“Can you tell if she is in there?” she asked me softly, her lips next to my ear. Marilena’s attention to exercise had paid off. She was the only one of the three whose breathing was back under control.
“Can’t tell. All quiet.”
She put her hand on the knob and carefully tested it. It was locked. Reaching into her purse, she quickly pulled out a small leather envelope about the size of a fat playing card. I was going to have to give her more credit about her purse content retrieval capabilities. Opening the flap, she selected two small hand tools, each a slender pick, one having a bend at the very end. Slipping them into the lock, she quietly worked them back and forth, rotating one while pulling the other back against some obstacle. The lock omitted an occasional click as some part of the mechanism fell into place. It seemed that my new girlfriend could pick a lock. I doubt that I will forget that.
When the lock finally yielded to Marilena’s deft manipulation, I turned the knob, pushed the door open quietly and entered the room, the Beretta in my hand although I don’t remember pulling it from its holster. The small living area with sparse furnishings was empty. A window was open, and the evening breeze moved a sheer curtain slowly back and forth. There was only one doorway out of the room, and I walked quickly to it. I looked into a small bedroom only to discover that it too was empty. The closet and the area under the bed were full of clutter but no April.
“Tom, come quick,” Omar said to me. “Marilena just went out the window!”
I ran to the window, stuck my head, out and found a fire escape. Marilena’s shapely lower half was in view and already ascending.
Omar and Barry were still catching their breath, and the thought of more stairs probably unappealing. I pushed the curtain aside and stepped out onto the fire escape landing. Unlike the movies where the characters spent considerable amounts of their evening hours perched on a fire escape that was large and secure, this metal contraption was both small and it wobbled side to side. I climbed the escape stairs up one short flight before getting to a rusty iron ladder secured to the side of the building. Going up the ladder required that I replace the gun in its holster. At the top of the ladder, I slowly peered over the top of the building wall and out on a roof littered with pipes and ventilators. Marilena was stooped low, looking around a ventilator with her gun drawn.
The sky was overcast, but the glow from the windows of taller buildings dimly lit the scene in front of me. About fifty feet from my vantage point was a clear area near the far side of the building. Sylvia Canfield stood behind April — they both faced away from me looking over the edge of the old building. She had her left arm around April’s upper body and was holding a knife in her right hand, its blade tip pointed at April’s right temple. The breeze that had moved the curtain was just loud enough so that I could not hear what Canfield was saying to April.
I looked down at Barry and Omar and motioned for them to be stay put. Slipping over the top of the ladder and onto the roof, I moved past Marilena, heading for Canfield and April as quietly as I could. I had the gun back in my hand, the center of Canfield’s back now a backdrop for the front sight. If they hadn’t been so close to the edge, I might have fired. I was confident that I would not hit April. But given where they were standing, I didn’t want the kinetic energy of the bullet to knock Canfield forward over the edge taking April with her. I kept moving.
I could hear Canfield now as she threatened April.
“Do you think I’m stupid? Don’t tell me he didn’t give you a copy! I want his research data! He must have given you a disk, a CD, something! Where have you hidden it? Tell me, or I will cut your brain out, you little slut!”
“He only gave me the helicopter! It’s the truth! Just the helicopter!”
“What? What do you mean? Did you say helicopter?”
It was at that moment when I was within fifteen feet of them that Omar stepped off the ladder and onto the roof next to Ledderman. Marilena was five steps behind me, her gun in her hand. Omar slipped and fell face forward. The noise alerted Canfield. She spun around, still holding April. Her face combined anger with the shock at recognizing the four of us.
“Stay away! Stay back! I’ll cut her throat! I swear to you, I’ll kill her!” She moved the knife from April’s head where from my closer vantage point I could see that she had pushed the knife into her temple. A rivulet of blood driven by an unseen pulse had coursed its way down the side of her neck. Blood had saturated the right shoulder of April’s blouse. Canfield held the blade across April’s throat, pressing the edge into her skin. A red line appeared and blood welled up along the blade. April inhaled sharply from the pain of the surprise incision.
Assuming a balanced stance, I held my gun in both hands and slowly, carefully, aimed it at Canfield’s head, the only part of her body not hidden by April. I still did not want to shoot. I was certain I could hit her in the center of her face and not shoot April, but if she went backwards off the building and managed to hold onto her hostage, they would both die. I put my right thumb on the hammer and pulled it back. It made a satisfying click, a click heard by Canfield.
“I’m not joking, Briggs! I’ll kill your brother’s little bitch!”
I held the hammer back by not taking my thumb from it. I pulled the trigger, it clicked, and Canfield’s expression changed from defiance to, for the first time, fear. The hammer did not fall on the cartridge when the trigger mechanism released it — it was still retained by my thumb.
“I’ve pulled the trigger,” the words came out calmly as I stepped closer and closer. “The only thing keeping you from getting a new and very large hole in your head is my thumb holding the hammer back. When it slips out, I won’t be able to stop it. This gun will fire, and you will die.”
“I’ll kill her,” she said, but this time much less convincingly. I had moved to within three feet of them and stopped.
“I can’t help that. I am going to keep this gun pointed at your head. Sooner or later, my thumb will tire, and you will die. I can already feel my thumb starting to weaken against the hammer spring. It’s getting a little sweaty. It’s funny, I can’t tell you how long I can hold it. I can’t tell you when you will die. I can only promise that unless I ease the hammer down, you will die.”
Sylvia Canfield was out of options, and she knew it. She closed her eyes. Without warning, she pushed April at me, turned and stepped off the roof.
I gently set the hammer down preventing the gun from firing and caught April, setting her down as quickly as I could. Marilena was there to catch her head; April was fading fast. I handed my gun to Marilena, who instinctively took it without questioning why.
Racing to the roof edge, I looked down and to my surprise there was Canfield about ten feet below me on a sharply inclined portion of roof that I didn’t know was there. This small abutment was covered in corrugated tin, had at least a forty-degree down angle, and had several pipes protruding up through it. She had managed to fall without impaling herself on any of them. As it was, she was slipping and clawing at the tin as she slid down the sloping metal. I could see no more outcropped roof sections to stop her from going the rest of the way to the ground.
I moved back three steps and then pumped hard, running to the edge of the roof. Marilena screamed, “Thomas! No! No!” I disappeared from her view as I went over the side.
My short run had propelled me far enough out so that I landed on my butt next to Canfield fifteen feet from the building’s edge where she was still in a slow motion slide to a final fall. We were quickly approaching the edge in our parallel slide. I rolled to my side and hooked a pipe with my arm as we passed by it. With my free hand, I grabbed for Canfield. Her arm flailed back and forth finally managing to make contact with my hand. I grabbed her wrist and locked on. Canfield’s arm stretched out as she continued to slide off the edge. Her body went over the side; my grip on her wrist remained. Her arm broke as it bent backwards at the elbow. She screamed in sudden agony. Her weight pulled me further
to the edge, my face ending up over the edge looking down at her.
“Hold on. I’ll get you up!” I yelled at her.
“Don’t drop me! Oh God, it hurts!”
“I’m not going to drop you! Hold on!”
“You can’t do it! I feel my elbow tearing out! God! Oh, God! It hurts!” her words punctuated by screams, excruciating shrieks that filled the night air.
We hung there for a minute or two, Canfield screaming in pain, me concentrating on not letting go. I saw Marilena’s face over the building edge, her look one of terror. She vanished out of sight.
“Agent Rigatti is getting help! Just hold on! Your arm won’t tear in half! It’s tougher than you think!”
Marilena reappeared above me looking down at us. She was joined by Omar and Barry. Her voice was loud, but it trembled as she said, “The fire department is coming! They will have a rope! Thomas! Please don’t fall!”
Canfield had stopped screaming, suddenly quiet except for deep and labored breaths. She looked up at me, her face pale and glistening with sweat. She was barely lucid, her body going into shock.
“I didn’t do it.”
“What? Just hold on! The rescue team is on the way!” I wondered how much longer I could maintain my grip. They had better hurry.
“I didn’t kill your brother!” she said, passing in and out of consciousness, tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t do it!”
It was the reason that I had jumped down to her, risking my life to save hers would not alone have been enough for me to take this risk. I needed to know. I had to know. “Who killed him?” I demanded. “Tell me!”
She answered me immediately and said as forcefully as she could, her voice rasping, “It was Townsend! Margaret Townsend!”
And with that, as I accepted the accusation with little surprise, a lie, another attempt to misdirect, the pipe I was holding onto broke off at its base, and we fell together three stories to the alleyway below. The only sound I heard as we plummeted toward the ground was Marilena’s scream.
Canfield was under me and hit some barrier, taking it in the small of her back. Instantaneously, I fell into her, was deflected to one side, twisted and crashed face up into a pile of wooden crates. I still had her wrist locked in my hand and had unknowingly pulled her on top of me. I looked at her head and shoulders lying across my chest and then up at what had originally stopped her fall. It was a wrought iron fence with closely spaced decorative spikes pointing skyward blocking access to the alley. The fence had pierced her along her waist and cut her in a jagged laceration, the force of the fall and my hold on her arm separating her into two pieces. Only the upper half of Sylvia Canfield had followed me onto the crates beside the fence. I couldn’t see the other half. It seemed I was developing a trend. When I suspected someone of killing my brother, the person soon died, and the cause of death was the body separating into two pieces.
AFTERMATH
I had been smart enough to remain completely still after I had landed until professional help could arrive to assess my condition. My body was covered in blood, and as much as I hoped it was all Canfield’s, there was no way to be sure. Even though I had not lost consciousness from the collision with the ground and felt alert, the impact had rung my bell pretty good making me a poor evaluator of my condition.
Having raced down ladders and stairs, Marilena had been the first to get to me. Given the darkened location of the alley and the fact that no one had been nearby when we landed, our incident was still a private one. As she was alone, my guess was that Omar and Barry had been left in charge of April, no doubt with explicit, yet rapidly delivered, instructions.
“Thomas! Thomas!” she had yelled to me while running up to the alleyway fence. She stopped in disbelief at the macabre tableau — me looking up at her while covered in the blood of a deranged killer whose upper torso and head constituted the only visible remains. She turned pale and fought an internal war between an almost uncontrollable need to look away and her just as strong requirement to determine my condition. Her concern for me won out, but just barely. Had our dinner not been an aborted affair, the gruesome mess that I had become would have gotten worse. Given the events of the last few days, her relationship with me would either toughen her up or drive her away.
“Oh, God! There’s so much blood! Please tell me that all of it is hers and not yours!”
“I’m not absolutely positive, but I don’t think that I’m leaking. I’m not moving because I don’t want to alter the crime scene.”
“To hell with the scene! You’re alive, and she is dead! Saving your life is more important than the forensics! I need to see how badly you’re hurt!”
“Easy, Baby. We need to take this by the numbers. The troops are on the way. I really don’t think I am bleeding out.” And, at that moment we heard the first siren. Marilena might have been a little relieved, but it wasn’t registering on her face. She ran to the end of the alley where it dumped out onto the street and waved excitedly at the oncoming rescue wagon. For my part, they couldn’t get here soon enough. I was starting to coagulate.
The EMT guys arrived, and even though they were tough skinned, New York ambulance jocks, the site of Canfield’s upper half hemorrhaging blood and damaged tissue all over me did cause the two of them, one male and one female, to lose a little color. The calm delivery of my end of our conversation with them further added to the surreal nature of the emergency call. Jim O’Dale’s car pulled up next to the oversized ambulance having found us easily, the previously dark alley now a strobe light show. He jumped out of the driver’s seat and trotted over to me. Unlike Marilena and the EMTs, he briefly looked at me and the half-body of Canfield as if he had seen something just like this thousands of times before. He joined the discussion about how to handle the very unusual situation.
The EMTs and O’Dale agreed with Marilena, who was barely hanging onto a professional demeanor and offering little chance that they could successfully object, that ascertaining my condition trumped evidence preservation. This was fine by me. It only mattered that someone else make that decision and then be around to tell the world that I had not tampered with evidence. As there was no protocol for pulling a live body out from under the partial remains of a dead one, we had to improvise. They slid Canfield’s upper half off of me and onto a plastic sheet without difficulty due to the slippery puddle I had become all the while trying to keep her from changing position. The arrival of a fire engine at the scene provided the help we needed for the next step. The only way we were going to see what had happened to me was to get rid of the muck. A water line was rigged up to the pumper truck and necked down from a large diameter fire hose to something more resembling a common garden hose in both flow rate and pressure. Carefully, but with water about the temperature of an Alpine lake, they hosed me off — a river of red headed to a nearby storm sewer. I had often wondered why the fire department would send a fire truck to a medical emergency call, and now I knew — you might just need to hose the victim down, and the pumper carried several hundred gallons of water. I mentioned this to Marilena attempting to lighten her mood a little. She was not amused in the least. A quick injury check confirmed that I wasn’t the major contributor to the mess — my leakage fairly limited. I had Marilena take charge of my watch and billfold; my clothes had been cut off of me and stuffed into a plastic bag. Even though the onsite exam didn’t indicate any spinal damage, they slid a backboard under me for transport. I approved. O’Dale told Marilena to ride in the wagon with me to the hospital and cleared it with the EMTs, whose protocol allowed only immediate family in the rig.
As they prepared to load me into the back of the oversized ambulance, Jim told Marilena that they needed to stay connected by cell throughout the night so they could tag team the local precinct. She agreed but was not focused on his words as she tried to hurry the techs along. O’Dale turned to me, rocked back and forth on his heels, and said, “Well, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!”
I answered back, “I believe that the actual quote was ‘another nice mess’ but it got screwed up by the papers.” He and I laughed.
“Would you two please shut up?” This, from my now fully exasperated girlfriend who obviously did not appreciate the sophisticated musings of Oliver Hardy. We’d have to work on that.
*
“Seven stitches? That’s it?”
“Yep,” I answered back. “Told you I was OK.”
It had been ten hours since I had fallen from the roof with Canfield. The hospital had x-rayed and CAT-scanned me looking for unseen trauma finding nothing. Marilena looked at me in disbelief, her head slowly moving back and forth in wonderment. It was about 6 AM, and she was standing next to the hospital bed in the emergency room where I had been treated. I am certain that I had annoyed the ER docs and nurses by providing, well maybe providing is not a strong enough word, supervisory services with respect to my case. After completing their work, they had vanished. Marilena had been with me most of the night, leaving only once to bounce back and forth between the apartment where April had been hiding out, the alley, the local police headquarters, Ron’s condo, and then back to the hospital where April and I were being treated. O’Dale had tried hard to minimize her involvement, so she could stay with me. He was mostly successful. I was happy that she had called Ricardo and not been in and out of cabs in the middle of the night. I had overheard the hospital staff comment on her frequent calls to inquire about me during the brief time she was gone. When she returned, I didn’t know if she had flashed her badge to get past the visitor’s area, or if the help just didn’t care who came to see me after my un-requested insertion into their management chain. Some people just don’t appreciate me.
I continued, “The wooden crates and pallets were great at providing an energy absorbing landing, you know, crunch, crunch, crunch, but a couple of slats stuck me when they broke.”
Death of a Cure Page 27