Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  “I know it’s an awkward time to talk,” Beam said to the slumping new widower who looked about to sob, “but the sooner we know some things, the better.”

  “I want the bastard who shot her caught,” Floyd said. “I want you to give him to me.”

  “If only the law allowed.”

  Floyd gave Beam a slightly surprised look.

  “Any idea who the bastard might be?” Beam asked.

  “None whatsoever. We had the perfect marriage. I know that sounds corny, but you can ask anybody who knows—knew—either one of us. Everybody liked Bev. She was outgoing.”

  “I don’t mean to be indelicate,” Beam said, “but keep in mind these questions are standard ones that have to be asked. And answered. Is it possible your wife was seeing someone else?”

  Floyd raised his head and looked over at Beam with a combination of grief and rage. “There was none of that shit in our marriage. We were happy together.”

  “Did you spend a lot of time together?”

  “Not as much as we would’ve liked, and that was my fault. Bev was a kind of golf widow. I mean, I retired and got interested in the game. Golf’s like a drug to some people. I could cut my wrists for it now, but I spent too much time on golf courses and not enough with my wife.”

  “And you were golfing today?”

  “Yesterday and today. Spent the night in Connecticut, in a motel near the Rolling Acres course. It’s a terrific course, got these big lakes and tricky greens. You gotta watch for the water and sand on damn near every hole. Three of my golfing buddies were with me.”

  “All the time?”

  “I don’t need a damned alibi!”

  “I’m sorry, but you do.”

  “Then I have one—them. We were on the course together, had our meals together.”

  “Separate motel rooms?”

  “No. There were only three rooms available. I doubled up with Alan Jones. Glad I did now.”

  “This Jones would know if you slipped out at night?”

  “And what? Drove or took a train into the city, killed my wife, then returned to bed at the Drowsy Ace motel?”

  “Doesn’t sound likely,” Beam admitted with a smile.

  “Way I snore, anyway, ask Alan Jones and he’ll tell you I was there all night. Poor bastard probably didn’t get a straight hour’s sleep. Upset his game, too.”

  “At this point you’re not really a suspect,” Beam assured Floyd.

  “Bullshit. Husband’s always a suspect. Should be.”

  “Would be,” Beam said honestly. “But I’m sure your alibi will check out. And lucky for you, the times don’t work out. Of course, you could always have hired someone to kill your wife.” No smile with the words.

  Floyd practically levitated with indignation, then he looked almost amused, so improbable was the notion. “Not my style, or my desire.”

  Beam believed him.

  “I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with a hit man.”

  “Or hit woman. I asked about whether your wife might be having an extramarital affair. What about you, Mr. Baker?”

  Floyd glared at him with a kind of hopeless rage. Beam, so nice for a while, had turned on him. “You’re a cop I could learn to dislike.”

  “That’d be okay, if it would help me find your wife’s killer.”

  Floyd’s features danced with his inner conflict.

  Bull’s eye, Beam thought. “Time for the curtain to drop and all secrets to be revealed,” he told Floyd.

  “Poetic.”

  “Because it rings true. This is a homicide investigation, Mr. Baker. It’s all going to be known in the end. That’s my solemn pledge to you.”

  “Pledge?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Floyd let out a long breath. “A couple of times when we were on golf outings, there were some women. Two of them. We paid for it.”

  “Happen this time in Connecticut?”

  “No! Hasn’t happened for over a year. And none if meant anything, not to us, or to the women. Hell they were just…”

  “Prostitutes.”

  “I guess you’d have to say that. We showed our gratitude with gifts or cash.”

  Beam, during his years in the NYPD, had become something of a human polygraph. He felt sure Floyd was telling the truth. He also was sure the man had loved and trusted his wife and was genuinely grief stricken. Add what would also doubtless turn out to be a tight alibi, and Floyd was pretty much out of the picture as a suspect.

  “It appears your wife was dressing up when she was killed, putting on her lipstick, in fact.”

  “She had a responsible job. She couldn’t go to work like some of these women do these days, no makeup, stringy hair. She was in sales, for Chrissakes!”

  “Just one more question, Mr. Baker. Did your wife ever serve on a jury in New York?”

  Floyd leaned far back as if to stare at the ceiling, but his eyes were closed.

  “She sure did.”

  “The Adele Janson case,” Beam told Nell and Looper, when they were seated in his Lincoln parked at the curb in front of a fire hydrant. He had his NYPD placard on the dash so no one would bother the car.

  “About four years ago?” Nell said. “The woman who poisoned her husband with antifreeze?”

  “Right,” Beam said. “She got off because her expert witness convinced the jury there was a natural disease that showed the same symptoms as ethylene glycol poisoning.”

  “I remember now. The defendant had motive and opportunity, not to mention what was left in a gallon jug of antifreeze, but her lawyer maintained hubby just sickened and died.”

  “And two years later she was convicted of poisoning her daughter,” Looper said. “After the trial, she confessed to both murders.”

  Beam lowered the power window on his side to cool down the big black car; the gleaming dark finish was starting to soak up more sun than it reflected. “Beverly Baker was foreperson on the first jury, the one that turned Janson loose after she’d done her husband.”

  “Which made the late Beverly a prime target for our guy,” Nell said. “This one was his work without a doubt.”

  “So what have we got besides mutual certainty?” Beam said. “I mean, beyond the red letter J?”

  Nell and Looper tried. They’d gotten nothing of significance from the Bakers’ neighbors, or from the doorman. It wasn’t the kind of building where security was tight, so it was no shock that a killer might have come and gone without being noticed. No one heard anything remotely like a gunshot, so a silencer was probably used to shoot Beverly Baker. No one had a word other than kind to say about the deceased: She was outgoing and friendly and a generous tipper. She gave neighbors discounts on lamps. The way she obviously enjoyed life, it was a shame—it was a crime—she was dead. It seemed the only notable thing about her was that she’d been foreperson on the Janson murder trial jury, though it had been long enough ago that none of the neighbors had mentioned it.

  “What did they say about her husband?” Beam asked.

  “Floyd?” Nell said. “He’s just a guy. Got in an argument with the doorman about a month ago, when one of his golf clubs was missing after he’d left his bag in the lobby. But he found the club later and apologized. Other’n that, no problems with anybody in the building. But it was Bev, as they called her, who everyone really liked.”

  “And who somebody didn’t,” Beam said.

  “We got the thirty-two caliber slug to help tie it in with the other murders,” Looper said.

  “If it is a thirty-two,” Nell said.

  “And no shell casing,” Looper pointed out. “This shooter walked away from a clean crime scene—typical of our guy.”

  Beam stared out the windshield of the parked car for a moment, then said, “Looper, you talk to Floyd again, then drive the unmarked up to Connecticut and check out his alibi. Nell and I are gonna go to the lamp emporium or whatever, where Bev worked, and talk to her boss and coworkers.”

  Looper open
ed the Lincoln’s right rear door and started to get out, then paused. “Anything I should know about Floyd?”

  “He didn’t murder his wife, but he’s got a guilty conscience. You work him right, he’ll tell you the truth.”

  Beam watched Looper walk away; he appeared to be absently feeling his pockets for cigarettes.

  “He’ll suck a cigarette before he goes back upstairs to talk with hubby,” Nell said. “It’s that way every day. He needs it to calm down.”

  “That’s his business,” Beam said, “as long as it doesn’t kill him before something else does.”

  Or before this investigation’s finished, Nell thought.

  When the jittery Looper was out of sight, Beam opened the driver’s side door and started to climb out from behind the steering wheel. The intensifying morning heat lowered itself like a weight onto his back.

  “I thought we were going to the lamp emporium,” Nell said.

  Beam leaned farther down and looked across the car at her. “We are, but let’s walk. That was how Beverly Baker usually went back and forth to work. Let’s follow in her footsteps. Maybe, sometime or other, they took her past her killer.”

  After leaving Beverly Baker’s building, Justice had strolled a few sunny blocks, then taken the Eighty-sixth Street entrance into the park. It was such a beautiful morning that people he didn’t know nodded to him and said hello. He returned their friendliness with his own. The latex gloves he’d used to be sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints in Beverly Baker’s apartment were neatly folded in his pocket, turned inside out just in case some of her blood might have gotten on them. Blood particles could be so minute the human eye wouldn’t spot them, but a police laboratory might. He knew the police had tricks that were almost magic.

  As he strolled along sun-dappled paths, he replayed the Beverly Baker murder in detail—mind like a DVD.

  Good looking bitch, lots of leg, perched with her ass spread and her back arched the way women do when they’re concentrating hard while sitting before a mirror and putting on lipstick. She’d seen him in the mirror, got the message, didn’t want to believe it, been momentarily paralyzed by the realization of her impending death—as they all were. That moment was ice. It froze them.

  Those crystallized seconds belonged to him. In that brief and vulnerable time, they comprehended the reason for their death at his hands. Surely they read the papers, watched television news, overheard conversations. The NYPD had of course long ago informed the media. The entire city knew why people were being killed, former jury forepersons whose hands were bloody, who’d been instruments of injustice. He assured himself that in their final, frozen moments of life, they understood that his was the final judgment and the hand of justice, righting the wrongs they’d perpetrated, the imbalance and pain they’d been so instrumental in causing. Always he read the cataclysmic knowledge in their eyes, but so there would be no misunderstanding, as the light died in them, he whispered the religion and the word that carried his victims to the other side: Justice.

  They died knowing. He lived knowing. He was setting the universe right. On a day like this one, with the sun laughing through the high leaves and the birds telling tales, his mission was especially satisfying.

  He still had work to do, but it was good work. It was right work. Not nearly finished.

  “Bev,” Mary Jean Maltz, assistant sales director at the Light and Shade Lamp Emporium, said to Beam and Nell. She was a stolid woman with dark bangs, a white blouse, brown slacks, and extremely wide thighs and hips. “Everyone called her Bev, not Beverly.” Mary Jean brushed a knuckle across a reddened eye; she’d obviously been crying. “She was a Bev.”

  Beam was prepared to believe it. He looked around at the sea of lamps and shades and dangling chandeliers. Almost everything was lighted. For display purposes, or in honor of Bev Baker.

  “Everyone loved her,” Mary Jane said.

  Don Webb, an elderly, mustached man whose family had long ago founded the lamp emporium, and who was Bev Baker’s supervisor, finished the phone call he’d been making when Beam and Nell arrived, and walked over to join the conversation. His long, lined face wore a somber expression, but his blue eyes were dry behind thick rimless glasses.

  “It’s a blow to all of us here,” he said, “what happened to Bev.” He fixed Beam with a steady, magnified gaze. “She was the best sales manager we ever had.”

  “Do you mean that literally?” Beam asked. “Forget for a moment about speaking well of the dead. We’re here for the truth. We’re trying to find out who murdered Beverly Baker.”

  “One of the best,” Webb amended.

  “An absolute peach to work for,” Mary Jane added.

  Webb looked at her. “Why don’t you check that floor lamp shipment that came in yesterday, make sure none of the shades are bent.”

  She nodded, slightly embarrassed. With her hips cocked sideways so as not to bump anything, she hurried away in a little side shuffle through what seemed like acres of glowing table lamps, floor lamps, and light fixtures on chains. Beam thought the electric bill here must be phenomenal, but then, they were selling illumination.

  Isn’t that what we came for—illumination?

  “I had no complaints about Bev,” Webb said, when Mary Jane was out of earshot. “She really was damned likable, and she worked hard and got the job done. Sales increased every quarter in the four years she was sales manager.” He gave Beam the same sincere expression he’d worn earlier. “It didn’t hurt that she was attractive and knew how to treat customers, how to talk to them.”

  “How to bullshit them?”

  “How to sell.”

  “Can you think of any enemies she might have had?”

  “No. But then I wasn’t privy to her personal life.” Was there a note of regret in Don Webb’s voice?

  “Might she have been in debt?”

  “I wouldn’t know, but I doubt it. She was well paid and knew how to manage money. Smart woman. Take-charge type.”

  The sort who’d volunteer to be jury foreperson.

  “Any changes in her behavior over the last six months or so?” Beam asked.

  Here Webb hesitated. “A few months ago she began taking longer lunches, coming in late sometimes in the morning. I never complained. I mean, if she came in late, she tended to stay late.”

  “What were her reasons for being late?”

  “Oh, one thing or another. Tell you the truth, I never asked her very often. I wasn’t kidding when I said she was a valuable employee. You don’t mess with people like that in this business or any other; you want to keep them.”

  A flurry of motion made them look to the side. A gray-haired woman who was apparently Webb’s assistant stood just outside the door to his partitioned office, holding up a telephone receiver and motioning frantically to him with her free hand that he had a call.

  “Must be important,” Webb said.

  “Go ahead and take it,” Beam said. “Thanks for your help.”

  Webb nodded gratefully and hurried away.

  As Beam and Nell moved toward the exit, Mary Jane, who’d returned to the sales floor, tacked sideways through the sea of lamps toward them on a collision course. Beam liked that. She seemed to have more to say, and she hadn’t wanted to say it in front of Webb.

  Mary Jane was smiling as she intercepted them near a bamboo and wicker floor lamp that was part of the tropical line. “Was Mr. Webb any help to you?”

  “Maybe,” Nell said. “Time will tell.”

  “He mentioned that Bev was coming into work late the past several months,” Beam said.

  Nell decided to keep silent and let Beam handle this, watch him work and maybe learn something from the master.

  Mary Jane didn’t look surprised. “He say why?”

  Beam shook his head no. “Said he didn’t know why.”

  Mary Jane suddenly seemed hesitant, now that it was time to release the words she’d stored up for them. Nell had seen it before when people with someth
ing to say to the police also had something to lose: Word jam.

  Beam reached out and gently touched the tropical lamp’s glowing shade, as if caressing a work of art. “Beautiful piece of merchandise. Makes you think of the South Seas.”

  Mary Jane definitely didn’t want to talk about lamps. “Did he mention Lenny Rodman?”

  “No…” Beam seemed thoughtful. Nothing rough or threatening about him now; merely a benign if looming gentleman who happened to be a cop. He seemed just as interested in the lamp as in what Mary Jane had to say.

  “Lenny’s why,” Mary Jane said in a near whisper.

  “Who exactly is this Lenny?” Beam asked with a smile. Definitely on Mary Jane’s side. “Other than Bev’s reason for tardiness?”

  “Fire extinguisher lamps.”

  “Ah!” As if Beam understood.

  “Lenny wholesaled us grosses of the damned things and they haven’t retailed for beans. Lamps made outta obsolete fire extinguishers. Can’t give the things away. Lenny sold himself to Bev, though. He fed her a line and she took the bait along with the hook. Smart as she was, she couldn’t control her heart, love being so blind. She thought she was using the guy, sneaking around with him, and he was using her.”

  “An old story but sad one,” Beam said. Nell thought he might actually cluck his tongue. “Did her husband suspect?”

  Mary Jane looked incredulous. “Are you kidding? That guy’s so wrapped up in fairways and doglegs it’s all he thinks about. He was ignoring Bev for a little white ball. That was part of the problem.”

  “Really? Did she confide this to you?” Beam leaning closer, intent with interest, making Mary Jane his coconspirator.

  “Some of it, but not all. Didn’t have to. Women can tell. You understand, I’m sure.”

  Beam did. He also understood that Mary Jane didn’t like Lenny Rodman, or maybe liked him too much, or she wouldn’t have made it a point to mention him.

  Now she wanted to do more than merely mention. She was ripe.

  Time to dish.

  He aimed his kindly smile at Nell like a flashlight, then at Mary Jane. “So tell us about Lenny.”

  11