A Ticket to the Boneyard (7 page)

I could understand the impulse, but I told her it struck me as a little premature. “Let me make a few calls in the morning,” I said. “It’s possible he did something and wound up back in the joint. It’d be silly to fly to Brazil if he’s locked up in Green Haven.”

“Actually I was thinking more along the lines of Barbados.”

“Or if he’s dead,” I said. “I thought at the time that he was a good candidate to come out of there in a body bag. He’s the type to make enemies, and it doesn’t take a lot for someone to stick a knife in you.”

“Then who sent me the clipping?”

“Let’s not worry about that until we see if we can rule him out.”

“All right. Matt? You’ll stay here tonight?”

“Sure.”

“I know I’m being silly but I’ll feel better. You don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

She made up the couch for me with a couple of sheets and a blanket and a pillow. She’d offered me half the bed but I said I’d be more comfortable on the couch, that I felt restless and didn’t want to worry about disturbing her with my tossing and turning. “You wouldn’t disturb me,” she said. “I’m going to take a Seconal, I take one about four times a year, and when I do nothing disturbs me that registers less than seven on the Richter scale. You want one? It’s just the thing if you’re wired. You’ll be out cold before you even have time to relax.”

I passed on the pill and took the couch instead. She went to bed and I stripped to my shorts and got under the covers. I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. I kept opening them and looking at the lights of Queens across the river. A couple of times I thought with regret of the Seconal not taken, but it was never really an option. As a sober alcoholic, I couldn’t take sleeping pills or tranquilizers or mood-elevators or any painkiller much stronger than aspirin. They interrupt sobriety and seem to undercut a person’s commitment to recovery, and people who use them usually wind up drinking again.

I suppose I slept some, although it felt a lot like a white night. After a while the sun came up and slanted through the living-room window and I went into the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. I toasted an English muffin and ate it and drank two cups of coffee.

I checked the bedroom. She was still sleeping, curled on her side with her face pressed into the pillow. I tiptoed past the bed and went into the bathroom and showered. It didn’t wake her. I dried off and went back to the living room and got dressed, and by then it was time to make some telephone calls.

I had to make quite a few of them, and sometimes it took some doing to reach the person I had to speak with. I stayed at it until I found out what I needed to know, and then I looked in on Elaine again. She hadn’t changed position, and I had a moment of wholly irrational panic, convinced that she was dead. He’d let himself in days ago, I decided, and he’d tampered with the Seconal, salting the capsule with cyanide. Or he’d let himself in just hours ago, slipping through walls like a ghost, slipping past me while I tossed on the leather couch, stabbing her in the heart and stealing away.

Of course it was nonsense, as I learned soon enough by dropping to a knee alongside the bed and listening to her steady shallow breathing. But it gave me a turn, and it showed me the state of my own mind. I went back to the living room, thumbed through the Yellow Pages, and made another couple of phone calls.

The locksmith got there around ten. I’d explained to him just what I wanted, and he brought along several models for me to look at. He went to work in the kitchen first, and he was halfway through in the living room when I heard her stirring. I went into the bedroom.

She said, “What’s that noise? At first I thought you were using the vacuum cleaner.”

“It’s a drill. I’m having some locks installed. It’s going to come to close to four hundred dollars. Do you want to write a check?”

“I’d rather give him cash.” She went to the dresser and took an envelope from the top drawer. Counting bills, she said, “Four hundred dollars? What are we getting, a vault?”

“Police locks.”

“Police locks?” She arched an eyebrow. “To keep the police out? Or to keep the police in?”

“Whatever you decide.”

“Here’s five hundred,” she said. “Get a receipt, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t know what my accountant does with them, but he’s a bear for receipts.”

She showered while I went out and kept the locksmith company. When he was done I paid him and got a receipt and put it and her change on the coffee table. She came out wearing baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and a short-sleeved red shirt with epaulets and metal buttons. I showed her how the locks worked. There were two of them on the living-room door and one in the kitchen.

“I think this is how he got in twelve years ago,” I said, pointing to the service door in the kitchen. “I think he came in through the building’s service entrance and up the back stairs. That’s how he got past the doorman with no trouble. You’ve got a deadbolt lock on that door, but maybe it wasn’t engaged at the time. Or maybe he had a key for it.”

“I never use that door.”

“So you wouldn’t have known if it was locked or not.”

“No, not really. It leads to the service elevator and the incinerator. Once in a blue moon I go out that way to the incinerator, but I don’t like having to squeeze past the refrigerator schlepping a bag of garbage, so I usually go out the front door and walk around.”

“The first time he was here,” I said, “he could have slipped into the kitchen and unlocked the door. Then it would have been open both times he let himself into the apartment. Sometime after that it would have been unlocked when you went to use it, but would you even have noticed it?”

“I don’t think so. I would have just thought I forgot to lock it the last time I’d used it.”

“Well, you don’t have to use it at all for the time being.” I demonstrated the lock, the steel bar that ran across the face of the door and lodged in a hasp on the doorframe. “This key locks and unlocks it,” I said, “but I suggest you just leave it locked all the time. There’s no way to unlock it from the outside. I had him install it without mounting a cylinder on the other side of the door. You never come in this way anyway, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“So it’s permanently sealed now, for all practical purposes, but you can let yourself out with the key if you ever have to get out in a hurry. But if you do, you can’t lock it after you. You can lock the deadbolt with the key, but not the police lock.”

“I don’t even know if I have a key for that door,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep it closed all the time, and I’ll keep the deadbolt and the police lock both locked.”

“Good.” We returned to the living room. “Now here,” I said, “I had him mount two police locks. One of them’s the same arrangement as you’ve got in the kitchen, a police lock that you can lock or unlock only from inside the apartment, with no cylinder on the outside. That way there’s no lock out there for anybody to pick. When you’re inside the apartment with both locks engaged there’s no way anybody can get in without a battering ram. When you go out, you can lock the second police lock with a key. This is the key for it, with the bumps on it. The cylinder’s supposed to be pickproof, and the key itself can’t be duplicated with ordinary equipment, so it would be a good idea not to lose it or your apartment will be secure against everyone, including you.”

“There’s a thought.”

“You’ve got a lot of security here,” I said. “He put an escutcheon plate over the cylinder so it can’t be pried out, and the cylinder itself is some space-age alloy that you can’t drill into. While he was at it I had him install a similar guard over the existing Segal deadbolt. All of this probably amounts to overkill, especially if you’re planning to catch the next plane to Barbados, but I figured you could afford it. And you ought to have decent locks, Motley or no Motley.”

“Speaking of him—”

“He’s not dead and he’s not in prison.”

“When did he get out?”

“In July. The fifteenth of the month.”

“Which July?” She looked at me and her eyes widened. “This July? He drew one-to-ten and served twelve years?”

“He wasn’t what you’d call a model prisoner.”

“Can they keep you there beyond the maximum sentence? Isn’t that a violation of due process?”

“Not if you’re a very bad boy. That sort of thing happens now and then. You can go to prison for ninety days and still be inside forty years later.”

“God,” she said. “I guess prison didn’t rehabilitate him.”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“He got out in July. So that’s plenty of time to find out where Connie went to and, and—”

“I guess it’s time enough.”

“And time to clip the story out of the paper and send it to me. And time to wait around while the fear builds. He gets off on fear, you know.”

“It could still be a coincidence.”

“How?”

“The way we said last night. A friend of hers knew you were her friend and wanted you to know what had happened.”

“And didn’t send a note? Or put on a return address?”

“Sometimes people don’t want to get involved.”

“And the New York postmark?”

I’d doped that out, too, lying on the couch and looking at Long Island City’s skyline. “Maybe she didn’t have your address. Maybe she put the clipping in an envelope and mailed the whole thing to someone she knew in New York, asking him or her to look up your address and send it on.”

“That’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it?”

It had seemed plausible while I was stretched out watching dawn break. Now it did look like a stretch.

And it seemed even less likely an hour later, when I got back to my hotel. There weren’t any messages in my box, but while I was checking I collected the letters I’d left behind the previous night. There was some junk mail, and a credit-card bill, and there was an envelope with no return address and my name and address block-printed in ballpoint.

It was the same story clipped from the same paper. No note with it, nothing scribbled in the margins. Something made me read it all the way through, word for word. The way you’ll watch a sad old movie, hoping this time it’ll have a happy ending.

United had a nonstop out of La Guardia at 1:45 that was due into Cleveland at 2:59. I put a clean shirt and a change of socks and underwear in a briefcase along with a book I was trying to read and took a cab to the airport. I was early, but after I’d had a bite in the cafeteria and read the
Times
through and called Elaine I didn’t have long to wait.

We were on time getting off and five minutes early at Cleveland-Hopkins International. Hertz had the car I’d reserved, a Ford Tempo, and the clerk gave me an area map with my route to Massillon marked out for me with a yellow highlighter. I followed her directions and made the drive in a little over an hour.

On the way, it occurred to me that it was just as well driving was one of those things you didn’t forget how to do, because I’d done precious little of it in recent years. Unless there was a time I was forgetting, it had been over a year since I’d been behind a steering wheel. Last October Jan Keane and I had rented a car and driven to the Amish country around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a long weekend of turning leaves and folksy inns and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It started off well but we’d been having our problems and I suppose the weekend was an attempt to cure them, and that’s a lot of weight for five days in the country to carry. Too much weight, as it turned out, because we were sullen and sour with each other by the time we got back to the city. We both knew it was over, and not just the weekend. In that sense you could say the trip accomplished what it was supposed to, though not what we wanted it to.

Police Headquarters in Massillon is housed in a modern building downtown on Tremont Avenue. I left the Tempo in a lot down the street and asked the desk officer for a Lieutenant Havlicek, who turned out to be a big man with close-cropped light brown hair and some extra weight in the gut and jowls. He wore a brown suit and a tie with brown and gold stripes, and he had a wedding ring on the appropriate finger and a Masonic ring on the other hand.

He had his own office, with pictures of his wife and children on his desk and framed testimonials from civic groups on one wall. He asked how I took my coffee, and he fetched it himself.

He said, “I was juggling three things when you called this morning, so let me see if I got it straight. You’re with the NYPD?”

“I used to be.”

“And you’re working private now?”

“With Reliable,” I said, and showed him a card. “But this matter doesn’t involve them, and I don’t have a client. I’m here because I think the Sturdevant killing might tie in with an old case of mine.”

“How old?”

“Twelve years old.”

“From when you were a police officer.”

“That’s right. I arrested a man with a history of violence toward women. He took a couple shots at me with a .25, so that was the major charge against him, and he wound up pleading to a reduced count of attempted aggravated assault. The judge gave him less time than I thought he deserved, but he got into trouble in prison and didn’t get out until four months ago.”

“I gather you figure it’s a shame he got out at all.”

“The warden at Dannemora says he killed two inmates for sure and was the odds-on suspect in three or four other homicides.”

“Then why is he walking around?” He answered his own question. “Although there’s a difference between knowing a man did something and being able to prove it, and I guess that goes double inside a state penitentiary.” He shook his head, drank some coffee. “But how does he hook up with Phil Sturdevant and his wife? They weren’t the kind of people who lived in the same world as him.”

“Mrs. Sturdevant lived in New York at the time. That was before her marriage, and she’d been on the receiving end of some of Motley’s violence.”

“That’s his name? Motley?”

“James Leo Motley. Mrs. Sturdevant—her name was Miss Cooperman at the time—dictated a statement accusing Motley of assault and extortion, and after sentencing he swore he’d get even with her.”