Serial

36

New York, the present

Adam Wright lived in a basement apartment in Lower Manhattan that wasn’t fit for rats. He was a man in his forties, but he looked older. His face was the color of slate. His eyes were only slightly darker and refused to be still, though they were always downcast. The way his facial bones seemed about to pierce his flesh suggested that once he might have been a handsome man. Now he was wasted as if by some persistent disease.

After Pearl had knocked on his door and shown him her ID, he’d offered her the only chair. It was a rickety, wooden straight-back with wriggly armrests and lots of spindles. On it sat a blue, absolutely flat pad decorated with a faded New York Mets team logo. Pearl settled down carefully on the chair, hoping it wouldn’t collapse beneath her, and got out her notepad and her gnawed yellow pencil. Wright sat slumped on the edge of the unmade bed. She didn’t have to tell him why she’d come.

He said, “I felt as bad as anyone when I heard about Millie Graff being killed.”

“How did you hear about it?” Pearl asked. The stench of stale perspiration and something she couldn’t identify made her want to jump up and flee from the tiny efficiency. There was no stove, only a hot plate with a dented old pressure cooker on its double burner. Maybe Wright had been cooking something that produced the rotten smell.

“I saw it in a newspaper somebody threw away. Soon as I read it, I got scared. I think you know why.”

“How’d it happen?” Pearl asked.

“The murder?” His pale eyes remained downcast, roaming this way and that, as if he were trying not to stare at her breasts.

She waited patiently until he looked up at her face. “Not the murder,” she said. “How’d you get the bad collar on the rape charge?”

Eyes down again, focused somewhere to the right of her knees. “I was working on a construction crew over on Tenth Street. Repairing a stone fascia. It was hard work, but it paid good. I’d just been transferred there after a roofing job in SoHo. The others had been there over a week. The guys I was working with talked a lot about Millie Graff, though none of us knew her name then. She had great legs, they said, and whenever she walked past, she’d put on a kind of show for us. Tried to get a reaction. You’d be surprised how many women do that.”

Pearl wouldn’t be surprised by how many construction workers thought that. “Maybe it was in your imagination about Millie Graff. She was a professional dancer, so she’d have great legs and a certain way of walking.”

“Yeah, she sure as hell had that. Those. Anyway, the guys that appreciated her pointed her out to me one day, and it seemed to me she gave me the look.”

Pearl raised her eyebrows. “ The look?”

“That one. So I didn’t think she’d mind if I put a move on her next time she passed. You know, just talked to her.”

“According to the court record, you suggested oral sex, only not in polite language.”

“Yeah, I guess that was kinda outta line.”

“Dumb, too.”

“Sure. But not punishable by five years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.” His eyes were steadier now, more injured than angry.

“I agree.”

“Sure you do, now, when it’s too late.”

“I’d apologize if it’d do any good,” Pearl said.

Despite herself, she was beginning to like Adam Wright. Or at least beginning not to dis like him. It was easy to see what he’d been, and might be now, if he’d had better luck. Beneath the grime and stench was a decent man approaching a premature middle age and the abyss all humans feared. He had been picked up by a whim of fate and plunked down here in a crappy life, and his future looked even worse.

“What do you do now, Adam?” she asked.

“Do? You mean to survive? I get a Social Security disability check because I fell off a ladder a few months ago washing windows. Messed up my back.”

“What’s in that sack over there?”

Immediately she wished she hadn’t asked. Wright began to tremble. He attempted a smile. “You got a search warrant?”

“I don’t want a warrant,” Pearl said. “I’m not gonna look in the sack.”

She made an obvious show of not writing in her pad. She’d be damned if she was going to report some poor wreck for selling aluminum cans to augment his disability payments. All so he could pay the rent for this shit hole.

Wright nodded gratefully. He tried to shrug but seemed too weary even for that. “You get outta prison, and even if it’s DNA evidence that sprang you, people still associate you with rape. Now, even with murder. I had a good job doing construction work. Since then I haven’t been able to find anything. I know why, and even understand. Hell, I wouldn’t hire me.” He looked so disgusted he wanted to spit, and probably would have if he wasn’t entertaining company. He dragged a hand with ragged fingernails across his lips. “It’s easier to lose a reputation than to find one.”

“What about the night Millie was murdered?” Pearl asked.

“I was in the hospital, watching hour after hour of South Park reruns.”

“My God, Adam.”

“I didn’t kill Kenny, either. Not even once.”

“Get serious, Adam.”

“Okay. That was the night I had my rare bit of luck. I’d bent over earlier that day to pick up a… to pick up something, and I couldn’t straighten up. This happened up at Fifty-fourth Street and Lexington, and a lot of people gathered around me. Some guy with a cell phone called for help and I got taken to a hospital emergency room. They helped me some but not much, and I spent the entire night there, watching TV and driving the nurses crazy, trying to get them to give me more pain pills. Angels of mercy-bullshit!”

“They might turn out to be angels after all,” Pearl said, “if they give you an airtight alibi.”

“That’s what the other cop said.”

Pearl paused in her note taking.

“What other cop would that be?”

“The one who was here a few days after Millie Graff’s murder.”

“What was his name?”

“Her name? Hell, I don’t know. She wasn’t as pretty as you. She had an NYPD badge, though. She was all business.”

“Don’t think I’m not,” Pearl said.

“No, ma’am.”

“I can see how you got into trouble.”

For the first time, Wright smiled. Briefly he looked ten years younger and Pearl saw again what he might have been, and it made her sick.

She put away her pencil and notepad in her purse and stood up, careful not to lean her weight on the chair’s spindly arms.

“That’s it?” Wright asked.

“It.”

He looked disappointed. Probably he never got visitors unless someone in the neighborhood was raped or murdered.

“I was told my alibi checked out,” he said, as if struggling to maintain conversation, to keep her there. His starvation for human contact had overwhelmed his fear. Again Pearl felt a thrust of pity for him. To be such an outcast, to be shunned, could in itself be a disease.

But what could she do? She couldn’t give him back his reputation. His five years.

“How’s your back now?” she asked.

“Not good. I need an operation to repair some ruptured disks. Tell me the city’s gonna pay for that.”

“I would if I thought it’d help.”

“But it won’t.”

“It won’t,” Pearl said, and left him alone in the ruins.

“Wright is just a poor schmuck,” Pearl said, sitting at her desk in the Q amp;A offices. “My gut tells me he couldn’t kill anyone.”

“Anyone under the right circumstances can kill anyone else,” Quinn said. He was standing, with his sleeves rolled up, drinking a diet Coke.

“You really believe that?” Pearl asked.

Quinn wiped foam from his chin and stared at her, wondering how she could think otherwise, considering the experience she’d had as a cop. “Yeah. I don’t like it, but I believe it.”

Pearl knew he was right, but she didn’t feel like giving Quinn the satisfaction of agreeing with him. Besides, she was still feeling sorry for Adam Wright.

“Wright was in the hospital the night Millie Graff was killed,” she said. “He’d been collecting aluminum cans and hurt his back.”

“That’s his alibi? He hurt his back picking up an aluminum can?”

“Well, he didn’t admit he was a can collector, but I’m sure he is. The important thing is, he hurt his back and was hospitalized at the time of Millie’s murder.”

“You feel for this guy, Pearl?”

“His life is a load of shit. But aside from that, he really does have an alibi.”

“Did you check out his story?”

“No. I will.” Pearl had no doubt that hospital records, along with eyewitness accounts, would substantiate Adam Wright’s alibi. Still, she should be reserving judgment until she verified his alibi. Was she getting soft?

“You getting soft, Pearl?”

Damn it! Thinking parallel thoughts again. It angered her. It was almost as if her privacy was being invaded.

“You should move in with me permanently,” Quinn said. “We could be like an old married couple that finishes each other’s-”

“Sentences,” Pearl interrupted. She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Quinn.”

“We’re sleeping together some of the time, anyway, even if we are practicing celibacy.” Yancy Taggart, even dead, is still in the way.

“Almost celibacy,” Pearl said. Things had changed lately, and were still changing, but slowly.

“I said practicing,” Quinn said. “And I’m redecorating the brownstone for you.”

“That place is an investment,” Pearl said. “And eventually it’ll be a good one. That’s why you’re rehabbing it.”

Quinn smiled. “Pick a room and choose a color.”

“Your room, black.” She laughed. “Never mind. Anyway, if I moved in with you, my mother wouldn’t approve. She still calls it shacking up, like I’m young Barbara Stanwyck in one of those movies where she winds up in an electric chair.”

“Could happen,” Quinn said.

“Yeah, to anyone. You told me so just a few minutes ago.”

“Barbara Stanwyck. Didn’t she usually get last-minute reprieves in those movies?”

“Not all of them.”

“Think about it, Pearl. Please.”

“I have. And my gut feeling is that Adam Wright didn’t kill anyone.”

Quinn sighed, making sure it was loud enough for Pearl to hear. “Okay. Just check his story before we strike him from the list.”

“Of course,” Pearl said. “Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

“The brownstone tonight wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Your air conditioner broken?” Quinn asked.

“I’ll break it if you want.”