The Poisoned Rose (10 page)

Tina whispered, “What is it?”

I held my index finger to my lips. She looked at me but said nothing more.

It took a moment, but then the sound came again—the creaking of wood being compressed under heavy weight. There was no doubt about it now, this sound had come from behind my door, from the hallway that ran from my apartment to the top of the stairs.

I pointed to Tina and mouthed the word, “Stay.” Her eyes went to my lips. She nodded quickly. I got up from the couch and went to my living room window and looked down onto Elm Street.

I saw nothing but the usual number of cars parked across the street. I saw no patrol cars directly below, and no flashing red and blue lights in the trees down the block, which I would have seen had a perimeter been set up.

I checked my watch. It was close to three in the morning.

I looked out my window again, this time toward the train station at the other end of Elm. I thought maybe the cops had parked there, but the lot was empty.

I thought, too, as I always did whenever I looked at the train station, of escape. But it was too late to run now. And couldn’t abandon Augie’s daughter. I couldn’t just
disappear.

I told myself that Augie would have knocked or used the key I kept these days hidden under a tear in the hallway carpeting. There just for him, just in case.

Another creak came, heavy, like a long, wooden sigh. Somebody was outside my door all right, hovering in my hall.

I got up, studied the door for a second, and finally walked to it. For the second time tonight adrenaline was surging through me. My heart was pounding, my muscles tight. I gripped the door knob and turned it fast, then yanked the door open.

And was suddenly face to face with Frank Gannon.

My hallway was dim. The only light was behind him, from a bare low-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the hall. But I could see him well enough by it. He was wearing blue jeans and a dark dress shirt and a light jacket made of Argentine leather. His shoes were black cop’s shoes.

I pulled the door partially closed behind me. From the doorway, the couch where Tina was sitting under my wool blanket was in clear view.

I whispered, “What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.” He glanced at the partially closed door and the firm grip I had on it with my hand. “Did I come at a bad time?”

“You could have called.”

“I don’t like phones. You should learn to dislike them, too.”

I assumed he was outside my door because of what had gone down tonight between me and Tommy Miller and his two friends. I braced for Frank to try to use that to his advantage in some way. It’s what he did. But what he said next made me realize he was here for something far worse than that.

“It’s about Augie,” he said. “I think he might be in trouble.”

I turned my head and looked into my apartment. It was involuntary. Tina had stood at some point, probably to move away from the door and out of the sight of whoever was in my hallway. Augie had said how smart she was. She was looking at me, her mouth hanging open slightly. There was, as there had been earlier tonight, real fear in her eyes.

Frank took a slight step to his right and titled his head. It was all he needed to do to look past me and see her. His glance was casual, but when he looked back at me, he was smiling.

“Clearly, I
have
caught you at a bad time,” he said. “She looks kind of young, MacManus.”

“It’s Augie’s daughter,” I said flatly. “She’s waiting for him here.”

Frank took another look at Tina. She was staring at us, frozen, her hands hanging at her sides. Her arms were long, lanky. My wool blanket was in a pile around her feet.

“I was hoping you’d know where he was, but I guess not,” Frank said.

There was no protecting Tina from the truth now, no way to answer Frank without her hearing.

“He was supposed to meet me after work, but he didn’t show.”

Frank nodded. This information obviously jibed with something he already knew. “He called me earlier and asked to borrow some equipment. I waited but he never came by.”

“Was he working for you tonight?”

“No. He hasn’t worked for me all week. He pulled himself off the roster, said he couldn’t tell me for how long he’d be unavailable.” Frank paused, glanced at Tina again, then said in a softer voice, “He hasn’t been himself lately. He’s been…preoccupied.”

I knew what Frank was talking about. And I knew what he wanted me to do.

“Since you’re so good at finding people, MacManus, I figured you’re my best shot at finding Augie.”

I nodded but said nothing.

Frank handed me a business card. I looked down at it.

“It’s my pager number,” he said. “I’m sure you went out of your way to forget it.”

I took the card.

“Let me know when you find him,” he said. He glanced at Tina once more. “And be careful.”

I closed the door, severing his view of her. I waited till I heard his footsteps moving down the hall. I waited till they were gone before I took my keys from the table by my door.

“I want to come with you,” Tina said.

“No.”

“He’s my father.”

“It would be better if you went home.”

“I don’t want to be alone.”

“I’m going to call you a cab. The driver’s a friend of mine. I’ll tell him to go inside and check the place out, then lock up tight when he leaves. You’ll be safe, I promise.”

“Can’t I stay here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The cops could still come looking for me.”

“I could hide.”

“We don’t have time for this, okay? You have to go home. I’m sorry.”

“Will you drive me?”

“No, it’d be better if Eddie took you—”

“He’s been leaving the house a lot at night with his own camera equipment,” Tina said quickly. “Augie has. He’s been leaving at sundown and not coming back till dawn. He locks up everything that’s important in a gun safe in his study. I’ll bet you there are photographs inside. They might tell you where to start looking for him.”

I had no leads, nowhere to start. The East End wasn’t a big place, but what was I going to do, drive around in my car, hoping to spot his pickup somewhere?

“Do you know the combination?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Write it down for me.”

“I don’t know it by heart. But I’ll remember it if the dial is in front of me.”

I waited a moment, watching her. She held perfectly still, her shoulders tight.

“I’m not lying to you, I swear. I need the dial in front of me.”

There was, I could see, no point in arguing.

I could see, too, that there was so much of her father in her.

“You do what I say, okay? The minute I say it. No questions. You understand?”

She nodded.

“All right,” I said, “let’s go.”

The late-rising moon was near full and hung just above the tree tops. Between it and us was a sky crowded with fragmented clouds that moved like slabs of ice down a dark river.

It took less than five minutes to reach their house. It was a small clapboard cottage at the end of Little Neck Road, not far from the college, on the edge of a long peninsula that reached into Shinnecock Bay. As I got closer I could see that Augie’s truck was in the driveway, parked outside the closed garage door. I pulled in behind it and cut the motor and killed the lights. Their house was dark and still, not unlike every other house we had passed along this residential street.

I could hear the lazy lapping of the slight bay waves against the stony shore not a hundred feet away. It was the only sound for miles around. I smelled brine through my half-opened window, and wild roses. The bay air was cool against the walls of my lungs.

Tina was looking at the truck in the driveway. “He’s home,” she said. There was a mix of surprise and hope in her voice.

“Yeah, it looks that way, doesn’t it?” I said. I studied the cottage through the windshield. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I could feel Tina looking at the side of my face.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“All the lights are off. Would your father really have come home and gone to bed if you weren’t there?”

Tina looked toward the house. “No,” she said flatly. She thought for a moment. “He could have gone out with someone else, though, right? In their car. And sometimes he rents a car.”

I was Augie’s only friend, though I suppose it was possible he was with one of Frank’s other men, or Frank himself, for that matter. And he could have rented a vehicle. Still…

“If he knew he was going to be out this late, wouldn’t he have told you? Asked you to sleep over at your girlfriend’s house.”

Tina was friends with a girl whose family lived on North Main Street. I didn’t know the girl’s name, first or last, or where on North Main her family lived, but I knew Tina slept over often enough.

“Yeah,” she said. “He would have.”

I eyed the cottage, scanning from window to window.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Wait here, okay.”

“Where are you going?”

“I just want to check something out.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No. Stay here.”

I reached up and flipped down my sun visor and removed the Spyderco knife I kept there. I slid it into my right hip pocket and climbed out from behind the wheel. I closed the door quietly, then followed the narrow slate walkway from the street to the front door.

I looked around, then pulled open the outer door. The winter glass was still in place. I leaned close to the front door, listening. I noticed then that the door wasn’t closed completely. I nudged it with my shoulder and it swung open a little. I reached down fast and grabbed the brass handle, keeping the door from moving any farther. I listened for something, anything, but all I heard was the broken rhythm of the gentle bay waves coming from around back.

I drew a deep breath and swung the door open enough for me to slip through it. I entered but left the lights off. I didn’t need them to see that the house had been trashed.

Furniture turned over, picture frames pulled from walls and smashed, the contents of shelves and drawers scattered across the floor.

The television lay on its side on the floor, the VCR beside it. Across the room the stereo lay upside down beside a broken lamp.

I took a few steps into the room, careful of the bits of broken glass that littered the floor, and looked toward the kitchen and small dining room.

Cupboard doors were opened, canned goods and boxes of food covering the countertop and tile floor. Appliances were broken apart, a tray of tableware had been dumped out in the sink. The dining room table had been turned on its side, chairs toppled around it.

But this wasn’t a robbery. It was, I knew, a hasty search.

I listened for creaking wood, fabric brushing together, matter moving through space—anything. Then I stopped listening for a moment. A presence can sometimes be felt before it’s detected by the five senses. But I could pick nothing up. The house seemed almost serene, which was odd considering its state, and the violence necessary to get it there.

I took a few more steps deeper into the house. Moonlight coming through the windows was all I had to see by, but my eyes were adjusting quickly. To my right was a narrow hallway that led to the bathroom and two bedrooms, beyond which was Augie’s study. I looked down the hall and saw that all the doors were open except for the door to his study.

I moved carefully down the narrow hall, pausing to look into each bedroom before passing it. These rooms, too, had been searched. In Augie’s bedroom his Sharper Image answering machine lay on top of his overturned mattress, unplugged.

I came to his office door and saw that it, like the front door, wasn’t shut all the way. I pressed the door open with my shoulder and looked inside.

This room had been hit the hardest. More than searched, it looked as if it had been taken apart by a wrecking crew.

Augie’s desk had been broken into several pieces, and there were sledgehammer holes in the walls. Even the floorboards had been pulled up in places. The only thing unmolested in that room was Augie’s gun safe. It was held securely in place by two heavy iron brackets bolted into the floor. But by the look of the boards immediately surrounding the brackets, someone had tried unsuccessfully to pry them free with a hammer or wrecking bar.

There was debris all over the dark room, piles of broken plaster and desk parts and pulled-up floorboards mixed in with the contents of the desk drawers and closet. It was like a scrap heap. It took me a moment of looking at each of these heaps, though, before I detected among them a shape that did not belong.

I whispered, “Shit,” and felt along the wall for a light switch. I found it and flicked it up with a panicked hand.

There was Augie, half seated, half slumped against the wall directly across from me, his arms hanging at his sides like an exhausted boxer resting between rounds. His face was battered, little more than raw meat. Blood oozed freely from countless cuts that reminded me of divots in grass. His head was slick with blood and sweat, the scalp beneath his buzz cut dinged and shimmering.

“Christ!” I said. I went to him, knelt and checked the pulse in his neck. It was weak. His skin was cold beneath my fingers.

I stood and started searching through the rubble for a telephone. I began to dig, throwing debris around. I moved quickly, working my way toward the center of the room. After a few seconds I found the handset to the phone. I pulled it out from under a pile, then reeled in the rest of the unit by the coiled cord. I put the handset to my ear fast but there was no dial tone.

I tossed the phone to the floor, bolted through the door and headed down the hallway. There was another phone in the kitchen. My heart was slamming itself against my rib cage and chemical reactions buzzed deep inside my head like alarms.

I think I heard their footsteps over the sound of my own, but not in time to eliminate the element of surprise they had over me. One minute I was the only conscious being in that house, and the next two men were there beside me.

They came out of Augie’s bedroom as I passed it, scurrying one right after the other. The first was a big guy, ugly, balding. The second was smaller, closer to my size. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans and a baseball cap, the bill dipped low. The hood of the sweatshirt was pulled up over that.