Three-Day Town

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.

He flashed the light behind the cartons and bins. Nothing moved.

Throughout his inspection, Horvath had hovered near the elevator. Now they were startled by the buzzer as one of the residents called for the elevator. The man seemed relieved to return to his regular duties.

Almost immediately, Dwight heard sirens out on the street and three uniformed cops barged through the basement’s outer door.

“Major Bryant?” the lead officer asked. “Lieutenant Harald sent us. She should be here in a few minutes. She said your wife’s missing from here?”

Dwight went through it again, hitting the high spots: how she would not have gone far because she was probably wearing her parka over her nightclothes, how he had found her glove by the outer door, how there was a uniformed employee here earlier who had also vanished.

“I know you’re worried, sir, but could it be that she just stepped out for a cup of coffee or something?”

The man sounded so reasonable that for the first time Dwight wondered if maybe he was overreacting. Deborah was gregarious. If one of the workers had come in early and she was on her way out for coffee, she might well have invited him to come along, her treat.

“The market around on Broadway opens at six,” he said slowly. “And I think they do serve coffee.”

“There now, you see? Bet you she’s there right now. Why don’t you go look since you know what she looks like and we’ll keep searching here?”

Dwight reluctantly agreed. “I’ve covered the tool room, the boiler room, and the break room.” He gestured to each in turn. “I haven’t started on the storage area back there. Maybe you could—?”

“Yessir!”

They unclipped flashlights from their utility belts, while Dwight hurried outside and up the ramp to the sidewalk. Even though he was almost running by the time he reached the corner, his eyes searched the sidewalks for Deborah’s form. The Upper West Side was coming awake and starting another workday. Early commuters streamed past him, newspapers under their arms, cartons of coffee or tea in one hand, fare card in the other as they flowed toward the nearby subway station and down into the subterranean tunnels.

At the market, Dwight quartered the store like a birddog casting back and forth for a downed bobwhite. As he feared, Deborah was not there. Nor did he see anyone in a brown uniform.

As he returned to the apartment building, two more prowl cars pulled up with blue lights flashing to park next to the first two responders. Sigrid got out of one car, Detectives Sam Hentz and Jim Lowry emerged from the other, while three more uniformed officers joined them.

“Start at the beginning,” Sigrid said before he could thank them for coming, so once more Dwight described waking up in the empty apartment, of determining what Deborah must be wearing, of hanging over the balcony to scan the sidewalks, of seeing a man in a brown uniform help the sanitation workers load the heavy bags from this building.

“But it wasn’t the night man—Horvath—and he says he’s the only employee on duty until eight o’clock, so who the hell was it and where is he now?”

Sigrid had gotten even quieter than usual as she concentrated on his words. Now she turned to Lowry and said, “Call Sanitation. Find out where that truck is and tell them to hold it.”

“Oh, shit!” An iron band tightened around his chest as her meaning sank in and he remembered that Antoine Clarke’s body would have been set out at the curb had that porter not hunted down the missing wheeled bin.

White-faced, he described how heavy the bags had seemed and how the slender man had swung the last one back and forth until he finally got enough arc to sling it up into the maw of the truck.

He read the look that passed between the three detectives and knew they were thinking the same thing.

“Describe him again, please,” Sigrid said. “You said a hat and a brown uniform. Coveralls or jacket and slacks?”

“I didn’t look that closely,” Dwight admitted.

“But thin?”

“Yes.”

“Black? White?”

“The light was bad, but I have an impression of light skin. Certainly not real dark.”

“Any facial hair?”

“Not to notice. He—” He broke off as a slender young man entered the basement from the outside door. “What the hell? That’s him!”

Before the others could stop him, he rushed forward and grabbed the newcomer by the collar of his brown uniform jacket. “What have you done with her, you bastard?”

Scared and bewildered, the new elevator man cowered and put up his hands to ward off the blow. “Done with who? When? I just got here.”

“You’ve been here since six-thirty. You were out on the sidewalk. I saw you.”

“Not me, man. What’s going on?”

Hentz put a hand on Dwight’s shoulder. “Calm down, Major.”

“James Williams?” Sigrid asked. “The new elevator man?”

“Yes, ma’am. Just started yesterday.”

“Okay,” Dwight said, lowering his hackles. “I get it.” He released his hold. “Sorry.”

Jim Williams straightened his jacket. “But for real, man, what’s happening?”

Before Sigrid could tell him, her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and signaled for Hentz to finish explaining.

The uniformed cops returned from the back to report. “Nothing obvious, sir. We need keys to get into those storage bins and look behind stuff.”

“Forget it,” Hentz told Dwight. “The locks belong to the owners and even Lundigren didn’t have duplicate keys.”

He sent the three officers to check the nearer buildings to see if any of the night people on duty had watched the garbage pickups earlier and had noticed any activity from this building.

Sigrid ended her call. “That was Tillie,” she told Hentz. “We’re putting out an APB on Sidney Jackson.”

“Sidney?” Dwight exclaimed. “The evening man?”

Sigrid nodded. “My sergeant got in early and started going through the pictures the party guests gave us. There’s a clear shot, time-stamped, of Antoine Clarke opening the elevator cage at ten-ten and again at ten-fourteen, which means that Sidney Jackson doesn’t have an alibi for at least part of the relevant period. That elevator was so crowded, I couldn’t even swear myself who was working it when I got here Saturday night.”

Hentz pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Like waiters and salesclerks.”

“Invisible men,” she agreed.

“Yeah, that could’ve been Sidney I saw out on the sidewalk,” Dwight said. “He has the right build. Haven’t they located that truck yet? Can you give me a car?”

“Easy, Major,” Sigrid said, realizing that he had not noticed that Lowry had left after taking a call a few minutes ago. From the nod Lowry had given her, the truck had been located and stopped. “Soon as we know anything, you’ll know.”

The elevator descended and a weary Jani Horvath pulled back the cage just as two buzzes hit their ears. He spotted Williams, glanced at his call board, and said, “She’s all yours, kid. Take her straight up to eight and work your way down.”

“Yessir,” an eager Williams said.

“Lieutenant?” one of the uniforms called from the outside door. “The night man across the street says he saw a woman and one of the men from here out by the garbage bags around six-thirty, give or take a few minutes.”

A sick feeling washed over Dwight as he realized he had missed Deborah by less than twenty minutes.

“He say who the man was?” Sigrid asked.

“No, ma’am. Just that he saw them come back in, and then a couple of minutes later the guy came out by himself.”

“Was he carrying anything? More garbage?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” the young cop said. “He said the guy helped load some of the bags, but he didn’t say if he brought one out with him.”

Something in the lieutenant’s look made him feel like a complete incompetent.

“I’ll go back and ask him,” he said hastily.

“You! Horvath,” Dwight called as the night man headed for the break room.

“Yeah?”

“You said you came down here around six-thirty. You sure you didn’t notice anything? Was the outside door open?”

He shook his white head. “Might’ve been a few minutes before six-thirty, and if that door was open, I’d’ve felt a draft, and I didn’t.”

Even as they spoke, the outer door opened again and the second porter, Hector Laureano, arrived.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked Horvath, following the older man into the break room.


The young cop was back almost immediately. “No, ma’am,” he told Sigrid. “He came out empty-handed, stayed to help throw the bags in, and then went back in. Said he saw a big guy come out to the sidewalk a few minutes later and then go back in. No woman either time.”

“Dammit!” Dwight exploded. “They’re still here then! Horvath says Lundigren was the only one who could unlock the stairwell doors from this side. You have to go up to the second-floor service landing to get to the stairs and come down to open either the lobby door or this one. So he’s done something with Deborah and he has to be hiding here somewhere.”

“You said you found one of her gloves by the outer door,” said Sigrid. “If she stuck it in the door to keep it from locking, maybe she did the same on that door. If so, Jackson could be anywhere in the building. Or he could have been waiting around the corner of the lobby till Horvath left and then walked out the front door.”

Nevertheless, she sent the troops up on the service elevator to search the stairwell and the hallways. After giving them a description of Sidney Jackson, one man was put on the lobby door and another positioned at the outer door just in case he was still in the building.

Frustrated and unable to stand around doing nothing, Dwight had combed through the storage area himself, shining the flashlight from ceiling to floor, looking behind anything bigger than a wastebasket that wasn’t locked in one of the cages.

As he passed by Hentz and Sigrid on his way to check out the front part of the basement again, he saw that Sigrid had her phone pressed to her ear again.

“They find the truck?” he asked.

Sigrid shook her head and stepped away to finish listening to what Jim Lowry had to report. No way was she going to tell Dwight Bryant that the truck had been found and that it carried a bag containing Corey Wall’s body.

“I cut it open so that I didn’t disturb the knot,” Lowry said. “Looks like the poor kid was smashed on the head just like Lundigren. Probably happened around the time he went missing. No rigor anyhow. I’ve called for the crime scene unit, but we’ve gone down another layer of bags below that one and I’m pretty sure it’s nothing but garbage.”

“Good work, Lowry,” she said. “Keep me informed.”

In a low voice, she told Sam Hentz what Lowry had found, but before he could comment, they heard Dwight call to them from the service elevator.

“Look here,” he said and turned back one of the quilted plastic pads that hung from a series of hooks along the top edge of the elevator wall to protect the walls from getting banged by heavy furniture deliveries. “I noticed that one of the grommets wasn’t on its hook, and when I reached up to put it back, the first one slid off and—well, look for yourselves.”

He turned back the loosened pad and they saw a large blood spatter across the width of the pad.

Hentz stepped into the car and lifted the rear pad. More blood. Fairly fresh, too. None on the wall, though, which meant that someone had reversed the pads.

The floor of the elevator was fairly clean, but Dwight pointed his flash to the side wall where it joined the floor. “That grunge in the crack look like blood to y’all?”

“Call for a crime scene crew,” she told Hentz, “and let’s secure this elevator till they get here.”

Dwight immediately brought over a chair that stood against the far wall and positioned it so that the door couldn’t close.

“Major…” Sigrid began.

“You don’t need to say it,” Dwight said grimly. “I can see it’s not fresh enough to be Deborah’s blood. You reckon it’s from that kid that went missing?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“He came down to go sledding,” Dwight said slowly, piecing together the likely scenario. “And he probably saw Sidney stuffing Antoine in a bag, so Sidney had to stop him, too. Only why you reckon Sidney killed Antoine?”

“Because Clarke could put him in your apartment at the same time Lundigren was killed. He must have seen people going in and out. Clarke was in early, planning to spend the night because of the predicted snow. Jackson could have told him he needed a bathroom break or something, and while Clarke ran the elevator, Jackson probably intended to duck in and grab those gold pillboxes, thinking their loss could be blamed on Denise Lundigren or some of the party guests. Just his bad luck that Lundigren picked that time to bring back that painted cat. Jackson probably panicked, grabbed up that brass maquette, and hit him as hard as he could. God knows what he hit the Wall kid with. We’ll have the whole basement processed. They’ll turn it up if it’s here.”

As they spoke, the door to the stairwell was opened from the other side by one of the uniformed officers. “No sign of him here, Lieutenant. You want me to prop this door open?”

“Yes, please. What about the hallways?”

“That’s gonna take a little longer. People are going to work, and so far, none of them have seen this Jackson guy today. There’s a Mrs. Wall up on twelve who says she wants to speak to you.”

Her cool gray eyes met Hentz’s dark blue eyes.

“Want me to go?”

She shook her head. “Too soon. I want to talk to Lowry again.”

Dwight looked around. “Was he that other detective? The one that called Sanitation? Where’d he go?” He took one look at their faces and his own face tightened. “He found the truck, didn’t he?”

“She’s not there, Major,” Sigrid said. “The boy is, but she’s not.”

“Then where the hell is she?”

“If they’re in the building, we’ll find them. I promise.”

He glared at her, then turned away.

“Where are you going?”

“To look for some rat holes. That bastard’s worked in this building for almost twenty years. He’s bound to know some we’ve missed.”

As he strode away, Sigrid said, “Stay with him, Hentz. If he does find Jackson, we don’t want another killing on our hands before we find out what he did with Judge Knott.”