Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  Looper had phoned ahead, but saw no one. Then a slim, gray-haired woman appeared from behind some artificial shrubbery and smiled, holding out her hand. “Detective Looper?”

  Looper shook her hand, careful not to squeeze. She was in her seventies and obviously had once been beautiful. “I’m Laverne Blisner.”

  “Let me guess,” Looper said, “you used to be an actress.”

  The smile brightened. “Close enough. I was a dancer. Now I do this.” She waved an arm gracefully—like a dance movement. “My husband and I went into the theatrical supply business twenty years ago. Now I and my daughters own and manage the company. We furnish play productions with just about anything, and if we don’t have it, we find it.”

  “I can’t imagine you not having it,” Looper said.

  “Have you seen Fiddler on the Roof?”

  “Several times,” Looper lied.

  “Our roof.”

  “Amazing.”

  “You mentioned uniforms when you called.”

  “Yes. New York Police uniforms.”

  “What period?”

  “Present, or at least recent.”

  “Got ’em.”

  “No surprise, Laverne.” Such an innately lovely woman, he found himself wondering what her daughters looked like.

  Laverne danced—or so Looper thought—over to a rack of clothes that weren’t uniforms, but Southern belle dresses with lace-laden hoop skirts. “Let me explain that most of our clothing is used. Those in charge of dressing a major play have their designs, their costumes, tailor-made. We get them after the plays close. Then, of course, smaller productions come to us to rent in order to economize.” Laverne obviously enjoyed explaining things, and might do so in detail for a long time.

  “If you’d show me the NYPD costumes.”

  She smiled and led the way through more racks of clothing, past a genuine stuffed grizzly bear that gave Looper the creeps, then to more clothing, including a rack of blue uniforms. Looper saw what looked like nineteenth-century police uniforms, then later, nineteen-twenties stuff, with less defined shoulders and the standard eight-point caps that were still worn. Other time periods were covered. The uniforms seemed to be arranged in chronological order. The last two on the rack looked modern enough to pass.

  Looper held them out separately from the other uniforms. “Have you rented either of these lately?”

  “Not for months. Those are from an Off-Broadway production, Rug Rats.”

  “Never heard of it,” Looper said honestly.

  “Well, it didn’t last very long. But there was a bit part in it for a policeman who patrols a lovers’ lane.”

  “A policeman? There are two uniforms.”

  “Everyone but the critics and the public expected the play to have a longer run,” Laverne said. “And costumes have to be rotated so they can be cleaned, or the first several rows of the theater would notice. That distinctive dress you see in a play is actually at least two dresses.”

  “I get your drift,” Looper said. He glanced around. “But lots of these clothes, you only have one of.”

  “Oh, maybe some are rented out, or maybe we only received one costume because its mate was damaged. And it isn’t unusual for one or more of the actors to like an article of stage clothing and, after the play closes, keep it for personal use, or maybe as a souvenir. But if you’re looking for a recent police uniform rental, I can’t help you. I’m afraid cops aren’t in great demand on Broadway.”

  “Except outside the theater, to control traffic when the shows let out.”

  Laverne smiled. “I get your drift.”

  They began walking idly back toward the freight elevator.

  “We have all the decorations, patches, and badges to go with the uniforms,” Laverne said. “I’m sure we have a badge exactly like yours.”

  “You’re starting to make me uneasy, Laverne.”

  “I mention it because I’m assuming you suspect someone is impersonating a policeman and committing crimes.”

  “It’s a theory,” Looper said.

  “The Justice Killer?”

  Looper only smiled.

  “He’s the one on everybody’s mind,” Laverne said.

  “Certainly our celebrity killer of the moment.”

  “I don’t like what he’s doing. I don’t see him as a hero. And I think that Adelaide Starr bitch needs a good spanking.”

  Looper’s smile turned to one of gratitude. “That’s pretty much the way we see him. And her.”

  “I’m also letting you know it’s possible he could be passing for a real policeman, right down to the details and identification. That kind of merchandise is available in this city.”

  Looper already knew that, but he said, “You’re not making me feel any better.”

  “Well, that isn’t why you came here.”

  She smiled at him and pushed the button that opened the elevator door.

  Uptown, Bradley Aimes returned from a lunch with his accountant and jogged up the steps to the entrance to his apartment building. He was plenty worried. The IRS, those were people you didn’t mess with. Harv, his accountant, kept telling him not to fret so much about the audit, or he’d get sick. But Harv didn’t know that some of the receipts for business and travel expenses were copies of previous years’ receipts, with the dates artfully altered. Harv was a stickler and would have been shocked to know. But hell, everybody did that kind of thing. It was a guy on a golf course in New Jersey who’d first given Aimes the idea, said he’d been doing it for years. You just had to be careful to use receipts that were more than three years old.

  Well, the IRS agent hadn’t figured that one out yet, and Aimes sure wasn’t going to clue old Harv in. Harv was the kind of guy who spilled his guts about everything. Some of the things he’d said about his wife…

  Ah! There was something showing through the vertical slots in Aimes’s mailbox. Probably ads, or maybe something else from the Internal Revenue. Well, better check. Might be a check. Aimes had a fifty-dollar rebate check coming from when he’d bought some computer equipment last month.

  He crossed the hexagonal-tiled lobby floor and fit his key in the brass mailbox with his name over it.

  That’s when the headache struck.

  An explosion of pain.

  A dizzy sensation. Everything moving, moving.

  What? Stroke or something…?

  Too much strain because of the audit. Harv had warned him about worrying too much. He tried to take a step, but his foot moved through air. Odd. Harv had…

  That’s the ceiling, stairs leading up and up and up. How’d I get on the floor?

  The wind…It’s so cold…How’d I get in a boat?

  I’m only five. I shouldn’t be alone in a boat.

  In the dark.

  Looper had finished his Greek salad and was about to bite into his baklava, when his mobile phone buzzed.

  He’d removed his suit coat and had the phone out of its pocket, lying next to the condiments on the table where he could get to it, so he answered after only two buzzes.

  “Looper,” he said simply, knowing from caller ID that it was Beam.

  “It’s Beam, Loop. We’ve got another Justice killing.” He gave Looper a West Side address, while Looper used sticky fingers to grip a pencil and write on a napkin. “Victim’s name is Bradley Aimes.” He spelled it out for Looper.

  “Isn’t that—”

  “Yeah,” Beam said. “The asshole who killed Genelle Dixon.”

  “Allegedly.” Looper licked his fingers.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Beam said. “Nell’s on the way.”

  Looper was already signaling for a take-out box for his baklava.

  65

  Murder was popular. The narrow vestibule of the brownstone apartment building was so crowded that half a dozen cops and CSU personnel were standing outside. Tenants were directed to a basement entrance usually accessible only to the super. Several windows were open above, and people leaned
out of them, silently watching what was going on below.

  Beam flashed his shield but didn’t go all the way into the vestibule, simply leaned in and saw Bradley Aimes’s body on the bloody tile floor. Aimes was lying on his back, his eyes open and gazing up the stairwell but seeing nothing. Techs were tending to business with their tweezers and brushes and plastic bags. A photographer was sending brilliant flashes over the scene every ten or twelve seconds. The little mustachioed ME, Minskoff, was stooped next to the body. He glanced over and saw Beam.

  “’Nother one,” he said.

  Beam looked and saw a bit of red cloth clutched in the dead man’s right hand. “That what I think it is?”

  “I’d say so,” said the ME. “Haven’t touched it yet.”

  “That a gunshot wound I see in his head?”

  “Certainly is. Bullet went in just behind his right ear.”

  “Thirty-two caliber?”

  “Could be. It’s still in his head, so we’ll know better after the postmortem.”

  On the floor, near the hand clutching the cloth J, was a small brass key. “Mailbox?” Beam asked, pointing to the key.

  “Haven’t touched that, either,” Minskoff said, deftly using the back of his wrist to adjust his glasses. “But his mailbox is open. Looks like he came downstairs to get his mail, but never got a chance to read it. It’s still in the box. Envelope I can see looks like it contains a rebate check. His lucky day.”

  “You notice a lot for an ME.”

  “Too many years hanging around guys like you. I learned to observe. Too much, I might add.” He bent back to his task, signaling that he was now ignoring Beam.

  “I’m observing blood getting on your shoes,” Beam said, backing away from the doorway.

  “Damn it!” he heard Minskoff say.

  “Let’s find the super,” Beam said to Looper, “so we can have a look at Aimes’s apartment while Nell keeps tabs on things here.”

  What they learned as soon as the super opened the door for them was that Aimes had bad taste and didn’t bother keeping things neat.

  Aimes had been a smoker. His apartment reeked of tobacco smoke, and there were ashtrays scattered around, most of them with ashes or filtered cigarette butts in them. Looper closed his eyes and took in a deep and blissful breath, like a man who’d stepped into a perfume factory. The blinds on one of the windows were broken and hanging crookedly. The furniture was a mishmash of styles, a couple of uncomfortable looking Danish chairs, a fat sofa with a rose and vine pattern, an Oriental rug that managed to avoid every color in the sofa. On one wall were some framed photos of a racehorse—“Secretariat,” Looper announced, after closer inspection—and a blown-up color photo of a big sailboat, the racing kind, listing to starboard almost enough to capsize. There was a crew of about half a dozen in the boat. Beam looked closely and saw that one of them was a younger version of the dead man in the lobby.

  “This prick used to have a lot of money,” Looper said. “Did things like race sailboats and kill girls. After the trial, his family still thought he was guilty and disinherited him.”

  “Maybe played the horses, too,” Beam said, looking again at Secretariat. “Trying to regain his lost wealth.”

  After putting on evidence gloves, they searched the apartment and found a sagging, unmade bed, a closet full of expensive but mostly out-of-style clothes. There was a desk drawer full of unpaid bills, past due notices, a checkbook that showed a balance of eighty-seven dollars and change. The checks were written for cash or to places like bars, restaurants, and shops.

  Beam thumbed through the check pad. “Oh-ho! A ten-thousand-dollar deposit front end of every month.”

  “Family buying his absence,” Looper said. “Black sheep, wild goose.”

  “Probably.” Beam glanced around. “Whatever the species, you’d think he could still live better than this on a hundred and twenty thousand a year.”

  “Gambled most of it away, would be my guess.”

  Beam opened the desk’s shallow center drawer. There were some postage stamps in there, pens and pencils, a couple of race track stubs, Mets and Yankees schedules, a shabby deck of Bicycle playing cards. Beam thought Looper’s guess was a good one.

  Looper was looking over Beam’s shoulder. “If he owed anybody money, they’re gonna be outta luck and pissed off.”

  “Reverting to the mean,” Beam said.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s how most gamblers wind up.”

  “Oh, I dunno. You ever been to Atlantic City? Vegas?”

  “Yeah,” Beam said. “I left a little of me both those places.”

  “I hit for nine hundred dollars once on a quarter slot machine,” Looper said. “Three smiling strawberries, straight across the pay line.”

  “That would suggest you’ve got some bad luck coming.” Beam shut the drawer. “Let’s go downstairs and see if Nell’s got anything.”

  What Nell had was a short, serious-looking bearded man wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt, and rubber flip-flop sandals. He appeared to be in his fifties, and had medium length, unkempt gray hair. Despite his casual clothes, there was a professorial air about him. Probably because of the oversized wire-framed glasses.

  Nell and the man were standing at the curb, next to a parked radio car with its red and blue roof-bar lights winking almost unnoticeably in the bright sunlight.

  “This is Vash Kolinsky,” she said, and introduced Beam and Looper.

  “This is a terrible thing, this kind of violence,” Kolinsky said, glancing toward the crime scene. He had a slight middle-European, or maybe Russian, accent.

  “Would you repeat to these detectives what you told me?” Nell asked.

  “You ask nice, not hit me, so sure.” He was grinning—his idea of a joke. “I was playing chess on my laptop up there.” He pointed to a third-floor balcony on a building diagonally across the street. There were potted plants on it that might block a view of anyone sitting there. “My opponent in the Internet chess club, a dummy in Vancouver, is so slow it bores me to play him, so I wait for him to move, and wait and wait, and happen to look over here, toward this building. I see this policeman, and he was there when I first came out on the balcony half an hour before. There was something about him, like he was pretending to look into the parked cars. But I don’t think he was interested in the cars at all. He was up to something, watching for something or someone. Me? I worry. I have family in Kiev. I didn’t leave Russia under the best circumstances. I know policemen, and when something’s not right with them. With this policeman, something wasn’t right.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Beam asked.

  “Mostly, the way he acts. Like there’s more than one thing on his mind. And he had on a jacket, on such a hot day. And his uniform cap didn’t look right, didn’t fit him right.”

  “Did you see him go into the building?” Beam asked.

  “No. But I look away, look back, and he’s gone.”

  “Then what?” Nell asked. She was staring at Beam as if he should pay special attention to Kolinsky’s answer.

  “I move my queen’s pawn two spaces.”

  “Mr. Kolinsky—”

  “Then I hear a bang.”

  “Like a shot?” Beam asked.

  “Could be like a shot. I didn’t pay much attention. This is a noisy street, all the traffic, horns honking, and kids around, they bang on things. I see that dummy in Vancouver has already fallen into my trap, so I go back to playing chess. Then I hear sirens, hear them stop, look back outside, and see something is wrong. More police come. A crowd. I hear loud talk, people yelling back and forth, and I learn someone has been shot. Then I remember the bang.”

  “Do you remember the time?”

  “Exact? No. About one-thirty.”

  “After you realized someone had been shot, did you continue to observe from your balcony?”

  “Yes, I look, see everything. More police, ambulance. Saw the lady detective arrive, then you and you
.”

  “The cop wearing the jacket, did you see him again?”

  “No. He was there before the shooting. Not after.”

  “He could have left through the basement,” Looper said to Beam. “The way we went in to get the super.”

  “That could be,” Kolinksy said. “I wouldn’t have seen him. I wasn’t looking for him.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” Beam asked.

  “No. Someone in uniform, you see the uniform, not the face. He was average man. Not too tall or short or fat or thin. Average man.”

  “Hair color?”

  Kolinsky shrugged. “He had on cap.”

  “Anything about the way he moved?”

  “Like he’s not supposed to be there. That’s why I noticed him in the first place. I have an eye for such things.” Kolinsky looked back up at his balcony. “King’s knight,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I need to get back so I can counter the move of the Vancouver idiot.”

  “Certainly,” Beam said.

  He thanked Kolinsky for his help, then watched him cross the street and enter his building.

  “Sounds like he saw the cop who was at Knee High’s murder,” Nell said.

  “Someone who looked like him, anyway,” Beam said.

  Nell and Looper stared at Beam. “If he wore the jacket to conceal the bulk of a sound suppressor,” Beam said, “he didn’t use it. Kolinsky heard the shot from across the street.”

  “Might have been something else,” Looper said. “Something not related to the murder. Backfire, somebody hitting something with a board or hammer. This is a noisy neighborhood that time of day.”

  “Kolinsky’s a good witness,” Nell said. “I’m sure he’s heard gunfire before and knows what it sounds like. And there’s corroboration. Two tenants on the first floor of Aimes’s building also heard what might have been a shot, at about the same time Kolinsky heard it.”