Void in Hearts (5 page)

Be careful, Coyne, I told myself. You really don’t want to upset this woman. “He and I talked fairly recently. Hard to know what he might have been thinking.”

I glanced at her. She was staring straight ahead at the blurry, winking lights of the late-afternoon traffic. Sparse, fine snowflakes sifted aslant through the headlights. Tiny drops of water materialized on the windshield. I turned on the wipers.

“You’d think,” she said softly, “he would have asked for his wife.”

“I imagine he suffered a lot of trauma,” was all I could think of to say.

“I wish that explained it.”

“Look, Becca—”

“Hey,” she said. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”

We were silent for a few minutes. Then she said, “It’s right up here.”

She pointed to a low brick commercial building tucked among some wood-frame multifamily homes, typical of Somerville’s helter-skelter zoning system. I pulled up in front and stopped. There was a dry cleaner, a package store, a consignment clothing shop, and a real-estate office on the first floor. A doorway in the center of the building led up to the second-floor offices.

We got out of the car and entered into a tiny foyer. Steep stairs ascended to the second floor. They were dimly lit, and the musty odor suggested disuse.

Becca said, “Up here. I guess his office is kind of grungy. He used to say that it was what his clients expected. That’s why he smoked cigars. He liked to cultivate the image.”

At the top of the stairs was a short corridor. Four doors opened from it. On one of them were the handpainted words “Lester Katz, Private Investigations.”

Becca fumbled in her purse and came out with a ring of keys. “I got these at the hospital. He had them in his pocket when he got hit by that car.”

She tried the keys, and the third one worked. She hesitated before opening the door. “Go ahead,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She pushed the door open. I followed her in. I felt along the wall beside the door until I found the switch. I flipped it on.

I heard Becca take a quick breath. She whispered, “Oh.”

A chair was tipped over. The drawers of the file cabinets hung open. Papers were scattered across the desk and heaped randomly on the floor. The carpet was turned back.

Les’s office had been ransacked.

Becca pressed herself back against me. She was staring at the obvious evidence of a burglary.

“Kinda looks like my apartment,” I said brightly.

She glanced over her shoulder at me, not smiling.

I shrugged. So she didn’t have much of a sense of humor. “Sorry.”

We went inside. She stood in the middle of the room amid the rubble and turned slowly, studying the entire 360 degrees of it. When she had come full circle and returned her gaze to me, she was nodding her head. Her mouth was a thin, hard line. She narrowed her eyes. “I want to know what the hell is going on,” she said softly.

I started to speak, but she held up her hand. “Wait, okay? Don’t try to protect me. I’ve got a right to know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, all of a sudden it’s pretty clear. Lester gets run over at two in the morning. His office is broken into. He asks for you in his one minute of consciousness before he dies. Now. You tell me what’s going on, and please don’t lie to me this time. Because I need to know the truth. And I really can handle it. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Les,” she said. “He was murdered, wasn’t he.”

T
HERE WAS A SMALL
sofa against the wall. I took Becca’s hand and led her to it. We sat down together.

“Was Les murdered?” she said. “There’s no reason not to tell me.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The answer is, I don’t know. But it’s possible.”

“What do you think?”

I shrugged. “I guess I think he might have been, yes.”

From somewhere in the room came a sudden beeping sound. Five or six quick beeps, a pause, and then another series of beeps. Then silence.

“What the hell is that?” I said.

Becca got up and went to the desk. She bent beside it, and when she straightened up she held a telephone. The receiver was off the hook. She placed it on the desk and returned the receiver to its cradle. Then she came back and sat beside me.

“We ought to call the police, don’t you think?” she said.

“Let me try to get your friend Kerrigan.” I went to the phone and dialed the emergency number for the Somerville police. An efficient woman’s voice informed me that Officer Kerrigan was on the night shift and wasn’t available. I told her that it regarded a possible homicide. She told me to hold, and a few seconds later a man’s voice told me he was Sergeant Rowe and I should talk to him.

“I’d rather talk to Kerrigan.”

“Kerrigan isn’t here. Who is this?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m trying to be a good citizen. But it’s Kerrigan I want to speak with. Can you get him for me, or shall I hang up now?”

“Mister, if you know something about a homicide—”

“Kerrigan knows what I know already, and I’m a lawyer, so don’t try to tell me the law. Can you do it or not?”

I heard him expel his breath. “Why don’t you give me your name and where you can be reached. I’ll try to get ahold of Kerrigan for you. He’s probably home having his supper.”

I gave Sergeant Rowe my name and read the phone number off Les’s telephone. Then I hung up.

I went back and sat beside Becca. “They’re going to try to get a message to Kerrigan. He should call us here.”

She was smiling at me. “You don’t fool around, do you?”

“People will push you around if you let them.”

She nodded. “So now we wait.”

“Right.”

She got up and began to move around the room, touching things. From the floor she picked up a book, glanced at it, and put it on the desk. She bent and poked randomly through the litter of papers. She wandered to the single window that looked out onto the dark Somerville street. She stood before it, her forehead resting against the sooty glass. Then she moved back to the desk. She sat in the chair behind it, rocking slowly, staring up at the ceiling. Then she swiveled around and looked at me.

“So tell me,” she said.

I nodded. So I told Becca Katz about the conversation I had had with Les at Hung Moon’s restaurant the previous Thursday afternoon.

“If Les did what I recommended,” I said, “the husband could easily have figured out that he was going to tell the wife what he knew.”

“And,” said Becca softly, “a man might kill to prevent that from happening.”

I nodded. “It’s possible. Anyway, the next thing that happened was that Les asked for me from his deathbed. Seems logical that he might’ve wanted to tell me something about this case. At least, I can’t think of anything else he might want to say to me. Assuming he was rational at the time.”

The phone rang. Becca started to pick it up, but I gestured at her not to. “I’ll get it,” I said. “It’s Kerrigan.” I went to it and picked up the receiver. “Yes?” I said.

There was a perceptible hesitation. Then a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Katz?” Another pause. “Is this Mr. Katz? The private investigator?”

“Who is this, please?”

“I’m trying to reach Lester Katz. Do I have the right number?”

“This is Les Katz’s office. He’s not here right now. May I take a message?”

I heard her breathe into the telephone. Then I heard a click.

I turned to Becca. “They hung up.”

“Who was it?”

“They wouldn’t leave their name.”

“Why do you say ‘they’? It was a woman, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “Probably a client.”

She smiled crookedly. “Probably a lover. It’s okay. Will you please stop trying to protect me? It’s very charming, this old-fashioned chivalry, or whatever you want to call it, and I appreciate it. But you’re not helping me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“Les had lovers.”

“You told me that.”

She smiled. “It probably sounds like I’m obsessing on the subject. I’m not, though. I got used to it.” She combed her fingers through her hair. “You think this man, then, this one who paid Les money for the photos, you think he killed him, right?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have a shred of proof, but it makes some sense.”

“What was the man’s name? Somebody should question him.”

I spread my hands, gesturing at the disarray in the office. “I don’t know. Les never mentioned a name. But I bet it’s the same one who made this mess. He came to steal his file so we wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”

She nodded. “That would fit. So if we could learn who did this, who this man was that Les was spying on, we’d know who killed him.”

“Maybe.”

“Except the file that has his name on it is probably gone.”

“Likely. Did Les keep his photos and tapes in the office here, too?”

She widened her eyes. “As a matter of fact, no, he didn’t. He has a little office at home. He’s got a lot of that stuff there.” She suddenly turned down the corners of her mouth in a gesture of disgust at herself. “There, listen to me. Still talking about him in the present tense. Anyway, Les wasn’t very well organized. I mean, keeping his files here, but the other stuff there.”

I shook a Winston from my pack and lit it. “Good thing for us, though. It’s a long shot, but Les described the kinds of photos he got of the man. If it’s true what he said, that he did keep the negatives, then maybe—”

“Maybe we can get a picture of the man with his woman friend. Yes.”

“A long shot,” I repeated.

The phone rang again. I picked it up. “Yes?”

“Is this Mr. Coyne?”

“Yes.”

“Kerrigan here. What’s up?”

“I’m at Lester Katz’s office with Mrs. Katz. The place has been burglarized.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You think…?”

“I think it could be a coincidence,” I said. “On the other hand…”

“I get it,” he said. “Kill the guy, then get your name out of his files, and you’re home free.”

“Possible, huh?”

“So what’s missing?”

“Only one person could tell us.”

“And he’s dead,” said Kerrigan.

“Right.” I glanced at Becca. She was watching me solemnly.

I heard Kerrigan sigh. “We’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything.”

I hung up and turned to Becca. “The police are on their way.”

She nodded. “So what are we supposed to do?”

“We wait.”

They arrived fifteen minutes later. Kerrigan was there, and a detective named Whiting, whose trench coat was more rumpled than Peter Falk’s, and three forensic experts. Becca and I went out into the narrow hallway to let them work. After a few minutes Kerrigan came out and joined us.

“Mrs. Katz,” he said, “is anything missing from your husband’s office?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never been here before.”

“Well, did he keep anything valuable here, do you know?”

“I don’t think so. Les didn’t have valuable things.”

“Artwork, a coin collection, like that?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He looked at me. “We’re following up on the hit-and-run the way we routinely would do it.”

“Anything turn up?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ll keep me posted?”

“Sure. You, too.”

Kerrigan went back into Les’s office. He closed the door behind him. Becca and I wandered down to the street. Fine snowflakes still drifted down from the dark sky. I smoked a cigarette. Becca leaned back against the brick wall, hunching her shoulders inside her coat.

The policemen paraded out of the building about an hour after they arrived. Whiting, the detective, paused beside us. “You can go back up there if you want. We’re done.”

“Already?” said Becca.

Whiting paused to light a cigar. “What did you expect?” he said after he got it lit.

“My husband was murdered. It would seem…”

Whiting glanced at me and rolled his eyes.

“Did you find anything interesting?” I said.

“About twelve million smudged fingerprints. A lot of ’em yours, probably. Listen, if you can’t even tell us what was taken—”

“This is probably linked with a murder, that’s all,” I said.

Whiting turned away. “We’re working on it,” he said before he ducked into his car.

I touched Becca’s shoulder. “You okay?”

She huddled deeper into her coat. “I’m fine. It just seems as if they don’t care.”

“They’re professionals. They know what they’re doing.”

She looked up at me. “It looks to me as if we’ve got to figure out who killed Les ourselves.”

“We ought to check Les’s collection of negatives.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Before that, we ought to go back up to the office, see what we can find.”

“What will we look for?”

“I don’t know. An appointment book. A scrap of paper with a phone number on it. A page torn off a calendar. Tapes. Photos.”

“But they would have stolen anything like that.”

I nodded. “We look anyway.”

We spent nearly two hours at it. Becca looked through all the files. I searched for hidey-holes. I pulled out all the drawers to see what might be taped onto the bottom of them. I flipped through the wall calendar, looking for notes, names, numbers, initials, something in code, anything. I rolled up the rug. I probed for loose floorboards. I took the cushions off the sofa, unzipped them, and poked around inside.

It was a simple, square room, and although my imagination was limited, I was satisfied that Les had hidden nothing there. Or if he had, someone else, whose imagination at least matched mine, had gotten there first.

I went to the swivel chair and sat in it. I lit a cigarette. Becca was kneeling on the floor. Her hair hung in her eyes.

“Enough, already,” I said.

She looked up at me, blinked, thrust out her lower lip, and blew at her hair. “Okay. This is frustrating. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Let’s go see if we can find those negatives.”

She was silent in the car as we drove back to her apartment. The snow had begun to stick to the roads. It coated the trees and the piles of old snow. It sparkled clean and white in the fuzzy night lights. Pedestrians hunched their shoulders as they shuffled along the sidewalks. Traffic moved slowly.