Chill of Night n-6

by John Lutz

  Nola didn’t look surprised to see him. “You get overheated sitting out there in your car?”

  “It isn’t much cooler in here,” Beam said, aware not only of the warmth, but of the musty scent of the surrounding objects, the past.

  “I’ll complain to the landlord.” She didn’t seem angry that he’d turned up again. She didn’t seem pleased. “What do you want, Beam?”

  “I think we need to talk.”

  “You need to talk.”

  “We both do,” Beam said. “To each other.”

  She rested her hand on an old black rotary phone on the counter. “I should pick up the phone, call the precinct, tell them I’m being threatened and I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not being threatened and you’re not afraid.”

  “But I could pick up the phone and call.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He waited, but she didn’t move. Didn’t look away from him. Nothing in the world was darker than the very center of her eyes. “I know you’ve asked people in the neighborhood about me, Beam. You wanted to know if I was married, if I was involved with anyone.”

  “I did that, yes.”

  Her hand didn’t move off the phone. “What is this we need to talk about?” she asked.

  There was a good question. But the answer came to him immediately. “Harry.”

  “He was my husband.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “Did he trust you? His friend? The cop who owned him and was bending his arm?”

  “Yes. And he trusted you. He was right to trust us both. I don’t deny I wanted you. But I never moved on it. Never touched you. I was married. And you were Harry’s wife.”

  “I’m still Harry’s wife.”

  “Not any longer.”

  “Your wife is dead now.”

  The simple statement, coming from her, didn’t carry the weight and pain it might have. He was appalled, and then relieved, that he could hear it and not be pierced by grief and loneliness.

  “You’re right, she’s dead,” he said. “And so is Harry.”

  “You want to screw me. You want me to forgive you.”

  “Yes.”

  “One doesn’t necessarily follow the other.”

  “I know. But we both need the same thing.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  “To be free of the past without losing it.”

  She continued to stare at him. He couldn’t decipher what was in her eyes.

  “I’m being honest with you,” he said.

  “You sure as hell are. You think I’m stuck here in some kind of cobwebby, self-imposed purgatory on earth because of what happened to Harry.”

  “Yeah, I think that.

  “And you think I can somehow ease the loss you feel for your wife.”

  She’s right!

  The knowledge, its clarity, so bluntly stated, struck Beam like a bullet.

  “And you have the formula that will help us both,” she said.

  “It isn’t a formula.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “A plea.”

  “You don’t sound so sure of yourself now.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What I said, do I have it right, Beam?”

  “As far as it goes.”

  “It goes farther?”

  “You know it does.”

  “I know I want you to leave.”

  “Question is, do you want me to come back?”

  Her gaze locked with his own. “I want you to leave.”

  Finally she removed her hand from the phone.

  He could feel her watching as he let himself out, the bell above the door tinkling a message in a code he didn’t know.

  He did know she hadn’t told him not to return, and she’d hesitated a beat before telling him again that she wanted him to leave.

  A beat. An infinitesimal fraction of time.

  A change in the rhythm.

  Adelaide understood that publicity was the oxygen of her business. Not that she wasn’t sincere, but why not make her plight known? Why not speak for the other poor people in the same predicament as hers, being pushed around by the system? This was her opportunity, and in a way her responsibility.

  Responsibility. That’s the word Barry used when finally he’d warmed to her idea, and even sort of adopted it as his own. “We average citizens can’t let ourselves be pushed around by the system,” he’d said. “Somebody has to speak up, even if it means falling on his or her sword.”

  “Like a real sword?” Adelaide had asked.

  “Like a book contract,” Barry told her. “And talk shows and acting jobs.”

  So here she was on the steps of City Hall, with maybe a hundred people gathered beyond the dozens of TV cameras and smaller camcorders directed toward her. One of the TV people had given her a tiny mike to clip to her lapel, with a wire running down inside her blouse to a small black power pack they’d attached to her belt at the small of her back.

  Adelaide looked young and beautiful in her tight jeans and her yellow blouse, tailored to emphasize her breasts and tiny waist. Her blond hair was piled high and with seeming recklessness on her head, with a few loose strands left to dangle strategically over her right cheek and left eye. Her tiny figure made even more diminutive by the solemn stone of City Hall, Adelaide looked soft and vulnerable. Adelaide looked cute.

  In her right hand, she held a sheet of crumpled white paper. She raised it high and told the assembled what they already knew: it was a jury summons.

  “It’s unfair!” she said in her high stage voice that would have carried even without a microphone. “I’d be eager to serve on a jury if the city could guarantee my safety. And your safety. They cannot. It’s asking citizens to perform much more than their civic duty when they’re asked to risk their lives.” She waved the summons in her tight little fist. “This isn’t a draft notice! We’re not at war. I don’t feel I should have to pay a price because the city can’t perform it’s first duty to us, its citizens, and that is to protect us!”

  The crowd beyond the media had grown to almost two hundred now, and they began to cheer. Some of the cameras swiveled away from Adelaide and toward the mass of onlookers.

  “I’m not a criminal,” Adelaide continued. “And I shouldn’t be asked to pay for someone else’s crime. But that’s exactly what might happen, because the police aren’t doing their job. They haven’t done it well enough so far, anyway. Maybe it is a tough job. And I’m sure they’re doing the best they can. But it isn’t my fault-it isn’t our fault-that it isn’t good enough!”

  Another loud cheer. Some in the crowd began waving the ADELAIDE’S RIGHT signs that looked homemade, but that Barry had had printed up yesterday by a friend of his who had a graphics art business in the Village. ADELAIDE’S ARMY and FREE ADELAIDE signs were already printed and being held in reserve.

  “I have no choice but to announce publicly that until the Justice Killer is apprehended and the city is no longer in the control of a madman-”

  “You mean the mayor?” a man shouted from the crowd.

  “I mean the Justice Killer.” Adelaide began waving both arms now, palms out in an appeal for a moment’s silence so she could be heard. “Until the city’s safe again, I will not obey this jury summons. I will not serve. I will not be a sacrifice.”

  The crowd was getting ever larger, and uniformed cops were having difficulty keeping it contained. A tall, skinny cop near the front used his nightstick as a probe to move a man back, but the man brushed it aside and pushed forward.

  “I will go to jail first!” Adelaide screamed. “I mean it! I pledge that I will go to jail!”

  “We got rights!” a woman in the crowd screamed.

  “And sometimes we have to fight for them!” Adelaide responded. The crowd roared its agreement. She set her jaw and gave them her left profile. Cute as a feisty twelve-year-old, only with a grown woman’s sexuality. “This is one of those times.” She raised her dainty fist
high above her head, as she had when she auditioned for Les Miz.

  The half dozen men Barry had hired began chanting, “Adelaide! Adelaide! Adelaide!” The crowd joined in, many of them pumping their fists in the air. At a subtle signal from Barry, his hirelings pushed forward, knocking over a police barricade. The crowd followed, surging toward City Hall.

  The cops moved fast, but they’d been taken by surprise and there weren’t enough of them. A line had been crossed, an invisible switch thrown. Suddenly the crowd became a mob. It was held back only a few seconds before it surged forward, knocking over some of the media, sending equipment smashing to the ground.

  “Holy shit!” Adelaide thought.

  “Barry!” She began calling for Barry, but in the maelstrom of motion and shouting no one heard her. “Barry!”

  Adelaide could count crowds, and she estimated that at least five hundred frenetic people were charging toward her. A uniformed cop was on the ground and couldn’t climb back to his feet. He scooted backward, his soles scraping on the pavement, then he was lost from sight in the rush of humanity. That really scared her.

  “Barry!”

  She saw Barry emerge from the left side of the crowd and start toward her. His face was flushed an improbably bright red and he looked out of breath. He staggered, went down, and disappeared.

  God! Barry, don’t have a heart attack, please!

  Adelaide began backing up the steps, afraid to turn away from the crowd, almost falling as her heel caught. She realized her face was frozen in a meaningless smile that masked near panic.

  The blue of a police uniform appeared in the corner of her vision, then another. More and more cops were on the steps. Some of them had long, curved shields as well as nightsticks and were forming a kind of line that was meant to hold back the crowd.

  Adelaide turned and saw uniformed cops streaming out of City Hall and down the steps. It was like the cavalry coming to her rescue in an old Technicolor western. And she was overjoyed to see them. She whirled and ran toward her rescuers with her arms spread wide, dropping her crumpled jury summons. A big cop who looked like a young Gary Cooper was gazing deadpan at her. She veered toward him.

  She fell sobbing into his arms.

  “Arrest me!” she gasped. “Arrest me, please!”

  They didn’t arrest Adelaide, didn’t charge her for inciting a riot, maybe because Barry and his-her-lawyers almost came right out and dared them to. Or maybe she was simply too cute to arrest.

  But they did take her into protective custody, and she spent the night by herself in a tiny, smelly holding cell. The bed was hard as a plank, and it was impossible for her to sleep. The place was noisy, too. There were voices she couldn’t understand because of the way they echoed, and someone was snoring not far away. Now and then people came by to look in at her. Most of them were in uniform. They didn’t say anything, only looked.

  But there was something in their expressions that Adelaide recognized, a kind of reserved awe. Only a few other times had people looked at her that way, the way they looked at real celebrities they knew were beyond their reach and envied. At stars.

  In the morning, they drove her home under police escort. Some of the people on the sidewalk seemed to recognize Adelaide and waved. As the lead cruiser she was in slowed to take a corner, a woman began hopping up and down, mouthing her name. Ad-e-laide, Ad-e-laide. Three of the cops asked for her autograph, and she smilingly obliged and asked how the siren worked.

  Her attorneys told her that next week, when she was due to appear in court in answer to her jury summons and wouldn’t be present, the police would issue a warrant for her arrest. She shouldn’t be alarmed. It was according to plan.

  Scared as she was, she was also excited. She was sure, as she had been all along, that Barry was an absolute genius and one of the truly sweet men in her life.

  Marge trusted Manfred Byrd enough to lend him a key to her apartment. That always seemed to Manfred to be the Rubicon, marking a client’s complete faith in him, the equating of decorator talent with honesty. A man less honest would take advantage of Marge.

  She was having lunch with a friend, she’d told him, to discuss some sort of charitable contribution, and would meet him immediately afterward. Manfred thought it interesting that a woman could become suddenly very rich and give some of it away to those less fortunate. He didn’t completely understand the impulse, but he found it commendable.

  Apparently her lunch had run later than anticipated. It was past two o’clock and he was alone in the unfurnished living room of her apartment. No matter. He could take the measurements he needed without her. He’d already decided that the sofa she chose would go well with the slightly burnt umber tint to the previously dead white walls. When he was finished, the room would be much warmer, and with a sense of order and stability, which was what Marge wanted.

  Manfred took off his gray silk sport jacket, carefully folded it lining out, and laid it on the carpet. Then he removed his tape measure from his briefcase on the floor and prepared to go to work.

  He was headed for the corner where the tall etagere was going to be, when a slight sound made him turn.

  And there was a man with a gun.

  Guns were not part of Manfred’s universe. All he could manage to say was, “Huh?”

  There was something bulky on the gun’s barrel, and while Manfred knew next to nothing about firearms, he recognized it as a silencer. It was all he could stare at as the man moved toward him.

  The gun didn’t waver as the man said, “Slip your jacket back on.”

  Manfred quickly did as he was told, so hurriedly he might have heard a seam rip in the silk fabric. Dreadful sound.

  “Now go out on the balcony,” said the very calm voice behind the gun. It might have been an invitation to step outside and admire the breathtaking view.

  “No. You’re-”

  “Outside!”

  Manfred turned his back on the gunman, opened the French doors to the balcony, and reluctantly stepped outside. Though the day was calm, at this height there was a steady breeze. He couldn’t help but notice that fear was making his movements stiff. At the same time, there was an unreality about all of this.

  He was shoved roughly from behind, stumbled forward, and caught himself on the waist-high iron railing just in time to keep from tumbling out into space. He gasped and began to turn around. He was dizzy, terrified.

  The rudeness! This really shouldn’t be happening!

  He was only halfway around when he was shoved again. This time he felt his right ankle grasped and lifted, and his perspiring hand slipped off the railing.

  Along with the momentum of the shove, it was enough to tip the balance.

  Manfred Byrd was airborne and for several seconds too astounded to be simultaneously frightened.

  It’s all so fast!

  Ten floors down he began to scream.

  36

  “Who the hell is she?” da Vinci asked.

  Beam was standing. Nell and Looper were seated before da Vinci’s desk. Helen Iman, the profiler, was sprawled in a chair over by the computer. The usually organized office was more cluttered than Beam had ever seen it. Papers were scattered over da Vinci’s desk, a stack of file folders leaned precariously on top of the computer monitor. A crumpled yellow slip of some sort had missed the wastebasket. It was almost as if the job were getting away from da Vinci. The Adelaide effect, Beam thought.

  He said, “She’s an actress who lives in the Village.”

  Da Vinci raised his eyebrows in that way that made him look more than ever like young Tony Curtis. “Successful?”

  “Not unsuccessful,” Beam said. “Sings, dances, acts…the whole package.”

  “And cute enough to top a dessert,” Looper said.

  The others stared at him and he nervously tapped his breast pocket where he used to carry his cigarettes.

  “She certainly stirred up some shit,” da Vinci said.

  “The kind she wanted,” B
eam said, standing with his arms crossed. “She’s front page and leads the news all over town. And out of town. The rest of the country’s getting more and more interested in our predicament, thinking it might happen to them.”

  “Do you think she’s the sort who could start a popular movement?” Nell asked.

  All three men looked at her disbelievingly.

  “She could start things moving that have never moved before,” Looper said.

  Da Vinci looked over at Helen. “What do you think of our Adelaide?”

  “Not exactly my department,” she said. Her voice was throaty and, in a quiet way, commanded attention. “But I’ll try. She’s self-involved, narrowly focused, clever, and not as dumb as she looks. Or at least she’s got somebody with brains directing her. Don’t let the cute act fool you. Could she start a movement? Think Joan of Arc.”

  Da Vinci looked disgusted. This was a turn in the case he hadn’t counted on.

  “This city’s gonna have an even tougher time getting anyone to serve on a jury,” Beam said, “unless we get ahead of the curve on this.”

  “I’ve heard that advice somewhere before,” da Vinci said. “It seems to have more to do with surfing than homicide investigations.”

  “It’s more or less worked.”

  “Mostly less. But what do you suggest this time?”

  “When she doesn’t report for jury duty,” Beam said, “don’t charge her.”

  Da Vinci shook his head. “We can’t let her get away with it and set an example, or nobody will even open their mail from the city unless they need something to wipe their ass.”

  “Issue a statement saying she’s being excused because she’s a hardship case.”

  “She’s an out-of-work actress,” Nell said. “She’s got nothing else to do, and the city does pay jurors a stipend.”

  “Only a stipend,” Looper said. “When last I checked, it was forty dollars a day. That doesn’t take you far in New York.”

  “She was in a show until six weeks ago,” Beam said, “a musical called Nuts and Bolts at the Herald Squared Theatre, Off-Off-Broadway. It was panned by the critics, but it ran for almost three months.”