Читать книгу The Night Watcher - John Lutz - Страница 15

January 2002

Raymond Masters was easy enough to find. He lived in his mother’s house in a run-down neighborhood in Astoria.

Rica stood to the side on the wooden porch while Stack knocked on the door. She thought this was better than the neighborhood where she’d grown up, and wondered what it would have been like to have a room of her own in a house like this, have girlfriends who lived on the block, maybe walked to school without worrying about—

“Rica?”

She started at the sound of Stack softly calling her name. This wasn’t the time to be daydreaming. What seemed routine could any second turn deadly. Cops who forgot that part of their training could die suddenly or cause it to happen to others.

Without thinking about it, she moved her hand closer to the 9mm in its shoulder holster beneath her coat.

“Yes?” a woman was saying warily.

Judging from what they could see of her deeply etched features, and her one visible faded eye as she peered from behind a door open only a few inches, she was hardly the lover of a desperado. Probably Masters’s mother.

“We’d like to talk to Raymond,” Stack said amiably. They might have been old friends of her son.

“Who should I say is calling?” Formal and wary.

“We’re with the police,” Stack said, “but please don’t be alarmed. I assure you we’re not here because Raymond’s in any trouble.”

Yet, Rica thought.

“We only want to talk to him for a few minutes, to reaffirm some things he told us earlier.”

Mom—if she was Mom—wasn’t that dumb. She put on a smile. “When he gets home, I’ll sure tell him you were here.”

Stack tuned to her wavelength; now they were older and worldly types, the sort of people who might say thou. “Between us…Mrs. Masters, is it?”

She nodded. Nothing in the faded eye changed.

“We both know we’re going to talk to your son one way or the other. I do pledge to you that there are no active warrants on him, nothing left over from his last problem. When we leave here, he’ll stay. Talk is all we want to do. And since we both know that conversation is going to take place sooner or later, why not now, in your own comfortable home, instead of the more unfriendly atmosphere of a Manhattan precinct house?”

“If he was here, I’d tell—”

“You don’t believe or trust me,” Stack said. He sounded crushed. “Well, I guess I can understand that. But ask yourself, dear, did what I just tell you make sense?”

Still no change in the bleary eye. But the door closed, the rattle of a chain lock being taken off sounded from inside; then the door opened and Mrs. Masters stepped back to admit them.

She was probably only in her fifties but might have passed for seventy, wearing a stained blue robe and huge fuzzy slippers though it was past noon. The place was a mess, with newspapers and magazines spread around, half a sandwich on the coffee table next to a bottle of bargain beer that was leaving a ring on the wood, a couple of roaches feeding on crumbs scattered over the cushions of the worn sofa. Stack and Rica remained standing.

Stack was still being reasonable. “Would you come with us to make the introductions? So as not to scare the boy unnecessarily.”

Raymond’s mother stared at him, still thrown off balance by this strange combination of officialness and kindliness, then shrugged. “It’s this way.” She preceded them to a hall leading past the door to the kitchen, then on toward the rear of the house. She must have been cooking. The scent of frying onions was in the air, almost strong enough to make Rica’s eyes water.

There was no sound as they walked down the hall. Rica’s gut told her something was wrong. Raymond might be scrambling out a window about now. Or loading the clip of a gun. Too damned quiet. Or maybe it was those fuzzy slippers the size of sheep.

Mrs. Masters waved a hand for them to stop, then walked ahead and knocked on a closed door. After a few seconds, she opened it and looked inside. “Raymond? Raymond!” She turned to stare at Stack, her eyes wide now and glittering with fear. “I think there’s something wrong with him!”

Stack pushed forward and moved the woman out of the way. Be careful! Rica almost shouted.

And he was careful. As Rica nudged the woman farther out of possible trouble, then removed her 9mm from its holster, Stack shoved the door all the way open with his foot and peered around the door frame over the barrel of his Police Special, keeping most of his body out of sight and a slight target.

Then he lowered the gun and stepped through the doorway.

Rica followed.

The air in the bedroom was stale and suffocating. A gaunt blond man wearing only stained Jockey shorts was curled in the fetal position on the bed. His scrawny arms were tucked in close to his body, encompassing drug paraphernalia as if he had gathered it near him because it might save instead of kill him.

Mrs. Masters screamed, “Raymond!” Once. It might have been heard all over the neighborhood. Then she bolted from the scene, which seemed an odd thing for a mother to do.

As Rica hurried to the phone in the living room, putting on a show for the woman even though her son was obviously dead, she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Masters in the kitchen, pouring gin from a bottle into a glass with trembling hands.

“The deal is,” said Stack to acting MR Squad Commander O’Reilly, “we’ve pretty much come to the wall on this case.”

O’Reilly, who was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and pretending to gaze out his office window, shook his head in denial and turned around. “Doesn’t sound right to me, Stack. We got Mr. Prominent Citizen burned like a log in his kitchen, and we’re gonna let it slide?”

“If we’ve got no choice,” Stack said. “We have no logical suspect and we’re out of moves. Raymond Masters might have helped us, or even been involved, but he’s dead and not talking.”

Rica, standing off to the side and behind Stack, thought she’d better come to his rescue before he got into it heavy with O’Reilly. “We’ve followed all the leads, sir,” she said in a reasonable tone. “Danner’s friends, coworkers, girlfriend, neighbors…Nobody has a clue or can give us a clue as to why he was murdered.”

“And the truth is,” Stack said, “Danner wasn’t that much of a prominent citizen. A well-paid attorney with a middlin’-size midtown firm.”

“What about the twenty thou you found in his safe?”

“It isn’t that much money.”

“But has it been explained?”

Rica thought she could imagine a thou explanations.

“No” Stack admitted.

“Maybe he bet a winner at the track,” Rica suggested. Stack glared at her.

O’Reilly seemed not to have heard her. He was back at the window, posing and gazing at some imagined horizon. “The girlfriend,” he said, then turned around and slid down into his desk chair—Vandervoort’s chair. He looked up at them as if he’d said something profound. “Helen whazzer-name.”

“Sampson,” Rica said.

“Stay on the girlfriend,” O’Reilly said. “You tie up some poor bastard and light him on fire, then stand over him with an umbrella so he don’t go out, I’d say that’s a crime of passion. Check the girlfriend, see if she’s going out with some other guy now and was maybe two-timing Danner.”

“The way we read the relationship,” Stack said, “it was between two people who’d been around and wouldn’t get their underwear all twisted up if one or the other happened to see someone else. Maybe they’d argue and split, but hardly set each other on fire.”

“Who told you about the relationship?”

“Helen Sampson,” Rica chimed in, not wanting Stack to have to say it.

O’Reilly smiled broadly, his pockmarked face creasing in the morning light. “So stay on the girlfriend.” He motioned with a sweeping motion of his arm at his cluttered desk. “Now I got goddamn paperwork, if you’ll excuse me. I don’t know how the hell Vandervoort kept up with this shit.”

“Part of the job, I guess,” Stack said noncommittally. But it seemed to aggravate O’Reilly.

“Stay on the girlfriend,” he said again, as Stack and Rica left the office, “even if it takes weeks.”

“The girlfriend,” Rica said, when they were out in the hall.

Stack didn’t answer her. She knew he was pissed off, and it amused her.

She knew it shouldn’t, but it did.