The Silver Chariot Killer. Richard A. Lupoff

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ stood uncomfortably.

      “Take a load off.” Sokolov pointed to a hard chair.

      Lindsey cleared his throat. “Mr. Zissler comes from our Manhattan East office. He has his other duties. I’m from SPUDS—Special Projects Unit/Detached Status. Cletus Berry was part of SPUDS. He was my friend. I wanted to do what I could do.”

      Sokolov held her face pointed downward, looked up at Lindsey with great dark eyes beneath jet black eyebrows. “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it,” she said.

      Lindsey said, “That’s right.” He recognized the line but didn’t say anything else.

      “I told you on the phone, Mr. Lindsey, this is a matter for law enforcement. We have something like 16,000 police officers in New York. Hundreds of detectives. Evidence technicians. Laboratory analysts. The DA’s office. Prosecutors and courts and jails. This city spends a fortune on law enforcement.”

      Lindsey waited.

      Sokolov frowned. “What makes you think you can do anything we can’t do?”

      “When a man’s partner is killed,” Lindsey repeated Sokolov’s line. “Doesn’t Bogie say that?”

      “Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade speaking to Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”

      “The line is in the movie, too.”

      “I know that. And it’s true. My partner is out on a bust. If anything happened—” she paused “—I’d do something about it, you can bet on that. But then it would be bye-bye, Roscoe, and I’d have to get myself another partner. Life is hard, cowboy.” She picked up a folder and laid it down again. Lindsey was surprised to see that she had sharply pointed, scarlet-painted fingernails. Somehow he’d expected her to trim them short and avoid nail polish. Come to think of it, she was wearing lipstick, too, the same color as her nails.

      “Okay,” she said, “talk to me. What do you need to know? What can you give me that I don’t have already?”

      Lindsey heard a slight scuffle and looked up. A young man in an immaculate three-piece suit and what looked like a hundred-dollar haircut was approaching with a scruffy-looking older man in a torn sweatshirt and faded jeans. The scruffy man had a badge pinned to his sweatshirt. The younger man was handcuffed.

      As they passed Detective Sokolov’s desk, Sokolov grinned at them. The scruffy man said, “Yowza, Mama,” and Sokolov said, “Cat’s pajamas. Congratulations, Roscoe.” To Lindsey she said, “Speak of the devil.”

      Lindsey said, “Moe Zissler put me up at Cletus Berry’s place.”

      “His apartment? With his family?”

      “No. His office. On 58th Street. His little place. There’s a futon there and a microwave.”

      “Yeah. In the old days it would have been an army cot and a hotplate. What else is different?”

      “Well, don’t you think there might be evidence there? I mean, the man is killed. You’re supposed to be detectives down here. There wasn’t even crime scene tape on the place.”

       “It wasn’t a crime scene, now was it?” Sokolov spread her hands as if she couldn’t understand Lindsey’s needing to have this explained. “Berry was killed in Hell’s Kitchen. Look, Mr. Colorado, I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t sell life insurance and you don’t try and solve homicides.”

      “You don’t get it.” Lindsey said. “Somebody murdered Cletus Berry and—”

      “For the last time, what do you think he was doing in an alleyway with Frankie Fulton, sneaking a little kiss?”

      Lindsey made a small shrug.

      “I don’t know either,” Sokolov furnished. “But you can bet it was nothing he’d want to tell his scoutmaster about. People who are clean don’t get mixed up with the likes of Frankie Fulton. I’d like to know what it was all about, and I expect to find out. All in good time.”

      “Then how come you didn’t—”

      “—seal off Berry’s little pad?” Sokolov grinned. Lindsey thought, she has pretty teeth, dear. She said, “We were in there by noon yesterday. I was there myself. We turned up nothing. Nada. Nicht.”

      Lindsey said, “Oh.”

      “That’s why there was no tape. We rifled his file cabinet. Nothing. We peeked in his computer. Looks like routine insurance matters to me. In fact, you might want to take a gander yourself and see if there’s anything strikes you funny. Give me a call if there is.”

      She stood up.

      “Wait a minute,” Lindsey stopped her. “Did you have a search warrant? How did you get in there?”

      Sokolov looked annoyed. “We didn’t have a warrant and we didn’t need a warrant. Your Mr. Zissler kindly informed us that your company pays the rent on Berry’s little nest. Zissler has a key and he let us in. Is that okay with you?”

      Lindsey felt the anger he’d been building for Sokolov, drain from him. Reluctantly, he nodded.

      “Now, if you don’t mind,” Sokolov said, “I have to go powder my nose.”

      When she stood up, Lindsey saw that she was wearing fresh new jeans to go with her blouse and sweater. She had a holster strapped to her belt and the grip of what looked like a revolver sticking out of it.

      It was still too early to visit Cletus Berry’s widow. Lindsey stood outside Midtown North watching the traffic, then asked a stranger for directions and learned how to get to Times Square. It wasn’t far.

      He started walking.

      He heard the noise well before he got there. Band music was playing through a loudspeaker and he could hear voices but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

      When he got closer he found himself on the edge of a mob. Brawny individuals in neat suits were striding around, eyeing people who approached. They might have been Secret Service men but Lindsey doubted that they were. There was something about them that made him uncomfortable.

      They were wearing lapel pins. Lindsey had trouble making out the shape of the pins, but he passed a vendor selling buttons that seemed to have the same design. Each button was attached to a campaign pamphlet. He bought one and studied the design. It looked like a Roman chariot pulled by a team of horses. He slipped the button and pamphlet into his overcoat pocket.

      If he’d seen Central Park in a hundred movies, he’d seen Times Square in a thousand. It must have taken amazing political clout to have this piece of New York shut down, even for a few minutes. Amazing clout to shut it down any time, but this was the middle of the day, on a business day, counting down to Christmas.

      A few blobs of sleet were falling. Lindsey felt one on his cheek, then another. They felt like icy tears.

      He moved into the mass of people. He didn’t see any opening in the crowd, but somehow a limousine managed to move down Broadway, rolling through a narrow lane, and a number of people climbed out. One СКАЧАТЬ