Slugfest

Forty-six

By the time I left El Quixote, the streets were slick with the first drops of rain. Traffic had slowed to a sluggish crawl and people with a single arm raised appeared on every corner. I’d never get a cab. I considered the bus but had no change and no idea what the fare was these days, and I knew better than to go into a store or restaurant and ask for change. In New York this is almost as welcome a thing to say as “This is a stickup.”

It’s a fact of life in the city that the four-dollar umbrella man is never there when you need him. I turned my collar up, tucked in my hair, and tried to make a twenty-minute walk take ten. The rain had picked up. I was trapped at a light between two better-prepared pedestrians, the shoulders of my wool blazer catching the runoff from both their umbrellas. When the light changed, I stepped off the curb to the furious honking of someone attempting to make a right. Jeez, give me a break—you’re in a warm, dry car and I’m in a monsoon. Relax yourself.

The honking continued even after I’d crossed the street. What a jerk.

That’s when I noticed the driver had double-parked and his window was sliding down. “Paula! Ms. Holliday, let me give you a ride.”

The rain was coming down pretty hard and I had trouble seeing. I moved closer to the curb and shielded my eyes with my hands. It was John Stancik, looking very inviting. “Have you been following me?”

“That sounds a little paranoid. Of course not.”

I jogged back across the street and opened the passenger’s side door. I checked the backseat.

“All alone. You trust me?”

Why not? Didn’t my mother always tell me to trust a policeman? Stancik moved the cardboard tray that was on the floor of the passenger’s side.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Station house is five minutes from here. I just got off duty and picked up some coffee. I saw you about two blocks ago.”

“But you thought you’d let me get really wet before offering me a lift?” I got in the car and John handed me a stack of paper napkins from the coffee shop.

“I was trying to decide how much I felt like sparring after putting in a long day.” That was fair.

I put on my seat belt, and we pulled away from the curb. “Where’s your friend—out looking for a club that still has a disco ball?”

“Give him a break. He’s a lot older than you think. He’s just very well preserved.”

I never knew any cops when I lived in New York. There were thousands of them, anonymous until one of them did something heroic or illegal, or was accused of the same. Most of time they faded into the mosaic of the city. You didn’t see them until you needed them. Then, unlike the umbrella vendors, they materialized. Which was a good thing.

In Springfield, I knew them all by name. And their wives’ names and their pets’. Some of that had to do with the size of the town; some had to do with my reputation as an amateur sleuth, a fact I kept to myself on the short drive to Lucy’s.

The next block was one-way, heading north. Stancik drove farther west, where he’d be able to make a left and go south. We caught one of the red lights.

“Do you know where I’m staying?” I asked, suspicious.

“Wow, you are paranoid.” Either he had an excellent memory or when we met this morning he’d filed it for future reference. A chill went through my wet clothes.

Without asking he turned the heat on. “Let me know if it’s blowing too much. I got two coffees. You want one?”

I lifted the cardboard tray he’d wedged between a large briefcase and the hump in the back of the car.

“Real or decaf?” I asked.

“I got one of each—take your pick.”

“That’s a strategy,” I said. “One for now and one for later?” I took the cup marked regular and popped off the lid.

The light changed and John took the left. After a block, he pulled into an empty metered spot and put the car in park.

“All right. I saw you in El Quixote and thought I might catch up with you when you left. I got one of each to be on the safe side.”

My heart started to beat faster and it wasn’t from two sips of coffee. Did everyone have that reaction when they talked to cops, or was it only people who worried they’d done something wrong? Had he seen me with Rolanda? Did he know what we were up to? He wasn’t saying.

“So were you spying on me?”

“Complete accident.”

We made small talk, occasionally blowing on our coffees, although it was more like something to do than an actual safety measure, until the subject returned, as I knew it would, to Jamal Harrington. He proceeded carefully, not wanting to make his offer of a ride seem like a quid pro quo—more information for a warm, dry vehicle and a hot beverage—but it did. Soon after, we pulled up to Lucy’s building without my having said much. He left the engine running.

“Apart from your prime suspect—a seventeen-year-old A student with no motive and no record,” I said, “how’s the case going?”

“Not an A student,” he corrected. “B plus. Looks like somebody whacked Mr. Bleimeister on the head a couple of times with a brick or bricklike object, then dumped him in the river. Might have survived the blows if he hadn’t drowned.” It was a ghastly thought.

“If he was a little slimmer we might not have found him for days.”

“What are you saying—heavy people float better? I would have thought the opposite was true.”

“You would have been wrong. If we hadn’t found him so soon after his death, we might not have connected it to Otis Randolph’s.”

“Another brick to the head?” I asked.

He nodded.

“M.E. says the two men died within an hour of each other, and the marks on the victims’ heads were remarkably similar. Two hours later and there would have been a shift change. Might have gone unnoticed. Randolph stank of alcohol, but there was none in his blood. And it’s a million to one that falling down the escalator and hitting his head—even if he’d been an epileptic—would have been enough to kill him.”

“Was the wound—?”

“About the size of a brick with some indentations on it, and above the brim.” He looked up from his coffee cup. “That means the top of the head. Not easy to fall and hit the top of your head, unless you’re jumping off a diving board into an empty pool,” he said.

“And even then you’d have to be an Olympic medalist to hit the very top of your head. Nobody noticed this when Otis’s body was found?”

“Cause of death was listed as undetermined.”

Poor Otis. What did he know or what had he seen? And what possible connection could Garland Bleimeister and Otis Randolph have had—a sixtysomething-year-old handyman from Harlem and a college dropout from—how did Labidou put it—Smallville, Pennsylvania?

“We know Jamal Harrington was acquainted with Otis Randolph from statements given by Wagner employees, and he was seen talking with Bleimeister on Wednesday. He’s a link, that’s all. We just want to talk to him. No one’s calling him a suspect.” The word yet hung in the air.

“Isn’t that just semantics? Look, I only met him a few times and doubt I’ll ever see him again. Show’s over tomorrow and I’ll go back to my sleepy Connecticut town and plant pansies or whatever it is you think suburbanites do.”

Stancik placed his coffee cup in the holder, fished two business cards out of his wallet, and gave them to me.

“What’s this for—in case I lose one?”

“I like pansies. One’s for Jamal. The other is in case you decide to call me after you get back to Springfield. It’s not that geographically undesirable.” Very smooth. Had I said I lived in Springfield? Right, he was a cop.

“Thanks for the lift. I’ll be thinking of you at three A.M. when the caffeine kicks in.”

“Feel free to give me a call.”

I turned up my collar and dashed across the wet street into the vestibule of Lucy’s building. A note was taped to her mailbox.

Stop in whenever you get home. J. C.

I’d started the day with J. C. Why not end it with her? I’d catch her up on what Rolanda and I had learned, and with any luck there’d be good leftovers.

My shoes squirted water with each step up to J. C’s apartment. I slipped out of them and shook off the rain before ringing her doorbell. Just as my finger hovered near the buzzer, J. C. opened the door, having seen me through the peephole. She looked paler than usual and wore the expression of a disapproving teacher. I wasn’t greeted with the smell of a welcoming dinner and Moochie and Bella didn’t dash out as they usually did.

“You’ve got company.”