CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (6 page)

“Well, I have what you wanted.”

“True.”

She shot me a look as she pulled a file folder from her black leather shoulder bag. “Anyway,” she said pointedly, and read from the file: “The Bronx Home for the Aged is owned and run by a not-for-profit called Helping Hands, Inc. They’re very highly regarded in the industry.”

“The not-for-profit ‘industry’? They call it that?” My mind went back to the caustic Dr. Madsen.

“That’s right,” Lydia said.

“Okay. Go on.”

“Helping Hands owns a bunch of other institutions in the Bronx. Two other nursing homes, three drug rehab centers, a group home for multiply handicapped people, another for juveniles, and a halfway house for ex-cons. Their administrative offices are at the Bronx Home. They were established eight years ago. I have a list of the administrative staff, if you want that, and the Board of Directors.”

“Is there anyone interesting on them?”

“I’m sure they’re all fascinating people. Do you want me to check them out?”

“Yes.” I picked up the list of the Board of Directors. None of the names were familiar, with one exception.

“Hey,” I said.

Lydia leaned close to read over my shoulder. There were blue glints in her short, asymmetrically cut hair. “What do you see?”

“Arthur Chaiken. Chairman of the Board.”

“You know him?”

“I worked for him a few times. He’s a lawyer. God, that was years ago.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a bulldog. Pleasant guy, unless his clients are threatened. If he’s your lawyer, he’s yours. He’d sit on a bomb for you.”

“Does he win?” Lydia asked.

“Used to, when I knew him. Wore everyone else out, if he had to. I remember some late nights and long days, working for him.”

“Do you want me to check him out? Or do you know him well enough already?”

“Do him, but save him for the second round. Let’s get in some preliminary stuff first.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Damned if I know. I’m thinking we should follow any path we can find, since we don’t know where we’re going.” I put my cigarette out. “And there’s something else. There’s a street gang over there called the Cobras. A guy named Anthony LeMoyne, who calls himself Snake, and a fat guy called Skeletor. See what you can dig up on them, okay?”

“Sure, boss. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Thumbnail backgrounds on everyone who works at the Bronx Home.”

“Everyone?”

“Start with the professional staff. But before that, start with Mrs. Wyckoff.”

“The—” Lydia shuffled her papers. “The Executive Director?”

“Right. Bobby, do you know her first name?”

“I didn’t know she had one.”

“I’ll bet no one calls her by it,” I agreed.

“Francine,” Lydia said, from her list.

“Okay. Francine. And who did the backgrounds on your own guys, Bobby?”

“My guys?” Bobby frowned, but he didn’t argue with me. “I did.”

“Get them to Lydia too, okay? For the guys who work out there now, and guys who used to.”

Lydia finished her soda. “It sounds like I’ll have enough to do tomorrow. And what’ll you be doing while I’m buried in paperwork?”

“Pining away because you don’t love me.”

She grinned, threw a look at Bobby, shook her head. As always, she thought I was kidding around.

E
LEVEN

I
drove Lydia home. The streets of lower Manhattan were as empty as they get, a few trucks rumbling, some late-model sports cars zipping home to New Jersey. The buildings stood square and black against the clear night sky.

“Mr. Moran calls you ‘kid,’ the way Shorty does.” Lydia’s face was eerie in the sodium streetlight. “Why do they do that?”

“You mean when I’m so obviously not one?”

“Well, unless you count adolescent behavior.”

I ignored that. “I was a kid when I met them. There was a tight group of guys who were friends of my uncle Dave’s. Cops, mostly. Dave called me ‘kid,’ so they all picked it up.”

“Your uncle Dave was the one you lived with?”

“For a few years. I moved in with him when I was fifteen. When I was seventeen I joined the Navy.”

“Why did you do that?” She waited, then added, “Unless it’s none of my business?”

“No, no, it’s okay.” The moon, bright and almost full, slipped for a moment from behind the old Western Union building, then hid again behind something else. “I joined the Navy because I was trouble for Dave.” I wasn’t sure that was the question she was asking, but I didn’t want to answer the other one.

We stopped at a light. From a black custom Camaro next to us came the pounding boom of heavy metal and the sweet smell of marijuana.

Lydia said, “Trouble?”

I lit a cigarette. “Those were bad years for me. If it hadn’t been for Dave I’d have a rap sheet a mile long, but all the cops in the neighborhood knew I was Captain Maguire’s kid.”

The light changed; the Camaro smoked out and was gone.

Lydia was looking at me curiously. “I didn’t know that about you.”

“No. Most people don’t.”

She was quiet; then she said, “And the Navy?”

I swung the car left onto Canal.

“The night I got arrested for maybe the twentieth time, the cops who picked me up knew Dave, so they didn’t even book me. They called him to come down.” I studied the empty road ahead as though driving it took great concentration. “I still remember the room where they put me, at the precinct. Bright lights, no windows. Hot and smelly. They left me there for a long time. When Dave finally came, he told me he’d had it. I could stay where I was, or I could join the service.”

Lydia was silent beside me.

“There was something in his eyes when he said that that was never there before. The next day I enlisted. My father was Army; nothing would have gotten me into the Army. Dave had been in the Navy.”

Lydia’s eyes searched my face, but she didn’t ask the other question.

I worked my way into Chinatown, pulled over in front of the old brick walk-up on Mosco Street.

“I’ll call you in the middle of the day,” I told her. “And we’ll have dinner tomorrow?”

“Okay.” She made no move to get out of the car, but sat for a minute, looking over the street. “Bill? Nobody said anything tonight about Mike Downey’s enemies.”

I nodded. “And you’re thinking that’s where we really ought to start.”

“Well, shouldn’t we?”

“Uh-huh. And I’m going to work on that end. But I don’t want to bring Bobby into that, yet.”

“I thought maybe that was it. That’s why I didn’t say anything at the bar.”

I kissed her lightly. “Thanks.” As she started out of the car, I said, “Lydia?”

She closed the door, leaned in the window.

“Bobby may be wrong about all of this,” I said. “The cops may be right. There may be nothing to find.”

Her eyes were gentle. “Then we’ll find that,” she said. “Then we’ll know.” She smiled, turned to go.

“Hey, Lydia?” She turned back to me. “Give your mother my love.”

Her smile became a grin. “If I gave her your love, she’d take something for it. She thinks it’s a disease.” She straightened, walked away. I waited until she was inside her building, then drove home in an empty car.

The sharp ringing of the phone cut through the darkness, brought me groggily out of someplace where dark shapes slid through glistening black water. I groped for the receiver, rasped, “Smith.” I coughed. The clock next to the bed read three.

“Kid? Kid, wake up. It’s Bobby.”

“Yeah. I’m up. What?” I rubbed my face, cursed as my hand pressed the bruise I’d forgotten.

A second’s silence; then, “Henry Howe. My night super out at the Home. He’s dead.”

The black water vanished in the electric charge that flew up my spine. “What happened?”

“Like Mike.” Bobby’s voice was tight. “Beat to shit. In the back, in the parking lot.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. He comes on at midnight. Sometime between then and now.”

“Where are you?”

“Home. They just called me.”

“When’d they find him?”

“Just now.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you out there. Half an hour.”

“It may take me longer.” Which meant: get out there, take care of things.

“It’ll take me less, Bobby.”

I pulled on some clothes, the .38, the windbreaker over it. I sprinted the two blocks to the parking lot where I kept my car. Fifteen minutes later I swung off the Deegan where the round hulk of Yankee Stadium loomed over the neighborhood like a brooding UFO. I cut up to the Concourse, and then it was six empty blocks to the Home. Empty; but when I got there, it was as if all the activity from the deserted streets had been drawn to the Home like filings to a magnet.

Three patrol cars with circling red and yellow lights were parked near the entrance to the lot, and an unmarked one slanted onto the sidewalk. Their radios squawked and hissed. A Samaritan Hospital ambulance was pulling away; an EMS one stood in the street, paramedics leaning on it, waiting. The Crime Scene wagon was across the street.

People milled around outside the gate, the crowd you can count on whenever there’s anything to see. A cop was waving them on, telling them go home, there’s nothing to see. Inside the lot were cops in uniform and cops in suits. In a corner, above some parked cars, floodlights had been strung. They threw bright, flat light and sharp shadows. There were technicians, a photographer, a guy moving along the ground picking up things and bagging them.

And at the eye of this crime-scene storm was a motionless man-shaped lump on the pavement.

I parked on the sidewalk to keep out of the way. At the gate the cop told me go home, there’s nothing to see.

“I want to talk to the detective in charge.”

“Yeah? Who does that make you?” He was young and tough and doing something official.

“I’m Smith. I work for Moran.”

“Oh, yeah?” He looked me over with a spark of interest, then hollered over his shoulder. “Hey, Lieutenant! Got something for you.”

A black man in a gray suit was standing in the glaring lights next to Henry Howe’s body. He looked up and found the young cop, who lifted a thumb in my direction. The black man walked around the body, toward me.

“I’m Lieutenant Robinson.” He was about my age, with a mustache like Lindfors’s and pale blue eyes. His gold shield hung on his jacket pocket.

“Bill Smith. I’m with Moran.” I took out my wallet, showed him what he wanted to see.

“Where’s Mr. Moran?”

“On his way.” I pocketed my wallet. “Can I see him?”

“Who? The stiff?” He looked at me for a few beats. “Can you do the I.D.?”

“I don’t know.”

We walked through the gate into the lot. “Why’re you here?” Robinson asked.

“Mr. Moran asked me to come down to see what I could do.”

Robinson snorted. “Not a damn thing, that’s what you can do.”

We stopped; I looked down at Henry Howe.

He lay on his back, one leg bent impossibly under him. His uniform shirt had pulled up out of his trousers; in the harsh lights his exposed belly was purple and black. Blood crusted in his red hair, blotched his shirtfront, streaked the hand twisted over his chest. His face was a mass of darkened, pulpy flesh. One eye stared blind. The other was gone. There was blood underneath him, too, on the unforgiving asphalt.

The stench was overpowering; Howe had lost control before he died. My stomach turned over, but I felt Robinson’s eyes on me, and I didn’t look away.

“You all right?” Robinson asked, less solicitous than information-gathering.

“Yeah.”

“That him? Henry Howe?”

“I think so. I only met him yesterday.” I made myself look closely at what was in front of me. Robinson looked closely at me. “Yes, that’s him.”

“Sure? Otherwise I’ll have Moran I.D. him, or one of the other guards. Because I don’t know if Howe had family, but if he did I don’t want to have to ask them.”

“No, it’s him.” I was hoping they’d get Howe covered and out before Bobby got there. “Was he shot?”

“Shot?” Robinson repeated carefully. “Why should he have been shot? He was beaten to death.”

“If this was a Cobra hit, he’ll have been shot too.”

“Why should it have been a Cobra hit?”

“Isn’t that how the Cobras operate?”

“How do you know?”

“Hank Lindfors told me. Is he here?”

“Lindfors.” Robinson looked at me in a new way. “I sent for Lindfors. He’s on his way. You a friend of Lindfors’s?”

“I had a drink with him this afternoon.” I sidestepped the question. “He told me about the Cobras.”

Robinson had another question ready, but he didn’t get to ask it. A wailing siren pulled to the mouth of the lot, a car door slammed, and a few seconds later Lindfors lurched into the lights. His raincoat
was open. His shirt had been buttoned wrong and it pulled across his chest. Breathing noisily, he came on a few steps, stopped still when he reached the body. He stared at it, swaying a little; then he swore heavily under his breath.

“Hank,” said Robinson.

Lindfors jerked his head up, spotted Robinson. He started to say something. Then he saw me. “Ah, shit! What’s this asshole doing here? Get rid of him! Fucking civilians—”

“Hey, Hank, back off,” Robinson said. “He’s with Moran. He I.D.’d the vic. Besides, I thought he was a friend of yours.”

Lindfors looked at me, then barked a bitter laugh. “Oh, yeah. A butt-hole buddy.” He turned back to Robinson. “What do you have?”

“Not much yet. He’s been dead under an hour. That checks out with what the other guard, Turner, told us.” Robinson gestured across the lot to the open door of a patrol car. For the first time I saw the young man in the Moran uniform who sat in the back seat, pale and staring.

“One of our guys?” I asked, stretching the pronoun. “Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“Yes,” said Robinson, with a sharp look at Lindfors. “He’s already given us a statement. I’m not ready for him to leave yet, though.”

“Okay. Thanks. See you, Lindfors.” Lindfors stared after me, then turned back to Robinson. If he said something, I didn’t catch it.

T
WELVE

T
he kid in the car looked at me through puffy eyes as I got in beside him. He’d been chewing on one knuckle; as I sat and shifted to face him, he pulled that hand down into his lap and covered it with the other, as though he’d have to force it to stay there.

“Turner?” I said gently. “I’m Bill Smith. Bobby Moran asked me to come down.” I showed him my Moran I.D.

“I guess he’s pissed.” Turner’s voice snagged in his throat. “I guess he’s pissed, Mr. Moran.”

“Why should he be?”

“Because I wasn’t—because Mr. Howe went—he said I—” The knuckle flew back to his mouth, got pulled away again.

I shook my head. “I don’t think he’s pissed, Turner. Not at you. But he’s upset and he wants to know what happened here. Can you tell me?”

“I—I didn’t—”

The patrol car smelled of coffee and greasy fries. A MacDonald’s bag was crumpled on the dash. I took my Kents from my pocket, offered the pack to Turner. His hand trembled. I lit one for him, and one for myself.

“What was Howe doing out here, Turner? Supervisor does the front door, isn’t that the way it is? It was late for break and early for mealtime. Why was he out here?”

I made the question long to give Turner a chance to get used to me. It seemed to work. “We were shooting the shit, you know, just for a minute, when I was coming through. ’Cause it was quiet, and … and …” He took a deep drag on the cigarette held stiffly between his fingers.

“Okay, Turner. That’s okay. What happened?”

“He—Mr. Howe—his beeper went off, and he said, shit, he had to make a call, and I should watch the desk, it might take a few minutes, but that was okay, he was the supervisor and he, he was telling me to do it….” Turner looked at me earnestly.

“It’s okay, Turner. You did the right thing. What happened then?”

Turner swallowed, pulled on the cigarette. He coughed on the smoke. “Well, nothing happened. Nothing happened. He didn’t come back. I thought he was just going downstairs, to make his call, but it got to be half an hour. Christ, it was quiet in there! So he didn’t come back. I didn’t know what to do. Christ, what was I supposed to do? It was quiet and I—”

“Turner!” I said sharply. His eyes widened and his knuckle jumped into his mouth again. My voice was much gender as I said, “Turner, I know it’s been tough. But you’ve got to stay with me.
Take me through it once, Turner. Just what happened, what you did. Can you do that?”

His eyes looked into mine. He took the hand slowly from his mouth, nodded at me. I waited.

Deliberately, slowly, he said, “I came down and talked to the back-door guy, Morales. He said Mr. Howe had gone out the back. So I … I came out here to look for him.” His knuckle hand started to move up; he pulled it down, took a drag on the cigarette instead. “I was thinking about Mike when I came out. When I found Mr. Howe I got sick, when I saw him, but it was like I wasn’t surprised. Like I expected it, you know?” His voice caught again.

“Turner, tell me exactly what you saw when you came out here.”

“I saw him—Mr. Howe. I didn’t touch him. I—like I said, I got sick. In the bushes, over there. Then I ran back and—” he stopped, rubbed the sweat from his upper lip—“and I told Morales to call the police.”

“Did you see anything else out here? Any movement, shadows, anything? Did you hear anything?”

Turner shook his head emphatically. “It was real quiet. Just my footsteps—they were loud.” He paused. “I came back out. While Morales was calling. Because … I sort of thought that’s what I was supposed to do. But I stayed over there. I couldn’t get close to him.”

“Okay, Turner.” I finished my cigarette, stubbed it out in the patrol car ashtray. “The cops want to talk to you again; they’ll tell you when you can leave. I’m going to find Morales.”

“He’s inside,” Turner said helpfully. “He’s still at the door.”

“Okay. Thanks. Listen, Turner? You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? You did what your supervisor told you to do; that was right. And coming back out here to wait for the police, that was right, too.”

He looked at me, looked away, put the knuckle in his mouth. He took it out to whisper, “It was my shift, Mr. Smith. It was supposed to be me.”

Morales was indeed at the door, at the desk where I’d sat talking with Fuentes half a day earlier. He was a heavyset Latino with thick black sideburns and a pitted face. I identified myself to him.

“Oh, good,” he said with what seemed like relief. “Good. You gonna be in charge now?”

“Until Mr. Moran gets here.”

“Good,” he repeated. “Gotta have somebody in charge. Gotta have that.”

“Morales, tell me what happened.” I didn’t quote Turner’s story at all; I wanted to see if their stories matched.

“Well, I already told the cops …” He seemed a little uncertain what to do, what proper procedure was.

“Good. Now tell me.”

Once was a request; twice was an order. Morales laid his pudgy forearms along the desk, leaned forward. “See, Mr. Howe, he went out, I guess about three. I didn’t think about it till Turner, he came down lookin’ for him. He said Mr. Howe said he was goin’ to make a phone call. But, see, you can’t make no phone call from outside round here. They’re always tearin’ up the phones, you know? The kids.”

“Where did you think Howe was going, when he went out?”

“What he told me, he was goin’ to get a sandwich.”

“You didn’t think that was strange in the middle of the night?”

“Well, sure, I thought it was strange. I wouldn’t go out around here at three in the mornin’. But he did it all the time.”

“Did what?”

“Went out at meal break. He took his break at four, an’ maybe once a week he’d go to the all-night bodega down there an’ get a sandwich an’ a coupla beers. He was in charge, so I never said nothin’.”

“How did he seem to you? Tonight.”

Morales shrugged. “Like he always seemed. Friendly an’ a little full a shit.”

“Okay. What happened next?”

“Well, so Turner, he went out, an’ a couple minutes later he comes runnin’ back in, lookin’ terrible, and he tell me, call the cops, cause Mr. Howe, he’s out there an’ he’s dead.”

“What did you do?”

“I call the ambulance, like it says here on the card, an’ then I call the cops.” He tapped the telephone on the desk. On it was a typed card with a list of emergency numbers. Samaritan Hospital was at the top; it was their ambulance I had seen leaving. They must
have decided that there wasn’t much for them to do, so they left it for the EMS crew, who knew the way to the morgue.

“Then I call Mrs. Wyckoff.”

“She’s coming down here?” I hadn’t thought of that, but of course it made sense.

“I guess. It says on the card, you gotta do that, in a emergency.”

“Morales, did you hear anything from outside in the time Howe was gone?”

“Uh-uh. Nothin’. I’d a gone out if I’d heard somethin’. To check it out, you know. That’s my job.”

“And you didn’t go out with Turner, after you called the cops? You didn’t go see the body?”

Morales looked at me blankly. “Why do I wanna do that? Turner says he’s dead, Turner says he’s all covered with blood. Why do I wanna see that?”

I couldn’t answer that question, so I asked another. “You were on duty three nights ago, weren’t you? When Mike Downey was killed?” I knew he had been. Bobby had told me about Morales, who had been down here in the back, doing his job, and hadn’t heard a thing.

“
Sí
, I was here.”

“And you didn’t hear anything then, either?”

“Well, see, that was in the front. Can’t hear nothin’ in the front from down here.” He scratched his head with a hairy hand. “Mr. Moran, he offer to change my shift after that. Me and Mr. Howe both, if we want. But I tell him no, I stay here, workin’ nights. ’Cause, you know, that’s my job.”

I left Morales doing his job. There was another question that had occurred to me to ask Turner, but there was something I wanted to do first.

Pete Portelli’s small office off the boiler room was locked. I had expected that. I took what I needed from my wallet and got to work. It was an old, simple lock; it took me under two minutes.

I groped for the light switch. The fluorescent tubes revealed the room in its paper-strewn glory. The overflowing ashtray and the dregs of a bottle of Schlitz perfumed the air. It didn’t look like much
to me, but a pig like Portelli sometimes has a photographic memory for his sty, so I was careful to touch nothing except what I’d come for. I slid open the desk drawer, pulled out the manila folder, read down the scrawled names on the locker list until I came to “Howe.” Number six; that was all I wanted to know.

I slipped the folder back in the drawer and the drawer back in the desk, turned out the light, closed the door behind me. I moved soundlessly down the hall to the other side of the boiler room. In the dim light from the high windows the old, dented lockers stood like tired soldiers far from battle and far from home.

Number six had a combination lock on it. I gave it three minutes and then gave up, picked the lock on the workshop down the hall, came back with a pair of bolt cutters. I snipped the lock and put it in my pocket.

I worked Howe’s locker from the top down, so that anything I knocked down or dropped I’d eventually find. There was no door on this room, so I didn’t dare turn the light on; Morales might see it, though he wasn’t close. As my eyes got used to the dimness I felt my way through Howe’s things: two magazines and a pair of canvas gloves on the shelf, blue jeans and a shirt hanging on the hooks, an old leather belt threaded through the jeans. Nothing in the pockets. On the floor, a pair of big rubber boots.

And in the right boot, wrapped with a rubber band, six thousand dollars in cash. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then; I was able to count it.