The elevator doors opened.
"Let's see what we can come up with," said Jerry with a smile.
Room service. Coffee. Toasted bagels and cream cheese and within fifteen minutes Jerry was preparing a policy. He couldn't believe how easy it had been to sell it. It was a good policy, but it wasn't cheap. When he finished making changes, he passed the four-page document across the small table to Keith who signed and initialed in all the right places.
Keith looked at his watch.
"I've got to go down to my room for a few minutes. I'll be right back with a check."
"Fine," said Jerry. "I'll just call my office and get the paperwork rolling."
Keith went to the door as Jerry picked up his cell phone and pressed a button.
Keith liked him. After he killed Ellen Janecek, he could come back and talk to him for a while, get him to accompany Keith out of the hotel. That was the plan in any case. He hoped he would not have to kill Jerry.
* * *
Ellen waited.
She wanted, needed to see Jeffrey. The television was on. The sound was off. She didn't want to miss the knock she was expecting on the door.
He would be coming soon.
The room was small. Two uncomfortable chairs with arms. A bed. The television. A single window with a mesh screen and beyond it a view of a dirty brick wall. Bathroom. Long dark lightning-shaped crack on the tile floor. The other hotel had been better, but he, the one she knew as Adam, had found her there. Yes, it was partly her fault. No, it was completely her fault, but "fault" wasn't quite the right word. It was her responsibility, and the consequence of her decision to tell him where she was had led to this small room.
But it was going to change.
And it was going to change now.
The knock at the door was gentle. Two raps. Ellen stood.
Keith stood in the hall. He was ready. He was lucky. There was no cop in the hall. In a few seconds, this part would be over. The circle would be complete. The letters of his brother's name would be carved in bloody gashes. A-D-A-M. This time all four letters in her soft, white flesh. Their bodies, what he had left of them, would forever be the reminder of Adam's death and their own unclean actions.
The world was a shitty place. There were decent, innocent people born into it, people like Adam. They were defiled.
Keith's hand was in his pocket touching the cool metal handle of the knife. She would open the door. An instant of recognition on her pretty, vacant face and then click, jab under her arm, push her back, close the door, take his time, but not too much time.
He knocked again.
The door started to open.
Knife out. No one in the narrow corridor.
The door swung open.
Mac had heard the knocking at the door. He had sent the officer in street clothes guarding the corridor down to the lobby. Mac came out of the bathroom, moved past Ellen Janecek, who he motioned to back away. More knocking. Flack had called him less than half an hour ago. Mac had arrived at the hotel fifteen minutes later.
When he had quickly told Ellen what he planned to do, her only question was, "Is Jeffrey all right?"
Mac, gun in his right hand, reached out for the door with his left, and threw the door open.
Keith stood there, knife in hand.
"Drop the knife," Mac said gently, both hands on the gun now.
Keith looked over the shoulder of the man in front of him, the man with the gentle, firm voice and the gun. Keith could see Ellen Janecek's face across the room. He wanted to tell the man with the gun that he had to kill her, that he couldn't leave this unfinished. He had a feeling that the man with the gun would understand, but he also had the feeling that the man with the gun would shoot.
"You don't understand," Keith said calmly. "She killed my brother. They all killed or destroyed my brother and other brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren. You have to understand."
Keith took a step forward, knife still in his hand. Mac could feel the man's pain, a horrible frustration. Mac took a step back and said, "Put it down now."
Keith tightened his grip on the knife. Maybe, just maybe he could surprise the man with the gun, make a move, stab him under the arm, make him drop that gun.
"Don't," said Mac.
"There are a lot of animals out there who don't deserve to live."
"Maybe," said Mac, taking a step forward. "I'm not one of them. I talked to your mother. She wants to hear from you."
Keith had few options left. He considered them.
"What's your name?" Keith asked.
"Taylor, Mac Taylor."
Keith looked at Ellen Janecek and tightened his grip on the knife. Before he had lost his leg he could have leapt across the room and gutted her before he was shot. That was before he lost his leg.
"Keith?"
Keith Yunkin nodded and dropped the knife.
* * *
The Hat walked under the elevated train tracks, clinging to the duffle bag that he had taken from the office building. He considered the theft of the bag a major triumph. The Hat had stood across the street from the office building, hidden in a doorway, until the cop came out with the kid.
Then he'd raced back into the office building and found the duffle bag in the room behind the one in which he'd found the kid. The bag had been tucked away under a sink. The Hat had grabbed the bag and fled the building.
Then, under the tracks and station above them, he had walked.
Now he stopped, looked around furtively, put the bag on the ground and leaned over to unzip it.
Knives. He could sell them somewhere. Clothes. Maybe they fit. An egg salad sandwich and bottles of water. He sat on a low block of concrete and ate.
The Hat reached into the bag and came up with one of the knives. He opened it easily and as he did the blade ran across his finger. He dropped his sandwich. The cut was deep, very deep, to the bone. The blade of the knife was bloody.
He'd have to find some bandages somewhere. A knife like this one could kill someone without a blink.
He let the knife tumble back into the bag, took out a shirt, wrapped it around his hand and gave serious thought to going to a drug store, but not for Band-Aids, for something much bigger than a Band-Aid. There was a clinic about six blocks away, but it was far and The Hat was bleeding. No, a drug store it would be. Maybe he could trade a knife for bandages.
It had begun as a very good day, The Hat thought. A good deed for a soft-brained boy had brought him a promising bag full of jangling goodies and a sandwich. It could turn into a bad day with a dark ending if the bleeding were not stopped. Oh well. The Hat knew people, lots of street people, who would be glad to buy these very sharp knives. But first, the bleeding had to stop.
* * *
Every drawer was occupied by a corpse. Nine of them. Sid Hammerbeck had been busy, nonstop for three days. Now he was home meditating in his state-of-the-art kitchen, amid shining pots, dark cast-iron pans, the smell of fresh vegetables and baking turbot. He took a spray of fresh chervil from a small paper bag in the refrigerator, placed it on a cutting board and expertly cut it into tiny, even pieces.
The timer was on. Sixteen minutes more.
It struck him that his life was one of smells, the smell of the dead, the smell of his own cooking. Sometimes he had guests over for dinner, but not tonight. Tonight he would dine alone. No conversation. No television. No book or newspaper on the table. He would eat slowly, close his eyes to savor the food without having someone across the table look at him as if he were doing something weird. His friends already thought his decision to leave the kitchen of one of the finest Continental restaurants in the city to go into the steel gray of the autopsy room was was weird enough.
Sid had explained that the room where he dissected the dead was cleaner than almost any four-star restaurant in the world. He could see disbelief, even when they said the obligatory and sophisticated "I know." Sid didn't explain much or often anymore.
Something itche
d, not physically, mentally. It was like trying to remember the name of a character in a favorite novel. There were several ways of dealing with it. Go back to the novel and find the name. Use some trick of the memory to locate the source of the itch and scratch it.
The microwave ticked behind him. Sid checked the oven timer. Perfect. Turbot in the oven. Chive and crushed cauliflower in the microwave. An inexpensive California white wine barely chilling in the refrigerator.
What was bothering him?
One of the bodies.
He stood over the sink holding the garlic press in his hand. Patricia Mycrant. It came to him suddenly. Not words, but a faint smell wafting in the alcoholic miasma of the autopsy room and then a vision.
Three minutes to go. He would wait, take the fish from the oven, put the chervil and garlic away, refrigerate the cauliflower and chives and have a late dinner, maybe a very late dinner.
The wine would be too cold. He removed it from the refrigerator and placed it on the counter.
Twenty minutes later he was back among the dead.
* * *
Flack knocked at her door.
Less than an hour ago he had been lying on his sofa, shoes off, fully clothed watching a Rockies/ Cubs game. He wasn't much interested in either team, but it was better than no game and it distracted him from the discomfort in his chest. He knew he couldn't concentrate on a movie or a series or read a book. He was hurting. He admitted it to himself, but no one else. He had come back from the trauma and surgery with rehab and rest, but on long days like this one, the aching, particularly in his chest, jarred him into memory.
When his phone rang, he was lying motionlessly, right arm across his eyes. He should get up and eat, maybe take a shower or bath, get some sleep, probably on the floor rather than his bed after taking one of his pain pills. It felt better to be on his back on the floor, though getting up in the morning was a series of challenges and pain.
The phone call had gotten him up and moving. Distraction was almost as good as sleep.
He knocked at the door again.
"Who is there?" came the voice.
"Detective Flack," he said.
"I'm not prepared for visitors," she said. "I've just bathed."
"Police business," he said.
Gladys Mycrant opened the door. She was wearing a black silk robe with colorful red and yellow flowers. Her hair was down and she wore makeup. Flack wondered if the makeup might be the tattooed kind.
"Yes?" she said, examining him and making it clear from her look that he came up short in her estimation.
"May I come in?"
"If you must."
She stepped back, hand holding her robe closed at the breast. He entered and she closed the door.
"When am I getting Patricia's body?" she said. "I want to give her a decent burial. It's awful to think of her, the way she is, in some cold police mausoleum.
"The medical examiner had to complete another examination and run some tests."
"Tests?"
She sat in an armchair, legs crossed, bouncing impatiently.
"According to the medical examiner, your daughter's body is slightly yellow."
"Jaundice. Patricia drank. I told her what it would do to her liver, what it had done to her father's liver. Detective, I have a vivid imagination that helps me in my business but hampers me in my thoughts. I'd rather not think of my daughter as she is now."
"She was being poisoned," said Flack, looking down at her.
He didn't want to sit. His back told him not to. She was watching him. He knew she would see him wince, even if it were slight, when he tried to get out of a chair.
"Poisoned?"
"Arsenic," said Flack. "The ME found it in her nails, skin."
"ME?"
"Medical examiner."
"Oh my God," she said. "Something in the water? The walls? Am I poisoned too?"
"I doubt it, but we can check. She was dying from chronic arsenic poisoning," he said. "Slow."
She was silent now, biting her lower lip, thinking.
"You have plants?"
"Plants? In the house? No."
"You do on the roof."
"Yes."
"We'll check the soil for arsenic."
"She spent too much time with those plants, tending them. I shouldn't have- "
"You told me she didn't like to go on the roof, remember?"
"Did I? Yes, that's true, but she did enjoy the plants."
"We'll check your supplies for prints. You have arsenic?"
"No," she said indignantly. "Why would I have arsenic?"
"It's used for plant care," he said. "Mind if we look at your supplies?"
"I don't- "
"Gladys," he said gently. "Enough."
Her head was down. She wept into her silk robe.
"Patricia didn't die from arsenic poisoning," she said. "She was murdered by that maniac."
"But you were killing her slowly."
She nodded.
"She hadn't changed, wasn't changing. That group was doing nothing for her. I could tell by what she said, watched, listened to, the way she looked at children on the street. Bad genes. I've always attributed it to bad genes from her father's side. Nothing you can do to help someone with bad genes."
"So you were killing her."
"Softly," she said looking up. "Very softly. She was my daughter. But I didn't kill her, did I?"
"No."
"So you can't arrest me."
"The district attorney's office says that I can. I'm calling it attempted murder for the record, but they can straighten it out when you get there."
He read her her rights and told her he would wait while she dressed and called a lawyer. Gladys got out of the chair slowly and looked at him.
"You understand, don't you? You understand why I had to do it?"
"Doesn't matter what I understand," he said, but that was a lie. It mattered to Flack. It mattered very much.
17
Three Days Later
DEXTER THE UMBRELLA MAN was now Dexter the Sunblock and Sunglasses Man. It hadn't rained in three days. He was a man who moved with the tides and the weather. He set up his table on Sixth Avenue, a block from Rockefeller Center in front of a McDonald's. Well, not right in front, but a few feet to the side.
The table folded with two quick moves and became a box with a handle. The box was filled with #45 Sol Ray Lotion whose label said it was made in Brazil, and with Protecto-Vision Sun Glasses, dark wrap-arounds with little stickers on the side that also read "Made in Brazil."
Both products, Dexter knew, were made in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Business wasn't bad.
He kept watching the sky. No clouds. If it rained, he was prepared to fold up his box and go into McDonald's and eat dollar burgers and Cokes till it passed. Dexter was not going to duck under any awnings, not again, not ever. You never knew what might come through an awning.
* * *
Waclaw Havel finished packing.
He had made it through his son's funeral, held the hands of his grandchildren, comforted his daughter-in-law and grieved with them and the friends who had shown up at the church and the grave site.
The night before they buried Alvin, Waclaw had worried that the ground would be too wet, that they would be up to their ankles in mud and water and that the coffin would be lowered into a pond.
But it had been reasonably dry. No one had mentioned what had happened to Alvin. No one would mention what Alvin had done to bring it on himself.
The children would grow up. They would find out, but maybe not until they were adults or nearly so.
Anne was going to move as soon as she sold the house, move back to Milwaukee where her parents and family lived and where she had grown up. No one from Anne's family had come to New York for the funeral. No one in Milwaukee wanted any connection to the man who had married Anne and brought shame and headlines in the New York Post.
Waclaw pushed the latch of his one suitcas
e and checked to see that it wasn't loose. Anne and the children were driving him to JFK. He would be back in Poland the next day. In Poland they would know nothing of Alvin's death and he planned to tell them a lie about that. Alvin will have met a terrible fate at the hands of a thwarted thief on the streets of the mythical and dangerous city.
"Ready?" asked Anne, standing in the doorway.
Waclaw nodded.
"You can stay. You don't have to leave. You understand?"
He understood. There was nowhere to stay. He would be part of the past for her, for the children. He could not go with them to Milwaukee. He didn't want to go there.
He shook his head. He was ready.
Anne had given him photographs for his wallet, photographs of the children, herself and Alvin. He smiled. He smiled because he knew what he would remember, knew the tale he would tell to his family. He would tell them of the rain. He would tell them how he had floated on his back on a river. He would tell them how he had been rescued by a wild man wearing a plastic garbage bag.
They might even believe him.
* * *
Ellen Janecek was grateful. She really was. They had stopped Keith Yunkin. They had rescued Jeffrey. The sun was shining. She was grateful, but she wasn't happy. They wouldn't let her see Jeffrey. They didn't understand. Paul Sunderland had understood. It was simple, but every time she explained it to almost anyone she was met with patient or exasperated looks that made it clear they thought she was either a criminal or a crackpot.
Mac Taylor had told her that Jeffrey and his family were moving out of New York and that there was a court order for her to stay away from them. They had given Ellen court orders before. She had ignored them. They didn't understand. She was hurting no one. There was no victim. She would find him.
Jeffrey's mother had a younger sister who headed maid services at a big hotel in St. Louis. The sister offered Jeffrey's mother a job at almost twice the pay she was now getting. An apartment was also available at half of what she was now paying. St. Louis sounded good to her.
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