by Dan Simmons
The Boxster was a beautiful sports car, but it handled like shit on snow and ice. He had just headed south on the Kensington toward the downtown and Marina Towers when his cell phone rang again.
"Have you seen Rachel, Joe? How is she?"
Kurtz told Arlene what the nurse had said.
"And what about Donald Rafferty?"
"He's not going to survive the accident," said Kurtz.
Arlene was silent a minute. "I was heading down to the hospital, Mr. Frears said that he'd be all right here, but Mrs. Campbell, one of my older neighbors, called me and said that a suspicious-looking man in a gray Ford was parked in front of her house, half a block down the street."
"Shit," said Kurtz.
"Mrs. Campbell called the police."
"And?"
"And I was watching through the blinds. The squad car stopped, one of the uniformed officers got out, the man in the parked car showed him something, and the squad car left in a hurry."
"It's probably either Brubaker or Myers, one of the two homicide detectives who've been tailing me," said Kurtz. "But it could be Hansen… Captain Millworth. I don't know how he could've made the connection with Frears, but…"
"I used Alan's binoculars. It's a fat man, almost bald. Not very tall. Brown suit."
"That's Myers," said Kurtz. He pulled the Boxster off at the East Ferry exit and did a fast loop, getting back on the Expressway headed out toward Cheektowaga. "Arlene, we don't know that Brubaker and Myers aren't working directly for Hansen. Stay put. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
"And do what, Joe? Why don't I take Mr. Frears and leave here for Gail's house?"
"Can you get out without being seen?"
"Sure. Through the carport and across the alley to the Dzwrjskys'. Mona will loan me her ex-husband's station wagon. Gail's at work, but I know where the extra key is. We'll leave Detective Myers sitting down the street all day."
Kurtz slowed the Boxster to below seventy. "I don't know…"
"Joe, there's something else. I checked our business e-mail from here and there's a message to you that was copied to my e-mail address. It was dated at one p.m., and it's signed just 'P. "
Pruno, thought Kurtz. Likely checking up on whether he'd met with Frears. "It's probably not important," said Kurtz.
"The message says that it's urgent, Joe. Let me read it to you— Joseph, absolutely imperative that you meet me as soon as possible at that place where the thing occurred on midsummer night's eve. This is urgent. P. "
"Oh, man," said Kurtz. "All right. Call me as soon as you get to Gail's place." He folded the phone away, took a high-speed exit onto Delavan Avenue, drove east a block, and accelerated south on Fillmore.
The main Buffalo train station was a dignified and imposing structure in its time; now, after being abandoned for a decade, it was a sad mess. The sprawling structure was dominated by a twenty-story tower built along the lines of one of the brooding, stepped-back skyscrapers in Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis. On the twelfth-story level of each corner of the tower, oversized clocks had stopped at different times. Some shards of glass remained in the hundreds of broken windows, which made the battered facade look all the more dismal. Besides the two main entrances on the tower building, four large, awninged and arched doorways that looked like entrances to blimp hangars had been situated along the five-story main structure to allow the thousands of passengers to enter and leave the huge complex without undue jostling.
There were no crowds jostling today. Even the hilly driveway to the expanse of the abandoned parking lot was drifted over with snow. Kurtz parked the Porsche Boxster on a side street and walked past the boulders placed in the drive to keep cars out of the lot. Trespassers and winos and kids intent on breaking the last of the windows had left a myriad of old and new footprints in the snow on the lot, so there was no way for Kurtz to tell who had passed here when. He followed some tracks across to the hurricane fence around the station itself and found a three-foot height of wire cut just under one of the yellow Keep out. No Trespassing signs. He passed under the massive overhang with its NEW YORK & BUFFALO RAILROAD legend just visible in the rusting metal and dimming light. The huge doors were firmly sealed with sheet metal and plywood, but the corner of one of the window coverings had been jimmied loose, and Kurtz squeezed his way in there.
It was much colder inside than out. And darker. The tall, high windows that had once sent down shafts of sunlight onto soldiers traveling off to World War II and onto the weeping families left behind were all dark and boarded up now. A few frightened pigeons took flight in the great, dim space as Kurtz crunched his way across the littered tile.
The old waiting areas and the ramps to the train platforms were empty. Kurtz climbed a short staircase to the tower building that had once housed the railroad offices, pried open a plywood barrier, and walked slowly through narrow corridors into the main hall. Rats scurried. Pigeons fluttered.
Kurtz slid his pistol out, racked a round into the chamber, and carried the gun by his side as he moved into the wide, dark space.
"Joseph." The whisper seemed to come from the far corner, forty feet from Kurtz, but there were only shadows and a tumble of old benches there.
He half-raised the gun.
"Up here, Joseph."
Kurtz stepped farther out into the hall and peered up at the mezzanines in the darkness. A shadow beckoned.
Kurtz found the staircase and climbed, leaving a trail through fallen plaster. The old man was waiting for him by the railing on the second mezzanine. He was carrying what looked to be a lumpy garment bag.
"Rather interesting acoustics," said Pruno. The old man's stubbled face seemed even more pale than usual in the dim light. "They accidentally constructed a whispering gallery when they built this hall. All sounds uttered up here seem to converge in that corner down there."
"Yeah," said Kurtz. "What's up, Pruno? You interested in Frears?"
"John?" said the old heroin addict. "Well, of course I'm interested in that, since I put you two in contact, but I assumed that you did not decide to help him. It's been almost a week. To be truthful, Joseph, I'd almost forgotten."
"What is it, then?" said Kurtz. "And why here?" He gestured at the dark hall and the darker mezzanines. "This is a long way from your usual haunts."
Pruno nodded. "It seems that there is a literal dead man in my usual haunt."
"A dead man. Who?"
"You wouldn't know him, Joseph. A homeless contemporary of mine. I believe his name was Clark Povitch, a former accountant, but the other addicts and street persons have known him as Typee for the last fifteen years or so."
"What did he die of?"
"A bullet," said Pruno. "Or two bullets, I believe, although I am no forensic expert."
"Someone shot your friend in your shack?"
"Not my friend, precisely, but in this inclement weather, Typee sometimes availed himself of my hospitality—specifically of my Sterno heater—when I was elsewhere."
"Do you know who killed him?"
"I do have a clue. But it does not seem to make any sense, Joseph."
"Tell me."
"An acquaintance of mine, a lady named Mrs. Tuella Dean—I believe you would refer to her as a bag lady—was on a grate today, under some newspapers and inadvertently concealed, on the corner of Elmwood and Market when she heard a patrolman outside his parked squad car speaking on either his radio telephone or a cell phone. The patrolman was giving directions to my domicile and mentioned my name… names, actually… and actually gave a description of me to his interlocutor. According to Mrs. Dean, the patrolman's tone was almost obsequious, as if speaking to a superior. She happened to mention this to me when I saw her near the HSBC arena just before I returned home and discovered Typee's body."
Kurtz took in a long, cold breath of air. "Did this Mrs. Dean catch the other guy's name?"
"She did, actually. A Captain Millworth. I would presume that this would mean a captain of police."
Ku
rtz let out the breath.
"There would seem to be no connection," said Pruno, "as police captains are not known for murdering the homeless, but it would be too much of a coincidence to think the events are unrelated. Also, there is another mild coincidence here that worries me."
"What's that?"
"To a stranger," said Pruno, "to someone who knew me only from another person's description, Typee might look a little bit like me. Quite a lot like me, actually."
Kurtz reached out and took his old friend's sharp elbow through the overcoat and other rags. "Come on," he said softly, hearing his whisper repeated in the darkness below. "We're getting out of here."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hansen could not get in touch with Dr. Howard Conway by phone and this bothered him. It bothered him a lot. He considered driving to Cleveland to check on Conway—make sure that the old fart hadn't died or finally run out on him—but there simply wasn't time. Too much was happening too fast, and too much had to happen even faster in the next twenty-four hours.
He canceled his meetings for the rest of the afternoon, called Donna to say that he'd be home soon, called Brubaker to make sure that he hadn't found Kurtz at his office or home, called Myers to make sure he was on surveillance at the secretary's house, and then he drove to a rotting industrial cold-storage facility near the Buffalo River. Behind an abandoned mill, a line of walk-in freezers—each with its own backup generator—had been rented to restaurateurs, meat wholesalers, and others needing overflow freezer storage. Hansen had kept a locker there since he'd driven a freezer truck up from Miami nine months ago.
Hansen unlocked the two expensive padlocks he kept on the unit and stepped into the frigid interior. Five halves of beef hung on hooks. Hansen had planned to use one of these during the July cookout he was going to throw at his Tonawanda home for his detectives and their wives, but it looked as if he would not be around Buffalo in July. Against the back wall were tall wire racks, and on these were four long, opaque plastic bags holding more frozen meat.
He unzipped the bag on the middle shelf. Mr. Gabriel Kendall, fifty years old, the same height, weight, and general build as James B. Hansen, stared up through a rim of frost covering his open eyes. The cadaver's lips were blue and pulled back, frozen into the position where Dr. Conway had X-rayed the teeth in Cleveland the previous summer. All four of the men's bodies stored here had a similar rictus. Kendall was the one Hansen had chosen for Captain Robert Gaines Millworth's suicide and the dental records should be on file, ready for the blanks to be filled in.
If he could get in touch with that miserable wretch Conway.
Satisfied that no one had been in the freezer or tampered with its contents, Hansen zipped the body bag shut, locked the freezer behind him, and drove back home in his Cadillac SUV. The sight of the hanging sides of beef had made him hungry. He used his cell phone to call Donna and tell her to set aside whatever else she had planned for dinner; they would grill steaks on the GrillAire Range tonight.
Arlene's sister-in-law Gail's home was the second floor of an old duplex on Colvin Avenue north of the park. Gail was divorced and was working a double shift at the Medical Center; Arlene had explained that Gail was sleeping at the hospital and wouldn't be home until late the following afternoon. Good thing, thought Kurtz as Arlene unlocked the door and led Pruno and him up the side stairway. Upstairs, Kurtz looked at the herd of refugees he was collecting—Frears hugging Pruno affectionately as if the old addict didn't smell like a urinal—Arlene with the.45 still in her sweater pocket. For all the years that he had used Pruno as a street source when he was a P.I., Arlene had never met the old wino, and now the two were busy with their introductions and conversation. Kurtz, a loner all his life, was beginning to feel like Noah, and he suspected that he might need a bigger ark if this refugee crap kept up.
The four of them sat in the tiny living room. Cooking smells came from the adjoining kitchen, and occasionally she would stand and go in to check on something and the conversation would pause until she returned.
"What is going on, Mr. Kurtz?" asked John Wellington Frears when they were all gathered around like a happy chipmunk family again.
Kurtz slipped his peacoat off—it was hot in the little apartment—and explained what he could about James B. Hansen being the esteemed Homicide Captain Robert Millworth.
"This dentist… Conway… admitted this to you?" asked Pruno.
"Not in so many words," said Kurtz. "But let's say that I confirmed it with him."
"I would guess that this Dr. Conway's life wouldn't be worth much right now," said Frears.
Kurtz had to agree with that.
"So how do you think this Millworth… Hansen… made the connection between Mr. Frears and you, Joe?" asked Arlene.
"We're not certain that he has."
"But it would be dangerous to assume anything else," said Frears.
"It is folly," said Pruno, "to form policy based on assumptions of the enemy's intentions… judge his capabilities and prepare accordingly."
"Well," said Arlene, "a captain in Homicide is capable of using the entire police department to track down Mr. Frears and the rest of us."
Kurtz shook his head. "Not without blowing his cover. We have to remember that this Hansen isn't a real cop."
"No," Frears said evenly, "he is a serial rapist and child killer."
That stopped conversation for a while. Finally Arlene said, "Can he trace us here, Joe?"
"I doubt it. Not if Myers didn't follow you."
"No," said Arlene. "I made sure that we weren't followed. But they'll get suspicious when Mr. Frears and I don't leave my house tomorrow."
"Or when the lights don't come on tonight," said Pruno. It was getting dark outside.
"I left the lamps in the front room on a timer I use when on vacation," said Arlene. "They're on now and will go off at eleven."
Kurtz, who was suddenly feeling exhausted, looked up at that. "When have you ever taken a vacation?"
Arlene gave him a look. Kurtz took it as his cue to leave. "I have to return a car," he said, standing and tugging on his peacoat.
"Not until you eat," said Arlene.
"I'm not hungry."
"No? When was the last time you ate, Joe? Did you have lunch?"
Kurtz paused to think. His last meal had been a sweet roll he'd grabbed with coffee at a Thruway stop during his midnight drive back from Cleveland. He hadn't eaten all this Wednesday and hadn't slept since Tuesday night.
"We're all going to have a good meal," Arlene said in a tone that brooked no argument. "I've made lots of spaghetti, fresh bread, some roast beef. You all have about twenty minutes to wash up."
"I may need all of that time," said Pruno. Kurtz laughed but the old man shot him a glance, lifted the bundle of his garment bag, and disappeared into the bathroom with dignity.
The family of Robert Gaines Millworth—his wife Donna and fourteen-year-old stepson Jason—ate as a family every night because James Hansen knew it was important that a family eat together. This night they had steak and salad and rice. Donna had wine. Hansen did not drink alcohol, but he allowed his wives to, in moderation.
While they ate. Donna talked about her work at the library. Jason talked about basketball and about ice hockey. Hansen listened and thought about his next move in this rather interesting chess game he had become involved in. At one point, Hansen found himself looking around the dining room—the art, the glimpse of bookcases from the family room beyond, the expensive furniture and Delft china. It would be a shame, all this lost to the fire. But James B. Hansen had never been one to confuse material possessions with the more important things of the soul.
After dinner, he would go down to his office, keeping his cell phone with him in case Brubaker or Myers called, and contemplate what he had to do tomorrow and in the days to come.
It was a strange dinner for Kurtz—a good dinner, lots of spaghetti and roast beef and gravy and real bread and a good salad and coffee—but st
range. It had been a while since his last home-cooked dinner eaten with other people. How long? Twelve years. Twelve years and a month. A dinner with Sam at her place, also spaghetti that night, with the baby, the toddler, in a tall chair—not a high chair, it didn't have a tray—what had Sam called it? A youth chair. With little Rachel in the youth chair at the table, chattering away, reaching over to tug at Kurtz's napkin, the child babbling even as Sam told him about this interesting case she was pursuing—a teenage runaway missing, drugs involved.
Kurtz stopped eating. Only Arlene noticed and she looked away after a second.
Pruno had come out of the bathroom showered, shaven, skin pink and scalded-looking, his fingernails still yellowed and cracked but no longer grimy, his thinning gray hair—which Kurtz had never seen except as a sort of nimbus floating around the old wino's head—slicked back. He was wearing a suit that might have been two decades out of style and no longer fit. Pruno's frail form was lost in it, but it also looked clean. How? wondered Kurtz. How could this old heroin addict keep a suit clean when he lived in a packing crate and in cubbies under the Thruway?
Pruno—or "Dr. Frederick," as Frears kept addressing him—looked older and frailer and more fragile without his protective crusts of grime and rags. But the old man sat very upright as he ate and drank and nodded his head to accept more food and addressed John Wellington Frears in measured tones. Frears had been his student at Princeton. One old man dying of cancer and his ancient teacher sitting there in his double-breasted, pinstripe suit—making conversation about Mozart as a prodigy and about the Palestinian situation and about global warming.