by Blake Banner
It wasn’t a landing. It was a room. It was stark and cold, with sparse, old furniture that exemplified the worst of the ’80s. There was a single, large window on the right. The drapes were open and the glass was black. Beneath the window there was a TV. It was off, angled across the room to a couple of couches set at right angles to each other around a nasty pine coffee table with a glass top. Teddy was sitting on the couch facing me. He was frozen, staring wide-eyed. I aimed the gun at his head and moved up the rest of the stairs. He watched me without speaking.
A passage ran down to my left, opposite the TV. In the passage, there were two doors. The one at the far end I guessed was the bathroom; the one half way down would be the bedroom. I looked back at Teddy. He looked terrified.
“Where is she?”
He didn’t answer. His breathing became heavier and he swallowed.
“Where is she, Teddy?”
When he spoke his voice was a rasp. “Who?”
I stepped closer to him, stared hard into his eyes, studied the texture of his skin, noted the rise and fall of his chest. “You need to understand something, Teddy. Detective Dehan is not just my partner. She’s the woman I love. I will do whatever I have to do to save her life. If I lose my job, go to jail for the rest of my life, that is fine by me. Where is she?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What was that noise downstairs? It sounded like a bomb…”
I jerked my gun at him. “Stand up.”
He got to his feet with his hands held at shoulder height. I waved him toward the passage. “The bedroom.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to blow your head off and ransack this building if you don’t do what I say, Teddy. I have probably already lost my job. Don’t push me any further!”
“OK, OK… Stay calm. This is all a misunderstanding. I will cooperate.”
He inched around the coffee table and moved toward the bedroom. I stayed close. He stopped in front of the door. “I’m going to open it, OK?”
“Do it.”
He turned the handle and eased it open, then reached in and flipped on the light. “Shall I go in?” He raised his hands again.
“Go in.”
He went in a few steps and I followed. It was as sparse and cold as the living room. The bed was made. There was no room under it for anything. There was a small wardrobe. I said, “Open it,” but I knew she wasn’t in there. He opened it and there was just a few shirts, pants and jackets.
I could feel my heart pounding, close to panic. My belly was burning. I fought to keep control, to try and understand. “The bathroom.”
He nodded, hurried to the bathroom door and pushed it open. There was an airing cupboard which he opened without being told. It was empty, as was the half-sized bath. I growled at him, “Where is she, Teddy?”
“I swear to God I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective!”
I felt a chill creep over my skin. I was terrified at what I was about to do. My voice wasn’t my own. It was cold and quiet. “I am going to count to three. Then I start shooting. Where is she?”
His eyes were wide. I saw his pupils contract, and now his skin went pale and pasty. “There is nowhere else in the house! What else can I show you? She isn’t here!”
“One…”
His voice began to rise. “What can I do? Tell me! For God’s sake! I haven’t got her! You can see…”
“Two…”
“She isn’t here! For Christ’s sake! How can I convince you…?”
“Three.”
I leveled the gun at his head. He screamed, “Wait! The cellar!”
I paused.
“Where we keep the beer barrels. If I show you, and she’s not there, will you believe me? I don’t know what else I can do. You’ve made a mistake.”
“Shut up. Show me the cellar.”
He moved past me to the stairs and I followed him down. We went through the kitchen and out to the darkness of the bar. The streetlamps gleamed eerily off the shattered glass and the Jag sitting there, with its dark windows and the door hanging open. He stared at the scene of wreckage and chaos with his mouth open. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “You’re insane.”
I snarled, “You’d better believe it. The cellar.”
He stared at me, swallowed and moved to a door that stood beside the bathrooms and was marked ‘private’. In the distance I could hear sirens. He fumbled in his trouser pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys. I watched his hands as he slipped one of the keys in the lock and opened the door. It gave onto a small, narrow landing. He hit the switch and the light revealed a short flight of wooden steps that led down to a concrete floor. There I could just make out a stack of steel barrels.
“Go down.”
He nodded and climbed down the stairs. At the bottom he backed up a little and watched me follow. I stood for a moment, looking around. There were stacks of crates: soft drinks, bottled beer, water. There were stacks of twelve-packs of cans, cartons of wine and against the far wall a wooden wine rack stacked with dusty bottles.
I watched him a moment. He swallowed three times in rapid succession. He looked like he might start crying. I gave something that might have been a rueful smile. He shook his head and spread his hands. “You can see she’s not here. Honest to God, Detective. I have no idea where she is.”
I nodded. After a moment I said, “Teddy’s Late Night Bar.”
He blinked.
“Your Australian barman was worried that we were after your license, because you stay open after you’re supposed to close most nights.”
He went very still. “We close the door. Just a few regulars shooting the breeze.”
I took a couple of steps into the room, staring around me. “Tonight you closed early. By eleven thirty, when I arrived to see Wayne, you were shut. What made you close early, Teddy?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “They’re not worth it, Detective. Even the sweet ones are just whores.”
My head exploded. The pain was shattering. Then a concrete wall hit me in the face and I knew I had fallen to the floor. A voice in my head told me not to let go of my gun, but a crushing pain in my hand made me cry out and I felt him levering the pistol from my fingers.
“Get up.”
I looked up at him.
He was expressionless. There was no anger and no fear. He said again, “Get up.”
I got to my knees. My hand was throbbing. The room swayed and rocked and I thought for a moment I might vomit. I steadied myself on a crate of beer.
He said, “That’ll do fine.”
I pushed myself to my feet. “If I’m going to die,” I said, “I won’t do it on my knees.”
He snorted. It might have been a laugh.
I said, “Is Dehan alive? Have you killed her?”
He nodded. “Yes, but don’t worry. You’ll be joining her soon. I’ve never killed a man before. It’ll be a new experience. A cop, too. Two cops in one night. That’s something.”
I felt empty. It was as though the floor fell away from under my feet. We don’t realize it, but we all live with pictures of our past and our future crowding our minds. The moments, hours, days and even years that have passed and are to come are permanent occupants of our minds. They give our lives coherence and meaning. In that one, brief instant, all of my future moments disintegrated. My future, my life, lost its meaning. All I could do was stare at him and try to make sense of what he had said. It had been a throw away comment, but with it, with that casual ease, he had thrown away Dehan’s life, and mine with it.
Dehan was dead.
NINETEEN
He pointed at the wine rack. “It’s not as sophisticated as it looks.” He gave an almost apologetic laugh. “All I did was take the door off the annex and put some casters on the wine rack. Give it a push.”
I frowned at him. “Is she in there?”
He nodded and grinned. “Wayne likes his spot by
the river. I prefer it here. It’s…” He shrugged. “I don’t know, more cozy. Push.”
It was unreal. I felt that reality was slipping away from me. I shook my head. “Am I going to see her…?”
He raised his eyebrows high on his forehead and smiled. “Yeah! Go on. Push.”
It was too much for my brain to grasp. She was just a few feet away from me, on the other side of the wine rack. Every instinct in my body told me to go to her. But I had seen many times what strangulation does to somebody, and to see Dehan like that was unimaginable. All I had was the past: her looking at me from behind her shades, tying up her hair behind her head, raising her sunglasses to squint at me with that beautiful trace of a smile. I needed to preserve those memories, but I also needed to be close to her, however she looked now.
I moved to the wine rack and pushed. It rolled easily to the side, revealing a gaping door with an old, peeling frame. There was a soiled mattress on the floor, a short coil of green nylon cord, a chair. Dehan was not there.
I felt a hard shove in my back and I staggered forward. I turned, knowing what was coming next: the crack of the Smith & Wesson, the crushing impact of the hot slug on my chest, the burning, searing pain. I had felt it before, but this time it would be terminal.
There was a scream. It filled the small room. It was like a banshee exploding from the gates of hell. I saw the muzzle of the pistol pointing at me. I saw it spit fire and kick. At the same time I saw Dehan, tall, lanky and wild, leaping at Teddy through the doorway, gripping the barrel of the automatic with her left hand and pummeling his belly with her right fist.
Next thing, she had levered the weapon from his fingers and smashed her right foot into his gut. He staggered back and crashed into a stack of red Coke crates, spilling them and shattering them in a spreading pool of foaming black liquid.
I said, “Dehan…” but my throat was too tight to let the word out.
She threw the gun on the floor. It fired and I stared at it for what seemed like an hour but was less than a second as a plume of dust erupted in slow-motion from the wall, where the slug had buried itself. I looked back at Dehan. She had her fists balled and was advancing on Teddy, who was crawling backward, trying to get to his feet. I saw blood trickling down his arm from where he had fallen on the shattered bottles. And, as he struggled away from her, I saw the jagged glass edge of a broken bottleneck.
I said, “Dehan, no, wait…”
But it was like a nightmare where you need to call out, but your throat is paralyzed. He scrambled to his feet and rushed her, swinging the cruel glass blade at her face. She weaved back and it missed her. Three jabs followed into his face, left, right, left, and she was roaring at him, “Come on! You want to strangle me, you piece of shit? Come on! Do it!”
He was bleeding from the nose and his eyes were wild. He stormed at her. I watched the blade miss her again by an inch as she delivered a right cross to his jaw. His leg wobbled and he staggered back three steps. She screamed at him again. “Come on! What’s wrong with you? You’re the big man! You’re the killer! You get off killing women! Come on! Kill me!”
Upstairs I heard the wail of sirens, loud. They slowed, seemed to stab the air a couple of times. I snapped out of my trance. It had been just a couple of seconds. But it was a couple of seconds too long. I bent, picked up the pistol and stepped out. I aimed the gun at Teddy and said, “Freeze. It’s over. Put down the bottle.”
Dehan glared at me. There was rage and resentment in her eyes. She wanted to take him. I ignored her and focused on Teddy. He was swaying and panting. He was still holding the broken bottleneck. I said, “Drop it, Teddy. Let it go. Lie face down on the floor. It’s over. Wayne is dead. We know everything.”
He blinked. “Wayne?”
“He’s on his way to the ME right now. They’ve seen my car. They’re coming in. Put it down, Teddy.”
He frowned. “Wayne?”
I coughed, gathered my voice and shouted, “Down here! In the cellar! Detectives Stone and Dehan!”
Then I saw Teddy’s face and I knew it was too late. It twisted into an ugly mask and he screamed. It was not a word. It was a primal, bestial, terrible noise and he rushed Dehan. I saw her eyes go wide and her mouth open. I fired at his head and watched the slug explode in red dust against the wall. By the time I’d pulled back the hammer again he was on her. The bottle plunging in, in a low thrust at her belly.
It was too fast to follow, too fast for thought. She had stepped to her left. The bottle had torn her blouse, but she was behind him now. His wrist was in her right hand, but her left arm was in a lock around his neck, and in an instant her right hand had released his wrist and was pressing the back of his head. She jerked and he went limp. She let go of him and he dropped to the floor in a strangely unnatural heap.
She stared at me. She said, automatically, “I did it without thinking. I had to stop him.”
I nodded. “He had to be stopped.”
I stepped over to her and put my arms around her, whispering over and over, to her and to myself, “You’re alive. Dear God, you’re alive.”
I felt her arms around my waist, squeezing tight, and she started to sob, warm, living tears into my shoulder. On the wooden stairs I heard the tramp of feet, and the inspector’s voice shouting, “John? Carmen? Are you there?”
I ignored him. I just held her, and a moment later I heard his voice again, no longer shouting but gasping, “Dear God, what in the name of hell…?”
I kept my eyes firmly closed and whispered again, “Thank God you’re alive…”
EPILOGUE
The inspector had his window open. The sky was very fresh and blue, and the birds in the plane trees and the oaks on Storey Avenue were getting a little over excited. But it was OK. They were getting a kick out of being alive, and that was something I could relate to just then.
I wasn’t sitting at the desk. Today I was an honored guest in his office, so I had one of his blue armchairs under the window, and a cool breeze was touching my face. Dehan had another armchair and the inspector was watching me from his big black leather seat, with a small frown of what I like to think was admiration.
“Well, John, I guess we all owe you an apology. You were right and we were all wrong. But, what I don’t understand is… well…” He made an elaborate shrug, opened his eyes wide and concluded, “…anything!”
Dehan smiled at me. “I have to say I’m pretty confused too. Who was doing the killing? Was it Jimmy, Wayne or Teddy? Or all three?”
Before I could answer the inspector nodded and added, “And, how did you know?”
I took a deep breath. “Well, the point is, as I kept telling Dehan, most of the time I didn’t know. I had the feeling right from the start that we were being maneuvered through a rat’s maze toward a conclusion that Wayne wanted us to reach. And it seemed pretty obvious to me that, if that was the conclusion he wanted us to reach, it was the wrong conclusion. So, I didn’t know, but everybody else thought they did know.”
He made a face like a shrug and said, “There were things that troubled you from the start. Yet, Wayne seemed to answer those doubts…”
I nodded. “Wayne was smart. If he hadn’t been so self obsessed…”
The inspector glanced at a file on his desk. “His therapist at Rikers said he was a narcissistic sociopath.”
“Yeah, that’s no surprise. If he had directed his attention more to what he was doing and less to how he looked and sounded when he was doing it, he might actually have achieved something. He enjoyed the game of playing with the cops and feeling he was smarter than us.
“But he was sloppy and lazy. For a start, the place where he said he lay and watched the murder take place made no sense. There was a comfortable, grassy knoll where he could have lain and been invisible from the road. And if you come through that gate, as he said he did, the path takes you right to that spot. There was no reason for him to go and lie on those rocks and prickly bushes.”
I paused, ga
thering my thoughts. “The fact that he then went to the trouble of explaining it, when it simply made no sense, told me he had gone away and thought it through and decided he needed to explain it to me. That meant one thing and one thing only, he was manipulating us. So I had to ask myself the question.”
The inspector frowned and nodded. “Why would he want to manipulate us? I see.”
I shook my head and saw Dehan smile. I said, “No, I try not to ask why, inspector. Why is too open. I asked myself, what: what would make him try to manipulate us? When you ask it like that, the answer leaps out at you.”
Dehan raised a hand. “Hang on, Stone. Aren’t we getting a bit too rarified here? He was simply covering the fact that he had been at the very spot where Angela died. He was covering the fact that he killed her.”
“Sure, and that is true. But it leads you back to the very first question. What made him tell us he had information in the first place? If he’d just kept his mouth shut nobody would ever have suspected he was there at all. A couple of years and he would have been out and nobody the wiser. The question was, what would drive him to tell us he had information in the first place, connect himself with the murders, but make it seem he was a witness?”
She made a face and grunted. “Yeah, that was the circle I was trapped in.”
“He needed us to know that he was there. He made that very clear from the start. And the fact that he lied about the place where he witnessed it from, made it clear to me that he had actually been on the grassy knoll, either killing her himself, or watching it.” I sighed. “Now, here is where it got a bit tricky. I began to feel there had to be more than one person involved. If he was just protecting himself, why draw attention to himself at all? He would only place himself at the scene if he was confident he could put somebody else in the frame.”