Fear the Night n-5

by John Lutz

  “Our beggar man?” Repetto asked. He’d been rousted out of bed and his hair was recklessly combed.

  “’Fraid so,” Birdy said. “He didn’t have a dime on him, and the Salvation Army woulda turned away his clothes. We don’t have an ID yet. Died sometime between ten and midnight last night. He was shot once in the chest, dead center through the heart.”

  “The ME said he was dead when he fell,” Meg said.

  Repetto squinted and peered up and down the block. It was early, and people were still asleep. The scene reminded him of a stage set before the actors appeared, other than the mournful supporting cast of onlookers on the opposite sidewalk. “Nobody called this in until this morning?”

  “That’s how it went,” Meg said. “A woman in an apartment at the end of the block’s the one who broke the ice. She said she heard what sounded like a shot a little before midnight. Didn’t think much of it and went back to sleep, then got to worrying this morning when she was taking a shower. About the time she called it in, a cleaning woman going to work early found the body and used her cell phone to call the police.”

  “The midnight shot dovetails with the approximate time of death,” Repetto said.

  “When we talk to people in the buildings around here that have apartments, we’ll find more who heard the shot,” Birdy said confidently. “They don’t like getting involved, but when they learn they weren’t the first to talk to the police, and won’t have to make a statement or testify, they’ll open up some. Like always.”

  Repetto simply grunted his agreement. The neighborhood was still waking up. The knot of people that had gathered on the other side of the street had finally dispersed, now that the body had been removed. The last of them, a woman walking a small, poodlike dog on a short leash, disappeared into a building diagonal from where the body had lain. An occasional car passed, headlights still glowing even though it was light out. Half a dozen pedestrians were visible down the block, near the intersection. A tall woman wearing incredibly high-heeled boots and low-cut jeans strode past across the street, staring straight ahead and moving fast, as if she had to be some place soon.

  “How do women get into jeans that fit like that?” Birdy asked, watching the woman. He was shaking his head in disapproval at the same time he was making his habitual pecking motion. It made him look like one of those wobbling dashboard dolls that didn’t stop motion until after the car had been parked awhile.

  “Last time I heard that question,” Meg said, “I was sixteen.”

  A patrol car slid into a parking space behind Repetto’s Buick, and four uniformed cops climbed out. They walked toward the three detectives. Meg noted that the sun was high enough to have ruined the silhouetted gunfighter effect.

  One of the uniforms was Nancy Weaver. Meg thought she looked pretty good for such an early hour. Or maybe she hadn’t slept at all last night. A woman like Weaver, who knew where she’d been, what she’d touched?

  Meg looked over and saw that Birdy was smiling at her, watching her watching Weaver.

  The smile widened. “Thinking catty thoughts?”

  “Like maybe I’ll claw your throat out,” Meg said.

  Weaver nodded good morning to Repetto and gave him a big grin.

  “I’m glad you’re on this,” Repetto told her.

  The bastard!

  “Fill Weaver in so she can instruct the others,” Repetto told Birdy.

  Birdy winked at Meg and moved about twenty feet away so he could talk privately with Weaver.

  “Familiar neighborhood,” Repetto said to Meg, who’d been watching Birdy and Weaver.

  Meg realized what Repetto had said and refocused her attention. “We’re only a few blocks from the Candle in the Night Theater.”

  “In this city,” Repetto said, “the Sniper had plenty of beggar man targets to choose from.”

  “You think there’s a connection between our dead beggar and where the Sniper left his last theater seat message?” Meg asked. Repetto was going somewhere with this, and she was intrigued.

  “Could be.”

  Waiting. Letting me run with it. “Possibly the Sniper lives in the neighborhood,” she suggested. “This particular beggar was convenient.”

  “I doubt it,” Repetto said. “Bad guys of all sorts tend not to foul their own nests. It’s human nature, even with the inhumane.”

  “Then maybe it was like you said. There are plenty of beggars to shoot. The Sniper was in the neighborhood to see the play and plant his message, and he didn’t have to go far to settle on his next victim.”

  “He didn’t kill on the same night he planted the theater seat note,” Repetto said. “He had to have spent time in the neighborhood, seen the beggar man more than once, or he wouldn’t have known his haunts and habits, where he’d likely be so he could be shot.”

  “The victim might have had some connection with somebody in the play,” Meg said.

  Repetto didn’t answer. She looked at him. He was still regarding her with a faint, anticipatory smile. Wherever he wanted to go with this conversation, they weren’t yet all the way there.

  Meg felt something cold walk up her spine. “The Sniper was hanging around the theater to see us! He’s watching us. The bastard is watching us. Maybe he has been for some time.”

  Repetto nodded, and the smile stayed but his eyes changed. “Maybe he’s watching us right now.”

  Canvassing the neighborhood where the beggar man had died garnered nothing, other than substantiation of the time when the Sniper squeezed the trigger. Half a dozen apartment dwellers reported hearing the shot, and at the same time-a few minutes before midnight. Because of the acoustics of New York, the echoes and reverberations of the shot made it impossible to home in on its source. By the end of the day, they still hadn’t found it.

  That evening Repetto drove to Candle in the Night, arriving an hour before curtain, when most of the cast would be present. He was armed with morgue photos of the dead homeless man. They’d done their usual good work at the morgue of making such photos as bearable to view as possible, and these were more pathetic than gruesome. The dead man appeared shrunken and forlorn, as if he were holding back a lifetime of tears that would never be shed.

  Straithorn seemed annoyed by Repetto’s presence, but he made the best of it and took him around to show the morgue photos to cast and crew.

  There was no reaction until Repetto was introduced to Tiffany Taft, who was fitting herself into a sequined black dress. Tiffany smiled at Repetto as she took a deep breath, exhaled, and with perfect timing a woman from wardrobe zipped up the dress’s back. Repetto returned the smile, thinking Tiffany was one beautiful young woman.

  When Straithorn and the woman from wardrobe left, and they were alone in Tiffany’s small dressing room, Tiffany sat on a bench in front of a vanity with a many-lightbulbed makeup mirror that looked like something out of A Star is Born. She worked her dainty feet into black high-heeled shoes. She had perfectly turned ankles.

  “I happen to be a theater buff,” Repetto said, “and I think on looks alone, you’ll go far.”

  Again the incandescent smile. “That’s so nice of you, Detective. .? ”

  “Repetto.”

  “But it takes acting talent, too.”

  “I’m sure you have it.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “You might not think so after I show you these.” He handed her the morgue photos.

  “These are of the homeless man who was shot last night?” she said, accepting them.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  When she looked at the top photo, she gasped.

  Repetto studied her eyes and knew she’d recognized the dead man. He waited.

  “I don’t know his name,” Tiffany said. She seemed genuinely moved by the man’s death. Repetto reminded himself that she was an actress.

  “It’s Joseph DeLong,” he said. “He was identified by his fingerprints.”

  “He was a criminal?”

  “No, h
e was in the military. His prints were on file.” Repetto didn’t mention the two pandering convictions.

  “Joseph. .” Tiffany looked at herself in the mirror, then in the mirror at Repetto. “I never asked his name. I should have.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Only as a homeless person who hung out in the neighborhood. After curtain, some of us usually go to a restaurant over on Twelfth Street and have a late snack. I usually left something for. . Joseph. . in a carryout box.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “No, I left it on top of the trash basket on the corner. He often rooted through its contents. I put the box right where he could reach it. He was almost always outside the restaurant when we came out. He stayed away until we were gone, like he was afraid to talk to us. Or like he was. . ”

  “Too proud?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you never attempted to speak to him?”

  “No. Never.” She sounded defensive.

  Repetto smiled at her. “You showed him kindness. There’s no reason to think you should have done more. I’m sure he was grateful.”

  She bent down and put on her other shoe.

  Repetto wanted to make sure of what she was saying. “So Joseph was a fixture in the neighborhood, especially around the restaurant. And he regarded you as a benefactor.”

  “I guess he could count on me for food, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I do mean that, and it’s something.” Repetto had the information he wanted confirmed. The beggar man was a neighborhood fixture, and was usually outside the restaurant where Tiffany dined. Repetto wondered if the late and un-mourned Joseph DeLong had been in love with Tiffany. Probably, he thought.

  He stood up. “I’ll leave you to concentrate on your performance. It’s been a real pleasure, and I’m sure I’ll see you uptown onstage sometime in the near future.”

  She handed him back the morgue photos, having looked at only the top one, and with her smile melted him in a way he’d have thought unlikely. “I hope you’re right,” she said. “And I hope whoever killed Joseph … you find him.”

  “We will,” Repetto told her. “You can be sure of it.”

  He didn’t tell her she and her beauty and generosity had been the magnetism that had kept Joseph near, and made him predictable prey.

  “Good-bye, Detective Repetto.”

  He told her good-bye, then almost gave her the traditional Broadway Good luck. “I won’t say it,” he said, pausing at the dressing room door.

  She looked puzzled, then grinned. “Oh, that!”

  “Your legs are too beautiful.”

  Another breathtaking smile. This time with a touch of shyness.

  Joseph DeLong hadn’t had a chance.

  42

  The view from the brick passageway between the leather goods shop and the closed Zippy Dog fast food restaurant remained the same. People passed without glancing into the shadowed passage, and if they did chance a look, all they saw were a few rubber trash containers and a pile of black plastic trash bags that had evaded months of pickup. The bags were old enough to be beyond odor, though a few rats that had scurried away must have scented something of value in them.

  What the Night Sniper saw from where he sat, with his back resting against the mound of plastic bags, was the view across the street, into a similar but wider and well-lit passageway. Opening into that passageway was the unmarked steel door that he knew was the stage door of the Bellam Theater. Right now the door was closed flush with the building’s brick side wall. Its flat gray surface was unbroken. It had no knob and could be opened only with a key or from the inside.

  Truly, no one sees the homeless, the Sniper reflected, slumped against the pile of trash bags. No one had so much as glanced at him as he’d shuffled down the street and entered the dark and dangerous access.

  Before he’d discovered the passageway, he had taken a position on the sidewalk, seated on his folded thin coat, his chipped ceramic cup set out for donations. He had his feebly scrawled AIDS sign out, which not only elicited sympathy but also seemed to repel the police, but hours on the sidewalk had garnered him only a few dollars in his cup.

  Not that he cared, sitting there watching New York stream past. His clothes were ragged and artfully stained, but clean against his flesh. They were the only part of his wardrobe he didn’t send out to be cleaned, but washed and dried in his condo’s laundry room off the main bedroom’s bath. He carefully maintained the garments’ threadbare, quasi-soiled condition and was sure they’d pass muster as throwaways even if someone with a trained eye looked closely at him.

  Of course, in the evenings he’d spent on the sidewalk across the street from the Bellam Theater, no one had looked closely at him. That was the genius of his disguise. That and the fact that no one who knew him would ever dream he’d be sitting on the sidewalk in such a subservient position, begging.

  Seeming to beg.

  During the day he worked out of his condo or his Wall Street office, where he’d become one of the most highly regarded money managers in Manhattan. In only a few years he’d made dozens of clients rich, and himself even richer. Now he led the life of an Epicurean in the city made for dissolution, enjoying women, clothes, fine liquors, art collecting, and his secretly acquired gun collection, the basis of which had come to him by way of Adam Strong. He was now a model man, leading a model life of urban sophistication.

  But occasionally he glimpsed his younger self on the street, and when he looked in the mirror he sometimes saw the scars and felt the unhealed wounds of the past. And felt the rage.

  For a moment he considered using his vantage point as his sniper’s nest. A victim taken from street level. Something new and puzzling for Repetto and his detectives. So difficult for them, in the game that kept changing.

  Then he decided the rooftop he’d scouted out and accessed twice, easily, would be the safest course of action, and would almost guarantee his escape. There were unacceptable risks here at street level. People were unpredictable. Coincidence might gain the upper hand. Besides, he couldn’t be sure of the echoing effect of the rifle’s report down low, how difficult it would be to guess its origin.

  Play it safe. Take more of what luck has granted you. In everything, it’s imperative that luck and genius be friends and accomplices, so each can alleviate the others’ shortcomings.

  He settled deeper into the concealing mound of formless plastic bags. They gave for him, welcoming him, their contents cooperating in his merging with them so he’d be invisible in the shadows. A feeling of power, of control, surged through him. What he attempted, he accomplished.

  In the game whose rules he set and employed, and in which his pawns and opponents had no choice but to play, he was fate itself.

  He smiled as he continued his watch on the Bellam Theater’s stage door, waiting, accumulating information on his target’s haunts and habits, becoming one with his prey.

  She had no idea that her future had been decided, and that it was brief.

  Meg sat in the unmarked across the street from Alex’s apartment building. She wasn’t sure why she’d driven here instead of home, but that shouldn’t surprise her, because she had no idea how she really felt about Alex.

  She’d received another e-mail from him this morning, imploring her to see him again, this time in an unofficial capacity. She’d caught herself smiling after reading it, and deleted it immediately and left to meet Repetto and Birdy.

  Who did Alex think he was? He’d been a cop, and he knew she was a cop. There was no way she should even consider beginning the kind of relationship he obviously had in mind. She also didn’t care for the way he assumed he could push her buttons and she’d respond. Meg figured she’d had her share of that kind of love.

  Yet here she was with her motor idling-the car’s motor-and the air conditioner keeping the heat and humidity at a minimum. Meg had figured out which of the windows facing the street were Alex’s, and saw that a light was on inside th
e apartment’s living room. She was about to look away when a figure passed the windows, moving in a way that, even from this distance, left no doubt it was Alex.

  Now she couldn’t drive away. Couldn’t look away. She knew why. She had to find out if he was alone.

  An idiot. I’m acting like a jealous idiot. As if he doesn’t have a perfect right to see whoever he chooses.

  Five minutes passed, and Meg’s neck was getting stiff from the way she had to sit to stare up at Alex’s windows.

  There he was again! Alone.

  But the glimpse wasn’t enough. Meg stayed.

  A minute or so later, Alex crossed the windows going the opposite direction. Alone again. Three times. That should be enough even for the most masochistic, jealous fool. And though she’d seen him only briefly each time and hadn’t absorbed detail from this distance, she was sure he was fully dressed.

  She looked away, raising an arm and using her right hand to massage the back of her neck, then put the car into drive.

  A final glance up as she was about to pull away from the curb stopped her.

  Alex had crossed the window again-she was sure it was Alex. And he’d been carrying a long object. A rifle or shotgun?

  A crutch? A closed umbrella? A saw?

  This is stupid! This is goddamned stupid!

  Enough!

  She concentrated on the view out the windshield and accelerated away from the curb.

  A horn blasted and made her jump when the car had traveled only about ten feet. A cab roared past her with another, abbreviated note of its horn, its driver chastising her with an automotive expletive.

  She hadn’t checked the mirror or glanced over her shoulder before pulling out into traffic.

  More careful now, remembering to look before stepping down on the accelerator pedal, she joined a string of vehicles that had just been set free by the signal at the corner.

  Part of the flow of traffic now, Meg relaxed somewhat.

  She was sure she hadn’t seen Alex carrying a rifle.

  In retrospect, she couldn’t even be sure she’d been looking at the right window. The man-if it had been a man-carrying the long object might not even have been Alex.