by John Lutz
“I can see why your work sells. It’s original and impressive.”
“I have a feeling you mean that. Thanks.”
She was momentarily at a loss for words, as she sometimes found herself when in his presence.
“Is this official?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh, my being here. Yes, official. Some more questions. Ones I forgot.”
“Detective Meg, I don’t think you forget anything.”
“When’s the last time you were at the theater?”
“Movies?”
“Plays.”
He seemed disturbed by the question, or maybe she was imagining it. “Been years,” he said. “I never was much of a playgoer. But if you like the theater and you’re free tonight . . .”
“Do you own a typewriter?”
“Ah! I get it. This is about the Night Sniper notes.”
Meg felt something cold crawl up her spine. The Night Sniper notes were one facet of the case that hadn’t been released to the media.
“You okay?” he asked, concerned.
“Yeah, sure.”
He gave her his smile again. “You’re probably wondering how I know about the notes. I’ve still got lots of contacts in the NYPD, Meg. Once a cop, always a cop. And you might have noticed, the NYPD leaks like the Titanic.”
That was true. She had noticed.
Jesus! I’m trying to reassure myself.
“Don’t worry,” Alex said, “I don’t leak.” He walked across the room and moved a folding screen aside to reveal a rolltop desk with something beneath a plastic cover on it. He lifted the cover and stood aside. “My typewriter.”
It was an old IBM Selectric, the kind with the replaceable lettered ball. Any police lab could identify one from the typeface immediately. Meg was relieved. The Night Sniper’s typewriter was an ancient Royal manual.
“You actually came to see me, right, Meg?”
“Detective Meg—Doyle. And of course I came to see you. You’re the only one who lives here, right?”
“Right. Please don’t get pissed at me, Detective Meg.”
“Doyle.”
“Meg, we both know this is primarily a social call. I have alibis for the Night Sniper murders.”
“You think they’re tight ones? Remember, you used to be a cop.”
“They’re tight as could be expected. Like you said, I’m the only one who lives here. So there’s nobody else to say for sure that, yes, I was home watching TV or reading a book or sanding a piece of furniture.”
“What about copycat murders?” Meg asked. “Who’s to say you didn’t commit one, on one of those weak-alibi nights?”
He frowned at her. “This is all hypothetical, of course.”
“Sure.”
“It’s possible that I could have committed one, or even more, of the Sniper murders. But I didn’t, and you know it.” He shot his smile at her again. “Tell me you know it, Meg.”
“I don’t regard you as a strong suspect,” Meg admitted.
“But you do have a point about copycat murders. The sniper used a different rifle for each murder—that was in the papers, Meg. Have you guys figured out that one yet?”
“We thought he might be a dealer or a collector, only we’ve gone down the list and checked all of them out, and they look clean.”
“Lots of people collect guns and don’t let anyone know. Especially long guns. They’re easier to buy outside the law because they’re mostly used as collectibles or for hunting, not for holding up convenience stores.”
“It could be somebody like that,” Meg said. “There are all sorts of gun nuts.”
He shook his head. “Not a nut, necessarily. Just a collector, a lover of precise mechanisms.”
She looked around at all of his precision tools that he used so precisely. “By nut I didn’t mean wacky, I meant he could be a gun enthusiast.”
“Yeah, enthusiast is better.”
He seemed mollified. Was he a gun nut? It wouldn’t be a surprise—he’d been a SWAT sniper.
Meg knew she shouldn’t be talking about the case this way with Alex. It was because he’d been a cop. That was why, once he got her talking, she couldn’t seem to shut up. She told herself that was the reason.
She stood up from the sofa.
“Not going so soon, I hope,” Alex said. He seemed genuinely disappointed.
“I got answers to my questions,” she said.
“About the theater and typewriter?”
“More or less.”
He moved closer to her, not much, but enough that his presence affected her just the way he planned. Clever bastard. Seducer. Paint thinner never smelled so good. “I’d like to see you again,” he said, “on an unofficial basis.”
“Not wise. Especially not while the Sniper case is hot.”
Now he put on a sad expression. “You don’t even want to see my rocking chair after it gets its final coat of finish?”
She did. Very much. But something told her it was time to leave. It was an instinct she’d learned to trust.
“Sorry, but I don’t have time.” She moved toward the door.
“You’re the first person other than me who’s been in here in months. Usually I don’t show people my work before it’s finished. I don’t want their reaction to influence me.” He reached out and touched her shoulder ever so lightly. “But for you I made an exception.”
“Don’t think of me as an exception,” Meg said. “It doesn’t make sense for either of us.”
“Yet you came here.”
“Yet I did.” She went to the door and opened it. “Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Reyals.”
He was grinning.
“If you ever want to take in a play . . .” she heard him say as she went out.
Her heart was banging away like the percussion section of a symphony orchestra as she made her way back downstairs and outside. Seeing Alex had been a mistake, made her infection worse.
I screwed up, coming here, she told herself over and over, crossing the street toward her parked car.
What would Repetto think if he knew about this visit? He wouldn’t buy that additional questions crap any more than Alex had.
I really screwed up!
20
Candy Trupiano cleared work in progress from her desk and switched off her office lights. It was past seven o’clock in the evening, and workaday New York had wound down. Towering buildings had dropped thousands of people to stream from lobbies and join the rush and roar of the homeward bound. The sun wouldn’t set for more than an hour, but except for the pale fluorescent glow leaking in from the hall, the office was dark.
Everyone else at Hamilton Publications had gone home. Candy’s was one of the few offices that didn’t have a window. She didn’t mind. Until a few months ago she’d been Army National Guard Corporal Candice Trupiano, Second Maintenance and Combat, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Her unit hadn’t left the country, but she’d served nonetheless and was proud of it. And apparently Hamilton Publications was proud of her. Not only had they saved her job while she was away, when she’d returned they awarded her with a sizable raise. This for a twenty-five-year-old associate editor. Old man Hamilton, who owned and ran the company, believed in her, and Candy was happy working hard in her windowless office in order to repay his faith and generosity.
She’d been a more than competent soldier, and the army had tried to convert her to a regular, but she was convinced she’d be a better editor. Besides, it was really what she wanted to do. She loved books and knew the marketplace, had a feel for what people wanted to read. She knew line editing, and she knew how to deal with writers, who could be a persnickety bunch.
Candy was a tall, lanky brunette, with bright blue eyes and a lean jaw. She was reasonably attractive in repose, and when she smiled she became incandescent. In the army she’d learned how to keep herself in top physical condition, and these were habits she didn’t want to lose in civilian life. She worked out three times a week in a
gym, and she jogged at least five evenings a week.
After leaving the office and subwaying uptown, she set out walking the three blocks from the stop to her apartment on West Seventy-second Street. Candy wouldn’t have been able to afford the apartment except for her roommate, Annette, an American Airlines flight attendant who was away most of the time. It was an arrangement Candy could live with easily. Annette was working the international flights now and was somewhere in Europe, where she’d remain until later this month. Living with Annette was almost like living alone, only with a DVD collection Candy couldn’t afford.
Candy was moving fast, taking long strides in her jogging shoes that didn’t go well with her businesslike gray skirt and blazer. Her gray high heels were in her baggy black denim attaché case, along with the bulky manuscript for The General’s Lover, which was on a fast-track production schedule. She was supposed to finish editing and get the novel back to the author by the end of the week. Not an easy task. It helped that she liked the novel a great deal, the World War Two story of a German general in Paris who fell in love with a French woman he knew was spying for the resistance.
Candy took the five concrete steps to her building entrance with an ease and grace that caused three teenage boys across the street to gawk at her. One of them shouted something she didn’t understand. Just as well.
As she keyed the door to her second-floor apartment and pushed inside, she raised the arm carrying the attaché case and glanced at her watch. She should still have time to get in her run in the park before it became dark.
Whenever she got the opportunity, instead of running in the neighborhood, Candy walked the few blocks to Central Park and jogged along the path that followed the park’s perimeter. The distance was 6.1 miles, exactly right for a runner of Candy’s ability to stay in tune, if she ran it often enough. She was proud of her body, of her athletic ability. She’d entered the New York Marathon twice, finishing well back both times, but finishing.
She removed The General’s Lover from the attaché case and placed the manuscript on her desk, where she’d work on it later that evening. Then she carried the case, along with her business shoes, into the bedroom.
As she changed into her sweats and training shoes, she glanced at the window. It seemed that the light was already failing, but that was because it was an overcast day.
Still ...
For a few seconds she paused. The park could be dangerous after dark; there were people who saw female joggers as prey. Just last month a woman who lived in the next block, over on Seventy-third, was shoved to the ground and robbed at knifepoint near the jogging trail. She might have been killed or raped, if someone hadn’t come along and scared away her assailant.
“Screw it!” Candy said, and continued dressing for her regular run.
She was young and strong and trained in hand-to-hand combat. There was no reason she should be afraid of the dark or anyone it might conceal. And she sure as hell had a perfect right to jog in the park—her park—whatever the hour.
When she was dressed to run, she tied back her long dark hair in a ponytail, then went into the kitchen and got a plastic bottle of water to sling in a holster at her waist. She went through the living room, then out into the hall, locking her apartment door behind her. Bending gracefully from the waist, she slid her apartment key into a small, Velcro-flapped pouch attached to her right shoelace. The pouch also contained a tightly folded twenty-dollar bill and a slip of paper with her name and address on it. She would have money in an emergency, and she could be identified, if anything happened to her. An oxygen deficiency or low blood sugar crisis might cause her to lose consciousness for a while.
It was wrong to be afraid, she thought, but right to be careful, as she jogged through lengthening shadows the three blocks to the park entrance.
Not far away, at Columbus Circle, Bobby Mays sat on a folded blanket with a chipped coffee cup before him. He hadn’t eaten since wolfing down half a doughnut this morning, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. He was plenty used to being hungry, and if he got hungry enough he could make his way to one of the shelters and take his chances on being assaulted or robbed in his sleep, in exchange for a genuine meal.
What Bobby needed was his medicine, his Xanax—that was what was working now. Working better than the rest of his meds, anyway. He glanced down at the few bills and change in the chipped cup. Not enough for his purposes. Not yet.
He didn’t want to go to illegal drugs, and the last thing he wanted to become was an alky. But now and then he smoked a joint, or found what was left of a bottle and had to drink it. It turned off the pain machine for a brief period.
It would be dark soon. He examined the cup’s contents more closely—three one-dollar bills, two dimes, and a couple of quarters. Not nearly enough to get his prescription filled.
Bobby was afraid that if he had the opportunity, he might forget about begging enough money to pay for the Xanax and steal some of it. From a hospital, pharmacy, doctor’s office, anywhere. That would be a last resort, and just thinking about it bothered him, because in another life, in another city, he’d been a cop, and a good one.
He’d been a husband and father, too.
Maybe not such a good husband or father, because he’d been driving when the accident happened. He’d gotten his family killed. He killed his family. His family—
Margie dead beside him with her mouth and eyes so wide, little Midge swimming in blood without a—
Staring at him, but that was impossible.
Don’t think about this! Don’t go there! Stay away!
Impossible.
The oil dripping. The blood? He couldn’t be sure. Dripping and ticking as if it were meting out time, only time had run out.
Not his time, though. That wasn’t fair to anyone.
What the fuck’s fair got to do with it? Fair’s in another world, on another planet. Not where I am.
“You oughta think about it, Bobby. Work it out so you can understand.”
My voice?
He rubbed his forearm across his eyes. Gotta think about it.
No!
He tried to shake his mind loose from that trap but couldn’t quite do it. He was stuck there again, as he was so often, while being eaten away from the inside. Guilt was like acid. It was more like acid than acid. Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .
A coin clinked in the cup and he automatically muttered a thank-you.
New York, not Philadelphia. What the fuck was I thinking about?
The man who’d spared the change didn’t look back.
When people did look at Bobby—which, as any of the homeless would tell you, was rare, the homeless being invisible—they sometimes remarked on how young and handsome he was, and how presentable he’d be if he cleaned up, on what a shame it was, a young man like that. Ruined. No more. He knew by their eyes what they were thinking, that he was no longer human.
That was how it felt to Bobby to be homeless. He was other than human now. And it was what he deserved.
Bobby worked his way to a kneeling position on his blanket, then managed to stand, the bunched blanket in one hand, the chipped collection cup in the other. He didn’t have enough money for the Xanax, or for a joint he could buy—thought he could buy—to help him through the coming night. He realized he didn’t know where to go to buy the joint, though he remembered who he should see. He had a cop’s memory for faces, just not times anymore, whole days.
Sometimes yesterdays simply didn’t exist for Bobby. The head injury from the car accident, the headaches that came with memories, the guilt, the guilt. All of that was real and never went away for good.
“Jesus!” he said softly.
But he’d tried Jesus and hadn’t found the answer. He thought there might not be an answer.
No yesterday for Bobby. No help for tonight. Enough money for a subway card, though. He could get it from one of the machines and ride the lines, steal some sleep, and hope none of the violent ones would steal w
hat little he had, or kill him because he had so little and was a disappointment.
He took a few shuffling steps, then stopped.
There was something about the man on the other side of the street, another of the homeless, judging by his clothes—his ragged long coat too warm for the weather, his faded backpack that probably held all he owned—and his demeanor.
There’s a word I haven’t used in a long time. Demeanor . . .
Demeanor!
That was what was wrong. The man on the opposite sidewalk looked like one of the homeless, one of Bobby’s lost brotherhood, only he didn’t look like one. Bobby had been a Philadelphia cop long enough to be brought up short when something didn’t look quite right. And this guy—he was gone now, turned a corner—was walking too fast, with a stride too confident. As if he had some place to go.
None of the homeless had some place to go.
Well, the man was gone.
If he’d ever really been there.
Bobby was beginning to wonder. Some of the things that had happened to him lately made him wonder. It could be the man hadn’t been real.
Forgetting the man, Bobby ambled slowly and painfully toward the subway stop up the street. People passing in the opposite direction glanced at him, through him, this shambling young man with the shock of unruly curly hair, the five-day-old beard, the dirt-stained face and lost eyes. Sometimes people whispered, making sympathetic or cruel remarks. Bobby continued on his way, not paying attention to them, not hearing them, not remembering if he had heard them. Bobby with yesterdays too slippery to grasp, losing his todays. Tomorrow was his birthday, but he wasn’t at all aware of it. Bobby didn’t know what month it was, much less what day.
He’d be thirty-one years old.
Repetto and Lora were in Mama Roma’s, having salad and house Chablis while they waited for their pasta. The dinner crowd was at its peak, and every table was occupied. The aromas of the kitchen, dominated by garlic, were in the air.
Lora sipped her wine, then stared over the rim of her glass at Repetto. “You look pensive. What are you thinking?”