Johanna sponged the stains on the cream-white wall and charted a thief’s progress around this room, going from drawer to pulled-out drawer. She knew where he had been standing when a policeman had barreled through the door with a drawn gun. The bullet had been pried out of the wall, but the hole remained. The thief must have had the knife in his hand, and the officer must have been very young, untried and nervous.
She filled the hole with a ready-mix plaster. A small brush and a few deft strokes of tint made it blend into the paint. Below this patch were red drops of hazardous waste from a murderer. He was wiped away with one wet rag, and, though no one would ever know, she placed it in a separate bag so the blood of the innocent woman would not mingle with his. Next, she replaced the contents spilled from the drawers, then went on to the problem of a torn lampshade and resolved it with a bit of mending tape. Last, she pulled out a hair dryer and moved it across the wet areas where she had spot-cleaned the rug, the couch and the drapes. Some of her services went beyond the job description, but she wanted the widower to find no trace of murder, no damp ghost of a stain that he might commit to memory.
No more than an hour had passed, as promised, and now the client inspected her work. She watched his fearful eyes search the wall for the bullet hole, but there was no sign of it anymore. And, by his wandering gaze, she could tell that he had forgotten the exact location of that scar in the plaster and his wife’s chalk silhouette on the floor. The room seemed so normal, as though no violence had ever taken place here—and his wife had never died—so said his brief smile as he wrote out a check.
Four months ago in another city, her first crime scene had required less work, and she had been her own client on that unpaid job. The armchair had absorbed most of the FBI agent’s blood, and so it had been a simple matter of furniture disposal after mopping up the puddle on the floor and the red drops spattered on the wall. In that room, death had been a drawn-out affair, for Timothy Kidd had not struggled enough to spend all his blood at once, and there had been ample time for him to be afraid.
However, that event had occurred in a previous life lived by another version of herself, though the dead man did remain with her as a constant presence, a haunt. And so it was neither odd nor coincidental to be thinking of Timothy when she emerged from the building to find an unpleasant reminder of his death.
Marvin Argus was waiting for her on the sidewalk. His trench coat flapped open in the wind, exposing a dark gray suit with a slept-in look. She guessed that he had taken the red-eye flight from Chicago to New York, and there had been no time for a change of clothes after landing, that or his fastidious grooming habits were deteriorating. Perhaps there had been some urgency in tracking her down today.
No, that was not it.
Argus had found time to carefully style his sparse brown hair so that no strand could escape the gelled fringe of bangs covering his receding hairline. The effect was juvenile and so at odds with his forty-year-old face.
“Hello, Johanna.” He smiled to show her all of his perfect teeth, acting as if this meeting might be a happy chance encounter and not an ambush, not a defiance of the court order to keep him at a distance.
Did he seem a little jittery—just on the verge of a tic or a twitch? She looked through him, then passed him by on her way back to the black van.
He walked alongside her, keeping his tone light, fighting down all the high notes of runaway anxiety. “You’re looking well.”
“Still alive, you mean, and you’re wondering why.”
“No, seriously, I think physical labor agrees with you,” he said. “But I suppose this new line of work is your idea of penance.”
Much could be read into that clumsy little barb, perhaps some desperate situation coming to a head. Johanna’s bent posture had made her a student of footwear, and now she gleaned more from his shoes than his words. The black leather was, as always, fanatically shiny, but both laces had been broken and repairs effected with knots. The man was coming undone.
Good.
She raised her face to his, not bothering to hide her contempt. “You don’t look well, Argus. You seem a little shaky today. Under a lot of stress?” Did that sound like a taunt, like getting even? She hoped so. “And you’re losing weight.”
He dismissed this with a wave of one hand, saying, “Long hours.” He drew back his shoulders in an effort to appear larger and less the nervous rabbit. Eyebrows arched, he folded his arms to strike a condescending pose, exuding an arrogance that invited every passerby to punch him in the face.
“I met your boss today.” Argus staged a pause. “We had a long talk about you.”
“Really?” That was unlikely, for Riker was tight with his words. And so she could surmise that this lie was an implied threat. Yes, Argus would want her to worry about what he might have shared with her employer. She stared at him, wondering, How frightened are you?
“That guy Riker, he’s a heavy drinker, isn’t he? Yeah,” said Argus. “Couldn’t help but notice. You can tell by the eyes, all those red veins.” He was still pressing what he believed was his advantage over her. A few seconds of silence dragged by before he realized that she was not at all threatened, and neither was she inclined to banal conversation. The man looked up at the sky, unwilling to meet her steady gaze anymore.
“He tried to grill me on your background.” The old familiar pomposity was back in his voice. “I could tell Riker was an ex-cop by his interrogation style. They never lose that, do they? On or off the job, they can never have just a normal conversation. I figure he doesn’t know the first thing about you, Johanna. That or you fed him some fairy tale—and he knows it.” Argus smiled, awaiting praise for this insight. Failing in that, he flicked imaginary lint from the sleeve of his coat. “Of course, I didn’t tell him anything. Not who I was or what I—”
“So you lied to him. You think Riker didn’t pick up on that?” She swung her body up into the driver’s seat and slouched deep into worn upholstery that received the hump on her back like a cupped hand. She faced the windshield.
Marvin Argus rushed his words. “Does your boss know—”
“I told Riker my history was none of his damn business.” She slammed the door and put the van in gear.
Argus reached up and gripped the door handle, as if that could prevent her from driving away. He yelled to be heard through the rolled-up window. “Johanna! About Timothy! Did you believe him—while he was still alive?”
If the man had held on to the van another moment, he would have lost his hand when she pulled into the street. Johanna pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and sped toward the broad avenue at the end of the street. She passed through a red light amid the screech and squeal of braking cars and a cabdriver’s hollered obscenities.
Marvin Argus had grown smaller in her rearview mirror, only insect high when she rounded the corner.
The young detective slouched down behind the wheel of her tan car and watched the black van speed away. Her eavesdropping device was picking up a clear conversation between the van’s driver and the radio dispatcher for Ned’s Crime Scene Cleaners. The vehicle was heading for the company parking lot in Greenwich Village.
Mallory reached out for the small silver camera on her dashboard. It contained a photographic record of the hunchback’s meeting with the driver of the white Lincoln. After downloading the new images into her laptop computer, she admired the array on the glowing screen. No public record had such clear likenesses of Johanna Apollo. The blurry portrait on a Chicago driver’s license had been, in Mallory’s view, deliberately sabotaged by the subject, who had moved in the moment the picture was taken. A perusal of prep school and college yearbooks had been of no help either, for the camera-shy hunchback had always been absent on the days when school photographs were taken.
The last photograph was the best of the lot, for the wind had swept the hair away from Apollo’s body. With one red fingernail, Mallory traced the outline of the hump that rode the woman’s back, ben
ding her spine and bowing her head. This was the soft spot.
Mallory smiled.
With a tap of keys, her computer returned to another file and an official portrait of the man in the double-parked Lincoln. Not content with running the rental plate and billing for his car, she had spent the past hour acquiring a dossier on the renter, Marvin Argus from Chicago, who now smiled at her from the glowing screen. His brow was fringed with ludicrous bangs, but she did approve of the double-breasted blazer and the tie.
Argus was the solid connection that she had been waiting for—living proof.
The detective closed her laptop and set it on the passenger seat where her partner used to ride. Riker had been a constant fixture in her life since she was ten years old, but now he would not return her phone calls. And he was never home to her when she came knocking on his door, looking for a word with him alone. But that would change when he read her report on the hunchback. It mattered nothing to Kathy Mallory that this case belonged to federal investigators, that it was well outside the purview of a New York City cop. This was a national contest, and anyone with the stomach for it could play the game on the radio five nights a week.
Marvin Argus slid behind the wheel of the white rental car and drove off. Detective Mallory’s vehicle eased up the street at a discreet distance, then crept into the southbound stream of traffic on Central Park West, following the man from the FBI.
Riker’s gray eyes were hooded, always had been, and his constant squint gave him the air of a man who was damn suspicious all the time. Mixed with this message was the attitude and posture of an easygoing soul, and the total effect said to everyone, I know you’re lying, but what the hell.
The man who ran Ned’s Crime Scene Cleaners was not named Ned. Ned was his brother. Riker did have a first name and even a middle name—Detective Sergeant, though no one had called him by that moniker for the past six months, not since acquiring the scars of four gunshot wounds. He had spent most of his medical leave in charge of a glorified janitorial service. His brother, niece and sister-in-law were away on an extended visit to the fatherland. They had not intended to stay away so long, but distant relations had held the small family hostage, dragging them up and down the Rhine, in and out of German castles and other tourist traps—poor Ned. Riker had been placed in charge of the business and left to consider his brother’s offer of a partnership.
He could not picture himself filling out the forms for his separation from NYPD, though this was common enough for cops at the age of fifty-five. His younger brother had left the force three years ago, and maybe it was time to follow suit. True or not, he believed his hair had gone grayer since leaving the hospital. And there was one more hint that the good years were gone; his wounds hurt him each time it rained—just like Dad’s arthritis.
Riker planted his elbows in the mess of papers that littered the desk, causing the top layer to avalanche to the floor. The office window gave him a view of gray bricks, a sliver of sky and a parking lot enclosed by a chain-link fence—a view of the future? Could he really do this job for a living?
At least he had been liberated from suits and ties. That was something.
He wore the jeans and flannel shirt of a working man, though he never traveled with the cleaning crews anymore. His last time out with a new trainee, he had nearly wrecked a van. That was the day he had discovered his one remaining infirmity, a sorry little secret that he had chosen not to share with his doctors.
Most of his time was spent in the office, where he was daily nibbled to death by forms, federal, state and local, for the management of hazardous waste, quarterly taxes, payroll deductions and other mind-numbing bits of paper. And all the while, he listened to a police scanner on the pretext of noting addresses for sudden deaths and potential customers. At midday he followed his brother’s custom of buying lunch for homicide cops, the real source of new business. He had eaten two lunches today, one in a Brooklyn precinct and one in the Bronx, so he had missed the hunchback when she had reported for work. And, in another sense, he simply missed Jo when she was not around.
He walked to the front window, called there by the sound of a dying muffler on the worst vehicle in the small fleet of three. He leaned both hands on the sill and winced as the van limped into the parking lot on one soft tire—more money out the window.
The woman he knew as Josephine Richards cut the engine and climbed out.
Lady, what long legs you’ve got.
Those mile-long gams were a subject of much discussion around the office. On the day of her hire, he had seen in her the makings of a Vegas showgirl spliced with a carnival freak. Over the past four months, he had become comfortable with her looks, her face in particular; it was saved from being ordinary by big brown eyes, warm and velvety, that held a man’s attention. Oh, and her mouth—some might call it too wide, too large; he called it generous. Oddly enough, of all the employees, she was the easiest to look at. And he would not be a complete man if he did not occasionally speculate about the legs beneath the blue jeans. They strolled, graceful and naked, through his fantasy life at least once a day.
Jo looked so tired as she crossed the lot, bent forward, eyes to the ground.
He could have made her workdays easier by giving her the lightest jobs, but he never deferred to her handicap. That would have ruined his new mythology of himself: it was said that he was so mean only silver bullets could kill him; conventional lead had failed every time. And legend had it that, during his seven hours of surgery, the doctors had removed what passed for his heart, a hard little knot of a thing mistaken for a wayward prune pit. It was also rumored that he had once kicked Jo’s cat clear across a room, and he would have kicked the poor animal through a window but his aim was off that day.
Riker had started these rumors himself, and none had taken hold. The employees insisted upon believing him to be a decent, likeable sort, a peg higher than a cat killer. In truth, he had only extended one hand to Jo’s cat to stroke it. He had taken no revenge for the savage mauling of claws that had followed this friendly overture. And Riker was a man of such sweet nature that he never failed to ask after the health of Jo’s pet whenever the lady walked in the door, as she did now.
He yelled, “Is that fleabag, shit-for-brains cat of yours dead yet?”
“Not yet!” Jo called out from the reception room as she set off the buzzer beneath the floor mat. A moment later, she stood on the threshold of his private office, saying, “Mugs is just fine.”
He shook his head to convey regret, then settled into the chair behind his desk and hunted through the pile of papers. “I got a note here—a name and a phone number. Some guy dropped by today—a real flake.”
And, with only that description, she said, “Marvin Argus? I don’t need the number.” She tossed a set of keys on the desk. “The van needs a new tire.”
Of course, this was sarcasm. They both knew that the van needed a whole new van. She signed her name in the log-book, then checked her watch before adding the time, five-thirty, and handed him two checks totaling an even thousand dollars.
“Not bad, Jo—for less than half a day. You can put in more time if you want.”
“Don’t start.” Her eyes were fixed on a clipboard as she made note of all the supplies she had used and the containers of hazardous waste to be disposed of. Bent over her paperwork this way, she seemed almost normal, and he half expected her to straighten up at any moment.
“Hey, Jo, just try it out for a week or so. What’s the harm?”
She met his eyes and wordlessly told him, I’m tired of discussing this, okay? Aloud she said, “I don’t need more hours.”
The lady only worked on murder scenes. She had no interest in cleaning up the debris of landlords whose tenants had died of natural causes, leaving a stinking mess beyond the sensibilities of ordinary cleaning services. Early on, he had wondered about this woman’s penchant for murder. Forays into her mind-set had always proven fruitless, and he could not shake the idea that Jo ha
d racked up many hours in interviews with other cops. He also wondered why she paid extravagant rates to live in a hotel instead of finding some cheaper, more permanent address. It would have been an hour’s work to run a background check, but where was the fun in that?
“Stay awhile.” He smiled and gestured toward the chair beside his desk.
Whenever Jo sat down with him at the end of a day, he always had the sense of some ritual examination taking place. He could swear that her brown eyes were looking deep inside of him, visually probing his innards, body and brain—just checking to see that everything was where it ought to be and working well. And now came her brief smile that pronounced him A-okay. He felt so safe in Jo’s eyes. When she was not scheduled to work, the structure of his day collapsed.
She leaned forward in the chair, arms braced on her thighs. In this posture, she seemed not at all deformed, merely tired. Jo’s head tilted to one side, suddenly wary of Riker as he reached into a drawer and brought out the good stuff—a bottle of cheap bourbon instead of the usual beer cans. She also seemed suspicious of the clean coffee cups, a rarity so late in the day, for Miss Byrd, the receptionist and dishwasher, only worked mornings. Oh, and now the pièce de résistance—goat cheese. Outside of work, all they had in common was this weird cheese addiction inherited from Nordic mothers. And, with these offerings, he telegraphed a bribe in the making.
“Given any more thought to that radio show?” He handed her a cup and waited out the silence.
Many times she had declined the offer to plug his brother’s business on the hottest radio program in America. Riker had actually given up on this gift-from-God advertising, but the request from the star of shock radio had raised some interesting questions. “I know this guy Zachary’s got a real smart mouth. Now I could probably never hold my own in an interview with him.” He widened his smile. “But you’re smarter than me.”
Was she buying this flattery?
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