John Lutz - Chill of Night

“Pledge?”

“Uh-huh.”

Floyd let out a long breath. “A couple of times when we were on golf outings, there were some women. Two of them. We paid for it.”

“Happen this time in Connecticut?”

“No! Hasn’t happened for over a year. And none if meant anything, not to us, or to the women. Hell they were just…”

“Prostitutes.”

“I guess you’d have to say that. We showed our gratitude with gifts or cash.”

Beam, during his years in the NYPD, had become something of a human polygraph. He felt sure Floyd was telling the truth. He also was sure the man had loved and trusted his wife and was genuinely grief stricken. Add what would also doubtless turn out to be a tight alibi, and Floyd was pretty much out of the picture as a suspect.

“It appears your wife was dressing up when she was killed, putting on her lipstick, in fact.”

“She had a responsible job. She couldn’t go to work like some of these women do these days, no makeup, stringy hair. She was in sales, for Chrissakes!”

“Just one more question, Mr. Baker. Did your wife ever serve on a jury in New York?”

Floyd leaned far back as if to stare at the ceiling, but his eyes were closed.

“She sure did.”

“The Adele Janson case,” Beam told Nell and Looper, when they were seated in his Lincoln parked at the curb in front of a fire hydrant. He had his NYPD placard on the dash so no one would bother the car.

“About four years ago?” Nell said. “The woman who poisoned her husband with antifreeze?”

“Right,” Beam said. “She got off because her expert witness convinced the jury there was a natural disease that showed the same symptoms as ethylene glycol poisoning.”

“I remember now. The defendant had motive and opportunity, not to mention what was left in a gallon jug of antifreeze, but her lawyer maintained hubby just sickened and died.”

“And two years later she was convicted of poisoning her daughter,” Looper said. “After the trial, she confessed to both murders.”

Beam lowered the power window on his side to cool down the big black car; the gleaming dark finish was starting to soak up more sun than it reflected. “Beverly Baker was foreperson on the first jury, the one that turned Janson loose after she’d done her husband.”

“Which made the late Beverly a prime target for our guy,” Nell said. “This one was his work without a doubt.”

“So what have we got besides mutual certainty?” Beam said. “I mean, beyond the red letter J?”

Nell and Looper tried. They’d gotten nothing of significance from the Bakers’ neighbors, or from the doorman. It wasn’t the kind of building where security was tight, so it was no shock that a killer might have come and gone without being noticed. No one heard anything remotely like a gunshot, so a silencer was probably used to shoot Beverly Baker. No one had a word other than kind to say about the deceased: She was outgoing and friendly and a generous tipper. She gave neighbors discounts on lamps. The way she obviously enjoyed life, it was a shame-it was a crime-she was dead. It seemed the only notable thing about her was that she’d been foreperson on the Janson murder trial jury, though it had been long enough ago that none of the neighbors had mentioned it.

“What did they say about her husband?” Beam asked.

“Floyd?” Nell said. “He’s just a guy. Got in an argument with the doorman about a month ago, when one of his golf clubs was missing after he’d left his bag in the lobby. But he found the club later and apologized. Other’n that, no problems with anybody in the building. But it was Bev, as they called her, who everyone really liked.”

“And who somebody didn’t,” Beam said.

“We got the thirty-two caliber slug to help tie it in with the other murders,” Looper said.

“If it is a thirty-two,” Nell said.

“And no shell casing,” Looper pointed out. “This shooter walked away from a clean crime scene-typical of our guy.”

Beam stared out the windshield of the parked car for a moment, then said, “Looper, you talk to Floyd again, then drive the unmarked up to Connecticut and check out his alibi. Nell and I are gonna go to the lamp emporium or whatever, where Bev worked, and talk to her boss and coworkers.”

Looper opened the Lincoln’s right rear door and started to get out, then paused. “Anything I should know about Floyd?”

“He didn’t murder his wife, but he’s got a guilty conscience. You work him right, he’ll tell you the truth.”

Beam watched Looper walk away; he appeared to be absently feeling his pockets for cigarettes.

“He’ll suck a cigarette before he goes back upstairs to talk with hubby,” Nell said. “It’s that way every day. He needs it to calm down.”

“That’s his business,” Beam said, “as long as it doesn’t kill him before something else does.”

Or before this investigation’s finished, Nell thought.

When the jittery Looper was out of sight, Beam opened the driver’s side door and started to climb out from behind the steering wheel. The intensifying morning heat lowered itself like a weight onto his back.

“I thought we were going to the lamp emporium,” Nell said.

Beam leaned farther down and looked across the car at her. “We are, but let’s walk. That was how Beverly Baker usually went back and forth to work. Let’s follow in her footsteps. Maybe, sometime or other, they took her past her killer.”

After leaving Beverly Baker’s building, Justice had strolled a few sunny blocks, then taken the Eighty-sixth Street entrance into the park. It was such a beautiful morning that people he didn’t know nodded to him and said hello. He returned their friendliness with his own. The latex gloves he’d used to be sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints in Beverly Baker’s apartment were neatly folded in his pocket, turned inside out just in case some of her blood might have gotten on them. Blood particles could be so minute the human eye wouldn’t spot them, but a police laboratory might. He knew the police had tricks that were almost magic.

As he strolled along sun-dappled paths, he replayed the Beverly Baker murder in detail-mind like a DVD.

Good looking bitch, lots of leg, perched with her ass spread and her back arched the way women do when they’re concentrating hard while sitting before a mirror and putting on lipstick. She’d seen him in the mirror, got the message, didn’t want to believe it, been momentarily paralyzed by the realization of her impending death-as they all were. That moment was ice. It froze them.

Those crystallized seconds belonged to him. In that brief and vulnerable time, they comprehended the reason for their death at his hands. Surely they read the papers, watched television news, overheard conversations. The NYPD had of course long ago informed the media. The entire city knew why people were being killed, former jury forepersons whose hands were bloody, who’d been instruments of injustice. He assured himself that in their final, frozen moments of life, they understood that his was the final judgment and the hand of justice, righting the wrongs they’d perpetrated, the imbalance and pain they’d been so instrumental in causing. Always he read the cataclysmic knowledge in their eyes, but so there would be no misunderstanding, as the light died in them, he whispered the religion and the word that carried his victims to the other side: Justice.

They died knowing. He lived knowing. He was setting the universe right. On a day like this one, with the sun laughing through the high leaves and the birds telling tales, his mission was especially satisfying.

He still had work to do, but it was good work. It was right work. Not nearly finished.