Chill of Night n-6

by John Lutz

  “I’m firm on my not guilty vote,” said Number Four, an African American man named Harvey, who worked as a super in a midtown apartment building.

  “Naturally,” said Smithers, from the other end of the table.

  “No, not naturally,” Harvey said. “It’s just that I’ve got plenty of reasonable doubt.”

  “Of course you do.” Smithers was pushing it.

  “I guess you don’t,” Harvey said.

  “Not a particle.”

  “Naturally not. You probably thought Simms was guilty the moment you walked into court and saw him.”

  “Or heard his music,” Mimi said with a laugh.

  “Stuff you’re too old to dance to,” Harvey said.

  Mimi merely smiled. “I was only joking. If we don’t joke now and then, we’ll go mad in this stifling little room that smells like Lemon Pledge.”

  Melanie hadn’t counted on this. She took a quick count. Six of the jurors were Caucasian, one Asian, one Hispanic, and three African American. “I don’t believe race enters into this,” she said. “We all need to agree on that.”

  One of the other black jurors, a middle-aged nurse named Pam, looked dubious and said, “You ain’t noticed we’re trying a black rap artist?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Wilma. “The law’s color blind.”

  “He might as well be a Martian,” Mimi said.

  “See what I’m sayin’?” Harvey said. “How many Martians been acquitted in New York courts?”

  “I think you understand my meaning,” Mimi said imperiously.

  “You some kinda diva?” Harvey asked, obviously pleased to have gotten under Mimi’s skin.

  “What we want to make sure we do,” said Wilma, “is not let the Justice Killer murders influence our judgment. If we really think we should acquit Richard Simms, we must do it.”

  “Maybe you don’t think the Justice Killer’s guilty,” Pam said.

  “I think he deserves all his constitutional rights and a fair trial even if he enjoys cutting people’s throats.”

  “Nicely put,” Smithers said. “What kind of writer are you?”

  “Right now I’m doing book reviews.”

  “We’re getting off point,” Melanie said. “We’re here to discuss a man’s guilt or innocence. Race has nothing to do with it.”

  “Amen,” said a lanky blond man with shoulder-length hair. Juror Number Two, Harold Evans. He was about forty, with narrow blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a long, pinched looking nose.

  “You a preacher?” asked Harvey.

  “Comedian.”

  “You shittin’ me?”

  “Nope. I play the clubs, had an HBO special. Stage name’s Happy Evans. Hap, offstage.”

  “So say somethin’ funny, Hap offstage.”

  “That’s not bad, Harvey. But comedians aren’t necessarily funny offstage.”

  “Robin Williams is.”

  “He’s got a point,” Pam said.

  “Billy Crystal!” said Delahey. “I bet you could wake up that man at midnight and he’d tell you a joke.”

  “I thought your name was Hap,” said Number Ten, a tax accountant named Hector Gomez. “So make us happy so we don’t notice the Lemon Pledge.”

  Everyone was staring at Hap.

  Melanie was afraid she was losing control. She was supposed to be setting the agenda here, and her jurors were turning on each other. Her throat was dry.

  Hap shrugged. “A guy goes into an apartment and shoots his wife.” He grinned. “That’s it, folks.”

  The Asian woman, Number Six, Marie Kim, held her nose between thumb and forefinger.

  “Not funny,” Delahey said.

  Hap shrugged again. “Then here’s the punch line: he didn’t do it.”

  No one said anything.

  “I abstained, but I’m a firm not guilty man,” Hap said. “I figure the more people I acquit, the better my chances if I ever get in trouble.”

  “That one I liked,” Delahey said.

  Melanie smiled, counting her allies. She’d need them if she was going to save Richard Simms from people like Walter Smithers.

  Manfred Byrd told the woman from Detroit that what she needed was a patterned sofa that contained all the colors of the room.

  The woman, whose name was Marge Caldwell, looked angry and waved her flabby arms about. She’d confided to Byrd that she’d been on a severe diet and had lost over fifty pounds. Byrd thought fifty more might be in order. “I paid a fortune to move all this stuff here from Michigan,” she said. “I was hoping you could tell me how to arrange it, not advise me to sell it.”

  “Keep all the stuff, dear. Only not the sofa. It’s Early American. Nothing else is.” Except for you, dear. “It’s a solid drab brown. Everything else you have is solid colored like the sofa. The room is static. You need something, one thing, that is busy, busy, busy.”

  Marge looked around. The expensive Third Avenue apartment was a puzzle to her, as was how to spend her money. She didn’t mind that Manfred Byrd was one of the most expensive interior decorators in the city, anymore than she minded the exorbitant rent she was going to pay. Marge, while in the middle of her divorce from a Detroit Dodge dealer, had won the state lottery and managed to come away with all the money. The Dodge dealer was angry and had run out of appeals. She didn’t want the Dodge dealer to find her. She wanted to start a new life in a new city she could lose herself in. What better place than New York? And if the Dodge dealer did locate her, the doorman wouldn’t let the bastard in the building. Manfred Byrd loved clients like this. She would put complete trust in him.

  He knew how to dress for this sort of client, too. Clothes made the man, and sometimes made the deal. He was still young, only forty-two and a half, and he exercised regularly to keep his slender body youthful. His suits were tailored and he favored silk in blacks and grays. His regular features were the sort that would always be boyish-he’d heard that said about him more than once. And it showed that he used a variety of skin conditioners. His hair was buzz cut and he sported no facial hair other than a tiny dark beard on the very tip of his chin. He wore one conservative diamond stud earring, and a silver bracelet. Byrd was intentionally obviously gay, but not too gay for a straight woman from Michigan.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Marge said.

  “Of course I’m right, dear. I’d better be. You’re paying me to be right.” Byrd laughed. “I’m right all the time.” He touched her flabby arm and smiled. “Sometimes I get so sick of myself.”

  Marge smiled along with him. “We lived in the suburbs in Detroit. This is so different. I’m not used to being so high.”

  “I won’t get into your personal life, dear.”

  Marge laughed and waved a ring-laden hand. “I meant high above the street.”

  “I know, and it’s good that you chose this place. High above the street is safer, even in a good part of town like this. You are an attractive woman alone.”

  Marge wasn’t buying into that one, but she seemed to consider what he’d said about being safer on a high floor. “Is New York really that dangerous?”

  “Not after you learn to take a few precautions. And not for someone from Detroit.”

  “The suburbs,” she reminded him.

  “Uh-huh. Where John Wayne Gacy murdered and buried all those boys.”

  “That was Chicago.”

  “Ah, you’re right! Well, Chicago!”

  “I get your point, though. New York’s no more dangerous than anyplace else.”

  Huh? “Exactly, dear. Well, Mayberry perhaps.”

  Marge pressed a finger to her dimpled chin and looked around, a thinking pose to let him know she was weighing his advice. “Pattern…”

  “Pattern, dear. Fewer solids and unbroken surfaces, less blah. More busy, busy.” He raised a cautioning forefinger. “But not too much. Only the sofa. And with a throw in an accent color.”

  “Yes, I do think I see what you mean. I wouldn’t have realized it
myself.”

  Byrd sent an offhand wave the way of the drab sofa. “I’ll make arrangements for you to have that removed, then you and I will go shopping for a divine divan. It will be fun.”

  Marge put on another smile, waging the ongoing battle to push away her past and fit into her new life. “It will be,” she agreed. “There’s no reason for it not to be.”

  “What I like about you, dear,” Byrd said, “is you got the spirit!”

  As he left the apartment, he was already planning their shopping expedition, a series of specialty furniture stores that wouldn’t have what they needed, then Niki’s Nook on Second Avenue, where there was plenty of pattern and he received twenty percent of markup for furniture sold to his clients. Furniture was such fun merchandise. Even after Marge’s special discount, Byrd’s finder’s fee would be considerable.

  Down on the sidewalk, he was waiting while the doorman tried to hail a cab, when he glanced across the street and saw the same man-he was sure it was the same one-he’d noticed twice during the last few days watching him in the Village. He was wearing a blue or black T-shirt with an eagle on its chest, dark sunglasses, tight Levi’s tucked into black boots. Going for the Harley Davidson look, not so noticeable in the Village, but here on this block of Third Avenue, he stood out the way Marge’s old sofa would. Though his eyes were concealed behind the dark lenses, Byrd was certain the man was staring directly at him. He could feel it.

  The Dodge dealer? Had the Dodge dealer found Marge? Byrd had been spending a great deal of time in her apartment; might the man think he was Marge’s new lover, moving in on her money that her ex-husband believed should be half his?

  Me and Marge? Hah!

  But everybody loved somebody, if they were lucky, and Marge had been the Dodge dealer’s wife.

  Or maybe the Dodge dealer’s interested in me!

  Am I insane? Maybe it isn’t even the same man.

  “Heads up, sir!”

  Brakes eeped and tires scraped on concrete. Byrd had to leap back from where he’d wandered off the curb while lost in thought. The vehicle’s right front fender had barely missed him.

  His heart hammering, Byrd tipped the doorman and hurriedly got into the cab and blurted out his destination. He was determined to get hold of his imagination. His analyst had cautioned him about flights of paranoia that could lead to panic attacks.

  Think pattern, think pattern…something that will pop…something wild…

  But as the cab accelerated away from the curb, Byrd craned his neck to peer out the rear window.

  Everyone else on the busy street seemed to be facing any direction other than toward the cab, but Harley Davidson man was looking directly at Byrd.

  33

  Looper suggested they prioritize, and Looper was right. Beam should have thought of it first.

  In Beam’s comfortably messy den, they sat around his desk and looked over the list of controversial acquittals during the past ten years, supplied to them by da Vinci. The air conditioning was working well and the den was cool. One of the trees planted outside happened to be right in front of the window, providing a view of morning sunlight glancing off green maple leaves.

  Beam sat in his leather desk chair, and Nell and Looper were in chairs pulled close to the other side of the desk, where the murder files were stacked. Beam wished he had a cigar. He didn’t want to smoke one in front of Looper, who was trying hard to quit cigarettes, and he had a suspicion as to what Nell would say, or at least think, about what he could do with his cigar if he asked if she minded. The world was rapidly closing in on smokers.

  “These three,” Beam said. “Bradley Aimes, Sal Palmetto, and Irwin Breach. They seem to have had the most publicity, and all three defendants sure as hell looked guilty but were allowed to walk.”

  “At least that’s what the public thought,” Nell said.

  “Still thinks,” Beam added. “Which means murdering someone who had any part in their trials will only make the Justice Killer more…famous.”

  He’d almost said popular.

  “Breach is dead,” Looper said. “Hanged himself in a holding cell when he was arrested on a later burglary charge.”

  “And Palmetto’s left the country,” Nell said. “He lives someplace now in Spain or Italy.”

  “A perpetual vacation,” Looper said in disgust.

  “It’s the jurors we’re most interested in,” Beam said. “And we can’t rule out Aimes as a potential victim. Not with this killer.” He laid the three files out side by side on the desk. “You take the Palmetto jury,” he said to Looper. “Make sure they know the danger to them, and at the same time try to find out anything they might know that might help us.” To Nell, “You get the folks who gave Breach a free pass.” He tapped the remaining file with his forefinger. “I’ll do the Bradley Aimes jury.”

  “Loop and I already talked to the Dixon family as potential suspects,” Nell said.

  “You wanna do that jury?” Beam asked.

  “I don’t see where it makes any difference. Not unless we seriously consider any of the Dixon family members suspects.”

  Looper gave her a look over the Palmetto file. “Do we?”

  Nell shook her head. “Not a chance. All they are in my view are Bradley Aimes’s secondary victims. Somebody kills Aimes, I guess we’d need to consider the Dixons, but it’d only be routine as far as I’m concerned. No more likely than Genelle Dixon returning from the dead to kill Aimes.”

  “I’ve never known that kind of thing to happen,” Looper said. He sniffed the air. Beam wondered if he could smell the cigars sealed in their desktop humidor. Beam could.

  “Okay, then,” Beam said, standing up behind his desk. “I’ll do Carl Dudman. He was foreman of the Aimes jury.”

  “I’ve seen his real estate agency ads in the papers,” Looper said. “He sells high end property. Guy like that, he’s probably too rich to be in much danger.”

  Nell and Beam looked at each other. Maybe Looper was right; neither could, offhand, think of a serial killer case where the victims were wealthy, their murders spread over a period of time and following a psychotic theme.

  But then, the killer they were chasing had a nasty unpredictable streak in him.

  Beam picked up the phone to dial information for a number for Dudman Properties.

  He watched Nell and Looper leave the den, and as he was jotting down the phone number, heard them find their own way out.

  It was surprisingly easy to see Carl Dudman. His offices were in Tribeca, in a tall, prewar building that covered half a block and contained three banks at street level. It was being remodeled, and while no one was visibly working at the moment, the main entrance was flanked by iron scaffolding painted a dull, flaking red. Pedestrians streamed over plywood that covered mud where the sidewalk had been torn up. The city was an organic being that changed constantly, and its citizens understood and accepted it.

  The building’s lobby was a symphony of oak paneling, polished brass, and dark-veined marble. Temporary but neatly painted signs directed visitors to the street-level bank entrances. A uniformed attendant behind a marble desk gave directions to Beam and had him sign in.

  Dudman Properties occupied the building’s entire ninth floor. Beam elevatored up in about a second and a half. A trim, efficient gray-haired woman, wearing a severe dark skirt and blazer with a white blouse and man’s maroon tie, had him wait only a few minutes before ushering him into Dudman’s office.

  Dudman was standing behind his desk, smiling slightly and looking curious. He was about five-foot nine and broad shouldered, his chalk-stripe, double-breasted suit buttoned across a flat stomach. He had a broad, handsome face with a shiny, protruding forehead, and the over-groomed, rested look of a man who ate well, slept in pajamas, wore a robe to breakfast, and had just stepped from a shower into clothes that had been laid out by a valet. Beam thought all of that might be true.

  He shook Beam’s hand with a firm grip but didn’t make it a contest. �
�Effie said you were police.”

  Beam smiled. “Effie was right. Detective Beam, Homicide, NYPD.” He reached for his shield, but Dudman waved a hand to stay the effort. He trusted Beam. Or knew about him.

  “Captain Artemis Beam. Retired. Sort of.”

  Beam almost winced. He didn’t like people using his given name. Few knew it. He was sure Dudman was letting him know he was one of the few. “You’re ahead of the game, Mr. Dudman.”

  “Only way to play,” Dudman said. “It isn’t difficult to learn about you, Detective Beam. You’re getting a great deal of publicity right now because of the Justice Killer investigation.”

  “Unfortunately,” Beam said. He was sure the name Artemis hadn’t been printed or mentioned on TV news. Well, not sure. How could he be?

  “Why unfortunate? I would think you’d enjoy being a celebrity.”

  “It can be inconvenient. I’d rather only the killer was a celebrity.”

  “Why so?”

  “It can be convenient.”

  Dudman grinned. The guy was a game player who obviously relished verbal fencing.

  “The investigation is what brings me here, Mr. Dudman.”

  “Carl, please. I hope I’m not a suspect.”

  “You know better, Carl.”

  Dudman’s grin became a thin smile, letting Beam know their little joust was ended and it was time to get to the point, he was a busy man. “Yes. To the Justice Killer, I’m a prospective victim.” He motioned for Beam to sit down in an overstuffed black leather chair facing the desk. “Maybe even a tempting one, as I’ve done quite well with my business since the Bradley Aimes trial. It’s always more fun to kill somebody rich.”

  Beam sat. The chair hissed and enveloped him like a creature that might devour his body slowly and at will. But the damned thing was sure comfortable. “So far,” he said, “the killer seems to be fairly democratic when it comes to victims. I wouldn’t let your wealth bother you, sir. But that doesn’t alter why I came here, which is to make certain you understand that you need to be cautious about your vulnerabilities.”

  “I’ve considered that, Detective Beam, and I have few vulnerabilities. I’m one of the lucky potential victims who can afford tight security.”