Act of God (5 page)

Reassuring Renfield that everything was okay, I went out to the kitchen and had some toast and juice. I showered and found a clean shirt I’d left at Nancy’s. Getting dressed in the bedroom, I made another unwelcome discovery. Putting my right arm into the sleeve of my suit jacket and grabbing the right lapel with my left hand to pull the jacket on, nothing happened.

There was no strength in my left shoulder. I couldn’t draw my left hand across my chest against even the minimal resistance of the jacket sleeve on my right arm. There was just a clicking noise and the same twinge inside the shoulder I’d felt the night before with the bureau.

I looked at Nancy’s newest piece of furniture. Walking over to it, I kept my weight centered. Then I kicked it in the part of its legs I took to be its shins.

What’s the matter, John?

I raised myself awkwardly from where I’d laid the tulips crossways to her headstone. “Had a little problem hauling furniture, Beth.”

You’re getting kind of old for Pepsi Generation moving parties, aren’t you?

“The ones in front of a rented van where beautiful people are smiling and the dog catches a Frisbee in its teeth?”

That’s what I had in mind.
A pause.
But that’s not the whole story, is it?

“No.” I told her about Pearl Rivkind and William Proft.

Sounds like you think you did the right thing and made a mistake, all at once.

“Maybe not the only mistake, either.”

The furniture moving again?

“Only partly, Beth. It’s more Nancy and me.”

Another pause.
How do you mean?

“There’ve been some … I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes everything’s just right and other times I’m not sure we’re on the same wavelength.”

What does she say?

“About what?”

About your … wavelengths.

“We haven’t talked about it.”

Sure you have, John. You just don’t realize it.

I looked away from the grave toward the edge of the harbor below us. A Styrofoam board was crashing against the rocks, so weathered and battered it was hard to picture what it had been before going into the water.

John?

“Still here.”

But trying not to be?

I looked back, not toward the headstone, but below that, to where she was. “What do you mean?”

You have a way, you always did, of closing off things you don’t want to hear.

I shook my head. “Beth, I wouldn’t have gotten this far, not as an MP or a claims—”

I don’t mean professionally, John. I mean personally. You close off and miss things.

“Like what?”

Like whatever you and Nancy should be resolving.

“Which is?”

That’s something you’ll have to see for yourself. With her.

I watched the hunk of Styrofoam bounce off a few more rocks and started to empathize with it.

“John, how you doing?”

I looked at Elie, holding a clipboard behind the counter at the Nautilus club I’d joined a while before. He was the manager, his black hair, olive skin, and blue eyes the kind of mix he’d told me was typical of his Lebanese background.

“Not so good, El.”

His face darkened. “When I didn’t see you for a while, I figured it had to do with that gang … thing.”

I’d been involved in a bad situation, a shoot-out with some members of a street gang into drug-pushing. “This is different, El. There’s something wrong with both my shoulder and my knee.”

“What happened?”

I told him.

“Gee, John, I don’t think you’d better work out till you get things looked at.”

“You know any good doctors?”

“Mostly just people at the Sports Medicine clinics. There are a couple of them, but you don’t really have a sports injury, you know?”

“I know, but I’ll need to be able to run and work out after whatever some doctor does to me, so I may as well start there.”

He tore a sheet of paper off his clipboard. “Let me give you the one I’d go to.”

I went back to the condo I was renting from another doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago. Changing suits, I called the number Elie gave me, reaching a receptionist who sounded frazzled. She said they had a cancellation for later that same Wednesday and did I want it. I said I did. Then I walked downstairs, carefully, and got the Prelude out from the parking space behind the building.

“Yeah?”

I opened the door that had LIEUTENANT ROBERT MURPHY on it. He was sitting behind his desk, the penholder in front of him sporting a miniature American flag. Murphy wore a crisp white shirt with short sleeves, his black skin contrasting with it and the gold-toned watch and wedding band. His paisley tie was snugged tight against the collar button, the pen in his hand hovering over a report he seemed to be revising.

“Cuddy. Forgive me for not getting up.”

“That’s okay, Lieutenant. Mind if I sit down?”

“Go ahead. Actually, it’s kind of kismet, you know?”

I closed the door. “Fate?”

“Yeah. I was just doing the biyearly here.”

“The homicide report?”

“Right. It’s—what’s wrong with your leg?”

“I had a little accident.”

“The gang thing?”

“No. Nothing from them or anybody else about that.”

“Good.” He leaned back in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his neck. “Just as soon not have you any more in the statistics than you already are.”

“How are things looking?”

“Not so bad, actually. A lot of cities, they had a banner year last time ’round, but we’ve been dropping since we hit the record with one-fifty in ’ninety.”

“Nice to know it’s safer out there.”

“It isn’t.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It isn’t any safer. Used to be, the perps used sawed-off shotguns, then went to .380 automatics. Now the nine mil’s the weapon of choice, account of the firepower. Fifteen, even eighteen rounds some of them, and you can pick one up for a hundred on the street. Shit, Uzi’ll go for only twice that, and I was talking to a fed from ATF said they found a guy in Hyde Park with six MP-5’s in his car trunk.”

“That’s the German thing?”

“Heckler & Koch. Light as a pistol, accurate as a rifle, and it’ll fire thirty slugs in two seconds flat.”

Christ. “How come the homicide statistics aren’t going up, then?”

“We’re getting better at handling the victims. More cops on the scene faster, more EMTs getting the wounded to hospitals, better trauma units once they get there. Hell, Cuddy, Boston’s geographically small and our medical care’s the best there is.”

Glad to hear it. “I don’t want to keep you from the paperwork too long.”

“Meaning you want something.”

“Just a little cooperation and understanding.”

“Let’s hear about the understanding part first.”

“I’ve been hired on a missing-person case that might be tied to an open homicide.”

“Which one?”

“Abraham Rivkind, the furniture guy got killed about three weeks ago.”

“Cross drew that one.”

“I thought she was on your squad?”

“So did I. Then the commissioner, he noticed he had exactly two so-called minorities in Homicide, so he decided it’d look better if the one black male and the one white female weren’t both crowding the same three-person team. We reassigned folks, and with her already being a sergeant and all, Cross got to be head of her own squad.”

Cross had a first name, “Bonnie,” but I’d never heard him call her other than by the last. “She around?”

Murphy’s eyes went to slits. “I’m guessing that brings us to the cooperation part.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t know if the killing and the missing person are related, but I figure the best way for me not to step on your toes is to find out what you’ve got and stay away from what you’re watching.”

“Cuddy, how come it always sounds so nice coming from you in the beginning and blows up by the time you work your way round to the end?”

“Kismet?”

A grunt. “Best you talk to Cross, then. Be her toes you’d be stepping on, and I don’t much like your chances for a life long and happy, you do.”

“What?”

“Nice to see you, too, Sergeant.”

“Cuddy, what?”

I sat in the chair beside her desk. On the desk were stacks of manila case folders and a box of assorted Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins. Behind the desk, Cross sat in a black, padded swivel chair with her elbows on the blotter. The elbows were even with her shoulders, which didn’t need any padding to fill out the camel’s hair blazer or the buttoned-down brown blouse underneath it. Her hair matched the blouse but was pulled behind her neck in a careless ponytail. She wore small pearl studs as earrings, no other jewelry except for a Timex on her left wrist, the face of the watch peeking at me as she reached for a powdered cinnamon and popped it into her mouth.

Around the Munchkin, she said, “For the third time, what?”

“I just talked with the lieutenant. He said you’d drawn the Rivkind killing.”

“He ought to know.”

“I’ve got a missing-person thing that might be related to it. I was wondering if we could talk some.”

Cross stopped chewing and looked at me, then swallowed and brushed off her hands. Moving a file, she delved into a short stack of folders and came out with one that she opened in front of her. “Related as in a relative?”

“No. A secretary at the furniture store named Darbra Proft. Her brother’s hired me to find her.”

“
The
secretary.”

“Don’t get you.”

“Proft, she’s the one and only secretary they had, and she left work the day of the killing at like five-thirty. She was with a friend of hers at the movies when the boss got it.”

I took out a pad. “Friend’s name?”

“I’ve got Wickmire, Traci. Want the spelling and address?”

All roads do lead to Ms. Wickmire. “Thanks, already got them from the brother.”

Cross closed the file and looked at me. “Guess that does it for you, then.”

I returned the look. “How about some details on the crime.”

“How about them?”

“Meaning, I’ve got just the secretary with an alibi, how come I’m still sitting here.”

“Cuddy, you’re still sitting there account of I haven’t thrown you out. The question is, how come you’re still interested in the homicide when it doesn’t look like the missing person has anything but coincidence going for her with it?”

“The widow’s also asked me in.”

“The widow. Mrs. Rivkind?”

“Yes.”

Cross dropped the eyes and the voice. “You know, I really feel sorry for her.”

“How come?”

She passed a hand over the file like a magician disappointed with a trick. “Woman’s lived her whole life for a man without knowing what the hell was going on in his.”

“What was going on?”

Cross raised her eyes again. “Number one, the store was going to hell in a hand basket.”

“Recession?”

“And the big suburban discount houses. Talk to the partner on that, Joel Bernstein.”

“Number two?”

“Two, I’ve got enough smoke to make me think there was a little fire between the decedent and your Darbra there.”

Shit. “Which is why you checked about the alibi.”

“That and the phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“The night he was killed, within probably ten minutes of him being attacked, there was a call placed from his office phone to her apartment.”

“Who made the call?”

Cross smiled, some powdered sugar lodged at the corners of her mouth like dried foam. “That’s a good question, isn’t it? Abraham Rivkind or somebody else or whoever killed him. New England Tel records show the call was completed, but—”

“But how could it be, if Proft was out to the movies with Wickmire?”

A better smile before it disappeared around a honey-dipped Munchkin. “You’re almost getting good at this, Cuddy.”

“Practice.”

“Yeah, you and me both. Anyway, Proft told us she had her tape machine on that night, and when she got home the message light was lit.” Cross jumped her tone two octaves, “ ‘But like it was five minutes of just like dead space, you know?’ ”

“A direct quote?”

Cross answered in her own voice. “Afraid so.”

“You believe her?”

“No. But it seemed kind of stupid for Proft to have an accomplice call her at home from the victim’s number, so I didn’t follow up much.”

“Aside from the telephone call, any other connections with Rivkind?”

“She worked there, they were all smiles, and they were seen together a lot at this local restaurant.”

“Grgo’s?”

“That’s the place.”

“Who else was in the furniture store that night?”

“Salespeople were gone. Only ones left were the decedent, the partner, the bookkeeper, named Swindell, Beverly, and the security guard, named Quill, Finian.”

I wrote down the guard’s name. “What are their stories?”

“Pretty consistent. Decedent was killed in the office he shared with Bernstein on the fourth floor of the building. The windows are fireproofed, so they give light but no access or egress. Bernstein says he was in the crapper, also on the fourth floor. Heard the security alarm for the back door on the first floor go off, and finished up as fast as he could to run down there. Swindell says she was in her office on the fourth floor, down the hall from the partners’ office. When she heard the alarm, she ran to find them.”

“Why?”

“She’d been counting the cash from the day’s take, and got panicked when she heard the alarm, so she went for Rivkind or Bernstein. She was pretty shaky by the time we got there.”

“What about the guard, Quill?”

“He says he was on the first floor, near the front doors, where he’s supposed to be, case some customer got so turned around they didn’t realize the store was closing.”

“So he could let them out.”

“Without anybody else getting in.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He says he was there at the front entrance when he heard the alarm. He ran to the rear of the building and went through the door, hoping to catch the guy going down the alley.”

I tried to picture it. “How did Quill know it was a guy?”