Act of God (18 page)

“Ah, the old honker? A bit of rugby, a few differences of opinion over a pint here and there. A small price to pay for enjoying oneself, don’t you think?”

“How did you come to be working here?”

The face went sly. “You’re a man who changes gears a lot, eh?”

“Depends on the terrain.”

“That it does, but this question’s a bit easier than the first few you’ve asked me. I saw an advert in the newspaper.”

“And responded.”

A nod. “Came in to see Mr. Rivkind. He liked what he saw.”

“And what was that?”

“Come on, man. You look at me, you see a lad can handle himself as a bouncer but mostly just act as a scarecrow. That’s what the owners had in mind.”

“When did you start here?”

“Two months ago tomorrow.”

A month after Darbra Proft. “Any trouble?”

“None to speak of. Couple of scamps, figuring to cause some mischief is all, and they came to see the error of their ways soon enough.”

“So Mr. Rivkind’s death was the first big problem.”

“Far as I would know.”

“Can you tell me what happened that night?”

“I can. Would you rather I walked you through it, though?”

“Yes.”

Quill got up and led me back into the first floor of the store. “I’d already locked up the front and turned off the elevator when the alarm sounded.”

“Hold on a second. What’s your routine?”

“You mean for closing up, now?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty simple, actually. I wait until eight-fifteen, eight-twenty, when the last of the customers appears to be gone. We’re supposed to close at eight, but this economy, it doesn’t do to rush the good people out.”

“Go on.”

“By eight-forty-five, even all the sales clerks have gone, and I turn off the elevator and lock the front entrance.”

“The only way in and out?”

“No. We’ve also the loading area out back, for delivering the pieces to the store. But that’s closed and locked by five.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Well now, I’ve turned off the elevator, and I’m starting my rounds here—”

“You work from the ground floor up?”

“What’s that?”

“Your rounds. You work from the ground floor up?”

“Ah, that’s right.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Rivkind’s idea, it was. He liked me checking everything and ending up there on the fourth floor with him and Mr. Bernstein so I could walk them to their cars and Mrs. Swindell to the subway.”

“Did you come down the stairs then?”

“You mean on a regular night?”

“Yes.”

“No. I’d turn back on the elevator, and we’d all ride down together.”

“Why was that?”

“Well now, Mr. Bernstein, he’s not as partial to stairs as some might be.”

“Okay. You’re on this floor that night, doing your rounds. Where are you when the alarm goes off.”

“Colonial.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m in the colonial section. Over this way.”

Quill took me to a display of living room sets that had lots of rural prints and burled wood.

I said, “Then what?”

“Well, I hear the alarm and I figure it’s kids, as what happened before. So I run over to the back door.”

“Show me.”

Quill started running. With the knee, I walked fast behind him.

I caught up outside another set of padded café doors with an illuminated FIRE EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND above them.

He said, “I’ve often thought the sign’s a challenge to them, but I’m told it’s another of your fine country’s laws.”

Quill pushed through the café doors, showing a steel door with a panic bar like the one on the fourth floor. To the right was a staircase leading upward.

“These the stairs that go to the fourth floor?”

“And each one in between, if that matters to you.”

“All right. What did you do when you got here?”

“What did I do? I went through the door and into the alley, to see if I could catch the lads.”

“You thought there was more than one?”

“That’s what Mr. Rivkind told me when he hired me. He said, ‘These kids, now, Finian, they hide in the store and then bust out, like it’s a game with them.’ ”

“But you didn’t actually see or hear anything before the alarm itself went off.”

“No. If I had, I would have come running sooner, wouldn’t I?”

“Can you show me the alley?”

“I can.”

Quill took out some keys, nearly as many as on Bernstein’s chain, and stuck one of them into a silver and red metal box near the top of the door. “Deactivates the alarm, now.”

“If you didn’t do that, how quickly would the alarm sound?”

“Matter of seconds.”

He removed the key from the box and used his hip to press the panic bar. The door opened onto a broad alley with a wooden stockade fence bordering it. To my right were two garage doors about six feet off the ground, the lip of the building sticking out just below the bottom of the doors.

“Loading bays,” said Quill.

I looked around the alley area. Potholes that held oil-slicked rainwater, some food wrappers and smashed bottles at the margins by the fence.

“No way for anybody to come through the bay doors?”

“Padlocked, inside and out.”

“Nor the front entrance.”

“Not once I’ve turned the key in her.”

“So this is the only other way out.”

“It is.”

“Show me what you did that night.”

“Well now, I came through the door—”

“Without bothering to deactivate the alarm.”

“No need to. She was already sounding because somebody had gone out the door.”

I looked at him. “Then what?”

“Then I ran down the alley.”

“Leaving the door open?”

“What was that?”

“Leaving this door open behind you?”

“Ah, no. I let her close because I had a key in my collection here to get back in.”

“Which way did you run?”

“To the right.”

“Why?”

“Why to the right, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where the driveway is for the trucks.”

“The delivery trucks.”

“That’s right. I figured the lads might take the low road out rather than try to hop the fence.”

“Did you hear them?”

“Well, I don’t figure now it was just young vandals, John.”

“I mean that night, did you hear anybody running in front of you?”

“Couldn’t very well with the alarm, could I? She wails like a banshee.”

“Even once the back door closed?”

Quill gave me a funny look. “My ear were still ringing from the noise.”

“When you got to the driveway, what did you do?”

“I went out to the street, to see if I could spot the lads running away, but I couldn’t, now.”

“And then?”

“I came back around here.”

“To the back door.”

“That’s right.”

“Running?”

“Me running, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well now, no. No, I don’t suppose I was. Not till I got close to the door, that is.”

“What happened there?”

“I could hear Mrs. Swindell screaming.”

“You could hear her?”

“Yes, like through the door, even all the way down here. I understand she was up at the door on the fourth floor, screaming her heart out over finding Mr. Rivkind.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went up the back stairs here, quick as I could.”

“Can we do that?”

“We can.” Quill unlocked the door with a key, ushered me inside, then closed it behind him, using another key on the red and silver box again. The stairs in front of us were concrete, gray with black rubber treading, the paint on the walls yellow. Emergency lighting boxes, like camping lanterns, lined the top of each landing.

As we climbed the stairs, I said, “You didn’t stop on the second or third floors?”

Quill turned to give me the funny look again. “And why would I do that?”

“You knew the screaming must be coming from the fourth?”

“Of course I did. That’s the only place anybody would be.”

We reached the fourth-floor landing. “What happened when you got to here?”

“I opened the door.”

“With your key?”

“That’s right. These doors, they’re all designed that way, to lock when they’re closed so that nobody on the stairs in a fire would get out before they reached the bottom and safety.”

I watched Quill. “Go on.”

“Well now, I couldn’t hear anything over the alarm.”

“Which was still sounding?”

“Nobody had turned her off, man. I would have down below when I came back in, but I could hear Mrs. Swindell screaming, and I didn’t want to take the time.”

“Was she screaming the whole time you were coming up the stairs?”

Quill stopped. “No, no, in fact I didn’t hear the lady at all once I was back inside downstairs, which made me hurry all the more.”

“Why?”

“Why? I thought there might be more troubles on the fourth floor, and I was right.”

“So you’re up here on the fourth floor—”

“And I open this door, and I hear somebody yelling—well, I know now it was Mr. Bernstein and Mrs. Swindell. In the owners’ office, they were, and when I got down there, they were trying to move Mr. Rivkind—Ah, a horrible scene it was, John. Horrible.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I went in to help them, but Mr. Bernstein, he was on his hands and knees, blood on his hands, too, and so I stepped in and moved the poker so he wouldn’t kneel on it.”

“You picked up the poker?”

“Yes. I was almost going to kick it, then picked it up before I saw the … the gore on the working end of it. Then I’m afraid I dropped it pretty fast.”

“Did Mrs. Swindell see that?”

Quill stopped again. “I couldn’t swear to it either way. I think she was on the telephone by then, calling for the police. Didn’t have to, of course.”

“Why not?”

“That alarm, I expect it would have brought the cops, too. We surely got more than our share of firemen out of it.”

I pictured the scene. A madhouse, as Bonnie Cross had described it.

Quill fingered his key ring. “You want to see the fourth floor, too?”

“Already have. Wait a minute.”

“What is it?”

“How could we go through this door without setting off the alarm?”

“How? By using my key, John.” He waggled the thing in front of my eyes.

“This key opens the door from the stairwell side without the alarm sounding?”

“And from the store side as well.”

I didn’t reply.

“John?”

“Who else has one of them?”

“One of the keys, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see. Mr. Bernstein for certain. Mr. Rivkind had his, too. I suppose that’s all. Anything else, now?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

As Quill turned to go back down the stairs, I said, “I’ll have to take these a little slowly.”

“A bit gimp in the knee, are you?”

“A bit.”

“I noticed from the way you held yourself on the stairs with Master Rivkind there.”

“Tell me, you know much about him?”

“The son, now?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing but what I saw of him at the funeral. Never really came around the store. Of course, I can only say about the last two months.”

“What did you think of Abraham Rivkind?”

“The salt of the earth, and gentle as a spring rain. The last man you’d hope would depart this world on the wrong end of violence.”

Not exactly the question I’d asked. “How about his relationship with the staff?”

“The staff? He was an easy man to work for, if that’s what you mean. No airs, very natural.”

I had the feeling I’d get less from Quill than I had from Swindell on that count. “How about Darbra Proft?”

“Darbra? Well now, I wouldn’t be seeing much of her, would I?”

“You tell me.”

“She was a secretary on the fourth floor, John. Not much need for me to be up there, and almost none for her to be wandering the store where I’d be.”

The past tense from Quill, too. “Do you think there was anything between Mr. Rivkind and Ms. Proft beyond boss and secretary?”

“It’s not good to think about such things, John. Like the priests and the nuns used to tell us.”

We reached the first floor and came through the padded doors back into the store. As we moved toward the front entrance, Quill said, “Will that be all, then?”

“Maybe one more thing. Is there a way to tell if the fire doors had been opened?”

“The alarm tells you that.”

“I mean, if the alarm was set off by one of the doors, is there a way to tell whether a particular other door was opened?”

Quill stopped. “Well now, that’s a good question, isn’t it? I don’t know. But I don’t see that it matters very much.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I opened that downstairs door, didn’t I, when I went out after what I took to be vandals. And Mrs. Swindell opened the fourth floor door to call for me, she said, and I surely opened it to go to Mr. Rivkind. So one way or the other, both the doors you care about got themselves sprung by people with a right to be inside the store.”

Finian Quill flashed the big smile at me, but I somehow didn’t find it very warming.

O
N MY WAY OUT
of Value Furniture, Karen gave me simple directions to Grgo’s. It was only around the corner from the store, but without her specifics, I would have walked right on by.

The door to the restaurant was six steps below street level, the name on the jamb in calligraphy so small it could have fit on a three-by-five index card. The door was locked, so I knocked.

It was answered by a wiry little man wearing a white shirt, black tie, and black pants. Shrugging into a black Eisenhower jacket and opening the door, he said, “No dinner before five, please.”

“I’m here to see the owner.”

A brief nod. “Come in, please.”

I did, the man locking the door behind me. “You wait, please, I bring him.”

The man hurried through an empty dining room with tables for two and four, all covered with heavy white cloths. The tables were positioned for privacy, cutting down on the number of people who could be served, surprising in downtown. On top of each cloth were silver place settings; a delicate, spiraled vase with one bloom in it, all tulips; and a candle with burgundy wax. The walls were painted the color of the candles and held portraits of medieval knights and aristocrats in dull golden frames. The largest frame held a flag, horizontally striped in red, white, and blue with a crest of red and white checkerboard centered in the upper half. There was a sense of being in a foreign land that you’ve never visited and know little about.