Late Payments

by Michael Z. Lewin

  He took a piece of adhesive vinyl from another jacket pocket.

  He peeled the paper from the back and covered the window glass at the point nearest the catch. He wrapped the backing paper over his fist and punched the glass out. Carefully he unfastened the catch, opened the window frame and hoisted himself onto the sill and into the house.

  Once inside he crouched by one of the curtains and listened.

  The house was silent.

  Powder waited for three minutes.

  He studied the room he was in, finding it sparsely furnished. He had a sense of its not being comfortable to use, to live in. But then he wondered if this feeling was just a reflection of the way his own desire for comfort in life, for soft, deep, warm things, had grown.

  He gave his head a little shake as if to put comfort out of mind.

  The room was not carpeted. An oval rug covered much of the central floor space but most of the path that Powder wanted to take was wood.

  He considered taking his shoes off. But decided against. The noise he would make was most likely to be squeaks from his weight on the floorboards. Shoes wouldn’t affect that.

  Powder edged away from the wall.

  The two doorways leading from the front room were close to each other and he made his way toward them.

  One opening led to a hall and the front door and a bathroom.

  The other to a dining room and to a push-open door, apparently to the kitchen.

  Powder went for the dining room, keeping close to internal walls and moving slowly, step by step.

  At the kitchen door he stopped to listen again.

  Again he heard nothing.

  Powder fitted his fingers in the gap between the door and its frame and pried the door toward him. As it came he got a better grip and opened it carefully so that he could see through the opening without entering the room.

  He saw nothing.

  He slipped into the kitchen.

  There, clean dishes stood in an open, half-filled dishwasher. The refrigerator door hung open. A hand can opener sat at the edge of the work surface by the sink, almost directly in front of a wall-mounted electric can opener. Two roughly opened empty cans of franks and beans lay on the floor.

  Through the window over the sink Powder saw the edges of the rambling roses he had seen from the back of the house.

  Powder listened.

  He heard nothing above the hum of the refrigerator’s endless, hopeless battle to cool the room it was standing in.

  Powder moved slowly past the kitchen door, toward the wall that the windowless brick grew from.

  He came first to a utility room, equipped with a washer and drier and a wall-mounted ironing board.

  From this an open doorway led to a short dark corridor. Powder entered the corridor and found a door that had to lead to the entrance to the windowless extension.

  Powder stood and listened.

  This time he heard what seemed to be a kind of rustling, an irregular tapping. It started and stopped. Its pace varied.

  And it certainly came from the brick room.

  Powder’s heart raced and his breathing quickened. Suddenly his mouth was dry and he almost considered going back to look for a drink, maybe something from the open refrigerator.

  He drew his gun.

  He put his free hand on the door handle.

  He turned the handle slowly and then threw the door open. He jumped into the room and dropped to a crouching position with his gun held up with two hands.

  As he pitched forward his knee dropped onto something hard. He glanced down. He saw a human head.

  The door he had thrown open bounced off a table and hit him back. He held his gun steady, pointing forward.

  He breathed.

  The stench of the place was nauseating.

  The air was a foggy mixture of excrement and death.

  Chapter Thirty

  Directly before him Powder saw the tubular back of a wheelchair outlined in front of a large, bright, green computer screen. The light from the screen silhouetted arms on either side of the chair as they struggled to find the wheels, to turn to face the entry noise. A head swung from side to side in the course of the search.

  The chair rotated to face Powder only after what seemed a long time. When the occupant did turn around, light from the computer screen illuminated enough of Powder’s face for Jules Mencelli to recognize him.

  Mencelli screamed with terror.

  Powder waited.

  The scream did not abate in time. It continued and rose and became self-sustaining. Mencelli screamed and screamed and screamed. The dark shadow of his head began to twitch as the noise continued, as if it were a mechanical thing going haywire. Powder held his position, thinking that the noise could not go on forever.

  But it did. Or seemed to.

  Finally Powder lifted the aim of his gun to the ceiling. He fired.

  As the reverberation of the blast faded away it was clear that Mencelli’s noisings had stopped too.

  The room was quiet suddenly as a shower of polystyrene fluttered around Mencelli’s head.

  “Hi, Ace,” Powder said, lowering the aim of the revolver back to the man’s chest.

  Mencelli said nothing. His shoulders shook.

  Without taking his eyes off the shaking figure. Powder took one hand off his weapon and felt for the head at his feet. The skin was flaccid and cold.

  “Who’s the stiff, Ace?” Powder asked.

  When Mencelli again did not respond. Powder rose from his crouching position. He stepped back toward the doorway. Keeping the gun aimed, he used his free hand to feel around the jamb. He found a light switch. He flooded the room with white light.

  If anything it made the smell of the place even worse.

  In the light Jules Mencelli looked tiny and pitiful.

  “Who is the stiff?” Powder asked again. “Baldine?”

  “He was doing it,” Mencelli said. “He was doing it. I know he was. I know he was.”

  “What?” Powder asked quietly. “What was he doing?”

  Mencelli fell silent again.

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was doing it,” Mencelli said again, brightly. “I can prove it. I’m sure I can.”

  “How did you get in here, Jules?”

  Mencelli was silent for a moment, as if his mind was conducting a search for the right memory, the answer to the question. He said, “I called him and told him I was coming. I told him it was really important. I came to the door. He brought me in.” Mencelli giggled. “He thought I was harmless.”

  The giggle grew into a deeper laugh that momentarily threatened to continue, the way the screaming had. But suddenly it stopped.

  “I knew about his equipment room, of course,” Mencelli said. “I knew he had what it took to get into the mainframe from home. He used to brag about it to me. He bragged!”

  “You came here to use his equipment?”

  Mencelli nodded violently. “It never occurred to me before that he . . .” His speech trailed away in thought.

  Powder watched.

  Mencelli said, “Then, things he said. They reminded me of things he said before.”

  “What things?” Powder asked.

  Mencelli chuckled quietly. “He never thought for a moment that I might be a danger to him. He thought he was impervious to lowly considerations like death. Other people might die. Inferior people might. Defective people might. But an exception would be made in his case.”

  Powder asked slowly, carefully, “Did he tell you he was doing it? In so many words?”

  Mencelli answered with a shake of the head. “But I knew anyway, you see. I knew. It all fitted into place when I listened to him talking.” Mencelli looked up sharply, as if Powder had only just entered the room. “I can prove it,” he said. “I’m sure I can.” Mencelli’s expression became sly. “If you’ll just leave me to do it.”

  “Why did you kill him, Ace?”

  Coyly. “Is he dead?” />
  “How did you kill him, Ace?”

  “With this.” Mencelli lifted a tiny pistol from his lap.

  He pointed it at Powder.

  He pulled the trigger.

  In a single instant Powder felt a whoosh pass his ear and he fired his own gun.

  The impact of the bullet’s sudden entry into Mencelli’s chest rocked his wheelchair onto its back wheels.

  Chapter Thirty One

  Ricky Powder appeared by his father’s side moments after the exchange of gunshots.

  “My God, Dad! Are you all right?”

  “Yes and no,” Powder said. “No and yes.”

  “It seemed like you’d been in the house forever, so I decided to go up to the window and listen. Just as I got there I heard these shots!”

  “I haven’t been hit,” Powder said.

  Ricky looked around the room. A body on the floor. A body facing them in the wheelchair.

  “The last thing I wanted to do was kill him,” Powder said with an old man’s sigh.

  “You killed these guys?” Ricky asked, the mortal awfulness of his father’s job hitting home for the first time in his life.

  “Only that one,” Powder said.

  “Oh.”

  Powder bolstered his weapon.

  Father and son stood for a few moments, not moving, not speaking.

  Then Ricky asked, “What is that awful smell?”

  “His body’s beginning to decay,” Powder said, pointing to Baldine. “And that guy sat in front of that computer for two days without leaving it for a minute.”

  Powder led Ricky to the living room and then sent him out through the window, back to Peggy Zertz. When the black Plymouth pulled away from the front of the house. Powder looked around for a telephone. He found one in the hall and called the police.

  A collection of patrol cars was on the scene within fifteen minutes.

  The district sergeant asked Powder some questions, curious more than critical about how a police lieutenant appeared to have broken into a house and killed a man.

  Powder said it would be better for him to wait to tell his story downtown.

  Downtown, Powder was interviewed by a Captain Shaller, who had been called in from a golf game.

  Shaller realized quickly that the case would be taken over in the morning by the deputy chief with responsibility for investigations involving police officers, a man named Ferguson. So Shaller did only what he had to with Powder, establishing the basic facts of Powder’s entry to the premises and of Jules Mencelli’s death. He accepted generalities about the reasons.

  Shaller took possession of Powder’s badge and weapon, after arranging for the reports from a medical examiner and a Forensic team to go to Ferguson, and he let Powder go home.

  Powder left Shaller at ten to six.

  Inspector Claude Mountjoy, with his outstanding questions about the nightclub killing, was not standing by, waiting for the Homicide people to finish. Inspectors, even ambitious ones, don’t work twenty-four-hour Sundays. So when Powder left the Homicide and Robbery with Violence Department he walked unhindered down the stairs to Missing Persons. One form of home.

  Noble Perkins was not in the office, but Powder could see a stack of paper waiting in his in tray.

  Powder walked to his desk. He sat in his chair and leaned back and put his feet up. He rested, and it was nearly twenty minutes before he tipped himself forward to look at the work Perkins had done.

  On top was a note, written in pencil in Perkins’s fine hand. It said, “You wanted everything I could get today on Martha Miles and Henry Painter, Junior. Here are full arrest records, conviction files, anecdotal files, bank records, military service records, insurance histories, police records of relatives, and known contacts, and pictures. I couldn’t swear that this is everything there is—how deep is a hole?—but it’s all I can get at the moment. Also,” Perkins continued, “I’ve put the file on Adolpho Manan on the bottom. You asked me for it on Friday.”

  Powder picked up the pile of paper and hefted it. “Thank you, Nobe, old buddy,” he said aloud.

  Powder put the documents back on his desk. He thought about all the things he had to do. All the things he had to take care of. Who he had to see, what he had to tell them.

  Then he leafed through the information sheet by sheet, trying to absorb essentials.

  For fifty minutes he found nothing stimulating. Many words, much information, but the frustrating sense that he just didn’t understand was unalleviated.

  At last, long last, when he came to the skimpy information available about Terry Miles, Martha’s son. Powder began to find the missing meaning of events.

  He literally sat up when he read Terry’s birthdate: two years after the death of Martha’s husband. And then there was Terry’s place of birth: Black Oak, Indiana. The map showed a small town—a suburb?—between Hammond and Gary.

  There was no picture of Terry, but the height and weight were about right.

  Powder found himself breathing heavily.

  He leaned back. He rubbed his eyes slowly. He thought.

  He looked again at the details on the arrest record of Henry Painter, Junior.

  Then Powder bundled the papers up, put them in a drawer, and left the office.

  It was about eight when Powder arrived at Biddle Street. There was no noise from within and Powder was uncertain whether Peggy Zertz and Ricky were there. But when he knocked, the door was answered almost immediately.

  “We been waiting,” Ricky said. He looked pale.

  Powder followed him through the living room to the kitchen.

  Peggy sat hunched over the table. She looked up and looked relieved.

  “What the hell is wrong with you guys?” Powder asked. “I’ve only come by for a cup of coffee.”

  Almost gratefully, Peggy Zertz rose and turned to a shelf. With her back to Powder she said, “We’ve had this most tremendously funny experience.”

  Powder said nothing.

  “Funny strange,” Peggy clarified.

  “It was like telepathic,” Ricky said. “When I was by the window of that house and heard those shots from inside, Peggy had this terrible sensation.”

  “It was a real shiver kind of thing, that went all up and down my body,” Peggy said. “It left me shaking.”

  “She was too far away to have heard anything,” Ricky said.

  “It really scared me,” Peggy said. “It made me realize how badly I don’t want to die yet.”

  When Charlene Tidmarsh answered the door, she recognized Powder and screwed up her face.

  “Don’t tell me,” Powder said. “He’s asleep in the bathtub.”

  Mrs. Tidmarsh stared at him intently. “Something important has happened, hasn’t it? Hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Powder said.

  “And dangerous?”

  Powder blinked. “Not for him.”

  They stood looking at each other.

  She said, “He’s in the kitchen playing Monopoly with the children.”

  Powder followed her and found Tidmarsh, looking gray, and hollower in the face than ever. He was frowning over a small pile of colored currency. He looked up. “Leroy Powder,” he said. “You couldn’t lend me a hundred thousand bucks, could you?”

  “Will you take a check?”

  Tidmarsh left his fortunes in the hands of the smallest of his three girls and led Powder to some chairs on a small screened porch at the back of the house.

  “Do you want a beer or something?” Tidmarsh asked.

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Not a social call?”

  “No,” Powder said. He hesitated. “I . . . shot Jules Mencelli this afternoon.”

  Tidmarsh blinked.

  “He’s dead. Mencelli killed John F. Baldine two days ago.”

  “What . . .?” Tidmarsh began.

  Powder held up a hand. “I am seeing Deputy Chief Ferguson in the morning. And, for sure, you’ll hear all about it.”

  “Al
l right,” Tidmarsh said.

  “What I wanted to tell you tonight was that Baldine had a room full of computer equipment. That’s where Mencelli was tampering with the data from.”

  Tidmarsh asked intently, “Did you find out whether . . .?”

  “I still don’t know whether all the killing was happening. Or whether it was a statistical kink in Mencelli’s mind.”

  Tidmarsh drew his lips tight.

  Powder said, “Tomorrow morning I am going to tell Ferguson everything.”

  Tidmarsh nodded.

  “What’s important is that I’m going to tell him that you must be allowed to go through everything, absolutely everything, that Baldine had there.”

  “I see,” Tidmarsh said.

  “If he was doing it, there is bound to be something in that room that proves it. Links him to the people he worked with. On a disk or a tape or whatever you people use.”

  Tidmarsh nodded slowly.

  “Ferguson must be made to make time for you to look for hard evidence. And you have to be ready to look for it. Until we know for sure, one way or the other. It has to be done. You know it has to be done.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ll do it. No matter what they decide on me.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  When Powder finally got to Fleetwood’s house, she said, “I thought you were never coming.”

  “Better late than never, as the bishop said to the show-girl.”

  She poured two glasses of scotch.

  They sat in silence. Powder drank. He felt drained. Exhausted.

  “It’s been quite a day,” he said. “Ricky called me ‘Dad.’ ”

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Although Powder got to sleep easily, he woke in the dark with a start. His muscles were tense to the point of pain. He was sweating profusely. He was gripped by panic.

  Fleetwood wiped his forehead with a tissue. “You were shouting,” she said simply.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He felt swamped with if onlys, what ifs.

  Many minutes passed before he could say, “The last thing I wanted to do was kill him.”

  Later his breathing slowed down, and he unwound and fell back into shallow sleep.