Three-Day Town Page 22

  Last night, I had counted the garbage bags in front of this building’s service entrance. I had then gone into the kitchen, poured myself a second glass of wine, and returned to this window to watch a cab come down the street. Its headlights had thrown the bags in sharp relief, enough to subliminally register a small change.

  I carefully counted. Seven large black garbage bags were now heaped on the curb where before there had only been six.

  My first impulse was to wake Dwight.

  My second impulse was to call Sigrid Harald.

  My third impulse, motivated by not wanting to appear melodramatic and stupid, was the one I acted on.

  Even though I couldn’t imagine why someone would lug another garbage bag out to the street in the middle of the night when there were no porters on duty, this was New York and what did I know? Maybe the person I’d seen disappearing around the corner earlier was a doctor responding to a late-night emergency, someone who suddenly realized he’d missed the evening garbage collection and decided to drop it off on his way out. And wouldn’t I look like the village idiot if I woke Dwight or Sigrid because someone had added a bag of dirty diapers, vegetable peelings, and coffee grounds to the bags already there?

  I stepped into my boots and slipped a parka on over my sweatshirt and warm-up pants. Out in the hall I started to ring for the elevator. Then I pictured Dwight leaning over my coffin to say, “If you didn’t want to feel stupid, what made you get into an elevator with the only employee still in the building? The one man who was known to be here when both Lundigren and Clarke were killed?”

  Too late then to say, “Whoever heard of a killer in a walrus mustache?”

  So I opened the door to the service landing instead. I was briefly tempted to use the self-service back elevator. Sidney had told us that Jani Horvath usually slept during the long quiet hours of the night, but I didn’t want to risk his hearing any mechanical rumbling. As quietly as possible, I crept down the stairs and past the first floor to the basement, where I eased open the automatic door into a dim and shadowy hallway that had only a security light to show me the way to the outer door. The instant I heard the door click shut behind me, I realized that I’d made a dumb mistake. Sure enough, when I tried to open the door, it was securely locked.

  Damn!

  “This could be a problem,” said my internal preacher.

  “You think?” said the pragmatist, shaking his head at my stupidity.

  No big deal. I would check out that seventh bag. If I was right, I could dash into the hotel down the street and call the police. If I was wrong, then I could wait till I saw someone approach the front door and slip in with them. Safety in numbers. This was New York. The City That Never Sleeps. Surely this building included early risers, morning joggers, coffee fiends. Dwight would never have to know how silly I’d been.

  To my horror, I heard the front elevator descending to the basement.

  I quickly retreated back around the corner and pressed myself against the wall.

  The door swooshed open, followed by the sound of the brass gate being pulled back. Someone—Horvath?—shuffled across the hall. I risked a quick look and saw Horvath’s white head and broad back disappear down a hall opposite the elevator doors. For one mad moment, I felt like pulling a Corey Wall and stealing the elevator.

  “Yeah, right,” jeered the pragmatist. “An elevator with no buttons to push and an accordion gate to close first.”

  Several minutes later from somewhere down that other hall came the sound of a flushing toilet, then footsteps back to the elevator. More door closings and the car rose again.

  I realized I seemed to have stopped breathing and took huge breaths of air to calm myself.

  When I reached the outer door, I carefully slipped one of my gloves between the door and the lock on the jamb so that I could get back in if I needed to.

  There was a narrow areaway and a steep ramp that led up to street level. At the top of the ramp was a gate made of steel bars, but it wasn’t locked and I passed easily out onto the sidewalk. The air was bitter cold, and down on Broadway an ambulance went shrieking by. That way was east and I fancied that the sky looked lighter there.

  From two blocks away, toward the river, I saw flashing lights and the roar of a heavy engine—a garbage truck making early morning pickups and coming this way.

  I moved over to the pile of black bags and quickly ran my hands over the chilled plastic. Nothing odd about the first bag, but the second one atop the pile sent a frisson of horror through me as I realized that my hand had found a shoe, a shoe that felt as if it was attached to something.

  “Mrs. Bryant? What are you doing? Did you lose something?”

  I turned and was relieved to see a different brown uniform and friendly face.

  “Thank God!”

  I’m sure I was white as new-fallen snow, and he looked alarmed.

  “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “In the bag!” I gibbered. “There’s another body in that bag!”

  “What?”

  “Feel,” I told him, guiding his hand over that foot.

  He touched it and immediately jerked his hand back and stared at me in consternation. “Oh my God!”

  “Do you have a phone?” I asked. “I forgot to bring mine.”

  “But Mr. Bryant—?”

  “No, he’s still asleep. We’ve got to call Lieutenant Harald.”

  He slapped his own pockets and came up empty-handed. “There’s a phone in the break room. Come on!”

  He hurried toward the ramp and I followed him down and through the basement door. My glove fell to the ground and his foot sent it skidding across the floor inside, but I didn’t stop to pick it up. The hall I’d seen Horvath go down earlier led to a sort of combination kitchen and common room with a set of tumbled bunk beds at the far end and a lavatory off to the side.

  “Do you know Lieutenant Harald’s number?” he asked, reaching for the wall phone. “Oh, never mind, I’ll just call 911.”

  “I’ll wait for them outside,” I said. “Make sure the sanitation people don’t take that bag.”

  I pulled up the hood of my parka and had taken one step toward the door when something slammed into my head.

  Dazed, I fell to the floor. Before I could gather my senses, I felt myself being rolled over and over until my arms were pinned to my side. More rolling and I realized that he was wrapping duct tape around my body and over my face. I opened my mouth to scream and a wide strip of duct tape effectively silenced me. To my horror, even my nose was covered and breathing came hard.

  I felt him grab me by the ankles and drag me across the floor. I bit into the tape that had folded itself upon my tongue when my screaming mouth closed. I was desperate for air and tried to writhe away from my attacker, but the struggle only made it worse. I was going to suffocate and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Then merciful darkness took me.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Occasionally there is an alley or small court that runs back or across the rear of the buildings, with its accumulation of rubbish and wretched out-houses where… thieves have their runways and hiding-places.

  —The New New York, 1909

  DWIGHT BRYANT—TUESDAY MORNING

  Dwight turned in his sleep, reached for Deborah, and felt nothing but pillows. The window showed a dark sky, so he lay there half awake and listened for her to come back to bed. After a few moments, he realized that the only sounds he heard came from outside. A large truck was moving noisily down the street out front, but here in the apartment, all was quiet.

  Puzzled, he rolled out of bed and looked into the bathroom.

  Empty.

  “Deb’rah?”

  No answer and a quick look through the other rooms let him know she had gone out.

  He glanced at his watch. Now where the hell could she be at 6:50 in the morning?

  Another quick search showed that her parka and her boots were gone,
which meant she had gone outside.

  On the other hand, because she had not dropped her nightclothes on the bed as she usually did, he had to assume she had not dressed in street clothes, so she probably intended to duck out and be back before he missed her. But where?

  He stepped out onto the balcony off the living room. The frigid early morning air nipped at his face. On the street below, a big sanitation truck with flashing yellow lights had stopped in front of this building and two men, well bundled against the cold, were collecting from either side of the street. A third man, one of this building’s employees to judge by the brown uniform, was helping. Daylight had begun to lighten the dull gray sky, but from this height and at this angle, it was hard to make out features beneath their hats. As Dwight watched, the man slung what looked to be a rather heavy bag into the maw of the truck and then stood back, obscured by the other two men, with his hand on another bag as they cleared the curb of garbage. Disregarding them, Dwight leaned over the balcony and scanned the sidewalks.

  No Deborah.

  Down below, the man in the brown uniform swung his second heavy bag up into the back of the truck. Then, as the two sanitation workers followed the truck on down to the next pile of garbage, he disappeared through what was evidently a side entrance into this building.

  Dwight quickly pulled on his boots and the wool slacks he had worn last night and grabbed up his wallet, keys, and phone, noting with exasperation that of course Deborah had left hers in the charger. One of these days he was going to chain that phone around her neck if she didn’t start carrying it.

  And start keeping it on.

  Out in the hall, he rang for the elevator, and when it came, the operator with the walrus mustache gave a dour nod and pulled back the brass gate.

  “Horvath, right?” Dwight asked as he stepped inside.

  “Yeah?”

  “You haven’t seen my wife, have you?”

  “The pretty lady that was with you last night?”

  “Yes. Did you take her downstairs?”

  Horvath shook his head. “Nope. You’re the first from this floor since I came on duty.” He closed the gate and the door and turned the brass handle so that they started down.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive, mister. Only been three people down so far and all of ’em were men.” He paused as if to think. “And a dog.”

  “Could she have taken the service elevator?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose. Would’ve heard it, though, and I didn’t.”

  “And she didn’t go out the front door?”

  “Not that I saw, and I’ve been awake for at least an hour.”

  “Who else is on duty now?”

  “Nobody. Just me till eight o’clock.”

  “But I saw someone in a brown uniform out on the sidewalk just now. He helped throw garbage bags in the truck.”

  “Not me, mister. Elevator men don’t mess with garbage and the porters don’t come on till eight.”

  The elevator stopped at the first floor and Horvath started to open the doors, but Dwight stopped him.

  “Take me down to the basement.”

  “I’m telling you. There’s nobody there,” he protested. “I was down there not twenty minutes ago and I had the place to myself.” Nevertheless, he closed the gate again and turned the brass handle another notch.

  As soon as they reached the basement and the doors slid back, Dwight walked out into the dimly lit passageway and called, “Deb’rah? You here?”

  No answer.

  “Hey!” he called again. “Porter! Anybody here?”

  Horvath watched impassively from inside the elevator.

  Dwight spotted the outer door at the end of the passage and started toward it, flicking on light switches as he went. Something lay on the floor off to the side, and when he picked it up, he saw it was a glove, Deborah’s glove.

  His mind raced as he tried to figure out why she had come down to the basement and why she hadn’t used the elevator.

  He went back to Horvath and dangled the glove in front of the older man. “She was here. This is her glove. Who’s the first porter on duty today?”

  “Ruzicka and Laureano both come at eight,” Horvath said again. “Although Laureano usually gets here a few minutes early.”

  “One of them sort of thin?”

  “Laureano’s on the thin side, but Ruzicka’s built more like me.”

  Even from that height and even though he had not been paying that man much attention, Dwight knew that someone as hefty as Horvath would not have registered as thin.

  He went back to the door and opened it to a freezing wind. Turning the deadbolt on the door so as to leave it ajar, he hurried up the ramp to the street. Still no sign of Deborah or of the man he’d seen come through this entrance. The garbage truck had crossed Broadway and was turning onto Amsterdam Avenue at the far end of the next block. He supposed he could chase it down, but to what point? Deborah had left the apartment before the truck got here and he was reluctant to leave the place where she had so recently dropped a glove.

  Earlier, he had been irritated that she would go out without telling him. With two murders in this building and the teenage boy who could have killed them still on the loose, his irritation was turning into serious worry.

  He pulled out his phone and ran through recent calls till he located Elliott Buntrock’s number. When the man answered, his voice groggy with sleep, Dwight identified himself and apologized for waking him, “but I need Sigrid Harald’s phone number.”

  Three minutes later, he was apologizing again. “Y’all hear anything on the Wall boy yet? Deb’rah’s gone missing.”

  Without giving the lieutenant a chance to speak or offer reasonable alternatives, he explained his own reasoning for thinking that his wife could not have gone far, dressed as she was. “There was another guy here in a brown uniform. I saw him from the apartment balcony, out on the sidewalk, but the elevator man on night duty says he’s the only worker here and nobody else is due till eight o’clock. I’m thinking that if there’s an extra uniform around—What does the kid look like? On the skinny side? Something’s pretty damn wrong here, Lieutenant, and I either get your help or I’m gonna start tearing this place apart room by room by myself.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” Sigrid promised.

  “And I’ll be here in the basement,” he told her. “If that bastard’s hurt her—”

  “Don’t do anything rash, Major,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

  Dwight turned to Horvath, who gave an involuntary step backward when he saw the big man’s face.

  “Honest, mister,” he said fearfully. “I never saw her since last night. And nobody else is here. Honest. Just me.”

  “I need a flashlight,” Dwight said grimly.

  Horvath scuttled across the passageway, past a small laundry room, and down to the break room. Dwight followed. Two unmade bunk beds stood against the back wall at the far end of the long narrow room. The blankets were tumbled and the pillows lay haphazardly on both beds as if someone had pushed the covers all the way back against the wall and had made no effort to pull them smooth again. At this end were an old wooden table, several mismatched kitchen chairs, and a refrigerator. Along one wall lay a long counter that held a sink, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a television set. Off to the other side was a lavatory and a closet. An empty lavatory.

  Ditto the closet.

  When the white-haired elevator man handed him a powerful flashlight, Dwight used it to throw a beam of light under the bunk. Nothing. Back in the main landing area in front of the elevator, he gestured toward the end of the basement farthest from the outer door. The place was a warren of narrow halls and jumbled shadowy objects. “What’s down there?”

  “Storage. Every apartment has its own space. And there’s a room for bicycles and kayaks and sleds.”

  With the flashlight probing everything he could see from where he stood, Dwight pointed the light at the recess
that housed the service elevator. “Fire stairs?”

  Horvath nodded. “You can’t open the door to the stairwell from this side without a key, and Phil’s the only one that had it. You have to go up to the second floor and walk down to open it from the other side. Same with the door in the lobby.”

  Farther down the wide passage, halfway between the niche for the service elevator and the outer door was another door. “What’s that?”

  “Goes to the boiler room,” Horvath said.

  Diagonally across the passage, close to the outer door, was another closed door. “And there?”

  “That’s the tool room. You know—snow blower, shovels, stepladders, leaf blower. That sort of stuff.”

  “Locked?”

  Horvath shrugged.

  Dwight strode down to the door and it opened easily. He found a light switch near at hand and used the flashlight to peer behind all the equipment.

  The door to the furnace room was also unlocked, but the overhead bulb did little to brighten the cavern’s dark recesses. A steel catwalk rimmed the near side of a deep concrete chamber that was at least twenty feet square and housed the boiler itself. Steel steps led down to it. The setup reminded Dwight of the boiler room in the bowels of the old Colleton County courthouse. Parts of the original steam boiler remained, but it had been patched and added onto so many times over the last eighty years that it looked like a Rube Goldberg creation. A variety of brass, copper, plastic, and iron pipes of different diameters jutted off in random directions, and an assortment of electrical cables connected the main boiler to mysterious-looking control boxes that could have spanned an era from vacuum tubes to computer chips for all Dwight knew. He had to take his hat off to the murdered super if that man had kept this monstrosity running for the last twenty years.

  He played the light over the machinery and called Deborah’s name.

  No muffled cry. Just eerie silence except for a low hum from the machinery below.

  The level on which he stood was neatly jammed with steel scaffolding, metal extension ladders, and a miscellany of pipes that probably came in handy for keeping the boiler working. Cartons and bins held other supplies, including a large wooden box stacked with neatly folded canvas tarps, and Dwight’s estimation of Phil Lundigren rose another notch. Too many workmen just threw their tarps in a pile. Lundigren evidently took pride in his work. This could have been a filthy cluttered space. Granted, it was not spit-polished, but the surfaces did not have a heavy layer of dust. The floor was swept clean and there were no loose bits of hardware to trip someone up.