Jade in Aries (21 page)

Koberberg pressed the cradle button down with a finger, and looked at me.

I said, “Dial 911.”

T
HE POLICE HAD GOTTEN
there first. A patrol car was out front, empty, its motor running, its red light looping and looping on the roof, the beam flicking through the descending snow.

The snowfall was getting heavier, denser, but still without wind. That had slowed the four of us, hurrying along sidewalks ankle-deep in wet snow, and it meant now that the patrol car’s beacon hadn’t produced its usual quota of spectators. Except for us, there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. Except for the patrol car, there was no other traffic on the street.

The front door stood open, the yellow corridor was brightly lit, the door leading to the living room at the far end of the corridor was also open. We went through and into the apartment, and I was struck at how large and empty and low-ceilinged it was. The only other time I’d seen it, during the party, it had been full of people and really very difficult to see.

The downstairs was empty. It was becoming weird; the intermittent blood-red light flashing through the front windows, tinging the green and yellow apartment, but no one to be seen. No Remington, no Maundy, no police. Finding nothing was almost the worst possibility of all; at any rate, the most frightening.

But then we found them on the second floor. I was leading the way, Koberberg behind me, Lane and Weissman trailing reluctantly after, and upstairs I saw the library door standing open, and I walked down that way.

Two uniformed cops, both somewhat overweight, both wearing their slick raincoats. They filled the room, and for the moment they were all I saw.

And they both saw me. They frowned, and one said, “Can I help you?”

“I’m the one who called,” I said. “Tobin. I gave my name.” I walked into the room, and the other three waited uncertainly in the doorway. “Those are friends of Mr. Remington,” I said.

“Do you want to tell us what happened here?” They didn’t know the situation, and were going to be polite and circumspect until they got their bearings.

I said, “I’m not sure myself. Mr. Remington was here with a person we knew to be potentially violent. He was supposed to phone us, Mr. Remington was, and when he didn’t we tried calling him and got no answer.” I looked around, and saw legs extending out from behind the leather reading chair: someone lying on his back. I gestured in that direction and said, “May I—?”

“Sure,” said the cop. He stepped back a pace to let me by.

I went over beside the chair, aware that Henry Koberberg had come into the room now and was moving with me, and behind the chair Stewart Remington was lying on his back. One of the cops had taken the seat cushion from another chair to support his head. His face was battered and bloody, and the left sleeve of his maroon smoking jacket was dark with blood from the elbow down. His eyes were open, and his mouth twisted a little in a kind of smile. He said, hoarsely, “Well, Tobin, the banderillos are in.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’d be better if I felt Bruce was going to be in any position to be sued.”

Koberberg said, “What happened?”

“He saw through the phone call. I tried to keep him from seeing what numbers I was dialing, but it didn’t work.”

I said, “What did he hit you with?”

Remington coughed, started to move his left arm, winced. The cop who’d spoken before said, “Maybe he shouldn’t talk now. We have an ambulance coming.”

“It’s all right,” Remington said. “If I can remember to keep that arm steady. To answer your question, Tobin. Unfortunately, my faggotdom extends to a cane fetish. In a case downstairs. He took one and had at me.”

“Downstairs?”

“I suppose I was to be another roof victim. He lugged me up the back stairs, but then the phone started to ring. He cursed and kicked me and dragged me in here, and then I heard him do a quick ransacking job in other rooms. To make me look like a burglary victim, I suppose. I expected him to come back and finish me off. I passed out several times, I’m afraid, and one time when I opened my eyes, the cavalry was here.”

Koberberg said, “Stew, I think you should stop talking now.”

Weissman had joined us, and was staring at Remington in horror. I had never seen them paired off together, as I’d seen Koberberg and Ross, or as I’d seen Lane and Poumon, so it came as a belated shock to remember that Weissman had been living here with Remington until this mess had started and he’d volunteered to assist Cornell. I said to Koberberg, “Why don’t you take Jerry downstairs and have him make us all, coffee?”

Koberberg frowned at me, mistaking the suggestion for obtuseness. “Coffee?” Then he got it. “Oh. Good idea. Jerry?”

“What? What?” Weissman was still staring at Remington, who now grinned at him and said, “Will you bring me hash in hospital, little angel?”

“Stew—”

Koberberg tugged at his arm. “Jerry, come on with me.”

Weissman, his expression still stunned, allowed himself to be led away. Lane joined them, and all three went on downstairs.

I said to Remington, “You told the police his name?”

“And address and blood type,” Remington said. “And I can’t think
who
dear Bruce is going to get to represent him.” The twisted smile showed again, and he said, “I believe I’d have to disqualify myself.”

The cop beside me said, “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“Of course,” I said. “But it will take longer than a minute.”

I
GOT A RIDE HOME
on a snowplow. I’d left in Koberberg’s Jaguar sedan, but by two-thirty in the morning, when I was finished at the precinct station, there were no vehicles other than snowplows still operating anywhere in the city. The snowfall, which had been persistent and steady for so long, had finally stepped up its pace and become a full-fledged storm. Still without wind, the snow was coming down now so heavily it was impossible to see more than half a block through it. Streets were impassable, subways weren’t running anywhere that there was exposed track, and it was clear now that the whole city was about to be shut down for a couple of days.

Koberberg and Lane and Weissman and I had been taken to the precinct to tell our stories, which we did, to a team of detectives new to us and new to the case. I told it to them straight, leaving out nothing, and when I was done, they went for a conference with the lieutenant who was the acting chief of detectives when the captain was off-duty. Then they’d called the captain, who lived out on Long Island and who couldn’t get in, and who didn’t like the thought that something might be about to blow up in his face. They put me on the phone to him to tell the story again, which I did. One of the detectives was on another phone, and when I was finished, the captain said to him, “Is Manzoni on duty now?”

“No, sir. You want us to call him?”

“No. I’ll see him tomorrow. You handle it, Bert.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And make sure we’re doing it right this time.”

“Yes, sir.”

They’d already sent to pick up Maundy on the assault charge. I’d expected they’d find him at home and that he’d deny everything, and both happened. He was brought in and told of his rights and elected to remain silent, and was put away in a cell for the night. I told one of the detectives, “As soon as he realizes this means his mother will find out, he’ll try to kill himself.”

“I know,” he said. “We’ll be careful.”

In between each period of action or talk there were long silent spaces of waiting, Koberberg and Weissman and Lane and I sitting on wooden benches along one wall of the bullpen. There was very little activity other than that concerned with us. For some reason, I found it easier to be in this setting this time; it seemed more comfortable somehow.

Weissman kept calling the hospital where Remington had been taken, and finally an intern gave him a report, which Weissman repeated at happy length; it was full of contusions and abrasions, with the compound fracture of the left arm as the worst injury, and nothing that was even remotely fatal.

Maundy would have to explain, himself, why he didn’t finish the job and kill Remington, and I doubted he ever would. But there’d been blood on the stairs he’d dragged Remington up, and maybe he’d realized he couldn’t make a suicide leap from the roof look sensible this time, so he’d changed his plan to burglary-with-murder in midstream. The phone ringing must have rattled him, and he’d ransacked the place first, leaving the death of Remington till the end. But then, I suppose, the patrol car arrived, and he went out the back way as the cops were coming in the front.

In any event, the assault charge was enough to hold him on for tonight, and tomorrow morning—or whenever the snow permitted—a real investigation into the Dearborn and Poumon murders would begin. I had no doubt that convictable proof would be found without too much trouble. Maundy had run into luck in the person of the investigating officer, Manzoni, but he had needed luck: his manner was too abrupt, his methods too erratic, his cleverness too improvisational. He hadn’t done clean methodical work, and now at last professionals would begin to look for the flaws.

It was two-thirty in the morning before I left the station. A detective drove me through just-cleared-and-already-filling-up-again streets to a Department of Sanitation garage, where a route was worked out that would get me home, eventually, after traveling on three different snowplows. I spent an hour and a half high up in the cabs of the yellow plows, listening to the tire chains rattle, seeing the mounded white landscape the city had become, and at just after four I made my way slowly through snow higher than my knees up to my front door.

Kate had left lights on in the living room and kitchen. I considered whether I was hungry or not, decided I was too tired to be hungry, switched off the lights, and went upstairs and to bed. I fell asleep almost at once, and I dreamed that Jock called me on the phone. I still couldn’t make out any of the words he said, but he didn’t sound angry. It was amazing.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mitchell Tobin Mysteries

M
Y FLASHLIGHT ARCED ACROSS
ancient political cartoons: menacing eagles with the leering faces of long-dead politicians, incredibly stout laughing men labeled “The Railroads,” tall slender downcast women trailing banners in the dust. Each print had been carefully preserved, mounted, framed and fronted by non-reflecting glass, and given a guard—me—to protect it at night from thieves and vandals. My shoes made echoing sounds on the uncarpeted wooden floor, and I angled the flashlight from left to right as I walked along the white-walled corridor where the cartoon display was hung.

Until I became aware that not all the sounds were echoes of my own movements. I stopped, and listened, and heard someone far away knocking on the museum’s front door. My watch said ten forty-five; who would be coming here at this hour of night?

My normal route would next have taken me through the section labeled “Comic Strips Between the World Wars,” but by turning left at the next doorway, I could instead cut through “Advertising in the Fifties” to the main staircase, and from there directly down one flight to the front entrance. As I went that way, striding but not running, the
tock-tock
at the door stopped, then repeated itself briefly, then stopped again. Whoever was out there was insistent, but not urgent.

This was the third night of my third week at this job, and I still wasn’t sure in my mind whether I would keep it or not. In many ways it was the ideal employment for me, but somehow that very fact frightened me and made me leery of staying with it very long. For instance, one of the advantages of the job was its solitude—I was alone here four nights a week, nine
P.M.
till seven
A.M.—
and in the eleven nights I’d worked so far, this was the first interpolation from another human being. I both welcomed and resented it, which is why I strode but didn’t run, and also why I wasn’t sure this job would be healthy for me over a long period of time.

The main entrance to this building, the Museum of American Graphic Art, was a wide wooden door with a small square speakeasy panel in it. I wasn’t afraid of armed robbery—the contents of the museum, while no doubt valuable, required protection more from destructive teenagers and overenthusiastic collectors than from professional criminals—but it was easier to slide open the panel than unlock the door, so that’s what I did.

At first I didn’t recognize her; she was only a short slender blond woman standing out there in the semi-dark, her features and expression hard to read in the dim spill from a nearby streetlight. It had been nearly three years since I’d seen her, and her face was in shadow, and I’d never expected to see her anywhere ever again; still, I should have known who she was.

But I didn’t. I said, “Yes?”

She peered at me; I suppose she was having trouble with recognition herself, both because of my own impersonality and the uniform hat I was wearing. Then she said, “Mitch?” and the voice did it. I knew who she was.

“Oh,” I said. I don’t know what my own voice could have sounded like. I was unable to move.