The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (9 page)

“Fuck,” he said.

9:40 A.M. — E.L. OXMAN

Before driving over to West Ninety-eighth Street, he stopped in at the Twenty-fourth to check with Lieutenant Smiley. A couple of veteran police reporters were hanging around the squadroom, and one of them tried to buttonhole Oxman for a quote. Oxman ducked him with more politeness than he felt, went over and knocked on the door to Manders’s office.

The lieutenant was in a foul mood. He was getting pressure from Captain Burnham, from the commissioner’s office, and he spent a couple of minutes chewing Oxman’s ass in turn, demanding results. No new developments had turned up during the night. Oxman had already figured that; he would have been notified if anything positive or negative had happened. About the only other thing Manders had to tell him was that the undercover officer was all set to move onto the block; Tobin would be meeting with him later in the morning for a briefing session. Artie had come in early, Manders said, and was already over on the street.

Oxman left the precinct house and drove there himself. The morning sun was still low, glinting off the windows of the high-rise apartment buildings across the Hudson, when he parked his car behind Tobin’s in mid-block. There was no sign of Artie; he had a list of people to interview, and that was no doubt what he was doing. There were a few residents left on Oxman’s list too, but before he tackled them he decided to have another look at the alley where Martin Simmons had been found.

When he entered the alley he automatically checked doors and ground-level windows for security. Both buildings, 1272 and 1274, were well kept up and tight. All the windows on the first two stories were covered with black-enameled iron grillwork.

He paused to look at the fading chalk outline of Simmons’s corpse, felt the sense of futility and sadness that seemed to linger at every murder scene. He shook his head and glanced toward the rear of the alley. But there was nothing to see back there; the lab crew had been over every inch of the passageway without finding a damned thing.

Oxman was about to turn back to the street when the basement door of 1276 opened and the super, Richard Corales, came out lugging a box of trash. Corales was a heavyset, swarthy man with broad Latin features, wearing the same outfit as he had been when Oxman talked to him the day before—jeans, sandals, and a yellow T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes jutting from the pocket. He blinked at Oxman, and “cop” registered on his seamed, flesh-padded face. He scowled.

“Morning, Mr. Corales,” Oxman said.

“Yeah. Look, man, I got work to do, you know?”

“So have I. That’s why I’m here.”

“I already told you everything I know. I don’t want to keep answering the same damn questions.”

The man’s hostility annoyed Oxman, just as it had yesterday. It was obvious that Corales was no mental giant, but that was no excuse for his attitude. Oxman decided to question him again. The hostility might mean that Corales had something to hide; and even if that wasn’t the case, he might have unintentionally neglected to report something important because of it. People who disliked the police weren’t always reliable or as cooperative as they could be.

“Suppose we talk in your apartment, Mr. Corales,” Oxman said. “I won’t keep you long.”

“But I already told you—”

Oxman gave him a hard look. “You lead the way.”

Corales said, “Ahh,” in a disgusted voice, banged the box of trash down, and turned back to the door. Oxman followed him down a dim, narrow stairway to the basement; the walls on either side were grayish-green and looked to have been newly painted. There were eight steps.

Oxman took stock of Corales’s apartment as he entered; when he’d talked to the super yesterday, it had been in the boiler room, where Corales was making repairs. The apartment was small, inexpensively but neatly furnished. On an old table were a metal ashtray, a pencil and tablet, and a deck of cards, as if Corales was expecting someone for a card game. There was a narrow mantel over a bricked-up fireplace, and on the mantel was a cheap plastic model of a battleship, meticulously painted and authentic looking.

Corales saw him looking at the model. “That’s the
New Jersey,
” he said. “My old man served on her as a gunner’s mate in Korea. Blasted the shit outa them gooks. That’s the last war we won.” He said it almost proudly, as if his old man had been personally responsible.

“I was in the Army myself,” Oxman said.

“Not in Korea. You ain’t old enough.”

“No. Peacetime army; I never saw any action.”

“Yeah. That figures.”

Oxman sat down at the table. “Tell me again how you found Martin Simmons.”

Corales made a face, but did as he was told. He recited the facts as if by rote. There were no essential variations from his original statement. He had taken some trash out into the alley, noticed Simmons’s body lying face down against the wall of the building next door, 1272, and looked at it closely enough to determine that Simmons was dead. He hadn’t touched the body, hadn’t disturbed anything near it. Then he’d come back here to his apartment and called the police. He’d waited for their arrival out in the alley; nobody else had come into it until the first patrol car arrived.

“Did you hear anything during the night?” Oxman asked him. “A gunshot, voices, anything like that out in the alley?”

“No. I didn’t hear nothing. I sleep good when I sleep.”

“Have you noticed anyone in the neighborhood recently who doesn’t belong here?”

“No,” Corales said. “Most of the time, I’m right here in this building. I always got work to do, you know.”

“Had you ever seen Martin Simmons before?”

“Never. Not until I found him dead.”

“Did you know either of the previous two victims, Charles Unger and Peter Cheng?”

“I seen the old guy around a few times. He was always drunk.”

“What about Peter Cheng?”

“No. You think I know everybody lives on this block?”

There was a knock on the door. Corales went over and opened it, said, “Hey, Willie, how’s it going?” in a pleased voice, and admitted a tall, sloppily dressed man carrying a burlap sack. The man had thick-wristed hands and disheveled brown hair that hung lank over his high forehead.

When he saw Oxman he brushed at the lank hair and asked Corales, “Am I interrupting, Richard?”

“Nah. This here’s another cop. He’s gonna leave pretty soon.”

Oxman identified himself. The tall man nodded. “Good morning, officer,” he said. “I’m Willie Lorsec.”

“Willie’s a good friend of mine,” Corales said. The hostility was gone from his face; it had been replaced by a grin and a little-boy look of pleasure and anticipation. “He’s a junk dealer.”

“Redeemable used merchandise,” Lorsec corrected.

“Yeah, right. Willie and me, we play gin together.” Corales’s grin widened. “I won nineteen straight hands off him yesterday. Ain’t that right, Willie?”

“A remarkable winning streak,” Lorsec said.

“Yeah. I figure if I can keep on winning, I can get into the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Jesus, wouldn’t that be something!”

“I guess it would,” Oxman agreed.

“Sure it would. Listen, you done asking me questions? Willie and me want to get at them cards again—”

The telephone rang. “Damn,” Corales said. “I hope that ain’t one of the tenants with a problem.” He went over to where the instrument was hooked onto one wall and answered it.

Oxman asked Lorsec, “You live in this neighborhood, do you, Mr. Lorsec?”

“I do, yes. In the next block.”

“Then you know about the homicides here.”

“Yes. A tragic series of events.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have been in this vicinity late Thursday night, by chance? The night Martin Simmons was shot?”

“No, I wasn’t,” Lorsec said. “I seldom go out late. It’s much too dangerous on the streets at night, especially now.”

Oxman asked him a few more questions, learned nothing, and took down his address in case he needed to talk to the junkman again.

Corales finished his telephone call, came over to stand next to Lorsec. “That was old Mrs. Muñoz in one-C,” he said. “She’s got trouble with one of her light switches, but I can fix it later. We can still play gin, Willie.” He shifted his gaze to Oxman. “So you done with me or what?”

“I’m done with you,” Oxman told him. He had watched the super closely when Corales repeated his story and answered Oxman’s questions, and he hadn’t seemed to be hiding anything. Oxman was reasonably sure that Corales had told him everything he knew. “For now, anyway.”

He left Corales and Lorsec to their card game and climbed the fifteen inside steps to the lobby. Counting steps was an idiosyncrasy of his; he’d done it since he was a rookie cop and it had once led to breaking a trumped-up alibi. In the lobby he paused. And his mind shifted again to Jennifer Crane.

He had no reason to talk to her again, after yesterday’s interview. But she’d been in his thoughts off and on all morning, just as she’d been in his thoughts last night. It would be foolish to see her again, unprofessional; he kept telling himself that. He had a job to do here, there were literally lives at stake, and it was no time to pursue a dangerous personal attraction.

All right. He consulted the list of names in his coat pocket, and then took the elevator up to the fourth floor to see if Michele Butler was home.

10:15 A.M. — MICHELE BUTLER

She was standing on the stoop, balancing the bag of groceries in one hand and with the other fumbling in her purse for her key, when the door opened and she was suddenly face to face with Marco Pollosetti. She blinked at him, startled. An impulse to turn and flee seized her; she managed to fight it off.
Stay calm
, she thought.
For God’s sake, don’t let him see that you’re afraid of him
.

Marco grinned at her. He was a scrawny man about her own age with yellowing teeth and odd eyes—small and hard and black, like pebbles set in tarnished ivory. His grin was broad and intimate, and he wore a knowing look on his gaunt face. Michele knew that grin and that look; she had seen them before, three months ago, when she’d had another unexpected run-in with him in the hallway upstairs less than an hour after shoplifting several fourteen-carat gold chains from Altman’s.

He had tried to date her a couple of times since he’d moved into the building, and he tried again that day. As always, she had politely refused. After making a joke of his suggestion, to lessen the sting to his male ego, he had started to edge around her and managed to brush against her as he did. Her purse had slipped from her hand, fallen to the floor, and the gold chains had spilled out. She hadn’t taken them straight to a pawnshop that time, as she’d done with the ruby ring yesterday; she’d been too nervous and she had hurried straight home instead. It had been one mistake she would never allow to happen again.

His eyes had widened when he saw the chains. Each of them was still price-tagged. The stores always removed the tags when jewelry was sold; Marco must have known that. He’d looked at her in a new way, with an amazed and pleased comprehension as he stooped to help her retrieve the chains and stuff them back into her purse.

“No one else here to see anything,” he’d said when they both stood up. “Don’t worry.”

“Why should I care if there was?” Michele had asked him, too quickly, too much as a challenge.

Marco had shrugged his bony shoulders, and that was the first time he’d grinned at her in his knowing and intimate way. He hadn’t said anything more about the chains, that day or since, but he had stepped up his attempts to get her to go out with him.

She wasn’t worried about him turning her in to the police. She was sure he was on drugs and that he had an aversion to the law for that reason. And there would be nothing in it for him if he steered the police to her.

Still, she didn’t like him knowing her secret. She was ashamed of stealing, even if it was a means to an end, even if it allowed her to buy groceries and pay the rent while she concentrated on more important goals. A man like Marco probably wouldn’t understand that. She was also ashamed that she no longer met his advances with a curt but polite refusal; instead, she gave him the impression that someday she might accept one of his invitations. It was a hateful game, and a dangerous one, and that was why she was afraid of him. What if he forced the issue? What if he tried to get her to go to bed with him? She didn’t know what she would do if that happened. So she avoided him whenever she could, and prayed that he wouldn’t knock on her door some night and demand that she let him in.

Now, facing him here on the stoop, she could feel her hands turn damp and shaky. She took a firmer grip on the grocery bag, on her purse. His odd eyes were steady on her face, but she didn’t meet them. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the knowledge in their hard black depths.

“What’s happening, sweets?” he said. “Been out shopping?”

“Yes.”

“Get anything good this time?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“At the grocery store,” he said. “You know, anything on sale?”

That wasn’t what he’d meant; Michele was certain of that. God, why didn’t he go away and leave her alone? There was a knot in her stomach, almost as if she were pregnant with her fears.

But she was an actress, a good actress, and this was just another role for her to play. It was the only way she could get through situations like this; it was the only way she had been able to go through with each of her shoplifting forays. She made herself smile and meet his eyes. When she spoke again she put a note of intimacy into her voice.

“I really do have to run, Marco,” she said. “I have an audition coming up this afternoon and I have to dress.”

“Yeah?” Marco said. “What is it, an off-Broadway play?”

“Yes.”

“Still nothing on the Big Street, huh?”

“That’ll come later,” she said. “I’ll get my break one of these days.”

“Sure you will. Just like I’m gonna get mine.”

“That’s right. We’re both very good at what we do.”

“You don’t know the half of how good I am, sweets,” Marco said. There was a leer in his voice, but Michele didn’t react to it. She was into her role now. Her hands were steady again and the knot of fear in her stomach had diminished.