Nasty Cutter

by Tim O'Mara

  ‘Work friends,’ I said, and motioned for Edgar to keep moving before this guy had any more questions for us.

  When we got to Robert Donne’s apartment, I placed my ear against the door to see if I could hear anything. When I didn’t, I knocked. We waited half a minute and I knocked again, louder this time. No answer. I knocked again, and followed that with a loud, ‘Robby! You in there, buddy? It’s James and Edgar.’

  I half-expected the other two doors on the floor to open up, the tenants wondering who the hell was screaming after their floor mate on a late Saturday afternoon. Neither door opened. I did it again. Louder this time.

  ‘Hey, Robby. Buddy. You OK?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. I turned to Edgar, looked at his laptop bag, and said, ‘Could you get his phone number off that list?’

  Edgar shook his head. ‘I already checked when we were in the car,’ he said. ‘He was the only one without a number. I thought that was kinda weird.’

  ‘Right. Well, looks like we may have wasted a trip.’

  Edgar gave me a sly look. Or as close to sly as Edgar can get. ‘Maybe not, Ray.’

  ‘What does that mean, Edgar?’

  He paused before whispering, ‘You promise you won’t get mad?’

  I looked him square in the eyes. ‘I’m going to get mad if you don’t tell me what you mean.’

  He closed his eyes and reached into his front jeans pocket. I thought he was going to pull out his cell phone. What he did pull out surprised me.

  ‘What’s that for, Edgar?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘Come on, Ray. You know what it’s for.’

  ‘I know what it’s for,’ I said, looking at the lock pick set in his hand. ‘What I mean is why do you have that with you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I brought it with me to Marty Stover’s office. Just in case we needed to get into something that was locked. A closet. A drawer.’

  ‘Knowing that there’d be cops there?’

  ‘Just in case, I said. Hey, you had the one guy upstairs and the lady cop was outside half the time on her phone. I coulda used it if I needed to.’

  I shook my head. ‘You didn’t need to do anything, Edgar.’ I was starting to rethink the idea of bringing him along today, and I told him so.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You don’t want the lock pick?’

  Jesus. ‘Give it to me, Edgar.’

  He did. I rolled it over in my fingers as I mulled over the idea of opening Robert J. Donne’s door. Before I decided, I knocked again and yelled out his name one more time. If there was anyone on the fourth floor in their apartment, they did not make their presence known. Or maybe they’d already called the cops.

  I decided it would be a wise choice to hedge my bets. I went over to both of the other apartments and knocked on the doors. If no one answered: great. If someone did answer, I’d just repeat the same story I told the guy who had buzzed us in. We were friends of Robert’s and were worried about his wellbeing. No one answered and I walked back to Robert’s apartment.

  I looked down at the set of lock pick tools in my hand. I’d used one before. They were pretty handy, truth be told. And pretty much the same size as a small screwdriver, about the same weight. The big difference was that the person using a screwdriver wasn’t usually breaking the law.

  There was that tingling sensation again. The buzz I got when doing something I knew was crossing the line just to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe it would be a better idea to squash the buzz now before I found myself in trouble. Maybe not.

  ‘OK.’ I could hardly believe what I was about to say next. ‘I am just going to open the door. We will look inside – from the doorway – and see what we see.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Unless there’s someone on the other side who needs help, we are not going in.’ Therein lies the difference between ‘breaking and entering’ and just ‘breaking.’ I could just picture myself explaining that one to Uncle Ray. ‘The last thing we need is Buzzer Guy hearing us traipsing around his upstairs neighbor’s apartment without permission. Are we clear on this, Edgar? We are not going inside.’

  Edgar looked like a six-year-old being teased with a wrapped present. ‘I get it, Ray,’ he said. ‘I get it.’ He inched toward the door and motioned with his head. If I listened closer, I was sure I could hear his heartbeat. ‘I’m ready when you are.’

  ‘Maybe even more so,’ I said.

  I inserted the pick into the lock, and with a few twists and turns of the tension wrench, and a slight upwards motion, the door unlocked. How many schoolteachers could do that? I pocketed the tools and waited a few seconds before turning the knob, briefly reconsidering the legality of what I was about to do. Briefly. I turned the knob and held on as I opened the door slowly. It was about a foot open when I yelled, ‘Robby! You home, man?’ Again, no answer.

  I opened the door wide enough to see inside the apartment. To describe the living room as sparsely furnished would not do it justice. There was one couch, a matching chair, and a coffee table. It looked like the place had been robbed of all valuables, but it didn’t have that feel. The wood floor looked as if it had recently been polished, and there was a small pile of books on the coffee table. There was no TV, nothing on the walls. Whoever this Robert J. Donne was, he was not into possessions.

  I could feel Edgar breathing down my neck. Literally.

  ‘What is it, Ray?’ he asked. ‘Whatta ya see?’

  I stepped over and let him get a look inside.

  ‘Man,’ he said. ‘This guy’s got no stuff.’ He turned to me with hopeful eyes and said, ‘Can we check the other rooms?’

  ‘I told you we’re only opening the door, and I meant it. That’s already more than I should have done. He’s not here, and I’m not going to risk our friend downstairs getting suspicious about what’s taking us so long to figure that out.’

  I shut the door to make sure Edgar knew I was serious about this. I never should have opened it to begin with, but no harm was done. I also didn’t learn anything about the guy who happened to have the same name as my father.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  We walked down a flight, and knocked on Buzzer Guy’s door. As we waited for him to answer, I heard the front door downstairs open.

  ‘What’d you find out?’ Buzzer Guy asked as he came to the door. ‘He OK?’

  ‘Not home,’ I said. ‘We’re thinking maybe he just headed out of town without telling anyone, and he’s not answering his phone.’

  Buzzer Guy shook his head. ‘People do all sorts of weird shit, man.’ Spoken like a true New York bartender. ‘Ain’t no crime to disappear for a bit. Fall off the grid, y’know? I feel like doing it myself sometimes.’

  Someone was coming up the stairs. I couldn’t help but hope it was Robert Donne.

  ‘Thanks again for letting us in,’ I said, distracted by the footsteps.

  ‘You want me to tell him to call you if he shows up?’

  I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Edgar, you got a card and a pen?’

  Edgar reached into his laptop bag and pulled out one of each. I almost wrote my real name on the back of Edgar’s business card, but remembered my earlier lie. I wrote the name James Hunter and my cell phone number. Maybe he’d call, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe I’d have to figure out another way to find out who he was. I handed Buzzer Guy the card. The footsteps kept coming.

  ‘Thanks again.’

  ‘No problem, man,’ he said. ‘I hope everything’s cool.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  With my back to the stairs, Buzzer Guy looked over my shoulder and said, ‘Hey, you’re in luck. It’s the girlfriend.’

  I turned and looked into the face of Robert Donne’s girlfriend.

  She did not look nearly as happy to see me as she had that morning.

  ELEVEN

  The three of us now stood outside the building where ‘Robert Donne’ lived. The clouds had opened up a bit, letting some more sun hit the streets. It was noticeabl
y warmer than when we had arrived less than thirty minutes ago. Edgar and I were by his car, while Mrs Robles paced nervously by the steps of the building.

  ‘Edgar,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you head home? I’ll call you later.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I wait around to drive you back to your place? I got nothing going on today, Raymond. Really. Nothing.’

  I looked over at Maria Robles. Her look of surprise a few minutes ago had transformed into one of confusion mixed with fear. We needed to talk, and I could tell she didn’t want to do so in front of Edgar.

  ‘I’ll call you later,’ I repeated, lowering my voice so Mrs Robles couldn’t hear. ‘And I can walk home from here.’

  Edgar wanted to argue more, but he was learning to read the tone of my voice. He knew I was not going to budge from this position.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But call me. You promised.’

  ‘I will.’ I shook his hand. ‘Thanks for all your help today.’ I gave a quick glance over at Maria Robles. ‘I wouldn’t have made these connections – Robert Donne, and now Hector’s mother – without you. You did good.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The rejection was still in his voice. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  As he headed off to his car, I walked over to Mrs Robles.

  ‘There’s a pretty decent diner a few blocks from here,’ I said. ‘Let’s go get some coffee and talk.’

  She nodded silently and followed me. It was starting to get dark.

  ‘I know it sounds like a cliché,’ Maria Robles said. ‘But we didn’t mean for it to happen. It just kind of did.’

  ‘How did you and Marty meet?’ I asked.

  ‘I was doing some temp work at a law firm in Manhattan that he did a lot of business with. I was half reception, half clerical. We’d talk a lot while he waited for my bosses. He could have waited in the other rooms, but he liked to talk. It turned out we were both from Williamsburg. When he found out that I was studying for my real estate license, he paid for the rest of my studies. He called it “an investment.”’

  I took a sip of coffee. The thought had occurred to me that I was sitting across the table from someone the cops would consider a suspect in a murder investigation. But after considering my talk with her that morning, seeing the obvious distress on her and her son, that didn’t seem very likely. But I’d been wrong before.

  ‘How long had he been your landlord?’ I asked.

  ‘About five years,’ she said. ‘That building was my first sale, actually. My family’d been living there for a while when the owner decided he wanted to sell. Marty grew up on that block. When I told him about it, he told the landlord he’d buy the building for the asking price, but only if I brokered the deal. He gave me my start.’

  ‘How long had Marty had the apartment?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Before I met him.’

  ‘And he’d been “Robert J. Donne” for how long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It was something he didn’t tell his family about obviously. He told me a lot that he sometimes needed to be alone. That apartment was where he’d go.’

  ‘When did the affair begin?’ Speaking of things he didn’t tell his family about.

  She waited before answering that question. That question is one you should wait a bit before answering. It basically comes down to admitting at what time did you decide your marriage – and your family – was worth risking.

  ‘A few years ago,’ she began. ‘My husband and I had been having problems for a while. He’s been out of work for years now. He gets the occasional part-time construction job, but mostly it’s me who brings the money into the house.’ She wiped her mouth with her napkin. ‘That hurt him. He’s a proud man. He was a good provider before the economy took a turn.’

  ‘Does he have any idea about you and Marty?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ve been very … discreet. Between temp jobs and the two kids, I have to show apartments at night, mostly. He doesn’t like it, but he knows we need the money, so there was not much he could do. Some nights, I would come see Marty.’

  ‘Why were you there today?’ I asked.

  ‘I wanted to make sure I’d left nothing behind in the apartment. I thought that someone would find out about his properties and check them out.’ She gave me a weird look. ‘I thought it would be the police and obviously didn’t want them to connect me to him in this way. If my husband ever found out, it would kill him.’

  She cringed a little when those words came out of her mouth. Maybe the possibility had just occurred to her that it was not her husband the affair had killed.

  I leaned back into the booth to process all of this. Marty Stover was having an affair with the mother of one of my kids. The kid I got involved with Marty’s charity. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. I thought back to the time when Marty had asked me if I knew of any kids who’d benefit from the work Bridges to Success did. ‘Only about a few hundred,’ I had told him. It was his idea to pick one from the area he’d grown up in. When I’d told him Hector lived on the same block he’d grown up on, he seemed genuinely surprised and thrilled. Now, if I had to guess, it seemed like he’d known it all along and made me think it was my idea to get Hector involved.

  ‘Marty even helped out with our rent,’ Maria Robles said. ‘During those months when things were especially tough for us, he let me pay less than what we owed. I do the family bills, so my husband wouldn’t know the difference. Some months Marty even told me not to pay anything.’ She stopped as her eyes filled with tears. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘I was sleeping with a man who paid my family’s rent. I sound like a whore.’

  She started crying full out now. Because she thought she sounded like a whore? Because Marty’s death was going to affect her family financially? Or maybe, the nicer side of me thought, she actually felt something deeper for Marty. He was a charming guy. He was old enough to be her father, but charming nonetheless. And with him helping out her family, maybe she had fallen for him.

  I pulled another napkin from the dispenser and handed it to her. I followed that gesture with, ‘You don’t sound like a whore, Maria. You sound like a mother looking out for her family. Unless you’re going to tell me you only had the affair with him because of what he could do for your family?’

  ‘No,’ she said with a sharpness I hadn’t expected, wiping her eyes with the napkin. ‘He was a good man. Maybe I loved him, maybe not. But he was a good man. He helped people. He helped us.’

  ‘Then stop being so hard on yourself,’ I said.

  She took a couple of deep breaths. ‘But what will the police say when they find out? Don’t they always look for stuff like this when someone’s murdered?’

  ‘Maybe they won’t find out.’

  That seemed to surprise her. ‘Aren’t you going to tell them?’ she asked. ‘Your uncle being who he is, don’t you—?’

  ‘I don’t have to do – or say – anything to my uncle. They’re going to find out he owned those buildings, but as far as me telling them about your relationship with Marty, I don’t see how that’s going to help them solve his murder.’ A thought occurred to me. ‘You’re sure your husband knew nothing about the affair? Jealous husbands make great murder suspects.’

  That shook her up a bit. Good. It was meant to.

  ‘I don’t see how he could know. Like I said, we were very discreet, and I always had a good reason to be out of the house.’

  ‘Then say nothing unless you’re asked. The cops may come around and talk to some of Marty’s tenants, but they’re not going to be looking for a secret lover.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘Do what you were going to do.’ I couldn’t quite believe I was saying this. But if the cops did find out about her affair with Marty, they’d be all over the family. I’ve seen what that can do to families, to husbands and wives. And to their kids. There’s no returning to normal after something like that. ‘Go back to the apartment. Make sure there’s nothing at the place connecting you to Marty.�
��

  ‘What about the neighbors? The guy you were talking to?’

  ‘Does he know your name?’

  She gave that some thought. ‘I think he just knows me as the woman who comes by Robert Donne’s apartment.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t know much and just assumed you were his girlfriend. Hell, he thought Marty’s name was Robert Donne. He’s not going to be much help besides the fact that he can prove Marty had an apartment his wife and son didn’t know about.’

  She took a sip of coffee and held the warm cup between her hands.

  ‘I feel like such a bad person,’ she said. ‘Now that I’ve admitted it out loud.’

  ‘Murder has a way of making people feel like that,’ I said. ‘We want to make it go away somehow. We question our involvement and ask ourselves what we could have done differently to change things.’

  She put her cup down. ‘You sound like you’ve been there.’

  I didn’t answer that. I just nodded knowingly. Truth was, I didn’t know shit. It just looked like I did sometimes. I knew what almost getting killed felt like. I knew what losing someone close to me felt like. Right now it probably looked like I completely believed that Maria Robles’s husband knew nothing about her affair with Marty. Who knew what he knew? What he was capable of?

  I finished up my coffee and put five dollars down on the table. As I stood up, I said, ‘Go do what you have to do back at the apartment, Maria. Then go home. Be with your family.’

  She stood. ‘You’re not mad at me?’

  ‘It’s not my place to be mad at you. You and Marty were adults. You did what you did. It could get a lot worse if his wife found out about you. That would be more than she could handle.’ Before I let her off the hook completely, I added, ‘This doesn’t mean I think it’s OK. You’ve got two kids at home to think about.’

  ‘I think about them all the time,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘They’re your priority right now,’ I said.

  ‘They always have been, Mr Donne.’

  ‘I just meant that right now is a real good time to focus on them. And your husband.’