Night Work (23 page)

“I wish I were.”

She picked up her phone and dialed. “Howie has to be at the station,” she said. “Where else could he be?”

I paced around the place while she stood there waiting for Howie to answer his phone. I went to the back porch and looked out. With the lights on behind me, I couldn’t see anything except my own face in the glass.

“I need some air,” I said. As much as I had wanted to get here, now all of a sudden I couldn’t stand the light and the heat and the four walls. “I can’t breathe.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said, the phone still next to her ear. “Just sit down.”

“I’m going outside. I’ll be right back. If I try to stand still, I’ll go crazy.”

“Joe …”

I didn’t stay another minute to argue with her. I opened the door and went outside, sucked in a gallon of air like I’d just come up from underwater. I walked up and down the parking lot a couple of times, then went around to the back of the condo unit. There was a narrow strip of grass there, giving way to a long, weedy slope down to the water. I walked to the edge, kicking up great clods of freshly mown grass. From where I stood, I could see across to the lights on the waterfront. There were three bridges spanning the distance, to the right the newer bridge I’d just been on
myself, to the left the old suspension bridge. Just beyond that was the railroad bridge. I heard the distant clattering of a train on its way. I breathed in the night air and tried to find some kind of purchase on things, some solid ground I could stand on. I didn’t find any.

That’s when I turned and looked back up at the window. High above me, I saw Elaine, backlit by the bright lights in the room. She was still, like she was watching me. Then I saw the second figure in the room. A larger figure, coming up behind her.

One second I stood there watching it happen, the figure getting closer. One second to realize that I had become the angel of death, that any woman I came in contact with would be in immediate mortal danger.

I started running, slipping in the wet piles of loose grass, scrambling my way up the hill and around the building to the front door. I turned the handle, put my shoulder into the wood and swung it open. Ten feet into the room, finally regaining my balance and standing upright again, I saw Elaine standing by the window, holding on to Howie like a teenage girl at a horror movie.

“JT,” he said. “What the hell?”

“You,” I said, trying to breathe. “It’s you.”

“Who did you expect?”

“I thought it was … I mean, I was down by the water …” I bent over and held on to my knees. “When I looked up here …”

“It’s okay.” He came over and put a hand on my back. “Everybody’s okay.”

“No.” I stayed bent over, breathing hard and looking at the carpet. “He’s watching me, wherever I go. Nobody’s safe.”

“Whoever it is, we’re going to find him, JT. He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

“They don’t even believe he’s out there, Howie. They think I did it.”

I straightened up finally and grabbed Howie by the shoulders.

“Do you hear me? They really think I did it. All of it. Even Laurel.”

He didn’t look surprised. “I know,” he said. “I just got the whole story. Come sit down and we’ll figure this out.”

A
s midnight came and went, the three of us were still sitting out on the porch, looking out at the lights over the creek. I had both hands around my second cold beer.

“I overheard those guys, by the way,” Howie said. “They were really going at it.”

“Who, Rhinehart and Shea?”

“Yeah, right after you left. The Rhino wanted to charge you, but Shea was telling him they couldn’t do it.”

“Did he say why?”

“If he did, I didn’t hear it. That’s right about when the chief found me and threw me out of the building.”

“How much trouble are you in?”

“It’s nothing. I just have to take a little vacation for
a few days and not come near the place. Or you, for that matter. I forgot to mention, by the way—you’re not here right now.”

“Got it.”

“Anyway, there must be a big hole in their case. It sounds like the Rhino was taking a chance, trying to sweat it out of you like that.”

“If there’s a hole, I don’t know what it is,” I said. “If I was on their side, hell … I’d have to admit, everything’s adding up.”

“But it’s not. That’s the thing. They must know something’s missing. Shea does, at least.”

“So what do I do now?”

“You get a new lawyer,” Elaine said. “Somebody who’ll actually show up when you need him.”

“She’s right,” Howie said.

“I’ll call Tom Petro,” I said. “He’s probably the best man in town. But then what? I can’t just sit around and wait for them to patch up their case.”

“How many old clients did you go see today?”

“Two that I could find. Two others were gone. I was going to have Shea look into those.”

“Out of the two you talked to, you didn’t get anything?”

“No. They were right on top of my A-list, too.”

“Maybe it’s not somebody so obvious.”

“If so, then I’m in trouble. I can’t talk to everybody who ended up getting violated. There’s hundreds of them.”

“I’ll help you,” he said. “Give me some names.”

“
How would you know if you found him? Unless he took one look at your badge and started running away or something? Besides, you’re officially on vacation right now.”

“I can’t just sit around, any more than you can. I have to help you.”

“I guess I can give you the two names from today and the last known addresses. You’ll have one pot-head and one vampire.”

“Piece of cake.”

We all seemed to run out of steam for a minute. I took a long drink of beer and looked out at the night. “Why did we stay here, anyway?” I finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“We were supposed to blow this place a long time ago, remember? How many times did we make that promise to ourselves when we were growing up?”

“I think about that sometimes,” he said. “Maybe leaving would have been too easy, you know? When have either of us ever done things the easy way?”

“Yeah, but after all those years of hating it …”

“You grew up, JT. You fell in love with the place. I think I did, too.”

“Come on.”

“Kingston’s a great town. You know it is.”

I took another drink. I wasn’t sure if I had a comeback to that one. Hell, maybe I
did
love the place. “I don’t love it this week,” I said. “That much I know.”

“You don’t have to decide tonight, anyway. You should go home and get some rest.”

“Yeah, I suppose. As long as they don’t fill in whatever holes they think they have and arrest me. This time tomorrow, I could be sitting in a jail cell.”

“You can’t think like that. Get your list and go back to work.”

Another joyful day, I thought, revisiting all my clients who ended up behind bars. Beats being behind them myself, I guess, waiting for the judge to set a million-dollar bail.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold the phone.”

“What is it?”

“Elaine, the last time I was here …”

She picked her head up. It looked like she had drifted off in the last minute or so. “What? I’m sorry.”

“What you said before. When I was here a couple of nights ago, before the phone rang … You remember? Howie answered and they told him about Sandra?”

She shook her head. “I remember the call, yes. But what were we talking about?”

“We were talking about me going out and seeing all the old clients who violated, remember? That was the first time I started thinking about it.”

“And I said, ‘How about the client who
didn’t
violate?’ I remember now.”

“The client who didn’t violate?” Howie said. “What do you mean?”

“The one who should have been locked away,” she said, “but wasn’t.”

“So the victim,” he said. “Or rather, the victim’s family. Something happened because a client was
running around free, and now they blame Joe because he didn’t put that person away.”

“That’s right,” she said. “What do you think, Joe?”

A few names came to mind. One in particular. From the way he looked over at me, I could see that Howie was right there with me. No surprise, as this particular case was as much his business as a Kingston detective as it was mine as a probation officer.

“You’re thinking of who I’m thinking of?” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “I know who I have to go see first thing tomorrow.”

This time, when the knock came I was ready for it. I opened the door and let Detective Shea into my room. “Good morning,” I said to him. I was dressed in clean jeans and a white shirt. “You’re late.”

He looked around the place, at the CDs that were all put back on the shelves, at the general lack of clothes all over the floor or the furniture. He probably noticed that the bed was made, too, but he couldn’t have known it was the first time in two years.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“That’s the difference between a guilty man and an innocent man.”

“What, a clean room?”

“No, Detective. I mean that a guilty man either sits around feeling relieved that he got away with it, or else he takes off running. An innocent man keeps himself occupied. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

I had some classic Miles playing on the stereo, just the thing I needed that day. I went over and turned the volume from five to three. “I’m glad you stopped by,” I
said. “I wanted to tell you something before I headed out.”

“Do you mind telling me where you’re going?”

“Do you mind listening to what I have to say?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“It was pretty obvious you were the one who didn’t want to charge me yesterday.” No sense giving up Howie, I thought. Let the man think I’m psychic.

He was about to say something. He stopped himself and shook his head, looking at the floor.

“You know I didn’t kill anybody. Your gut tells you that much.”

“My gut’s been wrong before.”

“Yeah, well … I know it has to be more than that. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got up and started cleaning. You want to know what I figured out while I was folding my clothes?”

“What did you figure out?”

I went to the closet and pulled out one of the three ties I had left. This one was blue. I held it up to him with both hands, the way you would if you wanted to choke someone to death. If he was alarmed, he did a good job of hiding it.

“My red tie,” I said. “It didn’t kill Marlene. It couldn’t have.”

“How do you know that?”

“The important question is how do
you
know that? By now, I’m sure you’ve had the tie in the lab long enough. I honestly don’t know that much about
forensics, but I’ve got to assume it would have left some kind of mark on her neck. Some kind of, what do they call it, ligature?”

“Go on.”

“I’m guessing that anything you use to strangle someone is going to leave a unique mark. Maybe fibers in the skin, too. Am I right?”

“You know I can’t talk about the details at this point.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I know I’m right, because I know what
couldn’t
have happened. It explains why Marlene was left outside, too. That never did make any sense, did it—for someone to go to all that trouble, when he didn’t do it for Sandra …”

“Or your fiancée.”

I stopped dead. I couldn’t help glancing over at her picture.

“Right,” I said. “Or Laurel. The reason Marlene was taken from her apartment was that the killer would have needed time to put my tie around her neck. Well after she was killed.”

“And the shoelaces?”

“If they were taken when I was out that next day, then they very well could have been used to kill Sandra. There’s no time problem with the shoelaces.”

“You seem to have it pretty well thought out,” he said. “But now you seem to be suggesting that this person is not only killing the women in your life, he’s also trying to make it look like you did it yourself.”

“Yeah, that kind of follows, Detective. That’s his game.”

I looked out the tall window, at the cars going up and down Broadway, at the people walking on the sidewalk.

“He’s out there,” I said. “It’s like I can feel him watching me all the time now.”

The detective didn’t come to the window. He stood his ground and watched me.

“By the way,” I said, “I’m sorry about that little crack I made yesterday. About your earring, I mean. I was having a tough day.”

“No apology necessary.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some more people to go see.”

It was obvious he wanted to say something about this, but he didn’t. There was nothing he could do to stop me and we both knew it.

“I have an important question,” I said as I showed him to the door. “How many shoelaces did you find around Sandra’s neck?”

“We found one.”

“That’s what I thought. Which means there’s one more left.”

“Yes, it does.”

“That’s why we’ve got to find him, Detective. And if you’re not going to help me, I guess I’ll have to do it myself.”

I
left Ulster County, crossing the Kingston–Rhinecliff bridge over the Hudson River. On the other side was Dutchess County. It had more people than Ulster. A lot
more money. I could see some of the old mansions from the bridge, high up on the hills, where the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts once spent their summers.

The Dutchess County Fair is better than the Ulster County Fair, too. No contest. Which is why, three years ago, Marshall Tilton and three of his friends crossed the bridge to get to it. Four kids from Kingston, not one of them a stranger to trouble. They ran into half a dozen kids from Red Hook, all of them wearing letter jackets and walking down the midway with their girlfriends. One word is all it takes in a situation like that. One word or one wrong look.

It blows over most of the time. Just teenagers protecting their turf. But this time it ended up with two cars going back across the bridge instead of one, the Red Hook boys following the Kingston boys back home to make good on a promise. Not a good idea in any town. Certainly not in Kingston. When it was over, one of the Red Hook kids, an eighteen-year-old senior named Ronald Ebisch, was lying dead on the sidewalk, a single bullet in his head.