Dirt

Chapter 21

Stone worked late on a memo advising a Woodman & Weld client how to handle a drunk driving charge for an employee’s wife. It was nearly eight when he had finished the memo and faxed it to Bill Eggers, and he had just turned out his office light when the phone rang. He switched the light on again and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Stone, it’s Dino.”

“Hi, Dino.”

“Can you meet me at Elaine’s in half an hour?”

“Sure.”

“Good.” The detective lieutenant hung up.

Dino could be curt when under pressure, Stone remembered; he wondered what was going on. He felt grungy, so he had a quick shower and changed into some casual clothes before leaving the house and hailing a cab uptown.

Dino was already at a table along the right wall when Stone entered, and he looked grim. Stone’s immediate thought was wife or father-in-law trouble, but he was wrong. He sat down, ordered a bourbon, and looked at his former partner. “So, what’s going on? You look a little down.”

Dino nodded. “Down is a good word for it. Somebody wasted Arnie Millman around six this evening.”

Stone stared at Dino. “Jesus, I saw him only this morning.”

“Not since then?”

“No, not since nine-thirty, ten, I guess. This is terrible; has somebody called his wife?”

“I drew that duty,” Dino said glumly. “I sent a policewoman out there to be with her until some family could be rounded up.”

“What happened, Dino?”

“Was he working on something for you?”

“No.”

“Stone, your check for sixteen hundred bucks was in his pocket.”

“He was working on something; we finished up this morning, and I paid him.”

“Any loose ends?”

Stone thought about Martha, but dismissed the idea. “No; he checked two people out for me, gave me his report this morning, and that was it.”

“Anything about these two people that could have hurt Arnie?”

Stone shook his head. “It was a straightforward surveillance, a background check. Both people were no problem to my client, so that was it.”

“Any chance either of them could have known Arnie was following them?”

“You know Arnie better than that, Dino; he was good.”

“Yeah.” Dino opened his notebook and showed Stone an address in the low Nineties. “That address mean anything to you?”

Stone shook his head again.

“Yeah. You sure this address doesn’t match up with either of your people?”

“Absolutely; one lives in the West Fifties, the other in the East Village. Who lives there?”

“My guys talked with all the tenants, but nobody admitted knowing Arnie or anything about him. One woman saw him coming down the front steps as she was going up; that was about five-forty-five. Arnie bought it in an alley beside the building shortly after that.”

“How?”

“Small-caliber handgun, looks like. He took two in the head. It wouldn’t have made much noise.”

“Robbery, maybe?”

“Maybe. They took his gun; I remember Arnie using the old standard Smith & Wesson thirty-eight, two-inch barrel. His wallet was beside him and the money was gone, but who knows? That could have been window dressing.”

“Look, Arnie wasn’t the sort of guy to attract a pro hit. He worked Robbery for most of his career, never had anything to do with the wiseguys.”

“I know, I know.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“What was he working on for you?”

“Are we off the record here, Dino?”

“Sure, it’s just between you and me.”

“You remember that DIRT thing. He was checking out two of Amanda Dart’s employees; both of them came up clean. It isn’t the sort of business to end up with a shooting like this one. It’s all ego, vanity.”

“Two good motives for murder.”

“Not in this case. Neither employee had any thought of being followed by Arnie; he’d have known it if they did. There’s only one other employee, and I didn’t assign Arnie to her; I was going to check her out myself, if it came to that. I don’t think it will.”

“Where does that employee live?”

“ Third Avenue in the Sixties.”

“Nowhere near, then.”

“No. She’s a secretary; not the type to shoot a retired cop.”

“I’ll take your word.”

“When do you get the ME’s report?”

“He’s working on Arnie’s body now; he’ll call me here when he’s finished.”

“No witnesses, of course.”

“None. Like I said, it wouldn’t have made much noise, wouldn’t have attracted any attention unless somebody had been walking right by the alley at the very moment.”

“And nobody was?”

“Nope. Let’s have some dinner while we wait for the ME to call.” He signaled a waiter for a menu.

They ate in glum silence. It was a ritual with them; in the circumstances they were either supposed to talk about Arnie, or not at all. Stone tried to remember some anecdote or other about Arnie, but he couldn’t. “Funny,” he said after a while, “all I can remember about him in the squad room is he never took his overcoat off in winter. He’d sit there in his coat with the steam heat going and type arrest reports.”

“He had some good busts,” Dino said. “I never partnered with him, but I remember he had a reputation for being tenacious, for not giving up on a case, for going the extra mile in an investigation.”

“I knew that, I guess. That’s why, when he called me for work – this was three, four years ago – I gave it to him when I could. He was reliable, he had a good nose. That’s why I don’t think either of the people he was working on for me could have been involved. Arnie would have smelled something. Do you think this could connect to some old case of his?”

“What, fifteen years after he retired? I can’t buy that.”

The pay phone on the wall rang, and they both stopped eating and watched a waiter answer it. He waved Dino over.

The conversation lasted less than a minute, and Dino’s expression never changed. He came back and sat down.

“What’s the news?”

“Like I thought, two shots, small caliber – a twenty-five automatic.”

“Don’t see many of those anymore.”

“Yeah, these days every punk on the street has a Glock or something better. There was an abrasion on Arnie’s left knee, too, like he fell down, but no marks to show that somebody hit him first.”

“Where’d he take the bullets?”

“Left temple and back of the head.”

“An execution, then. Well, I suppose it could have been some junkie with some trash piece he’d copped in a burglary. He sees Arnie, an old guy, easy mark, and he’s desperate enough to pop him, even for just a few bucks.”

“He didn’t take your check,” Dino said.

“Where was it, in the wallet?”

Dino shook his head. “Left inside jacket pocket. The guy went for the cash, didn’t worry about the rest. Arnie was wearing a Rolex we chipped in for when he put in his papers.”

“I remember that,” Stone said. “I bought a piece of that watch. The guy didn’t take that?”

Dino shook his head. “This doesn’t look good for clearing.”

“Pull in your snitches, put the word out on the street. The twenty-five handgun is something, at least. Not a lot of them on the street, I’ll bet.”

“Oh, we’ll treat it as a cop killing, which means all the stops out,” Dino said. “I’m just not optimistic.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“Funny,” Dino said, playing with his food. “I don’t feel lucky today.”