped along. Crazy people made him upset.

  He got there early in the morning and sat in the car down the block, looking up at the window and waiting for her to come out. Sometimes he parked the car far away and walked around the neighborhood, getting the feel of it. He hung around the next block over, trying to figure out the buildings.

  Half of the block, from west to east, was built around a sort of garden that was part of a larger building on the other side. Sometimes the iron gate to the garden was open. She lived on the fifth floor.

  He’d seen her about six times now. The first time it was like being hit by a blast of cold air. Like when he rode the scooter at seventy-five on the freeway with no helmet. Cold, exhilarating beyond anything, and almost out of control. It was a shock. The bitch he’d taken all the trouble for didn’t look like her. She looked like somebody he wouldn’t even look at. It almost took his breath away. Sixteen years and she was someone else.

  She was wearing a tan skirt and loose tweed jacket with a kind of purple blouse under it that didn’t show her figure at all. Her hair was not as blond as it used to be, was hardly blond at all now. Not blond by California standards. Even from a distance he could see she was quite thin, and her face was—different. She was not like the girl in the movie. This one was not the kind of woman he would talk to. He didn’t like her. That upset him. Then he told himself, so what? He wasn’t supposed to like her.

  He saw her stop at the wrought-iron doors and talk briefly to the doorman, a guy so small he couldn’t stop a child from getting in. Then a tall man came out with a dog. The dog jumped up on her like it knew her, and she leaned over to pat it. A small hairy thing. She smiled. Yeah, it was her. The smile made him mad.

  The second blow came when he delivered a pizza and found out she was living with a man. A doctor.

  “Chapman, or Dr. Frank?” the doorman asked.

  “It says Chapman here.” Troland showed him the receipt where he had written Emma’s name and address. He saw the doorman ring up 5C.

  “There must be a mistake. She’s out.”

  Course she was out. He saw her go out. Shit, he hadn’t considered a man. What kind of man would let her do that?

  “Look, I can’t help you,” the little doorman said. “I’m not supposed to ring the Doc under any circumstances, okay? You’ll have to take it back.”

  “Nah, you keep it.” Troland handed the pizza over and walked away.

  What kind of doctor wouldn’t let the doorman ring up under any circumstances? He wanted to get a look at the doctor. He wanted to get inside and look around where she lived. But it didn’t take a genius to see the inside was a problem. It was a really old building. He didn’t like the see-through elevator, or the center staircase. Anybody coming in or out could look up the middle of the building and see all the front doors. It didn’t take a genius to see it was a problem.

  The man came out of the building early, as Troland was walking by in a windbreaker and baseball cap, with a newspaper under his arm.

  “Morning, Dr. Frank,” he heard the night doorman say. The night doorman went off at eight.

  “Morning, Pete.”

  The doctor didn’t look like a doctor. He was at least an inch taller than Troland and probably a few pounds heavier. He was wearing white shorts and a plain gray sweatshirt, had muscular legs. No gray in his hair. Not a bad-looking guy. He felt himself getting upset.

  Troland slowed down and passed him when he stopped to stretch.

  “Nice day,” the doctor said to the doorman who stood outside with him, looking.

  “Perfect day.”

  The doctor took off at a brisk jog and passed Troland, heading for the path along the river. At a slower pace Troland followed him. Much later in the day, he couldn’t believe his luck when he saw him come out of her building with a suitcase and get into a taxi.

  36

  After breakfast, Jason drove around until he found North High School, which turned out to be south of both South High and Central High. It was a three-story brick building that looked only a few years younger than the municipal buildings nearby. It had a lot of steps going up to the entrance, green stuff that wasn’t ivy growing on the walls, a huge parking lot in front, and playing fields in the back. It was a real old-style American high school, the kind that’s always in the movies.

  As he pulled into the parking lot, he tried to picture Emma as a lonely senior in this tight community, where the rest of her class had been together for years. What he saw instead was himself and Emma, talking so many times in a coffee shop, a half hour stolen here and there, between his patients and her jobs. He had interviewed her for a paper he was writing on adults who had been constantly uprooted as children. And they kept meeting.

  He remembered the way she sat leaning slightly forward, with her hands relaxed in her lap as she told him how the Navy liked to move people as far away from where they had been as possible, preferring to move them laterally around the world, rather than up and down a coast. She had spent second and third grades in Jacksonville, fourth and fifth grades in Seattle. Sixth and seventh in Norfolk, Virginia. Eighth and ninth in Hawaii. Tenth and eleventh in Kodiak, Alaska. San Diego was her father’s last post.

  The parking lot was nearly full at ten, on another in an endless succession of golden mornings in southern California. The cars parked here showed no sign of a recession
in the country’s economy. This was clearly not a deprived area. Corvettes, Mercedeses, Miatas, a few Hondas and Toyotas were tightly parked side by side, all polished and shiny. It made Jason think again of maybe getting a car.

  He parked in the area reserved for visitors and started toward the building. Earlier he had debated what to wear, and finally decided to stick with what he had come in. Khaki pants and a sports jacket in the kind of muddy colors women don’t usually like, but men find unchallenging and comfortable. He noted some temporary classrooms on what had been another parking area.

  It didn’t take long to find Guidance, which was in the same office as College and Career Counseling. There was a list of names on the wall outside. He studied them for a second before going in.

  “Can I help you?”

  A plump woman with heavily rouged cheeks, red lips colored outside the lines, fluffy orange hair, and a purple blouse looked up from her computer screen.

  Jason almost said “Wow.”

  “Ah, yeah,” he replied diffidently. “I’d like to see Dr. Londry. Would that be possible?”

  “Anything is possible.” She smiled, showing off a set of whiter-than-white teeth to prove it. “Especially now with all the students in the middle of third period,” she added. “He’s right in there.”

  She pointed at a closed door behind her with frosted glass in the top half so nothing could be seen through it.

  Jason tapped on it softly and obeyed the equally soft reply, “Yes, come in.”

  He found Dr. Londry sitting at his desk with his feet up, reading a newspaper that he put down as soon as he saw his visitor wasn’t a student. Londry had long lifeless hair that grew unashamedly around a large circular bald spot on the top of his head. Rimless glasses magnified the lines around his pale eyes. His short-sleeved plaid shirt was open at the neck, and he promptly took his suede shoes off the desk.

  “Hi.” Jason held out his hand. “I’m Frank Miln. I’m out here doing an article for New York Magazine on rising stars from California who make it in film in New York. It’s kind of a reverse coast thing.”