Three-Day Town (28 page)

I vaguely remembered that when I’d lived here with Lev a million years ago, there had been controversy over landfills in the Brooklyn marshes, but surely they had long since reached capacity?

And why was I standing here in the middle of the night wondering about New York’s garbage?

My glass was empty but I still wasn’t sleepy. Okay, another half glass ought to do it, I decided.

When I returned to the window, I saw a figure turn the corner onto Broadway. A moment later, the man on duty across the way stepped out onto the sidewalk and flexed his arms as if to get the stiffness out. He seemed to be waiting for something, and sure enough, down the block from West End Avenue came a slender dark-haired woman with a beagle on a leash. She paused to toss a small bag onto their pile of garbage, then the night man held the door for them and followed them back inside.

One thing about living in the country, you don’t have to walk your dog and you don’t have to pick up after it.

A cab moved slowly down the street, its headlights bouncing off the shiny trash bags and making the sidewalks sparkle as if dusted by glitter. Glassphalt. Made from recycled glass. Before I could start trying to estimate how much waste glass the city must generate, I finished my wine and went back to bed.

Just before I fell asleep, I found myself remembering Lee’s comment that he thought someone had been in his locker before today. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different,” he had written.

Right. Thinking of how messy my own high school locker had been, I yawned and drifted off wondering how he could possibly tell.

It was still dark and the digital clock read 6:23 when I opened my eyes. I lay there quietly for a moment trying to grasp why I was awake. It was almost as if I had heard Lee’s voice say, “
Things look a little different.
”

Huh?

I closed my eyes and was almost asleep again when it finally registered.

Quietly, so as not to wake Dwight, I got up and went back to the living room. Without switching on any lights, I went straight to the window, looked out, and saw that I was right.

Last night, I had counted the garbage bags in front of this building’s service entrance. I had then gone into the kitchen, poured myself a second glass of wine, and returned to this window to watch a cab come down the street. Its headlights had thrown the bags in sharp relief, enough to subliminally register a small change.

I carefully counted. Seven large black garbage bags were now heaped on the curb where before there had only been six.

My first impulse was to wake Dwight.

My second impulse was to call Sigrid Harald.

My third impulse, motivated by not wanting to appear melodramatic and stupid, was the one I acted on.

Even though I couldn’t imagine why someone would lug another garbage bag out to the street in the middle of the night when there were no porters on duty, this
was
New York and what did I know? Maybe the person I’d seen disappearing around the corner earlier was a doctor responding to a late-night emergency, someone who suddenly realized he’d missed the evening garbage collection and decided to drop it off on his way out. And wouldn’t I look like the village idiot if I woke Dwight or Sigrid because someone had added a bag of dirty diapers, vegetable peelings, and coffee grounds to the bags already there?

I stepped into my boots and slipped a parka on over my sweatshirt and warm-up pants. Out in the hall I started to ring for the elevator. Then I pictured Dwight leaning over my coffin to say, “
If you didn’t want to feel stupid, what made you get into an elevator with the only employee still in the building? The one man who was known to be here when both Lundigren and Clarke were killed?
”

Too late then to say, “
Whoever heard of a killer in a walrus mustache?
”

So I opened the door to the service landing instead. I was briefly tempted to use the self-service back elevator. Sidney had told us that Jani Horvath usually slept during the long quiet hours of the night, but I didn’t want to risk his hearing any mechanical rumbling. As quietly as possible, I crept down the stairs and past the first floor to the basement, where I eased open the automatic door into a dim and shadowy hallway that had only a security light to show me the way to the outer door. The instant I heard the door click shut behind me, I realized that I’d made a dumb mistake. Sure enough, when I tried to open the door, it was securely locked.

Damn!

“
This could be a problem
,” said my internal preacher.

“
You think?
” said the pragmatist, shaking his head at my stupidity.

No big deal. I would check out that seventh bag. If I was right, I could dash into the hotel down the street and call the police. If I was wrong, then I could wait till I saw someone approach the front door and slip in with them. Safety in numbers. This was New York. The City That Never Sleeps. Surely this building included early risers, morning joggers, coffee fiends. Dwight would never have to know how silly I’d been.

To my horror, I heard the front elevator descending to the basement.

I quickly retreated back around the corner and pressed myself against the wall.

The door swooshed open, followed by the sound of the brass gate being pulled back. Someone—Horvath?—shuffled across the hall. I risked a quick look and saw Horvath’s white head and broad back disappear down a hall opposite the elevator doors. For one mad moment, I felt like pulling a Corey Wall and stealing the elevator.

“
Yeah, right
,” jeered the pragmatist.
“An elevator with no buttons to push and an accordion gate to close first.”

Several minutes later from somewhere down that other hall came the sound of a flushing toilet, then footsteps back to the elevator. More door closings and the car rose again.

I realized I seemed to have stopped breathing and took huge breaths of air to calm myself.

When I reached the outer door, I carefully slipped one of my gloves between the door and the lock on the jamb so that I could get back in if I needed to.

There was a narrow areaway and a steep ramp that led up to street level. At the top of the ramp was a gate made of steel bars, but it wasn’t locked and I passed easily out onto the sidewalk. The air was bitter cold, and down on Broadway an ambulance went shrieking by. That way was east and I fancied that the sky looked lighter there.

From two blocks away, toward the river, I saw flashing lights and the roar of a heavy engine—a garbage truck making early morning pickups and coming this way.

I moved over to the pile of black bags and quickly ran my hands over the chilled plastic. Nothing odd about the first bag, but the second one atop the pile sent a frisson of horror through me as I realized that my hand had found a shoe, a shoe that felt as if it was attached to something.

“Mrs. Bryant? What are you doing? Did you lose something?”

I turned and was relieved to see a different brown uniform and friendly face.

“Thank God!”

I’m sure I was white as new-fallen snow, and he looked alarmed.

“You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“In the bag!” I gibbered. “There’s another body in that bag!”

“What?”

“Feel,” I told him, guiding his hand over that foot.

He touched it and immediately jerked his hand back and stared at me in consternation. “Oh my God!”

“Do you have a phone?” I asked. “I forgot to bring mine.”

“But Mr. Bryant—?”

“No, he’s still asleep. We’ve got to call Lieutenant Harald.”

He slapped his own pockets and came up empty-handed. “There’s a phone in the break room. Come on!”

He hurried toward the ramp and I followed him down and through the basement door. My glove fell to the ground and his foot sent it skidding across the floor inside, but I didn’t stop to pick it up. The hall I’d seen Horvath go down earlier led to a sort of combination kitchen and common room with a set of tumbled bunk beds at the far end and a lavatory off to the side.

“Do you know Lieutenant Harald’s number?” he asked, reaching for the wall phone. “Oh, never mind, I’ll just call 911.”

“I’ll wait for them outside,” I said. “Make sure the sanitation people don’t take that bag.”

I pulled up the hood of my parka and had taken one step toward the door when something slammed into my head.

Dazed, I fell to the floor. Before I could gather my senses, I felt myself being rolled over and over until my arms were pinned to my side. More rolling and I realized that he was wrapping duct tape around my body and over my face. I opened my mouth to scream and a wide strip of duct tape effectively silenced me. To my horror, even my nose was covered and breathing came hard.

I felt him grab me by the ankles and drag me across the floor. I bit into the tape that had folded itself upon my tongue when my screaming mouth closed. I was desperate for air and tried to writhe away from my attacker, but the struggle only made it worse. I was going to suffocate and there was nothing I could do about it.

Then merciful darkness took me.

CHAPTER

24

Occasionally there is an alley or small court that runs back or across the rear of the buildings, with its accumulation of rubbish and wretched out-houses where… thieves have their runways and hiding-places.

—
The New New York
, 1909

D
WIGHT
B
RYANT
—T
UESDAY MORNING

D
wight turned in his sleep, reached for Deborah, and felt nothing but pillows. The window showed a dark sky, so he lay there half awake and listened for her to come back to bed. After a few moments, he realized that the only sounds he heard came from outside. A large truck was moving noisily down the street out front, but here in the apartment, all was quiet.

Puzzled, he rolled out of bed and looked into the bathroom.

Empty.

“Deb’rah?”

No answer and a quick look through the other rooms let him know she had gone out.

He glanced at his watch. Now where the hell could she be at 6:50 in the morning?

Another quick search showed that her parka and her boots were gone, which meant she had gone outside.

On the other hand, because she had not dropped her nightclothes on the bed as she usually did, he had to assume she had not dressed in street clothes, so she probably intended to duck out and be back before he missed her. But where?

He stepped out onto the balcony off the living room. The frigid early morning air nipped at his face. On the street below, a big sanitation truck with flashing yellow lights had stopped in front of this building and two men, well bundled against the cold, were collecting from either side of the street. A third man, one of this building’s employees to judge by the brown uniform, was helping. Daylight had begun to lighten the dull gray sky, but from this height and at this angle, it was hard to make out features beneath their hats. As Dwight watched, the man slung what looked to be a rather heavy bag into the maw of the truck and then stood back, obscured by the other two men, with his hand on another bag as they cleared the curb of garbage. Disregarding them, Dwight leaned over the balcony and scanned the sidewalks.

No Deborah.

Down below, the man in the brown uniform swung his second heavy bag up into the back of the truck. Then, as the two sanitation workers followed the truck on down to the next pile of garbage, he disappeared through what was evidently a side entrance into this building.

Dwight quickly pulled on his boots and the wool slacks he had worn last night and grabbed up his wallet, keys, and phone, noting with exasperation that of course Deborah had left hers in the charger. One of these days he was going to chain that phone around her neck if she didn’t start carrying it.

And start keeping it on.

Out in the hall, he rang for the elevator, and when it came, the operator with the walrus mustache gave a dour nod and pulled back the brass gate.

“Horvath, right?” Dwight asked as he stepped inside.

“Yeah?”

“You haven’t seen my wife, have you?”

“The pretty lady that was with you last night?”

“Yes. Did you take her downstairs?”

Horvath shook his head. “Nope. You’re the first from this floor since I came on duty.” He closed the gate and the door and turned the brass handle so that they started down.

“You sure?”

“Positive, mister. Only been three people down so far and all of ’em were men.” He paused as if to think. “And a dog.”

“Could she have taken the service elevator?”

He shrugged. “I suppose. Would’ve heard it, though, and I didn’t.”

“And she didn’t go out the front door?”

“Not that I saw, and I’ve been awake for at least an hour.”

“Who else is on duty now?”

“Nobody. Just me till eight o’clock.”

“But I saw someone in a brown uniform out on the sidewalk just now. He helped throw garbage bags in the truck.”

“Not me, mister. Elevator men don’t mess with garbage and the porters don’t come on till eight.”

The elevator stopped at the first floor and Horvath started to open the doors, but Dwight stopped him.

“Take me down to the basement.”

“I’m telling you. There’s nobody there,” he protested. “I was down there not twenty minutes ago and I had the place to myself.” Nevertheless, he closed the gate again and turned the brass handle another notch.

As soon as they reached the basement and the doors slid back, Dwight walked out into the dimly lit passageway and called, “Deb’rah? You here?”

No answer.

“Hey!” he called again. “Porter! Anybody here?”

Horvath watched impassively from inside the elevator.

Dwight spotted the outer door at the end of the passage and started toward it, flicking on light switches as he went. Something lay on the floor off to the side, and when he picked it up, he saw it was a glove, Deborah’s glove.