Torch Song (3 page)

He laughed and drained his glass. Besides, he might have added, Loretta knew the information was available to anyone who wanted to dig a little.

“The trouble is,” she said, “I don't know many of these people from a long time ago, from when you were still with the police. It's going to be up to you to sort it all out.”

By the time Constance had dinner on the table, Charlie had culled thirteen names from the list. In each case, he had been the investigating officer, the arresting officer, or had testified in court, often all three. He was gazing at his short list moodily when Constance called him to dinner.

“Ah, memories,” he said, putting his list on a table by his chair. Then he demanded, “Why is it when you cook, I have a lapful of cats in here, and when I cook, I have the kitchen full of the damn beasts?”

“I feed them before I start,” she said, “as I have told you more times than I can count”

He made them wait, he thought, tossing Brutus off his lap, so they could have table scraps, which was the natural order of things.

He did not mention his short list during dinner, and only when they had coffee and a leftover apple kuchen did he say almost casually, “I think I know who it is.”

She put her fork down. “You're kidding!”

He went to get his list, and then said, “These struck me as possibles.” He pointed to the first name. “John Scovotto used a knife and he got caught. Bad temper, very bad. Acted on the spur of the moment, a flash of rage with an irresistible impulse to kill. I don't think so.” He pointed to the next name. “Lincoln Trowbridge liked a baseball bat, drug stuff. Nope. Gary Thomson, armed robbery, several times, I believe. He forgave me on the spot. The way he saw it, he was doing his thing and I was doing mine. Reasonable sort of fellow. Barbara Jelinsky killed her pimp in a fight. Not her style—arson, planning.” He went on down the list, remembering all of them. He paused at one and said thoughtfully, “I considered him a bit longer. Wade Lee. He killed his wife, her mother, and a neighbor who happened to be in the wrong place, wrong time. Then he set the house on fire. After insurance, and really stupid. Too stupid.” He shook his head and pointed again. “Don Flexner. He was plenty sore, but he couldn't plan far enough ahead to get a bus transfer.” Finally, he pointed to a name he had skipped over.

“Peter Eisenbeis,” he said. “A great-looking kid, tall, blond, blue eyes, football type. A real planner, too.” He could tell from the alarmed expression on Constance's face that she remembered him.

The look of fear vanished; her face became expressionless, and she asked in a low voice, “When did they release him?”

“December tenth, 'ninety-one.”

They were both thinking about the anonymous threat: “You will feel my pain.”

God, Charlie thought suddenly, all this was making him feel old. Thirteen years ago, yet he remembered as if it had happened last week. Pete Eisenbeis had scoped out a warehouse on the East River, not far from where his girlfriend lived. One Friday afternoon, he had gone there to apply for a job and, application in hand, had roamed the building with no one paying much attention. At four, an armored truck arrived and at the same time a fire broke out in half a dozen places at once. The kid had walked up to the truck just as the guard on the passenger side opened his door and stepped out. The kid had shot and wounded him, had taken his place, and the truck had sped off. With all the confusion of alarms, fire equipment arriving with sirens blaring, workers rushing around, the truck was lost.

Charlie had found Pete's prints on the application, on a door facing, a metal girder, and he had gone through the neighborhood with his description and had come up with a name, Peter, and his girlfriend's name, Marla Sykes. No one approached her; they waited. Two days later, Peter Eisenbeis returned. Charlie should not have been involved in the chase, but he and the stakeout were trying to decide if they should wait outside the tenement or go in after him, when Marla and Pete reappeared; he was carrying a baby. He spooked, shoved the girl and baby inside the car, and raced off. Charlie's car was the one that hung on his bumper through the Upper East Side. By then, other cars were converging, and the kid crashed his car. He was barely injured, a few scrapes; the girl was hurt slightly more. The baby was thrown thirty or forty feet and suffered massive brain damage. Pete was sent up. The baby lived, but he would have been better off if he hadn't, from all accounts.

“You will feel my pain.”

“They didn't find the money,” Charlie said, remembering. Pete had taken them to the spot where he'd hidden the truck, out on Long Island. They had found the driver's body chained to a water pipe in a bathroom of an empty house; he had suffered a heart attack. Pete swore he had left everything in the truck. His plan was to get Marla, take the cash, and get out of the country. At least $280,000 in cash vanished, and millions in checks, paper of various kinds.

Constance was thinking of the two youngsters. Marla had been seventeen, Pete nineteen. Her mother had told her to get out with the baby; Pete said he did it for her, for their son, so they could have a life. The public defender took a plea bargain for him: twenty-five years. But now he was out. She rubbed goose bumps on her arms.

“Hey,” Charlie said softly, taking her cold hand. “At least we have a place to begin, more than we had a couple of hours ago.” He was grateful she didn't tell him to take this business to Pulaski. He could imagine the pitying look on that lean face, because he was certain he had worn such a look many times when a suspect cried, “I've been framed!”

When Constance went downstairs the next morning, Charlie was making blueberry waffles, whistling. Water droplets still clung to his crinkly black hair, it was hard to tell the droplets from the few gray hairs. She liked his hair, she was thinking, pouring coffee, when the phone rang.

They listened to a woman's voice explaining why she wouldn't make it to the aikido class that morning. When she finished, Constance said, “I'll give Sandy a call and have her take over for me.” Sandy was good enough to lead the group, she had decided during the night as she lay staring into darkness. Charlie had been up and down several times and she had been awake every time he left the bed without a sound.

“I don't think so,” he said, at the counter, taking a waffle from the iron. “Look, perfect, is it not?”

She agreed. He gave it to her on a plate and poured in more batter. “I'm going to be on the phone all morning. Pete's probation officer, where he reports, what he's up to, what he did in the jug, where Marla is now… stuff like that. You might as well be doing the usual thing. Let them worry that we're not taking any of this bullshit seriously. Okay?”

She nodded, her mouth full.

He was on the phone in his little downstairs office when she left for the recreation center, and he was on it when she returned two hours later. She waved to him from the doorway and he nodded, listening. He looked tired, she thought with dismay. Now and then, she caught him in a certain light, in a certain pose and realized that he was growing older before her eyes. Most of the time, such thoughts never came to mind; he was young in every way she could think of. But in fact, he was getting gray, and at the moment he looked tired. He hung up and regarded her with those strange, flat eyes that he sometimes showed her, and she knew it wasn't just that he was tired; he also was frightened.

She held her breath for a moment, then grinned and said, “I think a workout was just what I needed. How'd you make out?”

He shook his head. “I shouldn't have let you go out alone. I'm acting like a fool, honey.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Nothing. I began to think: If our guy is really Pete Eisenbeis, what hurt him most? Going to prison or losing his lover and his child? I don't want us separated until we see this through. Okay?”

She could feel his fear radiating out to her, enveloping her. She nodded wordlessly and went to him at his desk, held his head tightly against her; he wrapped his arms around her and drew her even closer.

“He's dropped out of sight, broken probation,” Charlie said, the words muffled against her breast. “He's out there somewhere, maybe watching us, watching you.”

Dear God, she thought. Oh dear God!

The phone on the desk rang. He drew back and picked up the receiver. “Yeah,” he said, then listened and made a note or two. “Right. I'll call if there's anything else. Thanks, Brian.” Brian Possner was an investigator he sometimes used in New York City.

“Let's go sit down and I'll tell you what I have,” Charlie said. “Hungry?”

She shook her head. Hand in hand, they went to the living room, where he sat in his Morris chair and she in the wing chair, close enough that they could touch each other.

“Okay,” he said. “He got out and two days later turned up at Marla's place. She has a house down around Tuxedo Park, been there all these years with the boy. She said she sent him away, and no one's laid eyes on him since. He's skipped, probably with two hundred eighty grand. She hasn't heard from him. That's for openers. She married Steve Boseman a year after Pete went up, and a year later Boseman was killed. They figure he was in the drug game or numbers; it had the marks of a gangland killing—hands tied behind his back, shot in the back of the head. He was dumped in a creek and drowned a few miles from where they lived. She's been alone since then. But she visited Pete once a month all the time he was in the pen.”

“Why? If she married someone else…”

“Don't know. We'll ask.”

Constance nodded. Crazy, she was thinking.

“What I thought we might do,” Charlie said, “is take a little spin over to Utica and then down to Norwich. If you're really not hungry yet.”

“We can get some lunch along the way,” she said. “I'll change first.” She was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, running shoes. He thought she looked good the way she was.

She drove. It was less than an hour's drive to Utica. He directed her to Grant Street, where the paint factory had burned down. And it would have burned to the ground, Charlie knew; it had been made of wood. Explosions, toxic fumes, roiling, poisonous smoke… The site had been cleared and fenced. This was an industrial area with ugly gray buildings and trucks, ugly gray slush, a railroad siding.… A road led around back of the property; the fence was new. Anyone could have parked within a hundred feet, walked in, sprayed the place, tossed the match, and out.

He directed her past a hospital, past Utica College, onto State 12. Another good road, she thought, driving. All the places had been on good roads, accessible. Rain started to fall. Don't freeze, she ordered. Just don't start freezing.

In Norwich, an hour later, they drove around the high school building. The gymnasium, an annex, had been destroyed; the school building had been saved.

Constance stopped for a bunch of teenagers who couldn't decide if they wanted to cross the street or not. They didn't seem to notice that they were getting wet.

Charlie scowled at the kids. He'd be leaning on the horn, he thought, and they'd flip him off and make him even madder. He'd end up yelling; one of them would pull a gun…. They moved out of the way and Constance edged past them; they didn't seem to notice the car. She turned to circle the school again, and Charlie touched her arm.

“Let's go find something to eat,” he said. This was a bust. The school would have been a cinch at three in the morning. A quiet neighborhood, everyone sleeping. Something was nagging at him, and he couldn't get at it. Something was screwy, he thought, then realized he was thinking like an arson investigator. What was behind the fires? Not killing anyone, not a spectacular show. He couldn't have hung around to watch, he thought, or said—he wasn't sure which, because Constance made a sound that sounded like agreement. A stranger in a small place like this would have been noticed. Even in Utica, around the warehouses, no stranger would have gone unnoticed. And Fircrest? Forget it.

Constance interrupted his train of reasoning. “What you should do,” she said grimly, “is find us the quickest way home, without going over mountains on narrow roads.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“The rain's starting to freeze,” she said.

By the time they reached their driveway, three hours later, the car was riding on ice like a hockey puck. Charlie let out his breath as she pulled into the garage. “Ya done good, babe,” he said.

She gave him a mean look. “I'm just about ready to faint from hunger. You cook.”

That night, Charlie dreamed of the fire, his fire. He was in the endless corridor, where every doorknob burned his hand as the fire roared behind him, forcing him on until he couldn't breathe and his knees were buckling. He woke up, to find Constance's arms around him. He drew in a long breath, another, and said, “Thrashing about a bit?”

“A bit,” she said.

He was soaking wet, the way he always was after that dream. “Shower,” he mumbled, pulling away from her. A moment later, as he stood under the hot water turned on full force, her shadow fell on the glass door; she opened the door and stepped in beside him.

“Wanton hussy.” He reached for her.

“Damn right,” she said.

Charlie hated it that he never could sleep later than seven, but there it was. They had remade the bed last night, and the last thing he remembered was seeing Constance turn the clock away. She intended to sleep late. He grinned; on the whole, he felt better than the few hours of sleep warranted. He was whistling as he made coffee and fed the cats. Constance was right; they stayed out from underfoot as he scrambled eggs. He took his plate to the table and only then glanced out the glass doors to the patio, and he stopped whistling. Iced in. Ice coated everything. He turned on the radio for weather news.