Chill of Night n-6

by John Lutz

  “We’ve diverted a lot of human assets to protect the Taylor woman,” da Vinci said, “but this building was still pretty much crawling with cops. You’d think at least one of them would have noticed something worth mentioning.”

  “Two, sir,” Beam said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There were only two undercovers in the building at the time of the shooting. Two more outside.”

  “Okay,” da Vinci said, “not exactly crawling. Our killer still ran a hell of a risk, getting in here and taking down Cold Cat. How’d he even know the apartment door would be unlocked?”

  “It wasn’t unlocked. Latches automatically when it closes. He either picked the lock or slipped it. Wouldn’t have been much of a problem, since it wasn’t dead bolted or chained from the inside, after the bodyguard shagged ass outta here to try to save his car.”

  “Any doubt the car was deliberately set on fire?”

  “Arson investigator says there’s no doubt about it. Somebody shoved some rags under it and put a match or lighter to them.”

  “Then waited for all the action that would eliminate the bodyguard and serve as a distraction, so he could make his way upstairs and do his thing.”

  “Why’d he risk the car fire business?” Looper asked. “Why didn’t he just shoot the bodyguard, then go on in and take out Cold Cat?”

  “He has ethics,” da Vinci said. “Morals. He doesn’t want to harm innocent people.”

  “He’s a goddamn psycho,” Looper said.

  Da Vinci looked as if he might want to argue, then seemed to relax. “I’m only going by what Helen the profiler says. This is a basically moral man.”

  “For a nut case.”

  “For a nut case,” da Vinci agreed. He looked over at Beam. “Too bad you didn’t get a better look at this sicko when you were chasing him the other night. If it was really him.”

  “It was,” Beam said.

  “Then one thing we learned,” da Vinci said, “is he can run like a striped ape.”

  Beam wandered over and looked into the recording room through the open padded door. There was blood on the control panel, the chair, the floor. While the rest of the apartment was extravagantly decorated, the recording room looked high tech and all business. Cold Cat, with his backup, could spend a few hours in here and make a million dollars. Beam thought it was amazing.

  He saw that Nell was finished with Lenny the bodyguard. She was slipping her notepad into her purse, coming over to join him. Behind her, Lenny was sitting with his bowed head in his hands, staring through spread fingers at the floor.

  “Some bodyguard,” Nell said.

  “Probably not very experienced,” Beam told her. “Cold Cat must’ve seen all the bulk and figured Lenny was a tough guy.”

  “Tough he might be. Smart he’s not.”

  “A man who loved his car too much.”

  “There you go,” Nell said.

  “Aw, damn!”

  Everyone looked to see who’d spoken.

  They saw an African American man about five feet tall who would have looked even more diminutive if it weren’t for his built-up boots. He was wearing an electric blue suit that was tailored tight at the waist and had exaggerated shoulders. His drastically upcombed hairdo was probably supposed to make him appear taller but simply made it look as if his head were exploding. He’d ignored the yellow crime scene tape across the door and plowed on in.

  “Aw, damn!” he said again, grinding the heel of his hand into his right temple. “Damn, damn, damn!”

  “Who the hell are you?” da Vinci asked.

  The little man looked astounded that da Vinci would ask. “I be Knee High.”

  “To what?” Looper asked.

  “That’s my name, man!”

  “We want your real name,” da Vinci insisted.

  “That be it! I had it legally changed. You all can check, you wanna take this farther. I’m-I was-Cold Cat’s right hand.”

  Beam saw that Lenny had his head up and was staring glumly at the little man.

  “You know this guy?” Beam asked.

  Lenny waited a while before answering, as if still numbed by shock and grief. “He’s Knee High. He hangs around Cold Cat all the time.”

  “Hung around,” Looper corrected.

  Lenny buried his face in his hands again.

  “Okay, Knee High,” da Vinci said. “What is it you want?”

  “Knee High wants to confess.”

  “Everyone, even the remaining techs, stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

  “This all Knee High’s fault,” Knee High said. Then he began wailing again. “Damn, damn, damn!”

  “You’re saying you killed Cold Cat?” Beam asked.

  Knee High’s eyes widened and he wore his astounded look again. “Cold Cat? Naw, Knee High loved that man. But this still all Knee High’s fault. Knee High killed Edie.”

  It took Beam a few seconds to realize what the little man was saying, and not just because he was one of those people who referred to himself in the third person. “Edie Piaf? Cold Cat’s wife?”

  “She weren’t no kinda decent wife,” Knee High said. “Knee High did just what the jury said Cold Cat didn’t have no time to do, left my apartment a minute after him and got a cab ’cross town, killed Edie, then ran most of the way back. Couldn’t get no cab. Didn’t matter then, anyways, ’cause Edie was dead. Knee High never thought you guys’d nail Cold Cat for it. Then, when you did, it figured he’d get off, him bein’ innocent. Knee High was gonna say something if he didn’t. That Merv Clark gave testimony got him off. Me, Clark, we both lied our asses off on the stand. Clark was our insurance. Cold Cat was gonna get some green to him. Don’t know if he ever did.” Knee High looked from da Vinci to Beam with anguished eyes. “One thing’s sure, though. Knee High killed Edie cause she an’ Knee High were gettin’ it on behind Cold Cat’s back. We was at each other for a while. She was gonna tell Cold. Imagine that cunt! It ain’t that Knee High was scared of Cold if he found out, but it woulda killed Cold. Cold, he loved that bitch, but she took no notice of him ’cept he could help her career. Knee High had to kill her so she wouldn’t talk and ruin ever’thing.” He began to cry. “Ever’thing ruined now anyways. It all Knee High’s fault.”

  There was a roar from the other side of the room that startled everyone, and the huge form of Lenny came rocketing at Knee High.

  Looper and Beam intercepted him but could only slow him down. Looper had him around the waist. Beam caught an elbow in the stomach and sank to the floor. He could only hang on to one of Lenny’s ankles. Da Vinci jumped in and wrapped an arm around Lenny’s bull neck.

  Lenny wouldn’t be deterred. Dragging the three men, he continued to move toward the cornered, terrified Knee High. Nell hurled herself on the slowly moving pile of humanity but was brushed aside. She rushed to the door and summoned one of the uniforms on duty in the hall.

  He was a man almost as large as Lenny, and he had a weighted baton, which he brought down over and over on Lenny’s head. Hard wood bouncing off Lenny’s skull made a hollow, thumping sound, as if a melon were being struck.

  It seemed to dawn on Lenny only gradually that he was being clubbed. He finally slowed and stopped his forward motion, but he didn’t go down, merely slouched. The uniform from the hall kept pounding him, as if angry at Lenny’s lack of reaction.

  Beam reached out a hand and caught the uniform’s wrist. “Okay, okay, he’s gonna cooperate.”

  The uniform nodded and moved away, still gripping the baton in his right hand, tapping it in the palm of his left. His chest was heaving and his adrenaline was pumping. He still saw Lenny as unfinished business.

  Lenny stood with his head bowed, seeming to have suffered nothing other than a change of attitude.

  Looper and Nell led him back to the sofa, where he sat morosely and gave no indication that he knew his head was beginning to bleed.

  Knee High was still squatting in the corner, back on his
heels, trembling. “You shoulda let him kill Knee High! You shoulda!”

  “We can leave you two alone,” da Vinci offered.

  Lenny shook his head violently from side to side. “No, no! I jus’ wanna do what I gots to do. Thas’ all what’s left for me. I jus’ wanna-”

  “We know,” da Vinci said. He trudged over and sat down hard in an orange armchair. Beam was already sitting in the matching chair. Looper was standing bent over with his hands on his knees. The uniform was leaning back against a wall. Down from his adrenaline high, he’d stopped tapping his baton in the palm of his hand.

  Nell read Knee High his rights. She was the only one in the room not out of breath.

  56

  Dust motes rioted silently in a shaft of morning sunlight lancing in between the drapes and casting a Picasso-like symmetry over the wall and bureau.

  Nell’s bedroom was cool. The air conditioner had cycled off, and only the blower was on. It was barely light outside the closed drapes, and the morning rush hadn’t yet developed. The city was quiet except for the occasional swish of traffic, and distant shouting and metal clanging somewhere blocks away. A bird chirped determinedly nearby, maybe on the sill.

  Nell lay beside the sleeping Terry, listening to the even rhythm of his breathing, and wondered if she’d mentioned to him that the police were pulling protection away from Cold Cat and assigning it to Melanie Taylor? The question nagged her more than it should. She couldn’t remember doing so, but it was possible. Just as it was surely possible that whoever had shot Cold Cat knew with certainty about his reduced protection. The killer had created a diversion, then slipped like grease through the police and the building’s security.

  At the precise time when Cold Cat had been killed yesterday, Terry was alone in his apartment, scanning scripts for parts he thought he might have a shot at if he auditioned. Nell thought it odd that Terry seemed almost to make it a point to mention his whereabouts to her.

  At about that same time, Nell had been talking with Jack Selig over drinks in the softly lighted lounge at Keys, a new four-star restaurant over on Third Avenue. Her watch at Melanie Taylor’s had ended, and this was, in a way, she told herself, a continuation of the investigation. It had been a few drinks and conversation, nothing more; a gentleman always, Selig had kept his word about that.

  But Nell, having been with another man, didn’t think it was a good idea to press Terry about his whereabouts. That would be edging too close to the kind of pot-and-kettle argument that could end a relationship Nell desperately wanted to continue.

  She recalled that Terry hadn’t really much of an alibi for the time of Carl Dudman’s death, either.

  But Terry lived alone. And she was a cop; she knew how seldom people who lived alone, with no one to witness their lives, had firm alibis.

  Terry’s arm was suddenly across her chest, just beneath her breasts, startling her. His big hand closed on her bare upper arm.

  “I thought you were asleep,” she said.

  “Been lying here looking at you,” he said. “Not much I’d rather do.”

  She laughed. “Oh? Is there something you’d rather do?”

  He raised his head and kissed her. Bad breath. She didn’t mind.

  “There is something I’d rather do,” he said, “but we did it only a few hours ago.”

  Another light kiss, and he scooted away from her, sat on the edge of the mattress for a few seconds, then stood up. Nude and without the slightest self-consciousness, he yawned, stretched, then swaggered toward the bathroom.

  “Gonna shower?” Nell asked.

  “Gotta. And I don’t have time for breakfast this morning. Woman on the East Side needs her oven fixed. It overheats, and she’s desperate for relief.” He winked.

  Nell sat up in bed. “Damn you, Terry!” She threw his pillow at him and missed.

  In the bedroom doorway, he paused and glanced back at her, smiling. “It’s her ice-maker, actually.”

  He continued his nude stroll to the bathroom, and a few minutes later pipes clanked in the wall and she heard the shower begin to hiss. It was an oddly reassuring sound.

  Nell lay back and stared up at the slowly revolving ceiling fan, as she’d stared up at it last night during and after sex. As she’d done before. The rhythms and cycles of life. There was something so right about it all. She smiled.

  Too much paranoia in the world.

  She decided she didn’t really distrust Terry.

  She couldn’t.

  But if she did distrust him, who would she confide in? Beam? Looper? Hardly. Simply on mere suspicion, they’d be all over Terry. Then the media might find out. They’d swarm. They’d discover one of the investigating officers was sleeping with a suspect.

  Nell shuddered. Jesus!

  Nobody to confide in there.

  She felt a dark contempt for herself. The problem was her disease. Cop’s disease. The creeping cynicism that ruined every relationship, personal or otherwise.

  The disease that left you, finally, lonely and alone.

  Or was the disease New York? The city was in its own way insular, and everything seemed faster and somehow enhanced. Just the place to lose your perspective, to begin to doubt yourself.

  Lonely and alone.

  Nell didn’t want that ever to happen to her. Not on a permanent basis. She was still young enough to prevent it. And there was Terry.

  Terry.

  Selig.

  She did love Terry.

  But the one person she felt confident to confide in, she realized, was Jack Selig.

  Melanie lay in bed alone with her eyes clenched shut.

  Cold Cat dead! Richard!

  Her avowed hatred for the rap artist melted away. It was, after all, her fault that he was killed. She recalled those moments during the trial when their gazes had met and they’d looked into each other’s souls. Those were moments suspended in amber, moments that would last a lifetime.

  Richard.

  The man she loved. One of the few men she’d ever loved. Dead.

  The thought was so burning that she couldn’t lie still. Finally, she got up and plodded into the kitchen. The tile floor was cool on her bare feet, and cold air spilled out on her when she opened the refrigerator to get the carton of orange juice.

  She sat at the table, her feet up on the chair’s rungs to keep them off the tiles, and sipped juice from the carton. It helped, but not much. Made her feel a little steadier.

  Then she looked over at the sink, with its empty beer can, and last night’s takeout pizza box propped on the drain board. Tonight’s supper might be exactly the same.

  Lonely damned life. Miserable life.

  She thought morosely that if anybody should have been killed, it was that coward Knee High. Maybe he’d get the death penalty for murdering Edie Piaf. He certainly hadn’t been Richard’s friend, sleeping with his wife, killing her, then sitting in court knowing Richard was innocent and watching him suffer, his very life in the balance. Edie Piaf. She’d deserved to die for betraying Richard. What fools some women were! She, Melanie, would never have betrayed such a man, a poet of the streets, a major figure in modern music.

  Melanie realized that tears were tracking down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the backs of her fingers and took another sip of cold juice. The refrigerator clicked and its motor began to run, making something glass inside vibrate shrilly with a regular rise and fall, as if taunting her.

  A cruel trick had been played on her. She’d been Richard’s fierce and persuasive advocate on the jury and actually believed in his innocence. The jury foreperson who instinctively knew he was too good a man to be a murderer. Now, ironically, she was the one who’d set him free only to be killed by a fool who’d shared most of the other jurors’ misimpressions.

  Melanie pushed the juice carton away and rested her cheek on the cool, hard Formica table. “Life is so unfair and unpredictable,” she said in a choked voice. But no one was there to hear.

  So goddamn
ed cruel!

  So this is how it feels to have a broken heart.

  “The word is you’re in love,” Beam said to Nell.

  They were walking along First Avenue, sipping lattes from Starbucks, on their way to meet Looper near Cold Cat’s apartment building so they could do follow up interviews and double-check some facts-the kind of drudge police work you don’t read about in mystery novels.

  Nell sidestepped a frail, gray woman walking a dog that might have been a horse except for the fangs. Protection. “Whose word would that be?” Nell asked. “Looper’s?”

  “Among others. He’s close enough to you to notice.”

  Is it that noticeable? “The word could be wrong, otherwise there wouldn’t be much use for our kind of work.”

  Beam grinned. “Is the word wrong?”

  “Gossip doesn’t become you, Beam.”

  “Becomes no one,” he said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “Why do you have to know if I’m in love?”

  “I like you. I want to know so I can feel good about it.”

  “You’re so full of bullshit, Beam.”

  “Sure. Otherwise I wouldn’t be of much use in our kind of work.”

  They waited for the traffic signal at Fifty-sixth and First, not speaking.

  “Okay,” Nell said, as they were crossing the intersection. “I guess there’s no point in trying to keep a secret from you. Answer’s yes. I’m in love. Now what? Do I get flowers?”

  “Not from me. I respect you too much to love you. So who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Terry Adams.”

  “Don’t know him,” Beam said, after a pause.

  “That’s because he’s not a cop.”

  “Good.”

  “He’s an actor.”

  “My, my.”

  “And he repairs appliances.”

  Beam broke stride, then took a sip of latte. “Your air conditioner. It’s working now.”

  “Same guy,” Nell said.

  “Didn’t he ride with some of the cops in the Two-Oh a while back, doing research so he could play a cop on Broadway?”

  “Near Broadway. Said that’s as close as he wants to get.”