Three-Day Town

CHAPTER

23

… the refuse from them makes the streets appear unkempt and uncared for.

—

The New New York

, 1909

Upon leaving Elliott, Dwight and I decided it would be just as easy, and certainly a lot cheaper and quicker, to walk over to Seventh Avenue and take the subway uptown. Even though it was cold, cold, cold, the wind had died down for the moment and walking was not too unpleasant as long as we held on to each other and avoided the worst of the ice.

The subway was half empty and we immediately found seats, but when we pulled into the Times Square stop several minutes later, Dwight suddenly grabbed my hand.

“C’mon,” he said, and hurried me out of the train and up the steps into the neon exuberance of New York’s theater district.

Most of the theaters are closed on Mondays, but those that were open were just letting out and the streets were thronged with people despite the bitter cold.

Dwight smiled down into my dazzled eyes and waved his hand to encompass the whole display. “I got ’em to turn everything on just for you.”

“Oh, Major Bryant!” I laughed and stood on tiptoes to kiss him. “You shouldn’t have!”

Grinning happily at my country bumpkin delight and pleased with himself for thinking of it, he stationed himself by a light pole right where Seventh and Broadway intersect at West 42nd Street and I leaned into his comfortable bulk to enjoy the blinking lights, the waterfalls of cascading LEDs, the riotous colors, the eye-popping whites. Brilliant blues and pure yellows chased each other up the front of buildings and erupted in a gush of green at the top. Reds and oranges blazed across the electric billboards. Garish razzamatazz brilliance dazzled my eyes and intoxicated my senses. Except for Dwight’s strong arms around me, I would have gone reeling into the street, drunk with the explosion of flashing lights and color. It was Fourth of July fireworks without the bangs, a thousand overly decorated Christmas trees without the carols, and the perfect antidote for the sadness I felt for Sigrid and Mrs. Lattimore.

“I want one of everything for our pond house,” I told him when I had looked my fill.

“Dream on, kid.” He acts appalled by my desire for neon bar signs, and maybe he’s not pretending, but when we do get around to building some sort of screened structure next to the farm pond where we swim and fish in the summertime, I’m determined to wallpaper one side of it with the signs I’ve started collecting.

We found a place where we could sit with a cup of coffee and watch people passing who seemed oblivious to the lights that blazed overhead. Eventually, we threaded our way over to the bus stop and trundled up Broadway to Columbus Circle and on past Lincoln Center, ablaze in its own floodlights.

We got off at our stop, and as we walked up the street to our building, I couldn’t help noticing all the bags of garbage piled along the curb and remembered that Phil Lundigren had told us that first night that pickups were on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.

“If the porter hadn’t found Antoine’s body before it got loaded onto a garbage truck, it probably never would have been found,” Dwight said. “Just wound up in a landfill somewhere.”

Sidney was standing inside the lobby when we got there and he held the inner door open for us. He looked drawn and less dapper than when we’d first met. The night man was seated in one of the lobby chairs.

“Jani Horvath,” Sidney said, introducing us.

Horvath was the oldest of the elevator men we had yet met, with thick white hair and an even thicker white mustache. He gave us a neutral look and nodded acknowledgment, but said nothing.

Once inside the elevator, I asked, “Any word on the missing Wall boy?”

“No, and his mother’s going crazy,” Sidney said heavily.

Once we were on our way up, Sidney told us that the building was buzzing with fear and speculation. Two men dead and a teenage boy missing?

“Half the people think Corey killed them both and the other half think one of the residents has turned into a homicidal maniac. They make me wait until they’ve unlocked their doors and got inside safely.” He shook his head in uncertainty. “I’m not really nervous, but it does get pretty deserted here after eleven on a weeknight. Jani’s feeling it, too. That’s why he’s up in the lobby instead of down in the basement. He’s not looking forward to his shift.”

He stopped the elevator at the sixth floor and pulled back the brass gate. “If you don’t mind me asking, I saw you two leave with those detectives… they don’t really think Corey killed Antoine, do they?”

“They won’t know till they talk to him,” Dwight said.

“I hear he was blackmailing Antoine because Antoine killed Phil, but that’s crazy. He’s just a kid. I’ve known him since he was in his stroller. He’s no killer.”

“Then why’d he run?”

“Because he’s scared?”

“If he’s scared, why doesn’t he go to the police? Or call his parents?”

Sidney’s slender shoulders drooped. “Yeah. That’s what I keep asking myself, too.”

While Dwight brushed and flossed, I checked my email. There were routine messages from friends and colleagues and six or eight messages from the nieces and nephews. Emma wrote that their mother was taking it better than they had expected. Barbara totally believed Lee but had ruled that he couldn’t post anything else on his Facebook page until it was shown who was responsible for that suggestive picture.

I clicked over to the site and saw that Lee had written in all caps: SUSPENDED UNTIL I FIND OUT WHO HACKED ME.

Ashley said she believed him, too, but she didn’t want to go out with him again and had given him back his FFA jacket.

They had questioned Jamie Benton and Mark McLamb, who had the adjoining lockers, and the freshman girl who had the locker below his. They believed the girl when she claimed to have seen nothing—“She’s a clueless freshman, for Pete’s sake,” wrote seventeen-year-old cousin Jessica, a junior—but they were convinced the two boys knew more than they were saying. They reported, only half facetiously, that they had even examined Lee’s locker with a flashlight (à la CSI) and a magnifying glass (à la Sherlock Holmes) and found no sign of tampering with screwdriver or hacksaw.

A.K., eighteen and a senior, thought perhaps someone had switched locks, substituting his own for Lee’s, but Lee insisted he had opened the lock with his own combination both before and after his lunch period and both times he had relocked it and twirled the dial on the lock.

One thing Lee did say was that he now believed someone had opened his locker and gone through his things a time or two before. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different. I thought I was getting absentminded, but maybe I wasn’t.”

The subject of their last email of the evening was “News Flash.” Emma wrote that she’d just learned that Jamie Benton had asked Ashley out right before she and Lee started going together. “More tomorrow.”

Dwight joined me on the bed and I passed my laptop over to him to let him check his mail while I went through my own bedtime routine.

When I returned, Dwight turned the screen around so I could read Cal’s message.

“Aunt Kate took me over to Granddaddy’s to see Bandit and then she let me bring him back with me. Trooper’s mean to him and growls a lot. He hopes Saturday gets here fast.” It was signed with a full line of X’s and O’s.

Kate had written, “Trooper does snarl every time he sees Bandit, but Cal’s getting homesick for you two so I thought it would help to have his dog here. He’s asleep now with his arms around Bandit.”

“That was nice of her,” I said. Truth to tell, I was starting to miss Cal, too.

We turned off the lights and lay awake a few minutes trying to decide what we wanted to do next day. For Christmas, Dwight’s mother had given us mock tickets to a Broadway play and a check large enough to buy real tickets, but we hadn’t decided what we wanted to see. Comedy or drama?

“Nothing too heavy,” Dwight said sleepily.

“Musical?” I asked.

He yawned. “Anything except Mamma Mia! Okay?”

“We could just go down to the TKTS booth and toss a dart at the list,” I said, but he was gone.

I should have been sleepy, too. I was sleepy, but even though I nestled in next to Dwight, I couldn’t seem to turn my brain off. I kept thinking about Lee and how someone seemed to be getting into his locker at will. If Emma was right, if the Benton boy was the one who did it, he might be afraid to admit it. Not only was Jenny Benton overprotective, she also had a wide streak of prudery. She would probably be horrified to think that her son had any idea what a girl’s nude anatomy looked like. If he did it, was it because he was jealous of Lee or was it simply an adolescent joke?

Like Corey Wall taking the elevator when it was left unattended?

The digital clock beside the bed clicked from 11:45 to 11:46. When it hit 11:53, I slipped out of bed. No need to switch on any lamps; the reflected glow from outside was more than enough to let me navigate the rooms. I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but I wasn’t really hungry and none of the little boxes or packets tempted me. Instead, I poured myself half a glass of wine from the opened bottle on the counter and wandered back to the living room. Too cold to go out onto the balcony, but I stood by the French doors that let me see a small sliver of upper Broadway where traffic had dwindled to a few cars and cabs.

The street below me seemed almost as deserted as the lanes that crisscross the farm back home, yet even as I watched, a cab slowed to a stop in front of the building across the way. I moved to the dining room window for an unobstructed look and saw a couple emerge from the cab. The woman wore an evening cape and a long gown. With his back to me, I couldn’t tell if the man was wearing a tux underneath his overcoat, but that was certainly a white silk scarf draped around his neck. Fred and Ginger home from a formal party?

I was amused by the juxtaposition of elegance and ugliness as he helped her from the cab. The space immediately out front was clear enough for her high heels and his patent leather shoes, but dirty snow still lined the curbs on either side of the polished glass door and large black bags of garbage were piled atop the snow by the service entrances of all the buildings from one end of the street to the other. I counted six bags from this building alone. Trying to multiply the garbage on this one street by the number of streets in the city numbed my brain. I sipped my wine and I wondered how many trucks it would take every day and what did they do with so much trash? Where was it all dumped? Or was it incinerated?

I vaguely remembered that when I’d lived here with Lev a million years ago, there had been controversy over landfills in the Brooklyn marshes, but surely they had long since reached capacity?

And why was I standing here in the middle of the night wondering about New York’s garbage?

My glass was empty but I still wasn’t sleepy. Okay, another half glass ought to do it, I decided.

When I returned to the window, I saw a figure turn the corner onto Broadway. A moment later, the man on duty across the way stepped out onto the sidewalk and flexed his arms as if to get the stiffness out. He seemed to be waiting for something, and sure enough, down the block from West End Avenue came a slender dark-haired woman with a beagle on a leash. She paused to toss a small bag onto their pile of garbage, then the night man held the door for them and followed them back inside.

One thing about living in the country, you don’t have to walk your dog and you don’t have to pick up after it.

A cab moved slowly down the street, its headlights bouncing off the shiny trash bags and making the sidewalks sparkle as if dusted by glitter. Glassphalt. Made from recycled glass. Before I could start trying to estimate how much waste glass the city must generate, I finished my wine and went back to bed.

Just before I fell asleep, I found myself remembering Lee’s comment that he thought someone had been in his locker before today. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different,” he had written.

Right. Thinking of how messy my own high school locker had been, I yawned and drifted off wondering how he could possibly tell.

It was still dark and the digital clock read 6:23 when I opened my eyes. I lay there quietly for a moment trying to grasp why I was awake. It was almost as if I had heard Lee’s voice say, “Things look a little different.”

Huh?

I closed my eyes and was almost asleep again when it finally registered.

Quietly, so as not to wake Dwight, I got up and went back to the living room. Without switching on any lights, I went straight to the window, looked out, and saw that I was right.

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.