Losers Live Longer (16 page)

Daylight from the partially open courtyard door still came from beneath the slant of the stairwell, but I no longer heard the sound of the garden hose rinsing out trash barrels.

Before I left, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get some more information about Mr. Andrew from Luis. That’s what I thought.

I started for the courtyard door and reached out a hand to push it farther open, but from the corner of my eye I saw something that registered as completely wrong.

Under the stairwell were more stairs, in shadow, leading down to a storage basement. A man was on them, but he was neither ascending nor descending, he was lying prone.

His workboots were toes-up on the top step, his head was awkwardly bent back over the seventh step down. Below his chin was a vivid, frown-shaped welt across his throat. Blood on his lips and red drool in his chin stubble. He was looking up, only he wasn’t looking, not anymore. Nevermore.

It was disorienting for a second, like meeting someone face-to-face on an Escher staircase: going up/coming down? coming up/going down? Maybe he was really standing up and I was the one lying down.

Then, no maybe about it. The slant of daylight from the courtyard changed shape, the rhomboid widening. I turned, but not quick enough. Something crashed down on my head and I fell forward.

Last thing I was aware of: a steely sound, a sound like a roulette wheel at the moment when the croupier drops the ball in—No more bets,
Mesdames et Monsieurs
—and I was that shiny steel ball sent spinning in its narrow track, round and round and round, until finally I slowed and bounced and tumbled and landed in the double zero.

Chapter Eleven: INCH-HIGH PRIVATE EYE

I came to, not in darkness but gauzy half-light, wondering why my head hurt so much and why the mattress was so lumpy: what was it stuffed with, juice boxes and chicken bones?

I was lying on top of the dead man, the both of us in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs. I scrambled off him. I must’ve landed on top and ridden him like a sled down the remaining flight of steps.

I crouched in a shadowy corner half-seated on a plastic rat trap, a black pentagon full of poison, staring up at the glare of daylight at the top of the stairs. No one was up there—whoever had hit me was gone—but I still gave it a minute or so before I moved again.

I looked over at the dead man. The super, Luis. The musty air of the chalky cellar was overlapped by the cloying vapor of alcohol. His bottle of tequila had broken, either in his fall or in cushioning mine.

Death has a stillness all its own, unmistakable for either stupor or sleep; by comparison the paint peeling off the walls was moving at a fast clip. All the same, I reached over and checked for a pulse just to make sure. Nothing.

I patted down his pockets and found a wad of bills in a money clip. A quick fan approximated it at eighty bucks. So not a robbery then, or at least not a successful one.

I tried to put the money back in the same pocket. It wouldn’t go. Just one of the reasons you’re not supposed to touch anything at a crime scene: things never go back the way they were. I slipped it into his breast pocket instead.

I stood, the wall at my back guiding me up.

I looked down at Luis. Another dead old man, my second that day, only this one wasn’t an accident, at least not in the strictest sense of the word; someone had crushed his windpipe. It made me consider again Owl’s accident and how strict that had been as well.

I brushed myself off. I touched the back of my pants. My gun was still tucked there in the waistband. As I climbed the stairs, halfway up I found the plastic bag I’d taken from Elena. The iPod was still inside it, so it wasn’t all bad news.

But the book I’d been carrying was gone. Whoever hit me had stolen
The Complete Guide to Tristan and Isolde
. Unless, of course, the book belonged to the person who hit me, then that wouldn’t be stealing.

I peered into the courtyard and the hallway but no one was around. I listened and thought and made a decision. I went back to apartment three. Though it had been closed when I left it, the door was open a crack now. With gun in hand—safety off—I opened it farther.

There was no one inside, living or dead. Signs of decampment and a hasty retreat. Closet door and dresser drawers hung open. Stray clothes on the floor that hadn’t been there before. The pair of coveralls that had been draped over the chair was one of the things now missing.

With a murdered man within shouting distance down in the basement, I didn’t want to spend any more time looking around.

But I did stop and pick up the phone. I pressed the redial button. On the other end, a phone rang and rang and no one answered, until finally on the twelfth ring an answering machine picked up: “You’ve reached E-Z Parking Garage with accommodations available for short-and long-term parking. We’re located at 446 East Tenth Street at the corner of Avenue D. The attendant is currently busy assisting another customer, but please leave a message and someone will get back to you.”

I hung up without leaving a message, got the dial tone, then punched in *69 to get the number of the last incoming call. The call had come in at 1:12 pm and had a 212 area code. I wrote it on the back of a Con Edison bill addressed to L. Andrews.

The need to leave the building was building inside me like an uncontrollable urge. For all I knew whoever had hit me had also called the cops.

I drew the apartment door almost shut behind me, leaving it the way I’d found it, open just that crack, and went down the corridor to the entryway and street doors.

I didn’t stop to look back down at Luis but said a brief prayer for him in Spanish, pretty much the only Spanish I know.
Vaya con Díos
.

A block away I stopped at a payphone, dialed the local precinct, and anonymously reported a dead man in the basement of 27 Avenue C.

I walked home to the office, feeling a little nauseous and hoping it was a delayed reaction to my spooning a corpse and not an early warning sign of a concussion. A thick skull had always been my one saving grace, as well as a damning constant.

The case was coming together, I felt it wriggling in my hands like a newborn living thing, viscous and slick, squirming to get away from me. I needed to swallow a couple aspirin, smoke a cigarette, then sit down in my thinking chair and get a good grip.

Two people were standing outside the street door of my building when I arrived. A man and a woman in their twenties, both slender and of average height, dressed like upwardly mobile professionals; the man in a light-gray Ralph Lauren summer suit, the woman in a knee-length blue silk dress that could’ve come straight from the Fifth Avenue storefront windows of Lord & Taylor. The buzzer they were pushing was mine.

Shit, my three o’clock appointment with the couple who wanted the background check on their prospective nanny—what were their names again?—Mr. and Mrs. Dough.

Was it three o’clock already? Where does the day go?

I wasn’t in the mood for Ken and Barbie and considered blowing ’em off, going someplace to get a cup of coffee until they tired of waiting, but I relented. My mom would never forgive me, turning away work.

“
Good afternoon, sorry I’m late.”

“
Mr. Sherwood?” the young woman asked. Her husband was talking on a Bluetooth plugged into his ear.

“
Yes. Mrs. Dough?”

She reached out her hand to take mine. Hers was a slender, soft, firm hand and she held mine for longer than I expected.

“
Please, call me Jane.” She had a spry Midwestern accent. “Mrs. Dough is my mother-in-law.”

She laughed and I politely laughed with her.

Her husband’s phone conversation ended and she finally let go of my hand as he joined us.

“
Sorry about that, Mr. Sherwood, had to put out a little fire at work.” He took the hand his wife had just relinquished. His was a loose, dry handclasp, like shaking hands with a feather duster. “Thank you for seeing us on such short notice.”

“
Yes, well, actually, this isn’t, as it turns out, the best time for me right now. Tomorrow would—”

Jane looked stricken, I thought she was going to cry.

“
Oh, please, Mr. Sherwood, if you would just hear our situation. It won’t take long.”

“
Yes,” Mr. Dough said, “we understand you’re very busy, but my wife has been worrying herself sick about this, and I know it would help if we could talk it over with you now. We can pay cash up front.”

It was more his wife’s doe-eyed appeal than the talk of money that finally won me over.

“
Come on up,” I said, “I can spare you twenty minutes.”

I unlocked the downstairs door and held it open for them. She went first, as her husband’s cell phone rang and he stepped aside to answer it, politely ushering me ahead. I followed his wife up the stairs watching with each step her firm buttocks flex and relax beneath the thin fabric of her dress. It was a nice sculpted ass, she must’ve worked out. I was wishing Mr. Dough had stayed at work to put out his little fires in person. To keep my mind on business, I asked how old their child was.

“
Three,” she said.

“
Two,” he said at the same time from behind me.

“
Annie will be three in November,” Jane Dough said quickly.

Maybe I would’ve made something of that little discrepancy if I hadn’t been so infatuated with her ass. She may not have had the raw flame-to-the-moth magnetism of Sayre Rauth, but…a fine ass is a fine ass.

At the top of the stairs, she stepped aside to let me pass and I went forward to open my office door.

“
Right this—”

One of them hit me, a swift kidney punch that dropped me to my knees. Then one of them kicked me—maybe the same one—right between the shoulder blades. It knocked the wind out of me and sent me face-forward onto my office floor gasping for air and sucking up dust-bunnies.

They didn’t even give me time for indignation or surprise as they patted me down, divested me of my gun, and handcuffed my wrists, not with metal handcuffs but with a plastic restraint, zipping me up like a trashbag.

I got just enough breath back to utter, “What the f—”

She kicked me in the side.

“
Shut up.”

Just great, I thought, I poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong and someone hires these two to rough me up. I was stimulating the economy, creating new jobs.

Mr. Dough made a quick tour of my office, drawing the curtains, looking in the bathroom and around the corner of the kitchenette. He nodded an all-clear to her.

She opened up her purse and took out a cell phone and dialed a number with the tips of her tapered, tangerine-sorbet fingernails.

He dragged me by the ankles into the center of the room and sat me up. Dust down my front. I had to clean the place one of these days. Definitely before my next bodily assault.

“
Keep quiet and don’t move,” he told me. He brought one of the club chairs over in front of me. The woman sat down in it.

She said, “There’s someone who wants to speak to you.”

She held the cell phone in front of me, aimed at my face. It had a brightly lit, inch-square LCD screen, and it was displaying the face of a bald-headed man with a short black goatee and little piggy eyes over a flat nose with nostrils flaring like an angry bull’s. He was a barnyard amalgam and I recognized him at once.

Maurice “Moe” Fedel, the former NYPD detective who’d retired to start Fedel Associates, Risk Management Consultants, one of the biggest detective and security agencies in the city, with branches in Philly, Baltimore, and D.C. He was one of George Rowell’s oldest friends; they’d started as sparring partners when Fedel was still on the force.

I’d never met him in person, but I’d seen him a few times on TV when visiting my folks. He was a frequent and outspoken guest commentator on their favorite 24/7 cable news network.

He was wearing a blue shirt with a stiff white collar like those cones vets put on dogs so they don’t bite their stitches.