CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (20 page)

“What’s the difference whether I believe you?”

“Partly it’s practical. If you believe me maybe you won’t go to the police.”

“What’s the other part?”

“For some goddamn reason I’d like you to believe me.”

“For some goddamn reason I’d like to.” That wasn’t enough,
but it was the best I could do for him. “What about Reynolds?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“Suppose he was killed by someone who’d gone to Howe’s to get back something like this. It isn’t hard to believe you weren’t the only person being blackmailed. That still leaves me wondering what Reynolds went to Howe’s to do.”

“Maybe,” he said, “to get back something like this.”

“What would that have been?”

“I don’t know.”

“Care to guess?”

“No. We didn’t know each other well. We’d consult on patients and that was about it.”

“What kind of guy was he? Would you be surprised to find out he was involved in something illegal, something blackmailable?”

“Smith, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Mother Teresa was involved in something illegal. Reynolds was a friendly, warm, insincere son of a bitch. I didn’t like him and I didn’t trust him, but if he was up to something he never told me about it. Listen, I have patients to see. I’m going to be here late into the night calming these people down. Can we end this?”

“All right.” I stood, pocketed the photo. He didn’t move to stop me. “Tell me one more thing. You were in trouble in Wisconsin before you came here. What was that about?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he said, “I killed someone.”

I waited. He said, “An old woman. She had liver cancer. Horrendous pain. It was what they call assisted suicide.”

“How’d you get in trouble? Don’t doctors do that sort of thing all the time, and everyone just looks the other way?”

His grin was wry. “Seemed she’d sent a letter to the papers about how assisted suicide should be legal and how she’d only found one doctor brave enough to help her. Her son had a fit. He hadn’t known. She didn’t name me but it wasn’t hard to track me down. The state was backed into a corner. They had to arrest me.”

“But you didn’t do time? Or lose your license?”

“The grand jury wouldn’t indict me. But the AMA took a tight-ass moral position. My license was suspended for a year and it was clear I’d never work in Wisconsin again.”

“So you came here?”

Madsen shrugged. “I figured,” he said, “that it’s easy to hide shit in a sewer.”

T
HIRTY
-F
OUR

U
pstairs was quiet, residents napping in the day-room, soft Muzak on the PA system. I wondered how Ida stood that. The Wells Fargo man at the desk nodded to me when I came up the stairs, but said nothing.

The piano parlor was empty, less bright now that the sun had moved around the building. The piano was closed.

Now what?

I’d given Robinson time to do whatever he was going to do and clear out, if clearing out was on his agenda. If it wasn’t, he was still here, fishing, stirring up the waters. Part of me wanted to stand back and let him do it. Maybe this hot-parts business was it, was enough to explain everything that had happened, and maybe Robinson, a lieutenant of New York’s Finest, could wrap the whole thing up without me.

But another part of me said no. That part said that Robinson was after something else. It said Carter was in jail. And it said Howe, who was dead, who was a blackmailer, who had killed Mike Downey, was one of Bobby’s guys.

I should have called Bobby. He was the client. His case was solved, now I should report. But I wasn’t ready. I wanted to have more to give him, more than just bad news. The truth was I didn’t ever want to have to tell him about Howe, about that kind of betrayal. I could see his face as he heard, gray, tight; could see where the blame and the anger would go. Probably nothing I could do would stop that. But it would help if I knew all the answers, if there were no more questions to ask.

I turned to leave the parlor. Maybe Lydia was here, spirited
away somewhere by Ida Goldstein and Eddie Shawn. I’d find her, we’d talk, maybe we’d find a way to make things come out all right.

I opened the door into the hall and ran straight into Mrs. Wyckoff.

Her eyes narrowed and her back straightened. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Visiting,” I said.

“Get out.”

“Mrs. Wyckoff—”

“Remove yourself from these premises immediately or I’ll have you arrested. You were told not to come back here.”

“No, I wasn’t.” And I hadn’t been, though I couldn’t have honestly said I’d expected to be welcomed.

“You’re trespassing. Get out.”

“Why, it’s Bill!” came a voice from behind her. “You’ve come for a visit! How nice.” Mrs. Wyckoff’s head spun around. Ida Goldstein, her face a bland, smiling mask of pleased surprise, was shuffling toward us. She was followed by Lydia, pushing Eddie Shawn’s chair. They were smiling too. Mrs. Wyckoff’s cheeks crimsoned and I laughed before I could stop myself. I tried to cover it with a cough, but it didn’t fool anybody.

“Get out!” Mrs. Wyckoff sputtered at me again.

“He’s my guest,” Ida objected, as the little rescue party approached. “He’s come to visit me.”

“He’s a troublemaker and a trespasser. I won’t have him here. It’s your fault I’ve had to deal with the police all day,” she accused me.

“My fault? I’m just the messenger. The bad news has been going on around here for a while. Right under you nose,” I added, quoting Fuentes.

“Police?” Ida said. “Your ladyship may remember there have been police around here for days, investigating murder. Unless this is-”

“Oh, Ida, please!” Mrs. Wyckoff dismissed her. Ida’s hands clenched, opened, clenched at her sides. She stopped talking. “I hold you responsible, Mr. Smith, for any damage done to the Home’s reputation,” Mrs. Wyckoff went on. “This could have been handled in a far more sensitive way. And just how did you get in?” She shifted her suspicious glance to the guard at the desk.

“I’m visiting Ida. My name wasn’t on any persona-non-grata list.”

“It is now,” Mrs. Wyckoff said. “Guard!”

The Wells Fargo guy snapped his head up, stood toughly.

“You can’t do that,” Ida said. “Bill’s my guest.”

Mrs. Wyckoff crimped her lips, glared at Ida. To the guard she said, “Throw this man out.”

“No, I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m starving. I have to get some lunch anyway.”

“You should have eaten with us,” Ida said. “It was awful.”

I smiled, kissed her dry cheek. “I’ll see you later, Dollface.” I shook Eddie Shawn’s left hand, the one he held out to me. “
Hasta la vista
,” I said.

“Geronimo,” said Ida. She shuffled determinedly past Mrs. Wyckoff and into the parlor. Mrs. Wyckoff had to step back as Lydia wheeled Eddie into the parlor right behind.

The Wells Fargo guard seemed relieved as I walked past him, out the front door and into the garden, leaving Mrs. Wyckoff fuming in the hall.

Lydia caught up with me on the sidewalk outside the walls. The shadow of the building fell on the wide stone porch, and the trees I’d walked under were barer now than three days ago, when I’d first come here.

“She doesn’t like you much, does she?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t see why she should.”

“Besides you’re obnoxious, aggressive, and abrasive, what’s not to like?”

“Aren’t those three of the seven dwarfs?”

“Except ‘aggressive.’ He’s one of Santa’s reindeer.”

“How come you know about Santa’s reindeer?”

“It’s incumbent upon a member of the model minority to study the social customs, political organization, and religious mythology of the ruling class.”

“Oh,” I said. “How about lunch?”

“It was terrible.”

“I was offering to buy you some. You ate with them?”

“You can still buy me some. Ida said Mrs. Wyckoff rarely
comes into the dining room so it was a safe place to hide. If she came in we were going to pretend I was checking out the food for my mother.”

“She’s a natural, Ida is.”

“She likes you.”

“Well, so maybe she’s not so smart. Of course, she likes you too.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“That she likes us?”

“That she has to be here.”

“I asked Dayton about her,” I said. “She’s had a series of small strokes, and she’s likely to have more. She’s on medication but there’s no real way to prevent them.”

“But have they really affected her?”

“So far the effects are only minor, but they’re permanent. She has trouble with nouns, especially people’s names, for example. But mostly what’s wrong with her is that she’s old and frail and has no relatives.”

“And that’s a crime,” Lydia said. She turned back and looked at the Home, wrapped in its tall garden walls. “It gets you a life sentence, and you serve it here.”

I said, “Or someplace worse.”

Lydia was very quiet. I wanted to put my arm around her, just as a friend, just to reassure; but I didn’t.

The light changed, traffic started up. Across the Concourse a bus stopped, picked up some citizens who went in the front door and paid their fares and some teenagers who went in the back door and didn’t.

I lit a cigarette, held it in my left hand, the side away from Lydia. “Do you mind walking?” I asked.

“No, I’d like to. I don’t know this neighborhood.”

We walked the long blocks to the deli, past six-story apartment buildings with little entrance courtyards. One courtyard had a fountain in its center, long dry, chips in its concrete sides and trash in its bowl. Beyond the buildings, leading up to the courthouse, was the park. On a boulder in the center of a circle of trees a young couple sat, he murmuring in her ear, she looking down at the ground as she smiled and answered. The wind came up, blew leaves around them.

“Why does Mrs. Wyckoff blame you for the police coming around today?” Lydia asked.

“Because I called them.” I told her about the storeroom below the basement, with the carriage doors on Chester Avenue, and about Pete Portelli, who had busted his hump on the operation.

“Wow,” she said. “I may be in the wrong business after all. I don’t think I have enough of a criminal mind. In a million years I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“I didn’t think of it either.”

“What are you saying? That even the best criminal minds sometimes slip?”

“There’s more.” I told her what Portelli had said about Howe, and Mike.

She stopped walking, faced me. The wind lifted her short glossy hair. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Is it true? Do you believe it?”

“It makes sense to me. I hardly knew Howe, but the picture I’ve gotten of him makes it plausible. And what Sheila Downey said about Mike being upset about something at work and refusing to talk to Bobby about it, that fits too. But mostly what convinces me is Portelli was terrified. He thought I was going to shoot him.” I paused, looked across the street as though there were something I wanted to see there. “I thought so too.”

Lydia’s fingertips brushed the back of my hand. “You didn’t.”

“No.” I dropped the cigarette butt, crushed it underfoot. “Anyway, I don’t see him coming up with a story like that on the spot.”

We started forward again. “Could he have had it invented in advance, in case he needed it?” Lydia asked. “With Howe dead, it’s convenient to point to him.”

“If he had, why not invent a story that let himself out completely? He’s up to his ass in alligators now. He may squeeze out from under this stolen-goods rap but it’ll take some doing. Why not set the story up better from the beginning, if it was a story?”

“All right,” she said. “But if Howe killed Mike Downey, who killed Howe?”

“Portelli says it was the Cobras, reestablishing their ownership of that particular method of operation.”

“And they picked a man doing the same job in the same place, to make their point?”

“That’s the theory.”

“Then why would they deny it when you talked to them? Wouldn’t they have bragged about it if that’s why they did it?”

“I think they would have. I don’t think they did it. But let me tell you the rest.” I told her what I’d gotten from Eddie Shawn, and I told her what had happened in the police station that morning, and in the parking lot behind it.

By the time I was through we’d reached the deli. It was half empty, the last of the lunch crowd dividing up their checks and gulping down their coffee. As we sat Lydia said, “So Howe was killed by someone he knew. And the police think it was Carter.”

“No, they don’t. They think they can convince a jury it was Carter. They think they can use that to get either Carter or me to give them Snake.”

“Do they think it was Snake?”

“Lindfors does, but he can’t see past Snake and he doesn’t want to look. Robinson thinks getting Snake off the street is a more urgent priority than finding out who actually killed Howe.” I added, “He may be right.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Howe was killed for a reason, his killer may never kill again. Snake kills for fun.”

The waiter brought menus. I didn’t need one, but Lydia is always interested in people’s dining customs. I ordered chopped liver and a cup of coffee while she studied it. She asked for tea and a toasted corn muffin.

“Is that all you’re having? I thought lunch was terrible,” I said.

“It was. But I was undercover, so I ate it.”

It was the kind of deli where they have pickles in stainless-steel bowls on the table. I bit into one, tasted garlic and brine.

“Well,” Lydia said. “So that’s what you know. Do you want to know what I know?”

“Yes, I do. But there’s something I didn’t get to yet.” I told her about Dr. Madsen while the waiter brought lunch.

“You had a feeling about him, didn’t you?” she said after a pause, when I was through.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s why you didn’t tell the police about the pictures in the envelope.”

“Maybe.”

“You liked him.”

“That first day? No, not really. But I didn’t think he was bullshitting
me, and I can’t say that about many people in this case.”

“Do you think what he told you today was true?”

“It would be easy enough to check. But even if it’s true and even if you think it’s admirable, it doesn’t mean he couldn’t have killed Howe. Or Reynolds.”

“Do you think it’s admirable?”

“It’s illegal.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

I finished off the sandwich half I was holding. “Jesus, Lydia, I don’t know. If you’re asking if I think Robin Hood was anything more than a thug with style, no, I don’t. If you’re asking if I think the world would be a better place with more Dr. Madsens and fewer Mrs. Wyckoffs, yes, I do.”

Her black eyes caught mine. “I like him for it,” she said.

“I knew you would. Now, tell me what you know.”

“What I know.” She sipped her tea. “Oh—the first thing I know is that Mr. Moran called. He wanted to know if you know where Mr. Dayton is.”

“Should I?”

“Mr. Moran’s been trying to reach him. He’s got a new job for him.”

“I have no idea.”

“Mr. Moran says it’s strange that Mr. Dayton hasn’t returned his calls.”

“I think it’s strange that you call everybody ‘Mister.’ ”

“Only those who deserve respect, Bill,” she said pointedly. “Anyway, I think Mr. Moran is worried that Mr. Dayton is avoiding him.”

“Did he say that?”

“No …”

“I think they’ve been working together too long for that. If Dayton doesn’t want to work for Bobby anymore, he’ll tell him.”

“Even if the reason is … the one Mr. Moran is afraid of?”

“That Bobby’s old and sick and he’s lost it?”

She nodded.

“He might not tell him the reason,” I said, “but he wouldn’t just duck Bobby’s calls.”

Lydia sipped her tea in silence. I thought about Bobby, wondered whether his fear was in Lydia’s mind, or his own, or whether
Dayton, in fact, really did want nothing more to do with Moran Security.

“Lydia?” I said. “What else do you know?”

Her eyes came back to me from where they’d been, far away. She smiled. “The name on the card in Henry Howe’s toilet tank?” she said. “Margaret O’Connor is the Administrator at Samaritan Hospital. ‘ES’ stands for Emigrant Savings. Bank. The number you gave me is a checking account there.”

“Margaret O’Connor’s checking account?”

Lydia had just bitten into a piece of corn muffin. She shook her head while she swallowed. “As a matter of fact, no. Did you know that?”

“I don’t know anything. I guessed. Whose is it?”

“You’ll have to guess that too, because I haven’t been able to find out yet.”