Читать книгу Darker Than Night - John Lutz - Страница 14

Quinn was up late at the kitchen’s tiny gray Formica table, smoking a cheap cigar and studying the Elzner murder file. Rather, the copy of the file, which Renz had provided.

He was drinking beer from a thick, clouded tumbler that looked as if it had been stolen from a diner years ago. The foam head had disappeared except for a light, sudsy film along the glass’s sides, and the beer was warm.

Quinn exhaled cigar smoke and leaned back away from the open file. There really wasn’t much of value inside it. Sure, there were things that didn’t quite add up, that suggested someone other than Martin Elzner had fired the shots that killed Elzner and his wife. But almost always in cases of violent death, there were such loose ends, questions that would never be answered. Lives that were stopped abruptly left them behind as if to haunt and not be forgotten. If you were a cop long enough, you didn’t expect to ever understand everything.

He propped the cigar in a cracked saucer he was using as an ashtray, then took a sip of beer. There was one thing, though, that stuck like a bur in his mind. The groceries. The Elzners must have bought them before the stores closed, then were putting them away when the shooting occurred. But no one in any of the surrounding grocery stores or all-night delis, where they might have bought groceries, recalled them being there. Of course it was possible they’d shopped just down the block from their apartment and not been recognized. Or had been recognized and forgotten. People didn’t go around paying attention to everything around them in case they might be quizzed later.

So, maybe the groceries were going to remain another of those unanswered questions.

But there was also the gun, a Walther .38-caliber semiautomatic. It was a large enough caliber to make plenty of noise, yet no one in neighboring apartments had heard shots.

That, too, was possible, especially at the time of the Elzners’ deaths. But it made the marks on the gun and the bullet nicks all the more likely to have been made by a silencer.

Which, of course, would mean a murderer other than the late Martin Elzner. One who couldn’t risk making noise, and who knew no one would bother using a silencer for a murder-suicide. Missing silencer: a killer still at large.

Quinn glanced at his watch, a long-ago birthday gift from May. Past midnight. He decided to go to bed. Renz had set it up for him to visit the Elzner apartment tomorrow morning, so Quinn wanted to be alert, and to resemble as much as possible the man he’d been.

Still am!

He closed the file, then snuffed out his cigar in the saucer and finished the tepid beer that would help him get to sleep.

Quinn was satisfied with his chances. He never expected or needed a brass ring.

A toehold would do.

In the bathroom he brushed his teeth, then leaned close and examined them in the mirror. Too yellow, and they seemed slightly crooked, and maybe that was a cavity way back there. He’d neglected them too long. A trip to a dentist wouldn’t be a bad idea for his appearance. He’d lost a couple of molars in a long-ago fight, and broken the bridgework since. Other than that, he still had his own teeth. He smiled, then shook his head at the rawboned, luckless thug looking back at him. Rough. Downright grizzly. Scary.

The smile disappeared and he turned away, sickened with himself.

He’d sunk. He could see it now that he was looking up again. He’d sunk so goddamned far! An outcast, a sexual predator the neighbors whispered about and avoided. He drank too much and thought too much, and spent too much time alone. His wife and his own daughter were afraid of him.

It isn’t fucking fair!

He turned again toward the mirror and drew back his fist, thinking of smashing his ruined image, cracking it into fragments so it resembled his broken life.

There again was his sad smile. And his own sad eyes staring back at him. Movie shit, punching mirrors. Heavy-handed symbolism. In real life it accomplished nothing and meant nothing.

Self-pity was his problem. Self-pity was like a drug that would pull him down as surely as any of the drugs on the street.

He went to the closet and rooted through his clothes. Whatever he had, it would have to do until he got an advance on his salary from Renz.

Bum’s clothes. Goddamned bum’s wardrobe!

Or maybe it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t have a decent suit but could put together what might loosely be called an outfit. A wrinkled pair of pants, a white dress shirt that had long sleeves and would be hot as hell this time of year, and a blue sport coat that wasn’t too bad if he kept the ripped pocket flap tucked in. Shoes were okay, a black pair, which he’d bought years ago, that weren’t too badly worn and were actually comfortable.

A shave, a reasonable taming of his unruly hair—starting to gray—and he could still look enough like a cop.

Which he was, damn it!

He was a cop.

A lot of blood.

That was the first thing that struck Quinn the next morning after he’d unwrapped crime scene tape from the door-knob and let himself into the Elzner apartment with the key Renz had taped to the back of the murder file.

The Elzners had died in their kitchen. Though it wasn’t so evident in the crime scene photos, it looked as if the wife, Jan, had dragged herself a few feet before expiring and left some bloody scratches on the freshly painted white door. Quinn didn’t think the scratches were an attempt at writing a dying message, more the result of death throes.

Stepping around the crusted dried blood on the kitchen floor, Quinn made his way to the table. The groceries were still there. The can of tuna that had been on the floor near the body was now next to one of the two small, unmarked plastic bags. There were some oranges, a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter. Nothing perishable other than the oranges, according to the file. Also there were two jars of gourmet strawberry jam.

Quinn didn’t touch anything as he leaned down to peer at the price tags on the jam jars. Expensive.

He left the table and examined the holes in the walls from the bullets that had gone through Jan Elzner. Two holes. One wide and jagged, struck by a misshapen, nearly spent bullet that had passed through too much tissue or bone. The other hole was as circular and neat as if it had been made by a drill bit, from the bullet that had made it through to the next apartment and led to the discovery of the bodies.

Standing there in the kitchen, Quinn felt something stir deep in his gut. The crime scene didn’t feel like murder-suicide. The roughly outlined positions of the bodies, the half-finished mundane task of putting away groceries. No foresight or even rudimentary planning was evident here.

Hubby was supposedly the shooter. If the wife had been interrupted by sudden, violent death while putting away groceries, her body probably wouldn’t have dropped where it had. And Hubby wouldn’t have been in such a rush to kill himself that he’d knock a can of tuna off the table.

Of course it was all possible.

But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like murder. And an unlikely, perhaps senseless one. An unsuspecting couple living out their domestic lives, and some evil bastard decided they’d had enough and ended it for them, maybe for no reason other than so he could watch them die. Evil. It wasn’t a word Quinn shied away from, because he’d learned long ago it was a palpable thing that never quite left where it visited. And it was here, in the Elzners’ kitchen, his old and familiar enemy.

Do something about this. You can do something about who did this if you don’t screw up.

Quinn realized he’d turned a corner and was assuming the killer wasn’t Martin Elzner.

It was the kind of gut assumption any old cop knew not to ignore.

Quinn went into the Elzners’ bedroom. Everything was neat in there except for the unmade bed, obviously slept in by two. There was a set of women’s pink slippers on the floor near the bed, the kind without heels that you could slide your feet right into. Mules, he thought they were called. But maybe not.

He made a mental note to check and see if Jan Elzner’s corpse had bare feet. If so, it suggested she might have awakened suddenly, maybe heard something in the kitchen that alarmed her, and hurried out there, in too much of a rush even to step into her slippers. Which would mean she’d been in bed alone at the time, or she would have alerted her husband.

Interesting, the slippers.

Mules?

Quinn nosed around in the bedroom some more, then the bathroom, finding nothing of use or interest.

He returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The usual. A carton of milk, now gone bad. Some half-used condiments, a six-pack of diet Coke, two cans of Budweiser. In the door shelves were a bottle of orange juice, an unopened bottle of Chablis, a jar of pickles, and two plastic Evian bottles, one of which was opened and half-empty. And something else: a jar of the same kind of gourmet strawberry jam that was on the kitchen table.

Quinn used a dry dish towel wadded on the sink counter to open the jar. It was almost full of jam.

After screwing the lid back on and replacing the jar, he shut the refrigerator door and tossed the towel back on the counter, near a glass vase containing a small bouquet of neglected yellow roses that had died not long after the Elzners. Then he opened the freezer compartment at the top of the refrigerator.

Three frozen dinners—free-range chicken. How free were they, really? Some frozen meat wrapped in white butcher paper. A rubber-lidded dish containing chocolate-chip cookies. Quinn leaned forward and peered into the icemaker basket—full of cubes.

The apartment was warm and the cool air tumbling from the freezer felt good, but he shut the narrow white door and heard the refrigerator motor immediately start to hum. A couple of decorative magnets were stuck to the door—a Statue of Liberty, an unfurled American flag—but there was nothing pinned beneath them. No messages. Such as, who might try to kill us.

Quinn figured he’d seen enough. He left the apartment, locking the door behind him and replacing the yellow crime scene tape. He was glad to get away from the smell. Even dry, so much blood had a sickly sweet coppery scent that brought back the wrong kind of memories. Too many crime scenes where death had been violent and gory. Years of cleaning up the worst kinds of messes that people made of their lives and other lives. The woman in Queens who’d slashed her sleeping husband’s throat with a razor blade, then mutilated his nude body. The Lower East Side man who’d shot his wife’s lover, then three members of her family, then himself. So many years of that kind of thing. What had it done to him that he hadn’t noticed? Didn’t suspect?

And why did he miss it so?

What had made May leave him so soon after he’d been discredited and lost his livelihood? Had she doubted his innocence from the beginning? Or had she seen something in him that was beyond his awareness?

While he was waiting for the elevator, he examined his reflection in its polished steel door. He looked okay, he decided, with his fresh shave, white collar, and dark tie. A homicide cop on the job.

Except for the shield. There wasn’t one.

The elevator arrived with a muted thumping and strumming of cables.

When the gleaming door slid open, a uniformed cop Quinn knew as Mercer stepped out into the hall. A big, square-shouldered guy with squinty eyes and a ruddy complexion. Quinn had only been in the man’s company a few times, years ago, and wasn’t sure if he’d be recognized.

Mercer nodded to him and politely stepped aside so Quinn could enter the elevator. Quinn nodded back, studying Mercer’s eyes.

They were good cop’s eyes, neutral as Switzerland.