Now, watching him sleep away the tension, I found myself wishing I’d pushed the conversation harder, made Matt listen. The feeling was irrational; I knew from experience that no one made Matt Riordan do what he didn’t want to do. And so I sighed and pulled the covers up to his chin. Then I slipped out of bed and went for my coat.
I went home to Brooklyn. There wasn’t much to smile at in my thoughts, so I spared an inner laugh for the graffiti in the Bergen Street station: In God we trust, in transit we bomb.
At home, I quickly undressed and sat down to finish the latest Arthur Lyons. It was great, as usual, but the words began to blur before my eyes. Sitting in the glare of a single lamp, a comforter wrapped around me, I thought at first that the real mystery that had entered my life was dwarfing the fiction, but then I found my thoughts wandering.
Nathan. I felt a sharp pang of loss as I remembered my dead lover. I’d buried my grief in work, realizing for the first time the fierce joy I took in practicing law on my own, without the safety net of Legal Aid. I had a moment’s pride, thinking how proud of me Nathan would have been.
My house. It was more than a building that devoured my cash—it was a responsibility bigger than any I’d ever known. In a way, it represented all my hopes for the future. It was my future—my office, my home, my business. I’d feared for its life before I’d ever heard the name Ira Bellfield. All my anxieties about leaving my job and starting out on my own seemed to center on that one four-story building. I’d visualized it in ashes, or burglarized, or, most humiliating of all, foreclosed on, several times a day for the last six months. The fact that my fears had coalesced into a horribly realistic prospect was something even Sigmund Freud couldn’t have anticipated.
Riordan. He was attractive. He was dangerous. He was also in danger, yet he made it clear he wanted no help from me or anyone.
Being alone. Proud as I was of my ability to handle my caseload, my responsibilities as a homeowner, there were times I wanted to share the burden, to feel someone else’s shoulder pushing along with mine. For all Matt Riordan and I could understand each other, we were irrevocably separate, our paths wholly distinct.
Being needed. By Matt Riordan, by Dawn Ritchie, by someone. When in hell had that become important to me?
8
It was your basic New York City government building, old and drafty, but efforts had been made. The walls were white, the woodwork fire-engine red. The lobby was lined with lithographs of famous fires being fought from horse-drawn engines, while horrified citizens in Victorian dress looked on. There was a glass partition with FDNY and a fireman’s hat emblazoned in red. I knocked, went in, and asked for Fire Marshal Duncan Pitt.
I don’t know why his being black surprised me. So Linda was an equal opportunity blackmailer. Or maybe, having known Button, as honest a cop as ever wore blue, I unconsciously considered corruption a white man’s disease. I tried not to let my surprise show as I sat in the wood chair, one of two in his tiny office. It was purely a working environment; every inch of the scarred desk was covered with reports. I wondered idly how many were honest and how many were doctored.
The phone rang. As Pitt answered it, I took stock of him, trying to get a clue as to how best to conduct what I suspected would be a very difficult interview.
Pitt was a big man, balding, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and full lips. He had a tough drill sergeant’s face and a voice to match. Yet the cut of his uniform, the perfectly trimmed hair, the almost exaggerated precision of his speech gave me a sense of a man who cared greatly for appearances.
The only personal touch in the drab office was photographs. On the desk, pushed aside by papers, were graduation pictures of a boy and a girl, both with even-toothed smiles that probably cost a pretty penny in orthodontists’ fees. I hoped I wasn’t going to hear Pitt use them as an excuse for what he’d done.
On the wall, there were the standard political photos I’d seen a hundred times in judges’ chambers all over the city. Photo opportunities with the candidate of the moment, displayed to demonstrate the political clout of the person doing the displaying. But the person shaking hands with Shirley Chisholm, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson wasn’t Pitt, but a light-skinned woman whose broad, buck-toothed smile seemed familiar. If she was the mother of the graduates, I thought, I was right about the orthodontics.
“Well, Counselor,” Pitt began in an expansive tone that seemed to have nothing to hide, “what can I do for you?”
“I represent a young man named Tito Fernandez,” I began crisply. “He’s charged with arson, second-degree. You filled out the fire marshal’s report.” I put my briefcase on my lap, opened it with a snap, and pulled out the report I’d gotten from the DA’s office. “As you can see,” I went on, showing it to him as though I were putting it into evidence in court, “it has your signature on it.”
He didn’t take it. His face wore the bland smile of a bureaucrat about to hide behind the rules. “You really ought to know I can’t discuss a pending case,” he said smoothly. “You can ask me anything you like in court, but before that …” He raised his palms in a gesture that was meant to express rueful apology. His face, however, betrayed his satisfaction.
“Oh, I have plenty of questions to ask in court,” I answered brightly. “I just wonder whether you really want to wait to hear them—and whether you really want them asked in such a public forum.” I gazed at Pitt with what I hoped was a wealth of meaning.
“Some people,” Pitt replied, his voice hard underneath the ruminative tone, “might consider that a threat. But I don’t think a smart lawyer would threaten a public official in his own office.” He shook his head. “It would be a very foolish thing to do, wouldn’t it? So if that’s what you’re doing, Ms. Jameson”—his eyes were as hard as his voice—“I think you’d better leave before things get out of hand.”
“Things are already out of hand, Mr. Pitt,” I countered, my voice remarkably steady even if my hands weren’t, which is why they got the job of holding onto my briefcase as though it were a life preserver. “They started getting out of hand when you started taking those manila envelopes from Ira Bellfield.”
I literally held my breath waiting for my bluff to be called. All Pitt had to do was throw me out—or worse, file a complaint against me with the bar association. What I was doing hadn’t been covered in my legal ethics class.
“That’s a pretty serious allegation,” Pitt replied, giving the word every one of its syllables. His face had lost none of its bland assurance. “I wonder,” he went on, his voice silky, “what could have put such a far-fetched notion into your head.”
I had won. The calm didn’t matter. The smoothness was a defense. What was important was that he had neither denied the charge nor picked up the phone. He hadn’t laughed either. He was playing for time, trying to find out just how much I had. My move: to convince him I had more than I really did.
“Ira Bellfield has a lot of fires,” I said conversationally. “Of course, you’ll say that he owns a lot of buildings and that some of them are in bad neighborhoods and that some of his tenants aren’t sober all the time, so it’s no wonder he has fires. But there are a couple of reports in here”—I tapped the briefcase significantly—“that could make you look really bad in court.” What I didn’t mention was the astronomical odds against my actually being able to introduce into evidence at Tito’s trial fire marshal’s reports from unrelated fires. “Irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial” about summed it up. My heart thumped, and I remembered an argument I’d forgotten to use against Riordan when he’d suggested running the bluff. I hated poker.
“Take 1309 Bedford Avenue,” I continued when the silence convinced me he wasn’t going to rush into guilty explanations. “You call it a gas leak fire. Would you be interested to learn that the Brooklyn Union Gas Company cut off service for nonpayment the week before the fire?”
“People in the ghetto,” Pitt answered with a crocodile smile, “have been known to supply thei
r own gas when the regular service runs out. It’s a dangerous practice.” He shook his head mournfully, but the twinkle in his eye told me he liked poker a hell of a lot more than I did—and probably played it better. “These poor tenants learned that the hard way.”
“What about 2718 Herkimer?” I shot back. “Do most fires started by winos have two points of origin and use accelerants? Doesn’t that pattern say ‘torch’ loud and clear? And yet you blame the fire on a drunk who was sleeping it off in a vacant apartment.”
“Cheap whiskey makes a pretty good accelerant.” Pitt snapped the words in a way that made me feel as though my hand might contain enough cards after all.
“But that’s not the biggie, is it?” I asked, airily waving away my hard-won points. “The real problem with these reports is that by the thirteenth fire somebody should have realized that these buildings were owned by the same man. All the phony holding companies in the world couldn’t have shielded him from a real investigation—but that’s just what these fires never got. And nobody bothered to notify the insurance companies, either, so they just paid and paid. Even the fires you did label ‘suspicious’ were blamed on people who couldn’t fight back. I suppose,” I went on, real indignation beginning to seep through the act, “it never occurred to you that innocent people like my client, who happens to be a deaf kid, could get hurt by your covering up for Bellfield?”
“This is all very interesting,” Pitt said suavely, “but it’s all speculation, isn’t it? Which you know as well as I do. So if that’s all you have to say …”
So much for poker. With an inward sigh I took out the hardball so highly recommended by Matt Riordan.
“I’m not just Tito Fernandez’s lawyer,” I announced. “I also represented Linda Ritchie. If there was nothing wrong with those reports,” I asked sweetly, “why did you pay her to keep quiet about them?”
Pitt’s brown eyes, which had seemed almost amused, now took on the hard blankness of obsidian. “I should have known,” he said wearily. “I should have fucking known.”
“You did pay her?” I made it a question, my voice softer than I’d intended. Winning may be everything, but it isn’t always fun.
He nodded, then cleared his throat. “Had to,” he said flatly. “Not much choice about it. The lady wasn’t one to leave room for doubts about what she’d do to me if I didn’t.”
My turn to nod. “And you hated her for it,” I said. “The question is, did you hate her badly enough to kill her?”
“Shit, I thought her old man done took care of that for me,” he snorted. The smooth façade had cracked a bit, and I could see the streetwise ghetto kid peeking out from behind the urbane civil servant.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied enigmatically. “But don’t you think the cops might be interested in where you were the night she was killed if they knew she was blackmailing you?”
“Maybe so,” he agreed warily, “but you’re not the cops. Am I to assume you are in the same line of work as your late client?” The bland bureaucrat was back with a vengeance; I found myself looking at the same smooth façade that had already bounced my best shots back at me.
I shook my head. Amazingly, the suggestion made me feel dirty, though I’d tried my best to sell just that picture of myself to Ira Bellfield. “I really do represent Tito Fernandez,” I explained, “and I have my doubts about whether Brad Ritchie killed his wife. You weren’t her only victim, you know.”
“I know. People like that seldom stop with one. Which was one reason,” he said with the unnatural calm I was beginning to associate with lying, “that she didn’t really bother me all that much.”
“Oh, you enjoyed paying blackmail?”
“No,” he admitted with a smile I was supposed to find ruefully charming. “But I accepted it. A man in my position”—again he spread his palms—“it was a little like paying taxes.” He shrugged.
“A cost of doing business?” My sarcasm wasn’t working, and I had to admit that falling back on it was an admission of weakness. No matter what weapon I pulled out, he had a better one to parry me with. Now instead of poker, we were fencing—and he was D’Artagnan.
“Exactly,” he beamed. “Hell,” he went on, “how self-righteous could I be? Stood to reason somebody was bound to come along and do me like I was doing. Way the world works. Everybody takes a cut, one way or the other. I took mine, and Linda took hers.”
“Nothing personal?”
“Nothing personal.” The crocodile teeth gleamed in the black face. The angry street kid I’d glimpsed for a moment wouldn’t have paid Linda without a fight, but he was buried now, and I knew I had no more weapons to force him out again. The question was, had Linda had those weapons?
There was nowhere to go but home. I rose to leave, not missing the gleam of triumph in the black eyes as Pitt stood up behind his desk.
Then my memory came up with a name for the smiling lady in the political photographs. “Dory Anderson Pitt,” I said slowly. “Just elected to the school board from Starrett City.” I wheeled on Pitt with a triumphant smile. “Does your wife know about the manila envelopes?”
Pitt sank slowly into his chair like a deflating hot-air balloon. His face crumpled, the complacent calm replaced by a defeat so utter that my victory seemed a shabby thing indeed. The stakes of my little game seemed suddenly too rich for my blood; against all my better judgment, I began to feel sympathy.
“You gonna tell her, bitch? You gonna break that woman’s heart like Linda said she was gonna do? What good you think that’ll do, huh? Make you feel righteous?”
“Was that what got to you, Mr. Pitt? It wasn’t the money, was it? You didn’t lie about that, the money you would have paid without anger, but the threat to tell your wife—that got you. Did it get you enough to kill her?”
“Hell, yes!” Pitt replied, slamming his fist on the desk. “What did the life of that bloodsucking bitch matter to me next to Dory’s happiness? I’d have wasted her in a minute, if I could have been sure to get away with it. If only she’d taken the money and been happy,” he went on. “But she wasn’t like that. She was always poking and prying, looking for some way to hurt. She didn’t like it that I just paid up every week with no complaints. She liked pain. She liked hurting, so one day she does the same thing you did, looks at the pictures, and says, ‘Does your wife know?’ All innocence and sweet magnolias.” He looked into the distance, as though he could see the scene before his face. “Like a damned fool, I panicked. I should have said, ‘Hell, girl, whose idea you think it was?’ But I didn’t. I let her know how bad the idea of Dory’s knowing got to me and from then on I didn’t have a moment’s peace. She called all hours, asking to talk to Dory, sometimes getting Dory on the phone and then hanging up. Letting on like she was going to tell her and then making me beg her not to. She liked me to crawl.”
“If you were so ashamed of what you were doing, why did you do it in the first place?”
Pitt sighed. His sigh was for the man he was before Bellfield, the man Dory Anderson married, the man those two high-school graduates thought their father was.
“I was one of three black rookies in my class,” he began. “One of us died in a supermarket fire, the other quit the department ’cause he couldn’t stand the harassment; and I made fire marshal. Not the first black man to hold the job, but one of very few in those days. Man”—he shook his head—“the graft I saw. Seemed to me like everybody I knew was on somebody’s pad. The indifference came from the top down. I remember as a nappy-haired kid trying to get up some interest in SRO fires. You know,” he explained, “those single-room-occupancy hotels for men on welfare. The attitude came down, ‘Who cares, they’re just bums.’ But then when it was a money fire, you’d find that influential people didn’t want the true reason for the fire known, so the report would read ‘insufficient evidence.’” He gave the words all possible syllables, well spaced out for emphasis. “It was discouraging as hell. And all the time there were lazy, dumb, honky shits
getting promoted over my head. Finally, in comes this affirmative-action bullshit and dumb black shits are moving up and white guys left behind are looking at me and nodding their heads like they know I wasn’t promoted on merit.”
“So you started taking Bellfield’s money.”
“Hell, girl, everybody’s taking somebody’s money. I just woke up and smelled the coffee.”
“Your wife never asked you where the extra money came from?”
“She never asked me what it feels like to go into a burning tenement and carry out what looks like a burnt-up pot roast, only it ain’t a piece of meat, it’s a baby,” he said, his voice as thick as the smoke from an oil fire. “She never asked me what it’s like watching another firefighter fall through a burning floorboard or how it feels when neighborhood kids throw rocks at me while I’m putting out a fire. Man has to do,” he explained, his palms up a the now-familiar gesture, “a lot of things he can’t be telling his woman about. Way it is,” he said, in a tone I might have called pleading.
“Did you kill Linda?” I don’t know why I expected a straight answer, but there was something in Pitt that, while I couldn’t call it integrity, had a certain strength.
“No,” he said quietly. “You have no grounds for believing me, but here’s one reason you might consider it.” His smile was genuinely rueful this time. “If I’d have done away with that bitch, I’d have damned sure done it before the election.”
I must have frowned. “Your wife’s election?”
“Sure,” he answered. “That was Linda’s big threat—to make my crime public just before voting day and destroy Dory’s chances. Once the election was over, it wasn’t as important. She knew that. That’s why she really kept the pressure up right then and kind of backed off in December. Tell you the truth, I kind of got the feeling she wasn’t as interested in me after that, as though maybe she had some fresh blood to suck.”
Where Nobody Dies Page 8