Riker unlocked the door to his apartment, flicked on the light switch and stepped over the notes pushed under his door by well-wishers who could never find him at home or in his favorite cop bar. He spent his evening hours supporting a different saloon in a neighborhood where he would not encounter detectives from Special Crimes Unit. One of the notes on his floor was an invitation in Charles Butler's handwriting. His old friend and new landlord had not yet grasped the fact that Riker preferred to drink his dinner alone, ungrateful as that might seem.
This SoHo apartment was bigger than anything he could afford, and Charles had insisted on chopping off more than half the rent. Riker knew it was a better place than he deserved, and so he compensated for this by turning every surface into a trash magnet. His dirty laundry had been scattered to four corners and the ashtrays filled to overflowing.
He entered the generously proportioned sit-down kitchen, a collection dump for his unopened mail. He had no other use for this room except as an additional storage area for the empty Chinese take-out containers, pizza cartons, crushed beer cans and bottles. With one hand, he swiped a pile of envelopes from the table, then set down his gift from Mallory, a radio. She had accurately guessed that his own had worn out and that this damage had gone unnoticed for years. The television had also been broken, or he had assumed as much since the screen had been cracked by a bullet. The TV set had been left behind in his old apartment in Brooklyn, where he had lain bleeding and shaking, hearing the distant scream of sirens and believing that he would die. He believed it still, though all the bloody holes in his body had been neatly closed and stitched. He walked through the rooms turning on all the lights. It was not yet midnight, and there was still time to catch the last twenty minutes of Ian Zachary's program. He returned to the kitchen and set up the antenna per Mallory's advice for the best reception. She had already tuned in the station for him, and then, distrustful brat, she had fixed the position of the dial with tape. Contrary to her style of complex electronics, this was a very simple appliance, only a few knobs to work. He could tell that a good deal of thought had gone into Mallory's selection of this model; she had wanted something that a drunk could easily operate. Plugging it in was a problem; his hand wavered back and forth, always missing the wall socket. Finally, he rammed the plug home, turned on the radio and recognized the voice of a transplanted Englishman dabbling in American slang. This was the man who had telephoned him six times to request an interview with Jo.
"No, you imbecile!"yelled the talk-show host. "The Reaper is not an escaped mental patient. He only kills on the weekends. That means he's a working stiff with a regular job and a leisure-time avocation of justice."
"You mean murder" This second voice revealed a genuine Bronx pedigree. "I'm tellin' you the guy's a nutcase. So I figure – "
The Reaper's not crazy," said Ian Zachary. "He's a man on a mission to cull the brain dead from the judicial system. And you don't win any prizes for your damn opinion, fool. I want hard information – facts and proof"
Zachary tapped a button to cut off the caller, then lowered his voice to speak to the wider audience. "All right, this is my fault. Too many big words. We'll review the rules one more time, people. While I go to the next commercial break, get out your damn crayons so you can take notes." He looked up at the window separating his dark studio from the well-lit booth of his sound engineer. The young woman behind the glass gave him a cutthroat signal to say he was off the air.
His eyes darted to the next booth window, the one where the light never shone, though he doubted that it was always empty. His producer, an abject coward, had yet to show his face, but that was not to say that the man did not occasionally look in on the radio show. Zachary used the reflective dark glass as a mirror, and his fingers combed back unruly strands of long black hair to expose a widow's peak. This was a sign of the black arts in his grandmother's lexicon. And his ears tapered down to the skin, no lobes, another granny omen that he would turn out badly. Yet he had evolved into God or God the Son. The station manager told him so every day when the man answered each telephone call with the words, Oh, God, it's you, oh, Jesus freaking Christ.
But women liked him.
His full lips and a bad-boy smile promised the ladies a roller-coaster ride of a real bad time. Women were also attracted to the hazel eyes that changed color depending upon ambient light or his mood: dark as bullet holes if he was angry; greenish brown when he was merely sardonic; and sunshine brought out the bits of blue, though he was only awake in the daylight for staff meetings and pretaped interviews. Ian Zachary had a preference for vampire hours, and his skin tone bordered on prison pallor. Slouching deep in his chair, lean and languid, he propped his cowboy boots on the console. His black shirt and jeans had designer chic and the tightness of a second skin. He was that new creature – Cool Goth.
A polar opposite was that lump of girl in the control booth. She obviously cut her own hair over the bathroom sink, and her shapeless clothes were more appropriate to the prairie town she hailed from. This homely youngster with thick ankles and prissy thin lips was his new sound engineer, call screener, personal assistant and whipping girl. Zachary had chosen her from a lineup of less ugly mutts with more experience. He had found her fragile personality… appealing.
His new pet sat in her cage of glass and steel, electronics and blinking ruby call buttons. Each red light represented a fool who actually believed he had a chance of getting on the air, though only one would make the cut in the final segment. On his own side of the window, best described as a cave, darkness was alleviated only by the glow of his control panel and the screen on his laptop computer. In the next room, his engineer sat shell-shocked beneath fluorescent lights that faded her freckles and leached the healthy farm-girl glow from her skin. After hours of being ridiculed on the air, her eyes were no longer bright, and gone was that smile of eagerness to do good on the first day of her brand-new job.
Zachary checked the digital clock on his panel as it counted down the seconds before live air. The commercial break was almost done. "Babe?" All employees of both sexes were called babe. What was the point of remembering names when so many did not last an entire shift? "Prep the next caller. We'll take the moron with the lisp."
She looked down at her phone board, suddenly frightened, and then she shook her head to tell him that the lisping caller's light had gone dark. Zachary left his chair and crossed the room, walking toward her window, saying, "No, babe, don't tell me you lost that one." Ah, but she had. This incompetence was the downside of hiring the tender mental cases. He returned to his panel to check the screen for the most overt flaws of call-in fans. "Okay, babe, we'll take the next one – that guy who squeaks like a girl." And if the next caller did not squeak as promised, he was going to fire the engineer as a finale to the show.
He sat back in his chair, glaring at her until she cued him to pick up line six. The commercial interlude was over. He hit the button for the next caller, saying, "So you're Randy from SoHo."
"Hi," said a small reedy voice almost lost in the dark. "I'm waiting to talk to Zack."
"You're talking to me now, you fool. When you hear my voice, that means you're on the air. My idiot engineer never mentioned that?" He heard a sudden intake of breath, then dead silence from the stagestruck Randy of SoHo.
"Don't be afraid," said Zachary to the caller. "Daddy loves you, you useless twit. What've you got for me? It better be damn good. If you're as lame as the last one, I'll have to fire the little girl who screened you." He imagined the caller's sweaty hands worming round a telephone receiver. "That's right, you geek. Her job is hanging on you. Randy? Still there, sport? Yes, I hear you breathing. And now, for the listening pleasure of my audience, I'll describe my engineer's reaction to her impending redundancy while we all do a slow countdown from ten. If Randy can't get his little dick up in time to save her, she's history. Ten. Did I mention that she was young? Oh, yes, fresh off the farm – just a little lost girl a thousand miles from home.
Nine. She's wearing shiny new shoes and an outfit she bought for her first trip to New York City. She must've thought we all dressed like Catholic schoolgirls."
He swiveled around to face the plate glass. "She's just sitting there so pale and still – so exposed. Can you see her? Every pimple, every pucker of cellulite? Oh, and that hairy patch on one knee, a spot she missed with her razor this morning. Eight! She seems quiet. But you just know inside her head, she's running round in circles, flapping like a duck and screaming."
Her shoulders slumped as she died a little. They all did that. She was probably wondering if she should risk a nervous laugh. Could she risk not laughing? What if he was serious? He could see all of this flashing through her mind.
"Well, people, so far, this isn't much fun. She's about as animated as a corpse."
Stupid, boring cow.
"Seven. Randy? You think her parents are listening tonight? Of course they are. Six. She would've told all her friends and relatives to tune in for her first big break in show business. Five seconds to go, people. Will our hero on the phone make it in time? Four. Will the little girl lose her job and take the next bus back to the farm?"
She snapped.
Finally.
"Our girl's not dead yet. Her chair is spinning round and round. Her eyes are glazing over as she stares at the ceiling. Looking for flights of angels, babe? Her chair just came to a dead stop. Her head is slowly swiveling. Oh – scary. I swear to God, people, it's like a scene from a horror movie. Her eyes are bulging, going medieval on me. She's raising a fist – extending her middle finger – a suggestion that I commit a physically impossible sexual act on myself. Wait. There's more. She could've let it go at that, a simple elegant gesture that pretty much said it all. But she just mimed a well-known slang word for the anal orifice. I'm guessing that's my new name. Is that right, babe?"
She mouthed the words, Die, you bastard.
He liked that. He liked it a lot. Ah, and now the angry tears. She was shredding all the careful notes written at the start of the day, making confetti of pages lined with her schoolgirl penmanship.
"Uh, Zack?" Randy the timid caller had found his voice. "I got a photograph of a live juror right here in Manhattan. So… what do I win?"
Chapter 3
JOHANNA APOLLO RAISED HER FACE TO THE LOW-RIDING sun as she strolled toward Bleecker Street. The morning air was cold, but early risers got company vans with four good tires. This would be the happy side effect of changing her hours and her route to avoid any more contact with Bunny. His habits were nocturnal and his home was a patch of sidewalk on another block.
Every retail store in Greenwich Village was still locked behind burglar gates, but the bagel shop in Father Demo Square was open for business, and she stopped to buy coffee. She was unable to abide the swill at work, believing that the coffee grounds were strained through Riker's old socks to save money on filters. Exiting the shop with a steamy paper cup in hand, she turned on Bleecker and, halfway down the block, she saw the shoe by the curb – Bunny's shoe. There was no mistaking this mangle of tortured leather for anyone else's. Another pedestrian passed her by, a true New Yorker, ignoring the evidence of violence, the blood in the shape of heel marks and red toe prints from one bare foot – and more blood later on down the sidewalk. The widely paced red tracks along the pavement were those of a loping man. Johanna followed the trail of lost blood, running fast, then faster, full-out, losing her paper cup somewhere along the way. And then – breathless and stunned – she came to a stop before the open gate of a playground.
Dead stop.
Bunny was seated on the small wooden board of a child's swing, and his back was turned to the gate. From any distance, he might pass for a man at rest. Johanna walked toward him, her footsteps slowed by shock as she rounded the swing and saw his stark white face. A loose link in one of the chains had snagged the shoulder of his coat and prevented his body from falling. His throat was slashed open, and blood drenched his breast.
How could he have traveled so far with that gaping wound?
It must have taken great will beyond anything she had imagined him capable of – and focus – and all the strength that he had. Buzzing flies lighted on the gross tear in his skin. Others walked across his closed eyes. His hands were folded in his lap and fingers interlaced.
Bunny, did you pray?
What had drawn him here? She knew that his illness had begun when he was painfully young. A playground might be the last memory of joy, some old association with a time when his mother still loved him. During all of the telephone calls to Bunny's mother, Johanna had listened to the voice of an automaton, a woman sucked dry by the incredible labor of raising a child who had early lost his mind.
His most pitiable wound was the one bare foot blackened with disease and unprotected. In other respects, it was like revisiting Timothy Kidd's murder. There could be no doubt that this homeless man was killed because he had met the messenger, the one who had taken such pains to imprint Timothy Kidd's name on his poor, cracked brain. She brushed the matted hair from Bunny's eyes, and a score of fat black flies took wing. Johanna's skin turned clammy as her breakfast marched back up her throat. She fell to her knees.
This death was a personal message. There could be no other point in slaughtering this poor lunatic. Bunny would have been so useless to a police lineup, unable to differentiate between a suspect and a shopping cart. The killer could not have guessed that she would be the one to find the body, but after all the months of noisy street encounters, it was predictable that the police, with only the description of a hunchback, would come knocking on her door.
Johanna stared at the glint of metal near the dead man's feet. This bloody knife, honed to a razor edge, had not been dropped by Bunny. His arthritic hands were no good at articulating small objects. Only in death would his fingers be pliant enough to press them to the metal. So Bunny's murderer must have come this far with him, walked alongside him on the death march, keeping a discreet distance to avoid the splatter of vagrant blood.
And saying what?
Oh, all the things that would terrify the homeless man as he struggled toward this place. And what had kept him on his feet all the way to the playground? Perhaps he had come looking for a parent he had lost years ago, the one who had called him her honey bunny. Had he believed that this woman would heal his gaping wound and calm his banging heart with motherlove? How disappointed he must have been not to find her here.
Bunny, did you cry?
Johanna looked up at his face and whispered, "I'm sorry." She was sorry that his life had been hell on earth, that he had died in pain and in such frightening company, sorry that she had not protected him. Johanna lost all track of time as she knelt in the dust, stuttering her apologies to a bloodied corpse. And now she heard the march of little feet and larger mother shoes and the giggle of soft voices approaching the playground. The children were coming.
Riker never wanted to remember his dreams, intuiting that scary country as best left alone. This morning he had been tricked by a fake awakening, a dream inside the dream, wherein he had opened his eyes to see the scary boy astride his chest, riding him like a belly-up horse, pressing down on him with the heavy weight of crazy. Then came the sensation of lightness from great blood loss and trauma to the body and the brain.
He woke up dying.
And then came the real awakening. The ringing telephone jangled his raw nerve endings, though the sound had to travel down the hall from his front room. The bedside phone had been broken long ago, deliberately and violently. He opened his eyes, wondering if this was his wake-up call from Miss Byrd. He was prepared to roll over and go back to sleep, for the receptionist only rang twice. He waited out the next ring, then five more. Not Miss Byrd.
Riker's most persistent caller was Mallory. She always rang exactly twenty times to punish him for his long silence. He rolled the covers back. His feet hit the floor wearing both of yesterday's socks, but only one shoe. Shoelaces were sometimes
difficult for him. Their knots asked too much of him when he was falling-down drunk or hungover. Sometimes a week would go by when he was entirely shoeless for only the time it would take to shower and shave.
The phone was still ringing as he made his way to the kitchen, where he prepared his faster-than-instant coffee, using hot water from the tap. Alternately inhaling black liquid and cigarette smoke, he counted off the twentieth ring – ah, silence – and waited for the rush of caffeine and nicotine to kick in. And now his heart beat faster. The pump was started. The day had begun.
The phone rang again.
One fist sent it flying into the wall, then crashing to the floor, and a familiar voice – but not Mallory's – was yelling with great alarm, as if the caller had also been injured by the fall. "What's going on? Riker! Talk to me!"
As he reached for the phone, the caller asked, "Are you okay?"
No. No, he was not.
The most senior employee of Ned's Crime Scene Cleaners was a retired teacher of the ruler-wielding, knuckle-smashing, authoritarian school. Everyone on the payroll called her Miss Byrd, never Frances. None of them would cross that line of respect (call it fear) drawn in youth, for each of them had been hostage to at least one imperious Miss Byrd during their formative years.
Her gray eyebrows delicately arched as she glared at the front door. It had been left unlocked. Well, this was just one more sign of Riker's dereliction of duty. It never occurred to her that he might have come to work at this early hour, for Ned's brother was not a morning person. She had long suspected the man of drinking on the job, and this was proof; he had grown careless about locking up. Upon entering the reception area, she counted up the office machines, wall hangings and furnishings. All was as it should be, no signs of a thief, no thanks to Riker. The door to the private office was ajar, and, in the habit of thoroughness, she entered the room, then froze midstride.
Dead Famous aka The Jury Must Die Page 4