Where Nobody Dies (11 page)

“Cheap whiskey makes a pretty good accelerant.” Pitt snapped the words in a way that made me feel as though my hand might contain enough cards after all.

“But that's not the biggie, is it?” I asked, airily waving away my hard-won points. “The real problem with these reports is that by the thirteenth fire somebody should have realized that these buildings were owned by the same man. All the phony holding companies in the world couldn't have shielded him from a
real
investigation—but that's just what these fires never got. And nobody bothered to notify the insurance companies, either, so they just paid and paid. Even the fires you did label ‘suspicious' were blamed on people who couldn't fight back. I suppose,” I went on, real indignation beginning to seep through the act, “it never occurred to you that innocent people like my client, who happens to be a deaf kid, could get hurt by your covering up for Bellfield?”

“This is all very interesting,” Pitt said suavely, “but it's all speculation, isn't it? Which you know as well as I do. So if that's all you have to say …”

So much for poker. With an inward sigh I took out the hardball so highly recommended by Matt Riordan.

“I'm not just Tito Fernandez's lawyer,” I announced. “I also represented Linda Ritchie. If there was nothing wrong with those reports,” I asked sweetly, “why did you pay her to keep quiet about them?”

Pitt's brown eyes, which had seemed almost amused, now took on the hard blankness of obsidian. “I should have known,” he said wearily. “I should have fucking known.”

“You did pay her?” I made it a question, my voice softer than I'd intended. Winning may be everything, but it isn't always fun.

He nodded, then cleared his throat. “Had to,” he said flatly. “Not much choice about it. The lady wasn't one to leave room for doubts about what she'd do to me if I didn't.”

My turn to nod. “And you hated her for it,” I said. “The question is, did you hate her badly enough to kill her?”

“Shit, I thought her old man done took care of that for me,” he snorted. The smooth façade had cracked a bit, and I could see the streetwise ghetto kid peeking out from behind the urbane civil servant.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied enigmatically. “But don't you think the cops might be interested in where you were the night she was killed if they knew she was blackmailing you?”

“Maybe so,” he agreed warily, “but you're not the cops. Am I to assume you are in the same line of work as your late client?” The bland bureaucrat was back with a vengeance; I found myself looking at the same smooth façade that had already bounced my best shots back at me.

I shook my head. Amazingly, the suggestion made me feel dirty, though I'd tried my best to sell just that picture of myself to Ira Bellfield. “I really do represent Tito Fernandez,” I explained, “and I have my doubts about whether Brad Ritchie killed his wife. You weren't her only victim, you know.”

“I know. People like that seldom stop with one. Which was one reason,” he said with the unnatural calm I was beginning to associate with lying, “that she didn't really bother me all that much.”

“Oh, you enjoyed paying blackmail?”

“No,” he admitted with a smile I was supposed to find ruefully charming. “But I accepted it. A man in my position”—again he spread his palms—“it was a little like paying taxes.” He shrugged.

“A cost of doing business?” My sarcasm wasn't working, and I had to admit that falling back on it was an admission of weakness. No matter what weapon I pulled out, he had a better one to parry me with. Now instead of poker, we were fencing—and he was D'Artagnan.

“Exactly,” he beamed. “Hell,” he went on, “how self-righteous could I be? Stood to reason somebody was bound to come along and do me like I was doing. Way the world works. Everybody takes a cut, one way or the other. I took mine, and Linda took hers.”

“Nothing personal?”

“Nothing personal.” The crocodile teeth gleamed in the black face. The angry street kid I'd glimpsed for a moment wouldn't have paid Linda without a fight, but he was buried now, and I knew I had no more weapons to force him out again. The question was, had Linda had those weapons?

There was nowhere to go but home. I rose to leave, not missing the gleam of triumph in the black eyes as Pitt stood up behind his desk.

Then my memory came up with a name for the smiling lady in the political photographs. “Dory Anderson Pitt,” I said slowly. “Just elected to the school board from Starrett City.” I wheeled on Pitt with a triumphant smile. “Does your wife know about the manila envelopes?”

Pitt sank slowly into his chair like a deflating hot-air balloon. His face crumpled, the complacent calm replaced by a defeat so utter that my victory seemed a shabby thing indeed. The stakes of my little game seemed suddenly too rich for my blood; against all my better judgment, I began to feel sympathy.

“You gonna tell her, bitch? You gonna break that woman's heart like Linda said she was gonna do? What good you think that'll do, huh? Make you feel righteous?”

“Was that what got to you, Mr. Pitt? It wasn't the money, was it? You didn't lie about that, the money you would have paid without anger, but the threat to tell your wife—that got you. Did it get you enough to kill her?”

“Hell, yes!” Pitt replied, slamming his fist on the desk. “What did the life of that bloodsucking bitch matter to me next to Dory's happiness? I'd have wasted her in a minute, if I could have been sure to get away with it. If only she'd taken the money and been happy,” he went on. “But she wasn't like that. She was always poking and prying, looking for some way to hurt. She didn't like it that I just paid up every week with no complaints. She liked pain. She liked hurting, so one day she does the same thing you did, looks at the pictures, and says, ‘Does your wife know?' All innocence and sweet magnolias.” He looked into the distance, as though he could see the scene before his face. “Like a damned fool, I panicked. I should have said, ‘Hell, girl, whose idea you think it was?' But I didn't. I let her know how bad the idea of Dory's knowing got to me and from then on I didn't have a moment's peace. She called all hours, asking to talk to Dory, sometimes getting Dory on the phone and then hanging up. Letting on like she was going to tell her and then making me beg her not to. She liked me to crawl.”

“If you were so ashamed of what you were doing, why did you do it in the first place?”

Pitt sighed. His sigh was for the man he was before Bellfield, the man Dory Anderson married, the man those two high-school graduates thought their father was.

“I was one of three black rookies in my class,” he began. “One of us died in a supermarket fire, the other quit the department 'cause he couldn't stand the harassment; and I made fire marshal. Not the first black man to hold the job, but one of very few in those days. Man”—he shook his head—“the graft I saw. Seemed to me like everybody I knew was on somebody's pad. The indifference came from the top down. I remember as a nappy-haired kid trying to get up some interest in SRO fires. You know,” he explained, “those single-room-occupancy hotels for men on welfare. The attitude came down, ‘Who cares, they're just bums.' But then when it was a money fire, you'd find that influential people didn't want the true reason for the fire known, so the report would read ‘insufficient evidence.'” He gave the words all possible syllables, well spaced out for emphasis. “It was discouraging as hell. And all the time there were lazy, dumb, honky shits getting promoted over my head. Finally, in comes this affirmative-action bullshit and dumb
black
shits are moving up and white guys left behind are looking at me and nodding their heads like they
know
I wasn't promoted on merit.”

“So you started taking Bellfield's money.”

“Hell, girl, everybody's taking somebody's money. I just woke up and smelled the coffee.”

“Your wife never asked you where the extra money came from?”

“She never asked me what it feels like to go into a burning tenement and carry out what looks like a burnt-up pot roast, only it ain't a piece of meat, it's a baby,” he said, his voice as thick as the smoke from an oil fire. “She never asked me what it's like watching another firefighter fall through a burning floorboard or how it feels when neighborhood kids throw rocks at me while I'm putting out a fire. Man has to do,” he explained, his palms up a the now-familiar gesture, “a
lot
of things he can't be telling his woman about. Way it
is
,” he said, in a tone I might have called pleading.

“Did you kill Linda?” I don't know why I expected a straight answer, but there was something in Pitt that, while I couldn't call it integrity, had a certain strength.

“No,” he said quietly. “You have no grounds for believing me, but here's one reason you might consider it.” His smile was genuinely rueful this time. “If I'd have done away with that bitch, I'd have damned sure done it before the election.”

I must have frowned. “Your wife's election?”

“Sure,” he answered. “That was Linda's big threat—to make my crime public just before voting day and destroy Dory's chances. Once the election was over, it wasn't as important. She knew that. That's why she really kept the pressure up right then and kind of backed off in December. Tell you the truth, I kind of got the feeling she wasn't as interested in me after that, as though maybe she had some fresh blood to suck.”

“A new victim?” I thought of the Lucentis. The election argument, if it held up, might apply to them too, but there was the move to Washington. It seemed a safe bet that Linda had gotten the job through blackmail, and maybe she'd been concentrating on Art instead of her other victims.

“But wait a minute,” I said, thinking aloud. “Even if your wife is on the school board, wouldn't she still be hurt if it came out that you took bribes?”

“It would hurt her personally,” he admitted, “and the news media would be all over her. But she really couldn't be removed from office for something I'd done, whereas before the election, a lot of people would just have changed their votes and there'd be nothing she could do about it. No,” he said, shaking his head. “If Linda had really wanted to destroy Dory, she'd have gone public before the second week in November.”

“And if you'd thought she was going to do that?”

“I'd have killed her,” he said simply. “Then. Not now.”

9

The orange cube, I reminded myself as I stepped out of the Fulton Street subway station into a surging flood of humanity. I was meeting Elliott Pilcher, the mystery civil servant, at an orange cube in front of a black glass office building on Broadway. He'd whispered the directions over the phone with the hushed anticipation of a practiced conspirator.

I plunged into the chaotic flow of traffic like a pioneer fording a spring-swollen river, and reviewed what I knew about Elliott Pilcher. As I crossed Nassau Street going toward Broadway, I came face-to-face with just how little that was. Hell, I recalled, I still didn't know where he worked, let alone what he'd done for Todd Lessek to earn his limited partnership in the waterfront deal. I cursed the phone company for promoting direct lines; I'd expected Elliott's phone to be answered by a helpful secretary who would announce the name of the agency as a matter of routine.

I turned south on Broadway and saw the cube in a people-filled plaza in front one of those faceless black-box office buildings that seem to be taking over Manhattan. It was a popular meeting-place; at least twenty people stood by the cube and scanned the crowd, searching for their lunch dates. I tried to guess which one was Pilcher, then decided I was too early. The uneasy feeling that I didn't have enough information to run a decent bluff began to grow on me. The one thing I could be sure of, I thought wryly, was that wherever Elliott Pilcher worked, it was nowhere near the black-clad building with the orange cube.

Bellfield burned buildings. Pitt covered up. Todd Lessek bought the burned-out hulks and turned them into co-ops with boutiques where the butcher shop used to be. What did Pilcher do? Lessek, I knew, had gotten city-backed loans and tax incentives for his renovations. It seemed likely that Pilcher made sure that the public trough was open whenever Lessek cared to drink from it, in which case he probably worked for HPD, the city's umbrella housing agency. But was “probably” going to be good enough? Wasn't my best bet to stay as silent as possible and let Pilcher think I knew more than I did?

“Funny”—a voice in my ear punctured my thoughts—“you don't
look
like a blackmailer.” The tone was faintly aggrieved, a near-whine. I turned and saw a pudgy, oatmeal-faced man with colorless eyes behind thick glasses, mousy, thinning hair, and a sulky expression around the mouth. On the other hand, I decided, nobody looks his best when he's being blackmailed.

“Elliott Pilcher, I presume,” I said affably. “I don't suppose you want to talk here. Where shall we eat?”

He grimaced. “Much as I hate the thought of breaking bread with you,” he intoned, “I suppose I ought to eat something. There's a dairy restaurant up this way.” He turned on his heel and plunged into the crowd, walking swiftly in the direction of City Hall, leaving me to follow as best I could.

The place was called the Dairy Planet, which gave me what I assumed would be the only laugh of the lunch hour. Inside it were aluminum-clad walls and traditional Jewish dishes—as if Molly Goldberg had been the cook aboard “Star Trek”'s
Enterprise
.

If you ask me, too many people have seen the scene in
Five Easy Pieces
where Jack Nicholson dumps his lunch on the floor because the waitress won't serve him what he wants. Elliott had obviously enjoyed that part.