Nightwatcher (17 page)

“I might be able to help you out,” she said, “if you’re willing to work hard.”

Jerry was excited. “I am! I want to be a fireman!” he told her, and she laughed.

“I don’t know about that—but maybe my husband can give you some work. He owns some apartment buildings, and he always needs help. He’d probably pay you under the table, if that’s all right.”

“That’s all right,” Jerry said, though when he pictured himself and Mr. Reiss crouched under a table, he wondered why he would want to do that.

He was disappointed that he couldn’t be a fireman, but he soon got over it. He felt important, going to work almost every day and getting paid.

It was funny, though—Mr. Reiss never paid him under a table, the way Emily said. He paid Jerry wherever he happened to see him, like in the hall, or out in front of the building, or in the boiler room. He would just reach into his pocket and he would count out some bills into Jerry’s hand.

“You don’t need money,” Mama told him when he started working. “You don’t even know how to buy things.”

She was right, so every time Mr. Reiss gave him his pay, Jerry gave the cash right to her. She saved it all up, and that’s how they moved into this building.

Now, he puts the cash into a drawer so that Jamie can use it.

Jerry takes out his key ring. It’s heavy. On it are keys to the building where he lives, and to all the buildings where he works, and to some of the apartments, too, in those buildings.

Mr. Reiss said he doesn’t have to carry all those keys around with him all the time, but he likes to. It makes him feel good, knowing that he can unlock things whenever he wants to.

He just wishes he could use it to unlock the front door of his building sometime. It’s supposed to be locked, but it never is. Jamie says the lock is broken. Jerry would fix it if he worked here, but he doesn’t.

He walks through the unlocked door and is glad, as always, that he gets to use a key to open the metal box for the mail.

There are bills with Mama’s name on them. Jamie takes care of the bills now that she’s gone. Jamie takes care of everything.

Jerry walks to the elevator bank and presses the button, anxious to get inside and take off his shoes. His feet hurt from all the walking, and his head is starting to hurt again, too.

On his floor, Jerry unlocks the door and starts to tiptoe inside. Then he remembers. She’s gone. He doesn’t have to sneak in anymore, hoping she won’t hear him and yell at him—or worse—for something he did or didn’t do.

This apartment has two bedrooms—tiny, but Jerry has his own private space.

In the old apartment, there was only one bedroom, and it was Mama’s. There was nowhere for Jerry to go to get away from her, nowhere to hide.

In that apartment, he slept in the living room, on a pullout couch with big hard lumps in it and a bar that hurt his back. There were bugs, too, a lot more bugs than there are here. Sometimes he felt them crawl over his skin in the dark.

That terrified him. He hates bugs, all kinds of bugs—bugs that fly and bugs that crawl and even bugs that Jamie says aren’t really bugs, like worms and spiders.

Some nights, when Jerry was young and living in the old apartment, he was too uncomfortable to sleep at all, and so he lay awake, afraid, until the morning light chased away the shadows and the bugs.

“I was there with you—don’t you remember?” Jamie asks sometimes, but Jerry doesn’t remember that.

Jamie tells him about things that happened to him in the old apartment. Usually, the things Jamie tells him aren’t nice at all, and Jerry is glad he doesn’t remember.

He likes to remember nice things—like Mama making cake. Mama made the best cake. Most of the time, she didn’t let Jerry have a piece, but once in a while, she did. Sometimes, when she was sleeping, he even snuck some out of the kitchen. Just a little bit, so that she wouldn’t know it was missing. He was careful not to drop any crumbs, not just because Mama would know, but because he knows now that bugs and rats like the smell of rotting food.

Mr. Reiss taught him that. He taught Jerry a lot of things, but not as much as Jamie taught him.

“Do you miss Mama?” Jamie asks sometimes, and Jerry wonders what would happen if he said yes. Would she come back?

He doesn’t miss Mama. Mostly, he was afraid of her.

“I was, too,” Jamie said. “I was always afraid of her.”

“Did she hurt you, too?”

“Yes, but mostly, it was you.”

“She still does. She hurts me a lot.”

“No, Jerry. That’s over. That’s not going to happen anymore. She went away, remember? And now I’m here, and nothing will ever hurt you again.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I won’t let it. Just like when you were a kid, Jerry, and I would try to make sure Mama didn’t hurt you. Don’t you remember that at all?”

Jerry didn’t. So Jamie told him all about it, about protecting Jerry when things got bad, and how one night, Mama hurt Jerry so badly that his head was smashed open, and Jerry started to remember.

“Is that why it always hurts me now?” Jerry asked, and Jamie told him that it might be.

“I went away after she did that,” Jamie said, “because I was afraid she would do the same thing to me if she ever found me.”

“Did she?”

“No. Never. But I found her,” Jamie said darkly.

“And me.”

“And you.”

“Don’t ever leave me again, Jamie.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“And if Mama ever comes back, you can make sure she doesn’t hurt me.”

“She won’t be coming back, Jerry. I promise you that, too.”

“But what if she—”

“Trust me. She won’t.”

Jerry hopes not. He really does.

Now, as is his new habit upon coming home, he walks over to her bedroom door.

Mama always spent a lot of time in her room with the door locked. Sometimes, Jerry would hear her talking in there, but he never saw anyone go in or out.

“Mama?” he calls, and knocks.

No reply from behind the door.

He tries the handle, just to be sure.

Yup, it’s still locked, just the way she left it when she moved away.

Sometimes, Jerry thinks about trying to get it open, but Jamie told him not to.

“Why would you want to go in there?”

“It’s probably dirty. I should clean it.”

“It’s not dirty. Don’t worry about it, Jerry.”

But Jerry worries, because there’s a bad stink coming from Mama’s bedroom, and he’s afraid it will attract bugs and rats.

“M
s. Taylor . . . ?”

Seated in a small room at the local police precinct, Allison looks up to see a rumpled-looking, middle-aged man in the doorway.

He’s wearing a dark tie whose point rides a good inch above his belt, and a dark shirt under a dark sport coat that, should he ever attempt to button it, would most certainly strain over his potbelly. There’s about as much salt-and-pepper hair in his bushy eyebrows and mustache as there is on his shiny head. He has sharp, shrewd eyes, but they’re not unkind.

“Detective Rocco Manzillo.” He strides over, shows her a badge, shakes her hand.

A strong smell wafts in the air between them. The smell of smoke, and burning rubber, and . . .

And she doesn’t want to think about what else.

“Were you down there?” Allison asks him, and he looks taken aback.

Maybe she was wrong.

But he nods.

Of course. The smell is distinctive, burned into her lungs and her memory.

“I’m sorry,” she says, wondering how many cops were killed and whether he knew any of them. Every officer she’s encountered today, both here at the station and back at the building, and even earlier, on the street, has been professional and efficient, but they all seem to have a vaguely preoccupied demeanor.

Detective Manzillo gives a weighty nod. “And I’m sorry about your friend.”

Her friend. Allison swallows and clasps both hands, hard, around the paper water cup someone gave her earlier.

Kristina is dead.

Not just dead. Murdered.

Allison saw her there, on her bed, covered in blood . . .

She shudders, remembering.

“Ms. Taylor, I need to ask you some questions, okay?” Detective Manzillo is sitting across the table from her now, taking out a pad and pencil. With the thick accent of a native New Yorker, he launches into a series of questions, most of them routine—her full name, age, occupation, etc.

She already went through all this information with the other investigators, back at the scene. It’s necessary, she knows, but exhausting to relay it all again; she’s been answering questions from the moment she screamed and Mack came running.

He was the one who called 911.

Even now, she can’t stop picturing the grisly scene as she numbly answers Detective Manzillo’s questions, relieved he isn’t asking anything that requires considerable thought.

Until: “When was the last time you saw Kristina Haines?”

She already discussed this with the cops at the scene. Ordinarily, she might have recalled it with ease days later, but too much has happened since that lazy weekend afternoon. Now, the details of her last encounter with Kristina lie almost out of reach beyond a yawning chasm, all but buried in the rubble of a seemingly distant past.

She clears her throat. “I saw her on Sunday afternoon.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s not much to tell. I mean, she was in the laundry room, and I came in, and we chatted while we washed our clothes.”

“About . . . ?”

“Oh God, I’ve been trying to remember everything she said. It was just small talk, really. We talked about her new temp job, and her commute . . .”

Detective Manzillo scribbles on his pad. “What else?”

“Um, we talked about how hard it is to find someone to date in this city, and—I already told the other police officers this—she mentioned that her ex-boyfriend had taken her CD player when he moved out, and she said she missed having music around. Did the other officers tell you that?”

“Yes. Tell me exactly what she said about it if you can.”

She searches her memory and does her best to quote Kristina word-for-word, then asks Detective Manzillo, “Is there a CD player in her apartment now? I mean, obviously, there must have been, because I heard the music, but I didn’t see one . . .”

I only saw her.

Covered in blood.

Dead.

“Yeah, there’s a CD player. The song that kept playing in her apartment,” Detective Manzillo says, “did you recognize it?”

“It was ‘Fallin’ ’ by Alicia Keys. I know the song, but—I mean, I’d never heard Kristina play it.”

“Do you know if the song might have had any significance to her?”

“I don’t know. It’s popular. I hear it all the time on the radio.”

He nods, scribbling on his pad. She notices that his pencil point is worn down to a nub. That bothers her. Some people can’t tolerate fingernails on a chalkboard or squeaking Styrofoam. Allison has always gotten chills when the wood of a dull pencil scrapes against paper.

“Tell me about Kristina’s ex-boyfriend.”

She drags her attention away from the pencil. “His name was Ray. I don’t know his last name, but—”

“We’ve got it. We’re already checking him out. Did she have any contact with him lately?”

“Not that I know of. But—I mean, it’s not like I talk to her all the time. We’re just neighbors, really.”

“Not friends, then?”

“Kristina is the kind of person who talks to everyone about anything and everything, so . . . it’s kind of hard
not
to be friends with her.”

She watches Detective Manzillo write something on his pad. The damned pencil lead is almost flat. Fixated on it, she shudders.

“How long have you known Mr. MacKenna?”

Startled by the shift in topics, she looks up. “A few months—ever since he moved into the building—I think that was May or June. But I didn’t know him well at all until the last day or two.” She explains about Mack’s wife; about how she’s been trying to give him support.

The detective writes it all down as if he’s hearing it for the first time, but she doubts that’s the case. The first officers to arrive at the scene separated Allison and Mack. They called for backup, then ushered Allison into her apartment to be questioned and Mack into his.

She has no idea where he is now. If they brought him down to the precinct, too, she hasn’t seen him.

“How would you describe Mr. MacKenna’s behavior today?”

“What do you mean?”

“You spent time with him this afternoon. How did he behave?”

Her temper flares at the absurdity of the question—unless no one told him about Carrie, which seems unlikely.

“You know his wife is missing, don’t you?”

“I know. How did he behave when you were with him?”

“How do you
think
he behaved?”

The detective is silent, watching her, waiting.

“He was upset,” she tells him, not bothering to hide her irritation. “That’s how he behaved.”

“Upset.”

“Yes.”

More silence. Clearly, he’s waiting for her to elaborate.

“You know—upset—distracted, and worried about his wife.”

“Did he mention Kristina at all?”

Grasping where he’s going with this—
disturbed
and
perturbed
by where he’s going with this—Allison shakes her head. “Mack never brought her up. I did. I was worried because I hadn’t heard from her and I asked if he had.”

“Why would you think he might have?”

“You mean why would he have heard from her? Because they’re neighbors. We’re all neighbors. You check in on your neighbors when something like this happens.”

Something like this . . .

Nothing like
this
has ever happened before. Who’s to say how people can be expected to behave in the aftermath of a terrorist attack of this magnitude? This is uncharted territory.

Which means you probably shouldn’t assume anything
, Allison tells herself.
About anyone.

Earlier she had speculated that there might be something going on between Mack and Kristina. Now she wonders what Mack told the cops about their relationship and whether there was, indeed, anything to tell?