A Simple Act of Violence (42 page)

She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. But he would be able to see right through her, and she would never get a chance to hit the buzzer, and she would be too afraid to tell the police that she’d seen him, and he would know that she’d tried to betray him, and when it suited him he would come down and—

Miller tried not to think of what someone would do to Audrey.

At twenty minutes after seven the phone rang. Roth snatched it from the desk. ‘Yes?’ he barked, and in his eyes was a spark of something, and then the spark died. ‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’ he said, and he dropped the receiver into its cradle noisily. ‘Wanted the other office,’ he said.

Miller decided there were few things worse than waiting. The combination of boredom and anxiety. The two emotions playing one against the other. The eventual belief that whatever might lie behind the door, whatever might lurk inside the warehouse, whatever your imagination could conjure for you had to be better than the vague and insubstantial nothingness that waiting had to offer. And then something would happen, and it was like being kick-started, and no-one save those in the emergency services - the firemen, the medics, the ER and triage nurses - would have any comprehension of how it felt when such things happened. Hours of silence, motionlessness, a stagnant nothing of anything at all, and then mayhem breaking loose. Sirens, flashing lights, people running and shouting, ambulances, fire engines, bleeding arteries, people leaping from windows, from bridges, pile-ups on the highway, the smell of burning rubber and the incendiary crump of gas tanks igniting, and the sound of people hollering blue murder as greenstick fractures and splintered bones protruded from open wounds. And not a moment to even think about what might have happened, or what might happen beyond this, because every ounce of adrenaline, every nerve and sinew, every impulse that the brain could generate was driving your body forward against the natural impulse to withdraw, to run, to hide, to pretend to yourself that the world you were seeing and the world you inhabited were not the same thing . . .

Miller looked up at the clock: three minutes after eight. He rose from his chair, paced back and forth between the door and the window. ‘So where do we go if we get nothing?’ he asked, almost to himself.

‘If we get nothing from him, or if he doesn’t show?’

‘Either which way,’ Miller replied. ‘He turns up, we speak to him, there’s nothing he can tell us, or he doesn’t show at all. The whole thing’s a dead end and we’re back where we started. What the fuck then, eh?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know. I try not to think about that. This is the only solid lead we have right now.’

‘Solid as fucking air.’

‘Sure, I know that . . . Jesus Christ, you know what I’m talking about, Robert. This guy could be someone—’

‘Or he could be no-one.’

Through the window Miller watched the city go about its business. Traffic filled the streets, people crowded the side-walks, all of them walking safe in the knowledge that whatever might be happening to someone else was not happening to them. He wondered if there was a time for people to die. If your death possessed a day, an hour, a minute, a second . . . If such things were already pre-ordained then the man standing at the junction up ahead, who might be awaiting news of his pregnant wife’s check-up or just learned that he’d gotten a raise or that his father had responded to chemo and was on a fast-track to recovery . . . he might step out into the street and find himself on the receiving end of a pick up driven by a drunk, or an engine on its way to a fire, or an ambulance on the way to his wife who’d just called the hospital to say her waters had broken . . .

Life was like that. Perhaps dying was the same.

Miller stretched his arms above his head. He yawned, and yawned again.

Roth caught the bug and yawned too.

As Miller turned and walked back to the desk, the sound of feet hammering up the stairwell assaulted the silence.

The desk sergeant came charging through the door, stood for a second trying to catch his breath. He glanced at the desk where the receiver was tilted slightly off the cradle.

‘God’s sake!’ he said. ‘God all-fucking-mighty, I can’t reach you guys. Littman called. The guy’s in the diner . . . the guy’s in the fucking diner . . .’

He was nearly knocked off his feet as Robert Miller and Albert Roth hurtled out of the office and started down the stairs.

Audrey, whose surname was Forrester, whose husband had died and left her a diner named Donovan’s on Massachusetts Avenue, would remember that morning for quite some time to come. The crowd of early-morning regulars, however, would remain oblivious. People like Gary Vogel - tail-end of his third divorce, forty-two years old and still dating the twenty-six-year-old girl he’d been fucking when his wife walked in on him; Lewis Burch, gas system repair technician, fifty-three, whose eldest son had just let everyone know he was gay, living with someone named Simon, and if the family didn’t accept it he would never come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, Easter, understand?; Jennifer Mayhew, thirty-seven, first week of a new job, loving every minute of it, couldn’t understand why she’d spent so many years afraid of change, and dinner this evening with a great guy - okay, so she’d only met him on the subway, but they’d traveled together so many mornings, and he seemed really genuine, and she felt life really had turned a corner; Maurice Froom, a man who’d somehow survived forty-eight years without becoming Morry, and was a minor celebrity in his own right, responsible for the voice on more than two hundred and thirty radio ads aired during the previous decade . . . These people. Ordinary people. People with wives and husbands and children, with cats and dogs and mortgage payments; people who’d managed to evade the edges that lurked unseen, those edges where others crossed the line and watched helplessly as their lives irretrievably changed for the worse. The dark edges of things that people like Al Roth and Robert Miller dealt with each and every day.

That Thursday morning those dark edges were hidden to all but Audrey Forrester and, at eight twenty-two a.m. - there, on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue - a man crossed the threshold of Donovan’s diner and brought a little darkness with him. He was recognized immediately by Audrey and, recognizing him, she smiled, acknowledged his presence, and then she busied herself along the counter, refilling a coffee cup that was obviously left behind, and the man who had entered smiled to himself like he knew something was happening, perhaps more than anyone else.

His name was John, just as Audrey Forrester had told the detectives who’d come, and John surveyed the people at the counter - Gary Vogel, Lewis Burch, Jennifer Mayhew, Maurice Froom, others whose names he also did not know, would never know, did not care to know.

And looking back at him, these strangers saw nothing but a smartly dressed middle-aged man, late forties perhaps, something about him that made it difficult to place his age exactly. They saw his dark suit, his blue shirt, the brown leather briefcase he carried, the overcoat folded across his arm. They saw his collar-length greying hair, his face - perhaps handsome, perhaps not, but certainly a face of character - the face of a man who had lived a life, a man who carried stories inside him, and all of them the kind of stories that would provoke an emotional reaction. He looked like a successful property developer, maybe. Or he looked like a scriptwriter, a poet, an author of dense and intellectual novels about human relationships that few people would understand, but those that did would consider him a genius, a man of insight, of wisdom and fortitude. Or perhaps he was no-one at all. A person just like them. A normal guy, a regular guy, a nine-to-five, fetch-some-coffee-on-the-way-to-work kind of guy.

He approached the counter. And when Audrey Forrester smiled at him for the second time, he knew. He knew when he saw the brief flash of anxiety in her eyes. He knew when he glanced out through the window, out to the sedan parked against the curb, out to the street where he sensed something was happening . . . merely a perception, an intuitive thing, but it was all there, right there in front of him, and he knew . . .

‘Take out?’ Audrey asked.

John smiled. He shook his head. ‘It’s okay, Audrey,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’ll wait for them here.’

And it was all Audrey could do to conceal her surprise, the sense of unease it created within her, because she already had a paper cup ready, the plastic snap-on lid with the imprinted message - The beverage you’re about to enjoy is HOT! - and she was walking toward the jug of coffee on the hotplate . . .

And John said, ‘I’ll wait for them here’, and this caused her a second thought, and she set down the paper cup, and she reached for the regular cups, and she wondered how many seconds it had been since she’d pushed the damn buzzer, and already she felt scared, and the cup seemed to weigh an awful lot in her hand, and when she stood near the coffee jug she looked in the bright shining chrome surround of the espresso machine to her left, and in the chrome fascia she could see John’s reflection, and there was something different about him . . .

Was it her imagination?

Did he seem relaxed?

How many seconds since she’d pushed that damn buzzer?

She wondered what the hell was taking these people so long, and then she wondered if maybe the buzzer wasn’t working. The thing was wireless, and it worked on the basis of radio waves or some such thing. There was a girl standing at the counter with a cell phone, and perhaps the cell phone was cutting the wavelength or creating some kind of interference, and maybe the buzzer hadn’t worked and the police weren’t coming . . .

She thought of Robert Miller and his partner. She filled a cup for John and took a small porcelain jug of cream from the refrigerator. She carried the cup and the jug back across to him, and she set them down in front of him, and she said, trying to sound breezy and unimportant and nonchalant, ‘Not to go today?’ and he said the strangest thing. He smiled at her, right at her, the kind of smile you give someone when you’re really pleased to see them, and he kind of half-closed his eyes - reminded her of a lizard sunbathing on a rock in Mexico . . . in a small town she’d visited with her husband when they went on their honeymoon, a small town named . . . and for the life of her she couldn’t think what that place was named . . . and then it came to her, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, and she remembered that lizard on a rock right there near the sidewalk, and the town was named Ixtapalapa, whatever the hell that might have meant, and for a second John looked like that sunbathing lizard, and Audrey smiled - not at John, but at the memory of her husband and how in love she’d been with him - and then John said the other thing, and the thing was, ‘I’m waiting,’ and then he shook his head resignedly, and added ‘For someone, you know? I’m waiting for someone.’

And Audrey thought, who is he waiting for? Like John was the sort of person who would never wait for anyone. People would wait for him - that’s how he seemed. People would wait for John, and he might show, or he might not show, and people would never be pissed off at him because John was the kind of guy people would be fortunate to know, and if he didn’t come when he said he was going to then it could only be because there was something an awful lot more important . . .

Audrey looked away from him. Realized she’d been staring even as the thoughts ran through her mind.

‘Sugar?’ she asked.

John shook his head. ‘I don’t take sugar, Audrey, you know that.’

And in that second she knew she was done for, and if they didn’t come, if the detectives didn’t come right now, he was going to leave, and he would know that something was wrong, and he would know that Audrey had somehow betrayed him, and he wouldn’t come again, not for a while, and then one night, out back in the yard as she carried the trash bags to the dumpster, she would hear a sound, and she would feel a chill down her spine, and she would turn slowly, fear rising in her chest, and she would see John standing there with that half-smile, eyes kind of closed, lizard sunbathing on a rock in Ixtapalapa, and she would know . . .

‘Hey, Audrey, you okay?’ John asked.

She felt like she was going to faint. ‘Tired,’ she said, and even as she said it she knew she’d said it too fast. Hell, what the fuck was this? What did they want from her? She wasn’t no actress. This wasn’t the kind of thing she’d had to deal with before. Some guy coming in for coffee and the cops are so eager to talk to him they spend a couple of hours in the place, and they even put a buzzer beneath the counter, a goddam buzzer that doesn’t work, and they expect you to keep your cool and play-act like everything’s fine and dandy . . .

And she’s remembering something, something she put to the back of her mind, and she wonders if the man she’s looking at has anything at all to do with the women that have been murdered . . .

Her heart missed a beat.

‘You should take a day off,’ John said, and he said it like he meant it. ‘Every day you’re in here, for God’s sake. You should close the place for a couple of days and have a rest . . .’

‘Can’t afford it,’ Audrey said, and she tried her very best to sound as relaxed as possible. ‘Amount of money this place costs me I couldn’t afford a vacation. You know how it is.’

‘I do,’ he said, and he smiled again, and he lifted his cup and sipped his coffee, and even as he looked away Audrey saw the two detectives coming in through the door.

John looked up at her.

He didn’t turn around.

He tilted his head to one side, and then he said something that made her feel like her skin would crawl right off of her, something that she would remember for several days to come, like Here we are. Here it all is. Here’s what we expected . . .

And he said: ‘It’s them, right? They’re here, aren’t they?’

Audrey backed up.

Miller and Roth stood behind John.