“Stan McGee,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “This way.”
The chopper made a ludicrous Apache of McGee’s comb-over as he hurried toward a large, decrepit warehouse across the pitted asphalt.
“I waited before entering, per instructions,” McGee said.
The dispatcher in Albany had caught the tip barely two hours ago, then forwarded it to Reeves at home. A woman’s voice; Reeves had a microcassette with the call in his pocket, along with a tiny tape player. He’d listened to the recording six times already.
“We couldn’t locate the landlord, but I got a warrant. My guys already busted open the lock.”
Two men in dark suits, legs akimbo, hands clasped at crotch level, blocked the entrance to the warehouse. Above the door was a faded sign: ASTORIA FURNITURE DEPOT.
“Guy next door”—McGee pointed to a slightly better kept warehouse fifty yards or so away—“he says this place used to be for storing furniture that came by plane from Europe. They brought it here after it cleared customs but before anybody claimed it.”
“Antique furniture by any chance?”
“I…he didn’t say.”
They entered the warehouse through a large sliding aluminum door. The enormous space was dimly lit by the meager sunlight that managed to penetrate a half dozen small, filthy windows. Wide dust motes crisscrossed the air. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Reeves saw that the place was empty, save for a few scattered piles of wood, a couple of opened cartons. A pigeon flew up from somewhere in the dark and circled anxiously overhead before disappearing.
“McGee, you take that area,” Reeves said. “Ask your men to search over there. I’ll look around here.”
He walked slowly, kicking aside rusty nails, bits of cardboard. A dark mass in the corner to the right of the entrance caught his eye. Approaching it, he began to make out a pile of broken-down cartons, discarded chair and table legs, balls of crumpled packing paper.
And an odor that hit him as suddenly as a gust of wind. Dank and musky, it intensified as he neared the corner. He’d smelled rotted corpses before, and certainly what he smelled just then was reminiscent of that unforgettable aroma…but also different, somehow. Sweeter, he thought, vaguely redolent of alcohol and less intense than a recently dead body. If there was a corpse under those cartons, it had been there a long time, long enough even for the putrefaction process to reach its conclusion.
He kicked a carton aside and heard mice or rats scurry into the darkness. Fighting a deep reluctance, he leaned over and began excavating with his hands, tossing collapsed cartons and amputated furniture legs to the side. In less than a minute he’d found him.
He was almost a skeleton, but not quite, for bits of blackened flesh clung to his face. His clothes had been badly torn—by the rats, no doubt—but shreds of cloth adhered to his body in enough places to preserve some semblance of a human form.
The entire warehouse shuddered as a jet roared overhead. Even the corpse seemed to shimmy for the second or two it took the plane to pass over. Reeves reached into his jacket pocket, took out the microcassette recorder, and pressed the play button.
“I understand you’re looking for Barry Amiel.” A woman’s voice, obviously disguised, perhaps with a cloth placed over the receiver. “Try the Astoria Furniture Depot, thirty-three twenty-two Atlantic Boulevard, Queens. He’ll be waiting for you.” A deep voice, syrupy slow, almost erotic, as if she were leaving instructions for a tryst.
Reeves clicked off the recorder and called the other men. He crouched next to the body—Barry Amiel, had to be—and squinted at a circular break in the blackened skull just over his right temple. An entrance wound.
“Aw, shit!” McGee covered his mouth with one hand, doubtless expecting a worse odor than actually existed.
“Looks like a bullet hole,” Reeves said. “He’s probably been here a month or more. One of you guys want to roll him over so I can check his wallet?”
The two agents glanced sheepishly at the floor.
“You, then,” Reeves said, arbitrarily choosing the shorter one. The agent knelt down and, touching only the clothing bits with his fingertips, managed to lift one side of the corpse off the concrete floor, revealing a ghetto of frantic insect life. Reeves reached into the back pocket, extracted a wallet, and opened it.
“Hundred-dollar bills,” he said. “At least a dozen hundred-dollar bills.” He searched through the wallet—credit cards bearing Amiel’s name, a photo of a little boy, aged about five, Amiel’s driver’s license, and a small, tattered piece of paper, folded in half. It bore a Brooklyn address, sloppily written in pencil, with $250/month scrawled underneath.
“Call the city,” he said. “Ask for the crime-scene unit. Tell them to get here fast. And call DC and get the bug man up here while you’re at it.” The condition of the larvae could help pinpoint the time of death. The FBI’s entomologist would earn his keep on this one. “Anyone know this address?”
He handed the paper over his shoulder, unable, somehow, to take his eyes off the body.
He’s waiting for you.
“Sure, that’s in Park Slope,” one of the agents said.
Reeves finally looked away and stood up, brushing off his pants.
“What’s this?” He bent over and lifted the flap of a carton.
“Looks like a gun,” the shorter agent said.
Reeves flashed his most compassionate smile. “Brilliant.” He examined the gun. “I’m no firearms expert, but my instincts tell me this is a Browning semi.”
“You want me to get ballistics here, too?”
“Excellent idea,” Reeves said as he straightened up. “Now, let’s get the hell over to Park Slope.”
Chapter 31
Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn: bodegas and gas stations and four-story apartment buildings, most run down, a few gentrified. The southern border of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Fifth Avenue was an uneasy DMZ between the yuppified neighborhood to the north and the working class—or out-of-working class—neighborhood to the south.
The address in Barry Amiel’s wallet led Don Reeves and Stan McGee to a five-story tenement between Garfield and Harrison Streets. They entered the dilapidated grocery on the ground floor, flashed their badges, and showed the photo of Barry Amiel to the heavyset man behind the counter.
“Maybe I see him,” he said, rubbing the dense black stubble on his jowls. “Coming into the building, leaving. But not lately.”
“Which floor?” Reeves asked.
“You think I own this building? Like I would be working this piece-of-shit business if I owned this place?”
“In other words, you don’t know where he lived.”
He shook his head dolefully, but called after them as they were leaving.
“You try Dilianna on three.”
Dilianna on three answered the door wearing a flowered kerchief around her head, a striped apron, and a wary frown. Two FBI badges did little to improve her disposition, but the photo of Barry Amiel got a reaction.
“You know where he is? Son of a bitch owe me two month rent. I spend three days clean up his mess, the filth you wouldn’t believe. I had to—”
“He lived with you?” Reeves managed to interject.
“He was my tenant.” She squared her shoulders and wiped her hands on the apron. Reeves noted her shapely legs and narrow waist, the way her lower lip jutted to a sultry pout. From inside the apartment came the aroma of sautéing garlic and onions. “I have four rooms I rent,” she continued. “Barry was here since the spring.”
Since Gwen Amiel and the kid left him, Reeves thought.
“You say you cleaned everything?”
“When he no come back after two weeks, I have no choice. Got to keep the rent coming.”
“What did you do with his things?”
“I keep them in one box,” she said. “Just in case he come back. You want to see?”
She led them through a dark, low-ceilinged room crammed with slipcover
ed sofas and chairs and one enormous television set. Reeves looked down a long corridor lined with closed doors.
“His room was second on the left,” Dilianna Flores said. “My new tenant is sleeping. He drives a taxi at night.” She stood at the head of the corridor, hands on hips.
“The box?” he said.
She opened a closet and dragged out a medium-size carton.
“Barry in some trouble?” she asked with what almost sounded like genuine concern as he and McGee crouched next to the carton and began rooting through it.
“You could say that,” he said. McGee snorted at the understatement.
“You think I get my rent from him? He owe me two months. I have just one month from security and then there’s the—”
“I’d forget about Barry Amiel,” Reeves said.
She mumbled something in Spanish that didn’t sound like genuine concern and padded off to the kitchen, a large, windowless alcove next to the living room.
They dug through the detritus of Barry Amiel’s life. Nothing of much value, though anything worth something had probably been applied to the back rent. Two framed photos of the kid—Jerry, was it, or Jimmy?—some underwear, a few shirts, a couple of mismatched socks, a pair of blue jeans.
“He was borracho,” Dilianna Flores shouted from the kitchen. “A drinker.”
“How long has he been missing?” Reeves asked, joining her by the stove. She was stirring a large, steaming pot.
“Since June fourteen. I remember good because it was Monday, rent day. Only he no pay that Monday, not ever.”
June 14 was the day Priscilla Lawrence was killed.
“Before the fourteenth, did you notice anything different about him, any unusual behavior?”
“He didn’t hang out here,” she said. “He come home to sleep. Sleep it off, you know? When he wake up in the afternoon he leave.”
“Here’s something,” McGee called from the hallway. He entered the kitchen and handed Reeves a piece of white paper. “Woman’s handwriting.”
Reeves read the note. Penaquoit. Two mi south of 24 on rite. 6-2-3.
Directions to the Lawrence property, that much was obvious. The three numbers? He’d have to ask Nick Lawrence. The paper had been folded in several places. Holding it by the edges, he refolded it and placed it in his pocket—their first clear-cut connection between Barry Amiel and Penaquoit.
“I’ll take this to our handwriting people,” he said. “Get it fingerprinted, too.” He glanced around the room. “What about visitors?”
“Did he have visitors?” She closed her eyes and made a face. “Women.”
“Do you remember names? Can you give us a description?”
She frowned and shook her head. “I try not to look too closely.”
He showed her a photo of Gwen Amiel. “Ever see her?”
“No.”
“What about phone calls, did he receive many?”
“One or two,” she said with a scowl, as if this were yet another of his shortcomings.
“Make any?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did he have his own number?” McGee asked.
“You kidding, right? We have one line.” She picked up a portable phone from the counter. “Tenants pay long-distance only.”
“Do you have your phone bill from May and June of this year?”
“I pay it on time, first of the month.”
“And you don’t save the bills?”
She looked at them as if this were a trick question, and slowly shook her head.
“We’ll requisition the phone records,” Reeves told McGee, then leaned over the pot and inhaled.
“Did Amiel take his meals with you?”
“He drank,” she said, “but he didn’t eat much.”
“His loss,” Reeves said, sniffing the pot again.
“You want a taste? Arroz con pollo, I make the best in Brooklyn.”
To his surprise he found himself nodding. She got a spoon from a drawer, dipped it into the pot, and handed it to him, pale beans and a thick orangy sauce.
“As delicious as it smells.” He placed the spoon in the sink and turned to her. “We may send a crime-scene unit over to dust the room for fingerprints.”
“Crime scene? This is no crime scene.”
“Just a formality,” Reeves said as he and McGee headed for the door.
Gwen heard the faint but unmistakable click of the kitchen door opening. The green neon of the bedside clock read eleven-fifteen; she’d been in bed for half an hour, trying to sleep, trying not to think of Barry’s photograph being passed around Sohegan like some sort of chain letter from her past, linking everyone she knew to the one thing she wanted most to forget. Trying to forget that effigy at the ravine, a stake through its heart, a thistle in its gloved hand. Feeling alone, feeling scared, wishing she could work through this on her own.
A dull thud as the kitchen door closed—her heart kicked into high gear. He came every night now, in the Piacevics’ Chevy, after Jimmy was asleep, and left before dawn. In the bright August sunshine she often wondered if these night visits were real, and if so, why she let them continue. In the moonlight she ached for him.
He was in the downstairs hallway now, heading from the kitchen to the staircase. She rolled onto her stomach, heart beating against the mattress. Lately she waited for him upstairs, in bed.
Now he was on the staircase, climbing slowly, deliberately, but still teasing creaks and groans from the dry wood steps. Did he know what his slow, deliberate approach did to her?
His footsteps reached the second-floor landing, hesitated for a cruel interval, then continued toward her room. She rolled onto her back just as his dark figure filled the doorway. Her heart felt as if it could rip out of her chest.
He stepped toward her, removing his shirt and tossing it to the floor. A few feet from the bed he kicked off his shoes, then slid off his pants. Pale moonlight silhouetted his naked body.
She threw off the covers and moon glow washed over her own body. He walked to the side of the bed and lowered himself onto her. Already hard, he slid easily inside. Gradually he began to thrust, gently biting her neck, then her ear, then her cheek.
She came almost instantly, just a moment before him. Within minutes he was sleeping, and then she too drifted off.
Chapter 32
Dwight Hawkins answered the phone at eight o’clock Sunday morning.
“Hawkins? Don Reeves. I have some news on the baby-sitter angle.”
Though Dwight had been up for almost two hours, he would have appreciated an apology for the Sunday morning call at home. He awoke at six on the dot every day of his adult life. On warm mornings like this one he would take his coffee to the back patio and watch the sun rise over the Ondaiga Mountains.
“Her husband’s dead,” Reeves said. “Shot once in the head. We had an anonymous tip, found in him a furniture warehouse in Queens. An antiques warehouse.”
“His wife’s business.”
“Right. The positive ID came in late last night from forensics here in New York. Time of death is hard to nail down, could be within a day or two of Priscilla Lawrence’s murder. He was last seen by his landlady in Brooklyn the day before the kidnapping.”
“Anything to implicate Gwen Amiel?”
“We found a Browning twenty-two near the husband. Looks like it was used to kill him. We’re waiting for ballistics to tell us if it was the same gun used on Priscilla Lawrence.”
“Gwen Amiel had a Browning…”
“Right, we’re checking the registration. We’ll know by tomorrow if it was hers. Meantime, a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“I want you to tell her about her husband, observe her reaction. What she was doing the day after Priscilla’s murder?”
“I was keeping an eye on her then. She didn’t leave Sohegan.”
“Oh.” Reeves paused a few moments. “You sure she didn’t leave town?”
“Almost sure. Are we getting clo
se to an arrest?”
“Real close,” Reeves said. “Call me when you’ve talked to her, okay?” He recited a 212 number and hung up.
From where he was parked on Glendale Street, Dwight Hawkins could see the backyard of Gwen Amiel’s house. The son was kicking a rubber ball into the air, catching it, kicking it again. Gwen sat just outside the back door, a paperback facedown on her lap.
Dwight had been there for fifteen minutes, fighting a nagging reluctance to get out of his car. He was an old hand at delivering bad news, and he wasn’t even sure Barry Amiel’s death was “bad news” to Gwen. No, his reluctance had to do with that kid, kicking that ball, as if getting it as high as possible into the air was the most critical thing in the world. And maybe it was, but not for long. Because things were going to get shitty for him real soon. Dwight watched the ball fly up into the blue sky, fall back down into the boy’s arms, fly up again. Just then he’d give anything not to be the one to fuck it up for the boy.
He opened the car door, slammed it shut, and saw Gwen Amiel start in the lawn chair and turn his way. He waved as he crossed the neighbor’s lawn to her yard.
“Morning,” he said, touching the visor of his cap.
“Got any photos of my ex-husband to show me?” she said bitterly.
The sun was behind his back, forcing her to squint at him. He circled her, the better to read her reaction.
“No photos,” he said. “Just some news.” He checked to make sure the boy was across the lawn, still kicking that ball. “Barry Amiel was found dead yesterday afternoon.”
Shock flashed across her eyes, but her composure returned almost immediately.
“How?”
“He was shot. At a warehouse in Queens. They used to keep foreign antiques there before they were claimed.”
“The Astoria Furniture Depot,” she said.
Their eyes met and he nodded.
“When?”
“Difficult to say, probably back in June, just after Mrs. Lawrence was killed.”
She looked beyond him, eyes unfocused.
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