Fear the Night n-5

by John Lutz

  It all had the ring of truth, Repetto thought. The shooting happened on the shortest route from the hotel to TKTS. Venus, wearing high heels and unused to so much walking, had talked her husband into hailing a cab.

  The cab hadn’t moved from where it was when Evans had been shot. Repetto stepped closer to it, opened its back door as it must have been when Evans was killed, and looked up and around him.

  Meg knew what he was thinking and said, “It’s impossible even to guess where the bastard was when he squeezed the trigger.”

  “We don’t even know if it was the same bastard,” Repetto said.

  Meg hadn’t considered that possibility.

  Repetto looked at her, smiling slightly so she wouldn’t feel she was back in the academy. “We won’t take anything for granted. We won’t guess.”

  “We won’t,” Meg said.

  “Nearest I can figure it-not a guess, a calculation-is with what we know from the direction of the shot, it could have come from any of those buildings.”

  Meg and Birdy looked down the block in the direction Repetto was pointing.

  “I count nine buildings and something like three hundred windows.”

  Repetto nodded. “And nine rooftops.”

  “Gonna take legwork,” Birdy remarked.

  “For lots of legs,” Meg said.

  “I’ll contact Melbourne,” Repetto said, “and get him to assign some uniforms to help us try to find the origin of the shot.”

  Birdy was still staring down the block. “All those buildings, but the shot had to come from somewhere. If there’s a shell casing, there’s no reason it can’t be found.”

  “Like Jimmy Hoffa,” Meg said.

  “Or the Titanic,” Birdy said. “They found the Titanic.”

  Meg thought of pointing out to him that the Titanic was considerably larger than a shell casing, or any other clue the Night Sniper might have left behind, but she glanced at Repetto and figured it was wiser to let Birdy top her this time.

  This time.

  “Admirable,” Repetto said, as they were climbing into the unmarked to call for more uniforms and begin the canvassing process.

  Meg knew what he meant.

  Melbourne got them half a dozen uniforms, and along with Repetto, Meg, and Birdy they worked the suspect buildings until ten that evening. They learned nothing from interviews or from entering and examining vacant apartments or offices with a view down the avenue. Just before they quit for the night, Repetto’s cell phone chirped and he got word from the lab that the bullet removed from Ralph Evans was a 7mm, and its markings matched those of similar slugs removed from previous Night Sniper murders.

  Repetto relayed the news before dismissing everyone. Nobody seemed surprised.

  “I know this looks almost hopeless, but we have to try for the information while the crime’s fresh. Tomorrow morning we’ll take up where we left off. It’ll be light out and we can examine the rooftops.”

  One of the uniforms rolled his eyes and looked like he was about to say something, then glanced at Repetto and remained silent.

  When they dropped her off outside her apartment half an hour later, Meg wondered if she’d be able to climb out of bed tomorrow morning, or if she’d be as dead as Ralph Evans.

  But she did make it out of bed, and three cups of strong coffee revitalized her enough to help in the continued canvassing and examination of the buildings along West Forty-fourth near where Evans was killed.

  A little after ten, they got word that a uniform had maybe found something on the roof of a building a block away from the crime scene.

  Repetto walked the short distance to the building. An ancient brass plaque to the left of the entrance said it was THEBERMINGALEARMS. When he entered, he found it wasn’t as grand as its name and probably never had been.

  He crossed the barren tiled lobby and took the elevator to the top floor. At the end of the hall, he found the service door to the roof.

  The door was already open, wedged at the bottom by a black leather-bound tablet Repetto recognized as a cop’s notebook.

  He also recognized the uniform who greeted him on the roof. Officer Nancy Weaver, who’d been a homicide detective second grade before she was demoted last year for sleeping with an uptown sergeant who’d been kicked off the NYPD for also sleeping with the wife of a drug dealer, giving the dealer wide latitude. Weaver hadn’t been involved in the drug trade and remained a cop, but she was in uniform again. Repetto knew she was a good cop who slept around with other cops, which would have been okay, only she slept with cops without rank.

  Weaver also recognized Repetto. She smiled and nodded to him. She was an attractive brunette with a certain look in her eye that drew the wrong kind of man. Over and over. Repetto knew she’d been married to the right kind, a guy named Joe, who finally got tired of her shenanigans and ran away with a woman who’d been runner-up in a Miss Portugal competition. He heard it made Weaver mad if you spoke Portuguese around her. No problem.

  The breeze was strong on the roof, causing a lock of dark hair that had escaped from beneath Weaver’s cap to do a dance on her forehead. Repetto thought it must tickle, but she seemed unaware of it.

  “What’ve you got?” he asked.

  “The door,” Weaver said. “I didn’t have anything other’n my notepad to wedge it open.”

  Repetto’s gaze went to the small wooden wedge lying nearby on the roof. It looked like it had been there for a long time. “What about that?”

  “Didn’t want to touch it.”

  Repetto nodded.

  “But I don’t think it was used so somebody could get back in off the roof,” Weaver added. “The door’s the kind that locks automatically if you let it close. It’d trap you out here. But look at the latch.”

  Repetto did, and saw a faint rectangle. He touched a corner of it gently with the back of a knuckle. “Sticky.”

  “That’s what I thought. It looks to me like tape was put there to keep the door from clicking locked. That way it wouldn’t be wedged open and maybe attract attention. Then, when whoever was up here left, they removed the tape. Could be they left a fingerprint.”

  “More likely a glove print.”

  Weaver smiled again and nodded. “Our guy’s smart, isn’t he?”

  “Smart and evil go together all too often,” Repetto said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, sir. I found where the shooter mighta sat or kneeled.”

  “Got an ejected shell casing?”

  “Never that lucky,” Weaver said over her shoulder, as she led Repetto toward where a billboard was mounted near the roof’s edge. “He had a good view from there,” she said. “Mighta fired through an opening in that rusty iron support gizmo. There’s a clear shot to where Evans was killed, and look how the gravel’s been disturbed.”

  Repetto looked. Weaver was right. The gravel that wasn’t embedded in the blacktop roof appeared to have been recently shifted around, perhaps by someone finding a comfortable shooting position.

  “Of course,” Weaver added, “we can’t be sure.”

  “True,” Repetto said, “but it’s something.”

  He went back to the service door and looked again where the door frame might have been taped so the spring latch couldn’t protrude and do its job. “I’ll get the techs to look at this,” he said. “Nice work. Keep an eye on the scene and don’t let anybody else up here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Weaver was staring at him, her head cocked to one side, the wind whipping the errant lock of hair.

  “You look good in uniform,” Repetto said, “but you look even better in plainclothes. I’ll see you get credit for finding this.”

  As he exited the roof, Weaver gave him her biggest smile.

  By that afternoon they had the lab information. There were no discernible foot-or handprints on the disturbed roof surface or on any part of the billboard or its support frame. The service door’s lock had been blocked at some point with a common brand of duct tape, but the only pr
int on the doorjamb near the tape’s adhesive residue was a partial finger, wearing a rubber or latex glove. The small wooden wedge yielded nothing other than that it was pine and didn’t figure in the investigation.

  There was no way to prove it, but Repetto was reasonably sure they’d found the killer’s shooting position.

  He got Meg and Birdy, and with three uniforms they concentrated their efforts on the building’s tenants.

  No one remembered seeing anything unusual. Most had heard the echoing sound of the shot, but they weren’t sure what it was and weren’t concerned. Obviously it had come from outside the building. They were polite but seemed impatient for the police to finish with them and leave.

  When they were back on the sidewalk, Repetto said, “Nobody in the Bermingale Arms can see or hear.”

  “He came and went like a ghost,” Birdy said.

  Like the Grim Reaper, Meg thought.

  15

  New York, 1989

  Joel Vanya swung himself up onto the back of the trash hauler and watched the fog of his breath stream out into the crisp winter air. The compactor roared and whined on the truck’s bed, the sound so many New Yorkers woke up to in the morning. Joel sometimes added to the din by banging metal trash cans, but they were becoming scarce, what with all the plastic containers and trash bags.

  Recycling, Joel thought. What a pain in the ass that is.

  He glanced around. This was a nice block, rich people still sleeping in, hours after he’d had to drag himself out of bed and into work. He wished he had some metal to bang now, maybe a pair of trash can lids he could use as cymbals. Wake up the rich snobs, let them know he had some control over their lives. Even things out. One thing Joel was sure of was that the world was rigged; once you were born down, or knocked down, everyone higher on the dung pile wanted to keep you down.

  With a roar, the truck lurched forward, rolled about fifty feet farther down the Lower West Side street, then hissed to a stop. Sal Vestamalo, the driver, dressed as warmly as Joel against the winter cold, opened the door and lowered himself to the street. A big man with a salt-and-pepper beard that seemed always to be crusted with frozen saliva or mucus, he swaggered around the front of the truck to start picking up the trash there, while Joel dropped back down to the street and headed for the mushroomed black trash bags piled at the curb behind the truck. It was a process they repeated, over and over, somewhere in the city almost every morning.

  Joel had long ago decided this was a shit job even when the weather was good, but now he had seniority and no other marketable skills, so he couldn’t afford to leave the Department of Sanitation. He was stuck working for the city. He didn’t enjoy his work. The truth was, more and more, he didn’t enjoy much of anything.

  Joel Vanya was a small man and had been a small child in a tough neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. His father had deserted Joel and his mother when Joel was ten. The mean drunk wasn’t much of a loss. Joel’s mother repeated that often as he was growing up. Joel agreed. His father had beaten his mother severely before leaving, and permanently injured Joel’s right leg when he’d tried to interrupt the violence. In this weather, Joel’s artificial kneecap hurt almost as badly as when his father had struck his knee with a beer bottle. Joel still walked with the same limp that had drawn bullies to him as a child.

  Every day, Joel hurt inside and out.

  He swung a heavy black plastic trash bag into the back of the truck, turned to pick up another, and almost slipped and fell when he stepped on a patch of ice.

  “We got no time for you to dance, short shit!” Sal yelled. “You wanna move that fast, do it with a load of trash.”

  Joel didn’t answer. He was used to swallowing his hate.

  Sal was already back in the cab and gunning the engine by the time Joel had returned with a cardboard box full of trash and another black plastic bag.

  The crusher was coming down as he tossed the box in, then the bag. The steel lip of the compactor smashed the box and ruptured the bag, then began scooping the trash back toward the front of the truck’s hold, making room for more.

  The truck lurched forward, then braked to a quick halt. Sal up to his tricks again.

  “Better jump on board!” Sal shouted back at Joel, locking gazes with him in the rearview mirror.

  Joel thought about flipping him the bird, but he didn’t want any trouble. He’d already complained to the boss, Frank Dugan, about Sal harassing him and had gotten nowhere. In fact, Sal had sold the idea that Joel was paranoid; then he’d stepped up his campaign of terror.

  The truck roared and jumped forward again just as Joel clutched the grab bar and began swinging his body back on board. He lost his grip and stumbled backward, knowing the truck’s sudden acceleration, then stop had been deliberate. Sal would be laughing his ass off in the warm-or at least warmer-cab.

  Joel walked toward the grab bar, determined to be more careful, and noticed a brown paper sack that had been in the plastic bag ruptured by the compactor. The sack had torn open. Something dark that it contained caught his eye.

  He looked more closely as he prepared to get back up on the truck. The dark object was the barrel and cylinder of a blue steel revolver. With a glance up and down the deserted street, Joel plucked the gun from the litter of trash and stuck it in his belt beneath his jacket.

  After the next stop, near the corner, he made sure Sal couldn’t see him in the rearview mirror and took the gun out for a closer look. It had a checked wooden grip and a snub barrel and looked to be in pretty good shape, the kind of gun that was easy to conceal and perfect for committing a crime. Most likely the owner had thrown it away for a reason, probably in someone else’s curbside pile of trash. A gun with a history that might interest the cops.

  If the cops ever got their hands on it.

  The truck’s motor roared, and the steel compactor screeched and bit down. Sal was yelling something unintelligible over the din.

  Before slipping the gun back beneath his coat, Joel flipped the cylinder out and looked at it.

  The gun was loaded.

  Dugan the boss called Joel into the office when the truck had returned to the shed. Joel always felt inferior around Dugan, who was a tall, barrel-chested Irishman whose family had always worked for the city. Dugan had come to the sanitation department with certain advantages.

  Twelve years ago, he’d started on one of the collection trucks, in a job much like Joel’s present one, but he hadn’t remained there long. From day one, Dugan had pull. Joel knew that was what it took to get ahead in a city job, pull. And that was what it took to get the assholes off you, once they settled on you as a target for their sick, cruel jokes.

  Not only didn’t Joel have pull, but Dugan and Sal had turned many of their fellow employees against Joel, spreading lies, making sure Joel was passed over for any promotion. Joel considered himself a realist and saw the situation as something he had to endure. In some matters there was no choice.

  Just as he always did, big Frank Dugan glanced up at Joel over the frames of his glasses and made the smaller man wait while he finished what he was writing. He sat behind a wide, cluttered desk. On the wall behind him was a large cork bulletin board with schedules and notices pinned to it. Alongside the corkboard was a bank of battered filing cabinets that were the same gray metal as the desk. A space heater was glowing over in a corner. There was a pair of wet leather boots on the floor in front of it, smelling up the place.

  Starting to sweat in his heavy coat, even though it was unbuttoned, Joel waited.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Joel,” Dugan said, when he finally put down his pen and looked up. His blue eyes were rheumy and his face flushed. He looked as if he’d been drinking before Joel arrived, not doing paperwork.

  Then it suddenly struck Joel that when he had the revolver out, Sal might have caught a glimpse of it in the truck’s outside mirror. A gun in New York, concealed on the person of a city employee, was a serious matter. It was especially
serious now, because the gun was in Joel’s black metal lunch pail, which was in Joel’s right hand.

  Joel began to perspire even more. He could feel beads of sweat running down his right side beneath his waffled winter underwear. This was just the kind of thing Dugan and Sal must pray for every night, a chance to rid themselves of Joel and at the same time humiliate him and make it impossible for him to find any kind of city job.

  But it wasn’t about the gun.

  Dugan shrugged his bulky shoulders and said, “I got some bad news. We’re going to have to lay you off, Joel. I’m sorry.”

  “Lay me off?” Joel was astounded. “With my seniority? You’d have to lay off a dozen men to get to me!”

  Dugan nodded somberly. “The department’s laying off twenty.”

  Joel could only stare at him. He’d been working for the Department of Sanitation for nine years. Getting flat-out fired for some lie cooked up against him was one thing, but the thought of a layoff had never occurred to him. His heart turned cold and dropped.

  “It isn’t the best of times for the city,” Dugan said.

  “I heard we were doing okay, with the new municipal bonds.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like a lotta money, but it’s not.” Dugan stood up, looming even larger in the small, warm office. “Not enough, anyway.”

  Joel nodded, swallowing loudly.

  Dugan extended his hand. “I wish you luck, Joel.”

  Joel shook his boss’s hand, feeling the powerful grip. Christ! What’s Doris going to say? And Dante? How are we all going to get by?

  Dugan must have known what he was thinking. “You have union benefits, Joel. And there’s always unemployment. I’d like to tell you it looks like you’ll be called back soon, but in all honesty I can’t.”

  Joel couldn’t get the words out-not the ones he wanted to say, that this was a crock of shit, that Dugan was a phony, that he and Sal probably got together to shaft him, that this was goddamn unfair! Joel should get the gun out of his lunch pail and tell Dugan what he really thought. Tell Dugan he was gonna fuckin’ die. Not that Joel would actually squeeze the trigger. But Dugan wouldn’t know that.