A Ticket to the Boneyard (30 page)

When he walked out of there he left her sprawled on her living-room floor with her blood soaking into the white rug. It’s possible he thought she was already dead. She would have been in shock, with her breathing imperceptibly shallow and all her vital signs muted. She was still breathing, though, and her heart was still beating, but she would have died there on the floor if it hadn’t been for the doorman.

He was a Brazilian, tall and heavyset, with a headful of glossy black hair and a belly that strained the buttons of his uniform. His name was Emilio Lopes. Something began bothering Lopes an hour or so after he showed Motley to the elevator. Finally he picked up the intercom and called upstairs to make sure everything was all right.

He rang a few times and no one picked up. The ringing of the intercom may have prompted Motley to hurry his work and get out of there. When he did leave, striding hurriedly through the lobby around seven o’clock, something in his manner set off Lopes’s internal alarm. He rang through on the intercom again, and of course there was no answer. Then he remembered the sketch he’d been shown, the portrait of the one man who most emphatically was not to be given access to Miss Mardell’s apartment, and it struck him that the police uniform might have covered that very man. The more he thought about it, the surer he was.

He abandoned his post and went upstairs. He rang the bell and pounded on the door. He tried the door, and it was locked; Motley had pulled it shut. The police locks were unengaged, as was the deadbolt, but the spring lock was enough to secure the door and it engaged automatically when you closed the door.

He turned away, intending to go back downstairs and root around for a passkey. Failing to find one, perhaps he would phone the local precinct. But then something made him turn back again and do what not one doorman in twenty would have done.

He drew back his foot and kicked the door. He kicked a second time, hard, and he was a big man and his legs were strong from carrying his bulk around all day long. They’d always been strong; when he was younger and lighter his legs had been strong from soccer.

The spring lock gave and the door flew open. He saw her on the rug and ran across the room to kneel at her side. Then he got up and crossed himself and picked up the phone and called 911. He knew it was too late but he did it anyway.

And that’s what must have happened while I was drinking coffee at the Flame and walking uptown to Mother Goose, while I sat there listening to quiet jazz, while I paid out money to Brian and to Danny Boy. While I traded stories with Mick Ballou, and scared the rats away from their garbage feast, and breakfasted on scrapple in view of the Hudson. While I sat in a car on the other side of that river and watched the sun come up over the city.

I may have some of the details wrong, and I’m sure there are things that happened that I don’t know about, and never will. But I think that’s pretty close to the way it went down. In any case, I’m sure of one thing. It happened just the way it was supposed to happen. Andy Echevarria might argue the point, and so might Elaine, but just check with Marcus Aurelius. He’ll explain the whole thing to you.

New York Hospital is at York and Sixty-eighth. My cab dropped me at the emergency-room entrance and the woman behind the desk determined that Elaine Mardell had come down from surgery and was in the intensive-care unit. She pointed to a floor plan of the building and showed me how to get to the ICU.

A nurse there told me they only allowed immediate family in the ICU. I said the patient didn’t have any family, that I was probably as close to family as she had. She asked the nature of our relationship, and I said we were friends. She asked if we were intimate friends. Yes, I said. Intimate friends. She wrote my name on a card, and made a notation.

She showed me to a waiting room. There were several other people there, smoking, reading magazines, waiting for their loved ones to die. I leafed through a copy of
Sports Illustrated
, but none of the words registered. Every once in a while I turned the page out of force of habit.

After a while a doctor came into the waiting room and looked around and asked for me by name. I stood up and he motioned me into the hallway. He had a very young face and a head of hair already thickly shot with gray.

He said, “This is a rough one. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Is she going to live?”

“She was in surgery for almost four hours. I forget how many units of blood we gave her. She’d lost a lot of blood by the time we got her and there was a lot of internal bleeding. She’s still bleeding now and still receiving transfusions.” He had his hands clasped in front of his lab coat, and he was wringing them together. I don’t think he was aware that he was doing it.

He said, “We had to remove her spleen. You can live without a spleen, there are thousands of people who manage. But she sustained considerable trauma to her entire system. Her renal function’s off, her liver’s damaged—”

He went on, cataloguing her injuries. I only caught about half of what he said and only understood a fraction of that. “She’s intubated,” he said, “and we’ve got her on a respirator. Her lungs failed. That happens sometimes, it’s what they call Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome. You see it sometimes in accident victims. Traffic accidents, I mean. The lungs quit.”

There was more, too technical for me to understand. I asked how bad it was.

“Well, it’s bad,” he said, and he told me all the things that could go wrong.

I asked if I could see her.

“For a few minutes,” he said. “She’s completely sedated, and as I said we’ve got her hooked up to a respirator. It’s doing the breathing for her.” He led me toward a door at the far side of the ICU. “It may be a shock for you to see her like this,” he said.

There were machines everywhere, and tubes strung all over the place. Dials flashed numbers, machines beeped and whirred, needles jumped. In the midst of it all she lay still as death, her skin waxy, her color awful.

I asked my first question again. “Is she going to live?”

He didn’t answer, and when I looked up he was gone and I was alone with her. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but I didn’t know if that was allowed. I went on standing there, a nurse came into the room and began doing something to one of the machines. She told me I could stay for a few more minutes. “You can talk to her,” she said.

“Can she hear me?”

“I think there’s a part of them that hears everything, even when they’re deep in coma.”

She went out, and I stayed for five or ten minutes. I talked some. I don’t remember what I said.

The same nurse came in a second time to tell me she’d have to ask me to leave. I could wait in the waiting room and they would call me if there was any change in the patient’s condition.

I asked what kind of change she expected.

She didn’t answer either, not exactly. “There are just so many things that can go wrong,” she said. “In a case like this. He hurt her so badly in so many ways. I’m telling you, this city we live in—”

It wasn’t the city. The city didn’t do it to her. It was one man, and he could have turned up anywhere.

Joe Durkin was in the waiting room. He got to his feet when I walked in. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and he looked as though he’d slept in his clothes.

He asked how she was.

“Not good,” I said.

“She say anything?”

“She’s out cold and she’s got tubes up her nose and down her throat. It limits her conversation.”

“That’s what they told me but I wanted to check. Be nice if she said it was Motley, but we don’t need her to ID him. The doorman confirmed it was him.”

He told me a little about what had happened. Echevarria’s murder, and how Motley had gained access to the building on East Fifty-first.

He said, “We got an all-points out, we’re using your sketch, putting it out all over the city. He killed an auxiliary cop. That damn well ought to turn the heat up.”

Most cops think the auxiliaries are a joke, a bunch of starry-eyed buffs who come around once a week to play Dress-up. Then every once in a while one of them gets killed and is instantly inducted into that glorious band of blue-coated martyrs. There’s nothing like death for lowering the barriers and opening the doors.

“He’s killed nine people, minimum,” I said. “Ten, if you count Elaine.”

“Is she going to die?”

“Nobody’s quite coming out and saying that yet. I think it’s against their religion to speak that plainly. But if this were Las Vegas they’d take the game off the boards. That’s how much of a chance they seem to think she has.”

“I’m sorry, Matt.”

I thought of a couple of things to say and left them unsaid. He cleared his throat and asked me if I had any kind of line on Motley’s possible whereabouts.

“How would I know?”

“I thought you might have scouted something up.”

“Me?” I looked at him. “How could I do that, Joe? He got an order of protection against me, remember? If I went looking for him and found him, somebody like you would have to show up and arrest me.”

“Matt—”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Elaine’s good people and I’ve known her a lot of years. I think it probably got to me, seeing her like that.”

“Of course it did.”

“And I’m running on empty. I was up all night, in fact I was just getting ready for bed when I caught a newscast.”

“Where were you? Out looking for Motley?”

I shook my head. “Just sitting up all night telling old stories with Mickey Ballou.”

“Why him, for Christ’s sake?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“Funny friend for you to have.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “When you think about it, all I am is a guy who used to be a cop a long time ago. And what I am now is a sort of shady character with no visible means of support, so—”

“Cut it out.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry, all right? I played it the way it looked as though it had to be played. You were on the job long enough to know how it works.”

“Oh, I know how it works, all right.”

“Well,” he said. “If you think of anything, you’ll let me know, right?”

“If I think of anything.”

“Meantime, why don’t you go home and get some sleep? You can’t do her any good here. Go get some rest.”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked out of there together. They were paging some doctor on the intercom. I tried to remember the name of the one I’d talked to. He’d been wearing one of those plastic badges with his name on it, but it hadn’t registered.

Outside the sun was shining, the air, a little warmer than it had been lately. Durkin said he had a car parked around the corner and offered me a ride downtown. I said I’d take a cab, and he didn’t press.

I didn’t have to loid the door at 288 East Twenty-fifth. A woman was on her way out as I came in from the street. From the smile she gave me, I think she must have thought she recognized me. She held the door for me and I thanked her and went on in.

I walked the length of the hallway. The door to the rear courtyard was as I’d left it, with my toothpick wedged in place to keep it from locking. I pushed it shut behind me and stood at the back of the yard and looked up at his window.

I’d made two stops on the way downtown. As a result, I had a pair of standard-issue NYPD handcuffs in one of my topcoat pockets and a miniature tape recorder in the other. I found room in one of my pants pockets for the cuffs and put the recorder in a jacket pocket, where it shared space with Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
, which I seemed as incapable of getting rid of as I was of reading. My other jacket pocket held the .38 Smith. I took off my topcoat, folded it, and set it down on top of one of the garbage cans. It was too bulky for what I had in mind.

No rats scuttled as I moved among the garbage cans. They were probably hidden away somewhere, sleeping off the effects of the long night. Maybe Motley was doing the same.

Making as little noise as possible, I positioned one garbage can beneath the fire escape and clambered on top of it. I straightened up and reached overhead to grasp the descending ladder. I pulled on it and nothing happened. I gave a yank and it creaked a little in protest, and there was a screech of metal scraping against metal as it lowered itself for my ascent.

I waited, but no heads emerged from the windows overlooking the courtyard. The noise was minimal, and most of the tenants were probably at work at that hour, while the night workers would be asleep.

Over on Second Avenue somebody leaned on a car horn, and another driver answered with a series of staccato beeps. I hauled myself upward, pulling myself hand over hand until I could get a foot onto the lowest rung. The Smith in my pocket clanged against the metal railing. I climbed onto the first horizontal walkway, leaned my weight against the brick wall of the building, and tried to catch my breath.

After a minute or two I was ready to go the rest of the way. I climbed up to the fourth floor and kept a low profile when I reached it, hunkering down on the metal parapet and peering over the windowsill.

The apartment was dark within. There were window gates to render the place burglar-proof, but they were unfastened, and the window itself was open a few inches at the bottom. I got up close to the window and looked in, first through the space at the bottom, then through the glass. I was looking into a small bedroom. There was an old-fashioned metal bedstead, a chest of drawers, a pair of milk crates set on end to serve as bedside tables. One of them held a phone, the other a digital clock-radio.

I sat perfectly still for what the clock-radio assured me was a full minute. The seconds ticked silently but visibly away, and not a sound issued from the apartment within. And the bed was empty, and unmade.

But it was the right apartment, and Brian’s information was good. And he’d been back since his visit to Elaine’s apartment.

A jacket with a New York Auxiliary Police shoulder patch hung from the knob of the closet door.