Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [5]
The detective took notes. There had been a fight. There had been many fights. A boy had been the subject of one of the fights. Other boys had been the subject of other fights, or maybe the same boy had. It wasn’t clear. What was clear was that the father had delivered an ultimatum: That boy doesn’t enter this house again or you don’t enter it again.
Angela had brought the boy back. The next day, her clothes were on the sidewalk. She had beaten on the door, crying, and the mother had wanted to let her back in. But her husband had held her back. When they finally opened the door, Angela was gone. When they phoned around to all her friends—even, finally, to the boy, who hung up on them—they couldn’t find her.
Three years later, they found her. No, that wasn’t quite accurate, either: The police had found her. The point was, she had been found. But she had been dead.
Did the police have any idea who had done it? The detective shook his head. He could have told the mother that it had probably been one of Angela’s tricks, but contrary to popular belief in the precinct house, he actually did have a heart. “We currently have no information, Mrs. Nicholas.” Which wasn’t entirely true, since that man, Sladek, had turned out to have been poisoned, too, and with the same poison, so that was—maybe—a starting point. But it was close enough to true. Anyway, he said it.
“How did it happen? How could this happen?”
“We aren’t certain. Our lab is working on it.”
The father finally stirred to life, raising his head, his eyes burning. “You find the man who did this and I’ll kill him.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Mrs. Nicholas said.
“Do you have a daughter, sergeant?”
“A son,” the detective said.
“Well, if somebody did to your son what somebody did to my daughter,” Mr. Nicholas said, “what would you do?”
I’d kill the son of a bitch, the detective said. To himself. “I’d let the proper authorities handle it.”
Mr. Nicholas shook his head. “With a daughter it’s different.”
For the first night in a week, it wasn’t raining. The detective looked at the map he’d made, showing the streets from 32nd to 45th on the West Side. The locations where the bodies had been found were marked with red circles. They were spread around—enough so that it didn’t look like there was a pattern. But five homeless people dead in the course of seven weeks? All poisoned? It wasn’t obvious that this was the work of just one person, but that the deaths were connected the detective had no doubt.
He started at the uptown end, the theater district. As you left the streets dominated by Disney marquees, you found the remnants of the old Times Square: novelty shops, import/export storefronts, peep shows, For Rent signs. Plenty of homeless people to talk to.
The detective took his time, walking slowly, keeping his eyes open—for what, he wasn’t sure. He stopped whenever he saw someone sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a street lamp, lying under a filthy quilt in a cardboard box. He introduced himself, asked whether the person had seen anything unusual lately.
Mostly they said no.
One man said, “You not going to get anyone to tell you anything. They too scared.”
“You scared?” the detective asked.
“Bet your ass I’m scared.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t want to end up dead.”
“We all end up dead,” the detective said.
“Not me, man. I’m not ready yet.”
“So why don’t you tell me, who is it that people are scared of?”
The man just shook his head emphatically.
“Why? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Maybe it’s you.”
“For god’s sake, I’m a cop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’re a cop don’t mean nothing. You know that, I know that, everybody know that.”
The detective moved on. Could it be a cop? He thought about it. A frustrated beat cop, maybe, out to clean up the neighborhood