Painted Ladies (13 page)

“He did indeed.”

“And he apparently chose not to,” I said.

“Yes,” Trachtman said. “That is a puzzle.”

“Maybe he liked teaching,” I said. “Maybe he wanted to be in the classroom.”

“I am, myself,” Trachtman said, “a reformed academic. In my years at the trade I never met anyone who didn’t want his or her teaching load to be smaller.”

“So they can do more research?” I said.

“No,” Trachtman said. “Because they don’t like to teach. It’s hard work if you really do it.”

“Most things are,” I said. “What would they prefer to do?”

“Sit about in the faculty lounge, drinking bad coffee and discussing intensely matters of great import with which they have no active engagement.”

“Frees their mind,” I said, “to romp with the mind of God.”

“Who said that?” Trachtman said.

“Nick Carraway, in
The Great Gatsby,
” I said. “Did Prince seem like that to you?”

“No,” Trachtman said. “He seemed a man who might actually want to be engaged.”

“Be my guess, too,” I said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at it, but nothing much else surfaced. So I went back to the Carlyle, which was always one of my New York indulgences, along with the Four Seasons restaurant and the Bronx Zoo. I had a couple of drinks from the minibar, ordered room service, called Susan, and had a pretty good time.

In the morning I had breakfast in the dining room and got my car from the garage and drove home straight to Susan’s house. Where I spent the night.

S
usan had early appointments, and I left her to them and went home at about seven-thirty. In the Back Bay all the streets have a public alley behind them, and the alleys are numbered. The one behind my building was number 21. I pulled into it off Arlington Street and parked in my spot behind my building. There was a back entrance, but I always liked to walk around and go in the front door. It was a good-looking street, and I liked that I lived there. I’d gotten the place when it was far cheaper than it would be now, and I’d worked on it during slow moments in the sleuthing business, so it was pretty much just the way I liked it. Actually, it was probably more the way Susan liked it, and I didn’t mind.

One of the collateral benefits of having someone try to kill you is that it makes you alert . . . unless they succeed. And as I walked to my door, I noticed a maroon Lexus sedan parked across the street from my building. The passenger-side window went down as I walked up Marlborough Street, and a cigarette flipped into the street. It was cold, but the motor wasn’t running. So somebody in there was sitting in a cold car. It could be that he didn’t want to attract my attention to the white exhaust that would tail up from the car if the motor was running. Might be that he was waiting for someone and didn’t want to waste gas, or pollute the atmosphere by letting his car idle.

If he was waiting for me, he probably expected me to come out of my building in front of him, and not walk up the street behind him. Or he might be killing time until a meeting that he didn’t want to be early for. The car had tinted windows, and I couldn’t see in. So I paid it no apparent attention and turned into my front walk and up the low stairs. The entry to my building had a glass door, and I could see the Lexus reflected in it. There was no movement. I opened the door and went in and looked back out covertly. Nothing.

I shrugged and went to my apartment. The door seemed as always. Still, no sense being careless. I put my overnight bag on the floor and took out my gun while I unlocked the door. I felt a little paranoid, but that was quite a bit better than feeling a little dead.

My apartment was undisturbed. No one was in it. I retrieved my overnight bag and locked my front door and headed to the front windows to see if anything was shaking down below. As I passed the open door to my bedroom I tossed my suitcase on the bed and was a step past the doorway when it landed and the bed exploded.

Scraps of mattress and bed frame surged through my door and scattered on my living-room floor. I stepped back a little and peeked around the doorjamb. The bed was gone. Beyond that, there was surprisingly little damage. The bomb had been intended to kill only me. It must have been under the mattress, which had muffled its force and sound. I went to my living-room window and looked down.

The Lexus had pulled out of its parking spot and was approaching Berkeley Street. I got the license-plate number. Then I called the cops and walked back into my bedroom and looked at the wreckage.

B
elson and I sat at my kitchen counter and watched the technicians do whatever it was they did.

“These guys are pretty good,” Belson said.

“I know.”

“They keep at it, they might get you.”

“I think the best bet is to catch them before they do,” I said.

Belson nodded.

“Good idea,” he said. “The license-plate number you got from the Lexus is assigned to a Volkswagen Passat. Owner is Laurie Hanlon. We’ll check her out, but sounds a lot like a stolen plate to me.”

“If it had anything to do with the bomb blast in the first place,” I said.

“If it’s a stolen plate,” Belson said, “it would make me think that they did.”

“Yeah, sat out there for however long,” I said, “waiting to make sure the bomb went off.”

“One of your neighbors takes her kid out in his carriage couple times a day, says the car’s been there for several days. Sometimes, she says, another car would pull up and a guy would get out and swap places with the guy in the Lexus.”

“Working in shifts,” I said.

“Rivera, the bomb-squad guy, says the kind of charge they rigged, to just destroy the bed and its occupant, is pretty sophisticated.”

“Can they tell anything else about it?”

“Nothing much to look at,” Belson said. “Maybe when they get the scraps into the lab.”

“We knew they had a bomber on staff,” I said. “The thing that blew Prince up wasn’t a bunch of nails in a pipe.”

“True,” Belson said. “You know how they got in here?”

“No.”

“You’ve looked?” Belson said.

“What do I do for a living,” I said. “Sell watches out of the trunk of my car?”

“You’ve looked.”

“I see no sign of forced entry,” I said.

“We haven’t, either,” Belson said. “Anybody got a key to the place besides Susan?”

“Hawk,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“Central Asia,” I said.

“Central Asia? Doing what?”

“What he does,” I said. “It’s got something to do with Ives, the government guy. You know Ives?”

“The spook,” Belson said.

“Yes.”

Belson shook his head slowly.

“Anybody else?”

“Nope. Just Hawk and Susan.”

“She’s okay?”

“Left her at seven-thirty this morning,” I said. “She was fine.”

“Why don’t I ask Cambridge to send a car up there, just to check,” Belson said.

“Yes,” I said.

He stood and went to the other end of the living room, where he took out a cell phone and talked for maybe five minutes. Then he came back.

“Cambridge will send a car up. I explained a little of the deal. They’ll actually talk to her, make sure she’s okay.”

I nodded.

One of the uniformed cops, a young one, came into my apartment.

“Sergeant,” he said.

“You got something, Stevie?” Belson said.

The young cop looked at me.

“He’s on our side,” Belson said. “For the moment, at least.”

Stevie nodded.

“Got a stiff in the cellar,” he said. “Hispanic male, maybe forty, forty-five, shot once in the back of the head. Got a tattoo on his right biceps says Rosa.”

“Francisco,” I said. “The super.”

Belson nodded.

“He have a passkey?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That’s probably how they got in,” he said.

I nodded.

“Take some scientists down there, Stevie,” Belson said. “I’ll be right there.”

He looked at me

“You wanna take a look?”

“I would,” I said.

And we headed to the cellar.

F
rancisco had been a good guy, and clever with his hands. He could fix a lot of stuff. Now he was facedown on the floor of his basement workroom with a small, dark hole at the base of his skull, in a pool of his blood dried and blackened on the floor.

“Keys?” Belson said.

Stevie shook his head. “Haven’t seen any.”

“Normally carried them in front, hooked to a belt loop,” I said. “Large bunch. You could hear him coming. They may be under him.”

“Turn him,” Belson said.

And a couple of technicians turned him up on his side. The bullet had apparently exited his forehead and made a much larger hole, from which the blood had come. The keys were on his belt loop. The technicians let him back down as he had been. Belson squatted on his haunches and looked at the bullet hole.

“Big caliber,” he said.

“Big enough,” I said.

Belson stood up.

“Bell marked
Super
out front?” Belson said.

“Yes,” I said.

“So they ring the bell,” Belson said to whatever he was looking at in the middle distance. “He lets them in. They point a gun at him, and since they don’t know the layout here, he takes them to your place and opens the door.”

“Then they walk him to the cellar and into his office,” I said, “and execute him.”

“No witness,” Belson said.

He appeared to be staring blankly at nothing. But I’d known him a long time, and I knew he was seeing everything in the room and could give you an inventory of it a week later. A Homicide dick named Perpetua came into the room.

“Look around, Pep,” Belson said. “When you’re done, come talk to me.”

Perpetua nodded and took out a notebook.

To me, Belson said, “Let’s you and me go someplace and talk.”

“Mi casa, su casa,”
I said.

We went up from the basement and sat on the stairs between the first and second floor.

“Couple things,” Belson said.

His cell phone rang. Belson listened, nodding slightly. At one point he smiled.

“She did, huh?” he said.

More listening.

“Thanks,” Belson said, and broke the connection.

“Susan’s fine,” he said. “She was with a patient and wasn’t pleased about the interruption.”

“She speak sharply to anyone.”

“I believe she called the prowl-car guy a ‘fucking ass-hole, ’ ” Belson said.

“That would be my Sweet Potato,” I said.

“Cruiser will stay there, anyway, out front, for the day, at least.”

“Probably make some of her patients nervous,” I said.

“You want me to pull the cruiser off?” Belson said.

“No,” I said.

“Okay,” Belson said. “Coupla things. One, you must be getting very close to finding out something they don’t want you to know.”

“Seems so,” I said.

“You know what it is?”

“I’m developing some theories,” I said.

“Good. We’ll talk about that,” Belson said. “But right now, I figure that they aren’t going to quit.”

“They don’t appear to be quitters,” I said.

“No,” Belson said. “But right at the moment they probably think they killed you.”

“They probably do,” I said.

“Might be smart to let them keep thinking so,” Belson said.

“You have a plan?” I said.

“About half a plan,” Belson said. “Say we slip you out the back way, and you stay in a motel or someplace?”

“No,” I said.

“No?” Belson said.

“Frank,” I said. “The only connection we got with them is their attempts to kill me. They think I’m dead and we lose that.”

“For crissake,” Belson said. “You hadn’t tossed your overnight bag on the bed, you would be dead.”

“But that wasn’t just luck,” I said. “I tossed it because I had spotted the guy in the car outside and was in a hurry to get a better look through my front window.”

“That’s weak,” Belson said. “You think you can keep them from killing you until we catch them.”

“Yes.”

“You’re fucking insane,” Belson said.

“Yeah, but I have access to a good shrink,” I said.

Belson nodded.

“Bedroom will have to be cleaned up,” Belson said. “Window will have to be replaced. And the super isn’t gonna do it.”

“True,” I said.

“And you’ll need a new bed.”

“Also true,” I said.

“So you’ll have to go someplace for a few days at least,” Belson said. “I can slide you out the back way in case anyone is trying to tail you.”

“If someone’s trying to tail me,” I said, “let’s go out the front door and let him, and maybe we can catch him.”

“Nobody’s gonna tail us without one of us spotting the tail.”

“Not possible,” I said. “And if he makes a move at me, you can throw yourself into the line of fire.”

“That is absolutely one of my favorite parts of police work,” Belson said.

“Especially,” I said, “if it’s me you’re taking the bullet for.”

“Especially,” Belson said. “But just in case nobody tails us and we don’t catch him, and I don’t take a bullet for you, how about backup?”

I shook my head.

“Vinnie?” Belson said.

“Nope.”

“West Coast guy, Latino, helped you save my life when I got shot,” Belson said.

“Chollo,” I said.

“How about him?” Belson said. “Or the big queer from Georgia.”

“Tedy Sapp,” I said.

“Maybe one of them?”

I shook my head.

“This one’s mine,” I said.

Belson was silent for a while, nodding slowly.