Dead Man's Thoughts (27 page)

“Really, Ms. Jameson,” Di Anci said, “did you think my friends would allow me to leave the Special Prosecutor's office without my arranging for a replacement?”

“Carrying on the tradition,” I said. I turned to Dave. “I guess that explains your co-op. I thought you must have a rich family.”

Chessler gave a short laugh. “My father's a professional alcoholic. My mother works in a department store. But I got a taste for the good things in life when I went to Harvard on a scholarship. And you don't get those things by being honest, Cass. Not when you start from nothing. You either inherit it or steal it, but you don't earn it—not the kind of money I'm talking about.”

“Jesus, you guys kill me,” I exploded, unconscious for the moment of the irony in that phrase. “I represent the kind of animals who push old people into their apartments and then rip off everything they own. But at least they've got some kind of excuse—their own lives are so empty it makes a weird kind of sense for them to take whatever they can from whoever they can. But you two—”

“Shut up!” Di Anci waved the gun at me. I shut up. It wasn't going to do any good anyway. You couldn't insult people like them. I wished to hell Button had been in when I'd called. I could at least have told him everything I knew and where to find the evidence that would prove it. So that he'd have something to go on when my body was found. Because I was becoming aware that that was the plan. I was about to become a mugging victim.

“We'll take her downstairs,” Di Anci was saying. “Then out onto the street. We should be able to find a deserted place near the river. Then we shoot her, grab her purse, take out the cash and leave the rest. Another mugging. The mayor can give one of his press conferences,” he chuckled.

“Except for one thing,” I pointed out, trying unsuccessfully to conceal a note of triumph in my voice. “When Dave and I came in, a guard downstairs checked us on a list. So he'll be questioned by the police if anything happens to me.” I glanced at Dave, trying to see whether my attempt to split him from Di Anci was doing any good. His face was a blank.

Di Anci laughed. “You must give me credit for some sense, Ms. Jameson. When Dave checked in with the guard, where were you?”

“Waiting for the elevator.”

“Exactly.” Di Anci beamed. “So the guard only saw Dave. Dave's name was on the list. Not yours. And,” he chuckled, “in case you were wondering, my name does not appear on the list at all. Dave was kind enough to obtain a pink pass for me. Which means I can go anywhere in the building. Of course, it's in someone else's name. So when the police come to investigate, they'll find that Dave came here alone to do some research and that I wasn't here at all. Dave will, of course, be deeply upset by what happened to you. I'm sure the
Post
will be able to do a lot with it. ‘Lady Lawyer Killed While Boyfriend Works a Few Blocks Away.' Tragic.” He shook his head sadly, but the grin on his face spoiled the effect.

I could see it all too clearly. From the utterly sickening “lady lawyer,” to the interview with Dave, to comments from my Legal Aid buddies, to a quote from my parents. “We didn't want her to live in New York City on her own.” And in a week no one would remember my name. I'd be “the girl who was killed over by the World Trade Center, wasn't it awful?”

Oddly enough, these thoughts, morbid as they were, gave me a spark of hope. Unlike Nathan, who had invited Di Anci into his apartment for a talk not knowing that Di Anci was a killer, I at least knew what his intentions were. The whole plan depended on my going quietly. And why the hell should I? Shooting me here in the building, with guards and Port Authority cops around, when they'd gone to so much trouble to make it look like I hadn't been there at all, wasn't Plan A. It didn't even make a very good Plan B. A shot might be heard. It would be hard to get my body down fifty-seven floors. It wasn't easy to get blood out of a royal blue carpet.

I was beginning to enjoy the turn my thoughts were taking. They might have guns, but could they use them? When Di Anci ordered me to get up from behind Parma's desk, I laughed in his face. “You don't dare shoot me,” I challenged. “You can't make me do anything.”

There was, however, one little thing I'd left out of my calculations. Di Anci lifted the gun up and hit me with it.

I reeled backwards with the force of the blow. My hand went to my head. It came away with blood on it. As though from a great distance, I could hear Dave remonstrating with Di Anci “… didn't have to do that.”

“What do you want me to do? Let her mouth off like that?”

“We take her down in the elevator bleeding, and somebody might notice.” So much for any momentary thought that Dave had been concerned for my welfare.

“I shut the bitch up, anyway,” Di Anci said with satisfaction. “Christ, that broad can talk.”

I fumbled in my bag for a Kleenex to hold against my bleeding head. Dave gave me a sharp look. Di Anci went outside to see if the coast was clear for our trip downstairs. As I pulled the Kleenex out of my purse, I recalled the Swiss Army knife Nathan had given me. It was still in my purse, buried under all the garbage I usually carried. Could I get my hands on it, and bring it out without Dave seeing me? And even if I could get it, could I open it? Use it? I'd never done anything but open wine bottles and peel oranges with it. Could I use it to stab someone?

The Kleenex I was holding to my cut head was sodden with blood. As I reached for another, I resolved to try for the knife. I plunged my hand into the bottom of the bag, felt something hard, and grabbed it. Dave was watching me closely; I had to work fast. As I brought the knife up, I glommed onto a huge wad of Kleenex and used it to cover the knife. So that what Dave saw was a handful of tissues. I peeled one off, held it to my head, and shoved the rest back into the bag. Then I looked Dave full in the face.

“I'm beginning to believe you're a crook,” I said conversationally, “but it's hard to accept you as a murderer. Up to now, Di Anci's the only one who's actually killed. You could turn state's evidence, make a deal, get off lightly. But if you kill me, you're up for murder. Think about—”

There was a chuckle from the doorway. Di Anci. “Wrong again, Ms. Jameson. It's true I killed Nathan and that I had Charlie Blackwell taken care of. But I was at a judges' meeting when Del Parma was pushed under the train. Your friend Dave did that all by himself.”

“But—” I began. There were so many buts. They all came down to one big one. But I wouldn't sleep with a murderer. I'd slept with Dave. Therefore he wasn't a murderer. Wonderful reasoning. I settled on a less personal approach. “But Marian said nobody'd left the office at the same time Parma did.”

“True,” Di Anci said. “We'd thought of that, of course.”

“I had a dental appointment for one o'clock,” Dave said. “So I told Marian I'd be taking the afternoon off. After I left the dentist, I came back here, waited for Del to leave, followed him into the subway, and—you know the rest.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I saw it on TV. It looked pretty gory. Must have been worse in person. Especially somebody you knew. Somebody you'd worked with for years.”

“Don't get sentimental, Ms. Jameson,” Di Anci cut in. “It had to be done. Once Parma looked at those files, it was all over.”

“So how did you lure him onto the subway platform?”

“Simple,” Di Anci shrugged. “I called him up and told him I wanted to see him. He wanted to see me. So I arranged with him to come to Brooklyn. Then Dave followed him and did what he had to do. I'm sure it wasn't pleasant for him, but.…”

Dave was looking a little green, but his voice was steady enough. “Del was mad as hell. He didn't even see me. And it didn't take much of a push to knock him off balance. The train did the rest. I just stood back in the crowd, screaming, like everyone else. Then, before the police got there, I slipped away.”

“And everybody assumed it was a punk kid. I think I read where some lady gave a description. Short, black kid with a knit hat. Not exactly a perfect description of you.”

“No, people don't expect a person like me to commit a crime like that. They see what they want to see,” Dave agreed coolly.

Well, I was feeling really bright. I'd figured out the Di Anci part all right, but I'd read Dave wrong from the beginning. When I'd thought he was being helpful, he was really pumping me to see how much I knew. When I'd thought he was personally interested in me, he was just stringing me along, trying to discourage me from talking to Riordan and Winthrop. Playing me for a sucker. I'd been right the first time. Never trust a prosecutor. Always look a gift horse in the mouth.

Di Anci went out again. There'd been a guard in the hall before. Maybe he would be gone by now and we could go downstairs.

It was now or never. I reached into my purse for the knife.

I looked Dave straight in the eye. It was one way to keep his eyes from straying to where my hand was moving, trying to grasp the knife and open it unseen. It wouldn't be easy.

“This explains,” I said brightly, “why Charlie was allowed to come through the system. It wasn't Del who screwed up—it was you. You saw to it that Charlie wasn't brought here—and you probably tipped Di Anci that Nathan had an appointment with Parma.” As I spoke, my fingers were working on the knife, trying to pry the blade open one-handed, without Dave seeing what I was doing. Also without cutting my finger off.

I went on, “Parma must have been mad as hell when he found out Charlie had passed through the system instead of coming straight here.”

Dave nodded, but he didn't answer. It didn't matter. I had the blade open. Now for the hard part. The last physically aggressive thing I had done was pulling Susie Pringle's hair on the school playground when I was ten. Now I was about to stab a man and grab his gun from him. If I could.

I pulled the knife out of the purse, scattering Kleenex all over the place. I lunged forward, the knife held straight in my hand, and plunged it with all my strength into Dave's belly. It went in up to the hilt. My hand, for the second time that afternoon, came away blood. This time it wasn't mine.

Dave cried out with surprise and pain. He dropped the gun with a clatter and clutched his stomach. I jumped out of the chair and got down on my hands and knees, looking for the gun. If only I could get to it before Di Anci came back, I told myself, I could meet him at least on equal terms.

No such luck. The first thing I saw was a shoe, coming right up to the gun and kicking it out of my reach. Then the shoe kicked me in the side. I looked up to see a look of pure pleasure on Di Anci's face. There was mingled in that look no concern at all for the wounded prosecutor.

When he had enjoyed fully the spectacle of me groaning, rolling on the ground and holding my side, Di Anci turned to Chessler. The knife handle stuck out like a novelty-store trick. Like the arrow Steve Martin uses. Except for the dark stain spreading on Dave's impeccable shirt front. Dave grimaced in pain, his eyes wide with shock. I felt sick.

“Don't take the knife out,” I advised. “If you do, the blood will really start flowing. You could bleed to death.” I don't read murder mysteries for nothing.

Dave nodded.

“Not that your good buddy Al here gives a shit one way or the other,” I went on. “In fact, he'd rather you bled to death than started talking. Wouldn't you, Judge?”

“Shut up, you bitch, or I'll kick you again,” was all Di Anci said. But there was a calculating look in his eyes. He was trying to put together a new scenario, one that would fit the knife in Dave's stomach into things. The mugging idea was down the tubes now, I decided. Somehow my dead body and Dave's wound would have to be explained by the same story.

Di Anci turned to Dave. “We'll tell the cops you and the bitch surprised a couple of robbers who were trying to steal the typewriters. They turned on you, you got stabbed, and she got shot.”

I opened my mouth to point out just a few of the obvious flaws in that story, then recollected that it wasn't in my interest to help out. But Dave, even in his weakened condition, saw a couple of the same things I had.

“It's her fucking knife, Al,” he said in a voice edged with contempt. “It's got her fingerprints on it.”

“We'll wipe them off.” Dave grimaced; the wiping-off process was not likely to be without pain. I was searching Di Anci's face for some sign that his concentration on the conversation was weakening his attention to me, but there was none. The gun was still pointed straight at me.

“How about we say she pulled the knife, one of the robbers got it away from her, and stabbed me?” Dave suggested. Di Anci nodded. “Okay, but we'll still have to handle the knife. Even if the robbers wore gloves, they'd obscure her prints. The cops shouldn't see clear prints on the knife.”

Now Dave nodded. “It's not great, but it's playable. Then how does she get shot?”

“The robbers get your gun away from you. They shoot her. When the cops get here, you're wounded, she's dead. They've only got your word for it as to what happened. You're a prosecutor, a respectable person. Why shouldn't they believe you?”

I was putting my own scenario together while they talked. When they'd wanted me out of the building, my only hope had been to refuse to go. Now that they wanted me here, I had to try to get out. Which made sense. It was the first thing I'd learned as a young lawyer—whatever the other sides wants, you automatically oppose. If they want it, it won't do you any good. So, while Di Anci's eyes flickered, the little wheels behind them whirring away, I began to assess my chances of making a getaway.

Di Anci went on. “I can throw things around a little, make it look like there was a struggle. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “we have to get out of Del's office. The whole thing has to take place in the lobby.” And away from Del's private files, I thought. That was the biggest flaw in Di Anci's scheme. He was calling attention to the last place in the world he wanted cops swarming all over.