Читать книгу The Silver Chariot Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

Lindsey scrunched down inside the futon, alternately cursing himself for not calling ahead for a hotel reservation and either Mrs. Blomquist or Corporate Travel for not thinking to ask if he needed one. No, it was his own fault for relying on Morris Zissler’s judgment.

It was cold. Of course—this was an office building, why would the landlord provide heat late at night? Fortunately, Berry had brought in a space heater. It helped a little. Only a little.

In his years with International Surety, Lindsey had done plenty of traveling, and he’d always stayed in comfortable accommodations. But when Moe Zissler asked Lindsey where to drop him off, Lindsey had no answer.

Zissler had suggested his using Cletus Berry’s pied à terre, and after a moment’s hesitation, Lindsey had agreed. Zissler rattled a key to the place, and when he drove through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and through Manhattan’s slushy streets, Lindsey got his first real look at New York.

He’d have to learn the city fast if he was going to do anything with this puzzle. It was the first time he’d taken a case for International Surety where the company had no financial stake. Normally, Desmond Richelieu would have squelched any effort like this one, but for all the Director’s faults, he was loyal to his troops and he wasn’t going to let Cletus Berry’s murder stand as just one more statistic in the most murderous country in the world.

Zissler drove uptown for a few blocks, then pulled to a stop in front of a nondescript commercial building on West 58th Street. “This is it.”

He raced around the car and opened the door for Lindsey.

The heater had been on, and the flow of warm, stuffy air had lulled Lindsey into a half-doze. He climbed out of the car and drew cold air into his lungs. That woke him up.

Torrington Tower. That was the name of the building, engraved into the granite lintel above the thick glass and tarnished cast-iron doors. Lindsey craned his neck. The Torrington Tower might have been considered a tower when it was erected; now, it was dwarfed by its neighbors.

“How are we going to get in?” Lindsey asked.

Zissler separated a pair of keys from a massive batch. “I had an extra set made when I heard you were coming to town, Mr. Lindsey. There’s a guard in the lobby, but we’ve got keys to the lobby door and to Mr. Berry’s office, both.”

He hauled Lindsey’s flight bag out of the sedan’s trunk. Lindsey clung to his laptop computer in its carrying case. Zissler opened the lobby door and stood aside while Lindsey entered. The door locked itself behind them with a click.

The guard was behind the desk, as Zissler had promised. He stood up when Zissler and Lindsey entered. He’d been reading; now he laid his book down on his desk, spine upward. Lindsey read the title. Principles of Modern Accounting for the Medium-Sized Business.

The guard was a tall Hispanic with rich wavy hair and a small mustache. He wore a name tag. It said, R. Bermúdez.

R. Bermúdez said, “Hello, Mr. Zissler. This gentleman with you?”

Zissler said, “This is Mr. Lindsey. Rodrigo Bermúdez.”

Lindsey extended his hand.

The guard smiled and shook it. “Rigo. Please just call me Rigo.”

Zissler led the way to a small elevator that creaked and wobbled its way up six stories. On the way up, Zissler said, “Rodrigo’s twin brother works here, too. Can’t tell ’em apart except by their schoolbooks. Rodrigo’s studying accounting. Benjamino’s out to be a lawyer.”

Once they reached Cletus Berry’s erstwhile home-away-from-home Zissler put Lindsey’s flight bag on the carpet, then handed him the keys.

“Didn’t the coroner put a seal on this place?” Lindsey asked. “Or the police?”

Zissler shook his head. “This is New York, Mr. Lindsey.” Apparently he regarded that as a full explanation.

Maybe it was.

Lindsey reached for his pocket organizer. He opened it and said to Zissler, “I want to make sure I’ve got this right. The detective on the case is named Marcie Sokolov. You’ve met her?”

Zissler shook his head. “I spoke with her. By telephone.”

Lindsey chewed his lower lip. This guy wasn’t going to be much help, that was obvious. He was like a big, good-natured, not-very-bright dog. He wanted desperately to please, but unless you kept the instructions simple, really simple, he was more likely to mess up than to help out.

“What was your impression of this, ah, Detective Sokolov?”

“She was okay.”

Lindsey looked around the office for a chair. The furnishings weren’t quite as sparse as Zissler had indicated. There was a nondescript gray rug on the floor and a couple of cheap prints of Rome on the walls. In addition to the computer, the microwave, and the futon, there were a desk with a telephone on it, a couple of chairs, and a filing cabinet. One window offered a view that surprised Lindsey. Some quirk of architecture had left a narrow line of sight to the north. He recognized Central Park from a hundred movies and a thousand postcards. He imagined he could see Dick Haymes and Deanna Durbin riding through the park pursued by the dastardly Boss Tweed, played by Vincent Price, in an AMC revival of Up in Central Park.

There were three doors in the room. One, Lindsey and Zissler had come through. Lindsey opened the others. A bathroom complete with shower stall. Okay. And a closet. A rack of clothes, a lightweight, mini-, what the heck did they call it, dresserette maybe. A shelf with a few pairs of shoes and a little TV set. The TV was one of those compact models with a built-in VCR.

Huh.

Lindsey dropped to his hands and knees and scoped out the electrical connections under the desk. There was a power line for the computer, a fax/modem connection, and a TV cable outlet.

“She, um, Detective Sokolov asked me some questions,” Zissler added to his statement.

Lindsey stood up and looked out the window. There were still a few lights on, farther uptown, but it was the park that held his attention. “What questions?”

“Well, like, Did Mr. Berry have any enemies? Did he use drugs? Did he go to Atlantic City often? Bet with bookies? Was he in debt? Did he run around with women?”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I told her no.”

“But you told me you hardly knew Berry. How did you know he didn’t have gambling debts? Or a dozen girlfriends?”

“Well, that’s right, I guess I didn’t know him very well. But he didn’t seem to have any enemies. Or—or the rest of it. Gambling, I mean. Or drugs.”

“Women?”

“I never saw Mr. Berry with any women. I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Lindsey knew that Berry was married and had a child. Berry had mentioned his wife once or twice, but Lindsey could not remember his saying anything about a child. Lindsey had learned about the child—a daughter—from Berry’s personnel file.

Cletus Berry was a sweet guy. Had been a sweet guy. Had been a top worker, Lindsey could testify to that. He had a pleasant personality, he made good dinner-table conversation and he had been an easy-going, unobtrusive room-mate. But he seldom spoke about his private life. Lindsey should have known that was a danger sign, but somehow he’d failed to pick up on it with Berry. Put the dunce cap on me, Lindsey thought. There’s more here than meets the eye.

“Did Sokolov say what the police were planning to do about the killings?”

“About Mr. Berry and that other fellow? Well, Detective Sokolov said they were going to investigate fully.”

Lindsey held his head in his hands. Then he lowered his hands and looked at his watch. He’d readjusted his watch as the jet approached JFK so the watch was running on Eastern Time even though Lindsey’s body still thought it was two hours earlier.

Zissler said, “I’d like to help out, Mr. Lindsey, but it’s awfully late. I have to drive back out to Queens. And my wife always worries when I’m late.”

Lindsey said, “Sure. I’ll call you at Manhattan East if I need you.”

As Zissler headed for the elevator, Lindsey could hear him humming. He thought, If only he’d hum something with a melody. But with a Moe Zissler, you took what you could get.

Now Lindsey scrunched down inside the futon.

This was the same Japanese bed that Cletus Berry had used. There were almost certainly a few of Berry’s hairs in the bed, and microscopic sheddings of dead skin.

Why had Berry kept this place? He was entitled to office space at Manhattan East, but as a SPUDS agent he was authorized to set up a separate facility if he chose. Lindsey had been offered the same choice, and had come close to moving out of the Northern California office where he’d worked before his move to Denver. It wasn’t strange that Berry had preferred the privacy and independence of a separate office.

But why a bed and a microwave oven? Why a TV? Why a closet full of clothing? Had Berry been leading a double life?

Lindsey had unpacked his flight bag and hung his suits in the closet along with Berry’s. If there were any clues in the office, Lindsey would have to find them. If the police hadn’t bothered to seal it off, there was no way they were going to send a forensics squad in to look for evidence.

What was Cletus Berry doing on Eleventh Avenue in the middle of the night, in the company of a petty mobster?

It didn’t make sense.

Lindsey closed his eyes and tried to get a feeling for the case. It was early on, he didn’t have much to work with, but sometimes you walked into a puzzle like this and you got a feeling for it.

Not this time.

* * * *

He had half a dream just as he was waking up. He was swimming in cold water. It was dirty and gray and he didn’t like it and it kept getting deeper the more he struggled. Then something was holding his arms and legs so he couldn’t swim and he started to get cold water in his nose and mouth.

Then he woke up fully and discovered that it wasn’t the water but the sunlight that was cold and gray. He climbed out of the futon and pulled on a sweater and a pair of pants. He padded across the carpeted floor and looked outside. The thoroughfares were filled with traffic. The accumulated sleet had already been shoved to the sides of the street, making shin-high gray-black berms along the curbs.

He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He’d had less than three hours sleep. He cleaned up, using Cletus Berry’s little shower stall. Berry had left behind a plastic bottle of shampoo, and a razor on the sink. The only thing Lindsey had to provide for himself was a toothbrush.

He dressed in a gray woolen suit and overcoat and left the office. He rode down in the elevator and passed a couple of business-people in the lobby and nodded. They ignored him.

A different guard sat at the battered wooden desk in the front lobby. He looked up at Lindsey and frowned, clearly disturbed to see a stranger coming out of the elevator and leaving the building so early in the morning.

Lindsey told the guard his name, told him he worked for International Surety and would be using the rented office for an indefinite time.

The guard looked more puzzled than ever. Like Rigo Bermúdez, he wore a gray uniform with a Sam Browne belt. There was even a holster bucked to the belt; Lindsey wondered whether there was really a weapon in it, or if it was just for show. The guard was easily thirty years Bermúdez’ senior and his uniform sleeve showed blue sergeant’s chevrons. The plastic name tag attached to his uniform jacket said, Halter. He wore half-glasses on the end of his nose and he’d been reading the Daily News. He had reddish, mottled skin and a bushy white mustache and white hair that stuck out from under his uniform cap. He looked a lot like Wilfred Brimley.

The guard frowned. “Linsley, is it?”

“Lindsey.”

“I know. That’s what Mike Quill called the mayor. Linsley. Name was Lindsey. Did it just to irk him. Great man, he was.”

“Mayor Lindsey? I’ve heard of him. I don’t think we’re related.”

“Not Linsley. Mike Quill was the great man. Ran the transit union. Great man.” He laid down the newspaper and said, “International Surety, hey? Who’s that? Sounds like some kind of insurance outfit.”

Lindsey said, “It is. Cletus Berry worked for us.”

“Oh.” Daylight broke across the old man’s face. “Sure, Mr. Berry. Nice man. Pity, what happened. Pity.”

Lindsey said, “How did you find out about it? Has anybody been here investigating?”

The guard laid his Daily News flat on his desk, turned it so Lindsey could see the front page. A huge headline announced, BLOOD AND ICE! Beneath it, in smaller type, Santa Rubs Out Duo in West Side Alley.

A stark black-and-white photograph filled most of the lower half of the page. It showed two bodies lying on an icy sidewalk, a couple of corrugated metal garbage cans and some cardboard boxes behind them. The face of one corpse was thin, middle-aged, unshaven. The man wore what looked like a badly frayed, too-thin coat, and the splotches on it had to be blood.

The second corpse was better dressed, but the angle of the photo showed little of its face. That shortcoming was offset by a smaller photo, framed in an oval and inset in what would have been the right-hand third of the larger photo. It was the face of a black man. He wore a white shirt and a dark necktie. You could see the edge of his suit inside his overcoat. His eyes were open and staring; they had the filmed-over look of the grisly post-mortem photos taken to celebrate nineteenth century hangings.

There was a perfect black dot above and between the eyes. On a Hindu, it might have been a caste mark. But on Cletus Berry’s dark, African American face, Lindsey knew that the dot was a bullet hole. He knew that inside the cranium behind that small, neat hole, Cletus Berry’s brain had been scrambled like a pan of eggs.

“So you’re from the insurance company,” the guard said. “You come to pay off on a policy?”

Lindsey said, “No. I’m here to find out who killed Cletus Berry.”

The guard opened his newspaper again. He grinned up at Lindsey. Come to think of it, he looked more like Edmund Gwenn than Wilfred Brimley. He’d need to grow a beard, of course. Then he could play Santa Claus in the next remake of Miracle on 34th Street.

“So, you going to be using Mr. Berry’s office now?” Halter asked.

Lindsey nodded. “For a while.”

The guard said, “I hope you can do some good. Cops sure won’t. Too busy with politics and graft. Same as ever.”

Lindsey said, “Sergeant Halter—” He reached for his wallet. He had a discretionary fund, and this looked like a good time to be discreet. He extracted a couple of medium-large bills from his wallet. “Mr. Halter—”

“Just call me Lou.” The bills disappeared. David Copperfield would have been proud. “Anything I can do to help.”

“Isn’t a little bit unusual for a tenant to have his office furnished the way Cletus Berry’s was?”

Halter frowned. “How’s that?”

“Well, it looks as if he might have lived there sometimes.”

“Never in there. I wouldn’t know.”

“But is it even legal?” Lindsey persisted.

Halter frowned, concentrating. “Building’s zoned commercial, not residential. But I guess anybody can put a couch in his office, don’t you think? And maybe a little kitchenette, and nuke a cup of soup if he feels like it? And if he’s working late and he decides he wants to catch forty winks.… I don’t think it’s nobody’s business. Nobody’s. Do you?”

“No.”

The lobby behind Lindsey was getting busy. People were arriving, the elevator was humming. Clearly, there were more tenants than the elevator could handle, and the ones who had to wait shuffled their feet and watched the indicator as the car creaked up and back down.

It was Christmas, though, so at least the small talk was friendly. “I was wondering, Sergeant—ah, Lou.”

Halter looked at Lindsey over the tops of his glasses.

“What goes on in this building? It isn’t exactly, well, the latest in posh surroundings, is it?”

Halter grinned crookedly. “Sure ain’t. Probably get pulled down one of these days. But for now, it’s a great address and it don’t cost no arm and a leg to rent a little office. So you got a lot of little guys trying to look big in this building. Couple of music publishers and theatrical agents, half a dozen loan companies and lawyers. Shylocks and Sherlocks, I call ’em. Got a few outfits call themselves consultants, I wouldn’t know who consults ’em or for what.”

Lindsey grunted a vague thank-you. It seemed unlikely that the killer was a fellow Torrington Towers renter, but you could never tell. Somebody who had it in for Berry might want to do his dirty work away from the building to keep the spotlight off himself.

Lou Halter had gone back to his newspaper.

Lindsey crossed the lobby. In seconds he was part of the crowd passing on the sidewalk. Yep, it was Christmas. Christmas, and NFL playoff time.

Lindsey walked along 58th Street. The morning was still gray, but the sun was starting to fight its way through the clouds. Lindsey wasn’t used to sidewalks this crowded, to people moving with the speed and seeming urgency that New Yorkers did.

Well, he’d adjust. He’d managed to speed up for Chicago, to slow down for New Orleans, he’d find the right pace for New York.

He stopped in a counter-joint, slid onto a stool and reached for a menu. Before he could look at the menu a waitress poured a cup of coffee and shoved it at him and asked, “What’ll you have?”

Lindsey took a breath.

The waitress didn’t wait. “How ’bout the special? I’m busy. Scrambled eggs and a muffin.”

Lindsey said, “No. No eggs.” An image of Cletus Berry’s scrambled brain presented itself and Lindsey blinked, hard. “Bring me a couple of pancakes.”

“You got it.” And she was gone.

Lindsey had never seen the likes of this place. Most of the men and women at the counter held newspapers or magazines in one hand and read while they shoveled food into their mouths with the other. A few of them talked to each other. More of them talked to themselves.

He found himself wolfing his food, tapping his finger impatiently while the waitress brought his check, slapping his money on the counter and striding rapidly to the door.

Why?

He didn’t have an appointment. He had work to do, but his style was to take a steady, gradual approach to each case. He wasn’t in any hurry.

No, he wasn’t in any hurry. He was just finding his pace.