So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) (11 page)

“There is only one reality,” he said. “You are here, and you are mine. That is reality.”

“I’m
here,
that’s reality, yes. But I’m not yours.”

“I’ll be late for work,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“There’s your trick again. I’m
mine,
” she said. “I belong to
me.
”

“You
were
yours. You are no longer yours. You are mine. This afternoon, after the ceremony, I will demonstrate that to you.”

“Let’s talk about reality again, okay?”

“Augusta, that
is
the reality. I will be home at three-thirty. I will take you to the bathroom, where you will bathe yourself and anoint yourself with the perfume I’ve purchased—L’Oriel
is
your favorite, am I correct? That’s what the article said. And then you will put on the white undergarments I bought, and the blue garter, and the gown you modeled in
Brides.
And then we shall have a simple wedding ceremony, uniting us in the eyes of God.”

“No,” she said, “I’m already—”

“Yes,” he insisted. “And then we shall make love, Augusta. I have been waiting a long time to make love to you. I have been waiting since I first saw your photograph in a magazine. That was more than two years ago, Augusta, you should not have
dared
give yourself to another man. Two long years, Augusta! I’ve loved you all that time, I’ve been waiting all that time to possess you, yes, Augusta. When I saw you on television doing a hair commercial—do you remember the Clairol commercial?—saw you
moving,
Augusta, saw your photographs suddenly coming to
life,
your hair floating on the wind as you ran, how beautiful you looked, Augusta—I waited for the commercial again. I sat before the set, waiting for you to appear again, and finally I was rewarded—but ah, how brief the commercial was, how long
are
those commercials? Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds?”

“They vary,” she answered automatically, and was suddenly aware of the lunatic nightmare proportions of the conversation. She was discussing the length of television commercials with a man who planned to marry her today in a fantasy ceremony…

“I abuse myself with your photographs,” he said suddenly. “Does that excite you? The thought of my doing such things with your pictures?”

She did not answer him.

“But this afternoon I will actually possess you. We will be married, Augusta, and then we will make love together.”

“No, we—”

“Yes,” he said. “And then I will slit your throat.”

Steve Carella was at home shaving that Wednesday morning when the telephone rang. He put down his razor, went out into the bedroom, and picked up the telephone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Steve, Danny. You got a minute?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“I’m sorry I’m calling you at home…”

“That’s okay, what’ve you got, Danny?”

“I located this guy Baal you’re looking for. Manfred Baal, with a double
a.
I found out where he is.”

“Where?”

“Or at least I found out where he
works.
I don’t know where he lives.”

“Where does he work?”

“Kane Construction Company, 307 South Beasley. He’s working as a common laborer, I think this is just to tide him over till he can pull a stickup. He bought a gun, Steve, that’s how I got a line on him.”

“What kind of gun?”

“A Smith and Wesson automatic. Bought it from a guy deals in stolen pieces. That’s the route I was following, Steve. I figured a guy done time for robbery, first thing he’s gonna do when he gets outside is plan another stickup. Okay. For a stickup, you need a piece. And there ain’t no guy who’s been in the joint who’s gonna go buy his gun from a sporting-goods store. So I been asking around guys who deal in such things. And I hit pay dirt three o’clock this morning. I called the squadroom right away, and they told me you wouldn’t be in till around a quarter to eight. I know it’s earlier than that now, but I figured you might want to move on this fast, maybe be waiting for the guy when he gets to work. These construction companies start early.”

“Good, Danny.”

“This guy Baal is a foreigner, did you know that? He talks with a foreign accent. That’s what the guy who sold him the piece said.”

“Yeah, I’ve got his folder up at the squadroom,” Carella said.

“Well, good luck with it,” Danny said. “I don’t suppose he’ll have the rod with him on the job, but you might be careful, anyway.”

“I always am,” Carella said.

“Okay, Steve, let me know.”

“I’ll drop a little something in the mail.”

“No rush,” Danny said, and hung up.

Manfred Baal’s folder identified him as a man who’d come to this country from his native Switzerland some thirty years ago. He was forty-seven years old, and had spent most of his years in the United States in prison. His hair was blond and his eyes were blue, but he did not otherwise resemble the man whose pictures Alexander Pike had taken in church. Fat Ollie and Carella went to talk to him only because they still had nothing else to go on, and were loath to eliminate the possibility that Augusta’s abductor was only a hired hand performing a service for someone with a grievance. Baal had a grievance; Kling had sent him to prison for ten years. Baal had made his grievance known; he had in fact shouted it out in court on the day the judge sentenced him. He had pointed his finger at Kling and yelled across the length of the courtroom, “You! I’m going to kill you one day, you hear?
You!
” The peace officers in the courtroom had dragged him out screaming and kicking, an auspicious beginning for his ten-year stretch at Castleview. Baal had been out of jail for close to a month now, and he still hadn’t killed Kling; perhaps he’d mellowed behind the walls. But Augusta had been kidnapped on Sunday night, and Baal’s threat echoed loud and clear on this Wednesday morning as they drove to the construction site. They had earlier called Kane Construction and spoken to a man named Di Giorgio who told them Baal was working on an apartment building at Weber and Tenth—they’d see the big sign as they drove up, a big red sign with the words Kane Construction on it in yellow. They had no trouble finding the sign
or
the construction site. Finding Baal was another thing again.

“Didn’t show up today,” the foreman said.

“What?” Carella asked. There were jackhammers and pile drivers going everywhere around them, trucks grinding into gear, bulldozers shoving earth, sledges pounding against rock, pneumatic drills stuttering.

“I said he didn’t show up today!” the foreman shouted.

“Did he call in sick or anything?”

“Nope.”

“Would you have his home address?”

“Me? No, I wouldn’t have his home address. You can call the office, though, they probably got it on file there. What’d this guy do, anyway?”

“Where’s the phone?” Carella asked.

“In the shack there. What’d Baal do?”

Carella dialed Kane Construction, and talked to Di Giorgio again. Di Giorgio said Baal hadn’t called there, either, but he said that wasn’t too unusual with some of the unskilled laborers; they went out on the town the night before and just didn’t bother showing up for work the next day. The address Baal had given the company when he was hired was for a rooming house on Oliver and Sixty-third. Carella jotted it down, thanked him, and then thanked the foreman, too, who asked again, “What’d Baal do?”

“If we’re lucky,” Ollie said, “he at least done something.”

“Huh?” the foreman said.

She was alone in the apartment.

The entire place was still.

She had listened very carefully after he’d gone out of the room and locked the door. She had gone to the door instantly, and put her ear against it, listening the way Bert had told her
he
listened before entering a suspect premises. She had heard the front door of the apartment closing behind him, and then she had continued listening, her ear pressed to the wooden door, listening for footsteps approaching the storage room again, suspecting a trick. She did not have a watch, he had taken that from her, but she counted to sixty, and then to sixty again, and again, and over again until she estimated that she’d been standing inside the door with her ear pressed to the wood for about fifteen minutes. In all that time, she heard nothing. She had to assume he was really and truly gone.

He had left the clothing behind.

More important than that, he had left the wire hangers and the wooden clothes rack. He was a very careful man, he had installed a double keyway deadbolt on the door as soon as he’d decided to abduct her, a most methodical, most fastidious, foresighted person. But he had forgotten that he was dealing with a cop’s wife, and he had neglected to notice that the door opened
into
the room, and that the hinge pins were on Augusta’s side of the door. Quickly, she removed all the clothing from the rack and tossed it into one corner of the room. Then she dragged the rack over to the door, and opened up one of the wire hangers by twisting the curved hook away from the body.

She was ready to go to work.

The rooming house on Oliver and Sixty-third was a red brick building covered with the soot and grime of at least a century, four stories high, with a five-tiered stoop rising from the pavement to a wide concrete landing just before the entrance door. A man bundled in a heavy black overcoat and muffler, his hands in the pockets of his coat, was standing just to the right of the glass-paneled entrance door, staring out at the street. He seemed not to be watching Ollie and Carella as they climbed the steps, his focus concentrated instead on the curb, where nothing was happening. But as Carella reached for the knob, he said abruptly, “Who you looking for?”

“Manfred Baal,” Carella said.

“No Manfred Baal here,” the man said.

“Who’re you?”

“Superintendent of the building. Ain’t no Manfred Baal here.”

“He’s a tall blond man with blue eyes,” Carella said. “About forty-eight years old.”

“A greenhorn,” Ollie said. “From Sweden or someplace.”

“Switzerland,” Carella said.

“Same difference,” Ollie said, and shrugged.

“That’s Manfred Baal, all right,” the super said, “but he don’t live here no more.”

“Where
does
he live, would you know?”

“Nope.”

“When did he move out?”

“About a week, ten days ago.”

“And he didn’t leave a forwarding address, huh?”

“Not with me, he didn’t. He might’ve told the post office where he was going, but I don’t guess he done that, either. All the time he was living here, he never got a single piece of mail.”

“Have you rented the room he was living in?”

“Not yet, I haven’t.”

“Mind if we take a look at it?” Carella asked.

“What for?”

“What’s your name, mister?” Ollie asked suddenly.

“Jonah Hobbs,” the super said.

“Jonah,” Ollie said, “what room was Manny Baal living in?”

“Room 24.”

“Jonah,” Ollie said, “have you got a key for room 24?”

“Of course I do.”

“Jonah,” Ollie said, “you want to come upstairs with us and open the door to room 24?”

“What for?” Hobbs said.

“Because if you don’t open it for us, we’re gonna kick the fuckin’ thing in,” Ollie said.

“I guess I’ll open it for you,” Hobbs said.

He took them into the building and up to the second floor, where he unlocked a door at the end of the hall. The room was sparsely furnished, a single bed to the left of a window, a night table beside the bed, a lamp, a chair, a dresser with a mirror over it. The window was covered with a shade, which was drawn now. The bed was unmade. The room was spotlessly clean. Carella went to the window and raised the shade. The brick wall of the adjacent building was some fifteen feet away across the shaftway. An old woman with a shawl over her shoulders was sitting at a window in the other building. As Carella raised the shade she turned her head sharply toward him and stared at him suspiciously.

“This room been cleaned since Baal moved out?” Ollie asked.

“Don’t it look it?” Hobbs said.

“It looks it,” Ollie said. “Was it?”

“It was.”

“Mm,” Ollie said, and went directly into the bathroom. Carella opened a closet door. There were eight wire hangers on the clothes bar. That was it. He closed the door. In the bathroom, Ollie was looking through the medicine cabinet.

“Anything?” Carella said.

“Dry as a bone,” Ollie answered, and came out into the room again. “Who cleaned this joint?” he asked Hobbs.

“We’ve got a cleaning woman comes in,” Hobbs said.

“She here today?”

“She’s here every day.”

“Where is she now?”

“What time is it?”

Ollie looked at his watch. “Ten after nine,” he said.

“Then she’s probably still up on the fourth floor.”

“I want to talk to her,” Ollie said.

Together, he and Carella followed Hobbs to the fourth floor. The cleaning woman was a black woman named Esther Johnson. It was clear from the beginning of their conversation that all she wanted to do was get her work done without interruptions; the whereabouts of Manfred Baal were of no interest whatever to her. Impatiently, she tried to tell the detectives that she didn’t know nothing about no Manfred Baal except she cleaned his room every day. Patiently, Ollie told her that he was precisely interested in the last time she had cleaned it, and in what she might have—

“I cleaned it last Tuesday,” Esther said.

“Had he moved out already?”

“Room was empty, I’d say the man had moved out.”

“Anything in the dresser?”

“Just the usual junk a man leaves behind when he’s moving.”

“Like what?” Ollie said immediately. “That’s the kind of junk I’m interested in, Mrs. Johnson. Matchbooks or—”

“It’s
Miss
Johnson,” Esther said.

“
Miss
Johnson, forgive me, m’dear,” Ollie said in his W. C. Fields voice. Then, switching immediately to his natural voice, he said, “Or an old address book, or maybe an appointment calendar.”

“Wasn’t nothing like that in any of the drawers.”

“But there
was
junk in the drawers…”

“That’s right. A ballpoint pen, as I recall, and a few pennies back there in the corner of the top drawer, and some paper clips. Like that.”

“How about the bathroom? Anything in the medicine cabinet there?”

“The cabinet was empty. I remember all I had to do was give the shelves a good wipe.”

“Anything in that basket under the sink?”

“Just some razor blades, stuff like that.”

“Stuff like what?”

“Like used razor blades. Like I told you.”

“And what else?”

“Some tissues. And a newspaper. That’s all I can remember.”

“How about the closet?”

Esther looked at Hobbs. “Shall I tell them about the whiskey?” she asked.

“What about the whiskey?” Ollie said at once.

“Had a dozen bottles of whiskey in there,” Esther said. “Is it all right to tell them about the whiskey?”

“I don’t see nothing wrong with telling them about the whiskey,” Hobbs said.

“What kind of whiskey?”

“All kinds,” Esther said. “Scotch, gin, vodka, bourbon, all kinds of whiskey. Must’ve been at least a dozen bottles in there, ain’t that right, Mr. Hobbs?”

“Four
teen
bottles, to be exact,” Hobbs said. “All of them sealed.”

“Man must’ve been a teetotaler,” Esther said. “Never did find a glass smelling of alcohol around here. And never did see an empty whiskey bottle in the trash container.”

“Fourteen bottles of unopened whiskey,” Ollie said. “He left that whiskey here, huh?”

“Left it behind him,” Hobbs said.

“Think he forgot it?”

“Don’t see how he could’ve forgot it,” Esther said. “It was sittin’ right there on the closet floor.”

“Left behind fourteen bottles of whiskey,” Ollie said, and looked at Carella. “Man doesn’t drink, but he buys himself fourteen bottles of whiskey, and then leaves them behind when he moves out.”

“Maybe he was planning a party,” Hobbs said.

“Then why’d he leave the booze behind?”

“Maybe he changed his mind,” Hobbs said, and shrugged.

“Where’s that whiskey now?” Ollie asked.

Hobbs and Esther looked at each other.

“Come on, come on,” Ollie said impatiently.

“Esther and me split it between us,” Hobbs said. “I took the scotch and the blended whiskey and a bottle of cognac and—”

“Yeah, I don’t need an inventory,” Ollie said. “Where’s the whiskey now? Is any of it left?”